A2-Kritik-Jumbo-File

Kritik Answers Kritik Defense (Deleuze on Cross-X) Kritik ist Kaput.......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. **GENERAL K ANSWERS** ........................................................................... 9 **Framework** ................................................................................................ 9 Fiat Good: 2AC ................................................................................................. 9 General Defense of the Aff: 2AC (1/2) ........................................................... 10 Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Long) (~50 sec.) .....................................................13 Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Short) (<20 sec.) ....................................................14 Do the Plan Perm: 2AC ................................................................................... 15 #1 Steals Aff Ground: 1AR ..............................................................................16 #4 Ext. Turns Offense: 1AR ............................................................................ 17 A2 ―Plan Focus Bad‖: 1AR ............................................................................. 18 A2 ―Plan is only a tiny part of the speech/Discourse of 1AC is ~9 min.‖: 1AR19 Must Have an Alternative: 2AC ..................................................................... 20 Hasty Generalization Bad: 2AC ......................................................................21 Law Transformative: 2AC (1/2) ..................................................................... 22 ―Policymaking Good‖: 1AR (1/2) ................................................................... 24 A2 ―Only Learn As Spectators‖: 1AR ..............................................................31 Policy Debate Good ........................................................................................ 32 Switch-side Debate Good (1/3)...................................................................... 33 Debate Solves Authoritarianism .................................................................... 36 Roleplaying Good (1/3).................................................................................. 37 Traditional Debate Good (1/2) .......................................................................41 Traditional Debate Accesses Peformativity ................................................... 44 Competition Good.......................................................................................... 45 **Permutations**........................................................................................... 46 Juxtaposition Perm: 2AC ............................................................................... 46 Juxtaposition Perm: 1AR ............................................................................... 47 Campbell Perm: 2AC...................................................................................... 50 Campbell Perm: 1AR ....................................................................................... 51 Strategic Essentialism Perm: 2AC ................................................................. 52 Strategic Essentialism Perm: 1AR ................................................................. 53 Bleiker Perm: 2AC.......................................................................................... 54 Perm Solves: Coalitions Key .......................................................................... 55 Perm Solves: Hybridization Effective ............................................................ 56 Perm Solves: Multifaceted Resistance Best ................................................... 57 Perm Solves: Radicalism Dooms the Movement .......................................... 58 Perm Solves: Working within Institutions Key to Change............................ 59 **Classic Turns** ............................................................................................61 Derrida Turn: 2AC ..........................................................................................61 Fear of Co-optation Turn: 2AC ...................................................................... 62 Fear of Co-optation Turn: 1AR ...................................................................... 63 The Fetish: 2AC.............................................................................................. 64 The Fetish: 1AR .............................................................................................. 65 Authenticity Impossible: 1AR ........................................................................ 67 Kulynych Turn: 2AC ...................................................................................... 68 Kulynych Turn: 1AR ....................................................................................... 69 Praxis Turn: 2AC............................................................................................ 70 Praxis Turn:1AR .............................................................................................. 71 Praxis Turn: 2AR ........................................................................................... 72 Praxis Turn: Ext ............................................................................................. 73 Presymbolism Turn: 2AC............................................................................... 74 Presymbolism Turn: 1AR ............................................................................... 76 Rejection Bad Turn: 2AC ............................................................................... 77 Rejection Bad Turn: 1AR ............................................................................... 78 Rejection Bad Turn: Ext ................................................................................ 80 Ricouer Turn: 2AC ......................................................................................... 81 Ricoeur Turn: 1AR ......................................................................................... 82 Ricoeur Turn: Ext .......................................................................................... 83 Romanticization Turn: 2AC ........................................................................... 84 Romanticization Turn: 1AR ........................................................................... 85 Romanticization Turn: 2AR........................................................................... 86 Said Turn: 2AC ............................................................................................... 87 Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext (1/2) .................................................... 88 Academics as Politics is Bad (1/2) ................................................................. 90 Criticism Destroys Agency ............................................................................. 92 Criticism is Nihilistic (1/4) ............................................................................ 93 **Postmodernism Bad**................................................................................ 97 1 Kritik Answers Floating Subjectivity Bad (1/3) ...................................................................... 97 **Pragmatism** ........................................................................................... 100 Pragmatism Good: 2AC (1/3) ...................................................................... 100 Plan focus good: Rorty (1/2) ........................................................................ 105 **Realism**.................................................................................................. 107 Realism Good: 2AC (1/2) ............................................................................. 107 #1 Mearsheimer: 1AR .................................................................................. 109 #1 Mearsheimer: Ext..................................................................................... 110 #2 Guzzini: 1AR ............................................................................................ 111 #2 Guzzini: Ext ............................................................................................. 112 #3 Murray: 1AR............................................................................................. 113 #3 Murray: Ext.............................................................................................. 114 Democratic Realism Solves the Links .......................................................... 115 Violence is Endemic ...................................................................................... 116 Realism Good: Prevents Nuclear War .......................................................... 118 Realism Good: Prevents War (1/3)............................................................... 119 Realism Good: Militarism Solves War (1/2) ............................................... 124 Realism Good: Militarism Solves Genocide ................................................ 126 Realism Good: Militarism Solves Democracy .............................................. 127 Alt Bad: Could Make Things Worse............................................................. 128 Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (1/2)............................................................... 129 Alt Fails: Realism Will Reasset Itself............................................................ 131 IR is Realist Now (1/2)................................................................................. 132 Miscalculation Inevitable............................................................................. 134 Perm Solves: Realism Necessary to Understand Parts of IR ...................... 136 A2 ―9/11 Disproves Realism‖ ........................................................................ 137 A2 ―Cold War Disproves Realism‖ (1/2) ..................................................... 138 A2 ―Cold War End Proves Liberalism‖ ........................................................ 140 A2 ―Cooperation Good‖ (1/2) ....................................................................... 141 A2 ―Democracy Solves War‖ ........................................................................ 144 A2 ―Defense Solves‖ ......................................................................................145 A2 ―Human Nature‖..................................................................................... 146 A2 ―Mindset Shift‖ ........................................................................................ 147 A2 ―Realism Assumes States Rational‖ ....................................................... 149 A2 ―Realism Constructs Threats‖ ................................................................ 150 A2 ―Realism is Amoral‖ ................................................................................ 151 A2 ―Realism is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy‖ (1/2) ..........................................152 A2 ―Social Constructivism‖ (1/3) .................................................................. 155 A2 ―State/Sovereignty Bad‖ ......................................................................... 158 **Calculability/Util** ...................................................................................159 Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (1/2) ....................................................................159 Utilitarianism Good: 1AR ............................................................................. 161 Calculability Good: 2AC (1/2) ...................................................................... 163 A2 ―Tyranny of Survival‖ (1/2) .................................................................... 166 A2 ―Ontology First‖: 2AC ............................................................................. 169 A2 ―Your Impact is Inevitable‖: 2AC ........................................................... 170 A2 ―Your Impact is Inevitable‖: 1AR ............................................................ 171 A2 ―Your Impact = Bare Life‖: 2AC (1/3) ..................................................... 172 A2 ―No Value to Life‖: 2AC (1/3) ..................................................................176 ―No Value To Life‖ Justifies Genocide.......................................................... 179 ―No Value To Life‖ Justifies Nazism............................................................ 180 There‘s Always Value To Life ........................................................................ 181 A2 ―Communication Scholar Framework‖: 2AC ......................................... 182 **Democratic Talk** .................................................................................... 183 Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (1/2) ................................................................ 183 Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (1/3) ................................................................ 185 Debate Solves Democratic Talk: Ext ........................................................... 189 Democratic Talk Key to Autonomy: Ext ....................................................... 191 Democratic Talk Key to Checking Right: Ext .............................................. 192 Restoring Public Sphere Solves Oppression: Ext ........................................ 194 Talk is Action: Ext .........................................................................................195 **Performance** .......................................................................................... 196 A2 ―Performativity‖ (1/2)............................................................................. 196 Performance is Commodified (1/2) ............................................................. 199 Performance Fails ........................................................................................ 202 **Link Answers: General**.......................................................................... 203 A2 ―The Case is Apolitical/Has No Theory‖ ................................................ 203 **Alternative Answers: General** ............................................................... 204 Individual Action Fails................................................................................. 204 Mann ............................................................................................................ 205 Power Vaccuum ........................................................................................... 206 **SPECIFIC K ANSWERS** ........................................................................ 207 **Apocalyptic Rhetoric** ............................................................................. 207 2 Kritik Answers Perm Solvency .............................................................................................. 207 Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (1/3) .................................................................208 **Badiou** ................................................................................................... 212 A2 ―Badiou‖: 2AC ......................................................................................... 212 Perm Solvency (1/3)..................................................................................... 213 Human Rights Solve .................................................................................... 216 Double Bind .................................................................................................. 217 Alternative Fractures Coalitions .................................................................. 218 Divorcing Politics from State Bad ............................................................... 219 **Baudrillard** ............................................................................................ 220 Baudrillard Destroys Social Change (1/2) ................................................... 220 Alternative Masks Violence ......................................................................... 222 Our Representations Solve .......................................................................... 223 Baudrillard is Wrong (1/2) .......................................................................... 224 A2 ―Disaster Porn‖ (1/3) .............................................................................. 226 **Butler** ..................................................................................................... 230 Butler Answers: 2AC (1/2) ........................................................................... 230 A2 ―Legal Categories Bad‖ ........................................................................... 232 **Biopolitics** ............................................................................................. 233 Agamben Answers: 2AC (1/6) ..................................................................... 233 #2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR (1/2) .................................................. 243 #5 Perm: 1AR ............................................................................................... 246 #5 Perm: Ext ................................................................................................ 248 #7 Good Biopower: 1AR (1/2)...................................................................... 249 #9 Essentialism: 1AR (1/2) .......................................................................... 252 #9 Essentialism: Ext .................................................................................... 254 #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: 1AR (1/2) ......................................... 255 #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: Ext (1/3) .......................................... 257 A2 ―Neilson Conclude Negative‖: 1AR......................................................... 261 #11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: 1AR........................................ 262 #11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: Ext (1/2)................................ 264 #13 Praxis: 1AR ............................................................................................ 267 #14 Liberalism Doesn‘t Cause Exception: 1AR ........................................... 268 Agamben Collapses the State....................................................................... 270 **Foucault**.................................................................................................. 271 Foucault Answers: 2AC (1/3)........................................................................ 271 #2 Perm: 1AR ............................................................................................... 276 Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (1/2) .................................................................. 277 #5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR (1/4) ................................................. 279 #6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (1/2) .................................................................... 284 #10 Reformism Good: 1AR .......................................................................... 286 Alt Fails: Body Cannot Be a Site of Resistance ............................................ 287 Alt Fails: Cannot Escape Subjectivity .......................................................... 288 Alt Fails: Geneologies Don‘t Produce Change ............................................. 289 Alt Fails: Remains Enmeshed in Power ...................................................... 290 Alt Fails: Praxis ............................................................................................ 291 Alt Fails: Suspicion ...................................................................................... 294 **Benjamin** ............................................................................................... 295 Benjamin Answers: 2AC .............................................................................. 295 **Chaloupka** ............................................................................................. 296 Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (1/3) ................................................................... 296 **CLS** ........................................................................................................ 302 CLS Answers: 2AC (1/4) .............................................................................. 302 #4 Permutation: 1AR (1/2) .......................................................................... 307 #7 Experiential Deconstruction Turn: 1AR ................................................. 309 A2 ―Religious Institution Rationalized Oppression‖: 1AR ........................... 311 #8 Liberalism Good Turn: 1AR ................................................................... 312 No Links (1/2) .............................................................................................. 314 Turns: Ricoeur ............................................................................................. 316 Turns: Judicial Oppression .......................................................................... 317 Turns: Criticism Perpetuates Capitalism .................................................... 318 Turns: Law Key to Solving Atrocity ............................................................. 319 Turns: Law Key to Solving Exploitation ...................................................... 321 Turns: Rights Good (1/4) ............................................................................. 323 Turns: Alternative Causes Rights Rollback ................................................. 328 Turns: Minorities ......................................................................................... 329 Turn: Working in System Good (1/2) .......................................................... 330 Indeterminacy False (1/4) ........................................................................... 332 A2 ―Language Makes Law Indeterminate‖: 2AC ......................................... 338 CLS Recreates Oppression (1/2).................................................................. 339 CLS is Nihilistic ............................................................................................ 341 No Alternative (1/2) ..................................................................................... 342 Alternative Fails: Elitism ............................................................................. 345 3 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Fractures Movement ....................................................... 346 Alternative Fails: Indeterminacy Kills Criticism ......................................... 347 Alternative Fails: Historical Record of Marxism ........................................ 348 Alternative Fails: Non-Rights Strategies Bad.............................................. 349 Alternative Fails: Praxis (1/3)...................................................................... 350 A2 ―That‘s Not Our Indeterminacy Thesis‖: 1AR ........................................ 354 A2 ―Reification‖: 2AC................................................................................... 355 A2 ―Rights Tradeoff‖: 2AC ........................................................................... 356 A2 ―Feminist Jurisprudence‖: 2AC ............................................................. 357 A2 ―Fem K of Intl Law‖: 2AC ....................................................................... 358 **CRT**........................................................................................................ 360 CRT Answers: 2AC (1/4) .............................................................................. 360 #5 Perm: 1AR ............................................................................................... 366 **Cuomo** ................................................................................................... 367 Preventing Nuke War Is a Prerequisite to Positive Peace ........................... 367 Negative Peace Key to Positive Peace .......................................................... 368 Absolutism Bad ............................................................................................ 369 **Deep Ecology**......................................................................................... 370 Permutation Solvency: 2AC ......................................................................... 370 Permutation Solvency: 1AR .......................................................................... 371 Anthro Good/Inevitable (1/3) ..................................................................... 372 Human Intervention Good .......................................................................... 376 Deep Ecology Justifies Ecocide (1/2) .......................................................... 377 Deep Ecology Reinscribes Anthropocentrism (1/2).................................... 379 Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 2AC ........................................................... 382 Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: Ext (1/2) ................................................... 385 A2 ―We‘re Not Fascists‖: 1AR ...................................................................... 388 Deep Ecology Justifies State/Capitalism..................................................... 389 Deep Ecology Creates Suffering................................................................... 390 Case Comes First .......................................................................................... 391 Alternative Fails: Bad Activism ................................................................... 392 Alternative Fails: Premodern Society Bad .................................................. 393 Asteroid Turn ............................................................................................... 394 HIV Turn ...................................................................................................... 395 African AIDS Outweighs .............................................................................. 396 Singularity Turn ........................................................................................... 397 **Deleuze and Guattari** ............................................................................ 398 Perms ........................................................................................................... 398 Alternative Increases Oppression................................................................ 399 Deleuze Bad (General) ................................................................................. 401 D & G Exclude Women ................................................................................ 402 A2 ―Life is Carbon‖....................................................................................... 403 A2 ―Death Doesn‘t Destroy Being‖: 2AC (1/2) ............................................ 405 A2 ―Life is Meaningless Because the Sun Will Go Out‖: 2AC ..................... 407 **Derrida** .................................................................................................. 409 A2 ―Deconstruction ...................................................................................... 409 A2 ―New International‖ (1/2) ...................................................................... 410 **Discourse Kritiks (General)** .................................................................. 413 Discourse Kritik Answers: 2AC (1/3) .......................................................... 413 ―Newspeak Turn‖: 1AR ................................................................................. 417 #2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (1/5) ...................................................................... 418 #4 Censorship Bad Turns: 1AR ................................................................... 425 #4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (1/4) ........................................................... 426 #7 Discourse Focus Trades off with Action: 1AR ........................................ 431 #7 Discourse Focus Trades off with Action: Ext ......................................... 432 #8 Alternative Fails: 1AR ............................................................................. 433 Holocaust Trivialization Answers: 2AC (1/3).............................................. 435 A2 ―Representation Links‖ (1/4) ................................................................. 439 A2 ―Indigenous Peoples Labels Bad‖: 2AC .................................................. 443 EPrime Answers: 2AC (1/3) ......................................................................... 444 EPrime Bad (Jack Attack!) .......................................................................... 447 **Fear Bad** ................................................................................................ 448 A2 ―Fear of Death Bad‖: 2AC (1/5) .............................................................. 448 #3 Good Fear of Death: 1AR (1/2) ............................................................... 454 #4 Repression Turn: 1AR (1/3) ................................................................... 456 #5 Fear is Key to Love: 1AR ......................................................................... 459 #6 Inaction Turn: 1AR ................................................................................. 460 #7 Fear Solves War: 1AR ............................................................................. 461 Spectacle of Death Good (1/4) ..................................................................... 463 **Empire** ................................................................................................... 469 Movements Fail............................................................................................ 469 Alternative Causes Violence ........................................................................ 470 Alternative is False Radicalism..................................................................... 471 4 Kritik Answers Capitalism is Sustainable ............................................................................. 472 Resistance Fails............................................................................................ 473 Alternative = Oppression ............................................................................. 474 Alternative Fractures Other Movements ..................................................... 475 Alternative Causes Terrorism ...................................................................... 476 **Exceptionalism (USC)**........................................................................... 477 Exceptionalism Answers: 2AC ..................................................................... 477 **Feminism** .............................................................................................. 479 Feminism Answers: 2AC (1/2)..................................................................... 479 White Feminism Bad: 1AR........................................................................... 484 **Gift**......................................................................................................... 486 A2 ―The Gift‖: 2AC (1/4) .............................................................................. 486 Anti-Globalization Turn: 1AR (1/2) ............................................................. 490 Anti-Globalization Movements Up Now (1/2) ............................................ 493 Provisional Truth Turn: 2AC (1/2) .............................................................. 496 Provisional Truth: 1AR ................................................................................ 498 **Global/Local**.......................................................................................... 499 Micropolitics Only Benefit Privileged.......................................................... 499 Localism Causes Oppression (1/2) .............................................................. 500 Globalism Key to Resistance........................................................................ 502 Alternative Kills Movements ....................................................................... 503 Rejection Bad ............................................................................................... 504 A2 ―Localism‖............................................................................................... 505 Permutation ................................................................................................. 506 **Habeas Corpus** ...................................................................................... 507 Habeas Corpus Answers: 2AC (1/3) ............................................................ 507 **Habermas** ...............................................................................................512 Habermas Answers: 2AC ..............................................................................512 **Heidegger** ........ 513 Ethics Turn....................................................................................................513 Ontological Fascism Turn: 2AC ....................................................................514 Ontology = Nazism: 1AR...............................................................................516 Ontology = Nazism: Ext (1/3) ....................................................................... 517 A2 ―We Don‘t Advocate Nazism‖: 1AR ........................................................ 522 A2 ―Nazism is Inauthentic‖: 1AR ................................................................. 523 Heidegger Kills Change................................................................................ 525 Heidegger Irrelevent .................................................................................... 526 Rejecting Tech Leads to Extinction ............................................................. 527 Alternative Fails: Lapses Into Ontic Thought ............................................. 528 Alternative Fails: Tech Returns ................................................................... 529 Alternative Causes Suffering ....................................................................... 530 Alternative Causes Paralysis (1/2) ................................................................531 Heidegger Was a Nazi .................................................................................. 533 Anti-Humanism Justifies Genocide ............................................................ 534 Liberal Humanism Solves Oppression ........................................................ 535 Humanism Solves Genocide ........................................................................ 537 A2 ―Reject Technology‖: 2AC ...................................................................... 538 A2 Spanos: 2AC (1/3)................................................................................... 539 A2 Spanos: 2AC (3/3) ...................................................................................541 HR Bad Answers: 2AC (1/4) ........................................................................ 542 #3 Essentialism Turn: 1AR .......................................................................... 547 #5 Relativist Apologism Turn: 1AR ............................................................. 548 #8 Permutation: 1AR (1/3) .......................................................................... 549 #10 Zizek Presymbolism: 1AR (1/2) ............................................................ 553 No Link......................................................................................................... 555 Relativism Is Self-Refuting .......................................................................... 556 Defense: Non-Westerners Want Dignity ..................................................... 558 A2 ―Foundationalism Bad‖ .......................................................................... 559 A2 ―Morality Is Culturally Created‖............................................................. 560 K = Imperialist ..............................................................................................561 **Kappeler** ................................................................................................ 562 Kappeler Answers: 2AC (1/5) ...................................................................... 562 #5 Alternative Causes Violence: 1AR (1/2) ................................................. 567 #7 Negation: 1AR ......................................................................................... 569 #8 Subversion: 1AR ..................................................................................... 570 #12 Authenticity: 1AR ................................................................................... 571 **Kato** ....................................................................................................... 573 Kato Answers: 2AC (1/4) ............................................................................. 573 **Levinas/Derrida** .....................................................................................577 A2 ―Infinite Responsibility‖ (1/3) .................................................................577 5 Kritik Answers Levinas Destroys Ethics (1/2) ...................................................................... 580 Levinas/Derrida Destroy Ethics .................................................................. 583 **Nietzsche** ............................................................................................... 585 Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (1/6) ..................................................................... 585 Nietzsche = Nihilism.....................................................................................591 Nietzsche Legitimizes Genocide (1/2) ......................................................... 593 Nietzsche Legitimizes Patriarchy ................................................................ 596 Alternative Causes Annihilation .................................................................. 597 Nihilism Fails ............................................................................................... 598 Nihilism Causes Terrorism (1/2) ................................................................. 599 Nihilism Causes Terrorism (2/2) ................................................................600 Nihilism is the Root Cause of Violence........................................................ 601 Nihilism Causes Authoritarianism .............................................................. 602 **Nonviolence** .......................................................................................... 603 Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (1/6)................................................................. 603 #2 Pragmatic Pacifism Perm: 1AR (1/2) ..................................................... 612 A2 ―Violence Snowballs‖: 1AR ..................................................................... 614 #5 Violence Inevitable: 1AR......................................................................... 616 #7 Pacifism Allows Atrocity: 1AR .................................................................617 Pacifism = State Collusion (1/2) .................................................................. 618 Embracing Violence = Nonviolence ............................................................ 622 Pacifism = Violence (1/3)............................................................................. 623 Pacifism Doesn‘t Solve Violence .................................................................. 626 Pacifist Activism Fails: General ................................................................... 627 Pacifist Activism Fails: Law is Violent ......................................................... 628 Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution (1/3)................................................ 630 Pacifist Activism Fails: Final Solution (3/3) ............................................... 633 Civil Disobedience Fails (1/2) ...................................................................... 634 A2 ―Violence Alienates the People‖: 2AC .................................................... 637 A2 ―Non-Violence Key to Prevent Eradication of Movement‖: 2AC........... 638 Pacifism Bad: War Good (1/2) ..................................................................... 639 Pacifism Bad: Unethical............................................................................... 641 Pacifism Causes Oppression ........................................................................ 642 Pacifism Causes Aggression (1/2)................................................................ 643 **Normativity** ........................................................................................... 646 Normativity Answers: 2AC (1/7) ................................................................. 646 #3 Permutation: 1AR ................................................................................... 655 #3 Permutation: Ext .................................................................................... 656 #5 Sublime Justice: 1AR .............................................................................. 657 #7 Alt Reinscribes Subject: 1AR (1/2) ......................................................... 659 #9 Normativity Good: 1AR .......................................................................... 661 #10 Simulation/Roleplaying Good: 1AR (1/3) ............................................ 662 #11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: 1AR ............................................................. 666 #11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: Ext .............................................................. 668 Normative Thought Inevitable (1/3) ........................................................... 669 Alternative Fails ........................................................................................... 673 Pragmatism Good ........................................................................................ 674 **Nuclearism** ............................................................................................ 675 Nuclearism Answers: 2AC (1/3) .................................................................. 675 #1 Permutation: 1AR.................................................................................... 680 #5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves Usage: 1AR ............................................... 682 #5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves Usage: Ext ................................................ 683 #5 Nuclear Imagery Good: 1AR ................................................................... 689 A2 ―Nuclear Numbing‖: 2AC ....................................................................... 690 A2 ―Nuclear Deterrence Immoral‖: 2AC (1/2) ............................................ 691 A2 ―Proliferation K‖: 2AC ............................................................................ 693 **Religion** ................................................................................................. 694 Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (1/6) ............................................................... 694 #1 Finite Quantum States: 1AR ................................................................... 700 A2 ―Can‘t Disprove God‘s Existence‖: 1AR .................................................. 702 #7 Religious Suffering: 1AR (1/3) ................................................................ 703 A2 ―Those Ppl Weren‘t Real Christians‖: 1AR ............................................. 706 #8 Evilution Disproves Religion: 1AR ......................................................... 708 Evolution Contradicts Christianity: Ext (1/2) ............................................. 709 A2 ―Evolution Is Only a Theory‖: 1AR .......................................................... 712 A2 ―Evolution Contradicts Thermodynamics‖: 1AR .................................... 713 A2 ―No Transitional Fossils‖: 1AR ................................................................ 714 #12 Sexual Abuse: 1AR ................................................................................. 715 Christianity = Sex Abuse: Ext (1/3) .............................................................. 716 A2 ―Life Without God Pointless‖: 1AR ........................................................ 720 A2 ―Life Without God is Terrifying‖: 1AR ................................................... 722 Alternative Hurts Religion........................................................................... 723 **Securitization** ........................................................................................ 724 6 Kritik Answers Security Good: Helps Marginalized People ................................................. 724 Alt Bad: Allows Suffering to Continue......................................................... 725 Alt Fails: Engagement/Nonengagement Doublebind ................................. 726 Alt Fails: Securitizes Itself ........................................................................... 727 Perm Solves: Starting Point ......................................................................... 728 Perm Solves: Must Act ................................................................................. 729 A2 ―Dillon‖: 2AC .......................................................................................... 730 **Speaking for Others** .............................................................................. 732 A2 ―Speaking for Others‖: 2AC (1/2) ........................................................... 732 #3 Retreat: 1AR ............................................................................................ 736 #3 Retreat: Ext ............................................................................................. 737 #6 Perm: 1AR ............................................................................................... 738 #9 Reductionism: 1AR ................................................................................. 739 The Alternative is a Fantasy ......................................................................... 741 **State Bad, Juhdge** ................................................................................. 742 Strategic Use of State Good ......................................................................... 742 State is Key to Solving Oppression (1/2) ..................................................... 744 State Key to Solving War (1/2) .................................................................... 748 Alternative Creates Worse Oppression (1/2) .............................................. 750 Alternative Causes Nuclear War .................................................................. 753 Permutation Solvency (1/3) ......................................................................... 755 No Link......................................................................................................... 758 No Alternative .............................................................................................. 759 A2 ―Borders‖: 2AC ....................................................................................... 760 **Terror Talk** ............................................................................................. 761 Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (1/5) ...................................................................761 Terror Discourse Good: 1AR ........................................................................ 768 Counterspeech Solves: 1AR ......................................................................... 769 **Threat Construction** .............................................................................. 770 Threat Construction Answers: 2AC (1/3) .................................................... 770 #2 Threat Rhetoric Deters War: 1AR ...........................................................775 #5 Realism Inevitable: 1AR ......................................................................... 776 #7 Scenario Analysis Good: 1AR (1/3) ......................................................... 777 #9 Prefer Our Args: 1AR .............................................................................. 780 Dillon Supports Acting Against Terrorism ...................................................781 **Zizek: Psychopolitics**............................................................................. 782 Lacan Destroys Social Change (1/2) ............................................................ 782 Lacan = Being Towards Death ..................................................................... 784 Lacan = Oppression ..................................................................................... 785 A2 ―Stavrakakis‖: 2AC ................................................................................. 786 Marxism Answers: 2AC (1/2) ...................................................................... 787 Brown Turns (1/2) ....................................................................................... 789 Permutation Key to Socialism ..................................................................... 792 **Miscellaneous**........................................................................................ 793 A2 ―Art‖ (1/2) ............................................................................................... 793 A2 ―Love‖...................................................................................................... 796 A2 ―Poetry‖ ................................................................................................... 797 A2 ―Silence‖ .................................................................................................. 798 A2 ―‗Third World‘ Bad‖ ................................................................................ 799 7 Kritik Answers 8 Kritik Answers **GENERAL K ANSWERS** **Framework** Fiat Good: 2AC Next, our interpretation is that plan is a yes/no question. If it‘s better than the squo or a competing policy option, we win. That‘s good because A. It is the most predictable because the resolution asks a question about federal action. The lack of individual agency stipulations in the resolution mean that introducing such questions are outside the scope of the subject matter we were asked to prepare to debate. We would be happy to address such concerns under different resolutions B. It facilitates the best policy analysis because it ensures that we are not forced to compare aff apples versus neg oranges C. Aff choice justifies—they can run critical affirmatives if they want and we will engage them—they should reciprocally respect our choice to play the fiat game D. Our affirmative impact claims necessitate—claims of individual agency beg the question of the efficacy of liberal politics, and we impact turn such claims by proving that their drive for unfettered autonomy lets the government get away with destroying the world E. Most educational—kritiks are run in debate because graduate assistants like to talk about their course readings with debaters—we lack the foundational understanding to engage in high speed discourse about such arguments until we‘ve done our homework, whereas high school civics provides adequate grounding for policy debate. We think that there should be two debate leagues: a policy circuit for undergrads and a critical circuit for grad students. F. Even if we lose the fiat debate, we still get to leverage our aff impacts against those of the kritik—the discursive (or other) mechanism through which their alternative solves is just as available to our message about the necessity of authoritarianism. We are both theoretical kritiks of the status quo 9 Kritik Answers General Defense of the Aff: 2AC (1/2) PERM – DO BOTH PERM – DO THE PLAN AND ALL OF THE ALTERNATIVE EXCEPT THE PARTS THAT LINK TO PLAN POLICYMAKING PROVIDES A UNIQUE SPACE TO BECOME EDUCATED ABOUT CRITICAL ADVOCACY, THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE IS THE CREATION OF A NEW ELITE Coverstone ‗95 [Alan, Princeton High School, ―An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchell‘s Outward Activist Turn,‖ www.wfu.edu/Student-organizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 3-16-05//uwyo-ajl] Yet, Mitchell goes too far. In two important areas, his argument is slightly miscalibrated. First, Mitchell underestimates the value of debate as it is currently practiced. There is greater value in the somewhat insular nature of our present activity than he assumes. Debate's inward focus creates an unusual space for training and practice with the tools of modem political discourse. Such space is largely unavailable elsewhere in American society. Second, Mitchell overextends his concept of activism. He argues fervently for mass action along ideological lines. Such a turn replaces control by society's information elite with control by an elite all our own. More than any other group in America today, practitioners of debate should recognize the subtle issues upon which political diversity turns. Mitchell's search for broad themes around which to organize mass action runs counter to this insight. As a result, Mitchell's call for an outward activist turn threatens to subvert the very values it seeks to achieve. KRITIK CAN‘T SOLVE THE AFF – EXTEND THE TRIBE AND LARSON EVIDENCE. IF THE COURTS DON‘T ACT, BUSH WILL CONTINUE DETAINMENT, WHICH IS WORSE THAN PLAN WE OUTWEIGH: FAILURE PASS PLAN THREATENS MULTIPLE EXTINCTION SCENARIOS, INCLUDING INTERNATIONAL LAW, MULTILATERALISM, EXECUTIVE POWER, DEMOCRACY, AND RUSSIAN INDEPENDENCE. EVEN IF THEY WIN ONE BIG IMPACT, WE‘RE HOSING THEM PLAN SOLVES BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE Cole 2003 [David, Prof. Georgetown U. Law Center, ―Judging the Next Emergency: Judicial Review and Individual Rights in Times of Crisis,‖ 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2565, August, LN//uwyo-ajl] To be sure, judicial decisions are not the only forces that may constrain government actors in the next emergency. Developing cultural norms may also play a role. As noted above, Korematsu has never been formally overruled, but it is nonetheless highly unlikely that anything on the scale of the Japanese internment would happen again. The cultural condemnation of that initiative, reflected in Congress's issuance of a formal apology and restitution, n52 has been so powerful that the option is a nonstarter even without controlling Supreme Court law. But even here, the legislative apology followed judicial decisions nullifying the convictions on writs of coram nobis. n53 In addition, the formal requirements that judges give reasons that are binding on future judges means that judicial decisions are likely to play a more specific constraining function than the development of cultural norms. Indeed, John Finn has argued that the obligation to give reasons is constitutive of constitutionalism and underscores the necessity of judicial review to any meaningful system of constitutional law. n54 Cultural norms and political initiatives are rarely as clear-cut as a legal prohibition, and their very contestability means that they are likely to exert less restraining 10 Kritik Answers force than a judicial holding. Court decisions are, of course, also contestable, but generally along a narrower range of alternatives. 11 Kritik Answers General Defense of the Aff: 2AC (2/2) SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS – PREFER OUR EV ABOUT HOW OVERRULING QUIRIN SOLVES ABUSIVE DETAINMENT TO THEIR ABSTRACT CARDS THAT DON‘T ASSUME PLAN WE MUST ASSUME A DOUBLE-RESPONSIBILITY TO CRITICIZE INSTITUTIONS WHILE USING SOVEREIGNTY AGAINST ITSELF MICHAELSON & SHERSHOW (Profs of Engl @ MSU and UC Davis) 2004 [Scott & Scott, Jan. 11, p. online: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero011104.html, accessed June 21, 2005 //buntin] The act of sovereignty that captures the Guantánamo detainees only to push them beyond the reach and protection of the sovereign state is the very manifestation of the existing state system and its corollary values. Critics are confronted with a Hobson's choice between attempting to limit or suspend the exercise of sovereignty through increasing legal regulation or endorsing the exercise of sovereignty as a necessary corrective to injustice (as in the king's or executive's pardon). On this point, progressive legal theorists have been split. But the ultimate answer cannot lie solely in the enforcement of existing international law and the production of yet more international documents within the same framework, nor in the tenuous hope for occasional exceptions to that sovereign exceptionality that is always the essential form of sovereign power. International law alone will never avail, and not merely because its own logic always holds in reserve a right to the same indiscriminate violence that it condemns in the guerrilla, the pirate or the terrorist. Sovereignty is the principle and activity that founds the state, and therefore constitutes its innermost and outermost possibility. The sovereign black hole, loophole or zone of legal limbo is foundational for the existing juridico-political order. Even more broadly, within that order, the absolute end of sovereignty is unthinkable. Without sovereignty, no decisions; and without decisions, no justice. Since sovereignty itself is inevitable, yet particular instances of sovereign power must still be confronted and challenged, critics of the current situation must assume a double responsibility. On the one hand, the present resources of national and international law must indeed be pursued to their limits, to discover and interpret precedents for the urgent decisions of the day, and, more importantly, to set new precedents for decisions still to come. But on the other hand, since law itself cannot in principle ever be adequate to the full enormity of Guantánamo, sovereignty itself must be torqued in a strange reversal, and made to work against itself. In other words, the sovereignty of strong states with the power to decide global matters -- the sovereignty that is, after all, finally a collective force, a power "of the people, by the people and for the people" -- must be expended without reserve in the name, not of law, but of justice, to the point where the territory and its boundary trembles. Such is not a mechanism or method which might be codified, because it will involve sovereign (and hence unprecedented) acts and decisions; and because its goal is a justice understood as an infinite task of thinking our relation to the Other. But as Jacques Derrida suggests, "the fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news"; rather, one can "find in this the political chance to all historical progress." All this is perhaps difficult to imagine in a world so dominated by reasons of state and the fanaticism of borders and identities. But the urgency of the task can hardly be overstated. At any rate, one thing is clear: at Guantánamo Bay, as Walt Kelly once observed, "we have met the enemy and he is us." 12 Kritik Answers Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Long) (~50 sec.) Next, Floating PICs are bad: 1. Steals all aff ground- the plan is the foundation for all affirmative offense in debate, allowing the negative to defend the plan crushes our ability to answer arguments, including their K. In a world where affirmatives are able to generate foundational offense separate from the plan, the negative‘s ability to debate is severely compromised, plan focus is best for both teams. 2. Not educational- there is little education to be gained from allowing the negative to agree that the plan is a good idea in totality and that there was something wrong with the ―Construction‖ of the iac, this justifies allowing the negative to ―Criticize‖ the spelling of our tags, while advocating the plan. Affirmatives rarely win in this world. 3. Undermines Reciprocal Burdens- allowing the negative to advocate the plan means that the negatives burden has shifted from disproving the plan to disproving anything that the affirmative has said; that is too easy on negatives, especially on a tiny topic with lots of generic negative ground. Their argument justifies affirmatives defending the text of the INC but not the justifications of the INC. It also justifies severing out of everything that is not the plan. 4. We Turn their offensive arguments- They should have to win the framework debate in order to win that their K comes before the affirmative, allowing them to win because there is a small risk that something was wrong with the aff, separate from the plan, means that we dodge a discussion of methodology and epistemology and its relationship to the aff, they should have to win that there is a meaningful relationship, not that there could be a meaningful relationship. They dodge a discussion of these questions, preventing any benefits of making affs defend their whole iac. 5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this argument just to get back to ground zero; this should be a non-issue. 13 Kritik Answers Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Short) (<20 sec.) Next, Floating PICs are bad 1. Steals Aff ground- Floating PICs steal the only option that affs have to generate offense, the plan. 2. Not educational- Floating PICs justify negatives defending the plan and criticizing the spelling of our tags, crushing education. 3. Not Reciprocal- the affirmative cannot agree with a bulk of the neg strat and k their reps, we would have to win a framework arg too. 4. We turn their offense- they sidestep a discussion of epistemology and its effects on policymaking, not defending the plan provides more meaningful education. 5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this argument just to get back to ground zero. 14 Kritik Answers Do the Plan Perm: 2AC Perm- do the plan. Perm solves1. That the negative can divorce themselves from the bad representations of the IAC surely means that we can too. If it really is just as easy as saying, we defend the plan but not the representations of the IAC; then there is no reason why we would not be able to do the same thing. 2. No theoretical reason why the perm is illegit, they might win substantive reasons why the our representations are tied to our plan, but that is a reason why they also would not be able to advocate it separate from the rest of the IAC, if the very utterance of the rest of the iac ties it to the plan, then that is irrevocable. 3. And we will defend that the perm is a test of the competitiveness of part of their alternative- the part that advocates the plan, which is decidedly not competitive, a remedy to this non-competitive nature would be to disallow the negative to advocate the plan. 15 Kritik Answers #1 Steals Aff Ground: 1AR Extend the 2AC #1- Floating PICs destroy all affirmative Ground; the plan is the only way for affirmatives to generate offense in debate. If the negative is allowed to defend the plan as well, then there is no residual IAC offense that we can claim, and the 2AC has to start from scratch, meaning that affirmatives always start at a disadvantage. This pits the block against the IAR, which means affs rarely ever win. If instead the aff is able to generate offense in the IAC that does not stem from the plan but something else, then debate for the negative becomes difficult as they not only have to disprove the plan but everything else. 16 Kritik Answers #4 Ext. Turns Offense: 1AR Extend the 2AC #4Any reason that they win that it is important for us to defend the non-plan parts of the IAC, we will win are reasons why they shouldn‘t defend the plan. If the negative did not defend our plan, but solely engaged in a criticism of our representations, then that would facilitate a discussion of how our representations related to and affected our plan. By choosing to defend the plan absent from the rest of the IAC, they have limited our discussion to just one of language, rather than including broader issues of epistemology. This short-circuits any reason why it would be good or educational to examine the representations because they have severed them from 17 Kritik Answers A2 ―Plan Focus Bad‖: 1AR 1. We will outweigh any of their arguments plan focus is bad A. Ground- Both teams benefit immensely from plan focus debate, their argument would not be possible in a world where we didn‘t read a plan, most negative args would be rendered meaningless B. Education- the alternative is res-focused debate, which prevents us from delving into the more interesting aspects of the resolution by parametrisizing it. 18 Kritik Answers A2 ―Plan is only a tiny part of the speech/Discourse of 1AC is ~9 min.‖: 1AR They say that the plan is relatively unimportant, this is just not true: 1. The plan is the foundation for the rest of the affirmative, taking the plan out of the affirmative would render the IAC fairly nonsensical, just because the plan can be read quickly does not render it meaningless. 2. This is untrue from the standpoint of the negative as well, the plan is what they get before the round, not the entire text of the affirmative, it is the focus of the debate in a literal as well as figurative sense. 19 Kritik Answers Must Have an Alternative: 2AC NEXT, LACK OF ALT IS BAD A. We need a text to provide us with ground to perm the kritik—such arguments are critical tests of the link B. Utopian alternatives destroy debate because we can never win that the plan is better than perfection C. Vague alternatives are moving targets that prevent us from linking offense D. It guts their solvency because their argument will never gain political traction, all of which are voters for fairness and education 20 Kritik Answers Hasty Generalization Bad: 2AC HASTY GENERALIZATION A. There are many instances where advocating government change is good—these instances would still vote to the K B. Call to reject doesn‘t justify its utilitarian basis—there are still plenty of reasons to do the plan 21 Kritik Answers Law Transformative: 2AC (1/2) IT IS IMPORTANT THAT EACH ONE OF US DEFENDS THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE LAW- WORLDWIDE RIGHTS AND FREEDOM DEPEND ON IT KENNEDY 06 (Anthony, Supreme Court Justice, ―Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association‖, Federal News Service, August 12, 2006, Lexis) we are at turning point in the history of the law. I sense, President Greco, as indicated in your remarks, that another The Constitution gave us judges. It's really remarkable that it did. Remember that attacks and complaints against judges were one of the indictments, one of the allegations, in the Declaration of Independence. The framers had been pushed around by judges. And what did they do? They created a judiciary and gave them life tenure. Why did they do that? Because they were confident that the process of reason, the slow elaboration of the principles of justice through the case-by-case method, was the surest way to interpret the Constitution. The framers knew that they were not prescient enough, and they were not brazen enough, to specify all of the elements of justice. They knew this could become apparent only over time. They knew that the whole purpose of the Constitution is to rise above the inequities and the injustices that you can't see. But now we are in an era where I sense something different happening. We know the truth needs no translation. There's a word for truth the rule of law is essential. We hear a lot about security. But our best we are not making the case as well as we ought. It could be, to use a Pacific metaphor, that the tide has gone out and we're on the beach. But a tsunami of expectations and discontent and demands and dissatisfaction may soon sweep in upon us. We must explain to the rest of the world the meaning, the essentiality and the purpose of the rule of law as it's understood by the American people and by other democracies throughout the world. And we must begin to do a better job of it, and we must begin that now. (Applause.) I was in every language. We know that the world is getting smaller. We know that security, ultimately our only security, is in the world of ideas. And I sense a slight foreboding. I sense that here in Hawaii, Governor Lingle, just a few months ago and met with the University of Hawaii law students. And I asked them, "What does the rule of law mean?" You know, I never heard that term when I was in law school. And lawyers bandy it about a lot. Should it not be defined? If you parse it as a grammarian might, it doesn't always work. You might have a dictator with laws that are known and that are enforced, but that can't be the rule of law. The rule of law does not exist just because a dictator makes the trains run on time. And so I tried to define the rule of law. And before doing so, there were certain caveats. There are certain risks. The phrase has a resonance, an allure, that you're reluctant to destroy. And we're often reluctant to talk about universal truths lest our efforts at formulating their specifics seem too bland, too insufficient, for the great purpose behind the phrase. So there's a risk, when we talk about the rule of law, that you say too little or that you say too much; that you say too little and you're facile, thereby preventing us from discovering other truths; that you say too much and that you're prolix. There's a reluctance to open the bidding so that every interest group has its particular interest, its particular goal, incorporated in the rule of law. I always wanted to teach a law school course in constitutional law to some very bright students who had never read the Constitution. And the way I'd do it is I'd say, "Now, here it is, but you can't read it. I want you to tell me what you think the Constitution should contain if it's a model Constitution." They'd look. I'd say, "Now, don't peek." And just as an academic trick, I would get them interested. I've done the same thing for you, and I'm glad it's dark, because I don't want you to look at it. I've given you a little definition of the rule of law. I have one for all the Kameamea students. What would you put in your definition of the rule of law? Would you talk about process, knowing that there are certain truths that are not evident to us now, that we're blind to the injustices and the prejudices of our own times? So you just talk about process? That really doesn't suffice. It's not elevating enough. So you must talk about substance. What is the substance which you include? I suggested that the rule of law has three parts. This is simply a working definition. If we were in the law school class at the University of Hawaii, or if we had more time, you could probably make some suggestions for how this should be improved. But I think it's important for us to begin assessing where we are in this campaign to explain the meaning of freedom, the meaning of the rule of law, to a There's a jury that's out. It's half the world. The verdict is not yet in. The commitment to accept the western idea of democracy has not yet been made, and they are waiting for you to make the case. I suggest that the rule of law has three parts. The first is that the law is binding on the government and all of its officials. This may seem a rather self-evident matter, but it's doubting world. My friends, make no mistake: a proposition that most government officials in most countries do not fully understand. If an administrative agency and an administrator in that agency is charged with giving you a permit, the permit is not given to you as a matter of grace. It's given to you because you're entitled to it, and it's his or her duty to give it to you. Very The rule of law binds the government and all of its officials. few countries in the world understand this. This is an essential lesson that must be taught if the corruption and the greed and the graft President Greco referred to are eliminated. The second part of the rule of law is there the rule of law must respect the dignity, equality and human rights of every person. And then there's a second sentence, and the second sentence says that the people are entitled to have a voice in the laws that govern them. So there's a process element. But it isn't just process, because the right to participate in government is nothing less than the right to help shape your own destiny. And the framers of our Constitution made it very clear that each generation has a share, has a chance to determine its own destiny, to determine its own direction. What are human rights? Is it the right to for you on the little slip. It is, I think, in a sense, the most troubling for me. I'm not sure that it's complete. It says that subsistence, the right to enough to eat, the right to breathe clean air, the right to an education? At this point the rule of law, as we, I think, would want to define it, may depart from the idea of a model constitution. These are two different things. In the Constitution of the United States, there are a series of essentially negative commands. "Congress shall make no law restricting free speech or the free press." "There shall be no unreasonable search and seizures." These are negative commands. It's easier to have the Ten Commandments -- "Thou shalt not steal" -- than the Sermon on the Mount -- "Thou shalt love thy neighbor." It's harder to enforce the latter. But what about affirmative rights? Aren't there some basic human entitlements? You see a man on a steam grate in the cold winter in Washington, D.C. and you say, "Well, you have the right to a jury trial, and you actually have a right to own a newspaper." He'd say, "I'm cold. I'm hungry. I want to eat." Americans if the rule of law is to have meaning, substance, hope, inspiration for the rest of the world, it must be coupled with the opportunity to improve human existence. I became interested a must understand that few years ago in water systems in Africa, and I have attended a few lectures about it. Not long ago I heard a speaker say the following. He asked this question: "How many hours of human labor per year are spent in the continent of Africa getting clean water?" This is work that falls on the shoulders of women. The answer was 8 billion hours a year. I was sitting in an audience like yours, thinking, "Now, did he say 8 million? No, that can't work out. Was it 80 million?" The answer is 8 billion. The biggest single cause of infant mortality in Africa and other undeveloped nations is diarrhea. Children with a slight body mass dehydrate quickly, and there's nothing for the heart to pump against. The heart can't pump if it's dry. This can be fixed. This is not rocket science. One of the reasons it can't be fixed, under present conditions, is that governments are corrupt. And people have a right to improve their lives, to gain basic security, without corrupt governments depriving them of the very means of existence. –CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGEAnd I asked him about it later. He said, "This is very conservative, because I'm just talking about the water that's clean when it gets back to the source." 22 Kritik Answers Law Transformative (2/2) --KENNEDY 06 CONT-My third suggestion -- and it can only be a suggestion; it would be presumptuous to say that I can define the rule of law -- my third suggestion for you to think about every person has a right to know what the laws are and to enforce them without fear of retaliation or retribution. This is almost a process-sounding precept, but it's again substantive as well. It's part of your identity, it's part of your self-definition, to know the laws that protect you, to know the laws that are respected by your neighbors and friends and family. This is part of who you are. And you're entitled to know this, and you're entitled to enforce them. I surprised me when I wrote it, and it was this, that was talking with some lawyers and judges not long ago from Bangladesh. They told me that a standard criminal sentence works something like this: A fine of three dollars or nine to 12 months in jail, and at least 1,000 people a year spend a year in jail for want of the three dollars. I said, "Well, I'm not a man of great means, but I'll write you a check for $1,000. That'll take care of 333 people." And they said, "Well, no, but then there'd be no deterrence." Is a nation, is a people, is a culture, is a we must find some ways to link the rule of law with real progress in improving the condition of humankind. We must have society able to embrace the western idea of the rule of law under such conditions? I suggest to you the answer is no. And some measures to assure that the vast aid, the work of the NGOs, the work of this association, has some immediate, visible, tangible return so that we can make the case. You were gracious to mention my remarks, President Greco, in San Francisco, when you last met in that city. We talked about the criminal justice system. And I Alexander Solzhenitsyn mentioned at the time a book by called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." And it occurred to me, when we were coming here to Hawaii, that Solzhenitsyn might be relevant in a somewhat different connection. He was a writer whom I greatly admired. He had escaped from the Soviet Union and from a gulag in order to write about that experience, and he was living in the United States. He was invited to Harvard to give the most important address given every year to the Harvard students. It was in the mid or late '70s. I was living in California at the time. I was thrilled that my hero was addressing the Harvard College. And this was pre-fax and Internet days, so it took me one or two days to get the text of his remarks, the text of his remarks from The New York Times. attacked the West, and particularly the law and the legal system. And he said that any society that defines the tissues of human existence in legalistic terms is condemned to spiritual mediocrity. My hero was saying this about my profession, And I was shocked, stunned, terribly disappointed to read his remarks, in which he about the Constitution that is America's self-identity, about the Constitution that Americans still think as defining who they are as a people?I reflected on it for a few We just define law differently than Solzhenitsyn did. From his era, from his , law was a dictat, a ucas (ph) -- a command, a mandate. In sum, it was a cold decree. That's not the meaning of law as our nation and our co- democracies define it. For us, law is a liberating force. It's a promise. It's a covenant. It says that you can hope, you can dream, you can dare, you can plan. You have joy in your existence. That's the meaning of the law as Americans understand it, and that's the meaning of the law that we must explain to a doubting world where the verdict is still out. You can make this case. You must make this case. And that is because freedom -- your freedom, my freedom and the freedom of the next generation -- hangs in the balance. I'm confident you will do this. days, and then I got the answer. culture 23 Kritik Answers ―Policymaking Good‖: 1AR (1/2) FIRST, EXTEND THE COVERSTONE ‘95 EVIDENCE. POLICY DEBATE CREATES A SAFE SPACE ALLOWING US TO TEST IDEAS, BECOMING EDUCATED ENOUGH TO HOLD ELITES ACCOUNTABLE, STOPPING THE RISE OF NEW OPPRESSION SECOND, DEBATE IS CIVIL SOCIETY: IT IS THE ROLE OF CRITICAL INTELLECTUALS TO FORM A PUBLIC POLICY SPHERE CONSTITUTED AROUND SPECIFIC POLICY IDEAS. WE ARE NOT THE GOVERNMENT, BUT BY ORIENTING OURSELVES TOWARDS THE STATE WE CAN ENSURE EFFECTIVE POLITICS. HABERMAS ‗98 [Jurgen, Prof. Philosophy at U. of Frankfurt, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 31//uwyo-crowe] A law is valid in the moral sense when it could be accepted by everybody from the perspective of each individual. Because only ―general‖ laws fulfill the condition that they regulate matters in the equal interest of all, practical reason finds expression in the generalizability or universalizability of the interests expressed in the law. Thus a person takes the moral point of view when he deliberates like a democratic legislator on whether the practice that would result from the general observance of a hypothetically proposed norm could be accepted by all those possibly affected viewed as potential colegislators. Each person participates in the role of co-legislator in a cooperative enterprise and thereby adopts an intersubjectively extended perpective from which it can be determined whether a controversial norm can count as generalizable from the point of view of each participant. Pragmatic and ethical reasons, which retain their internal connection to the interests and self0understanding of individual persons, also play a role in these deliberations; but these agent-relative reasons no longer count as rational motives and value-orientations of individual persons but as epistemic contributions to a discourse in which norms are examined with the aim of reaching a Because a legislative practice can only be undertaken jointly, a monological, egocentric operation of the generalization test in the manner of the Golden Rule will not suffice. communicative agreement. 24 Kritik Answers ―Policymaking Good‖: 1AR (2/2) THIRD, TECHNICAL, COMPETITIVE DEBATE IS A DIALECTICAL METHOD THAT TEACHES STUDENTS ABOUT INTERPLAY BETWEEN ARGUMENTS, TRAINING THEM FOR POLICY ENGAGEMENT Mitchell 2000 [Gordon R., the brilliant DOD at Pitt, Preface to Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science and Politics in Missle Defense Advocacy, Michigan State University Press, 2000, xvi//uwyo] intercollegiate policy debate is an odd and magical place, where a keen spirit of competition drives debaters to amass voluminous research in preparation for The world of tournaments, and where the resulting density of ideas spurts speakers to cram arguments into strictly timed presentation periods during contest rounds. Expert judges trained in policy analysis keep track of such contests as they unfold at breakneck speed, with speakers routinely delivering intricate argumentation at over 300 words per minute. To the uninitiated onlooker, this style of debate reveals itself as an unintelligible charade, something like a movielength Federal Express commercial or an auctioneering competition gone bad. But there are rich rewards for participants who master policy debate's special vocabulary, learn its arcane rules, and acclimate themselves to the style of rapid-fire speaking needed to keep up with the flow of arguments. The rigorous dialectical method of debate analysis cultivates a panoramic style of critical thinking that elucidates subtle interconnections among multiple positions and perspectives on policy controversies. The intense pressure of debate competition instills a relentless research ethic in participants. An inverted pyramid dynamic embedded in the format of contest rounds teaches debaters to synthesize and distill their initial positions down to the most cogent propositions for their final speeches. FOURTH, ONLY STATE-CENTERED DISCUSSION ABOUT POLITICS CAN REVERSE THE TREND TOWARD TOTALITARIANISM. THIS DESTROYS DEBATE… TORGERSON ‗99 [Douglas, Prof and Chair Dept. Political Studies @ Trent U., The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere, Duke University Press//uwyo-crowe] One rationale for Arendt's emphasis on the intrinsic value of politics is that this value has been so neglected by modernity that politics itself is threatened. Without a celebration of the intrinsic value of politics, neither functional nor constitutive political activity has any apparent rationale for continuing once its ends have been achieved. Functional politics might well be replaced by a technocratic management of advanced industrial society. A constitutive politics intent on social transformation might well be eclipsed by the coordinated direction of a cohesive social movement. In neither ease would any need be left for what Arendt takes to be the essence of there would be no need for debate. Green authoritarianism, following in the footsteps of Hobbes, has been all too ready to reduce politics to governance. Similarly, proponents of deep ecology, usually vague about politics, at least have been able politics: to recognize totalitarian dangers in a position that disparages public opinion in favor of objective management." Any attempt to plot a comprehensive strategy for a cohesive green movement, moreover, ultimately has to adopt a no-nonsense posture while erecting clear standards by which to identify and excommunicate the enemy that is within. Green politics from its inception, however, has challenged the officialdom of advanced industrial society by invoking the cultural idiom of the carnivalesque. Although tempted by visions of tragic heroism, as we saw in chapter, green politics has also celebrated the irreverence of the comic, of a world turned upside down to crown the fool. In a context of political theater, instrumentalism is often attenuated, at least momentarily displaced by a joy of performance. The comic dimension of political action can also be more than episodic. The image of the Lilliputians tying up the giant suggests well the strength and flexibility of a decentered constitutive politics. In a functional context, green politics offers its own technology of foolishness in response to the dysfunctions of industrialism, even to the point of exceeding the comfortable limits of a so-called responsible foolishness. Highlighting the comic, these tendencies within green politics begin to suggest an intrinsic value to politics. To the extent that this value is recognized, politics is inimical to authoritarianism and offers a poison pill to the totalitarian propensities of an industrialized mass society." To value political action for its own sake, in other words, at least has the significant extrinsic value of defending against the antipolitical inclinations of 25 Kritik Answers modernity. But what is the intrinsic value of politics? Arendt would locate this value in the virtuosity of political action, particularly as displayed in debate. Although political debate surely has extrinsic value, this does not exhaust its value. Debate is a language game that, to be played well, cannot simply be instrumentalized for the services it can render but must also he played for its own sake. Any game pressed into the service of external goals tends to lose its playful quality; it ceases to be fun. 26 Kritik Answers ―Policymaking Good‖: Ext (1/3) ACADEMIC SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING TEACHES STUDENTS HOW TO ORGANIZE INFORMATION AND DEFEND ARGUMENTS, RESISTING TOTALITARIAN INFORMATION OVERLOAD Coverstone ‗95 [Alan, Princeton High School, ―An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchell‘s Outward Activist Turn,‖ www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 316-05//uwyo-ajl] Mitchell's argument underestimates the nature of academic debate in three ways. First, debate trains students in the very skills required for navigation in the public sphere of the information age. In the past, political discourse was controlled by those elements who controlled access to information. While this basic reality will continue in the future, its essential features will change. No longer will mere possession of information determine control of political life. Information is widely available. For the first time in human history we face the prospect of an entirely new threat. The risk of an information overload is already shifting control of political discourse to superior information managers. It is no longer possible to control political discourse by limiting access to information. Instead, control belongs to those who are capable of identifying and delivering bits of information to a thirsty public. Mitchell calls this the "desertification of the public sphere." The public senses a deep desire for the ability to manage the information around them. Yet, they are unsure how to process and make sense of it all. In this environment, snake charmers and charlatans abound. The popularity of the evening news wanes as more and more information becomes available. People realize that these half hour glimpses at the news do not even come close to covering all available information. They desperately want to select information for themselves. So they watch CNN until they fall asleep. Gavel to gavel coverage of political events assumes top spots on the Nielsen charts. Desperate to decide for themselves, the public of the twenty-first century drinks deeply from the well of information. When they are finished, they find they are no more able to decide. Those who make decisions are envied and glorified. Debate teaches individual decision-making for the information age. No other academic activity available today teaches people more about information gathering, assessment, selection, and delivery. Most importantly, debate teaches individuals how to make and defend their own decisions. Debate is the only academic activity that moves at the speed of the information age. Time is required for individuals to achieve escape velocity. Academic debate holds tremendous value as a space for training. Mitchell's reflections are necessarily more accurate in his own situation. Over a decade of debate has well positioned him to participate actively and directly in the political process. Yet the skills he has did not develop overnight. Proper training requires time. While there is a tremendous variation in the amount of training required for effective navigation of the public sphere, the relative isolation of academic debate is one of its virtues. Instead of turning students of debate immediately outward, we should be encouraging more to enter the oasis. A thirsty public, drunk on the product of anyone who claims a decision, needs to drink from the pool of decision-making skills. Teaching these skills is our virtue. 27 Kritik Answers ―Policymaking Good‖: Ext (2/3) DEBATE TRAINS STUDENTS TO BECOME ACTIVISTS BY TESTING THEIR OPINIONS AND BECAUSE OF ITS COVERT NATURE – BECOMING OUTWARDLY POLITICAL THREATENS TO HAVE US INFILTRATED Coverstone ‗95 [Alan, Princeton High School, ―An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchell‘s Outward Activist Turn,‖ www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 316-05//uwyo-ajl] Mitchell's argument underestimates the risks associated with an outward turn. Individuals trained in the art and practice of debate are, indeed, well suited to the task of entering the political world. At some unspecified point in one's training, the same motivation and focus that has consumed Mitchell will also consume most of us. At that point, political action becomes a proper endeavor. However, all of the members of the academic debate community will not reach that point together. A political outward turn threatens to corrupt the oasis in two ways. It makes our oasis a target, and it threatens to politicize the training process. As long as debate appears to be focused inwardly, political elites will not feel threatened. Yet one of Mitchell's primary concerns is recognition of our oasis in the political world. In this world we face well trained information managers. Sensing a threat from "debate," they will begin to infiltrate our space. Ready made information will increase and debaters will eat it up. Not yet able to truly discern the relative values of information, young debaters will eventually be influenced dramatically by the infiltration of political elites. Retaining our present anonymity in political life offers a better hope for reinvigorating political discourse. As perhaps the only truly non-partisan space in American political society, academic debate holds the last real possibility for training active political participants. Nowhere else are people allowed, let alone encouraged, to test all manner of political ideas. This is the process through which debaters learn what they believe and why they believe it. In many ways this natural evolution is made possible by the isolation of the debate community. An example should help illustrate this idea. Like many young debaters, I learned a great deal about socialism early on. This was not crammed down my throat. Rather, I learned about the issue in the free flow of information that is debate. The intrigue of this, and other outmoded political arguments, was in its relative unfamiliarity. Reading socialist literature avidly, I was ready to take on the world. Yet I only had one side of the story. I was an easy mark for the present political powers. Nevertheless, I decided to fight City Hall. I had received a parking ticket which I felt was unfairly issued. Unable to convince the parking department to see it my way, I went straight to the top. I wrote the Mayor a letter. In this letter, I accused the city of exploitation of its citizens for the purpose of capital accumulation. I presented a strong Marxist critique of parking meters in my town. The mayor's reply was simple and straightforward. He called me a communist. He said I was being silly and should pay the ticket. I was completely embarrassed by the entire exchange. I thought I was ready to start the revolution. In reality, I wasn't even ready to speak to the Mayor. I did learn from the experience, but I did not learn what Gordon might have hoped. I learned to stop reading useless material and to keep my opinions to myself. Do we really want to force students into that type of situation? I wrote the mayor on my own. Debaters will experiment with political activism on their own. This is all part of the natural impulse for activism which debate inspires. Yet, in the absence of such individual motivation, an outward turn threatens to short circuit the learning process. Debate should capitalize on its isolation. We can teach our students to examine all sides of an issue and reach individual conclusions before we 28 Kritik Answers force them into political exchanges. To prematurely turn debaters out threatens to undo the positive potential of involvement in debate. 29 Kritik Answers ―Policymaking Good‖: Ext (3/3) OUTWARD ACTIVISM RISKS CREATING A NEW HOMOGENEOUS ELITE, CRUSHING IDEOLOGICAL DISSENT, TURNING THEIR ARGUMENT Coverstone ‗95 [Alan, Princeton High School, ―An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchell‘s Outward Activist Turn,‖ www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 316-05//uwyo-ajl] My third, and final reaction to Mitchell's proposal, targets his desire for mass action. The danger is that we will replace mass control of the media/government elite with a mass control of our own elite. The greatest virtue of academic debate is its ability to teach people that they can and must make their own decisions. An outward turn, organized along the lines of mass action, threatens to homogenize the individual members of the debate community. Such an outcome will, at best, politicize and fracture our community. At worst, it will coerce people to participate before making their own decisions. Debate trains people to make decisions by investigating the subtle nuances of public policies. We are at our best when we teach students to tear apart the broad themes around which traditional political activity is organized. As a result, we experience a wide array of political views within academic debate. Even people who support the same proposals or candidates do so for different and inconsistent reasons. Only in academic debate will two supporters of political views argue vehemently against each other. As a group, this reality means that mass political action is doomed to fail. Debaters do not focus on the broad themes that enable mass unity. The only theme that unites debaters is the realization that we are all free to make our own decisions. Debaters learn to agree or disagree with opponents with respect. Yet unity around this theme is not easily translated into unity on a partisan political issue. Still worse, Mitchell's proposal undermines the one unifying principle. Mitchell must be looking for more. He is looking for a community wide value set that discourages inaction. This means that an activist turn necessarily will compel political action from many who are not yet prepared. The greatest danger in this proposal is the likelihood that the control of the media/government elite will be replaced by control of our own debate elite. Emphasizing mass action tends to discourage individual political action. Some will decide that they do not need to get involved, but this is by far the lesser of two evils. Most will decide that they must be involved whether or not they feel strongly committed to the issue. Mitchell places the cart before the horse. Rather than letting ideas and opinions drive action as they do now, he encourages an environment where action drives ideas for many people. Young debaters are particularly vulnerable. They are likely to join in political action out of a desire to "fit in." This cannot be what Mitchell desires. Political discourse is a dessert now because there are more people trying to "fit in" that there are people trying to break out. 30 Kritik Answers A2 ―Only Learn As Spectators‖: 1AR FIRST, NOT TRUE – DEBATES ABOUT DETAINMENT TRAIN US TO HOLD POLICYMAKERS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR DECISIONS. IF WE CAN‘T HAVE A DEBATE, WE WON‘T KNOW WHAT TO DO WHEN WE CONFRONT REACTIONARIES. CROSS-APPLY COVERSTONE SECOND, TURN – VIEWING DEBATE DECISIONS AS ACTIVISM, IN AND OF THEMSELVES, CRUSHES ACTUAL POLITICAL ACTIVITY. WINNING A TOURNAMENT BECOMES GOOD ENOUGH CREATING NIHILISTS WHO NEVER ACTUALLY LOBBY THE GOVERNMENT. THIRD, THIS IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY THE MASSES OF DEBATERS WHO GO ON TO BECOME SOCIAL ACTIVISTS AND PROGRESSIVE ATTORNEYS. WE WOULDN‘T HAVE PEOPLE LIKE GORDON MITCHELL DOING WORK IN MISSILE DEFENSE OPACITY IF IT WEREN‘T FOR THE SAFE SPACE OF SWITCH SIDE DEBATE FOURTH, WORLDY ACADEMIC WORK IS DEMOCRATIZING AND SPURS ACTIVISM Gordon R. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh, ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47. argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and employ the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action, especially wider spheres of public In basic terms the notion of deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic energy by linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social argumentative agency links decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation and presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic empowerment. Argumentative agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based models of argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies movements, citizens and other actors engaged in live public controversies beyond the schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept, on strategies for utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive social change. Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and students pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by employing them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that through "critical constructivist action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency and work to transform the world around them . 31 Kritik Answers Policy Debate Good CRITICAL THEORY DIMINISHES THE BENEFIT OF POLICY DEBATE Jentleson 2002 [Bruce, Dir. Terry Sanford Inst. Public Policy and Prof. Pub Plcy and Pol. Sci. @ Duke, ―The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Debate Back In,‖ International Security 26:4, Spring, ASP//uwyo-ajl] To be sure, political science and international relations have produced and continue to produce scholarly work that does bring important policy insights. Still it is hard to deny that contemporary political science and international relations as a discipline put limited value on policy relevance—too little, in my view, and the discipline suffers for it. The problem is not just the gap between theory and policy but its chasmlike widening in recent years and the limited valuation of efforts, in Alexander George‘s phrase, at ―bridging the gap.‖ The events of September 11 drive home the need to bring policy relevance back in to the discipline, to seek greater praxis between theory and practice. AND DECENTRALIZED PUBLIC DEBATE IS NECESSARY OT TRANSFORM BUREACRACY Martin ‗90 [Brian, ―Bureacracy,‖ www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw08.html, 9-2306//uwyo-ajl] All of this can be quite useful and often effective, and should not be rejected. But working through bureaucracy on the inside, or demanding policy changes from the outside, does little to transform bureaucracy itself. In fact, working through bureaucracy can reinforce the legitimacy and sway of bureaucracy itself. In addition, campaigns oriented towards working through bureaucracy or applying pressure for change at the top tend to become bureaucratised themselves. Another important orientation adopted by many social activists is towards building selfmanaging organisational forms for their own activities, such as cooperative enterprises or egalitarian action groups. Self-managing organisational forms are an alternative to bureaucracy. Direct experience in self-managing groups strengthens the sense of community and commitment to social action and also provides understanding and individual strength to resist pressures for bureaucratisation in the wider society. In as much as social movements organise themselves as decentralised self-managing groups, linked by federations and networks, and self-consciously set out to develop and extend such structures, they provide a strong challenge to the domination of bureaucratic forms of social organisation. 32 Kritik Answers Switch-side Debate Good (1/3) CRITICAL DISTANCE & *PUBLICLY* ADVOCATING ARGUMENTS WITH WHICH YOU DISAGREE ARE ETHICALLY IMPORTANT: Dennis G. Day, Professor, Speech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, CENTRAL STATES SPEECH JOURNAL, February 1966, p. 7. All must recognize and accept personal responsibility to present, when necessary, as forcefully as possible, opinions and arguments with which they may personally disagree. To present persuasively the arguments for a position with which one disagrees is, perhaps, the greatest need and the highest ethical act in democratic debate. It is the greatest need because most minority views, if expressed at all, are not expressed forcefully and persuasively. Bryce, in his perceptive analysis of America and Americans, saw two dangers to democratic government: the danger of not ascertaining accurately the will of the majority and the danger that minorities might not effectively express themselves. In regard to the second danger, which he considered the greater of the two, he suggested: The duty, therefore, of a patriotic statesman in a country where public opinion rules, would seem to be rather to resist and correct than to encourage the dominant sentiment. He will not be content with trying to form and mould and lead it, but he will confront it, lecture it, remind it that it is fallible, rouse it -out of its self-complacency To present persuasively arguments for a position with which one disagrees is the highest ethical act in debate because it sets aside personal interests for the benefit of the common good. Essentially, for the person who accepts decision by debate, the ethics of the decisionmaking process are superior to the ethics of personal conviction on particular subjects for debate. Democracy is a commitment to means, not ends. Democratic society accepts certain ends, i.e., decisions, because they have been arrived at by democratic means. We recognize the moral priority of decision by debate when we agree to be bound by that decision regardless of personal conviction. Such an agreement is morally acceptable because the decision-making process guarantees our moral integrity by guaranteeing the opportunity to debate for a reversal of the decision. Thus, personal conviction can have moral significance in social decision-making only so long as the integrity of debate is maintained. And the integrity of debate is maintained only when there is a full and forceful confrontation of arguments and evidence relevant to decision. When an argument is not presented or is not presented as persuasively as possible, then debate fails. As debate fails decisions become less "wise." As decisions become less wise the process of decision-making is questioned. And finally, if and when debate is set aside for the alternative method of decision-making by authority, the personal convictions of individuals within society lose their moral significance as determinants of social choice. 33 Kritik Answers Switch-Side Debate Good (2/3) SWITCH SIDE DEBATING IS PROFOUNDLY MORAL AND GUARDS AGAINST ABSOLUTISM Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, Gifted Tongues, 2001, p. 54-55. Despite these concerns, most individuals with whom I discussed the issue felt that debating both sides of an issue was valuable, perhaps the greatest benefit of the activity, teaching the value of respect for differing opinions, multiple perspectives, and the dangers of absolutism. For some the ability to argue both sides of an issue is profoundly moral: I have seen some people become cynical as a result. I would hope with students I teach that they learn some ethical responsibilities. But I think what debate does is allow students to seriously consider important questions from both sides of the issue and see other perspectives before they become committed themselves to a position. I have students who will say, ―Well, I can‘t argue against this, because I really believe it.‖ But after they‘ve done some research they are not so certain of their convictions. They at least can see the other side. I think they become more humane as a result of looking at both sides. (interview) The ability to see both points of view has the potential in this view to make one more humane and less self-righteous. Others suggest that not only does debating both sides of a position not weaken one‘s position, but it strengthens it, perhaps by inoculating one to opposing arguments. Many debaters have strong political positions, which the activity seems to do nothing to diminish: I think what happens is that you leam that there are two sides to every issue. I think most debaters come down on one side or the other in their mind, but they are able to argue both sides. And I think that is an important thing to be able to do. I mean because it makes what you believe in, it makes that belief even more justified, because you do know both sides. (interview) The ability to take a position that is contrary to one‘s own beliefs has several benefits: making one appreciate the perspective of one‘s foes, making one‘s own thoughts more complex, and helping one become aware of counterarguments. Perhaps this stance does suggest that ―positions‖ are gamelike, but it is a game that corresponds to the way that much political decision making operates in the real world. 34 Kritik Answers Switch-Side Debate Good (3/3) SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING IS NECESSARY TO EXAMINE DIVERSE POLITICAL AGENDAS AND POLITICS. THE SOLUTION IS NOT TO SILENCE ALL REPRESENTATION; IT‘S TO MASSIVELY PROLIFERATE REPRESENTATIONS AND LET THE DEBATE EXAMINE THE WORTHINESS OF INDIVIDUAL REPRESENTATIONS WHICH CAN SUBVERT THE SYSTEM. EVERY TIME ANOTHER IMAGE IS REPRESENTED, IT MAKES OVERALL MARGINALIZATION LESS EASY. Ann Marie Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed 3/23/01 This questioning is particularly important when the representation of the subaltern is involved. The problem does not rest solely with the fact that often marginalized groups do not hold the 'power over representation' (Shohat 170); it rests also in the fact that representations of these groups are both flawed and few in numbers. Shohat asserts that dominant groups need not preoccupy themselves too much with being adequately represented. There are so many different representations of dominant groups that negative images are seen as only part of the "natural diversity" of people. However, "representation of an underrepresented group is necessarily within the hermeneutics of domination, overcharged with allegorical significance." (170) The mass media tends to take representations of the subaltern as allegorical, since representations of the marginalized are few, the few available are thought to be representative of all marginalized peoples. The few images are thought to be typical, sometimes not only of members of a particular minority group, but of all minorities in general. It is assumed that subalterns can stand in for other subalterns. A meaning that prime example of this is the fact that actors of particular ethnic backgrounds were often casted as any ethnic "other". (Some examples include Carmen Miranda HYPERLINK "http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/carmen.gif" in The Gang's All Here (1943), Ricardo Mantalban in Sayonara (1957), and Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik ). This collapsing of the image of the subaltern reflects not only ignorance but a lack of respect for the diversity within marginalized communities. Shohat also suggests that representations in one sphere--the sphere of popular culture--effects the other spheres of representation, particularly the political one: The denial of aesthetic representation to the subaltern has historically formed a corollary to the literal denial of economic, legal, and political representation. The struggle to 'speak for oneself' cannot be separated from a history of being spoken for, from the struggle to speak and be heard. (173) It cannot be ignored that representations effect the ways in which actual individuals are perceived. Although many see representations as harmless likenesses, they do have a real effect on the world. They are meant to relay a message and as the definition shows, 'influence opinion and action'. We must ask what ideological work these representations accomplish. Both the scarcity and the importance of minority representations yield what many have called " the burden of representation". Since there are so few images, negative ones can have devastating affects on the real lives of marginalized people. We must also ask, if there are so few, who will produce them? Who will be the supposed voice of the subaltern? Given the allegorical character of these representations, even subaltern writers, artists, Representations or the 'images or ideas formed in the mind' have vast implications for real people in real contexts. and scholars are asking who can really speak for whom? When a spokesperson or a certain image is read as metonymic, representation becomes more difficult and dangerous. Solutions for this conundrum are difficult to theorize. We can call for increased "self representation" or the inclusion of more individuals from 'marginalized' groups in 'the act of representing', yet this is easier said then done. Also, the inclusion of more minorities in representation will not necessarily alter the structural or institutional barriers that prevent equal participation for all in representation. Focusing on whether or not images are negative or positive, leaves in tact a reliance on the "realness' of images, a "realness" that is false to begin with. Finally, I again turn to Spivak and her question, 'Can the Subaltern Speak'. In this seminal essay, Spivak emphasizes the fact that representation is a sort of speech act, with a speaker and a listener. Often, the subaltern makes an attempt at selfrepresentation, perhaps a representation that falls outside the 'the lines laid down by the official institutional structures of representation' (306). Yet, this act of representation is not heard. It is not recognized by the listener, perhaps because it does not fit in with what is expected of the representation. Therefore, representation by subaltern individuals seems nearly impossible. Despite the fact that Spivak's formulation is quite accurate, there must still be an effort to try and challenge status quo representation and the ideological work it does. The work of various 'Third world' and minority writers, artists, and filmmakers attest to the possibilities of counter-hegemonic, anti-colonial subversion. It is obvious that representations are much more than plain 'likenesses'. They are in a sense ideological tools that can serve to reinforce systems of inequality and subordination; they can help sustain colonialist or neocolonialist projects. A great amount of effort is needed this force is not completely pervasive, and subversions are often possible. 'Self representation' may not be a complete possibility, yet is still an important goal. to dislodge dominant modes of representation. Efforts will continue to be made to challenge the hegemonic force of representation, and of course, 35 Kritik Answers Debate Solves Authoritarianism DEBATE INVERTS DOCILITY AND AUTHORITARIANISM N. Kirk Evans, two time NDT first-round and graduate student at U Chicago, [eDebate] We Other Debaters, Feb 27, 2002, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200202/0747.html, accessed February 27, 2002 Although critics of debate (e.g., Kevin Sanchez) appropriate Foucauldian language such as describing debate as ?the pedagogy devoted to scholarship and training in good conduct,? I can?t help but wonder if there is a little ?repressive hypothesis? discourse going on here. ?For a long time, the story goes, we supported a repressive/calculating/veritasseeking/flogocentric/docile body producing regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. The image of the stratego-spewtron is emblazoned on our restrained, (un)mute, and hypocrtical debating.? I don?t like certain aspects of debate as it is currently practiced. Some of my objections are political (e.g., under-representation of minorities, propensity of elite schools to dominate). Some are aesthetic (e.g., lack of clarity among most debaters). My problem with criticisms such as Kevin S?s or William S?s or Jack S?s is that they lump something together called ?debate? and criticize it from afar (if that isn?t rendering something standing reserve and then surveying it with an enlightened imperial gaze, I don?t know what is). Somehow the sentiment seems to be lurking about that we?d all be free, uninhibited, and unrepressed beings if the debate-machine hadn?t turned us into assemblyline products of technostrategic thinking. Ummm? repressive hypothesis. The reality is that proto-debaters enter high school with 8-9 years of educational training to be docile subjects and liberal humanists. If debate still maintains vestiges of these systems of thought, I think it has more to do with what people bring to the ?institution? of debate than what debate teaches them. Debaters are taught to question authorit(ies), and there is certainly a higher degrees of activism (both liberal and conservative) among debaters than among their nondebate counterparts. 36 Kritik Answers Roleplaying Good (1/3) AND, WE MUST POSIT OURSELVES AS THE GOVERNMENT Rawls, Political Philosopher, 1999 (John, The Law of Peoples, p. 56-7) How is the ideal of public reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative government, citizens vote for representatives—chief executives, legislators, and the like—not for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote directly on referenda questions, which are not usually , citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact. When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it fundamental questions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech. Similarly, the ideal of the public reason of free and equal peoples is realized, or satisfied, whenever chief executives and legislators, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the principles of the Law of Peoples and explain to other peoples their reasons for pursuing or revising a people‘s foreign policy and affairs of state that involve other societies. As for private citizens are to think of themselves as if they were executives and legislators and ask themselves what foreign policy supported by what considerations they would think it most reasonable to advance. Once again, when firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal executives and legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate the public reason of free and equal peoples, is part of the political and social basis of peace and understanding among peoples citizens, we say, as before, that ideally AND, ROLE-PLAYING DEBATES PROMOTE PREPARE US FOR REAL WORLD ACTIVISM BY GIVING US A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF HOW POLICY WORKS, MAKING US AFFECTIVE AGENTS TO ACHIEVE CHANGE. THIS ALLOWS US AS INDIVIDUALS TO BECOME ACTORS WHO COULD INDEED TRANSFORM INTERNATIONAL POLITICS. Joyner 1999 [Christopher, Professor international Law @ University of Georgetown, ―Teaching International Law: Views from an international relations political scientist‖]. The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense. 37 Kritik Answers Roleplaying Good (2/3) ROLEPLAYING IS KEY TO SOCIAL JUSTICE… LEARNING WHAT THE STATE SHOULD DO ALLOWS US TO ACHIEVE THE ALTERNATIVE‘S GOALS Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99 The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that ―the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism,‖ but it remains the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about social justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx‘s philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system" and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland—as a country of simulacra—and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list— endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets—might revitalize leftist politics. 38 Kritik Answers Roleplaying Good (3/3) ROLE PLAYING IN DEBATE IS ESSENTIAL TO BREAK DOWN ASSUMPTIONS, DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, AND DECONSTRUCT THE STATE Joyner, Professor International Law @ Georgetwon, 99 (Christopher ―TEACHING INTERNATIONAL LAW: VIEWS FROM AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS POLITICAL SCIENTIST‖ ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, Spring, 5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377) Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team. These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. [*386] By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policymaking, students realize that United States actions do not always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case. The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces 39 Kritik Answers students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense. 40 Kritik Answers Traditional Debate Good (1/2) SWITCH-SIDE PLAN-FOCUSED DEBATE ENSURES EVERY COMPETITOR MUST EVALUATE BOTH SIDES OF POTENTIAL POLICIES. THEY ENCOURAGE DEBATES WITHOUT CLASH. THIS UNCRITICAL FORM OF DEBATE ELIMINATES OUR CAPACITY TO ENGAGE IN SOCRATIC QUESTIONING, THE ONLY FIREWALL AGAINST GENOCIDE Dana R. Villa, Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, Political Theory, April 1998 v26 n2 p147(26) Arendt sees the categorical imperative as an absolute in the Platonic/authoritarian sense, standing above men and the realm of human affairs, measuring them without any concern for context, specificity, or the "fundamental relativity" of the "interhuman realm."(30) Arendt emphasizes this inheritance of Platonism because The more judgment is identified with the application of a rule or an unvarying standard, the more our powers of judgment atrophy, and the less we are able to "stop and think" in the Socratic sense. Moreover, the insistence that judgment is dependent on such standards she sees it as inculcating a habit of mechanical, unthinking judgment. leads to a "crisis in judgment" when these standards are revealed to be without effective power. This, according to Arendt, is what happens in the course of the modern . This process--call it the crisis in authority or, to use Nietzsche's symbolic formulation, the "death of God"--comes to its conclusion with the advent of the evils of totalitarianism, evils so unprecedented that they "have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment."(31) The age, as new and unprecedented moral and political phenomena reveal the hollowness and inadequacy of the "reliable universal rules" the tradition had offered failure of the inherited wisdom of the past, the fact of a radical break in our tradition, throws us back upon our own resources. Potentially, Arendt notes, the crisis is liberating, as it frees the faculty of judgment from its subservience to objectivist regimes such as Plato's ideas or Kant's categorical imperative. As Arendt puts it in "Understanding and Politics": Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.(32) The hope that the "crisis in authority" will lead to the rebirth of a genuinely autonomous faculty of judgment runs up against Arendt's own deeply Minus the presence of Socrates (who, like an electric ray, paralyzes his partners in dialogue, forcing them to stop and think), the likely result of such a crisis is thankfulness for anything that props up the old set of standards or provides the semblance of a new one. Responding to Hans Jonas's call for a renewed inquiry into ultimate, metaphysical grounds for ingrained sense that ordinary individuals will find it difficult indeed to wean themselves from pregiven categories and rules. judgment at a conference on her work in 1972, Arendt declared her pessimism that "a new god will appear," and went on to observe: If you go through such a situation [as totalitarianism] the first thing you know is the following: you never know how somebody will act. You have the surprise of your life! This goes throughout all layers of society, and it goes throughout various distinctions between men. And if you want to make a generalization, then you could say that those who were still very firmly convinced of the so-called old values were the first to be ready to change their old values for a new set of values, provided they were given one. And I am afraid of this, because I think that the moment you give anybody a new set of values--or this famous "bannister"--you can immediately exchange it. And the only thing the guy gets used to is having a "bannister" and a set of values, no matter.(33) Arendt thought that the natural tendency of the ordinary person, when faced with the destruction of one set of authoritative rules, would not be Socratic examination and perplexity (which only further dissolves the customary), but rather a grasping for a new code, a Socratic thinking, dissolves grounds, it does not stabilize them. new "bannister." Thinking, especially It is, as Arendt says, a "dangerous and resultless enterprise," one that can just as easily lead to cynicism and nihilism as to independent judgment and a deepened moral integrity.(34) Arendt agrees with the analysis Kant gives in "What Is Enlightenment?": most people would simply prefer not to make the effort that independent , Arendt holds onto the Socratic possibility that ordinary individuals will remain open to the "winds of thought." She profoundly agrees with Socrates that it is only through such examination that the individual is likely to avoid complicity with the moral horrors perpetrated by popular political regimes. Socratic thinking--which, in its relentless negativity, is the very opposite of all foundational or professional philosophical thinking--liberates the faculty of judgment from the tyranny of rules and custom. In this way, it judgment demands, let alone risk the taken-for-granted moral presuppositions of their existence. Yet however real this aversion to thinking or "paralysis" is prevents the individual from being "swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in."(35) Independent judgment is, according to Arendt, the ) Thinking may not be able to "make friends" of citizens as Socrates had hoped, but it can "prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when "by-product" of this liberating effect of thinking; it "realizes" thinking "in the world of appearances."(36 the chips are down."(37) 41 Kritik Answers Traditional Debate Good (2/2) TRADITIONAL DEBATE IS RE-PRESENTATION. WE DON‘T CLAIM TO SPEAK A HIGHER TRUTH OR KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR OTHERS. WE DEBATE THOSE ISSUES CONTINGENTLY. THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT DEBATE SHOULD BE PURELY REPRESENTATIVE ARE THE ACTIVISM/CRITIQUE CROWD. Ann Marie Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed 3/23/01 1. Presence, bearing, air; Appearance; impression on the sight. 2. An Image, likeness, or reproduction in some manner of a thing; A material image or figure; a reproduction in some material or tangible form; in later use, a drawing or painting. (of a person or thing); The action or fact of exhibiting in some visible image or form; The fact of expressing or denoting by means of a figure or symbol; symbolic action or exhibition. 3. The exhibition of character and action upon the stage; the performance of a play; Acting, simulation, pretense. 4. The action of placing a fact, etc., before another or others by means of discourse; a statement or account, esp. one intended to convey a particular view or impression of a matter in order to influence opinion or action. 5. A formal and serious statement of facts, reasons, or arguments, made with a view to effecting some change, preventing some action, etc.; hence, a remonstrance, protest, expostulation. 6. The action of presenting to the mind or imagination; an image thus presented; a clearly conceived idea or concept; The operation of the mind in forming a clear image or concept; the faculty of doing this. 7. The fact of standing for, or in place of, some other thing or person, esp. with a right or authority to act on their account; substitution of one thing or person for another. 8. The fact of representing or being represented in a legislative or deliberative assembly, spec. in Parliament; the position, principle, or system implied by this; The aggregate of those who thus represent the elective body. from The Oxford English Dictionary Representation is presently a much debated topic not only in postcolonial studies and academia, but in the larger cultural milieu. As the above dictionary entry shows, the actual definitions for the word alone are cause for some confusion. The Oxford English Dictionary defines representation primarily as "presence" or "appearance." There is an implied visual component to these primary definitions. Representations can be clear images, material reproductions, performances and simulations. Representation can also be defined as the act of placing or stating facts in order to influence or affect the action of others. Of course, the word also has political connotations. Politicians are thought to 'represent' a constituency. They are thought to have the right to stand in the place of another. So above all, the term representation has a semiotic meaning, in that something is 'standing for' something else. These various yet related definitions are all implicated in the public debates about representation. Theorists interested in Postcolonial studies, by closely examining various forms of representations, visual, textual and otherwise, have teased out the different ways that these "images" are implicated in power inequalities and the subordination of the 'subaltern'. Representations-- these 'likenesses'--come in various forms: films, television, photographs, paintings, advertisements and other forms of popular culture. Written materials--academic texts, novels and other literature, journalistic pieces--are also important forms of representation. These representations, to different degrees, are thought to be somewhat realistic, or to go back to the definitions, they are thought be 'clear' or state 'a fact'. Yet how can simulations or "impressions on the sight" be completely true? Edward Said, in his analysis of textual representations of the Orient in Orientalism, emphasizes the fact that representations can never be exactly realistic: In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a represence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as "the Orient". (21) Representations, then can never really be 'natural' depictions of the orient. Instead, they are constructed images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content. In a similar way, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between Vertretung and Darstellung. The former she defines as "stepping in someone's place. . .to tread in someone's shoes." Representation in this sense is "political representation," or a speaking for the needs 42 Kritik Answers and desires of somebody or something. Darstellung is representation as re-presentation, "placing there." Representing is thus "proxy and portrait," according to Spivak. The complicity between "speaking for" and "portraying" must be kept in mind ("Practical Politics of the Open End," The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.) 43 Kritik Answers Traditional Debate Accesses Peformativity TRADITIONAL DEBATE COOPTS THEIR ―PERFORMANCE GOOD‖ OFFENSE. IT INCORPORATES STYLE WITHOUT ELIMINATING SUBSTANCE Jeff Parcher, February 26, 2001, www.ndtceda.com BTW - my notions do not eliminate the notion of performance - they merely contextualize them within a discussion that can be limited and fair. It merely requires the performance be relevant by a reasonable criteria (ie the resolution). Also, debates have speaker points. It seems fairly obvious to me that the debate ballot is a clear dichotomy. One affirms or negates the resolution/plan and then gives speaker points to reward or punish performance. Obviously, I realize that performance impacts truth. But that's only a reason why a focus on the resolutional question coopts the performative criteria. Of course a good performance gets rewared in both points and in the decision itself. That's why we don't need to make it JUST about performance. We already take the perfromance into account inevitably. Mixing it further simply makes us drift aimlessly. PLAN FOCUSED DEBATES ALWAYS PROVIDE A CLEARER, FAIRER, AND MORE EDUCATION FRAMEWORK Jeff Parcher, February 26, 2001, www.ndtceda.com This is absolutely devastating to the performance arguments. And even if we could hodgepodge together some inevtiably subjective criteria in each individual debate, they simply could never match the benefits of debate provided by a clear plan/resolution focus. Performance debates would be incredibly repetitive in that they would always be 90% about methodolgy rather than the substance of performances. Because the limits to possible performances are so large - both sides would always have an incentive to focus on methodology rather than substance. The affirmative will be on an endless search to coopt the negative performance (in the words of the Fort, "We are in solidarity with these words"). The negative on an endless search to exclude the affirmative performance through topicality or general kritiks. Rarely do I think we would ever have debates which engaged the two performances. The current puryeyors of this type of debate have certainly relied much more on competitiveness arguments than on actual substantive engagement (as far as I've seen anyway). 44 Kritik Answers Competition Good COMPETITION IS IS NECESSARY FOR SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Gary Olson and Jean- François Lyotard, ―Resisting a Discourse of Mastery: A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,‖ JAC 15.3, 1995, http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/15.3/Articles/1.htm, accessed 1/21/02 Second, competition is not competition between different groups in a cultural reality. Not at all. The notion of competition as a ―male‖ model is a notion I reject, maybe because I am a male, but, in fact, because there is not any other way to understand the domination of the competitive pattern in our society. I mean, this system has competed against all other systems, all the other ways of organizing human communities. And we can consider human history not as a linear succession with a sort of causality between each segment of this line, but as the opposite, as the contingent and different ways in which human communities have tried to organize—exactly in the same terms that so-called life has fortuitously produced different forms of living beings. And between these different entities—animals, vegetables, human beings, or human communities—competition was necessarily open. They are all open systems; they need to grasp energy from outside in order to maintain themselves, and if they have to grasp energy from outside, they are competitive with other systems. That‘s true for animals, even vegetables, and for human communities. And that‘s how our system, now, won against other ways that communities have tried to organize themselves, and it has internalized competition itself in order to continue to be able to grasp outside and inside energies as much as possible. It‘s not a male idea; there is no argument against it. There is no doubt: it‘s not a male idea. And I‘m sure women are perfectly able to understand this, even if they hate it; so do I. But we are in this condition. 45 Kritik Answers **Permutations** Juxtaposition Perm: 2AC PERM – DO BOTH, CRITICISM WITHOUT OPPOSITION CAUSES COOPERTATION, ONLY JUXTAPOSITION ALLOWS CONSTANT CRITICISM Edelman ‗87 [Prof. Pol Sci @ Wisconsin, September, U. of Minn, Constructing the Political Spectacle] Opposition in expressed ―opinion‖ accordingly make for social stability: they are almost synonymous with it, for they reaffirm and reify what everyone already knows and accepts. To express a prochoice or an anti-abortion position is to affirm that the opposite position is being expressed as well and to accept the opposition as a continuing feature of public discourse. The well established, thoroughly anticipated and therefore ritualistic reaffirmation of the differences institutionalizes mboth rhetorics minimizing the chance of major shifts and leaving the regime wide discretion; for there will be anticipated support and opposition no matter what forms of action or inaction occur. As long as there is substantial expression of opinion on both sides of an issue, social stability persists and so does regime discretion regardless of the exact numbers or of marginal shifts in members. The persistence of unresolved problems with conflicting meaning is vital. It is not the expression of opposition but of consensus that makes for instability. Wher statements need not be defended against counterstatements they are readily changed or inverted. Consensual agreements about the foreign enemy of ally yield readily to acceptance of the erstwhile enemy as ally and the former ally as enemy, but opinions about abortion are likely to persist. Rebellion and revolution do not ferment in societies in which there has been a long history of the ritualized exchange of opposing views of issues accepted as important, but rather where such exchanges have been lacking, so that a consensus on common action to oust the regime is easily built. 46 Kritik Answers Juxtaposition Perm: 1AR EXTEND THE 2AC EDELMAN EVIDENCE. PURE CRITIQUE FAILS BECAUSE IT FLIPS THE BINARISM, NOT ENGAGING THE DISCOURSE IT CRITICIZED, CREATING A NEW MONOLITHIC HEGEMONY. ONLY THE PERM THAT COMBINES THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM CREATES CONSTANT CRITICISM, USING THE AFF AS A TARGET, SOLVING BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE ALSO, ALL OF THEIR PERM THEORY AND LINK ARGUMENTS DON‘T APPLY BECAUSE THE PERM COMBINES THE WHOLE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM, USING THAT CONTRADICTION TO CONSIDER BOTH SIDES, IMPACT TURNING THEIR ARGUMENT ALSO, COMBINING THE AFF AND THE K SOLVES BETTER Said ‗94 [Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures, Vintage, 1994, 60] Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual hear and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isoaltion. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually, this means that an idea or expreience is always counterposed with another, therefore, making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that justaposition, one gets a better, perhaps more universal idea of how to think say, about a human rights issue in one situation by comparison with another. I have felt that most of the alarmist and deeply flawed discussions of Islamic fundamentalism in the West have been intellectually invidious precisely because they have not been compared with Jewish or Christian fundamentalism, both equally prevalent and reprehensible in my own experience of the Middle East. What is usually thought of as a simple issue of judgment against an approved enemy, in double or exile perspective impels a Western intellectual to see a much wider picture, with the requirement now of taking a position as a secularist (or not) on all theocratic tendencies, not just against the conventionally designated ones. ALSO, PURE CRITICISM FAILS, ONLY COMBINATION OF CONTRADICTORY IDEAS SOLVES Walt ‗98 [Stephen M., Prof. Pol. Sci, U. of Chicago, ―International Relations: one world, many theories,‖ Foreign Policy, March 22, LN] No single approach can capture all the complexity of contemporary world politics. Therefore, we are better off with a diverse array of competing ideas rather than a single theoretical orthodoxy. Competition between theories helps reveal their strengths and weaknesses and spurs subsequent refinements, while revealing flaws in conventional wisdom. Although we should take care to emphasize inventiveness over invective, we should welcome and encourage the heterogeneity of contemporary scholarship. 47 Kritik Answers Juxtapositon Perm: 2AR THE EDELMAN PERMUTATION IS THE ONLY ADVOCACY WHICH PROVIDES FOR CONSTANT CRITICISM. JUXTAPOSITION TAKES THE WHOLE AFFIRMATIVE SPEECH ACT AND THE WHOLE NEGATIVE CRITICISM AND ALLOWS YOU TO VOTE FOR THE PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM. IT USES THE PLAN TO UPHOLD THE SYSTEM AS A TARGET FOR THE NEG CRITICISM. WITHOUT THAT, THE CRITICISM BECOMES INVERTED, EMBODYING ITS OWN OPPOSITE. ALSO, NONE OF THEIR SPECIFIC EVIDENCE APPLIES. IT‘S AN IN-ROUND PERMUTATION ABOUT OUR SPEECDH ACTS AND THE BEST WAY TO MAINTAIN THE INTEGRITY OF CRITICISM 48 Kritik Answers Juxtaposition Perm: Ext AND, JUXTAPOSING THE AFF AND THE ALTERNATIVE CREATES EFFECTIVE, CONSTANT CRITICISM, OVERCOMING THE HEGEMONY OF CRITIQUE Connolly 2002 [William E., Prof. of Pol. Sci. @ John Hopkins U., Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, September 2002, 180-1] Another way to pose the paradox is this: The human animal is essentially incomplete without social form and a common language, institutional setting, set of political traditions, and political forum for inunciating public purposes are indispensible to the acquisition of an identity and the commonalities essential to life. But every form of social completion and enablement also contains subjugations and cruelties within it. Politics, then, is the medium through which these ambiguities can be engaged and confronted, shifted and stretched. It is simultaneously a medum through which common purposes are crystalized and the consummage means by which their transcription into musical harmonies is exposed, contested, disturbed, and unsettled. A society that enables politics as this ambiguous medium is a good society because it enables the paradox of difference to find expression in public life AND, JUXTAPOSITION OF INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS AVOIDS THE PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL THEORY AND ENABLES A PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM Marcus '98 [George E., Professor of Anthro at Rice University, Ethnography through Thick and Thin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 186-7//uwyo-ajl] The postmodern notions of heterotopia (Foucault), juxtapositions, and the blocking together of incommensurables (Lyotard) have served to renew the long-neglected practice of comparison in anthropology, but in altered ways. Juxtapositions do not have the obvious meta-logic of older styles of comparison in anthropology (e.g., controlled comparisons within a cultural area or "natural" geographical region); rather, they emerge from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose controus are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account which has different, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation. The postmodern object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of seeming incommensurables or phenomena that might conventionally have appeared to be "world apart." Comparison reenters the very act of ethnographic specificity by a postmodern vision of seemingly improbably juxtapositions, the global collapsed into and made and integral part of a parallel, related local situations rather than something monolithic and external to them. This move toward comparison as heterotopia firmly deterritorializes culture in ethnographic writing and simulates accounts of cultures composed in a landscape for which there is as yet no developed theoretical comparison 49 Kritik Answers Campbell Perm: 2AC PERM – DO THE PLAN WHILE ENDORSING THE CRITICISM – EXIGENCIES DEMAND ACTION EVEN IN THE FACE OF CRITICISM Campbell ‗98 [David, Int‘l Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186] The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its urgency. As Derrida observes, ―a just decision is always required immediately, ‗right away.‘‖ This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because the pursuit of ―infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it‖ are unavailable in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, even by unlimited time, ―because the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation.‖ The decision is always ―structurally finite,‖ it a‖always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it.‖ That is why, invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that ―the instant of decision is a madness.‖ The finite nature of the decision may be a ―madness‖ in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derrida‘s argument concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derrida‘s argument addresses more directly – more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley – the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to combat domination. That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, ―that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others.‖ Indeed, ―incalculable justice requires us to calculate.‖ From where do these insistences come? What is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that ―left to itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation.‖ The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid ―the bad,‖ the ―perverse calculation,‖ even the worst.‖ This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the ―at least necessary condition,‖ for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences ―we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.‖ 50 Kritik Answers Campbell Perm: 1AR EXTEND THE 2AC CAMPBELL ‘98 EVIDENCE. WHEN FACED WITH UNDECIDABLE SITUATIONS AND THE STAKES ARE AS HIGH AS THE 1AC, YOU HAVE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF CRITICISM OR RISK POLITICAL PARALYSIS BECAUSE EVERY ACTION SEEMS DOOMED, ALLOWING OPPRESSION AND VIOLENCE TO REIGN UNCHECKED 51 Kritik Answers Strategic Essentialism Perm: 2AC PERMUTATION: THE PLAN IS A STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM THAT CREATES SPACE FOR ACTIVIST POLITICS (THE CRITIQUE IS A FALSE CHOICE THAT IMPEDES ACTIVISM.) Sankaran Krishna, Professor, Political Science, University of Hawaii, Alternatives v. 18, 19 93, p. 400-401. The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to ―nostalgic,‖ essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the move mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing ―facts‖ and ―realities,‖ while a ―postmodern‖ President Reagan easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4) Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls ―nuclear opposition‖ or ―antinuclearists‖ at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms. This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the ―failure‖ of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives. The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka, between total critique and ―ineffective‖ partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics. 52 Kritik Answers Strategic Essentialism Perm: 1AR NEXT, EXTEND THE KRISHNA PERM. THE NEG‘S ―WITH US OR AGAINST US‖ MENTALITY FRACTURES EFFECTIVE SOCIAL ACTION – INSTEAD OF FOCUSING ON DIFFERENCES. WE SHOULD HIGHLIGHT OUR AGREEMENTS. THIS HAS 2 IMPLICATIONS: IT FLIPS THE K SOLVENCY BECAUSE IT ENTRENCHING AN ALIENATING PRAXIS IT PROVES THAT ONLY THE PERM, WHICH RECOGNIZES THE VALUE OF BOTH ADVOCACIES, CAN LEAD TO EFFECTIVE POLITICAL ACTION – DICHOTOMOUS CHOICE COLLAPSES PRAXIS 53 Kritik Answers Bleiker Perm: 2AC VIEWING TWO COMPETING IDEOLOGIES TOGETHER AND CREATING CONTRADICTIONS ALLOWS THE IDEOLOGIES TO COEXIST, OPENING MORE AVENUES FOR POLITICAL THOUGHT Bleiker ‗97 [Roland, PhD Cand @ Australian National U. of Political Sci, Alternatives 22, 57-85//uwyo] No concept will ever be sufficient, will ever do justice to the object it is trying to capture. The objective then becomes to conceptualize thoughts so that they do not silence other voices, but coexist and interact with them. Various authors have suggested methods for this purpose, methods that will always remain attempts without Bakhtin‘s dialogism, a theory of knowledge and language that tries to avoid the excluding accepts the existence of multiple meanings, draws connections between differences, and searches for possibilities to establish conceptual and linguistic dialogues among competing ideas, ever reaching the ideal state that they aspire to. We know of Mikhail tendencies of monological thought forms. Instead, he values, speech forms, texts, and validity claims, and the like. Jurgen Habermas attempts to theorize the preconditions for ideal speech situations. Communication, in this case, should be as unrestrained as possible, such that ―claims to truth and rightness can be discursively redeemed,‖ albeit, one should add, though a rationalism and universalism that it violently anti-Bakhtinian and anti-Adornian. Closer to the familiar terrain of IR we find Christine Sylvester‘s feminist method of empathetic cooperation, which aims at opening up questions of gender by a ―process of positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is unaccustomed to heeding when building social theory. But how does one conceptualize such attempts if concepts can ever do justice to the objects they are trying to capture? The daring task is, as we know from Adorno, to open with concepts what does not fit into concepts, to resist the distorting power of reification and return the conceptual to the nonconceptual. This disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of critical philosophy. It impedes the concept from developing its own dynamics and from becoming an absolute in itself. The first step toward disenchanting the concept is simply refusing to define it monologically. Concepts should achieve meaning only gradually in relation to each other. Adorno even intentionally uses the same concept in different way in order to liberate it from the harrow definition . One cannot eliminate the contradictory, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous. Contradictions are only contradictions if one assumes the existence of a prior universal standard of reference. What is different appears as divergent, dissonant, and negative only as long as our consciousness strives for a totalizing standpoint, which we must avoid if we are to escape the reifying and excluding dangers of identity thinking. Just as reality is fragmented, we need to think in fragments. Unity then is not to be found be evening out discontinuities. Contradictions are to be referred over artificially constructed meanings and the silencing of underlying conflicts. Thus, Adorno advocates writing that language itself had already imposed on it. That contradictions could arise out of this practice does not bother Adorno. Indeed, he considers them essential in fragments, such that the resulting text appears as if it always could be interrupted, cut off abruptly, any time, and place. He adheres to Nietzsche‘s advice that one should approach deep problems like taking a cold bath, ―quickly into them and quickly out again.‖ The belief that one does not reach deep enough this way, he claims, is simply the superstition of those who fear cold water. But Nietzsche‘s bath has already catapulted us into the vortex of the next linguistic terrain of resistance – the question of style. 54 Kritik Answers Perm Solves: Coalitions Key THE OPPRESSED SHOULD WELCOME THOSE FROM THE DOMINANT GROUP COMMITTED TO FIGHTING AGAINST OPPRESSION Ali Khan, Professor, Law, Washburn University. ―Lessons From Malcolm X: Freedom by Any Means Necessary,‖ HOWARD LAW JOURNAL v. 38 1994. Yet, no concept of freedom requires that every member of the dominant group be dehumanized. Such dehumanization is unnecessary, even counter-productive, in the fight against oppression. The oppressed should welcome those among the dominant group who gather the moral courage to rebel against their own kind and fight for the sake of justice. n60 [*95] 55 Kritik Answers Perm Solves: Hybridization Effective THE PERM FUNCTIONS AS A NEGOTIATION BETWEEN THE POLITICS OF THE 1AC AND THE ALTERNATIVE, ALLOWING FOR MORE EFFECTIVE POLITICAL CHANGE THAN EITHER THE ONE OR THE OTHER. Homi K. Bhabha, Professor, University of Sussex, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE, 19 94, p. 28. My illustration attempts to display the importance of the hybrid moment of political change. Here the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides, which contests the terms, and territories of both. There is a negotiation between gender and class, where each formation encounters the displaced, differentiated boundaries of its group representation and enunciative sites in which the limits and limitations of social power are encountered in an agonistic relation. When it is suggested that the British Labour Party should seek to produce a socialist alliance among progressive forces that are widely dispersed and distributed across a range of class, culture and occupational forces - without a unifying sense of the class for itself - the kind of hybridity that I have attempted to identify is being acknowledged as a historical necessity. We need a little less pietistic articulation of political principle (around class and nation); a little more of the principle of political negotiation. 56 Kritik Answers Perm Solves: Multifaceted Resistance Best THE PERM SOLVES BEST – A MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO COMBATING OPPRESSION IS KEY Ali Khan, Professor, Law, Washburn University. ―Lessons From Malcolm X: Freedom by Any Means Necessary,‖ HOWARD LAW JOURNAL v. 38 1994. It must be noted that Malcolm's concept of any means necessary includes, but is not limited to non-violent civil disobedience. n29 If non-violent civil disobedience does not change the system, then any means necessary allows the oppressed to consider armed resistance. The oppressed may use multiple strategies. One group among the oppressed, for example, may use non-violent means to fight oppression; another may advocate more radical methods to change the system. This multi-faceted approach creates more pressure on the oppressor to lift oppression. In order for such a movement to be effective, however, the oppressor must believe that those who are involved are serious about [*87] their cause. Those who are oppressed must be willing to sacrifice their lives to abolish the state of subjugation. n30 It is also important that the oppressed maintain their underlying solidarity because it is inevitable that they will encounter efforts to divide them and turn them against each other. 57 Kritik Answers Perm Solves: Radicalism Dooms the Movement THEY WON‘T ACHIEVE THEIR MINDSET SHIFT, AND EVEN IF THEY DO CONCRETE POLICIES OPTIONS WILL STILL BE KEY Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International Studies at Duke University. GREEN DELUSIONS, 1992 p 11-12. Here I will argue that eco-radical political strategy, if one may call it that, is consummately self-defeating. The theoretical and empirical rejection of green radicalism is thus bolstered by a series of purely pragmatic objections. Many eco-radicals hope that a massive ideological campaign can transform popular perceptions, leading both to a fundamental change in lifestyles and to large-scale social reconstruction. Such a view is highly credulous. The notion that continued intellectual hectoring will eventually result in a mass conversion to environmental monasticism (Roszak 1979:289)—marked by vows of poverty and nonprocreation—is difficult to accept. While radical views have come to dominate many environmental circles, their effect on the populace at large has been minimal. Despite the greening of European politics that recently gave stalwarts considerable hope, the more recent green plunge suggests that even the European electorate lacks commitment to environmental radicalism. In the United States several decades of preaching the same ecoradical gospel have had little appreciable effect; the public remains, as before, wedded to consumer culture and creature comforts. The stubborn hope that nonetheless continues to inform green extremism stems from a pervasive philosophical error in radical environmentalism. As David Pepper (1989) shows, most eco-radical thought is mired in idealism: in this case the belief that the roots of the ecological crisis lie ultimately in ideas about nature and humanity As Dobson (1990:37) puts it: ―Central to the theoretical canon of Green politics is the belief that our social, political, and economic problems are substantially caused by our intellectual relationship with the world‖ (see also Milbrath 1989:338). If only such ideas would change, many aver, all would be well. Such a belief has inspired the writing of eloquent jeremiads; it is less conducive to designing concrete strategies for effective social and economic change. It is certainly not my belief that ideas are insignificant or that attempting to change others‘ opinions is a futile endeavor. If that were true I would hardly feel compelled to write a polemic work of this kind. But I am also convinced that changing ideas alone is insufficient. Widespread ideological conversion, even if it were to occur, would hardly be adequate for genuine social transformation. Specific policies must still be formulated, and specific political plans must be devised if those policies are ever to be realized. 58 Kritik Answers Perm Solves: Working within Institutions Key to Change ONLY WORKING WITHIN THE INSTITUTIONS OF POWER CAN CREATE CHANGE Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE, 1992, p. 391393 The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them. Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyone‘s position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the ―fallen‖ middle class demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation action as in everyone‘s best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what Axelos has described as a ―planetary thought‖ which ―would be a coherent thought—but not a rationalizing and ‗rationalist‘ inflection; it would be a fragmentary thought of the open totality—for what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. ―Local struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency which do not deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical utility theory); difference ends up ―trumping‖ politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective commonalities, a shared ―responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this place now.‖ The Left, after all, is defined by its common commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these might conflict) in economic, political and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new majority. 59 Kritik Answers 60 Kritik Answers **Classic Turns** Derrida Turn: 2AC TURN – CALL TO REJECT RE-INVENTS HIERARCHIES – POLITICAL ACTION IS KEY TO TRANSCEND THEIR FALSE BINARIES Newman 2001 [Saul, Sociology @ Macquarie University, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27: 3, pp. 46//uwyo] Derrida does not simply want to invert the terms of these binaries so that the subordinated term becomes the privileged term. He does not want to put writing in the place of speech, for instance. Inversion in this way leaves intact the hierarchical, authoritarian structure of the binary division. Such a strategy only re- affirms the place of power in the very attempt to overthrow it. One could argue that Marxism fell victim to this logic by replacing the bourgeois state with the equally authoritarian workers‘ state. This is a logic that haunts our radical political imaginary. Revolutionary political theories have often succeeded only in reinventing power and authority in their own image. However, Derrida also recognizes the dangers of subversion – that is, the radical strategy of overthrowing the hierarchy altogether, It must be made clear, however, that rather than inverting its terms. For instance, the classical anarchist‘s critique of Marxism went along the lines that Marxism neglected political power – in particular the power of the state – for economic power, and this would mean a restoration of political power in a Marxist revolution. Rather, for anarchists, the state and all Derrida believes that subversion and inversion both culminate in the same thing – the reinvention of authority, in different guises. Thus, the forms of political power must be abolished as the first revolutionary act. However, anarchist critique is based on the Enlightenment idea of a rational and moral human essence that power denies, and yet we know from Derrida that any essential , anarchism substituted political and economic authority for a rational authority founded on an Enlighten- ment-humanist subjectivity. Both radical politico-theoretical strategies then – the strategy of inversion, as exemplified by Marxism, and the strategy of subversion, as exemplified by anarchism – are two sides of the same logic of logic of ‗place‘. So for Derrida: identity involves a radical exclusion or suppression of other identities. Thus What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for anarchy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather the Umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierarchical structure itself. to avoid the lure of authority one must go beyond both the anarchic desire to destroy hierarchy, and the mere reversal of terms. Rather, as Derrida suggests, if one wants to avoid this trap the hierarchical structure itself must be transformed. Political action must invoke a rethinking of revolution and authority in a way that traces a path between these two terms, so that it does not merely reinvent the place of power. It could be argued that Derrida propounds an anarchism of his own, if by anarchism one means a questioning of all authority, including In other words, textual and philosophical authority, as well as a desire to avoid the trap of reproducing authority and hierarchy in one‘s attempt to destroy it. This deconstructive attempt to transform the very structure of hierarchy and authority, to go beyond the binary opposition, is also found in Nietzsche. Nietzsche believes that one cannot merely oppose authority by affirming its opposite: this is only to react to and, thus, affirm the domination one is supposedly resisting. One must, he argues, transcend oppositional thinking altogether – go beyond truth and error, beyond being and becoming, beyond good and evil. For Nietzsche it is simply a moral prejudice to privilege truth over error. However, he does not try to counter this by privileging error over truth, because this leaves the opposition intact. Rather, he refuses to confine his view of the world to this opposition: ‗Indeed what compels us to assume that there exists any essential antithesis between ―true‖ and ―false‖? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance?‘ Nietzsche displaces, rather than replaces, these oppositional and authoritarian structures of thought – he displaces place. This . Rather than reversing the terms of the binary opposition, one should perhaps question, and try to make problematic, its very structure. strategy of displacement, similarly adopted by Derrida, provides certain clues to developing a non-essentialist theory of resistance to power and authority 61 Kritik Answers Fear of Co-optation Turn: 2AC FEAR OF CO-OPTATION LEADS TO PASSIVE ACCEPTANCE OF OPPRESSION – THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE IS TO ENGAGE IN POLITICS WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR INCOMPLETION – THAT VERY FAILURE SPURS MORE RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE SYSTEM‘S UNCONSCIOUS COORDINATES Zizek 2004 [Slavoj, Ocean Rain, ―Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek,‖ The Electronic Book Review, July 1, 2004, www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?comman=view_essay&essay_id=rasmussen, Acc. 10-23-04//uwyo-ajl] Zizek: I‘m trying to avoid two extremes. One extreme is the traditional pseudoradical position which says, ―If you engage in politics - helping trade unions or combating sexual harassment, whatever - you‘ve been co-opted and so on. Then you have the other extreme which says, ―Ok, you have to do something.‖ I think both are wrong. I hate those pseudo-radicals who dismiss every concrete action by saying that ―This will all be co-opted.‖ Of course, everything can be co-opted [chuckles] but this is just a nice excuse to do absolutely nothing. Of course, there is a danger that - to use the old Maoist term, popular in European student movements thirty some years ago, ―the long march through institutions‖ will last so long that you‘ll end up part of the institution. We need more than ever, a parallax view - a double perspective. You engage in acts, being aware of their limitations. This does not mean that you act with your fingers crossed. No, you fully engage, but with the awareness that - the ultimate wager in the almost Pascalian sense - is not simply that this act will succeed, but that the very failure of this act will trigger a much more radical process. 62 Kritik Answers Fear of Co-optation Turn: 1AR EXTEND THE 2AC #__ ZIZEK 2004 EVIDENCE WHICH INDICATES THAT AVOIDING CO-OPTATION CREATES PARALYZING POLITICS THAT ENABLE OPPRESSION TO FILL THE VOID. ONLY THE AFF POLITICS OF INCOMPLETION SHATTERS STATUS QUO POLITICS BY UNDERMINING THE ROOT CAUSE OF VIOLENCE AND, FEAR OF CO-OPTATION FALLS INTO POWERLESSNESS Pritchard 2000 [Elizabeth, Bowdoin College, Hypatia, Summer, CWI] The third way in which a feminist reinscription of the development logic of mobility jeopardizes women's well-being is that a fixation on development or liberty as escaping or exiting the "closure" entailed in various locations reinscribes a utopianism that jeopardizes the possibility of a politics directed toward constructing an alternative and liveable world. And here again, some postmodern theorists betray the legacy of the Enlightenment. The dislocated mobile subjects of the Enlightenment are "at home" in a utopianism that defers the burden of the definitions, representations, and affiliations necessary for democratic political action. Such burdensome tasks are seen to threaten closure--and hence are repudiated. Reinhart Koselleck argues that a legacy of the Enlightenment is the persistence and pathology of utopianism (Koselleck 1988). The tradition of Enlightenment critique arises in the context of political absolutism that is instituted in the wake of religious wars. Setting themselves against the constraining tendencies of absolutism, the Enlightenment thinkers, whose field of action is a "single global world," engage in a "ceaseless movement" of depersonalized critique within the horizon of an "openended future." This produces a utopian self-conception whereby "modern man is destined to be at home everywhere and nowhere" (Koselleck 1988, 5). The error in this legacy of modernity, according to Koselleck, is that an unpolitical position of utopianism is mistaken as a political position. The Enlightenment thinkers were unwilling to take responsibility for history by formulating concrete policies and goals and designing and joining social and political institutions; instead they resorted to polar positions as persons who negate present realities and dream of a future they are powerless to realize. 63 Kritik Answers The Fetish: 2AC DISAVOWAL OF THE VIOLENCE OF REPRESENTATION AND CALLS FOR INTERNAL RETHINKING RELY ON ASSUMPTIONS OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE, FETISHIZING AN AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED Bewes ‗97 [Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 195-6//uwyo-ajl] postmodernism has actually become something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal of the violence of representation - both political and semiotic. There are three further aspects to this essentially ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of stupidity (what I have called Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical innocence') as a means of circumventing the ideational 'brutality' of the political life; (ii) a recourse to the idea of an internal or subjective 'truth of the soul' which transcends political reality, along with the contingencies of representation. Both of these signal an attachment to a surface/ depth model of subjectivity which in each case amounts to a fetishization of authenticity, whether by opting to 'remain' on the surface, or by retreating 'inwards'; (iii) a collapse Despite the diligence and the sterling efforts of its best theoreti-cians, then, it seems that of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in the political infrastructure but in the very' concept of political engagement - here it becomes apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more 'postodern' than any theoretician. . these three responses stand in an approximately analogous relationship to the archetypal forms in which consciousness, in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate negation and 'strives to hold on to what it is in danger It should be clear that of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the terms 'decadence', 'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an epistemological capitulation to 'things as they are' loss of nerve, this ; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel describes these manifestations of a retreat from truth. Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to remain in a state' of unthinking inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any Postmodernism, an empirical social legitimizes these symptoms of content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60 condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form - cultural anxiety; postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with deceleration, with a sense of cultural and political conclusivity; postmodernism is the principal vehicle of what Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'. AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF REASON AND VIOLENCE ALLOW US TO SPEND HOURS DEBATING THE FINE POINTS OF BAUDRILLARIAN ETHICS WHILE GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT Bewes ‗97 [Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl] If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even necessarily facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this metaphysical structure of domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of public citizens is reduced to a level determined entirely in the 'natural' or biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his 1927 essay. In an abstract and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the 'transcendent' realm of the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people with insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso facto justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept of the 'political', quite simply, is nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by necessity, in the form of what Marshall Berman calls German-Christian interiority - by its preoccupation with authenticity, that is to say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not of reason, understood as risk, but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The stench of burning bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics. 64 Kritik Answers The Fetish: 1AR THEIR ARGUMENT THAT WE SHOULD AVOID DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE IS SYMPTOMATIC OF ANXIETY IN THE WAKE OF CONTEMPORARY FRAGEMENTATION. THIS FEAR OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE ASSUMES THE EXISTENCE OF A UTOPIAN VIOLENCE-FREE STATE OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE, IGNORING THE WAY THAT SUCH A STATE IS FORECLOSED BY OUR ENTRY INTO THE POLITICAL, DESTROYING ALL CRITICAL SOLVENCY. CROSS-APPLY THE FIRST BEWES ‘97 EVIDENCE. THIS MOURNING OF AUTHENTICITY IS DEPOLITICIZING. IT NECESSITATES A TURN TOWARDS INTERNAL QUESTIONING AND A RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, ALLOWING US TO FOCUS ON THE TRUTH OF OUR INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES WHILE WE‘RE COMPLICIT WITH ATROCITY, IN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT EICHMANN TOILED AWAY ENSURING THAT, UNDERNEATH IT ALL, HE WAS A GOOD PERSON WHILE HE PARTICIPATED IN GENOCIDE. THAT‘S THE SECOND BEWES CARD THIS PRECEDES ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS BECAUSE THE RESISTANCE ADVOCATED BY THEIR ALTERNATIVE CANNOT OCCUR WITHOUT POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AUTHENTICITY CAUSES THE INTELLECTUAL PARALYSIS THAT ALLOWS ATROCITIES TO OCCUR Bewes ‗97 [Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,154-5//uwyo-ajl] Thus Fackenheim's encounter with the horror and the 'obscene rationality' of Auschwitz, secondly, displays an anxiety concerning the perceived integrity of the Third Reich, which is in fact an instinctive gesture of revulsion at the extremes which it is possible for man to justify. This revulsion, perfectly defensible in itself, is a It is this question of Hitler's 'integrity', perhaps more than anything, which leads to the intellectual paralysis characteristic of postmodernity, of which the most typical symptom is cynicism, in its various forms. On one level, of course, Hitler's programme was thoroughly 'integrated', if by this is meant 'internally coherent'. Certainly the consistency with which both 'good' and 'bad' Jews were persecuted - and Eichmann's diligence, it emerged, was exemplary in this regard - ensured that the Third Reich could indeed boast of a mindless sort of integrity. It is this consistency, together with what he calls its 'cosmic scope', which for Fackenheim elevates Nazi ideology to the prerequisite and an important if unacknowledged constituent of the postmodern 'critique' of rationality. status of a Weltanschauung, deserving of 'respect, even awe' .154 In this, how ever, Fackenheim's conception of what is or is not appropriate to the machinery of a political regime is warped, his values infected by those of the very society he is attempting (or refusing) to analyse. Integrity, to begin with, is not a political virtue, since it is one of those characteristics (like honesty, or moral scrupulousness) which cannot by their very nature appear intact in the public sphere. integrity, particularly in this narrow sense of 'internal coherence' (and this is the third point), has no positive correlation with rationality, and is in fact profoundly opposed to the processes of reason conceived, as Gillian Rose has defined it, in terms of risk '1" as a continually hazardous endeavour of going beyond existing limits, a spirit directed towards progress and the future, in which the "Hegelian moment of determinate negation is actively and recursively constitutive. The violence' represented by determinate negation is in essence mobilized against integration, just as it is perpetrated by the 'disintegrated' figures of Rameau, Daisy Miller, or Walter Benjamin's 'destructive character' against the philosopher) Diderot-Moi, the dullard Winterbourne, and the 'etui-man' of Benjamin's essay. Furthermore 65 Kritik Answers 66 Kritik Answers Authenticity Impossible: 1AR 1. THERE IS NO PURE RELATIONSHIP WITH ANYTHING BECAUSE EVERY ENGAGEMENT IS TAINTED BY MISPERCEPTION, COGNITIVE MEDIATION, AND VIOLENCE. CROSS-APPLY THE FIRST BEWES ‘97 CARD 2. EVERY ACT IS ALWAYS ALREADY INAUTHENTIC BECAUSE OF ITS MEDIATION BY SIGNFICATION AND CULTURE. ONLY YOUR DEATH IS AUTHENTIC Bewes ‗97 [Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 59//uwyo-ajl] If the K Foundation sought by such an act to demonstrate their freedom from the incrimination of art by capital, and thereby their own authenticity as artists, they inevitably failed. As perhaps they realize: 'I don't think people should find out about it,' Cauty tells Reid. 'Nobody would understand. The shock value would spoil ,it. Because it doesn't want to be a shocking thing; it just wants to be a fire.' Such an absence of semiosis is unthinkable and unattainable: ,how could the incineration of one million pounds possibly refuse to signify? As Reid observes 0 his article, 'this piece is the beginning of ithe art work. Without this article none of it ever existed.' Drummond and Caut are compromised from the outset, not only by money but by art itself, by representation, by the 'passage' from idea to vehicle, from signified to signifier - precisely because such a passage is neither linear nor free from diversion, is in fact ",eciprocal and systemically constituted: one begins at the signifier as often as one begins at the signified, and at every place in the system, and at no place. The intention to demonstrate authenticity is impli-cated in the demonstration itself. To have bothered to'destroy the money at all, even in complete privacy, is already to determine their sabservience to it, to bow to its power. To make a statement, 'artis-tic' or otherwise, is to concede at once to the violent demands of signification. Absolute authenticity necessitates one's own extinc-tion; only in death does one accede to the immaculate. The business of humanity, 'and thus of art, is precisely one of compromise, 'inau-thenticity' and fabication. In finding the artistic institution phoney and depraved, the K Foundation confuse ethics with aesthetics. Their failure to bring about the end of art dictates that Drummond and Cauty proceed logically to self-destruction; the next bonfire must surely,be one intended for their own physical immolation. 67 Kritik Answers Kulynych Turn: 2AC DEBATE HAS VALUE – DELIBERATIVE POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE RECAPTURE DELIBERATIVE SPACE FROM OPPRESSIVE STRUCTURES Kulynych ‗97 [Jessica, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Winthrop, Polity 30: 2, Winter//uwyo] A performative perspective on participation enriches our understanding of deliberative democracy. This enlarged understanding can be demonstrated by considering the examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol Hager's Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the West German Energy Debate.(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of citizen groups as they enter into problemsolving in contemporary democracies. After detailing the German citizen foray into technical debate and the subsequent creation of energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of energy policy, she concludes that a dual standard of interpretation and evaluation is required for full understanding of the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional understandings of participation focus on the policy dimension and concern themselves with the citizens' success or failure to attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on the discursive, legitimation dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in reconstituting participation discursively and asserts that the legitimation , success is not defined in terms of getting, but rather in terms of solving through consensus. Deliberation is thus an end in itself, and citizens have succeeded whenever they are able to secure a realm of deliberative politics where the aim is forging consensus among participants, rather than achieving victory by some over others. dimension offers an alternative reason for optimism about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive understanding of participation Through the creation of numerous networks of communication and the generation of publicity, citizen action furthers democracy by assuming a substantive role in governing and by forcing participants in the policy process to legitimate their positions politically rather than technically. Hager maintains that a sense of political efficacy is enhanced by this politically interactive role even though citizens were only minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate, and experienced a real lack of autonomy as they were coerced into adopting the terms of the technical debate. She agrees with Alberto Melucci that the impact of [these] movements cannot.., be judged by normal criteria of efficacy and success .... These groups offer a different way of perceiving and naming the world. They demonstrate that alternatives are possible, and they expand the communicative as opposed to the bureaucratic or market realms of societal activity.(87) Yet her analysis is incomplete. Like Habermas, Hager relies too heavily on a discursive reconstitution of political action. Though she recognized many of the limitations of Habermas's theory discussed above, she insists on the :innovative and creative potential of citizen initiatives. She insists that deliberative politics can resist the tendency toward authoritarianism common to even a communicative, deliberative search for objective truth, and that legitimation debates can avoid the tendency to devolve into the technical search for the better argument. She bases her optimism on the non-hierarchical, sometimes even chaotic and incoherent, forms of decisionmaking practiced by citizen initiatives, and on the diversity and spontaneity of citizen groups. Unfortunately, it is precisely these elements of citizen action that cannot be explained by a theory of communicative action. It is here that a performative conception of , the goal of action is not only to secure a realm for deliberative to disrupt and resist the norms and identities that structure such a realm and its participants. While Habermas theorizes that political solutions will emerge from dialogue, a performative understanding of participation highlights the limits of dialogue and the creative and often uncontrollable effect of unpremeditated action on the very foundations of communication. When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the out come of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. The disruptive potential of the energy commissions continues to defy technical bureaucracy even while their decisions are non-binding. political action implicitly informs Hager's discussion. From a performative perspective politics, but 68 Kritik Answers Kulynych Turn: 1AR NEXT, EXTEND OUR KULYNYCH EVIDENCE: DEBATE IS AN END UNTO ITSELF BECAUSE IT DISRUPTS NORMALIZING SYSTEMS BY ELUCIDATING THE LIMITS AND CONSTRAINTS ON DIALOGUE THROUGH A PERFORMATIVE ACT OF RESISTANCE – WHAT WE DO IS NOT JUST CONSTITUTED BY THE RATIONALITY OF OUR ARGUMENTS BUT BY THE TECHNIQUES WE USE – WHETHER OR NOT THIS PARTICULAR DISCUSSION CAUSES POLITICAL ACTION, OUR ACT OF DEFIANCE EMPOWERS IDENTITIES AND MAKES DEBATE MEANINGFUL 69 Kritik Answers Praxis Turn: 2AC AND, THEORETICAL INTERVENTIONS EMPTY OF PRACTICE JUST COMMODIFY AND DESTROY THE CRITICISM… PERM SOLVES BEST Routledge ‗96 [Paul, ―The Third Space as Critical Engagement,‖ Antipode 28(4), October, 399//uwyo] One of the problems of theory is that we attempt to understand processes, things, others, in a moment of cultural petrification, where we objectify living culturalpolitical forms (Jeudy, 1994). Such theory takes place at a distance. In the production of theory we are distanced from what Bey (1994) terms immediatism – direct, lived experience. Rather we become engaged in representations of (an)other‘s reality. As such, we are alienated form the lived moment, enmeshed in the theory market, where the production of theory becomes another part of spectacular production, another commodity. This commodification imples that a mediation has occurred, and with every mediation so our alienation from live experience increases. As Mies (1983) notes, we are too frequently engaged in uninvolved spectator knowledge, one separated form active participation. As such, research and theory can remain analytical and disembodied. It is not lived. To enact a third space within and between academia and activism is to attempt to live theory in the immediate. 70 Kritik Answers Praxis Turn:1AR AND, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, ROUTLEDGE PRAXIS ARGUMENT. THEORETICAL ENGAGEMENT REMOVES ITSELF FROM LIVED EXPERIENCE, RENDERING ITSELF ANOTHER COMMODITY TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD, PREVENTING TRANSFORMATION AND, THINKING ABOUT THINKING IS USELESS. THINKING ABOUT DOING IS KEY TO CHANGING STRUCTURAL WRONGS Booth ‗97 [Ken, Chair of Intl Pltcs @ Wales, Critical security studies, Ed. Krause & Williams, p. 114//uwyo] study of security can beneft from a range of perspectives, but not from those who would refuse to engage with the problems of those, at this minute, who are being starved, oppressed, or shot. It is therefore legitimate to ask what any theory that purports to belong within world politics has to say about Bosnia or nuclear deterrence. Thinking about thinking is important, but, more urgently, so is thinking about doing. For those who believe that we live in a humanly constituted world, the distinction between theory and practice dissolves: theory is a form of practice, and practice is a form of theory. Abstract ideas about emancipation will not suffice: it is important for critical security studies to engage with the real by suggesting policies, and sites of change, to help humankind in whole or in part, to move away from its structural wrongs. Security is concerned with how people live. An interest in practice (policy relevance) is surely part of what is involved in being a security specialist. The ALSO, MUST LINK PROTEST TO DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION Foucault ‗82 [Michel, God, ―Politics and Ethics: An Interview,‖ The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//uwyo-ajl] Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because the lines are drawn by others. . . . M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being. Let's take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of para- troopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account. 71 Kritik Answers Praxis Turn: 2AR NEXT, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, THE ROUTLEDGE PRAXIS ARGUMENT. OUR POSITION IS THAT THE AFF‘S DEPLOYMENT OF THEORY IS NOTHING BUT AN EMPTY GESTURE THAT FAILS BECAUSE IT‘S DEVOID OF PRACTICE A PURELY ―ACADEMIC‖ CRITICISM, LIKE THE NEG‘S, DIVORCES ITSELF FROM ANY SENSE OF PRAXIS, INEXORABLY COMMODIFYING ARGUMENT, WHERE THEORY BECOMES ANOTHER PRODUCT OF UNIVERSITY FACTORIES NOT ONLY DOES THIS ARGUMENT PROVIDE SOLVENCY FOR OUR PWERM, WHICH COMBINES THEORY AND PRACTICE, BUT IT SERVES AS A POWERFUL INDICTMENT OF THE POTENTIAL FOR ANY POSITIVE CRITICAL IMPACT 72 Kritik Answers Praxis Turn: Ext REAL PROBLEMS DEMAND ACTION – IVORY TOWER CRITICISMS CAUSE IMMOBILIZATION Booth ‗95 [Ken, Prof. of IR, ―Human wrongs and international relations,‖ International Affaris, ASP//delizzozzle] Philosophical sceptics, for whom nothing is certain, and so for whom the bases of action are always problematic, are a familiar feature of academic life Tom Stoppard enjoyable caricatured them in his clever comedy Jumpers, and in particular in the scene in which philosophical sceptics were discussed whether the train for Bristol left yesterday from Paddington station. On what basis could they ever know? Even if they were actually on the train that was supposed to leave for Bristol, might not the happening be explained by Paddington leaving the train? We all know such conundrums, and indeed such people Meanwhile, flesh is being fed or famished, and people are being tortured and killed And even philospohical skeptics have to catch trains Some of them do Unless acadmeics are merely to spread confusion, or snipe from the windows of ivory towers, we must engage with the real. This means having the ‗courage of our confusions‘ and thinking and acting without certainty. In reply to those sensitive to post-colonial critiques of Western imperialism I would argue that just because many Western ideas were spread by commerce and the Gatling gun, it does not follow that every idea originating in the West, or backed by Western opinion, should therefore simply be labelled ‗imperialist‘ and rejected. There are some ethnocentric ideas – and individual human rights is one of them – for which we should not apologize. Furthermore, I do not see the dissemination of powerful social and political ideas as necessarily occurring in one direction only. As the economic and political power of Asia grows, for example, so will its cultural power. World politics in the next century will be more Asian than the present one. What matters from a cosmopolitan perspective is not the birthplace of an idea, but the meaning we give it. 73 Kritik Answers Presymbolism Turn: 2AC TURN – GROUNDING RESISTANCE IN A BEFORE THE FALL IDENTITY RENDERS THE COLONIZED PASSIVE VICTIMS WITHOUT AGENCY… ACTIVISM WITHIN THE SYSTEM USES ITS OWN EXCESSES TO DISMANTLE IT Zizek '99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl] Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well aware of the retroactive process by means of which oppressive power itself generates the form of resistance – is not this very paradox contained in Hegel's notion of positing the presuppositions, that is, of how the activity of positing-mediating does not merely elaborate the presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms the very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour to return is already mediated-posited by the process of modernization, which deprived them of their ethnic roots. This argumentation may appear Eurocentrist, condemning the colonized to repeat the European imperialist pattern by means of the very gesture of resisting it – however, it is also possible to give it precisely the opposite reading. That is to say: if we ground our resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some kernel of previous ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the position of a victim resisting modernization, of a passive object on which imperialist procedures work. If, however, we conceive our resistance as an excess that results from the way brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can claim that our resistance is grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist system – that the imperialist system itself, through its inherent antagonism, activates the forces that will bring about its demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of how to ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus at which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order emerge, this in no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but provides it with an even stronger detonating force.) Or – to put it in yet another way – the premise according to which resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance, including in the eternal game Power plays with itself – the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall. It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from the fact that every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power edifice itself, from this absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he seems to draw the conclusion that resistance is co-opted in advance, that it cannot seriously undermine the system – that is, he precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the philosophical point to be made here is that this is the fundamental feature of the dialectical-materialist notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be ontologically 'higher' than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian notion of an allencompassing power edifice which always-already contains its transgression, that which allegedly eludes it: what if the price to be paid is that the power mechanism cannot even control itself, but has to rely on an obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other words: what effectively eludes the controlling grasp of Power is not 74 Kritik Answers so much the external In-itself it tries to dominate but, rather, the obscene supplement which sustains its own operation. 75 Kritik Answers Presymbolism Turn: 1AR AND, EXTEND THE 2AC # ___ ZIZEK ‘99 PRESYMBOLISM TURN. RESISTING OPPRESSION CREATES A BEFORE THE FALL FANTASY, RENDERING US PASSIVE VICTIMS. ONLY USING THE SYSTEM‘S OWN EXCESSES AGAINST ITSELF EXPLODES IT FROM WITHIN, CAUSING ITS DOWNFALL ALSO, POWER IS SPLIT FROM WITHIN BY ITS TRAUMATIC EXCESS – USING THAT DISAVOWED FOUNDATION DISMANTLES IT Zizek '97 [Slavoj, The Game, The Plague Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 26-7//uwyo-ajl] This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative identity, Power is always-already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a Foucauldian way, that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it and being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is alwaysalready mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the exercise of power. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the `repression' of some libidinal content retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of `repression' - this èroticization' of power is not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its `constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill depicted in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, for example, is not a secondary eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the constitutive obscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative. Judith Butler27 provides a perfect example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very formulation of the text of the anti-pornography law~ displays the contours of a particular fantasy - an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity with another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his own perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the obscene libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography. 76 Kritik Answers Rejection Bad Turn: 2AC TURN - CALL TO REJECT IMPOVERISHES DISCOURSE… PERM SOLVES BEST Ashley ‗88 [Richard, ―Untying the Soveregin State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique,‖ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(2), June, 227-262//uwyo] The monological reading of theoretical discourse of the anarchy problematique thus leaves the reader with the dichotomous choice of positions mentioned earlier: the choice titled the blackmail of the heroic practice. One must be either ‗inside‘ this discourse or ‗outside,‘ either for or against. On the one hand, in order to enter this discursive enclosure – even if one‘s interest is criticism or reform – one must adopt a subjective standpoint that affirms the objective and original powers of the heroic practice and interpret everything in its terms. One must resign oneself to complicity with the in order to stand outside this discursive enclosure – thus to repudiate the hard core representations of the anarcy problematique – one must condemn oneself to a position of practical futility, no matter how self-righteous it may be. Saying no to a powerful discourse that participates in the construction of the selfevIdent ‗truth‘ of the anarchy problematique, one is left to construct subjective counter-truths that cannot be effective precisely because they remove themselves from the workings of objective sources of power in history. knowledgeable practices by which the anarchy problematique is constituted as a self-evident and objective condition of life. On the other hand, 77 Kritik Answers Rejection Bad Turn: 1AR EXTEND THE 2AC #___ ASHLEY EVIDENCE. TOTAL REJECTION LOCKS US OUTSIDE OF DISCURSIVE SYSTEMS, PREVENTING US FROM CHANGING THEM FROM WITHIN, CONDEMNING US TO PASSIVE FUTILITY. THIS IS A NET BENEFIT TO THE PERM ALSO, TOTAL DOGMATIC SYSTEMS WHERE ONE SIDE IS RIGHT AND THE OTHER WRONG CREATE TOTALIZING POLITICS, RESULTING IN SLAUGHTER AND WAR Said ‗94 [Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures, Vintage, 1994, 113] Such transfigurations sever the living connection between the intellectual and the movement or process of which he or she is a part. Moreover there is the appalling danger of thinking of oneself, one‘s views, one‘s rectittude, one‘s stated positions as all-important. To read over The God That Failed testimonial is for me a depressing thing. I want to ask: Why as an intellectual did you believe in a god anyway? And besides, who gave you the right to imagine that your early belief and later disenchantment were so important? In and of itself religious belief is to me both understandable and deeply personal: it is rather when a total dogmatic system in which one side is innocently good, the other irreducibly evil is substituted for the process , the give and take of vital interchange that the secular intellectual feels the unwelcome and inappropriate enroachment of one realm on another. Politics becomes religious enthusiasm – as it is the case today in former Yugoslavia – with results in ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and unending conflict that are horrible to contemplate. AND, FOREIGN POLICY CRITICISMS BECOME COMPLICIT WITH THE STRUCTURES THEY OPPOSE Ashley ‗96 [Richard, Eric‘s Best Friend for Life & Prof. of Poli Sci @ ASU, ―The achievements of post-structuralism,‖ International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 247-8] And to these four premises I might add just one more. Under these circumstances, it can make little sense to rehearse all those strains of argument that have explored the limitations of the model of critical activity I have been discussing – this in the hope that I might thereby open up a conversation that seems so disposed to closure. Call them post-structuralist or call them what you will, these, once more, are strains of argument that have rigorously demonstrated how very paradoxical is every attempt to cling fast to this model of criticism in the face of all manner of excessive happenings that transgress or overflow the limits of every rendition of it; how much every such attempt depends upon strategiems for disciplining excess whose arbitrariness, whose violence, is right there on the surface for all to see; how much, therefore, every such attempt must rely upon effecting a blindness to its own emergence; and how readily, thanks to all of this, these attempts can be drawn into a complicity (thought not a secret complicity) with those very practices that would arrest ambiguity, discipline the proliferation of possibilities, tame resistances, and sustain structures of domination ostensibly opposed. 78 Kritik Answers 79 Kritik Answers Rejection Bad Turn: Ext REJECTION OF SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS BECAUSE OF RADICAL DKEPTICISM IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN PLAN Fierlbeck ‗94 [Katherine, Prof. Poli Sci @ Dalhousie, ―Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions,‖ History & Theory, 33: 1, ASP//uwyo-ajl] In many respects, even the dismally skeptical post-modernists are too optimistic in their allegiance to post-modern ideas. As many others have already pointed out, post-modernism offers little constructive advice about how to reorganize and reinvigorate modern social relations. "The views of the post-modern individual," explains Rosenau, "are likely neither to lead to a post-modern society of innovative production nor to engender sustained or contained economic growth." This is simply because "these are not post-modern priorities"(55). Post-modernism offers no salient solutions; and, where it does, such ideas have usually been reconstituted from ideas presented in other times and places.[9] What we need are specific solutions to specific problems: to trade disputes, . If one cannot prioritize public policy to the redistribution of health care resources, to unemployment, to spousal abuse alternatives, or assign political responsibility to address such issues, or even say without hesitation that wealthy nations that steadfastly ignore pockets of virulent poverty are immoral, then the worst nightmares of the most cynical post-modernists will likely come to life. Such an overarching refusal to address these issues is at least as dangerous as any overarching affirmation of beliefs regarding ways to go about solving them. Post-modernism suffers from -- and is defined by -- too much indeterminacy. In order to achieve anything, constructive or otherwise, human beings must attempt to understand the nature of things, and to evaluate them. This can be done even if we accept that we may never understand things completely, or evaluate them correctly. But if paralysis is the most obvious political consequence of post-modernism, a graver danger lies in the rejection of the "Enlightenment ideals" of t the opposite of "universalism" is is, some combination of intolerance, local prejudice, suspicion, bigotry, fear, brutality, and persecution. The uncritical affiliation with the community of one's universality and impartiality. If the resounding end to the Cold War has taught us anything, it should be tha not invariably a coexistence of "little narratives": it can be, and frequently birth, as Martha Nussbaum notes, "while not without causal and formative power, is ethically arbitrary, and sometimes ethically dangerous -- in that it encourages us to listen to our unexamined preferences as if they were ethical laws."[10] 80 Kritik Answers Ricouer Turn: 2AC TURN – THE SEARCH FOR HIDDEN MOTIVES ENGAGES IN A HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION, RISKING SPIRAL INTO PROFOUND SKEPTICISM Berman 2001 [Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN] Ricoeur contrasts two different "poles" among hermeneutic styles. At one pole, "hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of ... meaning." 23 At the other pole, hermeneutics is "understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion." 24 It is not entirely clear to me precisely a hermeneutics of faith to be one that treats the object of study as possessing inherent meaning on its own terms. In contrast, the hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to expose societal practices as illusory edifices that mask underlying contradictions or failures of meaning. I will return to the first pole in Part Four of this what Ricoeur means by these two categories. Nevertheless, I understand Essay, but for now I wish to focus on the hermeneutics of demystification and suspicion. t each of these thinkers makes "the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as "false' consciousness." 25 Ricoeur sees this perspective as an extension of Descartes' fundamental position of doubt at the dawn of the Ricoeur locates in the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the central hallmarks of this suspicious approach. He argues tha Enlightenment. According to Ricoeur, "The philosopher trained in the school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as they appear; but he does not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to itself; in consciousness, meaning and consciousness of meaning coincide." 26 The hermeneutics of suspicion takes doubt one step farther, by distrusting even our perceptions. This suspicious position questions the so-called "correspondence [*104] theory" of truth. As we go through our lives, most of us generally assume that our mental perceptions accord with reality because we believe we have direct access to reality through our senses or through reason. This is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the "answer" to the fundamental Cartesian doubt. But the hermeneutics of suspicion maintains that human beings create false truths for themselves. Such false truths cannot be "objective" because they always serve some interest or purpose. By discovering and revealing those interests or purposes, suspicious analysis seeks to expose so-called "false consciousness" generated through social ideology or self-deception. False consciousness may arise in many different ways. Nietzsche looked to people's self-deceit in the service of the "will to power." Marx focused on the social being and the false consciousness that arises from ideology and economic alienation. Freud approached the problem of false consciousness by examining dreams and neurotic symptoms in order to reveal hidden motivations and desires. Thus, "the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideas and illusions in Freud's sense represent three convergent procedures of demystification." 27 AND, SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE – THEIR PARANOIA FORECLOSES UPON REVOLUTION Berman 2001 [Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN] , one might view this as a positive development. One might think people should stop being lulled into a false sense of believing that the rhetoric of public life really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of entrenched power, so the argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a truly revolutionary political movement. I doubt that such an eventuality is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture of suspiciousness is the most effective way to seek political (or personal) change anyway. Of course Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed, Without the means of experiencing more profound enchantments, without communal rituals those beliefs ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from forms of enchantment in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted, construct and maintain. 112 81 Kritik Answers Ricoeur Turn: 1AR AND, EXTEND 2AC # ___, THE RICOUER TURN. SUSPCION OF HIDDEN MOTIVATIONS BEHIND POLICYMAKING FORCES INFINITE SKEPTICISM BECAUSE EVERY OUTCOME IS DETERMINATELY NEGATIVE. THE IMPACT IS THE OTHER RICOUER CARD, WHICH SHOWS THAT SUCH PARANOIA PREVENTS SOCIAL CHANGE, ALLOWING NIHILISM TO REPLACE REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATION ALSO, THEIR HERMENEUTICS WORK AGAINST SOCIAL CHANGE AND KILL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Berman 2001 [Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN] The second drawback of the hermeneutics of suspicion is perhaps even more important. As some scholars have noted, the hermeneutics of suspicion can easily slip from healthy skepticism into a kind of rhetorical paranoia. Paranoia, of course, is a loaded term, and probably a bit unfair. Nevertheless, because it is used frequently in the academic literature about the hermeneutics of suspicion, I will use it as well - though I want to make clear that I believe paranoia to be the hypothetical extreme in the movement toward skeptical scholarship. I do not mean to imply that any actual scholars necessarily display such paranoid logic. Critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion describe the "paranoid style of functioning" 104 as "an intense, sharply perceptive but narrowly focused mode of attention" that results in an attitude of "elaborate suspiciousness." 105 Paranoid individuals constantly strive to demystify appearances; they take nothing at face value because "they regard reality as an obscure dimension hidden from casual observation or participation." 106 On this vision, The obvious is regarded as misleading and as something to be seen through. So, the paranoid style sees the world as constructed of a web of hints to hidden meaning... . The way in which the paranoid protects fragile autonomy is by insuring, or at least insisting, that the paranoid's interpretation of events is the interpretation. 107 Such a paranoid style may, over time, have a potentially corrosive effect on society. 108 Consider the longterm consequences of repeated exposure to suspicious stories. An appeal to religious ideals is portrayed as an exercise of political power or the result of deluded magical thinking. A [*122] canonical work of art is revealed to be the product of a patriarchal "gaze." The programs of politicians are exposed as crass maneuverings for higher office or greater power. 109 The idealistic rhetoric of judicial opinions is depicted as an after-the-fact justification for the exercise of state-sanctioned violence. And the life choices of individuals are shown to be responses to psychological neurosis, or social pathology. All of these are exaggerations, but they increasingly represent the rhetoric that is used to describe human interaction both in contemporary society and in the past. As Richard Rorty describes, In this vision, the two-hundred-year history of the United States - indeed, the history of the European and American peoples since the Enlightenment - has been pervaded by hypocrisy and self-deception. Readers of Foucault often come away believing that no shackles have been broken in the past two hundred years: the harsh old chains have merely been replaced with slightly more comfortable ones. Heidegger describes America's success in blanketing the world with modern technology as the spread of a wasteland. Those who find Foucault and Heidegger convincing often view the United States of America as ... something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different. 110 If that is one's viewpoint, it will inevitably be difficult to muster one's energy to believe in the possibility of positive action in the world, short of revolution (and even revolution is probably inevitably compromised). As Rorty points out, though the writers of supposedly "subversive" works "honestly believe that they are serving human liberty," it may ultimately be "almost impossible to clamber back down from [these works] to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy." 111 82 Kritik Answers Ricoeur Turn: Ext LAW CAN BE VIEWED AFFIRMATIVELY – THE MULTIPLICITY OF STORES CAN PROVE MORE HOPE FOR CHANGE AND MEANING NOT LESS Berman 2001 [Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. of Law @ Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, LN//uwyo] Recently, Richard K. Sherwin's When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture n127 has attempted a similar project. Sherwin argues (as I skeptical postmodernism "manifests a marked inclination toward pessimism and disenchantment." n128 If truth, meaning, and reality are no longer discernible, and if any sense of the unified self or human agency is illusory, he argues, we risk living in a world where "individuals can no longer be held accountable for having "authored' their acts or caused an event to happen." n129 According to Sherwin, "In the end the skeptical postmodern is left with nothing more than endless play and detached irony." n130 Nevertheless, like me, Sherwin refuses to jettison postmodern theory altogether. Instead, he contends, "Postmodernism need not be skeptical... . A story might concede the demise of the autonomous modern subject, but still find meaning through the distributed self: an identity made up of multiple cultural and social constructs shared by others in particular communities." n131 Similarly, taking Sherwin's [*129] "affirmative postmodern" view, we might recognize that concepts such as truth and justice are contingent, but still see those ideas as coherent. "Abstraction may give way to particularity, contextuality, multiplicity; judgment may turn toward characteristic voices and localized accounts. But localization and contextualization are not fatal to meaning. It remains possible to seek rather than abandon meaning for concepts like truth and justice - even in the face of contingency, unpredictability, and spontaneity." n132 have earlier in this Essay) against what he calls "skeptical postmodernism." Referring to Baudrillard, Sherwin observes that Following Sherwin's suggestion, I wish to pursue a story about law that makes no attempt to return to a formalist world where legal rules are "truths" to be "discovered" by judges. Rather, I accept the idea that there is an infinite number of possible narratives for describing reality and that each narrative is inevitably a product of many cultural forces. Further, I will accept that, at least within a certain range, none of these narratives necessarily has a stronger claim to truth than any other. In such a world, how might one understand and justify law practice in America? n133 we might conceive of law as a site for encounter, contestation, and play among various narratives. I draw on Hannah Arendt's conception of the "public" as a space of appearance where actors stand before others and are subject to My suggestion is that mutual scrutiny and judgment from a plurality of perspectives. n134 The public, on this view, "consists of multiple histories and perspectives relatively unfamiliar to By communicating about their differing perspectives on the social world in which they dwell together, people and communities can collectively constitute an enlarged understanding of the world. n136 In this Part, therefore, I will first outline a one another, connected yet distant and irreducible to one another." n135 prominent conception of "communicative democracy" that builds on Arendt, offered by political theorist Iris M. Young. Then, I will speculate about law's potential as a site for the type of idealized public discourse Young envisions. n137 83 Kritik Answers Romanticization Turn: 2AC TURN: APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES THE RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS Routledge ‗96 [Paul, ―The Third Space as Critical Engagement,‖ Antipode 28(4), October, 399//uwyo] The issue of representation is a vexed one which has received much attention within the social sciences. For example, in discussing the academic strategy of polyphony, Crang (1992) raises issues of how the voices of others are (re)presented; the extent to which these voices are interwoven with persona of narrator the degree of authorial power regarding who initiates research, who decides on textual arrangements, and who decides which voices are heard; and the power relations involved in the cultural capital conferred by specialist knowledge. Moreover, Harrison (quoted in McLaren 1995 240) argues that polyphony can end up being aform of romantic ventroloquism creating the magical notion of the Other‘s coming to voice. These questions have important political implications for research which must be negotiated according to the specific circumstances of a particular project. It is all too easy for academics to claim solidarity with the oppressed and act as relays for their voices within social scientific discourse. This raises the danger of an uncritical alignment with resisters on the assumption that they know all there is to know without the intervention of intellectuals; and hence an academic‘s role becomes that of helping them seize the right to speak. 84 Kritik Answers Romanticization Turn: 1AR AND, EXTEND THE 2AC #___ ROUTLEDGE ‘96 ROMANTICIZATION TURN. SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF OTHERS USES THEIR SUFFERING FOR ONE‘S OWN ENDS, SILENCING THEM BY SEIZING THE RIGHT TO SPEAK, REINSCRIBING THE IMPACT 85 Kritik Answers Romanticization Turn: 2AR NEXT, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, THE ROUTLEDGE ROMANTICIZATION ARGUMENT. OUR CLAIM IS THAT EFFORTS TO ―OPEN SPACE FOR THE OTHER‖ WITHIN A COMPETITIVE FRAMEWORK ARE PROBLEMATIC BECAUSE THE WAY THAT THE VOICE IS PRESENTED IS NOT ONLY DETERMINED BY THE NEG, BUT ITS RE-PRESENTATION LEGITIMIZES THE AUTHORIAL POWER OF ACADEMICS TO SPEAK FOR OTHERS THAT POWER USES THE GUISE OF POLYPHONY TO PROMULGATE A FORM OF ROMANTIC VENTRILOQUISM THAT MASKS THE OPPRESSIVE NATURE OF THEIR RESEARCH THIS IS DEVASTATING TO THE NEG ON 2 LEVELS FIRST, IT‘S AN ABSOLUTE TAKEOUT TO ANY POSITIVE IMLICATIONS OF THE CRITICISM BECAUSE THE NEG‘S ALLEGED SPACE-CLEARING CAN NEVER LET OTHERS SPEAK SECOND, IT TURNS THE IMPLICATIONS BECAUSE THEIR PERFORMANCE ONY FURTHER COMMODIFIES THE USE OF THE PAIN OF OTHERS FOR PERSONAL GAIN, PLACING A WARM, FUZZY LEG WARMER OVER THE JACKBOOT OF DOMINATION 86 Kritik Answers Said Turn: 2AC THE ALTERNATIVE OPTS FOR INACTION IN THE FACE OF DOMINATION… ONLY POLICY DISCUSSIONS CAN REORIENT INTELLECTUALS TOWARDS FIGHTING INJUSTICE SAID (University Professor, Columbia University) ‗94 [Edward W., ―The Intellectuals and the War,‖ The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, New York: Vintage, p. 316-19] HARLOW: What are the political, intellectual, and cultural imperatives for combating this agenda? In 1967 Chomsky wrote the essay ―Responsibility of Intellectuals.‖ What would be the main component of such an essay today? jargonistic postmodernisms that now dot the landscape. They are worse are neither capable of understanding and analyzing the power structure of this country nor are they capable of understanding the particular aesthetic merit of an individual work of art. Whether you call it deconstruction or postmodernism or poststructuralism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle of giving back SAID: One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering than useless. They tickets that the entrance and saying, we‘re really out of it. We want to check into our private resort and be left alone. [317] Reengagement with intellectual processes has very little to do with being politically correct, or citing fashionable names, or striking acceptable poses, but rather having to do with a return in a way to a kind of old-fashioned historical, literary, and above all, intellectual scholarship based upon the premise that human beings, men and women, make their own history. And just as things are made, they can be unmade and re-re-remade. That sense of intellectual and political and citizenry empowerment is what I think the intellectual class needs. There‘s only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be some identification, not with the ; there has to be an affiliation with matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those don‘t occur in a laboratory or a library. For the American intellectual, that simply means, at bottom, in a globalized environment, that there is today one superpower, and the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, based upon profit and power, has to be altered from an imperial one to one of coexistence among human communities that can make and remake their own histories together. This seems to me to be the number-one priority---there‘s nothing else. powers that be, with the Secretary of State or the great leading philosopher of the time or sage An American has a particular role. If you‘re an anthropologist in America, it‘s not the same thing as being an anthropologist in India or France; it‘s a qualitatively different thing. HARLOW: We‘re both professors in English departments, despite the fact that the humanities have been quite irresponsible, unanswerable… SAID: Not the humanities. The professors of humanities. HARLOW: Well, OK, the professors, but there is this question… SAID: I take the general view that, for all its inequity, for all its glaring faults and follies, the university in this society remains a relatively utopian place, a place of . There needs to be some sense of the university as a place in which these issues are not, because it is that kind of place, trivialized. Universities cannot afford to become just a platform for a certain kind of narcissistic specialization and jargon. What you need is a regard for the product of the human mind. And that‘s why I‘ve been very dispirited, I must tell you, but aspects of the ―great great privilege Western canon‖ debate, which really suggest that the oppressed of the world, in wishing to be heard, in wishing their work to be recognized, really wish to do dirt on everything else. That‘s not the spirit of resistance. We come [318] back to Aime Cesaire‘s line, ―There is room for all that at the rendezvous of victory.‖ It‘s not that some have to be pushed off and demeaned and denigrated. The question is not whether we should read more black literature or less literature by white men. The issue is excellence---we need everything, as much as possible, for understanding the human adventure in its fullest, without resorting to enormous abstractions and generalizations, without replacing Euro-centrism with other varieties of ethnocentrism, or say, Islamo-centrism or Afro-centrism or gyno-centrism. Is it a game of substitutions? That‘s where intellectuals have to clarify themselves. HARLOW: I agree, but at least within certain university contexts there have been lately two major issues: the Gulf War and multiculturalism. I have not seen any linkage between the two. SAID: The epistemology and the ethic of specialization have been accepted by all. If you‘re a literature professor, that‘s what you talk about. And if you‘re an education specialist, that‘s what you talk about. The whole idea of being in the university means not only respect for what others do, but respect for what you do. And the sense that they all are part of a community. The main point is that we ascribe a utopian function to the intellectual. Even inside the university, the prevalence of norms based upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is so strong---whether it‘s authority derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the ethnos, from tradition---is so powerful that it‘s gone relatively unchallenged, even in the very disciplines and studies that we are engaged in. Part of intellectual work is And if you can understand that, they your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life, our national and political life, and our international life above all. understanding how authority is formed. Like everything else, authority is not God-given. It‘s secular. HARLOW: What can alternative publications do to interrupt that particular way of presenting authority? SAID: One is to remind readers that there are always other ways of looking at the issue---whatever it happens to be---than those that are officially credentialed. Second, one of the things that one needs to do in intellectual enterprises is to---Whitehead says somewhere---always try to write about an author keeping in mind what he or she might say of what you‘re writing. To adapt from that: some sense in which your constituency might be getting signals about what you‘re doing. The agenda isn‘t set only by you; it‘s set by others. You can‘t represent the others, but you can take them into account by soliciting their attention. Let such a publication be a place in which its pages that which is occluded or suppressed or has disappeared from the consciousness of the West, of the intellectual, can be allowed to appear. Third, some awareness of the methodological issues involved, and the gathering of information, the production of scholarship, the relationship between scholarship and knowledge. The great virtue of these journals is that they are not guided by professional norms. Nobody is going to get tenure out of writing for these journals. And nobody is trying to advance in a career by what he or she does there. So that means therefore that one can stand back and look at these things and take questions having to do with how people know things. In other words, a certain emphasis on novelty is important and somewhat lacking. You don‘t want to feel too virtuous in what you are doing: that I‘m the only person doing this, therefore, I must continue doing it. Wit is not such a bad thing. 87 Kritik Answers Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext (1/2) INTELLECTUAL WORK SERVES AS A CRITICAL RESOURCE FOR ACTIVISTS Milan Rai, independent peace researcher, CHOMSKY‘S POLITICS, 1995, p. 156. Chomsky suggests that the intellecutal can make an important contribution to the struggle for peace and justice by agreeing to serve as a ‗resource,‘ providing information and analysis to popular movements. Intellectuals have the training, facilities, access to information and opportunity to organize and control their own work, to enable them to make ‗a very significant contribution to people who are trying to escape the confines of indoctrination and to understand something about the real world in which they live; in particular, to people who may be willing to act to change this world‘. For the same reasons, intellectuals can be active and effective organizers. Furthermore, by virtue of their privilege, intellectuals are also often ‗visible‘ and can exploit their privilege in valuable and important ways. WORLDY ACADEMIC WORK IS DEMOCRATIZING AND SPURS ACTIVISM Gordon R. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh, ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47. In basic terms the notion of argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and employ the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action, especially wider spheres of public deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic energy by linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social movements, citizens and other actors engaged in live public controversies beyond the schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept, argumentative agency links decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation and presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic empowerment. Argumentative agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based models of argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies on strategies for utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive social change. Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and students pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by employing them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that through "critical constructivist action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency and work to transform the world around them. ACADEMICS FOSTER ACTIVISM BY LEGITIMATING DISSENT Suzie Mackenzie, columnist, THE GUARDIAN, January 4, 2003, p. 20. What does the intellectual have to offer that isn't already out there? "Dissent," Rose says. "It is the task of the intellectual to think thoughts, to say things, that can't be said anywhere else. What I think goes most frighteningly and disturbingly wrong in politics is that people hold intransigently to their ideals. They admit no flaw, no break in (their own) system." You can't argue with this, it's what any good liberal intellectual would say. 88 Kritik Answers Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext (2/2) WORLDLY ENGAGEMENT FOSTERS ACTIVISM WITHIN THE ACADEMY Gordon R. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh, ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47. Encounters with broader public spheres beyond the realm of the academy can deliver unique pedagogical possibilities and opportunities. By anchoring their work in public spaces, students and teachers can use their talents to change the trajectory of events, while events are still unfolding. These experiences have the potential to trigger significant shifts in political awareness on the part of participants. Academic debaters nourished on an exclusive diet of competitive contest round experience often come to see politics like a picturesque landscape whirring by through the window of a speeding train. They study this political landscape in great detail, rarely (if ever) entertaining the idea of stopping the train and exiting to alter the course of unfolding events. The resulting spectator mentality deflects attention away from roads that could carry their arguments to wider spheres of public argumentation. However, on the occasions when students and teachers set aside this spectator mentality by directly engaging broader public audiences, key aspects of the political landscape change, because the point of reference for experiencing the landscape shifts fundamentally. 89 Kritik Answers Academics as Politics is Bad (1/2) ACADEMICS AS POLITICS IS INEFFECTIVE AND CORRUPTS THE LEARNING PROCESS Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor, Princeton University, interviewed by Jenny Attiyeh, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, August 22, 2002, p. 12. No, not as an intellectual, because your responsibility as an intellectual is to deepen your understanding and therefore our understanding.... I think our university life would be corrupted irremediably if you said to everybody in the university, beyond understanding, you have an obligation to go out and change those parts of the world that your understanding can help change. I don't think we're especially good at it - practical wisdom doesn't come with theoretical understanding usually. Do we think Einstein would have made a better leader for Britain ... than Winston Churchill? I don't think so! ACADEMIC POLITICIZATION UNDERMINES UNIVERSITIES‘ QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE Bradford P. Wilson, Executive Director of the National Assocation of Scholars and former Professor of Political Science, Ashland University, NATIONAL FORUM PHI KAPPA PHI JOURNAL, Winter 19 99, p. 18. The culture wars in higher education are not between a political left and a political right, or between liberals and conservatives. They are between those who wish to politicize academic life as part of a larger agenda of social transformation, and those who see in the university the only institution in American life where knowledge is valued for its own sake, where students can be forgiven a temporary lack of social concern and engagement for the sake of remedying a more fundamental deprivation, their lack of self-knowledge. The cure, insofar as there is one, is to be found in a liberal education, not in an identity-fix offered by the latest multicultural initiative. POLITICS AND ACADEMICS HAVE FUNDAMENTALLY CONTRADICTORY GOALS Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor, Princeton University, interviewed by Jenny Attiyeh, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, August 22, 2002, p. 12. The fundamental vocation of the intellectual is to figure things out, you know, intellego, to understand. And politics isn't about understanding, politics is about getting things done. Understanding can be an instrument of getting things done, but nuance and complexity of understanding can be an obstacle to getting things done. Politics - it's the art of the possible, and sometimes in order to do the best that can be done, you have to ride roughshod over what are, for an intellectual, important distinctions - for example, between the truth and the untruth. 90 Kritik Answers Academics as Politics is Bad (2/2) DEMANDS OF POLITICAL RELEVANCE DESTROY THE VERY FOUNDATION OF THE ACADEMY Wendy Brown, Professor of Women‘s Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz, THEORY AND EVENT 2:2, 1998, p. npg. I think it is a terrible mistake to conflate or identify academic and political work. To see Left academics as necessarily confining their intellectual endeavors, their theorizing, the texts they love, their reflections, to that which is politically useful in an immediate way, is, I think, a serious error. It is a mistake just as it would be a mistake to claim that Alan Sokal is no Leftist because he is a physicist and is poorly versed in social theory, and I would never make such a silly claim. But I think it is equally silly to suggest that everything any of us ever write or say must have immediate political cache. What we do in the academy is think, and to constrain that thinking entirely to what is understandable and useful outside the academy is basically to eliminate the point of the academy's existence. It is to constrain the space of imagination, open-ended search, and inquiring into our own knowledge and beliefs, all of which are the life-blood of intellectual work. For me, to stop calling into question that which I believed yesterday, to stop examining ideas I have always been attached to, would literally be to stop thinking. It would be to go into a kind of political automatic, as opposed to using the great privilege of being an intellectual, to keep digging up the political ground we stand on. It would also be to constrain the space of original critique that has always been so vital to Left projects 91 Kritik Answers Criticism Destroys Agency ACADEMIC CRITICISM BECOMES A REPLACEMENT FOR INDIVIDUAL ACTION. THE CRITIC BECOMES SO COMMITTED TO REJECTION OF POWER STRUCTURES THAT THEY FAIL TO CREATE A MIDDLE GROUND NECESSARY FOR CHANGE Barber 92 Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg. 111-112 The questions this poses for pedagogy are drawn in the re condite language of literary postmodernism and deconstruction, but are of the first importance for education. Does the art of criticism doom the object of critical attention to displacement by the selfabsorbed critic? In other words, does criticizing books replace reading them? Can the art of questioning be made self limiting, or do critics always become skeptics? Are skeptics in turn doomed by their negative logic to be relativists? Must relativists melt down into nihilists? Conservatives have worried that this particularly slippery slope cannot be safely traversed at all, and thus have worried about a pedagogy that relies on a too critical mode of radical questioning. They prefer to think of education as instilling the right values and teaching authoritative bodies of knowledge to compliant students for whom learning is primarily a matter of absorbing information. When these conservatives appeal to the ancients, it is the rationalist Plato to whom they turn, rather than the subversive Socrates. Yet pedagogical progressives actually confirm the conservatives' fears when they themselves tumble happily down the slope, greasing it as they go with an epistemology that denies the possibility of any stopping place, any objectivity, any rationality, any criterion of reasonableness or universalism whatsoever. Asked to choose between dogma and nihilism, between affirming hegemonic authority and denying all authority, including the authority of reason, of science, and of open debate, what choice does the concerned teacher have but despair? Where she seeks a middling position, she is offered orthodoxy or nihilism. Where she seeks moderation in her students-a respect for rationality but an unwillingness to confound it with or measure it by somebody's power, or eloquence, or status-she is informed that all appeals to rationality are pretense: Bertrand Russell's no less than Joseph Goebbels's, Hannah Arendt's no less than Catherine the Great's, the rationality with which the skeptic skewers conventional reason no less than the rationality the skeptic skewers. 92 Kritik Answers Criticism is Nihilistic (1/4) DECONSTRUCTION WITHOUT ACTION FOR MATERIAL JUSTICE BLOCKS POLITICAL ESCAPE FROM OPPRESSION AND REINFORCES IVORY TOWER ELITISM Anthony Cook, Associate Professor, Law, Georgetown University, NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW, Spring 1992, p. 761-762. The effect of deconstructing the power of the author to impose a fixed meaning on the text or offer a continuous narrative is both debilitating and liberating. It is debilitating in that any attempt to say what should be done within even our insular Foucaultian preoccupations may be oppositionalized and deconstructed as an illegitimate privileging of one term, value, perspective or narrative over another. The struggle over meaning might continue ad infinitum. That is, if a deconstructionist is theoretically consistent and sees deconstruction not as a political tool but as a philosophical orientation, political action is impossible, because such action requires a degree of closure that deconstruction, as a theoretical matter, does not permit. Moreover, the approach is debilitating because deconstruction without material rootedness, without goals and vision, creates a political and spiritual void into which the socially real power we theoretically deconstruct steps and steps on the disempowered and dispossessed. [*762] To those dying from AIDS, stifled by poverty, dehumanized by sexism and racism, crippled by drugs and brutalized by the many forms of physical, political and economic violence that characterizes our narcissistic culture, power hardly seems a matter of illegitimate theoretical privileging. When vision, social theory and political struggle do not accompany critique, the void will be filled by the rich, the powerful and the charismatic, those who influence us through their eloquence, prestige, wealth and power. 93 Kritik Answers Criticism is Nihilistic (2/4) CRITICISM IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE THAT WILL EVENTUALLY LEAD TO THE REJECTION OF EVERYTHING—WHAT BEGINS AS AN UNWILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT ON-FACE OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE ENDS WITH A COMPLETE REJECTION OF ANY ATTEMPT TO OBTAIN KNOWLEDGE (EXTINCTION) Barber 92 Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg. 116-118 This cursory history of esoteric arguments about the nature of knowledge may seem far removed from the educational controversies of our time. It is offered only as a reminder that such fashionable new forms of radical criticism as deconstruction are but echoes of a very ancient skepticism and a very well entrenched tradition of reductionism. It is for this reason that Allan Bloom pins the blame for the changes in modern education on Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, and other maverick critics of reason and reason's canon (see Chapter 5). It is for this same reason that conservatives who esteem the role reason plays in grounding and justifying fundamental values view post-modern skepticism with alarm, and that liberals who care about reform worry that reductive strategies are ill-suited to their purposes. As Edmund Burke once noted, those who destroy everything are certain to remedy some grievance. The annihilation of all values will undoubtedly rid us of hypocritical ones or the ones misused by hypocrites. We can prevent the powerful from using reason to conceal their hegemony by burning the cloak-extirpating reason from political and moral discourse. However, those who come after can hardly complain that they feel naked or that their discourse, absent such terms as reason, legitimacy, and justice, seems incapable of establishing an affirmative pedagogy or a just politics. Just how crucially such seemingly abstruse issues impact on actual college curricula is unpleasantly evident in this approving portrait of literature and culture in a recent issue of the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors: Cultural studies moves away from "history of ideas" to a contested history of struggles for power and authority, to complicated relations between "center" and "margin," between dominant and minority positions. Literature is no longer investigated primarily as the masterworks of individual genius, but as a way of designating specialized practices of reading and writing and cultural production.... The renaming of "literature" as "culture" is thus not just a shift in vocabulary. It marks a rethinking of what is experienced as cultural materials ...[including] media, MTV, popular culture, newspapers, magazines, advertising, textbooks, and advice materials. But the shift also marks the movement away from the study of an "object" to the study of a practice, the practice called "literary study" or "artistic production," the practice of criticism.' How slippery this particular slope has become! What begins as a sound attempt to show that art is produced by real men and women with agendas and interests attached to things like their gender, race, and economic status ends as the nihilistic denial of art as object. What begins as a pedagogically useful questioning of the power implications of truth ends as the cynical subverting of the very possibility of truth. What begins as a prudent unwillingness to accept at face value "objective" knowledge, which is understood to be, at least in part, socially constructed, ends as the absurd insistence that knowledge is exclusively social and can be reduced entirely to the power of those who produce it. What begins as an educationally provocative inquiry into the origins of literature in the practice of literary production ends in the educationally insidious annihilation of literature and its replacement by criticism-the practice, it turns out ever so conveniently, of those asking the questions! Thus does the whirling blade of skepticism's latest reductive manifestations, post-modernism and deconstruction, cut and cut and go on cutting until there is nothing left. Thus does the amiable and pedagogically essential art of criticism somehow pass into carnage. 94 Kritik Answers Criticism is Nihilistic (3/4) USING THE ACADEMIC AREA FOR CRITICIZING EXISTENT SYSTEMS RISKS HYPER SKEPTICAL DISCUSSIONS. THE SELECTION OF THE MEDIAN FORCES RADICALISM AND NIHILISM Barber 92 Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone All thoughtful inquiry, and hence all useful education, starts with questioning. All usable knowledge, and thus all practical science, starts with the provisional acceptance of answers. Education is a dialectic in moderation in which probing and accepting, questioning and answering, must achieve a delicate balance. Stories must be told, queried, retold, revised, questioned, and retold still again much as the American story has been. In periods of rebellion, academic no less than social, when challenging authority means questioning answers, there is an understandable tendency toward skepticism, even cynicism. Michael Wood has characterized Jacques Derrida's approach to method as "a patient and intelligent suspicion,' 3 which is a useful description of one moment in a student's democratic education. The methodologies deployed by critics of power and convention in the academy do not always find the dialectical center, however, and are subject to distortion by hyperbole. Sometimes they seem to call for all questions and no answers, all doubt and no provisional resting places. This radicalism has many virtues as scholarship, but as pedagogy far fewer. In its postmodern phase, where the merely modern is equated with something vaguely reactionary and post-modernism means a radical battering down of all certainty, this hyperskeptical pedagogy can become self -defeating. Skepticism is an essential but slippery and thus dangerously problematic teaching tool. It demystifies and decodes; it denies absolutes; it cuts through rationalization and hypocrisy. Yet it is a whirling blade, an obdurate reaper hard to switch off at will. It is not particularly discriminating. It doesn't necessarily understand the difference between rationalization and reason, since its effectiveness depends precisely on conflating them. It can lead to a refusal to judge or to take responsibility or to impose norms on conduct. If, as Derrida has insisted, "the concept of making a charge itself belongs to the structure of phallogocentrism" (the use of reason and language as forms of macho domination), there can be no responsibility, no autonomy, no morals, no freedom. 4 Like a born killer who may be a hero in wartime but, unable to discriminate between war and peace, becomes a homocidal maniac when the war ends for everyone else, radical skepticism lacks a sense of time and place, a sense of elementary propriety. 95 Kritik Answers Criticism is Nihilistic (4/4) THEIR PROJECT IS BANKRUPT. CONFRONTING POWER RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH CYNICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND REJECTION WILL NOT CREATE PRAGMATIC SOLUTIONS Barber 92 Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg. 122-123 There can be no simple answer to such complex psycho -political questions, and I certainly do not mean to challenge philosophical reductionism by psychoanalyzing philosophers and thereby replacing one reductive logic with another. Nonetheless, as already suggested, Thrasymachus understood the connection between his brand of reductive questioning and brute power perfectly well: his was the cynicism of the power realist who wanted to convince Socrates' audience that power was all there was. He wished not to legitimize and thus limit power, but to enthrone and sacralize it. This is clearly not the goal of the far more naive advocates of the new hyperskepticism. They are genuine reformers struggling against the dogmas of what they see as a hypocritical establishment. They seek more equality, more justice, better education for all. They want not just to expose the hypocrisies of power, but to tame and equalize it. They want to reclaim true justice from its hypocritical abusers. They chase shadows in the valley of cynicism but trust they are on the path that leads to redemption. Yet the instruments of revolution they have chosen are more suited to the philosophical terrorist than the pedagogical reformer. Radical skepticism, reductionism, solipsism, nihilism, subjectivism, and cynicism will not help American women gain a stronger voice in the classroom; will not lift Americans of color from the prison of ignorance and despair to which centuries of oppression, broken families, and ghettoized schools have rele gated them; will not provide a firm value foundation for the young in equality, citizenship, and justice. How can such reform -ers think they will empower the voiceless by proving that voice is always a function of power? How can they believe the ignorant will be rescued from illiteracy by showing that literacy is an arbitrary form of cultural imperialism? How do they think the struggle for equality and justice can be waged with an epistemology that denies standing to reasons and normative rational terms such as justice and equality? 96 Kritik Answers **Postmodernism Bad** Floating Subjectivity Bad (1/3) POSTMODERN SUBJECTIVITY IS A SHELL GAME – IT CAN EXIST ONLY BY STRENGTHENING THE HOLD OF CAPITALISM Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, ―Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising,‖ 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/as/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02 The argument I am making about the postmodern theories of subjectivity and global capitalism are similar to arguments made about multiculturalism and global capitalism by David Rieff and Slavoj Zizek. Rieff suggests that multiculturalism is a ―byproduct or corollary of a specific material integument‖ (62). Rieff‘s position is that although multiculturalists often regard their work as politically leftist: resulting in the breakdown of patriarchal, European hegemony and the ascendancy of the previously marginalized, they actually function as the ―silent partner‖ of global capitalism. Additionally, Rieff points out how closely the buzz words of multiculturalism--―‗cultural diversity,‘ ‗difference,‘ the need to do away with boundaries‘—resemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation: ‗product diversification,‘ ‗the global marketplace,‘ and ‗the boundary-less company‘‖ (Rieff). Similarly, Zizek contends that postmodern identity politics—while ostensibly seeking to subvert capitalism—are made possible only in the field of global capitalism. He writes that ―‘cultural studies‘, is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of capitalism‖ and that ―the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism‖ (218; 216).My argument is that postmodern theories and global capitalism dialectically influence one another. Postmodern theory is generated by the material conditions of labor and production in late capitalism, which needs consumers who will disregard national boundaries. By the logic that all products of the system are necessary to the system, we assume that anything the system produces, it needs. Ideological state apparatuses, like the university, do the work necessary to interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism. My thought is that global capitalism needs postmodern theories of subjectivity because they produce subjects who are seamlessly articulated with the structures of global capitalism. While postmodern subjectivity may seem wildly radical at first—breaking down boundaries between genders, between machines and humans—the similarities between its subjectivities and the structures of global capitalism are eerily similar. Fluidity, flexibility, and boundary dissolution equally describe both. The celebration of the loss of the unified, coherent subject of modernity and the new fluid, flexible, fragmented subject of postmodernity is the stuff of ―Millenial Dreams,‖ Paul Smith‘s term for the rhetoric of globalization and the array of ideological forms which interpellate the desired subject of global capitalism. Smith writes that ―the annunciation of globalization itself is part of the ideological battery used to interpellate subjects in the current conjuncture . . . and attempt to regulate the moral and cultural practices of subjects‖ (46). I agree with Tereas Ebert that post-al theories are complicit with patriarchal capitalism. Rather than seeking the liberation of the exploited workers of late capitalism—primarily third-world, minority, poverty-stricken women—postmodern theorists celebrate a liberatory freedom experienced by a small percentage of the first world at the expense of the rest of the world. 97 Kritik Answers Floating Subjectivity Bad (2/3) FLOATING SUBJECTIVITY AND REBELLION AGAINST MODERNITY REINFORCES PATTERNS OF DOMINATION Kevin Cryderman, ―Jane and Louisa: The Tapestry Of Critical Paradigms: Hutcheon, Lyotard, Said, Dirlik, And Brodber,‖ 2000, http://65.107.211.206/post/caribbean/brodber/kcry1.html, accessed 11/7/01 In "Borderlands Radicalism," Dirlik is critical of the trends of postmodernism and postcolonialism in regard to borders, subjectivity, and history. Dirlik claims that postmodernism and postcolonialism tend to simply reinforce the reign of late capitalism: Post-modernism, articulating the condition of the globe in the age of flexible production, has done great theoretical service by challenging the tyrannical unilinearity of inherited conceptions of history and society. The political price paid for this achievement, however, has been to abolish the subject in history, which destroys the possibility of political action, or to attach action to one of another diffuse subject positions, which ends up in narcissistic preoccupations with self of one kind of another. (89) Dirlik claims that the 'happy pluralism' of postcolonialism -- such as its emphasis on flux, borderlands and liminal space -- does not so much oppose elite unified narratives of nations and cultures as it does reinforce them. Dirlik also links this trend of "fluid subject positions" (98) in postmodernism to postcolonialism and Global Capitalism: "in the age of flexible production, we all live in the borderlands. Capital, deterritorialized and decentered, establishes borderlands where it can move freely, away from the control of states and societies but in collusion with states against societies" (Dirlik 87). Moreover, the problem "presented by postcolonial discourse" is "a problem of liberating discourse that divorces itself from the material conditions of life, in this case Global Capitalism as the foundational principle of contemporary society globally" (99). Dirlik also links the intellectual class as a product of global capitalism which, according to Dirlik, "has jumbled up notions of space and time" (100). Indeed, both postmodernist and post-colonialist literature involve the fragmentation and rebellion against modernist ideologies that impose essentializing identity, linear time schemes, and totalizing narratives. FLOATING SUBJECTIVITY FACILITATES THE HEGEMONY OF TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALISM Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, ―Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising,‖ 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/as/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02 This web site explores the ways postmodern theories of subjectivity facilitate global capitalism. The seed for this project was planted during ―Deconstructed Selves, Postmodern Narratives,‖ a session at the 20th Century Lit. Conference. I had just heard a paper on Crash so thoughts of cyborgs and strange postmodern desires were already mingling with a project topic that was due in my Theories of Interpretation seminar. While Silvio Gaggi flashed slides of Cindy Sherman‘s photography—the pictures of her well-groomed, appropriately feminized body, a 50‘s starlet in juxtaposition with images of excrement, false eyelashes, cigarette butts--I discovered my topic: the ways that the postmodern notion of subjectivity--fluid, unfixed, transgressed boundaries--and the modern notion of subjectivitystable, unified, coherent, preserved boundaries-are analogous to the evolution from classical to global/late capitalism. My theory: While the dissolution of boundaries in postmodern subjectivity may at first seem wildly radical, it actually facilitates the hegemony by interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism, one who can manipulate fluid capital, produce/consume intangible data, and accept the dissolution of national boundaries for the purpose of exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of global e-commerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations. 98 Kritik Answers Floating Subjectivity Bad (3/3) FOCUSING ON TRANSITIONAL SUBJECTIVITIES CEMENTS OPPRESSION Aihwa Ong, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP: THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF TRANSNATIONALITY, 1999, p. 13. However, the influence on American cultural studies of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, with which Hall and Gilroy are associated, has generally been limited. American studies of diasporan cultures have tended to uphold a more innocent concept of the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, ―cultural‖ border crossing, and the production of difference. In the United States, the conjuncture of postcolonial theory and diaspora studies seems to produce a bifurcated model of diasporan cultures. Some scholars dwell on narratives of sacrifice, which are associated with enforced labor migrations, as well as on critiques of the immorality of development. Others, who write about displacements in ―borderland‖ areas, emphasize subjects who struggle against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and shifting positions in society. The unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power. Furthermore, because of the exclusive focus on texts, narratives, and subiectivities, we are often left wondering what are the particular local-global structural articulations that materially and symbolically shape these dynamics of victimhood and ferment. FRAGMENTARY IDENTITY IS CRUCIAL TO GLOBALIZING CAPITALISM Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, ―Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising,‖ 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02 With its dependence on fluid capital and the production/consumption of intangible data, global capitalism demands the dissolution of national boundaries for the purpose of exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of global ecommerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations. Global capitalism makes similar demands on its ideal producing and consuming subject, who is articulated as fluid, fragmented, and flexible. Clearly, this subject is a radical reconfiguration of the unified, coherent subject of classical capitalism, who is articulated for the purposes of producing and consuming solid material goods and preserving national boundaries. 99 Kritik Answers **Pragmatism** Pragmatism Good: 2AC (1/3) VOTE AFF IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR PROJECT TO REPOLITICIZE THE ACADEMY McClean 01 David E. , New School University, ―The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,‖ Presented at the 20 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm. leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multisyllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is , the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke , the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based the words of King, and with reference to the American society initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as . We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from 100 Kritik Answers which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class." 101 Kritik Answers Pragmatism Good: 2AC (2/3) SMACK TALKING ABOUT CHEATERS: READ LIBERALLY McClean 01 David E. , New School University, ―The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,‖ Presented at the 20 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm. There is a lot of philosophical prose on the general subject of social justice. Some of this is quite good, and some of it is quite bad. What distinguishes the good from . Displays of high erudition are gratuitously reflected in much of the writing by those, for example, still clinging to Marxian ontology and is often just a useful smokescreen which shrouds a near total disconnect from empirical reality. This kind of political writing likes to make a lot of references to other obscure, jargon-laden essays and tedious books written by other true believers - the crowd that takes the fusion of Marxian and Freudian private fantasies seriously. Nor is it the lack of scholarship that makes this prose bad. Much of it is well "supported" by footnotes referencing a lode of other works, some of which are actually quite good. Rather, what makes this prose bad is its utter lack of relevance to extant and critical policy debates, the passage of actual laws, and the amendment of existing regulations that might actually do some good for someone else. The writers of this bad prose are too interested in our arrival at some social place wherein we will finally emerge from our "inauthentic" state into something called "reality." Most of this stuff, of course, the bad is not merely the level of erudition comes from those steeped in the Continental tradition (particularly post-Kant). While that tradition has much to offer and has helped shape my own philosophical it is anything but useful when it comes to truly relevant philosophical analysis , and no selfWhat Pragmatists see instead is the hope that we can fix some of the social ills that face us if we treat policy and reform as more important than Spirit and Utopia. Like light rain released from pretty clouds too high in the atmosphere, the substance of this prose dissipates before it can reach the ground and be a useful component in a discussion of medicare reform or how to better sensibilities, respecting Pragmatist can really take seriously the strong poetry of formations like "authenticity looming on the ever remote horizons of fetishization." regulate a pharmaceutical industry that bankrupts senior citizens and condemns to death HIV patients unfortunate enough to have been born in Burkina Faso - and a It is often too drenched in abstractions and references to a narrow and not so merry band of other intellectuals (Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Luk�cs, Benjamin) to be of much use to those who are the supposed subject matter of this preternatural social justice literature. Since I have no particular allegiance to these regulatory regime that permits this. other intellectuals, no particular impulse to carry their water or defend their reputations, I try and forget as much as I can about their writings in order to make space for some new approaches and fresh thinking about that important question that always faces us - "What is to be done?" I am, I think, lucky to have taken this decision before it had become too late. One might argue with me that these other intellectuals are not looking to be taken seriously in the construction of solutions to specific socio-political problems. They are, after all, philosophers engaged in something called philosophizing. They are, after all, just trying to be good culture critics. Of course, that isn't quite true, for they often write with specific reference to social issues and social justice in mind, even when they are fluttering about in the ether of high theory (Luk�cs, for example, was a government officer, albeit a minister of culture, which to me says a lot), and social justice is not a Platonic form but parses into the specific quotidian acts of institutions and individuals. Social justice is but the genus heading which may be described better with reference to its species iterations- the various conditions of cruelty and sadism which we wittingly or unwittingly permit. If we wanted to, we could reconcile the grand general theories of these thinkers to specific bureaucracies or social problems and so try to increase such attempts, usually performed in the reams of secondary literature generated by their devotees, usually make things even more bizarre. In any event, I don't think we owe them that amount of effort. After all, if they wanted to be relevant they could have said so by writing in such a way that made it clear that relevance was a high priority. For Marxians in general, everything tends to get reduced to class. For Luk�cs everything tends to get reduced to "reification." But society and its social ills are far too intricate to gloss in these ways, and the engines that drive competing interests are much more easily explained with reference to animal drives and fears than by Absolute Spirit. That is to say, they are not easily explained at all. their relevance. We could construct an account which acts as a bridge to relevant policy considerations. But 102 Kritik Answers Pragmatism Good: 2AC (3/3) INTELLECTUALS HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO ENGAGE WITH REAL PROBLEMS—CRITICAL TO MAKING THEIR CRITICISM RELEVANT McClean 01 David E. , New School University, ―The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,‖ Presented at the 20 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm. Is it really possible to philosophize by holding Foucault in one hand and the Code of Federal Regulation or the Congressional Record in the other? Given that whatever , I see no reason why referring to the way things are actually done in the actual world (I mean really done, not done as we might imagine) as we think through issues of public morality and social issues of justice shouldn't be considered a viable alternative to the way philosophy has proceeded in the past. Instead of replacing epistemology with hermeneutics or God knows what else as the foundation of philosophical practice, we should move social philosophers in the direction of becoming more like social and cultural auditors rather than further in the direction of mere culture critics. We might be able to recast philosophers who take-up questions of social justice in a serious way as the ones in society able to traverse not only disciplines but the distances between the towers of the academy and the bastions of bureaucracies seeking to honestly and sometimes dishonestly assess both their failings and achievements. This we can do with a special advantage over economists, social scientists and policy specialists who are apt to take the narrow view of most issues. We do have examples of such persons. John Dewey and Karl Popper come to mind as but two examples, but in neither case was there enough it has meant to be a philosopher has been under siege at various levels grasp of the actual workings of social institutions that I believe will be called for in order to properly minister to a nation in need of helpful philosophical insights in policy formation. Or it may just be that the real work will be performed by philosophically grounded and socially engaged practitioners rather than academics. People like George Soros come to mind here. But there are few people like George Soros around, and I think that the improbability of philosophers emerging as a special class of social auditor also marks the limits philosophers are the class most likely to see the places at which bridges of true understanding can be built not only between an inimical Right and Left, but between public policy and the deep and relevant reflections upon our humanity in which philosophers routinely engage. If philosophers seek to remain what the public thinks we are anyway, a class of persons of whom it can be of social hope, inasmuch as said, as Orwell put it, One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool, then I do not know from what other class of persons to turn to . For I do not see how policy wonks, political hacks, politicians, religious ideologues and special interests will do the work that needs to be done to achieve the kind of civic consensus envisioned in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Without a courageous new breed of public intellectual, one that is able to help articulate new visions for community and social well being without fear of reaching out to others that may not share the narrow views of the Cultural Left and Cultural Right, I do not see how America moves beyond a mere land of toleration and oligarchy. navigate the complicated intellectual and emotional obstacles that prevent us from the achievement of our country McClean 01 David E. , New School University, ―The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,‖ Presented at the 20 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm. Our new president, possessing no towering intellect, talks of a people who share a continent, but are not a nation. He is right, of course. We are only beginning to learn to put tribal loyalties aside and to let ourselves take seriously other more salutary possibilities, though we delude ourselves into believing that we have made great progress. Perhaps so-called "compassionate conservatism," though a gimmick to win a political contest, will bear a small harvest of unintended and positive if the not-too-Neanderthal-Right is finally willing to meet the not-too-wacky-Left at a place of dialogue somewhere in the "middle," then that is good news, provided the Left does not miss the opportunity to rendevous. Yet, there is a problem here. Both the Cultural Left and the Cultural Right tend to be self-righteous purists. The best chance, then, is for the emergence of Rorty's new Political Left, in conjunction with a new Political Right. The new Political Left would be in the better position of the two to frame the discourse since it probably has the better intellectual hardware (it tends to be more open-minded and less dogmatic) to make a true dialogue work. They, unlike their Cultural Left peers, might find it more useful to be a little less inimical and a little more sympathetic to what the other side might, in good faith, believe is at stake. They might leave behind some of the baggage of the Cultural Left's endless ruminations (Dewey's philosophical cud chewing) about commodity fetishization, or whether the Subject has really died, or where crack babies fit into neocapitalist hegemonies, and join the political fray by parsing and exposing the more basic idiotic claims and dogmas of witless politicians and dangerous ideologues, while at the same time finding common ground, a larger "We" perspective that includes Ronald Reagan and Angela Davis under the same tent rather than as inhabitants of separate worlds. The operative spirit should be that of fraternal disagreement, rather than self-righteous cold shoulders. consequences, although I remain dubious about this if the task of thinking through what it might actually mean remains the chore of George W. Bush. But 103 Kritik Answers 104 Kritik Answers Plan focus good: Rorty (1/2) SPECIFIC PROPOSALS PROVE THE ACTION IS THE SUPERIOR FORM ACTIVISM Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99 When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system" and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland—as a country of simulacra—and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list— endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets—might revitalize leftist politics. THE FACT THAT SOMETHING IS PRODUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE DOESN‘T ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE POLICY ACTION Richard Rorty, Professor, Humanities, University of Virginia, TRUTH, POLITICS, AND POSTMODERNISM: SPINOZA LECTURES, 1997, p. 51-52. Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very important – meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship – is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida usually replies that the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like ìmpossible; `self-contradictory' and ùnrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of I am all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible. represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment offered. We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky. to describe intellectual progress. 105 Kritik Answers Plan focus good: Rorty (2/2) FOCUS ON THE SPECIFIC, STATE-FOCUSED PLANS IS CRITICAL TO ALLIANCES AND ACTIVISM Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99 The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that ―the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism,‖ but it remains the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about social justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx‘s philosophy of this claim is that history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for ―the system‖ and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard‘s account of America as Disneyland— as a country of simulacra—and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People‘s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list— endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals‘ toilets—might revitalize leftist politics. late Sixties. FOCUSING ON THE DETAILS OF POLICY IS CRITICAL TO POLITICAL EFFECTIVENESS Richard Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 103-104. The Sixties did not ask how the various groups of stakeholders were to reach a consensus about when to remodel a factory rather than build a new one, what prices to . Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of nonmarket economies seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, ―the people‖ would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how ―the people‖ would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about ―the system‖ rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like ―late capitalism‖ suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in pay for raw materials, and the like in the so-called socialist countries. They participatory democracy—the liberation of the people from the power of the technocrats—until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracy against Walter Lippmann‘s insistence on the need for expertise . 106 Kritik Answers **Realism** Realism Good: 2AC (1/2) FIRST, STATES INEVITABLY COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER FOR INTERNATIONAL POWER – ANY ATTEMPT TO DEVIATE FROM THIS STRUCTURE CAUSES VIOLENCE Mearscheimer 2001 [John J., Prof. of Pol. Sci @ U. of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Warfare] Great powers fear each other. They regard each other with suspicion, and they worry that war might be in the offing. They anticipate danger. There is little room for trust among states. For sure, the level of fear varies across time and space, but it cannot be reduced to a trivial level. From the perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential enemies. This point is illustrated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to German reunification at the end of the Col War. Despite the fact that these three states had been close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France immediately began worrying about the potential danger of a united Germany. The basis for this fear is that in a world where great powers have the capability to attack each other and might have the motive to do so any state bent on survival must be at least suspicious of other states and reluctant to trust them. Add to this the ―911‖ problem – the absence of a central authority to which a threatened state can turn for help – and states have even greater incentive to fear each other. Morever, there is no mechanism, other than the possible self-interest of third parties, for punishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter potential aggressors, states have ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared for war with them. The possible consequences of falling victim to aggression further amplify the importance of fear as a motivating force in world politics. Great powers do not compete with each other as if international marketplace. Political competition among states is a much more dangerous business than mere economic intercourse, the former can lead to war, and war often means mass killing on the battlefield as well as mass murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each other not just as competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies. Political antagonism, in short, tends to be intense because the stakes are great . States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances. But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today‘s alliance partner might be tomorrow‘s enemy, and today‘s enemy might be tomorrow‘s alliance partner. For example, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. States operating in a self-help world almost always act according to their own self-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the interests of other states, or the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as well as in the long term, because if a state loses in the short run, it might not be around for the long haul. Apprehensive about the ultimate intentions of other states, and a ware that they oeprate in a self-help system, states quickly understand that the best way to ensure their survival is to be the most powerful state in the system. The stronger a state is relative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that any of those rivals will attack it and threaten its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because the weaker states are likely to suffer military defeat. Indeed, the bigger the gap in power between any two states, the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither Canada nor Mexico, for example, would countenance attacking the United States, which is far more powerful than its neighbors. The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel Kant said, ―It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible.‖ Survival would then be almost guaranteed 107 Kritik Answers Realism Good: 2AC (2/2) SECOND, REALISM MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY – REJECTING IT RISKS WORSE USES Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 212 it is impossible just to heap realism onto the dustbin of history and start anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a disappointment, various realist assumptions are well alive in the minds of many practitioners and observers of international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a theory which helps us to understand a real world with objective laws, it is a world-view which suggests thoughts about it, and which permeates our daily language for making sense of it. Realism has been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which, Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that in the hands of its most gifted representatives, have been proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international affairs. Realism is alive in the collective memory and self-understanding of our (i.e. Western) foreign policy elite and public, whether educated or not. Hence, we cannot but , forgetting realism is also questionable. Of course, academic observers should not bow to the whims of being critical, does not mean that they should lose the capacity to understand the languages of those who make significant decisions, not only in government, but also in firms, NGOs, and other institutions. To the contrary, this understanding, as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very profession. More particularly, it is a prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name, although not always necessarily in the spirit, of realism. deal with it. For this reason daily politics. But staying at distance, or THIRD, THE PERM SOLVES BEST… REALISM OPENS UP SPACE FOR ONGOING CRITICISM, MAKING THE ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 193-6) For realism man remains, in the final analysis, limited by himself. As such, it emphasizes caution, and focuses not merely upon the achievement of long-term in the absence of a resolution of such difficulties, longer-term objectives are liable to be unachievable, realism would seem to offer a more effective strategy of transition than relativism itself. Whereas, in constructivism, such strategies are divorced from an awareness objectives, but also upon the resolution of more- immediate difficulties. Given that, of the immediate problems which obstruct such efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, they are divorced from the current realities of international politics realism's emphasis on first addressing the immediate obstacles to development ensures that it at least generates strategies which offer us a tangible path to follow. If these strategies perhaps lack the visionary appeal of reflectivist proposals, altogether, emphasizing simply the necessity of a restrained moderate diplomacy in order to ameliorate conflicts between states, to foster a degree of mutual understanding in , they at least seek to take advantage of the possibilities of reform in the current international system without jeopardizing the possibilities of order. Realism's gradualist reformism, the careful tending of what it regards as an essentially organic process, ultimately suggests the international relations, and, ultimately, to develop a sense of community which might underlie a more comprehensive international society basis for a more sustainable strategy for reform than reflectivist perspectives, however dramatic, can offer. For the realist, then, if rationalist theories prove so conservative as to make their adoption problematic, critical theories prove so progressive as to make their adoption unattractive. If the former can justifiably be criticized for seeking to make a far from ideal order work more efficiently, thus perpetuating its existence and legitimating its errors, reflectivist theory can equally be criticized for searching for a tomorrow which may never exist, thereby endangering the possibility of Realism's distinctive contribution thus lies in its attempt to drive a path between the two, a path which, in the process, suggests the basis on which some form of synthesis between rationalism and relativism might be achieved. Oriented in its genesis towards addressing the shortcomings in an idealist transformatory project, it is centrally motivated by establishing any form of stable order in the here and now. concern to reconcile vision with practicality, to relate utopia and reality. Unifying technical and a practical stance, it combines aspects of the positivist methodology employed by problem-solving theory with the interpretative stance adopted by critical theory, avoiding the monism of perspective which leads to the self-destructive conflict between the two. Ultimately, it can simultaneously acknowledge the possibility of change in the structure of the international system and the need to probe the limits of the possible, and yet also question the proximity of any international transformation, emphasize the persistence of problems after such a transformation, and serve as a reminder of the need to grasp whatever semblance of order can be obtained in the mean time. Indeed, it is possible to say that realism is uniquely suited to serve as such an orientation. Simultaneously to critique contemporary resolutions of the problem of political authority as unsatisfactory and yet to support them as an attainable measure of order in an unstable world involves one in a contradiction which is difficult to accept. Yet, because it grasps the essential ambiguity of the political, and adopts imperfectionism as its dominant motif, realism can relate these two tasks in a way which allows neither to predominate, achieving, if not a reconciliation, then at least a viable synthesis. Perhaps the most famous realist refrain is that all politics are power politics. It is the all that is important here. Realism lays claim to a relevance across systems, and because it relies on a conception of human nature, rather than a historically specific structure of world politics, it can make good on this claim. If its observations about human nature are even remotely accurate, the problems that it addresses will transcend contingent formulations of the problem of political order. Even in a genuine cosmopolis, conflict might become technical, but it would not be eliminated altogether.67 The primary manifestations of power might become more economic or institutional rather than (para)military but, where disagreements occur and power exists, the employment of the one to ensure the satisfactory resolution of the other is inevitable short of a wholesale transformation of human behaviour. Power is ultimately of the essence of , realism achieves a universal relevance to the problem of political action which allows it to relate the reformist zeal of critical theory, without which advance would be impossible, with the problem-solver's sensible caution that before reform is attempted, whatever measure of security is possible under contemporary conditions must first be ensured politics; it is not something which can be banished, only tamed and restrained. As a result 108 Kritik Answers #1 Mearsheimer: 1AR EXTEND THE 2AC #___ MEARSCHEIMER 2001 EVIDENCE. THE SELF-HELP INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM MAKES REALISM INEVITABLE BECAUSE OF STATE COMPETITION AND THE DESIRE FOR SURVIVAL. TRYING TO BREAK DOWN THAT SYSTEM CAUSES POWER DIFFERENTIALS THAT RESULT IN MASS WAR AND DEATH THAT MAKES THEIR ARGUMENT TERMINALLY NOT UNIQUE, BECAUSE STATES WILL STILL COMPETE AND FILL THE VOID AND YOU VOTE ON ANY RISK OF WAR ALSO, STATES ALWAYS ACT TO INCREASE THEIR RELATIVE POWER, MAKING SECURITY COMPETITION INEVITABLE Mearscheimer 2001 [John J., Prof. of Pol. Sci @ U. of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Warfare] Given the difficulty of determing how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the system because it already had sufficient power to survive. But even if a great power does not have the wherewithal to achieve hegemony (and that is usually the case), it will still act offensively to amass as much power as it can, because states are always better off with more rather than less power. In short, states do not become status quo powers until they completely dominate the system. All states are influence by this logic, which means htat not only do they look for opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also work to ensure that other states do not take advantage of them. After all, rival states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to recognize their own motives at play in the actions of other states. In short, states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as offense. They think about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor states from gaining power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, hwere states are wiling to lie, cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is nt liekly to break out in this world. 109 Kritik Answers #1 Mearsheimer: Ext THEIR CRITICISM DOESN‘T PROVIDE US WITH A ROADMAP WHICH ENSURES VIOLENCE – REALISM IS NEEDED TO KEEP THE BALANCE OF POWER STABLE – IT IS ON BALANCE BETTER Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 188-9) His disagreement with realism depends on a highly contestable claim - based on Herz's argument that, with the development of global threats, the conditions which might produce some universal consensus have arisen - that its 'impossibility theorem' is empirically problematic, that a universal consensus is achievable, and that its practical strategy is obstructing its realisation. In much the same way, in `The poverty of neorealism', realism's practical strategy is illegitimate only because Ashley's agenda is inclusionary. His central disagreement with realism arises out of his belief that its strategy reproduces a world order organised around sovereign states, preventing exploration of the indeterminate number of - potentially less exclusionary - alternative world orders. Realists, however, would be unlikely to be troubled by such charges. Ashley needs to do rather more than merely assert that the development of global threats will produce some universal consensus, or that any number of less exclusionary world orders are possible, to convince them. A universal threat does not imply a universal consensus, merely the existence of a universal threat faced by particularistic actors. And the assertion that indeterminate numbers of potentially less exclusionary orders exist carries little weight unless we can specify exactly what these alternatives are and just how they might be achieved. As such, realists would seem to be justified in regarding such potentialities as currently unrealizable Despite the adverse side-effects that such a balance of power implies, it at least offers us something tangible rather than ephemeral promises lacking a shred of support. Ultimately, Ashley's demand that a new, critical approach ideals and in seeking a more proximate good in the fostering of mutual understanding and, in particular. of a stable balance of power. be adopted in order to free us from the grip of such 'false conceptions depends upon ideas about the prospects for the development of a universal consensus which are little more than wishful thinking, and ideas about the existence of potentially less exclusionary orders which are little more than mere assertion. Hence his attempts, in 'Political realism and human interests', to conceal these ideas from view by claiming that the technical base of realism serves only to identify, and yet not to reform, the practical, and then, in 'The poverty of neorealism', by removing the technical from investigation altogether by an exclusive reliance on a problem of hermeneutic Ashley's post-structuralist approach circularity. In the final analysis, then, boils down to little more than a critique which fails. It is predicated on the assumption that the constraints upon us are simply restrictive knowledge practices, such that it presumes that the entirety of the solution to our offers nothing by way, of strategies problems is little more than the removal of such false ways of thinking. It alternative - no , no proximate goals, indeed, little by way of goals at all. If, in constructivism, the progressive purpose leads to strategies divorced from an awareness of the problems confronting transformatory efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, it produces strategies divorced from international politics in their entirety, in post- critique ultimately proves unsustainable. With its defeat, post-structuralism is left with nothing. Once one peels away the layers of misconstruction, it simply fades away. If realism is, as Ashley puts it, 'a tradition forever immersed in the expectation of political tragedy'. it at least offers us a concrete vision of objectives and ways in which to achieve them which his own structuralism it generates a complete absence of strategies altogether. Critique serves to fill the void, yet this position. forever immersed in the expectation of deliverance- is manifestly unable to provide." AND, COMPETITION AMONG STATES IS INEVITABLE 3 REASONS: 1) NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY 2) STATES HAVE OFFENSIVE CAPABILITIES 3) VAGUE INTENTIONS MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 3. ) Why do great powers behave this way? My answer is that the structure of the international system forces states which seek only to be secure nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other. Three features of the international system combine to cause states to fear one another: 1) the absence of a central authority that sits above states and can protect them from each other. 2) the fact that states always have some offensive military capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be certain about other states' intentions. Given this fear-which can never be wholly eliminated-states recognize that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon, because no other state can seriously threaten such a mighty power. 110 Kritik Answers #2 Guzzini: 1AR REALISM MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY BECAUSE REALWORLD ACTORS RELY ON IT Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 235 Third, this last chapter has argued that although the evolution of realism has been mainly a disappointment as a general causal theory, we have to deal with it. On the one hand, realist assumptions and insights are used and merged in nearly all frameworks of analysis offered in International Relations or International Political Economy. One of the book's purposes was to show realism as a varied and variably rich theory, so heterogeneous that it would be better to refer to it only in plural , to dispose of realism because some of its versions have been proven empirically wrong, ahistorical, or logically incoherent, does not necessarily touch its role in the shared understandings of observers and practitioners of international affairs. Realist theories have a persisting power for constructing our understanding of the present. Their assumptions, both as theoretical constructs, and as terms. On the other hand particular lessons of the past translated from one generation of decision-makers to another, help mobilizing certain understandings and dispositions to action. They realism's several deaths as a general causal theory, it can still powerfully enframe action. It exists in the minds, and is hence reflected in the actions, of many practitioners. Whether or not the world realism depicts is out there, realism is. Realism is not a causal theory that explains International Relations, but, as long as realism continues to be a powerful mind-set, we need to understand realism to make sense of International Relations. In other words, realism is a still necessary hermeneutical bridge to the understanding of world politics. Getting rid of realism without having a deep understanding of it, not only risks unwarranted dismissal of some valuable theoretical insights that I have tried to gather in this book; it would also be futile. Indeed, it might be the best way to tacitly and uncritically reproduce it. also provide them with legitimacy. Despite REJECTION FAILS – IT REPRODUCES SOVEREIGNTY AND PERPETUATES EXPLOITATION – ACTION MUST BE TAKEN Agathangelou, Director of the Global Change Institute, 1997 (Anna M., Studies in Political Economy, v. 54, p. 7-8) dissident IR also paralyzes itself into non-action. While it challenges the status quo, dissident IR fails to transform it. Indeed, dissident IR claims Yet, ironically if not tragically, that a ―coherent‖ paradigm or research program — even an alternative one — reproduces the stifling parochialism and hidden powermongering of sovereign scholarship. ―Any agenda of global politics informed by critical social theory perspectives,‖ writes Jim George ―must forgo the simple, albeit self-gratifying, options inherent in readymade alternative Realisms and confront the dangers, closures, paradoxes, and complicities associated with them. Even references to a ―real world, dissidents argue, repudiate the very meaning dissident scholarship opts for, instead, is a sense of disciplinary crisis that ―resonates with the effects of marginal and dissident movements in all sorts of other localities.‖ Despite its emancipatory intentions, this approach effectively leaves the prevailing prison of sovereignty intact. It doubly incarcerates when dissident IR highlights the layers of power that oppress without offering a heuristic, not to mention a program, for emancipatory action. Merely politicizing the supposedly non-political neither guides emancipatory action nor guards it against demagoguery. At best, dissident IR sanctions a detached criticality rooted (ironically) in Western modernity. Michael Shapiro, for instance, advises the dissident theorist to take ―a critical distance‖ or ―position offshore‘ from which to ―see the possibility of change.‖ But what becomes of those who know they are burning in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like while the esoteric dissident observes ―critically‖ from offshore? What hope do they have of overthrowing these shackles of sovereignty? In not answering these questions, dissident IR ends up reproducing despite avowals to the contrary, the sovereign outcome of discourse divorced from practice, analysis from policy, deconstruction from reconstruction, particulars from universals, and critical theory from problem-solving. of dissidence given their sovereign presumption of a universalizable, testable Reality. What 111 Kritik Answers #2 Guzzini: Ext BALANCE OF POWERS REMAINS A TOP PRIORITY- STATES WILL STILL FEAR EACH OTHER POST THE ALT Mearsheimer, Professor of Pol Sci at University of Chicago, ‘01, ―The Tragedy of Great Power Politics‖ The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are destined to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future. Consequently, realism will offer the most powerful explanations of international politics over the next century, and this will be true even if the debates among academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the real world remains a realist world. States still fear each other and seek to gain power at each other's expense, because international anarchy—the driving force behind great-power behavior—did not change with the end of the Cold War, and there are few signs that such change is likely any time soon. States remain the principal actors in world politics and there is still no night watchman standing above them. For sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a major shift in the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in the anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change, there is no reason to expect the great powers to behave much differently in the new century than they did in previous centuries. OTHERS WON‘T FOLLOW OUR LEAD – MAKES REALISM NECESSARY Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 181-2) This highlights the central difficulty with Wendt's constructivism. It is not any form of unfounded idealism about the possibility of effecting a change in international politics. Wendt accepts that the intersubjective character of international institutions such as self-help render them relatively hard social facts. Rather, What is problematic is his faith that such chance, if it could be achieved, implies progress. Wendt's entire approach is governed by the belief that the problematic elements of international politics can be transcended, that the competitive identities which create these elements can be reconditioned, and that the predatory policies which underlie these identities can be eliminated. Everything in his account, is up for gabs: there is no core of recalcitrance to human conduct which cannot be reformed, unlearnt, disposed of. This venerates a stance that so privileges the possibility of a systemic transformation that it simply puts aside the difficulties which it recognises to be inherent in its achievement. Thus, even though Wendt acknowledges that the intersubjective basis of the self-help system makes its reform difficult, this does not dissuade him. He simply demands that states adopt a strategy of 'altercasting', a strategy which 'tries to induce alter to take on a new identity (and thereby enlist alter in ego's effort to change itself) by treating alter as if it already had that identity'. Wendt's position effectively culminates in a demand that the state undertake nothing less than a giant leap of faith. The fact that its opponent might not take its overtures seriously. might not be interested in reformulating its own construction of the world. or might simply see such an opening as a weakness to be exploited. are completely discounted. The prospect of achieving a systemic transformation simply outweighs any adverse consequences which might arise from the effort to achieve it. Wendt ultimately appears, in the final analysis, to have overdosed on 'Gorbimania'. 112 Kritik Answers #3 Murray: 1AR REALISM IS THE BEST MIDDLE GROUND – IT SYNTHESISES CRITICAL THEORIES IN ORDER TO PROVIDE THE REAL POSSIBILITY FOR TRANSFORMATION Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 178-9) I n Wendt's constructivism, the argument appears in its most basic version, presenting an analysis of realist assumptions which associate it with a conservative account of human nature. In Linklater's critical theory it moves a stage farther, presenting an analysis of realist theory which locates it within a conservative discourse of state-centrism. In Ashley's post-structuralism it reaches its highest form, presenting an analysis of realist strategy which locates it not merely within a conservative statist order, but, moreover, within an active conspiracy of silence to reproduce it. Finally, in Tickner's feminism, realism becomes all three simultaneously and more besides, a vital player in a greater, overarching, masculine conspiracy against femininity. Realism thus appears, first, as a doctrine providing the grounds for a relentless pessimism, second, as a theory which provides an active justification for such pessimism, and, third, as a strategy which proactively seeks to enforce this pessimism, before it becomes the vital foundation underlying all such pessimism in international theory. Yet, an examination of the arguments put forward from each of these perspectives suggests not only that the effort to locate realism within a conservative. rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to provide reformist strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves. The progressive purpose which motivates the critique of realism in these perspectives ultimately generates a bias which undermines their own ability to generate effective strategies of transition. In constructivism, this bias appears in its most limited version, producing strategies so divorced from the obstacles presented by the current structure of international politics that they threaten to become counterproductive. In critical theory it moves a stage further producing strategies so abstract that one is at a loss to determine what they actually imply in terms of the current structure of international politics. And, in post-modernism, it reaches its highest form, producing an absence of such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at which we are left with nothing but critique. Against this failure, realism contains the potential to act as the basis of a more constructive approach to international relations, incorporating many of the strengths of reflectivism and yet avoiding its weaknesses. It appears, in the final analysis, as an opening within which some synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism. of conservatism and progressivism might be built. 113 Kritik Answers #3 Murray: Ext REALISM BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND THE NEED FOR POLITICAL ACTION – IT CAN ENCORPORATE ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS WHILE STILL RECOGNIZING THAT TEHRE ARE PROBLEMS THAT HAVE TO BE DEALT WITH IN THE WORLD TODAY Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 202-3) Ultimately, the only result of the post-positivist movement's self-styled 'alternative' status is the generation of an unproductive opposition; between a seemingly mutually exclusive rationalism and reflectivism. Realism would seem to hold out the possibility of a more constructive path for international relations theory. The fact that it is engaged in a normative enquiry is not to say that it abandons a concern for the practical realities of international politics, only that it is concerned to bridge the gap between cosmopolitan moral and power political logics. Its approach ultimately provides an overarching framework which can draw on many different strands of thought, the 'spokes' which can be said to be attached to its central hub, to enable it to relate empirical concerns to a normative agenda. It can incorporate the lessons that geopolitics yields, the insights that neorealism might achieve, and all the other information that the approaches which effectively serve to articulate the specifics of its orientation generate, and. once incorporated within its theoretical framework, relate them both to one another and to the requirements of the ideal, in order to support an analysis of the conditions which characterise contemporary international politics and help it to achieve a viable political ethic. Against critical theories which are incomprehensible to any but their authors and their acolytes and which prove incapable of relating their categories to the issues which provide the substance of international affairs, and against rationalist, and especially neorealist, perspectives which prove unconcerned for matters of values and which simply ignore the relevance of ethical questions to political action, realism is capable of formulating a position which brings ethics and politics into a viable relationship. It would ultimately seem to offer us a course which navigates between the Scylla of defending our values so badly that we end up threatening their very existence, and the Charybdis of defending them so efficiently that we become everything that they militate against. Under its auspices. we can perhaps succeed in reconciling our ideals with our pragmatism. 114 Kritik Answers Democratic Realism Solves the Links DEMOCRATIC REALISM RESPONDS TO THE CRITIQUE‘S CONCERNS, PROMOTING THE NATIONAL INTEREST AT THE SAME TIME AS WORLD PEACE AND PROSPERITY. Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, ―Democratic Realism: The Third Way,‖ BLUEPRINT, Winter 2000, http://www.ndol.org/blueprint/winter2000/marshall.html. Democratic Realism seeks a new balance of American ideals and interests. It builds on the time-honored principles of liberal internationalism: At the core of the post-Cold War world is a growing zone of democracies committed to relatively open markets and free trade, political relations based on agreed-upon rules and norms of behavior, and institutions to cooperatively manage and enforce those standards. Protecting and extending that democratic community serves our security and economic interests while also expressing Americans' ingrained belief in our country's historic mission. Deftly executed, policies based on Democratic Realism can not only underpin America's vital interests and continued global success, but help ensure a safer, more prosperous, and more democratic world. 115 Kritik Answers Violence is Endemic POLITICS MUST INCORPORATE THE EXISTENCE OF ENDEMIC VIOLENCE. WE CAN INCORPORATE THIS WITHOUT BUYING INTO EVERY REALIST PREMISE Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European University, ―The enduring dilemmas of realism in International Relations,‖ Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, December 2001, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/gus02/gus02.pdf, accessed 8/13/02 Until now, the purpose of this article might have appeared to be just another, perhaps more systematically grounded, critique of the difficulties realist theories of International Relations have been facing. By drawing on the lessons one can learn from these dilemmas, this conclusion wants to suggest a way forward. Once we know where realism gets stuck in its analytical justification, the study of its dilemmas should open a more reflexive way to reapprehend Realism as a double negation and the trap of the realism-idealism debate In what follows, I argue that the underlying reason why realists are not facing up the implications of the identity (distinctiveness/determinacy) and the conservative (science/tradition) dilemma consists in the terms of the first debate in which many realists feel compelled to justify realism. According to this self-understanding, realists are there to remind us about the fearful, the cruel side of world politics which lurks behind. This distinct face of international politics inevitably shows when the masquerade is over. In the Venetian carnival of international diplomacy, only the experienced will be prepared when the curtain falls and world history picks up its circular course. By trying to occupy a vantage point of (superior) historical experience, science came then as an offer, IR realism could not refuse. IR Realism has repeatedly thought to have no other choice but to justify this pessimism with a need to distance itself from other positions, to be nonsubsumable. It needed to show that whatever else might temporarily be true, there is an unflinching reality which cannot be avoided. Realism needed to point to a reality which cannot be eventually overcome by politics, to an attitude which would similarly rebuff the embrace by any other intellectual tradition. The ―first debate‖ is usually presented as the place in which this ―negative‖ attitude has been played out, indeed mythically enshrined. It is to this metaphorical foundation to which many self-identified realists return. Yet, I think that the ―first debate‖ is a place where the thoughts not only of so-called idealist scholars, but also of self-stylised realists look unduly impoverished exactly because it is couched in terms of an opposition. When scholars more carefully study the type of opposition, however, they quickly find out that many so-called realist scholars have been not only critical of utopian thought and social engineering, but also of Realpolitik. In other words, if one concentrates on scholars and their work, and not on labels, one sees realism not simply as an attitude of negation – which it is – but as an attitude of double negation: in the words of R.N. Berki, realism must oppose both the conservative idealism of nostalgia and the revolutionist idealism of imagination. Norberto Bobbio has developed this double negation in his usually lucid style as both a conservative realism which opposes the ―ideal‖, and a critical realism which opposes the ―apparent‖, a difference too few realists have been able to disentangle. For this double heritage of political realism is full of tensions. Realism as anti-idealism is status-quo oriented. It relies on the entire panoply of arguments so beautifully summarised by Alfred Hirschman. According to the futility thesis, any attempt at change is condemned to be without any real effect. The perversity thesis would argue that far from changing for the better, such policies only add new problems to the already existing ones. And the central jeopardy thesis says that purposeful attempts at social change will only undermine the already achieved. The best is the enemy of the good, and so on. Anti-apparent realism, however, is an attitude more akin to the political theories of suspicion. It looks at what is hidden behind the smokescreen of current ideologies, putting the allegedly self-evident into the limelight of criticism. With the other form of realism , it shares a reluctance to treat beautiful ideas as what they claim to be. But it is much more sensible to their ideological use, revolutionary as well as conservative. Whereas anti-ideal realism defends the status quo, anti-apparent realism questions it. It wants to unmask existing power relations. 116 Kritik Answers Realism Inevitable WE MUST USE REALISM BECAUSE OTHERS RELY ON IT Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 227 The main line of critique can be summarized as follows: realism does not take its central concepts seriously enough. To start with, its critiques claim that realism is a sceptical practice which however, stops short of problematizing the inherent theory of the state. It is, second, a practice which informs an international community. Third, international politics is not power politics because it resembles realist precepts, but because the international community which holds a realist world-view acts in such a way as to produce power politics: it is a social construction. Realist expectations might hold, not because they objectively correspond to something out there, but because agents make them the maxims that guide their actions. Finally, this can have very significant policy effects: even at the end of the Cold War which might have shattered realist world-views, realist practices could mobilize old codes, such as to belittle the potential historical break of the post-Berlin wall system. Realism still underlies major re-conceptualization of the present international system, from Huntington's geocultural reification to `neomedievalism' - and justifies the foreign policies which can be derived from them. 117 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Prevents Nuclear War REALISM KEY TO STOPPING NUCLEAR WAR. Hans Morgenthau, University of Chicago, ―Realism in International Politics,‖ 1958, Published in NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW, Winter 1998. It seems to me that to a great extent the future peace of the world-and the future peace of the world means under present conditions the future existence of the world-will depend upon the restoration of the original, the traditional, the realistic concepts of foreign policy: of a foreign policy which was regarded and practiced as what you might call the "mundane business" of accommodating divergent interests, defining seemingly incompatible interests, and then redefining them until finally they became compatible. For it seems to me to be very unlikely that the "cold war," as it has been practiced in the last ten years, will continue indefinitely. About five or six years ago Sir Winston Churchill said in a speech in the House of Commons exactly this: "Things as they are cannot last; either they will get better, or they will get worse." If the present trend continues, I think, in spite of what has been said about the desirability and possibility of limited war, the danger of an all-out atomic war will increase. One of the instruments to avoid this universal catastrophe lies in the restoration of those processes of a realistic foreign policy to which I have referred. 118 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Prevents War (1/3) REALISM IS KEY TO INTERNATIONAL PEACE – THE CRITIQUE ATTACKS THE WORST ASPECTS OF REALIST POLITICS, THE PLAN EMBODIES THE BEST. Robert Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP. Realism can also speak to the conditions under which states are most likely to cooperate and the strategies that actors can employ to foster cooperation. This line of theorizing is sometimes associated with neoliberalism, but the two are hard to distinguish in this area. Making a distinction would be easy if realism believed that conflict was zero-sum, that actors were always on the Pareto frontier. This conclusion perhaps flows from the view of neoclassical economics that all arrangements have evolved to be maximally efficient, but . Although ―offensive realists‖ who see aggression and expansionism as omnipresent (or who believe that security requires expansion) stress the prevalence of extreme conflict of interest, ―defensive realists‖ believe that much of international politics is a Prisoners‘ dilemma or a more complex security dilemma. The desire to gain mixes with the need for protection; much of statecraft consists of structuring situations so that states can maximize their common interests. The everpresent fear that others will take advantage of the state – and the knowledge that others have reciprocal worries – leads diplomats to seek arrangements that will reduce if not neutralize these concerns. Even if international politics must remain a Prisoners‘ Dilemma, it can often be made into one that is more benign by realists see that politics is often tragic in the sense of actors being unable to realize their common interests altering the pay-offs to encourage cooperation, for example, by enhancing each state‘s ability to protect itself should the other seek to exploit it and increasing the The knowledge that even if others are benign today, they may become hostile in the future due to changes of mind, circumstances, and regimes can similarly lead decision makers to create arrangements that bind others – and themselves, as previously noted. transparency that allows each to see what the other side is doing and understand why it is doing it. REALISM KEY TO DIPLOMACY AND PREVENTING CONFLICT. Robert Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP. Just as understanding the limits of the state‘s power can reduce conflict, so in protecting what is most important to them states must avoid the destructive disputes that will result from failing to respect the vital interests of others. Realists have long argued that diplomacy and empathy are vital tools of statecraft: conceptions of the national interest that leave no room for the aspirations and values of others will bring ruin to the state as well as to its neighbors. WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS, MOVING AWAY WILL INEVITABLY RESULT IN GREAT POWER WARS MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg xi-xii. ) The twentieth century was a period of great international violence .In World War I (1914-18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people were killed duringWorld War 11(1939-45), well over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War engulfed the globe. During this con-frontation, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies,but many millions died in proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century's lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including the Russo-Japanese con-flicts of 1904-5 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920- Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great powers that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means 21, the various Arab-Israeli wars, and the han-Iraq War of 1980-88. This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. 119 Kritik Answers to ensure one's own survival. Strength ensures safety, and the greatest strength is the greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each competes for advantage over the others. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping it unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic prospect, however, so conflict and war are bound to continue as large and enduring features of world politics. 120 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Prevents War (2/3) ANY SHIFT AWAY FROM REALISM WILL CAUSE A POWER VACUUM RESULTING IN GREAT POWER WARS MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 3. ) Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great powers have been purged from the international system is wrong. Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the soviet threat has disappeared, the United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major powers in these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every European state, including the United Kingdom and France, still harbors deepseated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by American power might behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even more profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the United States over Taiwan is hardly remote. This is not to say that such a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of great-power war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon--that is, the only great power in the system. (NEXT PAGE) 121 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Prevents War (3/3) (PREVIOUS PAGE) There are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position over potential rivals. Great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power; on the contrary, they face a constant incentive to change it in their favor. They almost always have revisionist intentions, and they will use force to alter the balance of power if they think it can be done at a reasonable price.3 At times, the costs and risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate goal of hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual greatpower competition. This unrelenting pursuit of power means that great powers are Inclined to look for opportunities to alter the distribution of world power in their favor. They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. But not only does a great power seek to gain power at the expense of other states, it also tries to thwart rivals bent on gaining power at its expense. Thus, a great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state, and it will try to undermine the balance when the direction of change is in its own favor. SURVIVAL IS CONTIGENT ON OFFENSIVE MILITARY POWER MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 36-7. ) The security dilemma," whith is one of the most well-known concepts in the international relations literature, reflects the basic logic of offensive realism. The essence of the dilemma is that the measures a state takes to increase its own security usually decrease the security of other states. Thus, it is difficult for a state to increase its own chances of survival without threatening the survival of other states. John Hen first introduced the security dilemma in a 1950 article in the journal World Politkc.'7 After discussing the anarchic nature of international politics. he writes, "Striving to attain security from . . . attack, [states] are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on."8 The implication of Herz's analysis is clear: the best way for a state to survive in anarchy is to take advantage of other states and gain power at their expense. The best defense is a good offense. Since this message is widely understood, ceaseless security competition ensues. Unfortunately, little can be done to ameliorate the security dilemma as long as states operate in anarchy. It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are power maximizers is tantamount to saying that they care about relative power, not absolute power. There is an important distinction here, because states concerned about relative power behave differently than do states interested in absolute power.'9 States that maximize relative power are concerned primarily with the distribution of material capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power advantage as possible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to survival in a dangerous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power concerns are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains give rival states even greater power, for smaller national gains that nevertheless provide them with a power advantage over their rivals.20 States that maximize absolute power, on the other hand, care only about the size of their own gains, not those of other states. They are not motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are concerned with amassing power without regard to how much power other states control. They would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained more in the 122 Kritik Answers deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end (survival), but an end in itself.2' 123 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Militarism Solves War (1/2) U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO WORLD PEACE Kagan, Hillhouse Professor of History at Yale, 1997 (Donald, ―Roles and Missions.‖ Orbis, Spring, Volume 41) the keystone of American strategy should be an effort to preserve and sustain the situation as well and as long as possible. America's most vital interest, therefore, is maintaining the general peace, for war has been the swiftest, most expensive, and most devastating means of changing the balance of international power. But peace does not keep itself, although one of the most common errors in modern thinking about international relations is the assumption that peace is natural and can be Few, if any, nations in the history of the world have ever enjoyed such a favorable situation. It stands to reason that preserved merely by having peace-seeking nations avoid provocative actions. The last three-quarters of the twentieth century strongly suggests the opposite major war is more likely to come when satisfied states neglect their defenses and fail to take an active part in the preservation of peace. It is vital to understand that the current relatively peaceful and secure situation is neither inevitable nor immutable. It reflects two conditions built up with tremendous effort and expense during the last half century: the great power of the United States and the general expectation that Americans will be willing to use that power when necessary. The diminution of U.S. power and credibility, which would follow on a policy of reduced responsibility, would thus not be a neutral act that would leave the situation as it stands. Instead, it would be a critical step in undermining the stability of the international situation. Calculations based on the absence of visible potential enemies would immediately be made invalid by America's withdrawal from its current position as the major bulwark supporting the world order. The cost of the resulting upheaval in wealth, instability, and the likelihood of war would be infinitely greater than the cost of continuing to uphold the existing international structure. conclusion: AND, NON-VIOLENCE DOESN‘T SOLVE – ITS JUST WISHFUL THINKING Regan, Political Science Professor at Fordham, 1996 (Richard, Just War: Principles and Causes, p. 6) Pacifists generally argue that nonviolence and nonresistance will ultimately win the minds and hearts of aggressors and oppressors, but that argument is neither convincing nor dispositive. The success of Gandhi or King may have been due (at least in part) to the appeal of their nonviolent campaigns to the conscience of their oppressors. But if that is true, it is because Gandhi could appeal to the moral conscience of a free British electorate over the heads of colonial administrators, and King could appeal to the moral conscience of the national American electorate over the heads of regional southern officials. There is no reason to believe that such campaigns would have been successful against the rulers of Nazi Germany. Second, the argument rests on an extremely optimistic view about the reformability of human behavior. Hobbes was surely correct in describing a persistent conflictual pattern of human behavior. To imagine that every or even most human beings will behave like saints seems to be wishful thinking. And even were human beings to be so transformed at some indefinite future point of time, why should innocent human beings suffer oppression in the intervening short run? 124 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Militarism Solves War (2/2) AND, THEIR STRATEGY IS IMMORAL AND INCITES MORE VIOLENCE Coates, Politics Lecturer at Reading, 1997 (A.J., The Ethics of War, p. 115-6) Doubts arise not just about the utility or efficacy of the pacifist strategy, but also about its moral consistency. The moral claim of the strategy rests on the assumption that non-violent resistance is noncoercive, that here is a morally superior form of action that is not part of a culture or cycle of violence. That assumption seems unfounded. As one critic argues: Even though your action is non-violent, its first consequence must be to place you and your opponents in a state of war. For your opponents now have only the same sort of choice that an army has: that of allowing you to continue occupying the heights you have moved on to, or of applying force – dynamic, active, violent force – to throw you back off them. Your opponents cannot now uphold the laws which they value without the use of such violence. And to fail to uphold them is to capitulate to you … In terms of its practical impact, therefore, your tactic is basically a military one rather than a morally persuasive one – or even a political one. (Prosch 1965, pp. 104-5) Not only does non-violent resistance invite a violent response from an opponent; it also produces – in some cases even deliberately engineers – circumstances in which those of a more militant and less sensitive disposition can realize their violent ambitions. In such circumstances it seems either naïve or hypocritical to parade one‘s pacific and non-violent credentials while ignoring the key role that has been played in the unleashing of the cycle of violence. 125 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Militarism Solves Genocide U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO PREVENTING GENOCIDE Diamond, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry, ―Why the United States must remain engaged,‖ Orbis, Summer, Volume 40, Number 3) Much in Nordlinger's book is wise, prudent, and morally responsible. Let us hope that we never again so demonize a global challenger that our officials are tempted to vitiate our constitution and values, or make the mistake, so tragically common in the cold war, of embracing any ethically repugnant regime that happens to be on "our side." Let us have a serious debate on our national interests and the military means we need to defend them. If we can pare our defense spending further by eliminating expensive weapons programs that are not needed or not likely to work (or even in some cases not wanted by the armed forces themselves), by all means let us do so. But let us not make the mistake - the core mistake of isolationists then and now - of assuming that a world without effective rules and the power to enforce them would be any more benign than Hobbes imagined it would be, or that a world full of escalating rivalries, arms buildups, aggression, repression, genocide, and war would not ultimately threaten our values, our security, and our way of life. Especially now, in a turbulent era of power instabilities and rapidly resurgent nationalisms, world order will depend heavily on preeminent American military power, selectively but strategically engaged around the world in the service of liberal principles. In the necessary task of reconfiguring U.S. foreign policy for a new century, liberal internationalism offers the best, wisest, most secure, and most humane foundation on which to build. EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT THE PLAN DOESN‘T PASS WE‘LL WIN THAT THE KRITIK SANCTIONS GENOCIDE Willis 12-19-95 (Ellen, The Village Voice) If intellectuals are more inclined to rise to the discrete domestic issue than the historic international moment, this may have less to do with the decay of the notion of international solidarity than with the decay of confidence in their ability to change the world, not to mention the decay of anything resembling a coh erent framework of ideas within which to understand it. Certainly the received ideas of the left, to the extent that a left can still be said to exist, have been less than helpful as a framework for understanding the Bosnian crisis or organizing a response to it. Although the idea of American imperialism explains less and less in a world where the locus of power is rapidly shifting to a network of transnational corporations, it still fuels a strain of reflexive anti-interventionist sentiment whose practical result is paralyzed dithering in the face of genocide. Floating around "progressive" circles and reinforcing the dithering is a brand of vulgar pacifism whose defining characteristic is not principled rejection of violence but squeamish aversion to dealing with it. In the academy in particular, entrenched assumptions about identity politics and cultural relativism promote a view of the Balkan conflict as too complicated and ambiguous to allow for choosing sides. If there is no such thing as universality, if multiethnic democracy is not intrinsically preferable to ethnic separatism, if there are no clear-cut aggressors and victims but merely clashing cultures, perhaps ethnic partition is simply the most practical way of resolving those "implacable ancient rivalries."\ 126 Kritik Answers Realism Good: Militarism Solves Democracy U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY Diamond, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry, ―Why the United States must remain engaged,‖ Orbis, Summer, Volume 40, Number 3) In the past, global power has been an important reason why certain countries have become models for emulation by others. The global power of the United States, and of its Western democratic allies, has been a factor in the diffusion of democracy around the world, and certainly is crucial to our ability to help popular, legitimate democratic forces deter armed threats to their overthrow, or to return to power (as in Haiti) when they have been overthrown. Given the linkages among democracy, peace, and human rights - as well as the recent finding of Professor Adam Przeworski (New York University) that democracy is more likely to survive in a country when it is more widely present in the region - we should not surrender our capacity to diffuse and defend democracy. It is not only intrinsic to our ideals but important to our national security that we remain globally powerful and engaged - and that a dictatorship does not rise to hegemonic power within any major region. LITTLE B: DEMOCRACY PREVENTS WAR, MASS DEATH, AND GENOCIDE Rummel, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii & Director of the Haiku Institute of Peace Research, 1994 (Rudolph J., ―Power, Genocide and Mass Murder,‖ Journal of Peace Research, February, Volume 31, Nubmer 1) The principal empirical and theoretical conclusion emerging from this project confirms previous work on the causes of war: Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. The more power a regime has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite. The more freely a political elite can control the power of the state apparatus, the more thoroughly it can repress and murder its subjects and the more insistently it can declare war on domestic and foreign enemies. By contrast, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects, the more constrained the power of a regime - the more political power is diffused, checked, and balanced - the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. This finding holds up through a variety of multivariate analyses comprising over a hundred different kinds of political, cultural, social, and economic variables. All considered, including the partial correlations, regression analysis, and the independent dimensions defined through factor analysis, a measure of democracy versus totalitarian regimes and measures of war and rebellion are the best independent predictors of democide (Rummel, 1995). At the extremes of power, the totalitarian regimes murdered their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers. The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom. This is the ultimate conclusion of this project. 127 Kritik Answers Alt Bad: Could Make Things Worse THE ALTERNATIVE MAY MAKE THINGS WORSE, WILL ELIMINATE BENEFITS OF THE CURRENT ORDER Alastair J.H. Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM: BETWEEN POWER POLITICS AND COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS, Keele University Press: Edinburgh, 1997, p. 182. This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the ‗lessons of Munich‘, rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar policies of deterrence. A realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an ethic of ‗sauve qui peut‘. But it is to suggest that, when realism emphasizes the need for a cautious, gradual approach to attempts to transform the nature of the system, it had a point. In Wendt‘s analysis, change ultimately becomes as privileged as the status quo in rationalist perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of effecting a transformation of the system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a transformation in the structure of international politics would be beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And, at the end of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international politics contains many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation would remove such iniquities anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does not guarantee to do is to undermine those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately, constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value of judgment which sacrifices the safe option of remaining within the current situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible over the extant and sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. 128 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (1/2) REALISM IS INEVITABLE John Mearsheimer, Professor, University of Chicago, THE TRAGEDY OF GREAT POWER POLITICS, 2001, p. 2. The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon-that is, the only great power in the system. REALISM IS A FACT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS EVEN IF WE DON‘T LIKE IT John Mearsheimer, Professor, University of Chicago, THE TRAGEDY OF GREAT POWER POLITICS, 2001, p. 3-4. This situation, which no one consciously designed or intended, is genuinely tragic. Great powers that have no reason to fight each other- that are merely concerned with their own survival- nevertheless have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. ―Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,‖ he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia should ―smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out.‖ Although it is depressing to realize that great powers might think and act this way, it behooves us to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. For example, one of the key foreign policy issues facing the United States is the question of how China will behave if its rapid economic growth continues and effectively turns China into a giant Hong Kong. Many Americans believe that if China is democratic and enmeshed in the global capitalist system, it will not act aggressively; instead it will be content with the status quo in Northeast Asia. According to this logic, the United States should engage China in order to promote the latter‘s integration into the world economy, a policy that also seeks to encourage China‘s transition to democracy. If engagement succeeds, the United States can work with a wealthy and democratic China to promote peace around the globe. Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail. 129 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (2/2) STATES COMPETE WITH EACHOTHER TO SURVIVE; ANY LOSS OF POWER IS ZERO SUM, MAKING REALIST AN INEVITABILITY MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 32-33 ) . There is little room for trust among states. For sure, the level of fear varies across time and space, but it cannot be reduced to a trivial level. From the perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential enemies. This point is illustrated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to German reunification at the Great powers fear each other, They regard each other with suspicion, and they worry that war might be in the offing. They anticipate danger end of the Cold War. Despite the fact that these three states had been close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France t in a world where great powers have the capability to attack each other and might have the motive to do so, any state bent on survival must be at least suspicious of other states and reluctant to trust them. Add to this the "911" problem-the absence of a central authority to which a threatened state can turn for help-and states have even greater incentive to fear each other. Moreover, there is no mechanism, other than the possible self-interest of third parties, for punishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter potential aggressors, states have ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared for war with them. The possible consequences of falling victim to aggression further amplIfy the importance of fear as a motivating force in world politics. Great powers do not compete with each other as if international politics were merely an economic marketplace. Political competition among states is a much more dangerous business than mere economic intercourse; the former can lead to war, and war often means mass killing on the battlefield as well as immediately began worrying about the potential dangers of a united Germany.'° The basis of this fear is tha mass murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to Political antagonism, in short, tends to be intense, because the stakes are great. States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help view each other not just as competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies. themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances." But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today's affiance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War H, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with States operating in a self-help world almost always act according to their own sell-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the interests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as weli as in the long term, because if a state loses in the West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. short run, it might not be around for the long haul. Apprehensive about the ultimate intentions of other states, and aware that they operate in a self- states quickly understand that the best way to ensure their survival is to be the most powerful state in the system. The stronger a state is relative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that any help system, of those rivals will attack it and threaten its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because the weaker states are likely to suffer military defeat. Indeed, the bigger the gap in power between any two states, the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither Canada nor Mexico, for example, would countenance attacking the United States, which is far more powerful than its neighbors. The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel Kant said, "It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible."12 Survival would then be almost guaranteed." Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of means-economic, diplomatic, and military-to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one state's gain in power is another state's loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions.'4 130 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Realism Will Reasset Itself RELYING ON A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO REFORMING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS FAILS, NEW PROBLEMS WILL ALWAYS DEMAND SPECIFIC REALISTIC SOLUTIONS. Hans Morgenthau, University of Chicago, ―Realism in International Politics,‖ 1958, Published in NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW, Winter 1998. I could go on and on to give you examples. I'll give you another one which just comes to my mind: the expectation (which was very prevalent in the last year or so of the Second World War) that at the end of that war, with the enemies defeated, we would enter into a kind of millennium from which, again, power politics with all of its manifestations would be dispelled. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, when he came back from the Moscow Conference of 1943, at which the establishment of the United Nations had been agreed upon, said that the United Nations would usher in a new era in foreign policy by doing away with power politics, with alliances, with the armaments race, with spheres of influence, and so forth. And he repeated this utopian expectation much later, in his memoirs. This is another example of the belief that the difficulties which confront us, the risks which threaten us, the liabilities which we must face in international affairs are the result of some kind of ephemeral, unique configuration; that if you do away with the latter you will have done away with the liabilities, the risks, and the difficulties as well. This belief is mistaken; for it is the very essence of historic experience that whenever you have disposed of one danger in foreign policy another one is going to raise its head. Once we had disposed of the Axis as a threat to American security, we were right away confronted with a new threat: the threat of the Soviet Union. I daresay if we could, by some kind of miracle, do away tomorrow with the threat which emanates from the Soviet Union, we would very soon be confronted again with a new threat-and perhaps from a very unexpected quarter. 131 Kritik Answers IR is Realist Now (1/2) REALPOLITIK DOMINATES THE IR (5 REASONS): 1. NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY OVER STATES 2. STATES HAVE OFFENSIVE MILITARY CAPABILTIES 3. STATES INTENTIONS ARE AMBIGUOUS 4. LONG TERM SURVIVAL IS A STATES PRIMARY GOAL 5. STATES ARE RATIONAL ACTORS MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 31-2 ) The first assumption is that the international system is anarchic, which does not mean that it is chaotic or riven by disorder. It is easy to thaw that conclusion, since realism depicts a world characterized by security competition and war. By itself, however, the realist notion of anarchy has nothing to do with conflict; it is an ordering principle, which says that the system comprises independent states that have no central authority above them.4 Sovereignty, in other words, inheres in states because there is no higher ruling body in the international system.' There is no "government over governments. "~ The second assumption is that great powers inherently possess some offensive military capability, which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and possibly destroy each other. States are potentially dangerous to each other, although some states have more military might than others and are therefore more dangerous. A state's military power is usually identified with the particular weaponry at its disposal, although even if there were no weapons. the Individuals in those states could still use their feet and hands to attack the population of another state. After all, for every neck, there are two hands to choke it. The third assumption is that states can never be certain about other states' intentions. Specifically, no state can be sure that another state will not use its offensive military capability to attack the first state. This is not to say that states necessarily have hostile intentions. Indeed, all of the states in the system may be reliably benign, but it is impossible to be sure of that judgment because intentions are impossible to divine with 100 percent certainty.7 There are many possible causes of aggression, and no state can be sure that another state is not motivated by one of them.8 Furthermore, intentions can change quickly, so a state's intentions can be benign one day and hostile the next. Uncertainty about intentions is unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other states do not have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities. The fourth assumption is that survival is the primary goal of great powers. Specifically, states seek to maintain their territorial integrity and the autonomy of their domestic political order. Survival dominates other motives because, once a state is conquered, it is unlikely to be in a position to pursue other aims. Soviet leader Josef Stalin put the point well during a war scare in 1927: "We can and must build socialism in the [Soviet Union]. But in order to do so we first of all have to exist."9 States can and do pursue other goals, of course, but security is their most important objective. The fifth assumption is that great powers are rational actors. They are aware of their external environment and they think strategically about how to survive in it. In particular, they consider the preferences of other states and how their own behavior is likely to affect the behavior of those other states, and how the behavior of those other states is likely to affect their own strategy for survival. Moreover, states pay attention to the long term as well as the immediate consequences of their actions. 132 Kritik Answers IR is Realist Now (2/2) STATES VIEW POWER IS AN END IN ITSELF THIS HAS TWO IMPLICATIONS: 1. MAKES THEIR LINKS NON-UNIQUE AND INEVITABLE 2. TAKES OUT SOLVENCY AS THEIR ALTERNATIVE IS UNREALISABLE MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 36 ) It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are power maximizers is tantamount to saying that they care about relative power, not absolute power. There is an important distinction here, because states concerned about relative power behave differently than do states interested in absolute power.'~ States that maximize relative power are concerned primarily with the distribution of material capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power advantage as possible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to survival in a dangerous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power concerns are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains give rival states even greater power, for smaller national gains that nevertheless provide them with a power advantage over their rivals.2U States that maximize absolute power, on the other hand, care only about the size of their own gains, not those of other states. They are not motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are concerned with amassing power without regard to how much power other states control. They would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained more in the deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end (survival), but an end in itself.2' 133 Kritik Answers Miscalculation Inevitable POWER MISCALCULATION IS INEVITABLE 1. STATES LIE 2. THEY MAKE MISTAKES IN CALCULATED STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 38. ) Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because they invariably make important decisions on the basis of imperfect information. States hardly ever have complete information about any situation they confront. There are two dimensions to this problem. Potential adversaries have incentives to misrepresent their own strength or weakness, and to conceal their true aims.24 For example, a weaker state trying to deter a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to discourage the potential aggressor from attacking. On the other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim does not build up its own arms and thus leaves itself vulnerable to attack. Probably no national leader was better at practicing this kind of deception than Adolf Hitler. But even if disinformation was not a problem, great powers are often unsure about how their own military forces, as well as the adversary's, will perform on the battlefield. For example, it is sometimes difficult to determine in advance how new weapons and untested combat units will perform in the face of enemy fire. Peacetime maneuvers and war games are helpful but imperfect indicators of what is likely to happen in actual combat. Fighting wars is a complicated business in which it is often difficult to predict outcomes. Remember that although the United States and its allies scored a stunning and remarkably easy victory against Iraq in early 1991, most experts at the time believed that Iraq's military would be a formidable foe and put up stubborn resistance before finally succumbing to American military might.25 Great powers are also sometimes unsure about the resolve of opposing states as well as allies. For example, Germany believed that if it went to war against France and Russia in the summer of 1914, the United Kingdom would probably stay out of the fight. Saddam Hussein expected the United States to stand aside when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Both aggressors guessed wrong, but each had good reason to think that its initial judgment was correct. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was , great powers constantly find themselves confronting situations in which they have to make important decisions with incomplete information. Not surprisingly, they sometimes make faulty judgments and end up doing themselves serious harm. Some defensive realists go so far as to suggest that determined to get someone else to assume that burden. He guessed right. In short the constraints of the international system are so powerful that offense rarely succeeds, and that aggressive great powers invariably end up being punished.2' As noted, they emphasize that 1) threatened states balance against aggressors and ultimately crush them, and 2) there is an offensedefense balance that is usually heavily tilted toward the defense, thus making conquest especially difficult. Great powers, therefore, should be content with the existing balance of power and not try to change it by force. After all, it makes little sense for a state to initiate a war that it is likely to lose; that would be self- defeating behavior. It is better to concentrate instead on preserving the balance of power.27 Moreover, because aggressors seldom succeed, states should understand that security is abundant, and thus there is no good strategic reason for wanting more power in the first place. In a world where conquest seldom pays, states should have relatively benign intentions toward each other. If they do not, these defensive realists argue, the reason is probably poisonous domestic politics, not smart calculations about how to guarantee one's security in an anarchic world. IT‘S IMPOSSIBLE FOR STATES TO ADEQUATELY PERCIEVE FUTURE POWER RELATION—MISCALCULATION IS INEVITABLE MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 35. ) Second, determining how much power is enough becomes even more complicated when great powers contemplate how power wifi be distributed among them ten or twenty years down the road. The capabilities of individual states vary over time, sometimes markedly, and it is often difficult to predict the direction and scope of change in the balance of power. Remembet few in the West antidpated the collapse of the Soviet Union before it happened. In fact, during the first hail of the Cold War, many in the West feared that the Soviet economy would eventually generate greater wealth than the American economy, which would cause a marked power shift against the United States and its allies. What the future holds for China and Russia and what the balance of power will look like in 2020 is difficult to foresee. 134 Kritik Answers 135 Kritik Answers Perm Solves: Realism Necessary to Understand Parts of IR PERM: COMBINE THE ALTERNATE APPROACH TO IR WITH THE REALIST STANCE OF THE 1AC – THIS PROVIDES THE BEST POSSIBLE SOLVENCY FOR DECREASING VIOLENCE AND WAR. Robert Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP. The popularity of alternative approaches to international politics cannot be explained entirely by their scholarly virtues. Among the other factors at work are fashions and normative and political preferences. This in part explains the increasing role of rationalism and constructivism. Important as they are, these approaches are necessarily less complete than liberalism, Marxism and realism. Indeed, they fit better with the latter than is often realized. Realism, then, continues to play a major role in IR scholarship. It can elucidate the conditions and strategies that are conducive to cooperation and can account for significant international change, including a greatly decreased tolerance for force among developed countries, which appears to be currently the case. 136 Kritik Answers A2 ―9/11 Disproves Realism‖ EVEN IN THE POST 9/11 WORLD, WE STILL LIVE IN AN INTENSELY REALIST WORLD – THE UN IS IN THE GUTTER, COUNTRIES DO NOT WANT TO ENGAGE IN A COMMUNITY, AND THE US STILL REMAINS DIVIDED WITH EUROPE Rieff, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, 2003 (David, Mother Jones, ―Goodbye, New World Order,‖ July-August, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/07/ma_442_01.html) <Yes, many people still want to believe in the United Nations -- though they're becoming fewer and fewer in number. There is even the fantasy that some institutional or policy silver bullet -- the International Criminal Court, say, or the Kyoto Protocol -- will provide an Archimedean lever for solving the world's woes. Were it not for the machinations of the United States, which refused to sign on to either Kyoto or the international court, the argument goes, we would be well on our way to a better America stands only as an obstacle that will be overcome on the road to inevitable progress. Such claims have all the ingredients of a fine press release, but the reality is more depressing. It is true, for example, that European governments increasingly subscribe to the ideology -- some would say the secular religion -- of human rights. But then so does the United States; after all, the official position of the U.S. government is that the intervention in Iraq was undertaken at least in part in the name of human rights. Now a doctrine that world; even so, can be claimed by the United States of America as well as the still social democratic nations of Western Europe, and the nongovernmental organizations that view the United States as little more than a rogue state -- not to mention major transnational corporations that have signed on to a U.N. "compact with business" -- has become elastic to the point of fatuousness. If we all claim to be pledged to the cause of human rights (and who, it seems, does not?), then it is hard not to think of Dr. Johnson's remark about patriotism, that it is the last refuge of a scoundrel. There is the United Nations sunk in irrelevancy, except as the world's leading humanitarian relief organization. There is a landscape of international relations that seems far more to resemble the bellicose world of pre-1914 Europe than the interdependent, responsible world imagined by the framers of the U.N. Charter. There is an entire continent, sub-Saharan Africa, mired in an economic calamity largely not of its own making. There is a Europe that pays lip service to human rights, but remains intransigent where its own real interests -- such as farm subsidies that effectively condemn subSaharan Africa to grinding poverty by limiting its agricultural exports -- are concerned. And then there is the United States, seemingly bent on empire. As far as the international system is concerned, what are the most striking aspects of the current situation? Where was the good news again? That Augusto Pinochet was briefly detained in London, or that Slobodan Milosevic will likely spend the rest of his life in a U.N. jail? This, while somewhere between 2 and 4 million Congolese die in the first general war in Africa since decolonization? The truth is that, outside the developed , much of the world is actually in worse shape than it was just a few decades ago. Where there has been progress, if that term is even appropriate in so apocalyptic a context, it has been in the realm of norms - that is, the laws that nations try to evade and ignore, and in which many of the most decent people on this slaughterhouse of a planet continue to believe. But we are deep in loaves-and-fishes land here. To believe that states will suddenly come to their senses and behave as responsible members of an "international community," when few states have ever done this, is, indeed, to believe in miracles. countries There is unquestionably a globalized world economy, which remains largely dominated by the United States and is administered through central banks, the there is no such thing as an international community, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. But at least not one worthy of the name -- assuming, that is, we mean a community of shared values and interests, not just shared membership in the United Nations. For that matter, even the old, Cold War-era blocs are disintegrating: The G-77, the major international organization representing the developing world, now has trouble agreeing on anything beyond the most generic recommendations. The run-up to the Iraq war showed the depth of the divisions within the so-called transatlantic family, and equally sharp splits were evident within Europe during the same period. Never mind community; how can there be any international system when what we have actually witnessed in the period since 9/11 has been the steady erosion of the very idea of consensus in international relations? 137 Kritik Answers A2 ―Cold War Disproves Realism‖ (1/2) REALISM ACCURATELY DESCRIBES THE WORLD POST-COLD WAR – U.S. INTERVENTIONISM PROVES Miller, IR at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003 (Benjamin, Integrated Realism and Hegemonic Military Intervention in Unipolarity, Hanami, Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, Perspectives on Structural Realism, p. 34-35) Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has undertaken several military interventions abroad, fluctuating widely in scope from the massive intervention in the Gulf War through medium-scale intervention in Panama and Haiti to the limited and abruptly terminated engagement in Somalia. Similarly another regional crisis (Bosnia) was the occasion for great fluctuations of policy. The U.S. response to the crisis shifted from military disengagement in the first four years of the crisis to a considerable intervention on the ground in the last three years. It has also refrained from intervention on other occasions, notably in post-Soviet and African crises. Is there a coherent logic behind these wide-ranging variations in post-Cold War U.S. intervention behavior? Numerous critics have argued that there is not, and that this erratic behavior reflects a lack of focus in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the former archenemy. For example, in a recent comprehensive treatment Gholz, Press and Sapolsky characterize U.S. behavior this way: "the U.S. intervenes often in the conflicts of others, but without a consistent rationale, without a clear sense of how to advance U.S. interests, and sometimes with unintended and expensive consequences" (1997, 5). In the following discussion I will challenge the conventional wisdom about the illogic and incoherence of recent U.S. military interventions. I will argue that in contrast to widespread opinion, there is a clear logic to post—Cold War interventions, even if it does not amount to a preconceived and purposive grand strategy. Indeed, the U.S. has followed, whether consciously or not, the logic of costs and benefits, namely different combinations of incentives and constraints in different regions. More specifically, the intensity of U.S. interests at stake and the intensity of the regional constraints on intervention (as reflected by the estimated costs of intervention, especially in terms of casualties) best account for the scope of U.S. military interventions in the post—Cold War era. My argument suggests that different types of regions are prone to specific levels of intervention or nonintervention because of the different combinations of U.S. interests and constraints in each region. Thus, this logic accounts for the variations in the scope of interventions and predicts different patterns of U.S. intervention in different regions. The realist explanation presented here integrates the classical realist focus on state interests with the structural realist emphasis on constraints on state action in order to provide a theoretical model of hegemonic military intervention in unipolarity. To illustrate this model, this study will outline briefly the variations in the scope of U.S. military engagement in all the major post-Cold War regional crises, notably the Persian Gulf (1990-1991, Fall 1994), Panama (1989), Somalia (19921994), Bosnia (since 1995), Kosovo (since 1999), Haiti (1994-1996) and also the cases of nonintervention in post-Soviet and African crises. The proposed explanation will demonstrate the continuing relevance of realism to major issues of post—Cold War U.S. foreign policy. 138 Kritik Answers A2 ―Cold War Disproves Realism‖ (2/2) REALISM IS MORE APPLICABLE IN THE POST COLD WAR ERA – UNIPOLARITY MAKES ALL STATES MORE VULNERABLE TO FOREIGN AGGRESSION Hanami, Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, 2003 (Andrew, December, ―Structural Realism and Interconnectivity‖, Perspectives on Structural Realism, p. 200-201) , it has been said that structural realism has run its course in explanations of international relations in the post-Cold War era. Presumably this is because since the end of the Cold War, there is now as As a theory, now decades old expected the long-term absence of a major war between the major states. For some, it was the high-conflict era of bipolarity in which structural realism had its greatest But the occurrence of war was never the sole reason why structural realism explained international behavior. It was only its most dramatic, and in some ways, its most important. Structural realism today can be expected to endure as long as state preeminence endures and states remain the most important actors in the international system, even in peace, for in peace one finds the rudiments of war. In explanatory power. recent years, non-state and near-state actors have been put forth as decisive new units in a world now focused on economics, limited campaigns or on terrorism. The state therefore is said to have declined in relative importance. But one needs to identify the impact of such non-state actors in the world before we can make an Interconnectivity is the relationship between states as conditioned by structure and state motive. Interconnectivity, as a feature of the prevailing international structure, allows that significant internal or even multilateral actors can forge relations across borders. The inside-out and outside-in perspectives can be seen to combine when individual personalities of key leaders, for example, may be pushed by assessment about the significance of the new relations they create, and the theory that explains them. internal, historical or group dynamics to act outwardly. An international organization may decide on an agenda simply from the internal inertia of its members. But personalities and organizations are important, in part, because they represent a state's power, and to be effective they must push with that state and act with one eye on their external environment. Personalities and organizations may initiate foreign policy, bin foreign policy action that stems from internal drives but which goes against the grain of structure is risking failure, and over time, successful leadership will see that.1 The disappearance of the Soviet Union from the center stage for some seems to mean that suddenly unit-level explanations have replaced structure. But in reality the unipolarity that was created when the Soviet Union slid away merely gives unit-level actors like personalities the appearance of .1 greater relative profile because they stand on a narrower stage. They went there before. Systemic dynamics that operated then continue to persist. We should not be repulsed by the continuation of the familiar just because it did not explain all actions in the past. As the simplest A change in history does not necessarily require a change in the general theory that explains history. structure, unipolarity may not seem as threatening to all states as bipolarity had been. If, however implausible, under bipolarity then-was a direct U.S.—Soviet conflict of any proportion, the results would have significant systemic effects. But since the onset of unipolarity if the U.S. and any other power engaged in a conflict, there would be much less system it impact. Thus all states feel the release of dread that accompanied the prospect of superpower confrontation in which they as smaller The change from bipolarity to unipolarity is forcing most states to learn more about themselves, and their world. Structure still instructs. With a lone superpower, the challenge today is not only what the U.S. might do to second states, and they may feel the U.S. has less urgency to shape some of them as formerly was the case, but what other second states could do to them, directly or indirectly. Whether it was true or not, states believed that strong bipolar confrontations would have negative consequences sooner or later . Unipolarity, whether it is a moment or a few decades in length, has ushered in a more variegated and self-help environment and has thus caused states to focus on their most likely or immediate problems. Neither Asia nor a united states could only watch, wait and weather as best they can. Europe, as David Rieff believes, is likely to successfully challenge U.S. hegemony in the twenty-first century. In pan, this is because European armies are shrinking both in "size and in capability. The only threats to U.S. leadership—terrorism, failed states, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosivic or even the heirs to Osama bin Laden are limited." In bipolarity, major confrontations being rare and their prevention by the action of lesser states was not possible, the international system below the level of the superpowers was, in a sense, frozen in time. Their maneuvers mattered less because it was the potential top tier movement that held the greatest leverage. Thus the orbit of state actions took place within a relatively immobile, stable and patterned bipolar world, as . With the erosion to unipolarity, the calculus has changed considerably. Now more states must watch more states. There are not just two sides, therefore there is no "protection," sociology or structure of belonging to East or West. There is a sense of greater anarchy, or at least, greater uncertainty as to both the movement and consequences of the actions of states in an unbalanced world. This is worrisome particularly to smaller states because the prospect of rescue in unipolarity is reduced as the U.S. has greater choices of how and if to prop up second states in proportion to their value in a less bifurcated world. Both Africa and Latin America have received less attention and aid from the U.S. since 1990. This has caused Kenneth Jowitt to remark that large parts of the world today are now "disconnected" from the main states of the world. Therefore, many things suddenly become or appear to become important to smaller states: their economies, militaries, allies, rivals, relations with the U.S. and even their relations with bigger states like Russia, China or other regional powers. Everything matters more because the importance of margins has increased in a unipolar world as small gains or losses tilt states no longer buoyed by a superpower sponsorship. Indeed, the fact that the U.S. remains the only important superpower may have structuralists have predicted led Osama bin Laden to target the "World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as he and his al Qaida group tried to "balance" or, in their minds, punish or alter U.S. behavior in the Middle East 139 Kritik Answers A2 ―Cold War End Proves Liberalism‖ REMOVING US HEGEMONY WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC IN A POST COLD-WAR WORLD MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 2-3. ) Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great powers have been purged from the international system is wrong. Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the soviet threat has disappeared, the United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major powers in these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every European state, including the United Kingdom and France, still harbors deepseated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by American power might behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even more profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the United States over Taiwan is hardly remote. This is not to say that such a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of great-power war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon--that is, the only great power in the system. 140 Kritik Answers A2 ―Cooperation Good‖ (1/2) PEACE IS IMPOSSIBLE—STATES WILL CHEAT MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 35 ) All states are Influenced by this logic, which means that not only do they look for opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also work to ensure that other states do not take advantage of them. After all, rival states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to recognize their own motives at play in the actions of other states. In short, states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as offense. They think about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor states from gaining power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, where states are willing to lie, cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is not likely to break out in this world. STATES COOPERATE TO GAIN POWER OVER POTENTIAL RIVALS—EVERY COOPERATION IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SUSTAIN MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 48ish] One might conclude from the preceding discussion that my theory does not allow for any cooperation among the great powers. But this Conclusion would be wrong. States can cooperate, although cooperation is sometimes difficult to achieve and always difficult to sustain. Two factors inhibit cooperation: considerations about relative gains and concern about cheating.'3 Ultimately, great powers live in a fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or at least potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at each other's expense. Any two states contemplating cooperation must consider how profits or gains will be distributed between them. They can think about the division in terms of either absolute or relative gains (recall the distinction made earlier between pursuing either absolute power or relative power; the concept here is the same). With absolute gains, each side is concerned with maximizing its own profits and cares little about how much the other side gains or loses in the deal. Each side cares about the other only to the extent that the other side's behavior affects its own prospects for achieving maximum profits. With relative gains, on the other hand, each side considers not only its own individual gain, but also how well it fares compared to the other side. Because great powers care deeply about the balance of power, their thinking focuses on relative gains when they consider cooperating with other states. For sure, each state tries to maximize its absolute gains; still, it is more important for a state to make sure that it does no worse, and perhaps better, than the other state in any agreement. Cooperation is more difficult to achieve, however, when states are attuned to relative gains rather than absolute gains.~' This is because states concerned about absolute gains have to make sure that if the pie is expanding, they are getting at least some portion of the increase, whereas states that worry about relative gains must pay careful attention to how the pie is divided, which complicates cooperative efforts. Concerns about cheating also hinder cooperation. Great powers are often reluctant to enter into cooperative agreements for fear that the other side will cheat on the agreement and gain a significant advantage. This concern is especially acute in the military realm, causing a "special peril of defection." because the nature of military weaponry allows for rapid shifts 141 Kritik Answers in the balance of power.5' Such a development could create a window of opportunity for the state that cheats to inflict a decisive defeat on its victim. These barriers to cooperation notwithstanding, great powers do cooperate in a realist world. Balance-of-power logic often causes great powers to 142 Kritik Answers A2 ―Cooperation Good‖ (2/2) ALLIANCES ARE TEMPORARY AND UNRELIABLE MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 33-4 ) States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances." But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today's affiance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War I, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 143 Kritik Answers A2 ―Democracy Solves War‖ DEMOCRACIES STILL ENGAGE IN REALIST MINDSET MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 5. ) Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail. If China becomes an economic powerhouse it will almost certainly translate its economic might into military might and make a rim at dominating Northeast Asia. Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as much as non- democracies do, and hegemony is the best way for any state to guarantee its own survival. Of course, neither its neighbors nor the United States would stand idly by while China gained increasing increments of power. Instead, they would seek to contain China, probably by trying to form a balancing coalition. The result would be an intense security competition between China and its rivals, with the ever-present danger of great-power war hanging over them. In short, China and the United States are destined to be adversaries as China's power grows. 144 Kritik Answers A2 ―Defense Solves‖ OFFENSE IS THE BEST DEFENSE—WHOEVER COMMITS THE FIRST STRIKE WINS 60% OF WARS MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 38. ) There is no question that systemic factors constrain aggression, especially balancing by threatened states. But defensive realists exaggerate those restraining forces.28 Indeed, the historical record provides little support for their claim that offense rarely succeeds. One study estimates that there were 63 wars between 1815 and 1980, and the initiator won 39 times, which translates into about a 60 percent success rate. Turning to specific cases, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany by winning military victories against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870, and the United States as we know it today was created in good part by conquest in the nineteenth century. Conquest certainly paid big dividends in these cases. Nazi Germany won wars against Poland in 1939 and France `0 1940, but lost to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945. Conquest ultimately did not pay for the Third Reich, but if Hitler had restrained himself after the fall of France and had not invaded the Soviet Union, conquest probably would have paid handsomely for the Nazis, In short, the historical record shows that offense sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not. The trick for a sophisticated power maximizer is to figure out when to raise and when to fold. 145 Kritik Answers A2 ―Human Nature‖ THE ANARCHIC SYSTEM OF IR IS THE REASON WHY OFFENSIVE REALISM IS CORRECT—WE NEVER MAKE CLAIMS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 56-7] In sum, my argument is that the structure of the international system. not the particular characteristics of individual great powers, causes them to thinic and act offensively and to seek hegemony.6C I do not adopt Morgenthau's claim that states invariably behave aggressively because they have a will to power hardwired into them. Instead, I assume that the principal motive behind great-power behavior is survival. In anarchy, however, the desire to survive encourages states to behave aggressively Nor does my theory classify states as more or less aggressive on the basis of their economic or political systems. Offensive realism makes only a handful of assumptions about great powers, and these assumptions apply equally to all great powers. Except for differences in how much power each state controls, the theory treats all states alike. I have now laid out the logic explaining why states seek to gain as much power as possible over their rivals. I have said little, however, about the object of that pursuit: power itself. The next two chapters provide a detailed discussion of this important subject. 146 Kritik Answers A2 ―Mindset Shift‖ INEVITABLY PARANOIA AND DISAGREEMENTS OVER COOPERATION MAKES REALIST IDEOLOGY INEVITABLE— MOVING AWAY RISKS A DECAPITATING BLOW BY AN INVADING NATION MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 40. ) The claim Is sometimes made that great powers can transcend realist logic by working together to build an international order that fosters peace and justice. World peace, it would appear, can only enhance a state's prosperity and security. America's political leaders paid considerable lip service to this line of argument over the course of the twentieth century. President Clinton, for example, told an audience at the United Nations in September 1993 that "at the birth of this organization 48 years ago a generation of gifted leaders from many nations stepped forward to organize the world's efforts on behalf of security and prosperity . . . Now history has granted to us a moment of even greater opportunity . . Let us resolve that we will dream larger. . . . Let us ensure that the world we pass to our children is healthier, safer and more abundant than the one we inhabit today."" This rhetoric notwithstanding, great powers do not work together to promote world order for its own sake. Instead, each seeks to maximize its own share of world power, which is likely to clash with the goal of creating and sustaining stable international orders. This is not to say that great powers never aim to prevent wars and keep the peace. On the contrary, they work hard to deter wars in which they would be the likely vic tim. In such cases, however, state behavior is driven largely by narrow calculations about relative power, not by a commitment to build a world order independent of a state's own interests. The United States, for example, devoted enormous resources to deterring the Soviet Union from starting a war in Europe during the Cold War, not because of some deep-seated commitment to promoting peace around the world, but because American leaders feared that a Soviet victory would lead to a dangerous shift in the balance of power.46 The particular international order that obtains at any time is mainly a by-product of the self-interested behavior of the system's great powers. The configuration of the system, in other words, is the unintended consequence of great-power security competition, not the result of states acting together to organize peace. The establishment of the Cold War order in Europe illustrates this point. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States intended to establish it, nor did they work together to create it. In fact, each superpower worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to gain power at the expense of the other, while preventing the other from doing likewise.47 The system that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of World War II was the unplanned consequence of intense security competition between the superpowers. Although that intense superpower rivalry ended along with the Cold War in 1990. Russia and the United States have not worked together to create the present order in Europe. The United States, for example, has rejected out of hand various Russian proposals to make the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe the central organizing pillar of European security (repladng the U.S.-dominated NATO). Furthermore, Russia was deeply opposed to NATO expansion, which It viewed as a serious threat to Russian security. Recognizing that Russia's weakness would preclude any retaliation, however, the United States ignored Russia's concerns and pushed NATO to accept the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as new members. Russia has also opposed u.S. policy in the Balkans over the past decade, especially NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Again, the United States has paid little attention to Russia's concerns and has taken the steps it deems necessary to bring peace to that volatile region. Finally, it is worth noting that although Russia is dead set against allowing the United States to deploy ballistic missile defenses, it is highly likely that Washington will deploy such a system if it is judged to be technologically feasible. For sure, great-power rivalry will sometimes produce a stable international order, as happened during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the great powers will continue looking for opportunities to increase their share of world power, and if a favorable situation arises, they will move to undermine that stable order. Consider how hard the United States worked during the late 1980s to weaken the Soviet Union and bring down the stable order that had emerged in Europe during the latter part of the Cold War.48 Of course, the states that stand to lose power will work to deter aggression and preserve the existing order. But their motives will be selfish, revolving around balance-of-power logic, not some commitment to world peace. states are unlikely to agree on a general formula for bolstering peace. Certainly, international relations scholars have never reached a consensus on what the blueprint should look like. In fact, it seems there are about as many theories on the causes of war and peace as there are scholars studying the subject. But more important, poll- cymakers are unable to agree on how to create a stable world. For example, at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, important differences Great powers cannot commit themselves to the pursuit of a peaceful world order for two reasons. First, over how to create stability in Europe divided Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson.49 In particular, Clemenceau was determined to impose harsher terms on Gennany over the Rhineland than was either Lloyd George or Wilson, while Lloyd George stood out as the . The Treaty of Versailles, not surprisingly, did little to promote European stability. hard-liner on German reparations Furthermore, consider American thinking on how to achieve stability in Europe in the early days of the Cold War.'° The key elements for a stable and durable system were in place by the early 1950s. They included the division of Germany, the positioning of American ground forces in Western Europe to deter a Soviet attack, and ensuring that West Germany would not seek to develop nuclear weapons. Officials in the Truman administration, however, disagreed about whether a divided Germany would be a source of peace or war. For example, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, who held important positions in the State Department, believed that a divided Germany would be a source of instability whereas Secretary of State Dean Acheson disagreed with them. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower sought to end the American commitment to defend Western Europe and to provide West Germany with its owr~ nuclear deterrent. This policy, which was never fully adopted, nevertheless caused significant instability in Europe. as it led directly to the Berlin crises of 1958-59 and 196l.~' Second, great powers cannot put aside power considerations and work to promote international peace because they cannot be sure that their efforts will succeed. If their attempt fails, they are likely to pay a steep price for having neglected the balance of power, because if an aggressor appears at the door there will be no answer when they dial 911. That is a risk few states are willing to run. Therefore, prudence dictates that they behave according to realist logic. This line of reasoning accounts for why collective security schemes, which call for states to put aside narrow concerns about the balance of power and instead act in accordance with the broader interests of the international community, invariably die at birth. 147 Kritik Answers 148 Kritik Answers A2 ―Realism Assumes States Rational‖ FIRST, HISTORY PROVES THAT ONLY STATES THAT ACT THROUGH SELF-INTEREST WILL SURVIVE ONLY THE LONG RUN, ENSURING RATIONAL BEHAVIOR. CROSS-APPLY MEARSHEIMER SECOND REALISM DOES NOT POSIT RATIONALITY OR CONSTANCY BY STATES. WE ONLY POINT OUT THAT SELFHELP SYSTEMS REINFORCE THOSE TENDENCIES Kenneth Waltz, Cram‘s BFF, Neorealism and its Critics, ed. by Robert Keohane, 1986, p. 117-118 Most of the confusions in balance-of-power theory and criticisms of it, derive from misunderstanding these three points. A balance-of-power theory, properly stated, states: are unitary actors who, , seek their own preservation begins with assumptions about They at a minimum and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination. States, or those who act for them, try in more or less sensible ways to use the means available in order to achieve the ends in view. Those means fall into two categories: internal efforts (moves to increase economic capability, to increase military strength, to develop clever strategies) and external efforts (moves to strengthen and enlarge one‘s own alliance or to weaken and shrink an opposing one). The external game of alignment and realignment requires three or more players, and it is usually said that balance-of-power systems require at least that number. The statement is false, for in a two-power system the politics of balance continue, but the way to compensate for an incipient external disequilibrium is primarily by intensifying one‘s internal efforts. To the assumptions of the theory we then add the condition for its operation: that two or more states coexist in a se1f-help system, one with no superior agent to come to the aid of states that may be weakening or to deny to any of them the use of whatever instruments they think will serve their purposes. The theory, then, is built up from the assumed motivations of states and the actions that correspond to them. It describes the constraints that arise from the system that those actions produce, and it indicates the . The system, like a market in economics, is made by the actions and interactions of its units, and the theory is based on assumptions about their behavior. A self-help system is one in which those who do not help themselves, or who do so less effectively than others, will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to dangers, will suffer. Fear of such unwanted consequences stimulates states to behave in ways that tend toward the creation of balances of power. Notice that the theory requires no assumptions of rationality or of constancy of will on the part of all of the actors. The theory says simply that if some do relatively well, others will emulate them or fall by the wayside. Obviously, the system won‘t work if all states lose interest in preserving themselves. It will, however, continue to work if some states do, while others do not, choose to lose their political identities, say, through amalgamation. Nor need it be assumed that all of the competing states are striving relentlessly to increase their power. The possibility that force may be used by some states to weaken or destroy others does, however, make it difficult for them to break out of the competitive system. expected outcome: namely, the formation of balances of power. Balance-of-power theory is microtheory precisely in the economist‘s sense THIRD, STATES RATIONALLY CALCULATE OFFENSIVE MEASURES BEFORE TAKING RISKS MEARSHEIMER 2001 [John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 38. ) Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because they invariably make important decisions on the basis of imperfect information. States hardly ever have complete information about any situation they confront. There are two dimensions to this problem. Potential adversaries have incentives to misrepresent their own strength or weakness, and to conceal thek true aims.24 For example, a weaker state trying to deter a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to discourage the potential aggressor from attacking. On the other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim does not build up its own arms and thus leaves itself vulnerable to attack. Probably no national leader was better at practicing this kind of deception than Adolf Hitler. 149 Kritik Answers A2 ―Realism Constructs Threats‖ REALISM DOESN‘T REQUIRE WORST CASE FORECASTING OR ―THREAT CONSTRUCTION.‖ THE CRITIQUE SACRIFICES STABILITY ON THE ALTER OF UNCERTAIN TRANSFORMATION. Alastair Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism, 1997, p. 182 This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the `lessons of Munich', rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar policies of . A realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an ethic of `sauve qui peut'. But it is to suggest that, when realism emphasises the need for a cautious, gradual approach to attempts to transform the nature of the system, it has a point. In Wendt's analysis, change ultimately becomes as deterrence privileged as the status quo in rationalist perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of effecting a transformation of the system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a at the end of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international politics contains many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation would remove such iniquities transformation in the structure of international politics would be beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And, anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does guarantee to do is to undermine those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately, constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value judgment which sacrifices the safe option of remaining within the current situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible over the extant and sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. This is not to attempt to level a charge of utopianism, as Wendt complains that Mearsheimer does, by emphasising constructivism's normative rather than explanatory commitment. As Wendt responds: `Constructivists have a normative interest in promoting social change, but they pursue this by trying to explain how seemingly natural social structures, like self-help or the Cold War, are effects of practice ... If critical theorists fail, this will be because they do not explain how the world works, not because of their values."' All theories ultimately have normative commitments; the fact of their existence does not allow us to question the validity of constructivism's explanatory power. What Just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism generates its ahistoricism, the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates its unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of elements of permanency. And, just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism generates strategies which threaten to become self-perpetuating, so the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates strategies which threaten to become counter-productive. does, however, is the impact of these normative assumptions on its account of international politics. REALISM IS NOT A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY. Alastair Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism, 1997, p. 184-5 Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously misinterprets its approach. First, as we have seen, the `logic of anarchy' that realism portrays is not a material phenomenon, but the intersubjective emanation of cumulative past choices, albeit choices rooted in a material account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic represents a relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes the state to be the principal focus of this logic in contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is permanent or final - indeed, no sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the notion that realism ignores the clash between the individual's simultaneous identification as both man and citizen mistakes the entire thrust of its work. If realism is concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is only for the conflict that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obligations which fall upon men. Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national interests of the state, it also recognised that, particularly in an age of interdependence and nuclear weapons, a stable international order could ultimately only be built on some broader sense of community than that which existed in states alone, and was thus centrally concerned with the extension of community in international relations. 150 Kritik Answers A2 ―Realism is Amoral‖ THEY DON‘T UNDERSTAND REALISM—IT IS AN EFFORT TO NEGOTIATE BETWEEN THE INTERESTS OF MORAL AGENTS Alastair J.H. Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM: BETWEEN POWER POLITICS AND COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS, Keele University Press: Edinburgh, 1997, p. 2. Consequently, realism is portrayed by its opponents not only as being silent in the contemporary normative debate, but as being incapable of saying anything. Such a conception of realism is, however, fundamentally erroneous. Realism arose in opposition to idealism; and, given that the locus of idealism was a concern with the moral, realism‘s genesis was oriented towards normative issues. Of course, it never sought to engage in the type of abstract moral principles, and to introduce an awareness of the pervasive influence of power in the determination of political outcomes. Yet, whilst this presupposed an intimate involvement with ‗the facts as they really are‘, the realist concern with the real was not exclusive, but rather a function of its desire to juxtapose it to the ideal. It sought to interrelate morality and power in a viable synthesis, to generate a practical ethic which might prove more realistic, and more productive, than those which ignored the ‗rules‘ of international politics. Realism ultimately represented a fundamentally practical tradition of thought, centrally concerned with the moral understandings of participants, with the productive application of these understandings, and with the task of generating some form of moral consensus in international relations which might support a stable international order. Whatever the merits of its solutions to these issues, it clearly was not a positivist, explanatory theory; it was profoundly concerned for normative issues, and, in particular, for the articulation of a selfconsciously political ethic. 151 Kritik Answers A2 ―Realism is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy‖ (1/2) THEY‘VE GOT IT BACKWARDS – FAILURE TO PLAN FOR CATASTROPHES CAUSES THEM Macy General Systems Scholar and deep ecologist, 1995 (Joanna, Ecopsychology) There is also the superstition that negative thoughts are self-fulfilling. This is of a piece with the notion, popular in New Age circles, that we create our own reality I have had people tell me that ―to speak of catastrophe will the contrary is nearer to the truth. Psychoanalytic theory and personal experience show us that it is precisely what we repress that eludes our conscious control and tends to erupt into behavior. As Carl Jung observed, ―When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.‖ But ironically, in our current situation, the person who gives warning of a likely ecological holocaust is often made to feel guilty of contributing to that very fate. just make it more likely to happen.‖ Actually, REALISM DOES NOT REQUIRE WORST CASE FORECASTINGIT SIMPLY DOES NOT SACRIFICE STABILITY FOR UTOPIANISM Murray, Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H., Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 192) This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the "lessons of Munich', rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar policies of deterrence. A realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an ethic of "sauve qui peut'. But it is to suggest that, when realism emphasizes the need for a cautious, gradual approach to attempts to transform the nature of the system, it has a point. In Wendt's analysis, change ultimately becomes as privileged as the status quo in rationalist perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of effecting a transformation of the system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a transformation in the structure of international politics would be beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And, at the end of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international politics contains many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation would remove such iniquities anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does guarantee to do is to undermine those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately, constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value judgment which sacrifices the safe option of remaining within the current situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible over the extant and sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. This is not to attempt to level a charge of utopianism, as Wendt complains that Mearsheimer does, by emphasizing constructivism's normative rather than explanatory commitment. As Wendt responds: "Constructivists have a normative interest in promoting social change, but they pursue this by trying to explain how seemingly natural social structures, like self-help or the Cold War, are effects of practice... If critical theorists fail, this will be because they do not explain how the world works, not because of their values."1 All theories ultimately have normative commitments; the fact of their existence does not allow us to question the validity of constructivism's explanatory power. What does, however, is the impact of these normative assumptions on its account of international politics. Just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neo-realism generates its ahistoricism the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates its unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of elements of permanency. And, just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism generates 152 Kritik Answers strategies which threaten to become self-perpetuating, so the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates strategies which threaten to become counter-productive. 153 Kritik Answers A2 ―Realism is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy‖ (2/2) REALISM IS NOT A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY- IT ACCURATELY DESCRIBES THE WORLD Murray, 1997 [Alastair, Politics at the University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism, 1997 pg. 184-185] Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously misinterprets its approach. First, as we have seen, the 'logic of anarchy' that realism portrays is not a material phenomenon, but the intersubjective emanation of cumulative past choices, albeit choices rooted in a material account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic represents a relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes the state to be the principal focus of this logic in contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is permanent or final - indeed, no sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the notion that realism ignores the clash between the individual's simultaneous identification as both man and citizen mistakes the entire thrust of its work. If realism is concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is only for the conflict that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obligations which fall upon men. Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national interests of the state, it also recognized that, particularly in an age of interdependence and nuclear weapons, a stable international order could ultimately only be built on some broader sense of community than that which existed in states alone, and was thus centrally concerned with the extension of 154 Kritik Answers A2 ―Social Constructivism‖ (1/3) CHANGING REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES DOESN‘T ALTER THE MATERIAL REALITY OF STATE PRACTICES OR HELP CREATE BETTER POLICY FOR THE OPPRESSED Jarvis 2k [DSL, lecturer in the Dept. of Gov and International Relations, Faculty of Economics, Politics and Business at U. of Sydney ‗International Relations and the Challenge of Post Modernism, University of South Carolina Press, pg 128-30] Perhaps more alarming though is the outright violence Ashley recom-mends in response to what at best seem trite, if not imagined, injustices. Inculpating modernity, positivism, technical rationality, or realism with violence, racism, war, and countless other crimes not only smacks of anthropomorphism but, as demonstrated by Ashley's torturous prose and reasoning, requires a dubious logic to malce such connections in the first place. Are we really to believe that ethereal entities like positivism, mod-ernism, or realism emanate a "violence" that marginalizes dissidents? Indeed, where is this violence, repression, and marginalization? As selfprofessed dissidents supposedly exiled from the discipline, Ashley and Walker appear remarkably well integrated into the academy-vocal, pub-lished, and at the center of the Third Debate and the forefront of theo-retical research. Likewise, is Ashley seriously suggesting that, on the basis of this largely imagined violence, global transformation (perhaps even rev-olutionary violence) is a necessary, let alone desirable, response? Has the rationale for emancipation or the fight for justice been reduced to such vacuous revolutionary slogans as "Down with positivism and rationality"? The point is surely trite. Apart from members of the academy, who has In an era of unprecedented change and turmoil, of new political and military configurations, of war in the Balkans and ethnic cleansing, is Ashley really suggesting that some of the greatest threats facing humankind or some of the great moments of history rest on such innocu-ous and largely unknown nonrealities like positivism and realism? These are imagined and fictitious enemies, theoretical fabrications that represent arcane, selfserving debates superfluous to the lives of most people and, arguably, to most issues of importance in international relations. More is the pity that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy us at a time of great global turmoil. That it does and continues to do so reflects our lack of judicious criteria for evaluating the-ory and, more importantly, the lack of attachment theorists have to the real world. Certainly it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical heard of positivism and who for a moment imagines that they need to be emancipated from it, or from modernity, rationality, or realism for that matter? imaginations, engage in epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of our lmowledge.37 But to suppose that this is the only task of international theory, let alone the most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism and displays a certain contempt for those who search for guidance in their daily struggles as does Ashley's project, his deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight against positivism say to the truly it help solve the plight of the poor, the displaced refugees, the casualties of war, or the emigres of death squads? Does it in any way speak to those whose actions and thoughts comprise the policy and practice of international relations? On all these questions one must answer no. This is not to say, of course, that all theory should be judged by its technical rationality and problem-solving capacity as Ashley forcefully argues. But to suppose that problem-solving technical theory is not necessary-or is in some way badis a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of solving some of the nightmarish realities that millions confront daily. As Holsti argues, we need ask of these theorists and their theories the ultimate question, "So what?" actors in international politics. What marginalized, oppressed, and des-titute? How does To what purpose do they deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist and rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the human condition? In what sense can this "debate toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology and metaphysics" be judged pertinent, relevant, help-ful, or cogent to anyone other than those foolish enough to be scholasti-cally excited by abstract and recondite debate.38 Contrary to Ashley's poststructural approach fails to empower the marginalized and, in fact, abandons them. Rather than ana-lyze the political economy of power, wealth, oppression, production, or international relations and render an intelligible understanding of these processes, Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent by delivering an obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley wishes to chastise structural realism for its abstractness and detachment, he assertions, then, a must be prepared also to face similar criticism, especially when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real life plight of those who struggle at marginal , we might ask to what extent the postmodern "empha-sis on the textual, constructed nature of the world" represents "an unwarranted extension of approaches appropriate for literature to other areas of human practice that are more constrained by an objective reality. " All theory is socially constructed places. If the relevance of Ashley's project is questionable, so too is its logic and cogency. First and realities like the nation-state, domestic and international politics, regimes, or transnational agencies are obviously social fabrications. But to what extent is this Just because we acknowledge that the state is a socially fabricated entity, or that does not make the reality of the state disappear or render invisible international politics. Whether socially constructed or objectively given, the argument over the ontological status of the state is of no particular moment. Does this change our experience of the state or somehow observation of any real use? the division between domestic and international society is arbitrar-ily inscribed diminish the political-economic-juridical-military functions of the state? To recognize that states are not naturally inscribed but dynamic entities continually in the process of being made and reimposed and are therefore culturally dissimilar, economically different, and politically atypical, while perspicacious to our historical and theoretical understanding of the state, in no way detracts from its reality, practices, and consequences. Similarly, few would object to Ashley's hermeneutic interpretivist understanding of the international sphere as an artificially inscribed demarcation. But, to paraphrase Holsti again, so what? This does not malce its That international politics and states would not exist with-out subjectivities is a banal tautology. The point, surely, is to move beyond this and study these processes. Thus, while intellectually interesting, con-structivist theory is not an end point as Ashley seems to think, where we all throw up our hands and announce there are no foundations and all reality is an arbitrary social construction. Rather, it should be a means of rec-ognizing the structurated nature of our being and the reciprocity between subjects and structures through history. Ashley, however, seems not to want to do this, but only to deconstruct the state, international politics, and international theory on the basis that none of these is objectively given but fictitious entities that arise out of modernist practices of representation. While an interesting theoretical enterprise, it is of no effects any less real, diminish its importance in our lives, or excuse us from paying serious attention to it . great consequence to the study of international politics. Indeed, structuration theory has long talcen care of these ontological dilemmas that otherwise seem to preoccupy Ashley.40 155 Kritik Answers A2 ―Social Constructivism‖ (2/3) SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS FLAWED – IT FAILS TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE VALUES THAT WE HAVE THAT HAVE CREATED PROSPERITY, FOR EXAMPLE BY STOPPING SLAVERY Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2001 (Alan Charles, ―Triumph without Self-Belief,‖ Orbis, Summer, ebsco) . It is a dangerous intellectual error to imagine that goodness, wisdom, order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality, mutual forbearance, and kindness are the "default mode" in human affairs, and that it is malice, folly, disorder, war, coercion, legal inequality, murderous intolerance, and cruelty that stand in need of historical explanation. The West, in theory, always has understood that man has a lower side to which he is drawn, that man is a wolf to man, and that we are governed more by prejudice and passion than by the rational capacity of our minds. If that is so, however, then we err What often denies us both optimism and pride, however, is the very stringency of our self-judgment untempered by historical realism grievously in our assumptions of what it is that requires particular explanation in the world. We understand the defaults; what should astonish us is the ability to change them. Rousseau and the postmodernists have it all backward in this domain. It is not aversion to difference, for example, that requires historical explanation, aversion to difference is the human condition; rather, it is the West's partial but breathtaking ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that demands explanation, above all in the singular American accomplishment. Anti-Semitism is not surprising; the opening of Christian America to Jews is what should amaze. Racial aversion and injustice are not sources of wonderment; the Fourteenth Amendment and its gradual implementation are what should astonish. It is not the abuse of power that requires explanation--that is the human condition--but the Western rule of law. Similarly, it is not coerced religious conformity that should leave us groping for understanding, but the forging of values and institutions of religious toleration. It is not slavery that requires explanation, for slavery is one of the most universal of all human institutions; rather, it is the values and agency by which the West identified slavery as an evil and, astonishment of astonishments, abolished it. Finally, it is not relative pockets of poverty in the West that should occasion our wonder, for because we used to term almost infinitely worse absolute levels of poverty simply "the human condition." Instead, what is extraordinary are the values, institutions, knowledge, risk, ethics, and liberties that created such prosperity that we even notice that poverty at all, yet alone believe that it is eradicable. We are surprised, in a we lose our wonder at the accomplishments and aspirations of our civilization as a tragic result. Depravity should never startle us; rather, the identification and naming of failure of intellectual analysis, by all of the wrong things, and depravity should amaze us, and the attempt, frequently successful, to contain it should fill us with awe. Indeed, that attempt has been so successful in the West, relative to the human condition, that the other world fantasized by the multiculturalists seeks entrance, again and again, at our doors, and the multiculturalists are not the multiculturalists' ostensible rejection of the West's philosophical realism--their vaunted "social constructionism"-does not stay with them past their medical doctor's door. In the final analysis, it is that last trait, the West's commitment to a logically ordered riding leaky boats to the otherness of the Third World. Most obviously, philosophical realism, that undergirds its ways of thinking, valuing, and, indeed, worshiping. Such philosophical realism was defended by Augustine, Aquinas, and almost all fathers and doctors of the Church. While various extreme epistemological and ontological skepticisms and radical irrationalisms have flourished, sometimes Western civilization has always had at its core. a belief that there is a reality independent of our wishes for and ideas of it; that natural knowledge of that reality is possible and indeed indispensable to human dignity; that such knowledge must be acquired through a discipline of the will and mind; and that central to that discipline is a compact with reason. The West has willed, in theory at least, to reduce the chaos of the world to natural coherence by the powers of the mind. Indeed, the belief that truth is independent of a particular time and place is precisely what has led the West to borrow so much from other cultures, such that, ironically, whole schools of tendentious thought decry with brilliance and profundity in our history, Western "thefts," as if the recognition of compelling example and argument in others were a weakness, not a strength. The West recognized and adopted Eastern systems of numbers superior to that of the Romans; it took the Aristotelianism of the High Middle Ages from the Islamic scholars who had preserved and interpreted it in manners superior to the schools of the West; it took music, art, forms of expression, and new foods from around the earth that, in large part out of restless curiosity about realities beyond its own, it had explored. The West has always renewed and revitalized itself by means Of recognizing superior ways to its own. It did so, however, with a commitment to being a rational culture. The Greek principle of self-contradiction as the touchstone of error, and thus its avoidance as a touchstone of truth, is the formal expression of a commitment to reason that the Christian West always understood to separate us from beasts and madmen. To live with selfcontradiction was not merely to fail an introduction to philosophy, it was to be less than human. Induction from experience always had a logic, and the exploration of that logic was one of the great and ultimately triumphant pursuits of the Western mind. To live with error was to deny oneself the fruits of human light. Again, the core philosophical assumption of Western civilization is that there is a reality that exists independently of our will and wish, and that this reality can be known by human inquiry and reason. There were many radical ruptures in the history of certain disciplines in the West; there were no radical ruptures with the Western compact with reality and reason. It is that compact that led to a civilization of self-scrutiny and honest borrowings; to a civilization in which self-criticism gave rise to a critical scholarship that could question and either strengthen or repair the West's received beliefs themselves; to a civilization in which the mind could appeal, with ultimate success, against the irrational to the rational; to a way of understanding that led to the sciences that have changed both the entire human relationship to nature and our sense of human possibilities, always tempered by our knowledge of human nature. 156 Kritik Answers A2 ―Social Constructivism‖ (3/3) SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF THEIR HARMS- FAILURE TO TAKE REALIST ACTION ENSURES SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2001 (Alan Charles, ―Triumph without Self-Belief,‖ Orbis, Summer, ebsco) The fruits of that civilization have been an unprecedented ability to modify the remediable causes of human suffering, to give great agency to utility and charity alike; to give to each individual a degree of choice and freedom unparalleled in all of human history; to offer a means of overcoming the station in life to which one was born by the effort of one's labor, mind, and will. A failure to understand and to teach that accomplishment would be its very betrayal. To the extent that Western civilization survives, then, the hope of the world survives to eradicate unnecessary suffering; to speak a language of human dignity, responsibility, and rights linked to a common reality; to minimize the depredations of the irrational, the unexamined, the merely prejudicial in our lives; to understand the world in which we find ourselves, and, moved by interest and charity, to apply that knowledge for good. The contest, then, is between the realists and the antirealists, and the triumph of the West ultimately depends on its outcome. The failure to assess the stakes of the struggle between the West and its communist adversary always came from either a pathological self-hatred of one's own world or, at the least, from a gross undervaluation of what the West truly represented in the . The West has altered the human relationship to nature from one of fatalistic helplessness to one of hopeful mastery. It has made possible a human life in which biological atavism might be replaced by cultural value, the rule of law, individuation, and growing tolerance. It also created an intellectual class irrationally devoted to an adversarial stance. That adversarial view of the West, in the past generation at least, history of mankind had become a neo-Gramscian and thus neo-Marxist one in which the West was seen as an unparalleled source of the arbitrary assignment of restrictive and lifestultifying roles. The enemies of the West--for some, in practice; for others, increasingly in the ideal represented a fictive make-believe that supposedly cast grave doubt upon the West's claim of enhancing freedom, dignity, and opportunity. With the triumph of the West in reality, and with the celebration of Marxism and the the adversarial intellectual class appears to be retreating into ideologies and philosophies that deny the very concept of reality itself. One sees this in the growing strength in the humanities and social sciences of critical theories that view all representations of the world as mere text and fiction. When the world of fact can be twisted to support this or that side of delusion (as in astrology or parapsychology), pathology tries to appropriate what it can of the empirical. When the world of fact manifestly vitiates the very foundations of pathological delusion, then Third World shown more and more to have been truly delusional, it is the claim of facticity or reality per se that must be denied. This is what we now may expect: the world having spoken, the intellectual class, the left academic wing of it above all, may appropriate a little postcommunist chaos to show how merely relative a moral good the defeat of Stalin's heirs has been. If it does so, however, it In Orwell's 1984, it was the mark of realistic, totalitarian power to make its subjects say that all truth was not objective but political--"a social construction," as intellectuals would say now--and that, in the specific case, 2 + 2 = 5. By 2004, making students in the humanities and social sciences grant the will assail the notion of reality itself. equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5 will be the goal of adversarial culture. They will urge that all logical--and, one should add, inferential--inductive truths from experience are arbitrary, mere social constructions. The West Has Indeed Survived,, So Far The ramifications of that effort will dominate the central debates of the humanities in the generation to come. Until there is a celebration and moral accounting of the historical reality of "The Triumph of the West," that "triumph" will be ephemeral indeed. Academic culture has replaced the simplistic model that all culture was functional, a model that indeed could not account for massive discontents Whole disciplines now teach that propositions are to be judged by their therapeutic value rather than by their inductive link to evidence until, in the final analysis, feeling good about saying something determines the truth-value of what is said. Understanding human weakness, however, the West has always or revolutionary change, let alone for moral categories, by the yet more astonishing and absurd model that virtually all culture is dysfunctional. believed that it is precisely when we want to believe something self-gratifying that we must erect barriers of experiment, rigor, and analysis against our self-indulgence The human ability to learn from experience and nature, so slighted in current , is not merely an object of cultural transmission, let alone of social control, but an evolutionary triumph of the species, indeed, a triumph on which our future ultimately depends. There is nothing more desperate than helplessness, and there is no more inveterate cause of helplessness than the inability to affect and mitigate the traumas of our lives. If the role of both acquired knowledge and the transmission and emendation of the means of acquiring knowledge is only a "Western" concern, then it is a Western concern upon which human fate depends. In the current academic climate of indoctrination, tendentiousness, and fantasy, the independence of critical intellect and the willingness to learn open-mindedly from experience of a reality independent of the human will are the greatest hopes of our civilization. Has Western civilization survived? That is, has a human and our propensity for self-serving error. humanistic theory relationship to the world based upon the assumption of a knowable reality, reason, and a transcendent value of human dignity and responsibility survived? Has a will to know oneself and the world objectively survived? Has a recognition of human depravity and the need to limit the power of men over men survived? I do not think that free men and women will abandon that hard-won shelter from chaos, ignorance, parochial tribalism, irrationalism, and, ultimately, helplessness. Has Western civilization survived, its principle of reality justified and intact? Yes, indeed, though it requires constant defense. The demand for perfection is antinomian, illogical, and empirically absurd. The triumph of the West is flawed but real. While everyone else around you weeps, recall Alexander Ushakov, and celebrate the fall of the Soviet threat as he celebrated the fall of Grenada. Then recall how everything depends on realism in our understanding, and rejoin the intellectual struggle. 157 Kritik Answers A2 ―State/Sovereignty Bad‖ INTERNATIONAL GOALS CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY STATES. ONLY REALISM ESCAPES THE TYRANNY OF SMALL DECISIONS Kenneth Waltz, Travis‘ BFF, Neorealism and its Critics, ed. by Robert Keohane, 1986, p. 105-108 We may well notice that our behavior produces unwanted outcomes, but we are also likely to see that such instances as these are examples of what Alfred E. Kahn people are victims of the ―tyranny of small decisions,‖ a phrase suggesting that ―if one hundred consumers choose option x, and this causes the market to make decision X (where X equals 100x), it is not necessarily true that those same consumers would have voted for that outcome if that large decision had ever been presented for their explicit consideration‖ (Kahn 1966:523). If the market does not present the large question for decision, then individuals are doomed to making decisions that are sensible within their narrow contexts even though they know all the while that in making such decisions they are bringing about a result that most of them do not want. Either that or they organize to overcome some of the effects of the market by changing its structure—for example, by bringing consumer units roughly up to the size of the units that are making producers‘ decisions. This nicely makes the point: So long as one leaves the structure unaffected it is not possible for change in the intentions and the actions of particular actors to produce desirable outcomes or to avoid undesirable ones. Structures may be changed, as just mentioned, by changing the distribution of capabilities across describes as ―large‖ changes that are brought about by the accumulation of ―small‖ decisions. In such situations units. Structures may also be changed by imposing requirements where previously people had to decide for themselves. If some merchants sell on Sunday, others may have to do so in order to remain competitive even though most prefer a six-day week. Most are able to do as they please only if all are required to keep comparable hours. The only remedies for strong structural effects are structural changes. Structural constraints cannot be wished away, although many fail to understand this. In every age and place, the units of self-help systems— nations, corporations, or whatever—are told that the greater good, along with their own, requires them to act for the sake of the system and not for their own narrowly defined advantage. In the 1950s, as fear of the world‘s destruction in nuclear war grew, some concluded that the alternative to world destruction was world disarmament. In the 1970s, with the rapid growth of population, poverty, and pollution, some concluded, as one political scientist put it, that ―states must meet the needs of the political ecosystem in its global dimensions or court annihilation‖ (Sterling 1974:336). The international interest must be served; and if that means anything at all, it means that national interests are subordinate to it. The problems are found at the global level. Solutions to the problems continue to depend on national policies. What are the conditions that would make nations more or less willing to obey the injunctions that are so often laid on them? How can they resolve the tension between pursuing their own interests and acting for the sake of the system? No one has shown how that can be done, although many wring their hands and plead for rational behavior. The very problem, however, is that rational behavior, given structural constraints, does not lead to the wanted results. With each country constrained to take care of itself, no one can take care of the system. A strong sense of peril and doom may lead to a clear definition of ends that must be achieved. Their achievement is not thereby made possible. The possibility of effective action depends on the ability to provide necessary means. It depends even more so on the existence of conditions that permit nations and other . World-shaking problems cry for global solutions, but there is no global agency to provide them. Necessities do not create possibilities. Wishing that final causes were efficient ones does not make them so. Great tasks can be accomplished only by agents of great capability. That is why states, and especially the major ones, are called on to do what is necessary for the world‘s survival. But states have to do whatever they think necessary for their own preservation, since no one can be relied on to do it for them. Why the advice to place the international interest above national interests is meaningless can be explained precisely in terms of the distinction between micro- and macrotheories. Among economists the organizations to follow appropriate policies and strategies distinction is well understood. Among political scientists it is not. As I have explained, a microeconomic theory is a theory of the market built up from assumptions about the behavior of individuals. The theory shows how the actions and interactions of the units form and affect the market and how the market in turn affects them. A macro-theory is a theory about the national economy built on supply; income, and demand as systemwide aggregates. The theory shows how these and other aggregates are interconnected and indicates how changes in one or some of them affect others and the performance of the economy. In economics, both micro- and macrotheories deal with large realms. The difference between them is found not in A macrotheory of international politics would show how the international system is moved by system-wide aggregates. One can imagine what some of them might be—amount of world GNP, amount of world imports and exports, of deaths in war, of everybody‘s defense the size of the objects of study; hut in the way the objects of study are approached and the theory to explain them is constructed. spending, and of migration, for example. The theory would look something like a macroeconomic theory in the style of John Maynard Keynes, although it is hard to see how the international aggregates would make much sense and how changes in one or some of them would produce changes in others. I am not saying that such a a macrotheory of international politics would lack the practical implications of macroeconomic theory. National governments can manipulate system-wide economic variables. No agencies with comparable capabilities exist internationally. Who would act on the possibilities of adjustment that a macrotheory of international politics might reveal? Even were such a theory available, we would still be stuck with nations as the only agents capable of acting to solve global problems. We would still have to revert to a micropolitical approach in order to examine the conditions that make benign and effective action by states separately and collectively more or less likely. Some have hoped that changes in the awareness and purpose, in the organization and ideology of states would change the quality of international life. Over the centuries states have changed in many ways, but the quality of international life has remained much the same. States seek reasonable and worthy ends, but they cannot figure out how to reach theory cannot be constructed, but only that I cannot see how to do it in any way that might be useful. The decisive point, anyway, is that them. The problem is not in their stupidity or ill will, although one does not want to claim that those qualities are lacking. The depth of the difficulty is not understood intelligence and goodwill cannot discover and act on adequate programs. Early in this century Winston States facing global problems are like individual consumers trapped by the ―tyranny of small decisions.‘ until one realizes that Churchill observed that the British-German naval race promised disaster and that Britain had no realistic choice other than to run it. 158 Kritik Answers **Calculability/Util** Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (1/2) FIRST, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE Schell 1982 (Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej) Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this superior importance, as though in making our decision about extinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to destroy something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this the survival of the species, on the other. For absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives . SECOND, SURVIVAL OF POLITICAL ORDER KEY TO ETHICS Stenlisli, 2003 (―Pace nr.1‖ accessed onlinehttp://www.pacem.no/2003/1/debatt/stensli/ ) The debate on political realism, a set of ontological assumptions about international politics, has been a central theme in international relations over the past 40 years. Many scholars and politicians have wrestled over the question of the limitations and insights of realism. Still, realism seems very much alive today, one reason perhaps being that the value of realism as an analytical tool seems to become more relevant to policymakers in times of crises. In turn, such changes cause further debate among realists and their critics. In PACEM 5:2 (2002), Commander Raag Rolfsen(1) in practise argues that we are in need of a new framework for analysing international politics. According to Rolfsen, A situation characterized by globalisation, democratisation and a new sense of shared vulnerability demands a novel theoretical framework for world politics. Rolfsen`s aim is indeed ambitious, but his state of departure is surprising: political realism cannot provide this framework because, again according to Rolfsen, it was developed in an undemocratic environment.(2) Thus, we are not far from concluding that realism is corrupted and that realists are conspicuous people.(3) This bold proclamation illuminates the front between idealism and realism in a manner that is not typical of Norwegian academic discourses on international relations. Rolfsen has delivered a substantial and refreshing article. It is of such originality and importance that it deserves to be debated and criticised, which is no evident feature in contributions on world politics in Norway. Having said that, my motivation to engage in such a debate does not spring from a wholehearted embracement of realism. Rather, its source is the belief that a theory of foreign policy cannot do without significant elements of realism. Traditional security policy can never remove our vulnerability. At this point there simply is no disagreement between ―realists‖ and ―idealists‖. However, security has an instrumental value in ensuring other ends. Thus, acknowledging our vulnerability does not remove the value and importance of security as phenomenon and concept.(4) In this article, I will discuss whether the effort to construct a new security concept possibly can succeed when it simultaneously becomes an attack on political realism (PR). Rolfsen undoubtedly deals some blows against Hans Morgenthau‘s Theory of International Politics, although the same points have been made by others before him.(5) Indeed, political realism has to be anchored to ideals and visions of desired end states beyond its basic assumptions,(6) but my main line of argument is that any attempt at establishing a basis for ethical conduct in politics is bound to remain a purely theoretical construction without empirical relevance if it since the existence of a polity is a precondition for thinking about, implementing and evaluating policies in other areas, politics based on realism is required in the first place in order to secure the polity. There can be no democracy without a modern state, and no state without a minimum level of security through a monopoly of violence. Herein lies a significant aspect of what makes the state legitimate to its citizens. In this way, one can even claim that all normative evaluations and theories implicitly rest on minimum requirements both to the practises and theoretical considerations of realism.(7) Indeed, one should at least question whether attempts at denying the empirical relevance of PR could lead us into is not mixed with a sound and thorough understanding of PR. The reason simply is, that paralysis or hypocrisy. The latter can even serve, unintentionally to be sure, as a basis for demonising opponents, thus functioning as a (moral) sentiment that forms the basis of a more hawkish or brutal conduct in international crisis than is necessary. The prudence found in Morgenthau should not be seen as cynical or a-ethical, but rather as a configuration of thought that should balance our aspirations to fulfil what Morgenthau calls the ultimate aims of politics. The central political problem is exactly how to translate these aspirations (like democracy and human rights) into feasible and efficient decisions. But in order to pursue these important goals, the ability to use power, be it hard or soft, is required. 159 Kritik Answers Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (2/2) DEONTOLOGY LOCKS US INTO A DEADLOCK WHEN VALUES CONFLICT, ONLY WAY TO RESOLVE THAT IS BY USING CONSEQUENTIALISM Person, 1997 (lngmar. Lund University. Three Methods of Ethics: a debate. Eds. Baron, Marcia, Philip Petit, and Michael Stole. Pg 13-14. uw//wej) Now the natural rights theorist maintains, of course, that. the presence of a right is such a relevant factor, or reason, that may justify departing from the goal of fulfilment maximization. In Ronald Dwor. kin's phrase, rights could in this way `trump' the pursuit of maximal fulfilment. A right to M provides a reason for holding that one morally should have M even if this is at odds with the goal mentioned. I do not say that it ensures that one should have M because the rights theorist may like to impose a limit on the weight of rights, on how great the loss of fulfilment overall may be if a right is not to be outweighed. Suppose that my hair has a unique healing quality: thousands of terminally ill patients could be saved if a couple of strands are removed and made into a medicine. What should the rights theorist say if I none the less refuse to have these strands removed? Surely, something like this: the suffering caused by respecting my right to my strands of hair is so great that we are morally justified in violating the right. But there is a limit on the weight of my right, on its capacity to restrain maximization; a right provides a moral reason that can be outweighed. As an aside, note that, like the limit on the extension of rights, this limit would seem to have to be based on consequentialist considerations, on then weighing the frustration and confusion occasioned by infring- ing our deep-seated intuitions about rights against the frustration and suffering caused when It comes to the precise weight of rights, no less than their extension, we see that it cannot be fixed unless we transcend the natural rights framework in favour of a consequentialist one. by respecting them. Thus, UTILITY CALCULUS ALLOWS ACTION, MORAL DOGMATISM FREEZES US INTO INACTION Smart, 1973 (J.J.C prof. of philosophy, Australian riatibual university. Utilitarianism: For and Against uw//wej) lf we are able to take account of probabilities in our ordinary prudential decisions it seems idle to say that in the field of ethics, the field of our universal and humane attitudes, we cannot do the same thing, but must rely on some dogmatic morality, in short on some set of rules or rigid criteria, Maybe sometimes we just will be unable to say whether we prefer for humanity an improbable great advantage or a probable small advantage, and in these cases perhaps we shall have to toss a penny to decide what to do. Maybe we have not any precise methods for deciding what to do, but then our imprecise methods must just serve their turn. We need not on that account be driven into authori.- tarianism, dogmatism or romanticism. 160 Kritik Answers Utilitarianism Good: 1AR First, extend our Jonathan Schell evidence, he explains that accepting extinction to uphold rights is like burning down a house to remodel the living room, rights are a result of human society and accepting the destruction of that society to uphold a right is going too far and ultimately self-defeating. Second, Stenlisli indicates that survival of the political order is a precondition of all other values. The alternative is impossible without a stable security framework. Third, LIFE IS KEY TO ETHICS Diana Meyers, prof of Philosophy @ Connecticut University, 1985 Inalienable Rights, p. 54 The right to life prohibits other persons from killing the person who possesses the right and allows this person to defend himself if he is attacked. It is obvious that a person cannot be a moral agent unless he is alive (at least, not within the moral sphere in which we presently find ourselves), and so it is also obvious that this right protects something essential to moral agency. But it is doubtful that it is always supererogatory when it is appropriate for a person to sacrifice his life for the benefit of others. Two representative cases can be adduced to call this claim into question: I) a soldier has a duty to follow orders to participate in battles if her army is involved in a just war, and 2) a citizen may have a duty to join her country‘s army in wartime. Fourth, Ingmar Person explains even rights must be weighed against each other, but that deontology doesn‘t allow preferential treatment of one right over another without resorting to consequentialism, making consequentialism inevitable, or action impossible. Fifth, Smart in 73 illustrates how consequentialism avoids dogmatic action, making it flexible in dealing with different situations UTILITARIANISM IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO EXTINCTION, OUTWEIGHING RIGHTS Ratner ‗84 [Leonard G., Legion Lex Prof. Law @ USC, ―The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution,‖ 12 Hofstra L. Rev. 723, Spring, LN//uwyo-ajl] The search for the ought is a search for the goals of human behavior. Underlying the ought of every goal is an implicit description of reality that predicts the consequences for humans of compliance or noncompliance with the ought. n49 Humans choose the goals. n50 And the perceived accuracy of the description, along with the perceived value of the consequences predicted by the description, influence the choice. Ought and is thus coalesce. The goal of enhanced human need/want fulfillment implies that such enhanced fulfillment is possible and will facilitate long-run human existence.Goals that facilitate human existence are persistently chosen by most humans, because human structure and function have evolved and are evolving to facilitate such existence. The decisionmaking organism is structured to generally prefer survival, although some may trade long-term existence for short-term pleasure, and physiological malfunction or traumatic experience may induce the preference of a few for personal nonsurvival. Intermediate human goals change with human structure and function; long-run human survival remains the ultimate human goal as long as there are humans. 161 Kritik Answers 162 Kritik Answers Calculability Good: 2AC (1/2) FIRST, FAILURE TO CALCULATE ALLOWS TOTALITARIANISM BY DENYING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY Campbell ‗98 [David, Int‘l Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186] The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its urgency. As Derrida observes, ―a just decision is always the pursuit of ―infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it‖ are unavailable in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, required immediately, ‗right away.‘‖ This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because even by unlimited time, ―because the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation.‖ The decision is always ―structurally finite,‖ it a‖always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it.‖ That is why, invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that ―the instant of decision is a madness.‖ The finite nature of the decision may be a ―madness‖ in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derrida‘s argument concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derrida‘s argument addresses more directly – more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley – the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to combat domination. undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, ―that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridicopolitical battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others.‖ Indeed, ―incalculable justice requires us to calculate .‖ From where do these insistences come? What That exceeds the determinalbe cannot and is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that ―left (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it to itself, the incalculable and given can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation.‖ The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid ―the bad,‖ the ―perverse calculation,‖ even the worst.‖ This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the ―at least necessary condition,‖ for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences ―we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.‖ SECOND, EVEN IF WE OBSCURE THE INCALCULABLE, WE HAVE AN ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO CALCULATE DEATH BECAUSE IT‘S OUR ONLY MEANS OF FIGHTING INJUSTICE Santilli 2003 [Paul C., Siena College, ―Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badiou‘s Ethic of the Truth Event,‖ World Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue, May 18-22, www.isud.org/papers/pdfs/Santilli.pdf, acc. 9-2406//uwyo-ajl] From the standpoint of an ethics of subjection there is even something unnecessary or superfluous about the void of suffering in the subject bearers of evil. For Levinas, the return to being from the ethical encounter with the face and its infinite depths is fraught with the danger the subject will reduce the other to a "like-me," totalizing and violating the space of absolute alterity. As Chalier puts it, "Levinas conceives of the moral subject's awakening, or the emergence of the human in being, as a response to that pre-originary subjection which is not a happenstance of being." But if there really is something inaccessible about suffering itself, about the 'other' side of what is manifestly finite, subjected, and damaged, then to a certain extent it is irrelevant to ethics, as irrelevant as the judgment of moral progress in the subject-agent. Let me take the parent-child relation again as an example. Suppose the child to exhibit the symptoms of an illness. Are not the proper "ethical" questions for the parent to ask questions of measure and mathematical multiples: How high is the fever? How long has it lasted? How far is the hospital? Can she get out of bed? Has this happened before? These are the questions of the doctor, the rescue squads and the police. They are questions about being, about detail, causes Ethically our response to the needs of must be reduced to a positivity simply because we have access to nothing but the symptoms, which are like mine. Our primary moral responsibility is to treat the symptoms that show up in being, not the radically other with whom I cannot identify. Say we observe someone whose hands have been chopped off with a machete. How would we characterize this? Would it not be slightly absurd to say, and effects. "He had his limbs severed and he suffered," as though the cruel amputation were not horror enough. Think of the idiocy in the common platitude: "She died of cancer, but thank God, she did not suffer", as though the devastating annihilation of the human by a tumor were not evil itself. For ethics, then, the only suffering that matters are the visible effects of the onslaught of the world. All other suffering is excessive and inaccessible. Therefore, it is in being, indeed in the midst of the most elemental facts about ourselves and other people, that we ethically encounter others by responding to their needs and helping them as best we can by identifying being and not pretending that we know any thing about suffering, other than it is a hollow in the midst of being, that we can act responsibly. What worries me about Levinas It is precisely is that by going beyond being to what he regards as the ethics of absolute alterity, he risks allowing the sheer, almost banal facticity of suffering to be swallowed in the infinite depths of transcendence. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas too often over emphasizes the importance of the emergence of the subject and the inner good in the ethical encounter, as though the point of meeting the suffering human being was to come to an awareness of the good within oneself and not to heal and repair. I agree with Chalier's observation that Levinas's "analyses adopt the point of view of the moral subject, not that of a person who might be the object of its solicitude." an ethics that would be oriented to the vulnerabilities of the subjected (which are others, of course, but also myself) needs to address the mutilation, dismemberment, the chronology of torture, the numbers incarcerated, the look of the bodies, the narratives, the blood counts, the mines knives, machetes, and poisons. Evil really is all that. When the Ethics has limits; there are situations like the Holocaust where to speak of a moral responsibility to heal and repair seems pathetic. But 163 Kritik Answers mind does its work, it plunges into being, into mathematical multiples and starts counting the cells, the graveyards, and bullet wounds. Rational practical deliberation is always about the facts that encircle the void inaccessible to deliberation and practical reason. 164 Kritik Answers Calculability Good: 2AC (2/2) THIRD, INFINITE JUSTICE REQUIRES CALCULATION Jacques Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Drucilla Cornell, ed, 92, p. 289. , that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between institutions or states and others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. It's always possible. And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we That justice exceeds law and calculation associate with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which . Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn't have to be reinvented there where we are cast, there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond intervene in it and are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc the -already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement does not properly belong either to justice or law. It only belongs to either of these two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the very 4bundations of law such as they had previously been This was true for example in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the grand geopolitical scale, beyond calculated or delimited. all self-serving interpretations, beyond all determined and particular reappropriations of international law, other areas must constantly open up that at first can seem like secondary or marginal areas. This marginality also signifies that a violence, indeed a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the examples closest to us would be found in the area of laws on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception; bio-engineering, medical experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without forgetting, of course, the treatment of what we call animal life, animality. On this last problem, the Benjamin text that I'm coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this subject remain quite obscure, if not quite traditional). FOURTH, FOCUS ON THE INCALCULABLE IS PARALYZING Mithcell Stephens, chairman of the journalism and mass-communication department at NYU, New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1994, http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Jacques%20Derrida%20-%20NYT%20-%20page.htm, accessed 11/7/02 Deconstruction had another problem: the widely held belief that reading in search of contradictions and misunderstandings is foolish, if not insidious. John Updike has attacked what he has called "deconstruction's fatiguing premise that art has no health in it." Critics on the right are outraged by the implication that there is something tangled or "impossible" about such important concepts as "reality" and "truth," which they are committed to extricating from the grip of quotation marks. "Derrida's influence has been disastrous," Roger Kimball, a conservative critic and author of "Tenured Radicals," proclaims. "He has helped foster a sort of anemic nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators who no longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who would find that notion risible." Though Derrida considers himself a member of the democratic left, critics on the left haven't necessarily been any kinder. Some have charged that all this emphasis on the "impossible," on what we can't know, threatens to leave us paralyzed, "standing" -- like poor Bartleby -- "mute and solitary" before the world's injustices. 165 Kritik Answers A2 ―Tyranny of Survival‖ (1/2) FIRST, WE OUTWEIGH – EVEN IF SURVIVAL RHETORIC CAUSES TYRANNY, THEY HAVEN‘T DISPROVEN OUR TRUTH CLAIMS. WE STILL PREVENT EXTINCTION SECOND, NO LINK – THE NAZIS ALSO WORE T-SHIRTS, THAT DOESN‘T PROVE OUR USE OF SURVIVAL CAUSES OPPRESSION THIRD, IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE JUSTIFIES SURVIVAL RHETORIC Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 106-7 But let us assume that the stage of a dark cloud on some distant horizon has been passed, and the evidence is good that serious deterioration has already set in. At what point in the deterioration should survival become a priority? Observe that I said a priority; it should never become the priority if that means the sacrifice of all other values. But there are surely conditions under which it could become a priority, and a very high one. The most important of those conditions would be the existence of evidence that irreversibility was beginning to set in, making it increasingly impossible to return to the original conditions. That situation, combined with visible evidence of serious present deterioration-for instance, an urgent need to develop compensatory technologies-would warrant a focus on survival; for that is just what would be at stake. FOURTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE Schell 1982 (Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej) Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this superior importance, as though in making our decision about extinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to destroy something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this the survival of the species, on the other. For absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives . 166 Kritik Answers A2 ―Tyranny of Survival‖ (2/2) FIFTH, *INDIVIDUALISM IS ALSO TYRANNY: CALLAHAN ARGUES AGAINST ABSOLUTISM, NOT FOR CATEGORICAL REJECTION OF ARGUMENTS APPEALING TO SURVIVAL. Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 134-5 The irony with which Rieff analyzes psychological man makes evident his distrust and final rejection. But Rieff offers little to put in its place, in great part because he does not offer a positive view of culture which would strike a good bargain between the demands of the individual and of the culture. No more than Freud can he offer the foundation for a social ethic which would integrate a range of values in a way that would enable the individual and civilization to mutually behave toward each other in ways which respected the requirements of each. What Rieff has done is to lay bare the hubris and folly of an individualism run amuck, seeking a final break from all cultural restraints. But having rejected that form of individualism, what are the alternatives? Not an ethic of survival, which would manage to keep the individual in line at the price of a final victory of the community over the individual, resolving all tensions, ending the possibility of a mutual respect. If the tyranny of individualism, inherent in the mode of life of psychological man, presents only the prospect of a culture of self-contained human monads occasionally jostling each other, the tyranny of survival projects a world where the individual is effaced altogether. Both tyrannies are proof against any kind of social ethic, for both dissolve that necessary dialectic between individual and community which is the prime requirement of such an ethic. A failure in the first place to posit the validity of both individual and community will make it impossible in the end to combat the virulence of individualism and survivalism, a virulence which not paradoxically draws them closer together with every advance in technology and affluence. The first step, then, in constructing a social ethic for technological societies is to reject the polarities of the analytic attitude, on the one hand, and the species attitude, on the other. The analytic attitude dissolves all of life into a cunning detachment of individual from community, providing the former with the psychological weapons to keep other human beings at bay. The species attitude, seeking only survival and perpetuation, provides no less effective weapons for keeping human beings at bay, only this time in the name of a future made safe for the future. The great threat to the possibility of a social ethic for a technological society is less the absence of all values than the triumph of one value over all others. Both individualism and survival are struggling to achieve that position, with a striking degree of success. Nothing is more important than to deny both the triumph they seek. SIXTH, SURVIVAL AS THE HIGHEST VALUE CAN'T JUST BE REPLACED WITH UNCRITICAL INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AS THE HIGHEST VALUE. Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 57-8 Moreover, as I will develop more fully in later chapters, technological societies impose both a tyranny of survival and a tyranny of individualism. They impose the former because, in times of stress, their extreme fragility (stemming from the high base of expectation they engender and the high degree of total control their complexity demands) is instantly and terrorizingly apparent, creating a natural environment for an obsessive fear of annihilation, i.e., a tyranny of survival. They impose the latter-monomaniacal individualism-because only the privatized life seems viable or endurable in the midst of a system which presents itself as impersonal and uncontrollable. Thus is intensified the tyranny of individualism, which demands that each person create his or her own world ex nihilo: self-direction, self-realization, self-fulfillment-self, self, self. 167 Kritik Answers 168 Kritik Answers A2 ―Ontology First‖: 2AC PREVENTING VIOLENCE COMES BEFORE ONTOLOGY Arnold Davidson, 1989 Critical Inquiry, Winter, p. 424 I understand Levinas‘ work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings: The dimension of the divine opens forth froni the human face. Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted— in our relations with men. . . . The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men .. . that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of.35 Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face; and, in a clear reference to Heidegger‘s idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the country with its trees. In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought, with the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgment of others: As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn‘t the other suffer the fate of God? ... I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 47Oj The suppression of the other, the human, in Heidegger‘s thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is always directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will.38 So Levinas can see in Heidegger‘s silence about the gas chambers and death camps ―a kind of consent to the horror.‖39 And Cavell can characterize Nazis as ―those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by what they do.‖4° Where was Heidegger‘s horror? How could he have failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery‘s aphorism, ―Les evenments ne sont que l‘écume des choses‘ (‗Events are but the foam of things‘).‖4‘ I think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop. 169 Kritik Answers A2 ―Your Impact is Inevitable‖: 2AC AND, ALL OF THEIR INEVITABIILTY ARGUMENTS ARE QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT THAN OUR 1AC SCENARIOS. THEY REFER TO EXTREMELY LOW LEVEL WARS THAT DON‘T CAUSE ANNIHILATION. ANY BIGGER IMPACT IS PURE RHETORIC, WHEREAS WE HAVE EV THAT A BREAKDOWN OF THE REALIST BALANCE CAUSES GREAT POWER WARS ALSO, WARFARE IS AT ITS LOWEST EBB IN HUMAN HISTORY Gregg Easterbrook, journalist, ―The End of War?‖ THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005, p. 18. War has entered a cycle of decline. Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a person's chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history. Five years ago, two academics--Monty Marshall, research director at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, and Ted Robert Gurr, a But here is something you would never guess from watching the news: professor of government at the University of Maryland--spent months compiling all available data on the frequency and death toll of twentieth-century combat, expecting to find an ever-worsening ledger of blood and destruction. Instead, they found, after the terrible years of World Wars I and II, a global increase in war from the 1960s through the mid-'80s. But this was followed by a steady, nearly uninterrupted decline beginning in 1991. They also found a steady global rise since the mid'80s in factors that reduce armed conflict--economic prosperity, free elections, stable central governments, better communication, more "peacemaking institutions," and increased international engagement. Marshall and Gurr, along with Deepa Khosla, published their results as a 2001 report, Peace and Conflict, for the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. At the time, I remember reading that report and thinking, "Wow, this is one of the hottest things I have ever held in my hands." I expected that evidence of a decline in war would trigger a sensation. Instead it received almost no notice. AND, CURRENT GLOBAL TRENDS ARE AGAINST WARFARE Gregg Easterbrook, journalist, ―The End of War?‖ THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005, p. 18. . War "may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents," Keegan wrote. Now there are 15 years of positive developments supporting the idea. Fifteen years is not all that long. Many things could still go badly wrong; there could be ghastly surprises in store. But, for the moment, the trends have never been more auspicious: Swords really are being beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. The world ought to take notice. In his 1993 book, A History of Warfare, the military historian John Keegan recognized the early signs that combat and armed conflict had entered a cycle of decline 170 Kritik Answers A2 ―Your Impact is Inevitable‖: 1AR AND, EXTEND THE 2AC ANSWERS TO THE INEVITABILITY DEBATE. FIRST, THEIR EV ONLY SHOWS THAT LOW SCALE, REGIONAL SKIRMISHES ARE INEVITABLE, NOT THE GREAT POWER WARS OF THE 1AC. THEIR TRANSITION IS THE ONLY RISK OF AN IMPACT SECOND, WE‘RE RUNNING CIRCLES AROUND THEM ON THE UNIQUENESS QUESTION. EASTERBOOK 2005 SHOWS THAT GLOBAL CONFLICT IS AT ITS LOWEST IN HISTORY THIRD, YOU PUT EXTINCTION FIRST. THE RISK OF A NUCLEAR WAR, WHICH SHATTERS THE MORAL FRAME. CROSS-APPLY SCHELL 82 FOURTH, WAR IS DOWN Gregg Easterbrook, journalist, ―The End of War?‖ THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005, p. 18. Of course, 2001 was the year of September 11. But, despite the battles in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere that were ignited by Islamist terrorism and the West's response, a second edition of Peace and Conflict, published in 2003, showed the total number of wars and armed conflicts continued to decline. A third edition despite the invasion of Iraq and other outbreaks of fighting, the overall decline of war continues. This even as the global population keeps rising, which might be expected to lead to more war, not less. of the study, published last week, shows that, 171 Kritik Answers A2 ―Your Impact = Bare Life‖: 2AC (1/3) FIRST, NO LINK – We don‘t ascribe a quantitative value to someone‘s life, but only say that we shouldn‘t forcibly allow them to die in a horrific way, allowing them the option to find their own value. SECOND, VALUE TO LIFE IS SUBJECTIVE… MUST ALLOW PEOPLE THE CHOICE TO FIND THEIR OWN VALUE AT ALL COSTS AND RESIST EXTERNAL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT Schwartz 2004 [―A Value to Life: Who Decides and How?‖ www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf] Those who choose to reason on this basis hope that if the quality of a life can be measured then the answer to whether that life has value to the individual can be determined easily. This raises special problems, however, because the idea of quality involves a value judgement, and value judgements are, by their essence, subject to indeterminate relative factors such as preferences and dislikes. Hence, quality of life is difficult to measure and will vary according to individual tastes, preferences and aspirations. As a result, no general rules or principles can be asserted that would simplify decisions about the value of a life based on its quality. Nevertheless, quality is still an essential criterion in making such decisions because it gives legitimacy to the possibility that rational, autonomous persons can decide for themselves that their own lives either are worth, or are no longer worth, living. To disregard this possibility would be to imply that no individuals can legitimately make such value judgements about their own lives and, if nothing else, that would be counterintuitive. 2 In our case, Katherine Lewis had spent 10 months considering her decision before concluding that her life was no longer of a tolerable quality. She put a great deal of effort into the decision and she was competent when she made it. Who would be better placed to make this judgement for her than Katherine herself? And yet, a doctor faced with her request would most likely be uncertain about whether Katherine‘s choice is truly in her best interest, and feel trepidation about assisting her. We need to know which considerations can be used to protect the patient‘s interests. The quality of life criterion asserts that there is a difference between the type of life and the fact of life. This is the primary difference between it and the sanctity criterion discussed on page 115. Among quality of life considerations rest three assertions: 1. there is relative value to life 2. the value of a life is determined subjectively 3. not all lives are of equal value. Relative value The first assertion, that life is of relative value, could be taken in two ways. In one sense, it could mean that the value of a given life can be placed on a scale and measured against other lives. The scale could be a social scale, for example, where the contributions or potential for contribution of individuals are measured against those of fellow citizens. Critics of quality of life criteria frequently name this as a potential slippery slope where lives would be deemed worthy of saving, or even not saving, based on the relative social value of the individual concerned. So, for example, a mother of four children who is a practising doctor could be regarded of greater value to the community than an unmarried accountant. The concern is that the potential for discrimination is too high. Because of the possibility of prejudice and injustice, supporters of the quality of life criterion reject this interpersonal construction in favour of a second, more personalized, option. According to this interpretation, the notion of relative value is relevant not between individuals but within the context of one person‘s life and is measured against that person‘s needs and aspirations. So Katherine would base her decision on a comparison between her life before and after her illness. The value placed on the quality of a life would be determined by the individual depending on whether he or she believes the current state to be relatively preferable to previous or future states and whether he or she can foresee controlling the circumstances that make it that way. Thus, the life of an athlete who aspires to participate in the Olympics can be changed in relative value by an accident that leaves that person a quadriplegic. The athlete might decide that the relative value of her life is diminished after the accident, because she perceives her desires and aspirations to be reduced or beyond her capacity to control. However, if she receives treatment and counselling her aspirations could change and, with the adjustment, she could learn to value her life as a quadriplegic as much or more than her previous life. This illustrates how it is possible for a person to adjust the values by which they appraise their lives. For Katherine Lewis, the decision went the opposite way and she decided that a life of incapacity and constant pain was of relatively low value to her. It is not surprising that the most vociferous protesters against permitting people in Katherine‘s position to be assisted in terminating their lives are people who themselves are disabled. Organizations run by, and that represent, persons with disabilities make two assertions in this light. First, they claim that accepting that Katherine Lewis has a right to die based on her determination that her life is of relatively little value is demeaning to all disabled people, and implies that any life with a severe disability is not worth Write a list of three things that make living. Their second assertion is that with proper help, over time Katherine would be able to transform her personal outlook and find satisfaction in her life that would increase its relative value for her. The first assertion can be addressed by clarifying that the case of Katherine Lewis must not be taken as a general rule. Deontologists, who are interested in knowing general principles and duties that can be applied across all cases would not be very satisfied with this; a case-based, contextsensitive approach is better suited. Contextualizing would permit freedom to act within a particular context, without the implication that the decision must hold in general. So, in this case, they would prefer to be able to look to duties that would apply in all cases. Here, Katherine might decide that her life is relatively valueless. In another case, for example that of actor Christopher Reeve, …CONTINUED… 172 Kritik Answers A2 ―Your Impact = Bare Life‖: 2AC (2/3) …CONTINUED… the decision to seek other ways of valuing this major life change led to him perceiving his life as highly valuable, even if different in value from before the accident that made him a paraplegic. This invokes the second assertion, that Katherine could change her view over time. Although we recognize this is possible in some cases, it is not clear how it applies to Katherine. Here we have a case in which a rational and competent person has had time to consider her options and has chosen to end her life of suffering beyond what she believes she can endure. Ten months is a long time and it will have given her plenty of opportunity to consult with family and professionals about the possibilities open to her in the future. Given all this, it is reasonable to assume that Katherine has made a well-reasoned decision. It might not be a decision that everyone can agree with but if her reasoning process can be called into question then at what point can we say that a decision is sound? She meets all the criteria for competence and she is aware of the consequences of her decision. It would be very difficult to determine what arguments could truly justify interfering with her choice. The second assertion made by supporters of the quality of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective determination to be made by the person experiencing that life. The important addition here is that the decision is a personal one that, ideally, ought not to be made externally by another person but internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for herself based on a suggests that the determination of comparison between two stages of her life. So did James Brady. Without this element, decisions based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give informed consent. Patients must be given the To ignore or overlook patients‘ judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy and their freedom to decide for themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and comparative consideration of their opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not . past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we must treat persons as rational and as ends in themselves. THIRD, REFUSAL TO ASSIGN A VALUE TO LIFE RENDERS LIFE VALUELESS Phera.com 2005 [www.phera.com/value_of_life] Refusal to assign any value to life often leads, ironically, to ''no'' value being attached to life. So, treating an endangered human life, or even the value of Earth itself, in economics formally as a commodity can be morally justified, in that risks of failure to protect it, thus become costs. FOURTH, NUCLEAR WEAPONS USE IS A HORROR ON PAR WITH GENOCIDE BECAUSE OF HOW IT INDISCRIMINATELY AND ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS INNOCENT LIFE Evans ‗95 [Gareth, Ministor of Foreign Affairs, Australia, ―On the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,‖ Verbatim Excerpts of Oral Statements to the International Court of Justice, October 30, disarm.igc.org/oldwebpages/icjquote.html, acc. 8-24-05//uwyo-ajl] The right to self-defence is not unlimited. It is subject to fundamental principles of humanity. Self-defence is not a justification for genocide, for ordering that there shall be no enemy survivors in combat or for indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population. Nor is it a justification for the use of nuclear weapons. The fact remains that the existence of nuclear weapons as a class of weapons threatens the whole of civilization. This is not the case with respect to any class or classes of conventional weapons. It cannot be consistent with humanity to permit the existence of a weapon which threatens the very survival of humanity. There are some weapons the very existence of which is inconsistent with fundamental general principles of humanity. In the case of weapons of this type, international law does not merely prohibit their threat or use. It prohibits even their acquisition or manufacture, and by extension their possession. Such an attitude has been manifested in the case of other types of weapons of mass destruction. Both the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention do not merely prohibit the use of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, but prevent their very existence. As was hideously demonstrated at Hiroshima, where a relatively minuscule atomic bomb was detonated, and as the release of radiation by the Chernobyl disaster showed to our horror, any use of nuclear weapons, anywhere at any time, would be 173 Kritik Answers devastating and in no way comparable to any use, in whatever magnitude, of conventional weapons 174 Kritik Answers A2 ―Your Impact = Bare Life‖: 2AC (3/3) FIFTH, FAILURE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF ANNIHILATION RISKS TOTALITARIANISM BY DENYING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY Campbell ‗98 [David, Int‘l Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186] The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its urgency. As Derrida observes, ―a just decision is always required immediately, ‗right away.‘‖ This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because the pursuit of ―infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it‖ are unavailable in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, even by unlimited time, ―because the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation.‖ The decision is always ―structurally finite,‖ it a‖always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it.‖ That is why, invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that ―the instant of decision is a madness.‖ The finite nature of the decision may be a ―madness‖ in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derrida‘s argument concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derrida‘s argument addresses more directly – more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley – the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to combat domination. That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, ―that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others.‖ Indeed, ―incalculable justice requires us to calculate.‖ From where do these insistences come? What is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that ― left to itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation.‖ The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid ―the bad,‖ the ―perverse calculation,‖ even the worst.‖ This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the ―at least necessary condition,‖ for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences ―we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.‖ 175 Kritik Answers A2 ―No Value to Life‖: 2AC (1/3) FIRST, THIS ARGUMENT IS REPULSIVE – People ascribe their own value to life. Violently taking it from them is the worst form of atrocity SECOND, THERE‘S ALWAYS A VALUE TO LIFE – Even people in the worst conditions find was of living beautifully THIRD, THIS ISN‘T OFFENSE – If someone finds their life valueless, they can commit suicide. We at least give people who want to live the choice FOURTH, LIFE ONLY BECOMES VALUELESS WHEN IT IS DECLARED AS SUCH [author is describing specific men who were in Auschwitz with him] Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Man‘s Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 90-93 We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner‘s inner self was not so much the enumerated psychophysical causes as it was the only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp‘s degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could, or should, have constituted this ―inner hold‖? Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, result of a free decision. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his release. (In our camp it was pointless even to talk about it.) Actually a prison term was not only uncertain but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a ―provisional existence.‖ We can add to this by defining it as a ―provisional existence of unknown limit.‖ New arrivals usually knew nothing about the conditions at a camp. Those who had come back from other camps were obliged to keep silent, and from some camps no one had returned. On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible A man who could not see the end of his ―provisional existence‖ was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time—inner time-which is a result of their unemployed state. Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange ―timeexperience.‖ In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience! In this connection we are reminded of Thomas Mann‘s The Magic Mountain, which contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Mann studies the spiritual development of people who are in an analogous psychological position, i.e., tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existence— without a future and without a goal. One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote—out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world. A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our provisional existence‖ as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man present of its reality there lay a certain the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp‘s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. meaningless. Life for such people became 176 Kritik Answers A2 ―No Value to Life‖: 2AC (2/3) FIFTH, VALUE TO LIFE IS SUBJECTIVE… MUST ALLOW PEOPLE THE CHOICE TO FIND THEIR OWN VALUE AT ALL COSTS AND RESIST EXTERNAL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT Schwartz 2004 [―A Value to Life: Who Decides and How?‖ www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf] Those who choose to reason on this basis hope that if the quality of a life can be measured then the answer to whether that life has value to the individual can be determined easily. This raises special problems, however, because the idea of quality involves a value judgement, and value judgements are, by their essence, subject to indeterminate relative factors such as preferences and dislikes. Hence, quality of life is difficult to measure and will vary according to individual tastes, preferences and aspirations. As a result, no general rules or principles can be asserted that would simplify decisions about the value of a life based on its quality. Nevertheless, quality is still an persons can decide for themselves that their own lives either are worth, or are no longer worth, living. To disregard this essential criterion in making such decisions because it gives legitimacy to the possibility that rational, autonomous possibility would be to imply that no individuals can legitimately make such value judgements about their own lives and, if nothing else, that would be counterintuitive. 2 In our case, Katherine Lewis had spent 10 months considering her decision before concluding that her life was no longer of a tolerable quality. She put a great deal of effort into the decision and she was competent when she made it. Who would be better placed to make this judgement for her than Katherine herself? And yet, a doctor faced with her request would most likely be uncertain about whether Katherine‘s choice is truly in her best interest, and feel trepidation about assisting her. We need to know which considerations can be used to protect the patient‘s interests. The quality of life criterion asserts that there is a difference between the type of life and the fact of life. This is the primary difference between it and the sanctity criterion discussed on page 115. Among quality of life considerations rest three assertions: 1. there is relative value to life 2. the value of a life is determined subjectively 3. not all lives are of equal value. Relative value The first assertion, that life is of relative value, could be taken in two ways. In one sense, it could mean that the value of a given life can be placed on a scale and measured against other lives. The scale could be a social scale, for example, where the contributions or potential for contribution of individuals are measured against those of fellow citizens. Critics of quality of life criteria frequently name this as a potential slippery slope where lives would be deemed worthy of saving, or even not saving, based on the relative social value of the individual concerned. So, for example, a mother of four children who is a practising doctor could be regarded of greater value to the community than an unmarried accountant. The concern is that the potential for discrimination is too high. Because of the possibility of prejudice and injustice, supporters of the quality of life criterion reject this interpersonal construction in favour of a second, more personalized, option. According to this interpretation, the notion of relative value is relevant not between individuals but within the context of one person‘s life and is measured against that person‘s needs and aspirations. So Katherine would base her decision on a comparison between her life before and after her illness. The value placed on the quality of a life would be determined by the individual depending on whether he or she believes the current state to be relatively preferable to previous or future states and whether he or she can foresee controlling the circumstances that make it that way. Thus, the life of an athlete who aspires to participate in the Olympics can be changed in relative value by an accident that leaves that person a quadriplegic. The athlete might decide that the relative value of her life is diminished after the accident, because she perceives her desires and aspirations to be reduced or beyond her capacity to control. However, if she receives treatment and counselling her aspirations could change and, with the adjustment, she could learn to value her life as a quadriplegic as much or more than her previous life. This illustrates how it is possible for a person to adjust the values by which they appraise their lives. For Katherine Lewis, the decision went the opposite way and she decided that a life of incapacity and constant pain was of relatively low value to her. It is not surprising that the most vociferous protesters against permitting people in Katherine‘s position to be assisted in terminating their lives are people who themselves are disabled. Organizations run by, and that represent, persons with disabilities make two assertions in this light. First, they claim that accepting that Katherine Lewis has a right to die based on her determination that her life is of relatively little value is demeaning to all disabled people, and implies that any life with a severe disability is not worth Write a list of three things that make living. Their second assertion is that with proper help, over time Katherine would be able to transform her personal outlook and find satisfaction in her life that would increase its relative value for her. The first assertion can be addressed by clarifying that the case of Katherine Lewis must not be taken as a general rule. Deontologists, who are interested in knowing general principles and duties that can be applied across all cases would not be very satisfied with this; they would prefer to be able to look to duties that would apply in all cases. Here, a case-based, context-sensitive approach is better suited. Contextualizing would permit freedom to act within a particular context, without the implication that the decision must hold in general. So, in this case, Katherine might decide that her life is relatively valueless. In another case, for example that of actor Christopher Reeve, the decision to seek other ways of valuing this major life change led to him perceiving his life as highly valuable, even if different in value from before the accident that made him a paraplegic. This invokes the second assertion, that Katherine could change her view over time. Although we recognize this is possible in some cases, it is not clear how it applies to Katherine. Here we have a case in which a rational and competent person has had time to consider her options and has chosen to end her life of suffering beyond what she believes she can endure. Ten months is a long time and it will have given her plenty of opportunity to consult with family and professionals about the possibilities open to her in the future. Given all this, it is reasonable to assume that Katherine has made a well-reasoned decision. It might not be a decision that everyone can agree with but if her reasoning process can be called into question then at what point can we say that a decision is sound? She meets all the criteria for competence and she is aware of the consequences of her decision. It would be very difficult to determine what arguments could truly justify interfering with her choice. The second assertion made by supporters of the quality of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion suggests the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective determination to be made by the person experiencing that life. The important addition here is that the decision is a personal one that, ideally, ought not to be made externally by another person but that the determination of internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for herself based on a comparison between two stages of her life. So did James Brady. Without this element, decisions based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give To ignore or overlook patients‘ judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy and their freedom to decide for themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and comparative informed consent. Patients must be given the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not. consideration of their past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we must treat persons as rational and as ends in themselves . 177 Kritik Answers A2 ―No Value to Life‖: 2AC (3/3) SIXTH, ―NO VALUE TO LIFE‖ RHETORIC UNDERMINES HOPE FOR THE FUTURE. IT CREATES FALSE HOPE OF LIBERATION FROM MEANINGLESSNESS WITHOUT ADDRESSING WHAT WE ARE LIVING FOR. VOTE TO AFFIRM INTRINSIC VALUE TO EXISTENCE [THIS EVIDENCE IS GENDER PARAPHRASED] Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Man‘s Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 96-98 I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F—, my senior block warden, a fairly wellknown composer and librettist, confided in me one day: ―I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctor—for me! I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.‖ ―And when did you have this dream?‖ I asked. ―In February, 1945,‖ he answered. It was then the beginning of March. ―What did your dream voice answer?‖ Furtively he whispered to me, ―March thirtieth.‖ When F— told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty-ninth, F— suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus. Those who know how close the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend‘s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body‘s resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the body fell victim to illness—and thus the voice of his dream was right after all. The observations of this one case and the conclusion drawn from them are in accordance with something that was drawn to my attention by the chief doctor of our concentration camp. The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year‘s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a any attempt to restore a man‘s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche‘s words, ―[One] He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,‖ could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died. As we said before, psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, ―I have nothing to expect from life any more.‖ What sort of answer can one give to that? What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to thisnk of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. each individual. SEVENTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE Schell 1982 (Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136-137 uw//wej) Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most it does not go far enough to point out this superior importance, as though in making our decision about extinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and the survival of the species, on the other. For the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to destroy something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives . 178 Kritik Answers ―No Value To Life‖ Justifies Genocide EUTHANASIA AND GENOCIDE IS JUSTIFIED BY THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE RHETORIC OF ―NO VALUE TO LIFE‖ Richard Coleson, M.A.R., J.D., ISSUES IN LAW & MEDICINE, Summer, 1997 Euthanasia also was advocated in Germany. As early as 1895, a widely-used German medical textbook made a claim for "the right to death." Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 64 (1993). Immediately following World War I, the notion took greater root in the German medical and legal professions, instigated largely by a publication by Professors Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche of Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwertens Leben (Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life) (1920). See 8 Issues in Law & Med. 221 (1992) (Patrick Derr and Walter Wright, trans.) (copies of which have been lodged with the Court). What transpired in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s would unalterably change the debate over the ethics and legality of physicians participating in ending the lives of their patients. In that period, the lives of hundreds of thousands of terminally ill, incurably sick, and mentally incompetent patients were terminated by German doctors--the elite of the profession in Europe--in a program of "euthanasia" propagated both by acceptance of the " unworthy life" thesis and by the imposition of National Socialist theories of eugenics derived from earlier concepts developed by the German medical profession and intelligentsia. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945 93-97, 273-277, 284-285 (1994); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide 44-79 (1986); Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed, supra at 74-95. In the ensuing decades, the connection of medical killing in Nazi Germany to contemporary debates regarding the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia has been a matter of great controversy. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, supra at 291-98. [Footnote omitted] It is clear, however, that those closest to these events saw some connection. The condemnation of the "Nazi doctors" was universal and prompted great reflection on the question of ensuring that their actions never be repeated. As one step, the world's physicians reaffirmed the foundational ethical principle of their profession: that doctors must not kill. [Footnote omitted] The cases before this Court are the most important juridical test since that time of the meaning of that principle. For this reason alone, the experience which influenced so much of what the world thinks today of the issue of euthanasia is relevant to the deliberations of this Court. The acceptance by physicians of the notion of a "life not worthy to be lived" under the "euthanasia" program was a cornerstone of the horror that was to follow. Leo Alexander, Medical Science Under Dictatorship, 241 New Eng. J. Med. 39, 44 (1949). Without the willingness of doctors to participate, the euthanasia program would not have occurred. Patrick Derr, Hadamar, Hippocrates, and the Future of Medicine: Reflections on Euthanasia and the History of German Medicine, 4 Issues in Law & Med. 487 (1989). This "cornerstone" principle persists today. The experience of the Netherlands (described in the Brief of Amicus Curiae the American Suicide Foundation in No. 96-110) establishes that the participation of physicians in killing their patients invariably rests upon, and propagates, the notion of life unworthy of life. The writings of pro-euthanasia philosophers James Rachels, Peter Singer, and John Harris [Footnote omitted] confirm this fact. While social and political conditions in Western democracies obviously differ from those of post-World War I and Nazi Germany, the consequences of legalizing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia will be no less dire. 179 Kritik Answers ―No Value To Life‖ Justifies Nazism ALSO, THE ARGUMENT THAT CERTAIN CONDITIONS MAKE ―LIFE NOT WORTH LIVING‖ ACCEPTS THE PHILOSOPHICAL PREMISE OF NAZI GERMANY STYLE MURDERS AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS THAT RESPECT FOR LIFE DOES NOT ENTAIL PRESERVING LIFE Steven Neeley, Assistant Professor at Saint Francis, AKRON LAW REVIEW v. 28, Summer, 1994. The final solution in the United States and other western societies will be unlike the final solution in Nazi Germany in its details, but not unlike it in its horror. And I fear that some who now live will experience this final solution. They will live to see the day they will be killed. Variations of the "slippery-slope" argument as applied to suicide and euthanasia are abundant. Beauchamp has argued, for example, that at least from the perspective of rule utilitarianism, the wedge argument against euthanasia should be taken seriously. Accordingly, although a "restricted-active-euthanasia rule would have some utility value" since some intense and uncontrollable suffering would be eliminated, "it may not have the highest utility value in the structure of our present code or in any imaginable code which could be made current, and therefore may not be a component in the ideal code for our society . . . . For the disutility of introducing legitimate killing into one's moral code (in the form of active euthanasia rules) may, in the long run, outweigh the utility of doing so, as a result of the eroding effect such a relaxation would have on rules in the code which demand respect for human life. " Beauchamp then continues down a now-familiar path: If, for example, rules permitting active killing were introduced, it is not implausible to suppose that destroying defective newborns (a form of involuntary euthanasia) would become an accepted and common practice, that as population increases occur the aged will be even more neglectable and neglected than they now are, that capital punishment for a wide variety of crimes would be increasingly tempting, that some doctors would have appreciably reduced fears of actively injecting fatal doses whenever it seemed to them propitious to do so . . . . A hundred such possible consequences might easily be imagined. But these few are sufficient to make the larger point that such rules permitting killing could lead to a general reduction of respect for human life. 180 Kritik Answers There‘s Always Value To Life THERE‘S ALWAYS VALUE TO LIFE Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Man‘s Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 104 But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a poet—to avoid sounding like a preacher myself—who had written, ―Was Dii erlebst, k,ann keme Macht der Welt Dir rauben.‖ (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind. Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die. THERE‘S ALWAYS VALUE TO LIFE, EVEN WITH TREMENDOUS SUFFERING Victor Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Man‘s Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 99-100 When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. For us, as prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed from reality. They were the only thoughts that could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to be no chance of coming out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying. Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp‘s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, ―Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!‖ (How much suffering there is to get through!) Rilke spoke of ―getting through suffering‖ as others would talk of ―getting through work.‖ There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, ‗I have wept it out of my system.‖ 181 Kritik Answers A2 ―Communication Scholar Framework‖: 2AC MCCHESNEY CONCEDES THAT UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT McChesney ‗96 [Robert W., U. of Wisconsin-Madison, ―The Internet and U.S. Communication PolicyMaking in Historical and Critical Perspective,‖ Journal of Communication 46 (1), Winter, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue4/mcchesney.html, acc. 9-30-06//uwyo-ajl] All communication technologies have unanticipated and unintended effects, and one function of policy-making is to understand them so we may avoid or minimize the undesirable ones. The digitalization and computerization of our society are going to transform us radically, yet even those closely associated with these developments express concern about the possibility of a severe deterioration of the human experience as a result of the information revolution (Deitch, 1994; Stoll, 1995; Talbott, 1995). As one observer notes, "Very few of us-only the high priests-really understand the new technologies, and these are surely the people least qualified to make policy decisions about them" (Charbeneau, 1994, pp. 28-29). For every argument extolling the "virtual community" and the liberatory aspects of cyberspace, it seems every bit as plausible to reach dystopian conclusions. Why not look at the information highway as a process that encourages the isolation, atomization, and marginalization of people in society? In fact, cannot the ability of people to create their own community in cyberspace have the effect of terminating a community in the general sense? In a class-stratified, commercially oriented society like the United States, cannot the information highway have the effect of simply making it possible for the well-to-do to bypass any contact with the balance of society altogether? These are precisely the types of questions that need to be addressed and answered in communication policy-making and precisely the types of questions in which the market has no interest (Chapman, 1995). At any rate, a healthy skepticism toward technology should be the order of the day. COMMUNICATION SCHOLARS HAVE TO CONSIDER POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES Sandgathe 2001 [Sharon, Engl Dept. @ Arizona, ―The Culture of Agriculture,‖ February 27, darkwing.uoregon.edu/~tns/session_6.htm, acc 9-30-06] As a scholar of rhetoric, much of my work examines discourse in public arenas. I find public constructions of agriculture to be a fascinating site for study because in agriculture people must explicitly engage the interpenetration of nature and culture. Currently, a common way to validate a particular vision of that interpenetration is to label a favored version of agriculture with the highly prized signifier ―sustainable.‖ In this discussion I will argue that the shifting use of the term ―sustainable agriculture‖ in public discourse reflects political conflict over social identities, cultural values, and material practices. I will also examine how discourses about nature, especially highly valued scientific discourses, are used to legitimate the social agendas represented by ―sustainable agriculture,‖ and what the political consequences of that legitimization might be. 182 Kritik Answers **Democratic Talk** Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (1/2) TURN: DEMOCRATIC TALK – A. REFUSING TO ACT AS IF WE‘RE THE GOVERNMENT DESTROYS THE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF DEBATE Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) Agenda-Setting. In liberal democracies, agendas are typically regarded as the province of elites -of committees, or executive officers, or (even) pollsters. This is so not simply because representative systems delegate the agenda-setting function or because they slight citizen participation, but because they conceive of agendas as fixed and self-evident, almost natural, and in this sense incidental to such vital democratic processes as deliberation and decision-making. Yet a people that does not set its own agenda, by means of talk and direct political exchange, not only relinquishes a vital power of government but also exposes its remaining powers of deliberation and decision to ongoing subversion. What counts as an "issue" or a "problem" and how such issues or problems are formulated may to a large extent predetermine what decisions are reached. For example, the choice between building a small freeway and a twelve-lane interstate highway in lower Manhattan may seem of little moment to those who prefer to solve the problems of urban transportation with mass rail transit. Or the right to choose among six mildly rightof-center candidates may fail to exercise the civic imagination of socialists. Nor is it sufficient to offer a wide variety of options, for what constitutes an option-how a question is formulated-is as controversial as the range of choices offered. Abortion is clearly an issue that arouses intense public concern at present, but to say that it belongs on the public agenda says too little. The vital question remains: How is it presented? In this form: "Do you believe there should be an amendment to the Constitution protecting the life of the unborn child?" Or in this form: "Do you believe there should be an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting abortions?" When asked the first question by a New York Times-CBS poll, over one-half responded "yes," whereas when asked the second question only 29 percent said "yes .,,25 He who controls the agenda-if only its wording-controls the outcome. The battle for the Equal Rights Amendment was probably lost because its enemies managed to place it on the public agenda as calling for "the destruction of the family, the legitimization of homosexuality, and the compulsory use of coed toilets." The ERA's supporters never succeeded in getting Americans to see it as "the simple extension of the Constitution's guarantees of rights to women"-a goal that most citizens would probably endorse. The ordering of alternatives can affect the patterns of choice as decisively as their formulation. A compromise presented after positions have been polarized may fail; a constitutional amendment presented at the tail end of the period of change that occasioned it may not survive in a new climate of opinion. A proposal paired with a less attractive alternative may succeed where the same proposal paired with some third option would fail. What these realities suggest is that in a genuine democracy agenda-setting cannot precede talk or deliberation, and decision but must be approached as a permanent function of talk itself. Relegating agenda-setting to elites or to some putatively "natural" process is an abdication of rights and responsibilities. Unless the debate about Manhattan's interstate freeway permits people to discuss their fundamental priorities for mass transportation, energy, and ecology, it is a sham. Unless the debate over abortion permits people to discuss the social conditions of pregnancy, the practical alternatives available to the poor, and the moral dilemmas of a woman torn between her obligations to her own body and life and to an embryo, such debate will treat neither pregnant women nor unborn babies with a reasonable approximation of justice. For these reasons, strong democratic talk places its agenda at the center rather than at the beginning of its politics. It subjects every pressing issue to continuous examination and possible reformulation. Its agenda is, before anything else, its agenda. It thus scrutinizes what remains unspoken, looking into the crevices of silence for signs of an unarticulated problem, a speechless victim, or a mute protester. The agenda of a community tells a community where and what it is. It defines that community's mutualism and the limits of mutualism and draws up plans for pasts to be institutionalized or overcome and for futures to be avoided or achieved. Far from being a mere preliminary of democracy, agenda-setting becomes one of its pervasive, defining functions. 180-182 183 Kritik Answers Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (2/2) B. THE IMPACT IS SLAVERY [THIS EV HAS BEEN GENDER MODIFIED] Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) Political animals interact socially in ways that abstract morals and metaphysics cannot account for. Their virtue is of another order, although few theorists who have defended this claim have been called everything from m realists to immoralists for their trouble. Yet Montaigne caught the very spirit of social man when he wrote, "the virtue assigned to the affairs of the world is a virtue with many bends, angles, and elbows, so as to join and adapt itself to human weakness; mixed and artificial, not straight, clean, constant or purely innocent." If the human essence is social, then men and women have to choose not between independence or dependence but between citizenship or slavery. Without citizens, Rousseau warns, there will be neither free natural men nor satisfied solitaries-there will be "nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards." To a strong democrat, Rousseau's assertion at the opening of his Social Contract that [an individual] is born free yet is everywhere in chains does not mean that [an individual] is free by nature but society enchains him [or her]. It means rather that natural freedom is an abstraction, whereas dependency is the concrete human reality, and that the aim of-politics must therefore be not to rescue natural freedom from politics, but, to invent and pursue artificial freedom within and through politics. Strong democracy aims not to disenthrall [individuals] but to legitimate their dependency by means of citizenship and to establish their political freedom by means of the democratic community. 216 184 Kritik Answers Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (1/3) OUR TURNS ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE THE KRITIK IS UNLIKELY TO BRING ABOUT AN ENTIRELY CHANGED WORLD – THE PROCESS OF DEMOCRATIC TALK BRINGS US TOGETHER AS A POLITICAL COMMUNITY WHERE WE CAN ENVISION ALTERNATIVE FUTURES (RE)CREATING OUR POWER AS POLITICALLY ACTIVE PARTICIPATING CITIZENS – MORE EV… Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) Liberal critics of participation, imbued with the priorities of privatism, will continue to believe that the neighborhood-assembly idea will falter for lack of popular response. "Voters," writes Gerald Pomper, "have too many pressing tasks, from making money to making love, to follow the arcane procedures of government." If the successful and industrious will not participate because they are too busy, and the poor and victimized will not participate because they are too apathetic, who will people the assemblies and who will give to talk a new democratic life? But of course people refuse to participate only where politics does not count-or counts less than rival forms o private activity. They are apathetic because they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic. There is no evidence to suggest that once empowered, a people will refuse to participate. The historical evidence of New England towns, community school boards, neighborhood associations, and other local bodies is that participation fosters more participation. 272 185 Kritik Answers Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (2/3) RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW WE HAVE TO SET THE AGENDA – LEAVING THESE DUTIES UP TO THE ELITES AND THOSE IN CONTROL ENSURES THAT WE WILL ALL LOSE OUR SOVEREIGNTY – WE HAVE TO DETERMINE WHAT QUESTIONS ARE GOING TO BE ASKED AND WHAT FORM THOSE QUESTIONS TAKE – TAKING PROACTIVE ACTION EVEN IF IT IS JUST COMMON DELIBERATION IN THIS ROOM IS WHAT IS TRULY CRITICAL TO OUR OWN POLITICAL EFFICACY AND PREVENTING THOSE IN POWER FROM SETTING THE AGENDA FOR US Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) If talk can give the dead back their voices, it can also challenge the paradigms of the living and bring fundamental changes in the meaning or valuation of words. Major shifts in ideology and political power are always accompanied by such paradigmatic-shifts in language usage-so much so that historians have begun to map the former by charting the latter. The largely pejorative meaning that the classical and early Christian periods gave to such terms as individual and privacy was transformed during the Renaissance in a fashion that eventually produced the Protestant Reformation and the ethics of commercial society. Eighteenth-century capitalism effected a transvaluation of the traditional vocabulary of virtue in a manner that put selfishness and avarice to work in the name of public goods. (George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty is merely the last and least in a long line of efforts to invert moral categories.) The history of democracy itself is contained in the history of the word democracy. The battle for selfgovernment has been fought over and over again as pejorative valuations of the term have competed with affirmative ones (pitting Plato or Ortega or Lippmann or modern political science against Machiavelli or Rousseau or Jefferson). The terms ochlocracy, mob rule, tyranny of the majority, and rule-of the masses all reflect hostile constructions of democracy; communitarianism, participationism, egalitarianism, and -it must be admittedstrong democracy suggest more favorable-constructions. Poverty was once a sign of moral weakness; now it is a badge of environmental victimization. Crime once proceeded from original now it is an escape from poverty. States' rights once bore the stigma of dishonor, then signified vigorous sectionalism, then was a code word for racism, and has now become a byword for the new decentralized federalism. Busing was once an instrument of equal educational opportunity; now it is a means of destroying communities. The shifts in the meaning of these and dozens of other key words mirror fundamental national shifts in power and ideology. The clash of competing visions-of social Darwinism versus collective responsibility and political mutualism, of original sin and innate ideas versus environmentalism, of anarchism versus collectivism ultimately plays itself out on the field of everyday language, and the winner in the daily struggle for meaning may emerge as the winner in the clash of visions, with the future itself as the spoils of victory. An ostensibly free citizenry that leaves this battle to elites, thinking that it makes a sufficient display of its freedom by deliberating and voting on issues already formulated in concepts and terms over which it has exercised no control, has in fact already given away the greater part of its sovereignty. How can such a citizenry -help but oppose busing if busing means the wrecking of communities and only the wrecking of communities? How can it support the right to abortion if abortion means murder, period? To participate in a meaningful 186 Kritik Answers process of decision on these questions, self-governing citizens must participate in the talk through which the questions are formulated and given a 187 Kritik Answers Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (3/3) (Barber continues) decisive political conception. The anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s did just this, of course; it won no elections, it participated in no votes, and it contributed to no legislative debates. But it radically altered how most Americans saw the war and so helped bring it to an end. If language as a living, changing expression of an evolving community can both encapsulate and challenge the past, it also provides a vehicle for exploring the future. Language's flexibility and its susceptibility to innovation permit [people] to construct their visions of the future first in the realm of words, within whose confines a community can safely conduct its deliberations. Language can offer new solutions to old problems by altering, how we perceive these problems and can make new visions accessible to traditional communities by the imaginative use (and transvaluation) of familiar language. This-is the essence of public thinking." The process moves us perforce from particularistic and immediate considerations of our own and our groups' interests, examined in a narrow temporal framework ("Will there be enough gasoline for my summer vacation trip?" for example), to general and long-term considerations of the nature of the communities we live in and of how well our life plans fit in with that nature ("Is dependence on oil a symbol of an overly materialistic, insufficiently self-sufficient society?" for example). In sum, what we call things affects how we do things; and despite the lesson of Genesis, for mortals at least the future must be named before it can be created. Language is thus always the crucial battlefield; it conserves or liquidates tradition, it challenges or, champions established power paradigms and it is the looking glass of all future vision. If language is alive, society can grow; if it is dialectical, society can reconcile its parts- past and future no less than interest and interest or class and class. As Jurgen Habermas has understood, democracy means above all equal access to language, and strong democracy means widespread and ongoing participation in talk by the entire citizenry. Left to the media, the bureaucrats, the professors, and the managers, language quickly degenerates into one more weapon in the armory of elite rule. The professoriate and the literary establishment are all too willing to capture the public with, catch phrases and portentous titles. How often in the past several decades have Americans been made to see themselves, and thus their futures, through the lens of a writer's book title? Recall The True Be liever, The Managerial Society, The End of Ideology, The Other America, The Culture of Narcissism, The Greening of America, The Totalitarian Temptation, The Technological Society, The Two Cultures, The Zero-Sum Society, Future Shock. We are branded by words and our future is held hostage to bestseller lists'.195-197 188 Kritik Answers Debate Solves Democratic Talk: Ext DEBATE SERVES AS A FORUM THROUGH WHICH WE CAN ENGAGE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS Watson, 04 (J.B. Watson, Assistant Professor of sociology and gerontology coordinator @ Stephen F. Austin State University, ―A Justification of the Civic Engagement Model,‖ p. 73-74, Service Learning: History, Theory, and Issues) The civic engagement of ordinary citizens with voluntary associations, social institutions, and government in local communities is a central feature of strong democracies. Further, a fundamental feature of democratic governmental structure is its relationship to civil society, defined as "voluntary social activity not compelled by the state" (Bahlmueller, 1997, p. 3). Through voluntary participation in civil society associations at the local and regional level, citizens pursue activities that potentially serve the public good. Through this rudimentary civic engagement, citizens learn the attitudes, habits, skills, and knowledge foundational to the democratic process-(Patrick, 1998). Unfortunately, in 1998 the National Commission on Civic Renewal (NCCR) highlighted the declining quantity and quality of civic engagement at all levels of American life. A number of other studies concur on the decline of involvement in civic activities (Bahlmueller, 1997; McGrath, 2001; Putnam, 1995). This concern about the nature and extent of civic engagement in the United States has impacted the debate on the proper role of higher education in a democracy. Higher education institutions, as transmitters of essential elements of the dominant culture, struggle with the development of mechanisms to socialize the next generation about democratic values. A national debate has emerged on the higher education response to this perceived need for revitalizing constructive democratic engagement, building civil society, and increasing citizen participation in government at all levels. Colleges and universities have responded with a number of civic engagement initiatives, including university-community partnerships, empirical studies of political engagement, community-based (collaborative) research, and the development of new (or expanded) service-learning programs (Jacoby 2003). A RENEWAL OF DEMOCRATIC TALK VIA COMMUNITY BASED ORGANIZATIONS IS KEY TO CREATING A FOUNDATION FOR DEMOCRACY- ALLOWING US TO INFLUENCE THE POLITICAL REALM Cohen 03--Professor of Political Science at Columbia University—( Jean L., ―Civic Innovation in America: Towards a Reflexive Politics‖, The Good Society 12.1 (2003) 56-62, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/good_society/v012/12.1cohen.html) Civic Innovation in America is a refreshing addition to what has become a growth industry of writing on American civil society. Unlike the influential approach of Robert Putnam, this is not a backward-looking lament about the decline of associational life, although Sirianni and Friedland are aware of the worrisome signs of civic disaffection and citizen passivity in the U.S. 1Yet they don't join neo-communitarian efforts to revive traditionalistic types of "mediating institutions" in order to secure social integration. 2Although not adverse to mobilizing old forms of social capital—such as congregation-based community organizations within and across denominational lines—they are primarily interested in networks that expand local organizing capacities for new purposes and with fresh democratic methods. 3 Indeed, the focus of Civic Innovation is on significant recent attempts "from below" to reinvent and revitalize American democracy. Accordingly, the book points the reader to the ongoing public work of citizens and the actual processes of civic innovation that have sprung up in recent years. The authors maintain that: "Over the past several decades American society has displayed a substantial capacity for civic innovation, and the future of our democracy will depend on whether we can deepen and extend such innovation to solve major public problems, and transform the way we do politics." 4Theirs is a forward-looking approach: it highlights new forms of cooperative civic participation in civil society and discusses the new modes of governance needed to support them. 189 Kritik Answers 190 Kritik Answers Democratic Talk Key to Autonomy: Ext THE DEMOCRATIC TALK THAT WE ARE CONDUCTING IS A NECESSARY CONDITION FOR AUTONOMY – GIVING UP POLITICAL TALK OF WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ENSURES THAT VALUES AND BELIEFS WILL BECOME OSSIFIED Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) 6. Maintaining Autonomy. Talk helps us overcome narrow selfinterest, but it plays an equally significant role in buttressing the autonomy of individual wills that is essential to democracy. It is through talk that we constantly reencounter, reevaluate, and repossess the beliefs, principles, and maxims on the basis of which we exert our will in the political realm. To be free, it is not enough for us simply to will what we choose to will. We must will what we possess, what truly belongs to us. John Stuart Mill commented on the "fatal tendency of mankind to leave all thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful." He ascribed to this tendency "the cause of about half [men's] errors." Mindless convictions not only spawn errors, they turn those who hold them into charlatans of liberty. Today's autonomously held belief is tomorrow's heteronomous orthodoxy unless, tomorrow, it is reexamined and repossessed. Talk is the principal mechanism by which we can retest and thus repossess our convictions, which means that a democracy that does not institutionalize talk will soon be without autonomous citizens, though men and women who call themselves citizens may from time to time deliberate, choose, and vote. Talk immunizes values from ossification and protects the political process from rigidity, orthodoxy, and the yoke of the dead past. This, among all the functions of talk, is the least liable to representation, since only the presence of our own wills working on a value can endow that value with legitimacy and us with our autonomy. Subjecting a value to the test of repossession is a measure of legitimacy as well as of autonomy: forced knowingly to embrace their prejudices, many men falter. Prejudice is best practiced in the dark by dint of habit or passion. Mobs are expert executors of bigotry because they assimilate individual wills into a group will and relieve individuals of any responsibility for their actions. It is above all the imagination that dies when will is subordinated to instinct, and as we have seen, it is the imagination that fires empathy. Values will, naturally, conflict even where they are thoughtfully embraced and willed; and men's souls are sufficiently complex for error or even evil to dwell comfortably in the autonomous man's breast. Autonomy is no guarantee against moral turpitude; indeed, it is its necessary condition. But in the social setting, it seems evident that maxims that are continuously reevaluated and repossessed are preferable to maxims that are embraced once and obeyed blindly thereafter. At a minimum, convictions that are reexamined are more likely to change, to adapt themselves to altered circumstances and to evolve to meet the challenges offered by competing views. Political willing is thus never a one-time or sometime thing (which is the great misconception of the social-contract tradition), but an ongoing shaping and reshaping of our common world that is as endless and exhausting as our making and remaking of our personal lives. A moment's complacency may mean the death of liberty; a break in political concentration may spell the atrophy of an important value; a pleasant spell of privatism may yield irreversible value ossification. Democratic politics is a demanding business. Perhaps this is why common memory is even more important for democracy than for other forms of political culture. Not every principle of conduct can be tested at every moment; not every conviction can be exercised on every occasion; not every value can be regarded as truly ours at a given instant. Thus remembrance and imagination must act sometimes as surrogates for the actual testing of maxims. Founding myths and the rituals associated with them (July 14 in France or August 1 in Switzerland), representative political heroes who embody admired convictions (Martin Luther King or Charles de Gaulle), and popular oral traditions can all revivify citizens' common beliefs and their sense of place in the political culture. These symbols are no substitute for the citizenry's active reexamination of values through participation in political talk, but they can and do supplement such talk through the imaginative reconstruction of the past in live images and through the cultivation of beliefs that are not necessarily involved in a given year's political business. 190-191 191 Kritik Answers Democratic Talk Key to Checking Right: Ext FAILURE TO ENGAGE IN DEMOCRATIC TALK MEANS THE POLITICAL REALM WILL BE DOMINATED BY THE FARRIGHT AND COLLAPSE INTO FASCISM, CAUSING WARS AND TYRANNY Rorty 98 (Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 87-94) if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and the United States but . In such a world, there may be no supernational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party—namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell‘s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals—Lind‘s ―overclass,‖ the people like you and me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues.7 The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere—to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world‘s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created psuedo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear. Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated—and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.8 The first response comes comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into rightwing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very much worse standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the same side of the managers and stockholders—as sharing the same class interests. For we intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book our fellow citizens. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone will assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis‘ novel It Can‘t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ―nigger‖ and ―kike‖ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left selfishness. For after channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called national politics. the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in It is not the sort of the Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The the Left should put a moratorium on theory . It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman first is that might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey‘s Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of ―individualism versus communitarianism.‖ Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies ―the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order.‖9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of today‘s academic leftists says that some topic has been ―inadequately theorized,‖ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan‘s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ―problematizing familiar concepts.‖ Recent attempts to subvert social institutitons by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ―theorize‖ philosophizing at its worts. The authors of these purportedly ―subversive‖ books honestly believe that the are serving human liberty. But is often something very concrete and near at hand—a curent TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most absract and barren explanations 192 Kritik Answers . These futile attempts to philosophize one‘s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The imaginable cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmund- son calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook."10 193 Kritik Answers Restoring Public Sphere Solves Oppression: Ext RESTORING THE PUBLIC SPHERE FACILITATES AN EMANCIPATORY PRAXIS OF OPEN COMMUNITY Lakeland 93 (Paul, professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, ―Preserving The Lifeworld, Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education,‖ Cross Currents, Winter, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p488, 15p http://www.crosscurrents.org/lakeland2) Habermas, then, is our third ally and resource. He describes the pathology of life in late capitalist societies as the "colonization of the lifeworld by the system,"[4] and vests the hope of movement toward a newly humane and democratic society in the "transformation of the public sphere."[5] The former phrase expresses the conviction that distinctly human patterns of communication and interaction, which are in principle open and even emancipatory, are under threat, progressively squeezed to the margins of communal life by the more instrumental or manipulative model of interactions appropriate to technology or to impersonal systems. By "the public sphere," Habermas means first the empirically discerned historical phenomenon of a community of discourse in which rational discussion of matters of social and political import took place, and influenced the formation of public policy. Secondly, he uses the term to point toward the (perhaps counterfactual) possibility of creating something today that would serve to protect the lifeworld from the depredations of the system or, more simply expressed, to preserve democracy in late capitalist society. Habermas's view is not dissimilar to Frankl's. What Frankl saw epitomized by the Nazi "final solution," namely, the systematic application of technology to eradicate the sense of personal identity, Habermas sees as the logic of late capitalist, national security, consumerist society. But where Frankl looks to inner spiritual resources to defeat these annihilating pressures, Habermas turns to the dynamics of the speech-act. By so doing, incidentally, he strengthens Freire's somewhat unfocused appeal to the "dialogical method" and shows why it is so potentially revolutionary. For Habermas, the attempt to communicate directly with other human beings rests on a set of mutual assumptions: there is something comprehensible to be heard; the speaker is sincere; the speaker seeks truth; the hearer will listen; and so on. Even someone who attempts to deceive another can only hope to do so because the hearer will assume the speaker is acting according to the rules of open communication. Thus, the communication community is oriented in principle towards the "ideal speech situation," that is, a context of distortion-free discourse in which all have equal access to the conversation, and all seek consensus on norms for action. Though such an ideal speech situation may never exist, it operates regulatively to draw communication onward. And what is assumed about the importance of truthfulness and sincerity, and about the dignity of other speakers and hearers, makes communication, which is after all the fundamental structure of human sociality, intrinsically emancipatory. The pathologies of personal, communal, and political life become interpretable in terms of "systematically distorted communication," and overcoming them becomes a matter of restoring the contexts in which communicative praxis can occur. 194 Kritik Answers Talk is Action: Ext TALK IS ACTION – IT MAKES AND REMAKES THE WORLD – IT DEFINES WHAT WE ARE AS A COMMUNITY, WHAT WE WANT AND WHAT WE NEED Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) Stripped of such artificial disciplines, however, talk appears as a mediator of affection and affiliation as well as of interest and identity, of patriotism as well as of individuality. It can build community as well as maintain rights and seek consensus as well as resolve conflict. It offers, along with meanings and significations, silences, rituals, symbols, myths, expressions and solicitations, and a hundred other quiet and noisy manifestations of our common humanity. Strong democracy seeks institutions that can give these things a voice-and an ear. The third issue that liberal theorists have underappreciated is the complicity of talk in action. With talk we can invent alternative futures, create mutual purposes, and construct competing visions of community. Its potentialities thrust talk into the realm of intentions and consequences and render it simultaneously more provisional and more concrete than philosophers are wont to recognize. Their failure of imagination stems in part from the passivity of thin democratic politics and in part from the impatience of speculative philosophy with contingency, which entails possibility as well as indeterminateness. But significant political effects and actions are possible only to the extent that politics is embedded in a world of fortune, uncertainty, and contingency. Political talk is not talk about the world; it is talk that makes and remakes the world. The posture of the strong democrat is thus "pragmatic" in the sense of William James's definition of pragmatism as "the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts." James's pragmatist "turns toward concreteness and adequacy, toward facts, toward action, and toward power.... [Pragmatism thus] means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth." Strong democracy is pragmatism translated into politics in the participatory mode. Although James did not pursue the powerful political implications of his position, he was moved to write: "See already how democratic [pragmatism] is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature." The active, future- oriented disposition of strong democratic talk embodies James's instinctive sense of pragmatism's political implications. Future action, not a priori principle, constitutes such talk's principal (but not principled) concern. 177-178 195 Kritik Answers **Performance** A2 ―Performativity‖ (1/2) THE PERFORMANCE IS ALWAYS ALREADY TAKING PLACE. THE EXISTENCE OF THE ROUND IS THE PERFORMANCE, NOT SPECIFIC SPEECHES Jessica Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter, 1997, n2 p315(32) We bring normativity to our performances as ethical principles that are themselves subject to resistance. By unearthing the contingency of the "self-evident," , the question is not should we resist (since resistance is always, already present), but rather what and how we should resist. This notion of performativity is also important for performative resistance enables politics. Thus understanding the possibilities for innovation in Habermasian deliberative participation. Just as a protestor exposes the contingency of concepts like justice, a dialogue exposes the limits and contingency of rational argumentation. Once we are sensitive to the performative nature of speech, language and discourse, then we Deliberation must be theatrical: it is in the . Indeed it is precisely the non-rational aspects of deliberation that carry the potential for innovation. In his description of the poignant reminders of demonstration Chaloupka recognizes that it is at the margins that the actual force of the demonstration resides, no matter what happens at the microphone. The oral histories of demonstrations (the next day over coffee) linger over the jokes and funny signs and slogans, the outrages and improprieties, more than the speeches and carefully coherent position papers. (68) can see that deliberative politics cannot be confined to the rational statement of validity claims. performance of deliberation that that which cannot be argued for finds expression PERFORMANCE IS ALWAYS CONTEXT-DEPENDENT. OUR CRITICISM CAN ONLY BE EVALUATED IN THE CONTEXT OF DEBATE Jessica Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter, 1997, n2 p315(32) Consequently, a performative concept of political participation changes debates within the traditional participation literature over the inclusion of protest activities and community decisionmaking in the definition of political participation. While these debates have generally been conducted on familiar terrain, justifying the inclusion of such activity by delineating its impact on the distribution of goods, services, or political power by the government, a performative concept of participation breaks down this distinction altogether.(75) Because performative participation is defined by its relation to a set of normalizing disciplinary rules and its confrontation with those rules, nothing can be categorically excluded from the category of political participation. As Honig eloquently puts it, "not everything is political on this (amended) account; it is simply the case that nothing is ontologically protected from politicization, that nothing is necessarily or naturally or ontologically not political."(76) Therefore, the definition of political participation is always context dependent; it depends upon the character of the power network in which it is taken. Political participation is not categorically distinguished from protest or resistance, but rather the focus is on the disruptive potential of an action in a particular network of power relations. To say that participation is context dependent means not only that any action is potentially participation, but also that no particular action is necessarily a participatory act. Housecleaning is a good example. The character of the power network in which one exists defines housecleaning as a potential act of political participation. In her description of the defensive strategies of Black women household workers, Bonnie Thorton Dill argues that the refusal to mop the floor on hands and knees, or the refusal to serve an extra dinner, constitutes an effective act of resistance.(77) It is not the act itself that is politically definitive, but rather the context. Black domestic laborers, who in this context are constructed as desperate, willing to do any type of work, and always immediately available for service, resist that construction by acting as if they have other choices. Thus it is the context of the domestic labor relationship that defines the repertoire of political actions. Similarly, Jonathan Kozol describes poor welfare mothers living in the degrading conditions of the South Bronx whose homes "no matter how besieged, are nonetheless kept spotless and sometimes even look cheerful."(78) For women who are constructed as thoroughly dependent, irresponsible, unfit, and unclean, cleaning the house takes on the character of resistance; it becomes a political act. Housecleaning itself is not necessarily political, rather, 196 Kritik Answers the disciplinary context of a gendered social welfare state gives political import to seemingly banal, everyday activities. 197 Kritik Answers A2 ―Performativity‖ (2/2) COALITIONS MUST PRECEDE VICTORY THROUGH PERFORMANCE Jessica Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter, 1997, n2 p315(32) A performative perspective on participation enriches our understanding of deliberative democracy. This enlarged understanding can be demonstrated by considering the examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol Hager's Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the West German Energy Debate.(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of citizen groups as they enter into problemsolving in contemporary democracies. After detailing the German citizen foray into technical debate and the subsequent creation of energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of energy policy, she concludes that a dual standard of interpretation and evaluation is required for full understanding of the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional understandings of participation focus on the policy dimension and concern themselves with the citizens' success or failure to attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on the discursive, legitimation dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in reconstituting participation discursively and asserts that the legitimation dimension offers an alternative reason for optimism about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive understanding of participation, success is not defined in terms of getting, but rather in terms of solving through consensus. Deliberation is thus an end in itself, and citizens have succeeded whenever they are able to secure a realm of deliberative politics where the aim is forging consensus among participants, rather than achieving victory by some over others. 198 Kritik Answers Performance is Commodified (1/2) THEIR POETRY SUPPORTS THE CULTURE INDUSTRY. IT IS MANUFACTURED DISSENT Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, ―Writing, Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter,"‖ Intertexts, Fall 2000 v4 i2 p144(23) It would be easy to conclude from passages like this that avant-garde styles of writing which foreground the production of subject positions within the discursive configuration of a text are necessarily subversive of established political order because they forestall the "reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter" that underpins the systematic totality of the culture industry. This belief in the inherently subversive effect of textual polyphony and difference underscores Easthope's reading of modernist poetics. But the matter is not so simple. For as Adorno and Horkenheimer demonstrate, incommensurable or "refractory material" is always and everywhere implicated in a dialectical relationship with the "total process of production" that it opposes (Adorno and Horkheimer xii). One of their more melancholy insights is that the culture industry actively produces different images and styles in order to reassert the absolute uniformity of its own authority. Novelty is all around us, from the "standardized jazz improvisation to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality" but what is individual here "is no more than the generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such" (Adorno and Horkheimer 154). The "accidental" or incommensurable detail is "accepted as such" because it can be endlessly reproduced as a "house style" or "lifestyle practice" and, paradoxically, it is the capacity of the culture industry to transform difference into a set of uniform discriminations that allows a social body to be demarcated according to the sectional logic of politicians, advertisers and marketing executives. Fredric Jameson makes exactly the same point when he observes that what has happened in the contemporary or postmodern phase of monopoly capitalism is "that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of producing ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (Jameson 4-5). It is therefore inadequate to proclaim the ineluctable emancipatory promise of incommensurable or refractory material because "capitalism also produces difference or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic" (Jameson 406). CHALLENGES TO CONFORMITY ONLY CEMENT THE OVERARCHING CONTROL OF THE DOMINANT LANGUAGE Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, ―Writing, Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter,"‖ Intertexts, Fall 2000 v4 i2 p144(23) The central claim of this essay is that these critical debates concerning the dialectic between totality and difference in modern cultural production provide the most rewarding context within which to discuss the relationship between textuality and politics in Prynne's poetry. For Prynne's work takes as its subject the very status of writing, and the epistemological practices writing both produces and brings into question, in a cultural sphere dominated by the power of instrumental reason to enforce a principle of "equivalence" where "whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect" (Adorno and Horkheimer 6). The importance of style, or the mode of relation between thought and its representation, to this question becomes apparent when we consider that the failure to challenge this universal principle of equivalence means to accept that the "identity of everything with everything else is paid for in that nothing may at the same time be identical with itself" (Adorno and Horkheimer 12). Yet any challenge to this process of abstraction and exchange based upon the formal autonomy or "difference" of style is vulnerable to Adorno's charge 199 Kritik Answers that it is through difference and exchange "that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 146-47). 200 Kritik Answers Performance is Commodified (2/2) POETIC RESISTANCE IS DIRECTED BY THE CULTURE INDUSTRY Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, ―Writing, Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter,"‖ Intertexts, Fall 2000 v4 i2 p144(23) Prynne's difficult and dialectical style in fact proposes two points of resistance to the principle of equivalence enforced by instrumental rationality and the culture industry. Both may be explicated by reference to Adorno's assertion that the work of art is a "fetish against commodity fetishism" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 227). The fetishistic element within art, according to Adorno, lies in its illusory claim that its value is integral to itself rather than an effect of consumption and exchange. This insistence of the artwork upon its autonomy as a source of value, and the cultivation of styles and modes of reference that place it at one remove from the world around it, is often identified as the origin of the 'elitism' of modernist art. But if we reconsider the entire question of modernist style in the context of the remorseless conversion of use or human labor value into exchange value effected by late capitalism, then the conviction of the modernist artwork that it conceals an autonomous and non-exchangeable source of value offers a challenge to prevailing political and cultural conditions. For it is only by "persisting with its illusory claim to a non-exchangeable dignity" argues Simon Jarvis, that "art resists the notion that the qualitatively incommensurable can be made qualitatively commensurable" (Jarvis 117). This is the artwork's first point of resistance to the principle of equivalence within commodity production. Yet it might still be objected that far from challenging the commodification of culture, the autonomous character of the artwork is instead produced by capitalism, which enables both art and artistic labor to be alienated from any broader social or cultural purpose. 201 Kritik Answers Performance Fails FAITH IN PERFORMANCE IS NAÏVE AND FAILS TO CHANGE POLITICS Rothenberg & Valente ‗97 [Molly Anne, Assoc. Prof. English @ Tulane, & Joseph, Prof. @ Illinois, ―Performative Chic: The Fantasy of a Performative Politics,‖ College Literature 24: 1, February, ASP] The recent vogue for performativity, particularly in gender and postcolonial studies, suggests that the desire for political potency has displaced the demand for critical rigor.[1] Because Judith Butler bears the primary responsibility for investing performativity with its present critical cachet, her work furnishes a convenient site for exposing the flawed theoretical formulations and the hollow political claims advanced under the banner of performativity. We have undertaken this critique not solely in the interests of clarifying performativity's theoretical stakes: in our view, the appropriation of performativity for purposes to which it is completely unsuited has misdirected crucial activist energies, not only squandering resources but even endangering those naive enough to act on performativity's (false) political promise. It is reasonable to expect any practical political discourse to essay an analysis which links its proposed actions with their supposed effects, appraising the fruits of specific political labors before their seeds are sown. Only by means of such an assessment can any political program persuade us to undertake some tasks and forgo others. Butler proceeds accordingly: "The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed to repeat, and through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable repetition itself" (Gender Trouble 148). Here, at the conclusion to Gender Trouble, she makes good her promise that subjects can intervene meaningfully, politically, in the signification system which iteratively constitutes them. The political "task" we face requires that we choose "how to repeat" gender norms in such a way as to displace them. According to her final chapter, "The Politics of Parody," the way to displace gender norms is through the deliberate performance of drag as gender parody. 202 Kritik Answers **Link Answers: General** A2 ―The Case is Apolitical/Has No Theory‖ THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE IS FALSE – BOTH FORMS OF POLITICAL ACTION INVOLVE AND DEPEND ON THE OTHER Homi K. Bhabha, Professor, University of Sussex, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE, 19 94, p. 21-22. Committed to what? At this stage in the argument, I do not want to identify any specific 'object' of political allegiance - the Third World, the working class, the feminist struggle. Although such an objectification Of Political activity is crucial and must significantly inform political debate, it is not the only option for those critics or intellectuals who are committed to progressive political change in the direction of a socialist society. It is a sign of political maturity to accept that there are many forms of Political writing whose different effects are obscured when they are divided between the 'theoretical' and the 'activist'. It is not as if the leaflet involved in the organization of a strike is short on theory, while a speculative article on the theory of ideology ought to have more practical examples or applications. They are both forms of discourse and to that extent they produce rather than reflect their objects of reference. The difference between them lies in their operational qualities. The leaflet has a specific expository and organizational purpose, temporally bound to the event; the theory of ideology makes its contribution to those embedded political ideas and principles that inform the right to strike. The latter does not justify the former; nor does it necessarily precede it. It exists side by side with it - the one as an enabling part of the other - like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, to use a common serniotic analogy in the uncommon context of politics. 203 Kritik Answers **Alternative Answers: General** Individual Action Fails THE ALTERNATIVE ALONE WILL FAIL. THE NATURE OF DISCOURSE AND DOMINANT RECONTEXTUALIZATION PREVENTS INDIVIDUALS FROM SOLVING D. Franklin Ayers 2005 The Review of Higher Education, 28.4, Neoliberal Ideology in Community College Mission Statements: A Critical Discourse Analysis Because discourses are determined by higher levels of social structuring, texts—such as community college mission statements—and the discourses they represent are not created entirely by individuals. Instead, individual producers of text can only choose among the discursive options available at higher levels of social structuring. Because no ideology is monolithic, multiple discourses exist and are available to producers of text, although hegemonic discourses may make alternatives nearly imperceptible. Because discourses reflect ideologies of groups with unequal power resources and because the producer of text must choose among these discourses, he or she engages in a negotiation of power relations. [End Page 534] To the degree that powerful groups act upon discourses at various levels of social structuring, their ideologies and world views gain authority. Dominant discourses consequently determine the meanings assigned to social and material processes, and they do this in ways that reinforce power inequities. One way that meanings may be determined is through recontextualization (Fairclough, 1995). Recontextualization is a process in which the discourse related to one social process dominates or colonizes the discourse related to another social process. 204 Kritik Answers Mann THE CONTEXT OF DEBATE COOPTS THE CRITICISM SINCE IT IS ANTICIPATED AND FOOTNOTED ALTERNATIVE TACTICS WOULD BE NECESSARY FOR IT TO HAVE AN EFFECT Paul Mann, professor of comparative literature at Pomona college, Masocriticism, 1999, pg. 106-107. Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or women‘s studies or queer theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed, and critics can still congratulate themselves on their ―resistance,‖ but the contrary is clearly the case. The most profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., romance philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still possible, and nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance most often serve as mere alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms CRITICISM CAN NEVER BE MAINTAINED AND IS IGNORED BECAUSE OF ITS PROLIFIC NATURE Paul Mann, professor of comparative literature at Pomona college, Masocriticism, 1999, pg. 16-17. The avant-garde, which always began in brilliant refusals and destructions, must in the end abandon those economies that, with frightening efficiency, have put it to use, made it instrumental, profited from it, developed ways to get a return even from negation, even from the death drive itself. In the light of the sun of expenditure, such a culture seems the narrowest of misconceptions . Imagine instead that the vast proliferation of writing, drawing, painting, performance—not just what cultures have preserved for us through the filtration systems of their own values, but all writing, all music, and so on —is the actual, lived field of culture; that culture is waste, expenditure: productivity and destruction without any exclusion or discrimination; that all of these works have been produced not so that a few precious articles of value, the ―best that has been known and thought,‖ can, through a sort of reasoned brokerage, be conserved as culture per se, but so that they would be destroyed; that what is most important about all of those poems and paintings and constructions is precisely that the vast majority of them disappear even as they are born, that they dismember and consume themselves without our ever knowing them, vanish in the air, into the death they most desired, never to be remembered again. Imagine a writing that saw itself in this light, a light that never shines on most of what we call culture, that never consigns itself to productive discourse but always escapes, that is valuable only because it escapes, because it is elsewhere, nowhere. Or imagine a certain book: it arrives uncalled for, unpredicted, perhaps in the mail, perhaps fallen from the sky, unmarked by a publisher‘s apparatus, by advertising, even by an author‘s name; a book made of white noise that erases itself as it goes along and everything you say for weeks is stolen from it; a book that you cut into pieces and disseminate at random (on the street, on walls, through the mail) or that you burn without having read it and scatter the ashes to the four winds; or imagine such a book that you never receive in the first place. Perhaps that is the useless book one must learn to write, that is the only book one ever writes. Or perhaps it is precisely a book one cannot write, but only imagine, and in imagining it call it down upon one‘s writing, to tear one‘s own writing apart. As this talk, this argument that began at cross-purposes and went nowhere, unravelling itself as it proceeded, even now beginning to cease vibrating in the air, will soon vanish , leaving nothing but a fading imprint on your memories, soon to be effaced as you turn toward more productive labors, and itself only the trace of an expenditure whose disappearance it briefly betrayed 205 Kritik Answers Power Vaccuum POWER IS ZERO SUM –THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY SHIFTS POWER ELSEWHERE John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics p. 34) Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of means—economic, diplomatic, and military—to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one state‘s gain in power is another state‘s loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions. 206 Kritik Answers **SPECIFIC K ANSWERS** **Apocalyptic Rhetoric** Perm Solvency PERM: DO BOTH EVEN YOUR AUTHOR CONCEEDS THAT APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC USED AWAY FROM RELIGIOUS FORM IS KEY TO SPUR ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE- ITS KEY TO AVOIDING TYRANNY QUINBY in 1994 [Lee, ―Anti-Apocalypse‖, http://www.dhushara.com/book/renewal/voices2/quin/quinby.htm //wyo-pinto] I am not saying that this is all bad. Precisely because it is on tap in the United States, it is possible for apocalyptic ideas to aid struggles for democracy by exciting people toward activism. This is the force of Cornet West's warning about ,this country's failures in creating a multiracial democracy: "Either we learn a r;ew language of empathy and compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all. , But even when apocalyptic imagery is used to fight racist suppressions of freedom, as with West's allusion to James Baldwin's warning, it runs the risk of displacing concrete political analysis. While advocating a new kind of leadership "grounded in grass-roots organizing that highlights democratic accountability," West's insistence that if we don't learn this lesson the fire will consume us all is the kind of hyperbole that undermines his own earlier analysis of local devastation. People in positions of privilege can, and clearly do, dismiss the threat to their own way of life as by and large inaccurate. At stake here are the relationships between power, truth, ethics, and apoca@pse. In attempting to represent the unrepresentable, the unknowable-the End, or death par excellence -apocalyptic writings are a quintessential technology of power/knowledge. They promise the defeat of death, at least for the obedient who deserve everlasting life, and the prolonged agony of destruction for those who have not obeyed the Law of the Father. One does not have to succumb to apocalyptic eschatology to understand why end-time propensities imperil democracy: the apocalyptic tenet of preordained history disavows questionings of received truth, discredits skepticism, and disarms challengers of the status quo. Appeals to the Day of judgment, the dawn of a New Age, even the dream of a cryogenic "return" to life, put off the kinds of immediate political and ethical judgments that need to be made in order to resist both overt domination and the more seductive forms of disciplinary power operative in the United States today and fostered by the United States in other countries. 207 Kritik Answers Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (1/3) ONLY BY CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CAN WE EXPOSE THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE SYSTEM OF THE BOMB, OUR APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC IS KEY MODERN AMERICAN POETRY NO DATE [―from Thomas McClanahan's "Gregory Corso", http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/corso/bomb.htm //wyo-pinto] Although it can be read as a polemic against nuclear war, "Bomb" is also an examination of the loss of humanistic virtue. Additionally, it is a vehicle for expressing Corso's developing epistemology. To know the world, for the younger poet, is to recognize it as a Heraclitean continuum, an alteration of consciousness that prefigures the way man understands himself and the world about him. Like the bomb, powerful forces--whether they are generated by great religious prophets or authentic poetic statement--provide the elemental energy that transforms human consciousness. So Corso's poem is a paradoxical rendering of two points of view: on the one hand it is about the destructive power of a weapon that can annihilate mankind, while at the other extreme it concerns the positive force of man's own potential to see the world from a new perspective. CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CAUSES SOCIAL TRANCENDENCE- IT‘S THE ONLY WAY TO RESCUE PEOPLE WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, ―Apocalypse Now?‖ Christian Century, Oct 17, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyo-pinto] If that were the whole story about apocalyptic, many of us would want nothing to do with it. That is not the whole story, however. There is a positive role for apocalyptic as well as its better-known negative. The positive power of apocalyptic lies in its capacity to force humanity to face threats of unimaginable proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self and social transcendence. Only such Herculean responses can actually rescue people from the threat and make possible the continuation of humanity on the other side. Paradoxically, the apocalyptic warning is intended to remove the apocalyptic threat by acts of apocalyptic transcendence. 208 Kritik Answers Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (2/3) CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CREATES A FEARLESS FEAR THAT INCITES ACTION AGAINST WHAT IS SAID AS INEVITABLE- THIS FEARLESS FEAR IS KEY TO ACTION AS OPPOSED TO THE INACTION OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM- A CALL FOR INACTION PARALYZES***** WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, ―Apocalypse Now?‖ Christian Century, Oct 17, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyo-pinto] Positive apocalyptic, by contrast, calls on our every power to avert what seems inevitable. "Nothing can save us that is possible," the poet W. H. Auden intoned over the madness of the nuclear crisis; "we who must die demand a miracle." And the miracle we got came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott refused to accept nuclear annihilation. But she did it by forcing her hearers to visualize the consequences of their inaction. Imagination, says Anders, is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so overwhelming that we cannot take it in. Hence the bizarre imagery that always accompanies apocalyptic. Optimists want to believe that reason will save us. They want to prevent us from becoming really afraid. The anti-apocalyptist, on the contrary, insists that it is our capacity to fear which is too small and which does not correspond to the magnitude of the present danger. Therefore, says Anders, the anti-apocalyptist attempts to increase our capacity to fear. "Don't fear fear, have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. Frighten thy neighbor as thyself." This is no ordinary fear, however; it is a fearless fear, since it dares at last to face the real magnitude of the danger. And it is a loving fear, since it embraces fear in order to save the generations to come. That is why everything the antiapocalyptist says is said in order not to become true. If we do not stubbornly keep in mind how probable the disaster is and if we do not act accordingly, we will not be able to prevent the warnings from becoming true. There is nothing more frightening than to be right. And if some amongst you, paralyzed by the gloomy likelihood of the catastrophe, should already have lost their courage, they, too, still have the chance to prove their love of man by heeding the cynical maxim: "Let's go on working as though we had the right to hope. Our despair is none of our business." 209 Kritik Answers Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (3/3) WE MUST TAKE ACTION IN THE FACE OF THE REAL APOCALYPSES- GLOBAL WARMING, THE OZONE HOLE, WAR, POLLUTION, NUCLEAR WAR- THE THREATS WON‘T GO AWAY ****** WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, ―Apocalypse Now?‖ Christian Century, Oct 17, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_7951 4992 //wyo-pinto] It is not difficult to see in that warning perils that threaten the very viability of life on earth today. Global warming, the ozone hole, overpopulation, starvation and malnutrition, war, unemployment, the destruction of species and the rain forests, pollution of water and air, pesticide and herbicide poisoning, errors in genetic engineering, erosion of topsoil, overfishing, anarchy and crime, the possibility of a nuclear mishap, chemical warfare or allout nuclear war: together, or in some cases singly, these dangers threaten to "catch us unexpectedly, like a trap." Our inability thus far to measure ourselves against these threats is an ominous portent that apocalypse has already rendered us powerless. Terrible as it was, the destruction of the World Trade Center was not an apocalypse. That horror will slowly recede. Other acts of infamy may take place. But we can anticipate a time when terrorism will decline. Nor are we helpless. We have the means to stop at least many, perhaps even most, of the terrorist attacks hurled at us. But we can see the other side of this catastrophe, when life feels normal again. The threats to our very survival that I listed above, however, will not go away. They could well spell the end of humanity, and even of most sentient life. This is the awful truth that we have yet to recognize: We are living in an apocalyptic time disguised as normal, and that is why we have not responded appropriately. If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as scientists tell us we are, our response has in no way been commensurate with the danger. We Homo sapiens are witnessing the greatest annihilation of species in the last 65 million years, and our children may live to witness ecocide with their own eyes. So while we are understandably preoccupied with terrorism, and must do everything necessary to stamp it out, we must at the same time wake up to these more serious threats that could effectively end life on this planet. SOUTH AFRICA PROVES THAT OUR MODEL OF APOCALYPSE WORKS- WE MUST INCITE ACTION WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, ―Apocalypse Now?‖ Christian Century, Oct 17, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyo-pinto] BUT THE VERDICT is not yet in. It is late, but a positive response to the real apocalypse of our time is still possible. Consider South Africa. When I was there in the 1980s, it appeared that armed revolution was inevitable. Blacks were becoming more desperate by the day. Teenage boys were confronting the police and army without concern for their safety. Chaos was beginning to overtake the townships, as children, outraged by the timorousness of their parents, seized the initiative themselves. Whites were taking an increasingly hard line. It was a recipe for disaster. The whole scene reeked of an apocalypse of the negative sort. Then the most unexpected thing happened. The white government chose, under intense internal and international pressure, to relinquish power, and negotiated with its former black enemies a process that led to the election of a black president, a model constitution, and relatively low casualties, considering the alternatives. No one to my knowledge anticipated this turn of events. What had appeared as an inevitable (negative) apocalyptic bloodbath turned out to have been a (positive) apocalyptic situation instead, thanks to the "anti-apoca 210 Kritik Answers 211 Kritik Answers **Badiou** A2 ―Badiou‖: 2AC EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT EVERY AFFIRMATION OF LIFE OCCURS AGAINS THE BACKGROUND OF HUMN DEATH AND FINITUDE Zizek '99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl] It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here, Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event; every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be accounted for in the terms of this connection: the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls the domain 'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18 212 Kritik Answers Perm Solvency (1/3) WE SHOULD COMBINE THE PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE – THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVE THE CASE WHILE MAINTAINING AN AFFIRMATIVE CONCEPTION OF ETHICS OUTSIDE THE BOUNDS OF THE STATE Hallward, Lecturer in the French department @ King‘s College, 2K2 (Peter ―BADIOU'S POLITICS: EQUALITY AND JUSTICE‖, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm) At this point, the reader has to wonder if the OP‘s policy of strict non-participation in the state really stands up. The OP declares with some pride that ‗we never vote‘, just as ‗in the factories, we keep our distance from trade unionism‘ (LDP, 12.02.95: 1).26 The OP consistently maintains that its politics of prescription requires a politics of ‗non-vote‘. But why, now, this either/or? Once the state has been acknowledged as a possible figure of the general interest, then surely it matters who governs that figure. Regarding the central public issues of health and education, the OP maintains, like most mainstream socialists, that the ‗positive tasks on behalf of all are incumbent upon the state‘ (LDP, 10.11.94: 1).27 That participation in the state should not replace a prescriptive externality to the state is obvious enough, but the stern either/or so often proclaimed in the pages of La Distance politique reads today like a displaced trace of the days when the choice of ‗state or revolution‘ still figured as a genuine alternative. WE SHOULD COMBINE BADIOU‘S GENERIC CONCEPTION OF BEING WITH OUR DESCRIPTION OF THE SPECIFIC, WHICH DOESN‘T RESULT IN DEPICTION OF THE SINGULAR Hallward, Lecturer in the French Department @ King‘s College, 2K3 (Peter Badiou: A Subject to Truth, P. 274) At each point, the alternative to Badiou‘s strictly generic conception of things is a more properly specific understanding of individuals and situations as conditioned by the relations that both enable and constrain their existence. In order to develop this alternative, it is essential to distinguish scrupulously between the specific and what might be called the specified (Badiou‘s ―objectified‖).5 Actors are specific to a situation even though their actions are not specified by it, just as a historical account is specific to the facts it describes even though its assessment is not specified by them. The specific is a purely relational subjective domain. The specified, by contrast, is defined by positive, intrinsic characteristics or essences (physical, cultural, personal, and so on). The specified is a matter of inherited ―instincts‖ as much as of acquired habits. We might say that the most general effort of philosophy or critique should be to move from the specified to the specific—without succumbing to the temptations of the purely singular. Badiou certainly provides a most compelling critique of the specified. But he has—at least thus far— inadequate means of distinguishing specified from specific. The result, in my view, is an ultimately unconvincing theoretical basis for his celebration of an ―extreme particularity‖ as such. 213 Kritik Answers Perm Solvency (2/3) BADIOU‘S OWN WRITING CONCEDES THE NECESSITY OF INCLUDING THE STATE WITHIN OUR POLITICAL FOCUS. WHEN SOMETHING MUST BE DONE THAT ONLY THE STATE CAN DO – LIKE THE PLAN – BADIOU‘S ETHICS FORCE US TO DEMAND THE PLAN FROM THE STATE WHILE MAINTAINING A PROPER DISTANCE TOWARDS IT – THIS ALLOWS THE PLAN TO FUNCTION AS A TRULY ETHICAL COMMITMENT Hallward, Lecturer in the French department @ King‘s College, 2K2 (Peter ―BADIOU'S POLITICS: EQUALITY AND JUSTICE‖, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm) Badiou‘s early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably evolved. Just how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains resolutely anti-consensual, anti-‗reWe know that presentative‘, and thus anti-democratic (in the ordinary sense of the word). ‗A philosophy today is above all something that enables people to have done with the "democratic" submission to the world as it is‘ (‗Entretien avec Alain Badiou‘, 1999: 2). But he seems more willing, now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La Distance politique again offers the most precise points de repère. On the one hand, the OP remains suspicious of any political campaign – for instance, electoral contests or petition movements – that operates as a ‗prisoner of the parliamentary space‘ (LDP, 19-20.04.96: 2). It remains ‗an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as norm. ‗their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought‘ (LDP, 6.05.93: 1).24 The OP now conceives itself in a tense, non-dialectical ‗vis-à-vis‘ with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses ‗any antagonistic conception of their operation, any conception that smacks of classism.‘ There is to no more choice to be made between the state or revolution; the ‗vis-à-vis demands the presence of the two terms and not The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics.‘ On the other hand, however, it is now equally clear that the annihilation of one of the two‘ (LDP, 11.01.95: 3-4). Indeed, at the height of the December ‗95 strikes, the OP recognised that the only contemporary movement of ‗désétatisation‘ with any real power was the corporate-driven movement of partial de-statification in the interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. Unsurprisingly, ‗we are against this withdrawal of the state to the profit of capital, through general, systematic and brutal privatisation. The state is what can sometimes take account of people and their situations in other registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state assures from this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does not incarnate the general interest‘ (LDP, 15.12.96: 11). Coming from the author of Théorie de la contradiction, these are remarkable words. 214 Kritik Answers Perm Solvency (3/3) BADIOU‘S ETHICAL PROJECT NECESSITATES ENDLESSLY RECONSTITUTING THE SOCIAL REALM TO OPEN IT UP TO THE TRUTH-EVENT – THE SPECIFIC DEMAND OF THE PLAN CAN HAVE UNIVERSAL ETHICAL RESONANCE AND CAN FORM THE BASIS OF A POLITICS OF TRUTH Barker, Lecturer in Communications and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Philosophy @ Cardiff U, 2K2 (Jason, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, P. 146-48) How does Balibar‘s theory of the State constitution stand alongside Badiou‘s, and can we find any key areas of mutual agreement between these two ex-‘Althusserians‘? The most general area of difference involves Balibar‘s ‗aporetic‘ approach to the question of the masses. Balibar refuses to see any principle underlying the masses‘ conduct, since the latter are synonymous with the power of the State. Badiou, on the other hand, regards the masses (ideally) as the bearers of the category of justice, to which the State remains indifferent (AM, 114). Two divergent theories of the State, then, each of which is placed in the service of a distinctive ethics. With Balibar we have an ethics — or ‗ethic‘ in the sense of praxis — of communication which encourages a dynamic and expanding equilibrium of desires where every opinion With Badiou we have an ethics of truths which hunts down those exceptional political statements in order to subtract from them their egalitarian core, thereby striking a blow for justice against the passive democracy of the State. Overall we might say that the general area of agreement lies in the fact that, in has an equal chance of counting in the democratic sphere. each case, ‗democracy‘ remains a rational possibility. In particular, for both Balibar and Badiou, it is love as an amorous feeling towards or encounter with one‘s fellow man — a recognition that the fraternal part that is held in common between human beings is somehow ‗greater‘ than the whole of their differences — which forges the social bond. However, on the precise nature of the ratio of this bond their respective paths diverge somewhat. In Balibar‘s case we are dealing with an objective illusion wherein one imagines that the love one feels for an object (an abstract egalitarian ideal, say) is shared by others. Crucially, love in this sense is wholly ambivalent, wildly vacillating between itself and its inherent opposite, hate.18 On this evidence we might say that a ‗communist‘ peace would be really indistinct from a ‗fascist‘ one. Therefore, the challenge for Balibar is to construct a prescriptive political framework capable of operating without repression in a utilitarian public sphere where the free exchange of opinions is more likely than not to result in the self-limitation of extreme views. In Badiou‘s case what we are dealing with, on the other hand —and what we have been dealing with more or less consistently throughout this book — is a subjective reality. The social contract is forever being conditioned, worked on practically from within by the political militants, in readiness for the occurrence of the truth-event. This is the unforeseen moment of an ‗amorous encounter‘ between two natural adversaries (a group of students mounting a boycott of university fees, for instance) which retrieves the latent communist axiom of equality from within the social process. Here we have a particular call for social justice (‗free education for all!‘) which strikes a chord with the whole people (students and non-students alike). Crucially, love in this sense is infinite, de-finite, in seizing back (at least a part of) the State power directly into the hands of the people. Moreover, in this encounter between students and the university authorities there is an invariant connection (of communist hope) which is the challenge is to develop and deepen an ethical practice, not in any utilitarian or communitarian sense — since the latter would merely risk ‗forcing‘ a political manifesto prematurely, perhaps giving rise to various brands of State-sponsored populism‘9 — but in the sense of a politics capable of combating repression; a politics which, in its extreme singularity, holds itself open to seizure by Truth. shared by all, and where any difference of opinion is purely incidental. Momentarily, at least. For Badiou, 215 Kritik Answers Human Rights Solve BADIOU IS WRONG ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS – THEY‘RE A CRUCIAL RALLYING POINT FOR ACTIVISTS AGAINST OPPRESSION Dews, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Essex, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 109) Badiou is not mistaken, of course, in suggesting that the discourse of human rights has come to provide a crucial ideological cover for economic and cultural imperialism, not to mention outright military intervention. No one doubts the murderous hypocrisy with which the Western powers, led by the US, have invoked the language of human rights in recent years. But 'human rights' have also been a rallying call for many activists around the globe. In the form of the Helsinki Accords, they were a major focus for the East European opposition in the years leading up to 1989- They were equally important tactically for Latin America's struggle against the dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many indigenous populations, not to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Palestinians. The United States, as is well known, continues to refuse recognition to the recently established International Criminal Court, fearful, no doubt, that members of its own armed forces, and perhaps of former administrations, could be amongst those arraigned before it. 216 Kritik Answers Double Bind BADIOU IS IN A DOUBLE-BIND: EITHER THERE‘S NO WAY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TRUE AND FALSE EVENTS WHICH MEANS THE ALTERNATIVE CAN‘T SOLVE, OR SUBJECTS OF THE EVENT GO INTO IT WITH A PRECONCEIVED NOTION OF THE EVENT, WHICH MAKES TRUE FIDELITY IMPOSSIBLE Hallward, Professor of French at King‘s College, London, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 15-16) Badiou insists on the rare and unpredictable character of every truth. On the other hand, we know that every truth, as it composes a generic or egalitarian sampling of the situation, will proceed in such a way as to suspend the normal grip of the state of its situation by eroding the distinctions used to classify and order parts of the situation. Is One implication of this last point is easily generalized. this then a criterion that subjects must presume in advance or one that they come to discover in each case? If not the if truth is entirely a matter of post-evental implication or consequence, then there can be no clear way of distinguishing, before it is too late, a genuine event (which relates only to the void of the situation, i.e. to the way inconsistency might appear within a situation) from a false event (one that, like September 11th or the triumph of National Socialism, reinforces the basic distinctions governing the situation). But if there is always an initial hunch which guides the composition of a generic set, a sort of preliminary or prophetic‘ commitment to the generic —just as there is, incidentally, in Cohen‘s own account of generic sets, insofar as this account seeks to demonstrate a possibility implicit in the ordinary extensional definition of set25 — then it seems difficult to sustain a fully post-evental conception of truth. In short: is former, the initial decision to affirm an event unequivocally free, a matter of consequence alone? Or is it tacitly guided by the criteria of the generic at every step, and thereby susceptible to a kind of anticipation? 217 Kritik Answers Alternative Fractures Coalitions BADIOU‘S ALTERNATIVE IS A DISASTROUS FORM OF POLITICS BECAUSE THE SUBJECTS OF A TRUTH CAN NEVER TRANSLATE THAT TRUTH TO THOSE HOSTILE TO THEIR AGENDA, AND THUS CAN NEVER MAKE POLITICAL COALITIONS Hallward, Professor of French at King‘s College, London, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 17) is it enough to explain the process of subjectivation, the transformation of an ordinary individual into the militant subject of a universalizable cause, or truth, mainly through analogies with the process of conversion? It is certainly essential to maintain (after Saint Paul) that anyone can become the militant of a truth, that truth is not primarily a matter of background or disposition. If it exists at all, truth must be equally indifferent to both nature and nurture, and it is surely one of the great virtues of Badiou‘s account of the 6. In a related sense, subject that it, like Zizek‘s or Lacan‘s, remains irreducible to all the forces (historical, social, cultural, genetic .. .) that shape the individual the lack of any substantial explanation of subjective empowerment, of the process that enables or inspires an individual to become a subject, again serves only to make the account of subjectivation unhelpfully abrupt and abstract. Isn‘t there a danger that by disregarding issues of motivation and resolve at play in any subjective decision, the militants of a truth will preach only to the converted? Doesn‘t the real problem of any political organization begin where Badiou‘s analyses tend to leave off, i.e. with the task of finding ways whereby a truth will begin to ring true for those initially indifferent or hostile to its implications? or ego in the ordinary sense. On the other hand, 218 Kritik Answers Divorcing Politics from State Bad BADIOU‘S DESIRE TO SEPARATE POLITICS FROM THE STATE MAKES POLITICS ITSELF IMPOSSIBLE Bensaid, Prof @ the U of Paris VIII and leading member of the Ligue Commiuniste Revolutionnaire, 2K4 (Daniel Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 99-100) Yet in Badiou, the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of politics problematic. According to him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of oppression declare themselves. His determination to prise politics free from the state in order to subjecrivize it, to ‗deliver it from history in order to hand it over to the event‘, is part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed. The alternative effort, to subordinate politics to some putative ‗meaning of history‘, which has ominous echoes in recent history, is he suggests to incorporate it within the process of general technicization and to reduce it to the ‗management of state affairs‘. One must have ‗the courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics, history as meaning or direction does not exist: all that exists is the periodic occurrence of the a priori conditions of chance‘. However, this divorce between event and history (between the event and its historically determined conditions) tends to render politics if not unthinkable then at least impracticable (PP 18). BADIOU‘S ALTERNATIVE FAILS BECAUSE HE‘S BLIND TO POLITICAL POWER STRUCTURES – HIS DEMAND TO DIVORCE POLITICS FROM THE STATE MEANS IT CAN‘T DEAL WITH TODAY‘S MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS Hallward, Professor of French at King‘s College, London, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 18-19) to what extent can we abstract an exclusively political truth from matters relating to society, history and the state? Take those most familiar topics of ‗cultural politics‘: gender, sexuality and race. No doubt Most obviously, the greater part of the still incomplete transformation here is due to militant subjective mobilizations that include the anti-colonial wars of liberation, the civil rights movement, the feminist movements, Stonewall, and so on. But has cumulative, institutional change played no role in the slow movement towards racial or sexual indistinction, precisely? More importantly: since under the current state of things political authority is firmly vested in the hands of those with economic power, can a political prescription have any enduring effect if it manages only to distance or suspend the operation of such power? If a contemporary political sequence is to last (if at least it is to avoid the usual consequences of capital flight and economic sabotage) must it not also directly entail a genuine transformation of the economy itself, i.e. enable popular participation in economic decisions, community or workers‘ control over resources and production, and so on? In today‘s circumstances, if a political prescription is to have any widespread consequence, isn‘t it essential that it find some way of bridging the gap between the political and the economic? Even Badiou‘s own privileged example indicates the uncertain purity of politics. The declaration of 18 March 1871 (which he quotes as the inaugural affirmation of a proletarian political capacity) commits the Communards to ‗taking in hand the running of public affairs‘,3 and throughout its short existence the Commune busies itself as much with matters of education, employment and administration as with issues of equality and power. Is a sharp distinction between politics and the state helpful in such circumstances? Do forms of discipline subtracted from the state, from the party, apply in fact to anything other than the beginning of relatively limited political sequences? Does the abstract ethical imperative, ‗continue!‘, coupled with a classical appeal to moderation and restraint,38 suffice to safeguard the long-term persistence of political sequences from the altogether necessary return of state-like functions (military, bureaucratic, institutional . . .)? To what extent, in short, does Badiou‘s position, which he presents in anticipation of an as yet obscure step beyond the more state-centred conceptions of Lenin and Mao, rather return him instead to the familiar objections levelled at earlier theories of anarchism? 219 Kritik Answers **Baudrillard** Baudrillard Destroys Social Change (1/2) BAUDRILLARD‘S ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGICAL DISTORTION Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff, Wales, What‘s Wrong with Postmodernism, 1990, p. 190-191. *Gender modified Baudrillard‘s alternative is stated clearly enough: ‗a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference‘ (p. 167). It is a vision which should bring great comfort to government advisers, PR experts, campaign managers, opinion-pollsters, media watch-dogs, Pentagon [spokespeople] spokesmen and others with an interest in maintaining this state of affairs. Baudrillard‘s imagery of ‗orbital recurrence‘ and the ‗simulated generation of difference‘ should commend itself to advocates of a Star Wars program whose only conceivable purpose is to escalate East—West tensions and divert more funds to the military-industrial complex. There is no denying the extent to which this and similar strategies of disinformation have set the agenda for ‗public debate‘ across a range of crucial policy issues. But the fact remains (and this phrase carries more than just a suasive or rhetorical force) that there is a difference between what we are given to believe and what emerges from the process of subjecting such beliefs to an informed critique of their content and modes of propagation. This process may amount to a straightforward demand that politicians tell the truth and be held to account for their failing to do so. Of course there are cases — like the Irangate—Contra affair or Thatcher‘s role in events leading up to the Falklands war — where a correspondence-theory might seem to break down since the facts are buried away in Cabinet papers, the evidence concealed by some piece of highlevel chicanery (‗Official Secrets‘, security interests, reasons of state, etc.), or the documents conveniently shredded in time to forestall investigation of their content. But there is no reason to think —as with Baudrillard‘s decidedly Orwellian prognosis — that this puts the truth forever beyond reach, thus heralding an age of out-and-out ‗hyperreality‘. For one can still apply other criteria of truth and falsehood, among them a fairly basic coherence-theory that would point out the various lapses, inconsistencies, non-sequiturs, downright contradictions and so forth which suffice to undermine the official version of events. (Margaret Thatcher‘s various statements on the Malvinas conflict — especially the sinking of the General Beigrano — would provide a good example here.)29 It may be argued that the truth-conditions will vary from one specific context to another; that such episodes involve very different criteria according to the kinds of evidence available; and therefore that it is no use expecting any form of generalised theory to establish the facts of this or that case. But this ignores the extent to which theories (and truth-claims) inform our every act of rational appraisal, from ‗commonsense‘ decisions of a day-to-day, practical kind to the most advanced levels of speculative thought. And it also ignores the main lesson to be learnt from Baudrillard‘s texts: that any politics which goes along with the current postmodernist drift will end up by effectively endorsing and promoting the work of ideological mystification. 220 Kritik Answers Baudrillard Destroys Social Change (2/2) RELEGATING HUMAN SUFFERING TO THE REALM OF THE SIGN AND SIMULATION IS JUST DISGUISED NIHILISM, WHICH CRUSHES THE POSSIBILITY FOR EFFECTIVE POLITICS Kellner, Philosophy Chair @ UCLA, 89 (Douglas, Jean Baudrillard, P. 107-8) Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of death? Baudrillard‘s notion of symbolic exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism (see 4.4) is probably his most un-Nietzschean radically devalues life and focuses with a fascinated gaze on that which is most terrible — death. In a popular French reading of Nietzsche, his ‗transvaluation of values‘ demanded negation of all repressive and life- negating values in favor of affirmation of life, joy and happiness. This ‗philosophy of value‘ valorized life over death and derived its values from phenomena which enhanced, refined and nurtured human life. In Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not exist as an autonomous source of value, and the body exists only as ‗the caarnality of signs,‘ as a mode of display of signification. His sign fetishism erases all materialjty from the body and social life, and makes possible a fascinated aestheticized fetishism of signs as the primary ontological reality. This way of seeing erases suffering, disease, pain and the horror of death from the body and social life and replaces it with the play of signs — Baudrillard‘s alternative. Politics too is reduced to a play of signs, and the ways in which different politics alleviate or intensify human suffering disappears from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently Baudrillard‘s theory spirals into a fascination with signs which leads him to embrace certain privileged forms of sign culture and to reject others (that is, the theoretical signs of modernity such as meaning, truth, the social, power and so on) and to pay less and less attention to materiality (that is, to needs, desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead him to embrace nihilism (see 4.4). Thus Baudrillard‘s interpretation of the body, his refusal of theories of sexuality which link moment, the instant in which his thought it with desire and pleasure, and his valorization of death as a mode of symbolic exchange — which valorizes sacrifice, suicide and other symbolic modes of death — are all part and parcel of a fetishizing of signs, of a valorization of sign culture over all other modes of social life. Such fetishizing of sign culture finds its natural (and more harmless) home in the fascination with the realm of sign culture which we call art. I shall argue that Baudrillard‘s trajectory exhibits an ever more intense aestheticizing of social theory and philosophy, in which the values of the representation of social reality, political struggle and change and so on are displaced in favor of a (typically French) sign fetishism. On this view, Baudrillard‘s trajectory is best interpreted as an increasingly aggressive and extreme fetishizing of signs, which began in his early works in the late 1 960s and which he was only gradually to exhibit in its full and perverse splendor as aristocratic aestheticism from the mid-1970s to the present. Let us now trace the evolution of his fascination with art, a form of sign culture which Baudrillard increasingly privileges and one which provides an important feature attraction of the postmodern carnival. 221 Kritik Answers Alternative Masks Violence FOCUS ON THE HYPER-REAL PRIVILEGES THE SIGNIFIER OVER THE SIGNIFIED, NUMBING US TO ACTUAL VIOLENCE Krishna ‗93 [Snakaran, Dept. Poli Sci @ Hawaii, Alternatives 18, 399] By emphasizing the technology and speed in the Gulf War, endlessly analyzing the representation of the war itself, without a simultaneous exposition of the ―ground realities,‖ postmodernist analyses wind up, unwittingly, echoing the Pentagon and the White House in their claims that this was a ―clean‖ war with smart bombs that take out only defense installations with minimal collateral damage.‖ One needs to reflesh the Gulf War dead through our postmortems instead of merely echoing, with virilio and others, the ―disappearance‖ of territory or the modern warrior with the new technologies; or the intertext connecting the war and television; or the displacement of the spectacle. Second, the emphasis on speed with which the annihilation proceeded once the war began tends to obfuscate the long build-up to the conflict and US complicity in Iraqi foreign and defense policy in prior times. Third, as the details provided above show, if there was anything to highlight about the war, it was not so much its manner of representation as the incredible levels of annihilation that have been perfected. To summarize: I am not suggesting that postmodern analysts of the war are in agreement with the Pentagon‘s claims regarding a ―clean‖ war; I am suggesting that their preoccupation with representation, sign systems, and with the signifier over the signified, leaves one with little sense of the annihilation visited upon the people and land of Iraq. And, as the Vietnam War proved and Schwartzkopf well realized, without that physicalist sense of violence war can be more effectively sold to a jingoistic public. 222 Kritik Answers Our Representations Solve TURN—MEDIA IMAGES REVEAL THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS Jean Baudrillard, professor of philosophy of culture and media at Univ. or Paris, 1994, Illusion of the End, pg. 60-61 And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the simulacrum of their revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known. The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre (Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of millions of people by means of television — a crime of blackmail and simulation. What penalty is laid down for such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the ‗Timisoara syndrome‘. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose [destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real. There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we should be grateful to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality — soaking up all these things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture, every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference distance, scepticism and unconditional apathy. Through the world‘s becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the imagination, provokes a sickened abreaction, together with a surge of adrenalin which induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would render reality [le reel] dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute advance in the consciousness — or the cynical unconscious — of our age. 223 Kritik Answers Baudrillard is Wrong (1/2) BAUDRILLARD‘S CRITIQUE IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY THE GULF WAR Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff, Wales, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War, 1992, p. 11. How far wrong can a thinker go and still lay claim to serious attention? One useful test-case is Jean Baudrillard, a cult figure on the current ‗postmodernist‘ scene, and purveyor of some of the silliest ideas yet to gain a hearing among disciples of French intellectual fashion. Just a couple of days before war broke out in the Gulf, one could find Baudrillard regaling readers of The Guardian newspaper with an article which declared that this war would never happen, existing as it did only as a figment of mass-media simulation, war-games rhetoric or imaginary scenarios which exceeded all the limits of real-world, factual possibility.1 Deterrence had ‗worked‘ for the past forty years in the sense that war had become strictly unthinkable except as a rhetorical phenomenon, an exchange of ever-escalating threats and counter-threats whose ‗exorbitant‘ character was enough to guarantee that no such event would ever take place. What remained was a kind of endless charade, a phoney war in which the stakes had to do with the management of so-called ‗public opinion‘, itself nothing more than a reflex response to the images, the rhetoric and PR machinery which create the illusion of consensus support by supplying all the right answers and attitudes in advance. There would be no war, Baudrillard solemnly opined, because talk of war had now become a substitute for the event, the occurrence or moment of outbreak which the term ‗war‘ had once signified. Quite simply, we had lost all sense of the difference —or the point of transition — between a war of words, a mass-media simulation conducted (supposedly) by way of preparing us for ‗the real thing‘, and the thing itself which would likewise ‗take place‘ only in the minds and imaginations of a captive TV audience, bombarded with the same sorts of video-game imagery that had filled their screens during the build-up campaign. 224 Kritik Answers Baudrillard is Wrong (2/2) BAUDRILLARD‘S CRITIQUE IS NAÏVE AND CONTRADICTORY, DOES NOT CORRESPOND WITH REALITY, AND IS NORMATIVELY USELESS James Marsh, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, 1995, Critique, Action, and Liberation, pp. 292-293 Such an account, however, is as one-sided or perhaps even more one-sided than that of naive modernism. We note a residual idealism that does not take into account socioeconomic realities already pointed out such as the corporate nature of media, their role in achieving and legitimating profit, and their function of manufacturing consent. In such a postmodernist account is a reduction of everything to image or symbol that misses the relationship of these to realities such as corporations seeking profit, impoverished workers in these corporations, or peasants in Third-World countries trying to conduct elections. Postmodernism does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality to image and a mediation of reality by image. A media idealism exists rooted in the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism and doing insufficient justice to concrete human experience, judgment, and free interaction in the world.4 It is also paradoxical or contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true, that everything is illusory or imaginary. Postmodemism makes judgments that implicitly deny the reduction of reality to image. For example, Poster and Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age that is informational and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into media images is akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream. What happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point that its original meaning lying in its contrast to natural, human, and social reality is lost. We can discuss Disneyland as reprehensible because we know the difference between Disneyland and the larger, enveloping reality of Southern California and the United States.5 We can note also that postmodernism misses the reality of the accumulation-legitimation tension in late capitalism in general and in communicative media in particular. This tension takes different forms in different times. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, social, economic, and political reality occasionally manifested itself in the media in such a way that the electorate responded critically to corporate and political policies. Coverage of the Vietnam war, for example, did help turn people against the war. In the 1980s, by contrast, the emphasis shifted more toward accumulation in the decade dominated by the ―great communicator.‖ Even here, however, the majority remained opposed to Reagan‘s policies while voting for Reagan. Human and social reality, while being influenced by and represented by the media, transcended them and remained resistant to them.6 To the extent that postmodernists are critical of the role media play, we can ask the question about the normative adequacy of such a critique. Why, in the absence of normative conceptions of rationality and freedom, should media dominance be taken as bad rather than good? Also, the most relevant contrasting, normatively structured alternative to the media is that of the ―public sphere,‖ in which the imperatives of free, democratic, nonmanipulable communicative action are institutionalized. Such a public sphere has been present in western democracies since the nineteenth century but has suffered erosion in the twentieth century as capitalism has more and more taken over the media and commercialized them. Even now the public sphere remains normatively binding and really operative through institutionalizing the ideals of free, full, public expression and discussion; ideal, legal requirements taking such forms as public service programs, public broadcasting, and provision for alternative media; and social movements acting and discoursing in and outside of universities in print, in demonstrations and forms of resistance, and on media such as movies, television, and radio.7 225 Kritik Answers A2 ―Disaster Porn‖ (1/3) TURN: VIOLENCE IS INESCAPABLE. OUR VIOLENCE ENABLES UNDERSTANDING MORE THAN IT INHIBITS. REMEMBERING AND REPRESENTING VIOLENCE IS ESSENTIAL TO AVERT THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OTHER. REJECT THE CRITIQUE‘S SILENCE. Michael Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge University, Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 391-6 Derrida allows nothing prior to language; since, in Derrida's s philosophy, everything is inscribed in language, he places speech and language prior to ethics, prior to any possible ethical injunction. Derrida's formulations owe a tremendous debt to several major epistemological shifts. of the early twentieth century: Sapir's and Whorf's notion that language conditions thought, for example, or Lacan's claims that both conscious and unconscious thought processes (and thus the subject) are structured by language. Because for Derrida ethics is inscribed, along with everything else, in language, and because for Derrida language is inherently violent in that it is always a reduction, a totalization, he reaches the conclusion that even a Levinasian ethics cannot ever avoid violence: "One never escapes the economy of war." The origin of this violence inherent in discourse is the act of inscribing the other in the definitions and terms of the same: Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the predicative act are implied in every other verb, and in every common noun, nonviolent language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invocation . . .purified of all rhetoric [in Levinas' terms] . . . . Is a language free from all rhetoric possible? Derrida answers his own question in the negative, affirming that "there is no phrase which is indeterminate, that is, which does not pass through the violence of the concept. Violence appears with articulation." Foucault has expressed this same sentiment, maintaining that "We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them." Naming and predication-two acts essential to language-confine what is being described, and fix it in one's own terms. As we shall see from an examination of Hiroshima non amour, memory works the same way, attempting to enclose the past within determinate parameters, employing the same brand of totalization to whose presence in language Derrida has gestured. Concern over the necessary violence of memory as representation to the consciousness, as willed inscription in one's own terms of what is other because past, is perhaps the most obvious point at which Derrida, Levinas, Duras, and Resnais converge, for the impossibility of remembering an historical event as it was-of actually arriving at a clear understanding of a past event by imaging it through memory, by re-presenting it to our memory-is a chronic preoccupation of Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais confronted this dilemma as well in the process of constructing Nuit et brouillard. Claiming historical authority over Auschwitz, or giving the illusion that it is comprehensible, would only, in Resnais' opinion, "humaniz[e] the incomprehensible terror," thereby "diminishing it," perhaps even romanticizing it; so, unable to describe the violence, and unwilling to inscribe it, Resnais opted instead to document our memory of it. Resnais carries no illusions that the past can be duplicated to any significant degree, rendered for us now as it was then. Given the accepted generic constraints of a film, he says, "it is absolutely absurd to think that in that space of time one can properly present the historical reality of such a complex event. [Historical facts] were the bases for our `fiction,' points of departure rather than ends in themselves." This explains what Leo Bersani has described as Resnais' clear favoring of the word "imagination" over the word "memory" when referring to his own films." However, in the case of Hiroshima mon amour, instead of filling in with imagination the details between the historical "facts," the film throws its hands up at any effort to "remember" or "see" the tragedy at Hiroshima. Thus, Hiroshima mon amour, in the words of one critic, turns out "to be a film about the impossibility of making a documentary about Hiroshima"1' or, in Armes' more broadly epistemologically oriented phrase, "a documentary on the impossibility of comprehending." Duras reminds us of this in her synopsis of the screenplay: "Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce qu'on peut faire c'est de parler de l'impossibilite de parler de HIROSHIMA (Impossible to speak of HIROSHIMA. All one can do is speak of the impossibility of speaking of HIROSHIMA)." She then drives the point home in Hiroshima mon amour's unforgettable opening sequence, as Okada incessantly reminds Riva that she can never know Hiroshima's tragedy. Riva knows, for example, that there were two hundred thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded, in nine seconds; she can rattle off the names of every flower that bloomed at ground zero two weeks after the bombing; she has been to the museum four times, seen the pictures, watched the films. As if to accentuate the veracity of' Riva's learned data, Duras alerts the reader in a footnote to the origin of the details, and there is hardly a more famous or traditionally reputable source on the immediate aftermath of the bombing than John Mersey's Hiroshima. And yet, as one critic has commented, "les images collees aux murs . . . sont incapables de faire revivre completement la realite du fait (images pasted to walls . . . are incapabale of completely restoring the reality of the fact)." 226 Kritik Answers Despite Riva's wealth of statistical (read: historically trustworthy) data, Okada is able to refute her with confidence, "Tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima (You saw nothing at Hiroshima)," and the almost incantatory …continued… 227 Kritik Answers A2 ―Disaster Porn‖ (2/3) …continued… repetition of this phrase strengthens its punch. Duras increases the effect by reminding us that the day of the bombing of Hiroshima, while a tragedy for Okada, coincides with Riva's liberation from her horrifying wartime experience in Nevers, France. This fact forces the question: How can Riva ever understand as a tragedy an event that corresponded with her own emotional rebirth and reclaiming of some measure of normalcy? Okada points out that the entire world was celebrating while Hiroshima smouldered in ashes. This fact forces another, similar question, one that I myself must confront on reading or watching Hiroshima mon amour: How could the Westerners in the audience ever expect to grasp the tragedy that they originally celebrated as the end of the war? These reminders have The effect is even stronger on what Duras must have assumed would be a predominantly Western audience, when their own Verfremdungseffekt further alienating the audience/reader from the history of Hiroshima, dispelling any lingering notion that historical tragedy can ever be . Riva's optimism is almost infectious, though, and she indeed believes that she can master the history behind the leveling of Hiroshima. She claims to know everything, and she is once again swiftly negated by the Japanese. She fully comprehended contents herself by concluding that, even if she does not know yet, ―ca s'apprend (one learns)."" She is not gifted with memory, though, as Okada reminds her and thus all she can claim to know about Hiroshima is what she has "invente." This particular verbal exchange is highlighted by the fact that it is for the first time in the text Riva's turn to use the word "rien," until this point a word uttered frequently and only by Okada: ELLS: Je n'ai rien invente. (SHE: I invented nothing.) LUI: Tu as tout invente. (HE: You invented everything.) Proof of her inability to approach comprehension of Hiroshima arrives in the form of a laugh, when Riva asks her lover if he was at Hiroshima the day of the bombing and he laughs as one would laugh at a child. She shows herself further distanced from the historical event by the manner in which she sounds out the name of the city, "Hi-ro-shi-ma," as if it were-or rather because it is-radically foreign to her. (Later, in the same manner, Okada sounds out Riva's youth, the story of which will always be unknown and incomprehensible to him: "Jeune-a-Ne-vers [ Young-in-Nevers].") Her memory of Hiroshima, created by herself and inscribed in terms that she can understand from photographs taken by other people, is mere "illusion," truth several times removed. She remembers, . Historical memory must be reductive, though, and almost obsessively, because she knows that it is worse to forget sometimes violently so, according to a Derridean understanding of it, because it is always a form of representation and thus of predication. A less diplomatic statement made by Okada one's memory only ever serves one's own purposes goes so far as to suggest that : "Est-ce que to avais remarque," he asks, "que c'est toujours dans le meme sens que l'on remarque les chows? (Did you ever notice that one always notices things in the same way?)." We notice what suits us, in However, just as language-the system of -carries in its every use the violence inherent in its reductiveness, we use it anyway, as it enables far more than inhibits. In Levinas's formulation, not only is discourse our primary means of relating to and maintaining the other, but the absence of it, silence, "is the inverse of language . . . a laughter that seeks to destroy language. " Derrida accords with Levinas: "denying discourse" is "the worst violence," "the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse." Despite the violence that Riva's impulse toward memory commits against any ideal or "objective" history, absolute forgetting is far more dangerous; by any account, remembering and representing past violence must be seen as a necessary evil, as a sort of metaphysically violent means of averting future real, physical violence. Still, the partial forgetting of the unforgettable tragedy is inevitable, as John Ward points out in his treatment of Resnais' films: "With the passage of time we become so insensitive to other people's suffering that we can lie in the disused ovens of Auschwitz and have our photographs taken as souvenirs." the direction and sense which we prefer, and we notice it in the manner in which we can best use it. representation par excellence Duras' text also renders disturbing images of forgetting, of loubli. Riva confesses to her own struggle against ignorance: "mei aussi, j'ai essaye de lutter de toutes mes forces contre l'oubli . . . . Comme toi, j'ai oublie (me too, I've tried to struggle with all my strength against forgetting . . . . Like you, I've forgotten). "During the third part of Duras' script, at the staged demonstration against nuclear armaments, Okada seems far too preoccupied with taking Riva back to his family's house to care about the demonstration, even if it is only a performance for a film. Immediately after explaining the appearance of the charred skin of Hiroshima's surviving children, he informs her, "Tu vas venir avec moi encore une fois (You will come with me once again)." Remembering the bombing is quite obviously not a first priority for him. There are other grim reminders of the forgetting in the reconstruction of Hiroshima and the importation of American culture. At one point, Riva and Okada enter a nightclub called "Casablanca" -a strange immortalization of American pop culture in a city leveled by an American bomb less than two decades earlier. Moreover, the Japanese man who tries to converse with Riva in the Casablanca gladly (and proudly, it seems) speaks the language of the conquerors, the bomb-droppers. The attitude on display in this scene is reminiscent of one in John Hersey's account of the months following the bombing, in Hiroshima: [Dr. Fujiil bought [the vacant clinic] at once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in English, in honor of the conquerors: M. MUJII, M.D. MEDICAL & VENEREAL Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built up a strong practice, and he was delighted, in the evenings, to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom he lavished whiskey and While there is certainly something to be said for not bearing a grudge, the speed of the forgetting and forgiving seems unbelievable. Memory represents historical tragedy insufficiently, in violently subjective practiced English. reductions; we are never able to experience being there and can never know the event, can never have witnessed it firsthand. Thus, we forget. Duras' script clearly stresses both the necessity and difficulty of remembering, but demonstrates, perhaps pessimistically, that we will veer slightly but inexorably toward l'oubli. And once we forget, violence will erupt again. 228 Kritik Answers A2 ―Disaster Porn‖ (3/3) THE CRITIQUE IS REDUCTIVE. THEY FORECLOSE THE ESSENTIAL ABILITY TO MOBILIZE VIOLENCE AGAINST VIOLENCE. Michael Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge University, Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 403-4 I have tried to demonstrate through this reading of Hiroshima mon amour that Resnais' and Duras' text falls prey to the violence of historical memory and to the worse violence of absolute oblivion. Strictly following a theoretical apparatus reconstructed from the thought of Levinas and Derrida, Hiroshima mon amour seems to participate, through the apparently deliberate reduction to race and place and event of two already allegorical and emblematic characters, in the very violence which Resnais and Duras set out initially to document, the most reductive of predications. The script trades in an economy of violence, dealing out the abstractions and totalizations that are the seed of every Holocaust, that mark every uninhabitable corner of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This conclusion seems to me, though, far too conclusive, far too reductively critical and discomforting, far too dependant on a great deal of interpretive faith, not unmerited but certainly not absolute, in the debate between and formulations of Levinas and Derrida What I am trying gingerly to say is that our reading should remain sensitive, attentive and open enough to discover those points at which the theoretical scaffolding may fail us, points at which a Levinasian/Derridean reading seems to stall; I believe a conclusive dismissal of Hiroshima mon amour as a text governed and permeated by violence is probably one such moment. I would propose instead a different, and hopefully more useful, reading of my reading of this well-intentioned script and film. For, while Hiroshima mon amour is certainly guilty of the very violence it claims as its object, it is likely from this portrayal and mobilizing of violence that the film sees its greatest anti-violent gesture; all that is required is a return to Duras' stated desire to avoid the banal describing of "l'horreur par l'horreur." Instead of horrifying us with horror, as she refused to do, Duras' screenplay has shown us the humble beginnings of horror: the total forgetting of past horrors, and the blatant inscribing of infinite Others within the finitudes of the language of the Same. And in this, Duras and Resnais may have succeeded, ultimately, in their declared mission to bring the horrifying tragedy of Hiroshima back to life, to see it reborn, out of the ashes. 229 Kritik Answers **Butler** Butler Answers: 2AC (1/2) 230 Kritik Answers Butler Answers: 2AC (2/2) 231 Kritik Answers A2 ―Legal Categories Bad‖ BAILING ON LEGAL CHANGE FOR PARODIC PERFORMANCE FAILS TO BREAK DOWN GENDER CATEGORIES AND COLLAPSES INTO QUIETISM Nussbaum 99 (Martha, Feb. 22, ―Professor of Parody‖, New Republic, Lexis) Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism. If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in What precisely does which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. "Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially." In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change. Isn't this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed-- but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice. contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power-- that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure. Well, individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has. 232 Kritik Answers **Biopolitics** Agamben Answers: 2AC (1/6) FIRST, NO LINK – PLAN DOESN‘T TAKE A STANCE ON THE BODILY SITUATION OF DETAINEES. IT ONLY STRIPS THE EXECUTIVE OF ONE SOURCE OF CONTROL SECOND, AGAMBEN‘S ALTERNATIVE TO PLAN IS PARALYZING AND DELINKS THE LAW AND JUSTICE, ENABLING TOTALITARIANISM Kohn 2006 [Margaret, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci @ Florida, ―Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,‖.Theory and Event, 9:2, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.2kohn.html, Retrieved 9-26-06//uwyo-ajl] Is there an alternative to this nexus of anomie and nomos produced by the state of exception? Agamben invokes genealogy and politics as two interrelated avenues of struggle. According to Agamben, "To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'." (88) In a move reminiscent of Foucault, Agamben suggests that breaking the discursive lock on dominant ways of seeing, . Agamben clearly hopes that his theoretical analysis could contribute to the political struggle against authoritarianism, yet he only offers tantalizingly abstract hints about how this might work. Beyond the typical academic conceit that theoretical work is a decisive element of political struggle, Agamben seems to embrace a utopianism that provides little guidance for political action. He imagines, "One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good." (64) More troubling is his messianic suggestion that "this studious play" will usher in a form of justice that cannot be made juridical. Agamben might do well to consider Hannah Arendt's warning that the belief in justice unmediated by law was one of the characteristics of totalitarianism. or more precisely not seeing, sovereign power is the only way to disrupt its hegemonic effects It might seem unfair to focus too much attention on Agamben's fairly brief discussion of alternatives to the sovereignty-exception-law nexus, but it is precisely those sections that reveal the flaws in his analysis. It also brings us back to our original question about how to resist the authoritarian implications of the state of exception . For Agamben, the problem with the "rule of law" response to the war on terrorism is that it ignores the way that the law is fundamentally implicated in the project of sovereignty with its corollary logic of exception. Yet the solution that he endorses reflects a similar blindness. Writing in his utopian-mystical mode, he insists, "the only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law."(88) Thus Agamben, in spite of all of his theoretical sophistication, ultimately falls into the trap of hoping that politics can be liberated from law, at least the law tied to violence and the demarcating project of sovereignty. without falling into the liberal trap of calling for more law THIRD, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE BECAUSE THE EXECUTIVE WILL STILL VIOLENTLY DETAIN. THIS CREATES A DOUBLE BIND: EITHER THE END RESULT OF THE ALT IS PLAN AND THERE‘S NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL OR IT DOES THE STATUS QUO AND DOESN‘T SOLVE FOURTH, PERM – RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION AND ENGAGE IN THE RESISTANCE OF THE 1AC 233 Kritik Answers Agamben Answers: 2AC (2/6) FIFTH, PERM SOLVES BEST – ACKNOWLEDGING THE TENSION OF MODERNITY WHILE ENGAGING IN DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE ALLOWS POLITICS BEYOND THE POLICE STATE IN OPPOSITION TO SOVEREIGNTY AND EXCEPTION Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl] . If, with Rancière, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continual struggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancière 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation. What should be stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the times 47 that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not it points to a tension inherent in modern communities, necessarily render the first invalid. Rather between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault‘s late hypothesis is more 48. about power than it is about politics (Rancière 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancière suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion. SIXTH, NO ALTERNATIVE – AGAMBEN ISOLATES SOVEREIGNTY AS INEVITABLY EXCLUSIONARY OF NONPOLITICAL LIFE, MEANING THERE‘S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THAT SYSTEM, RENDERING THEIR OFFENSE INEVITABLE 234 Kritik Answers Agamben Answers: 2AC (3/6) SEVENTH, OUR SPECIFIC USE OF BIOPOLITICS IS GOOD, LEADING TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY THAT SOLVES THEIR VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION CLAIMS Dickinson, Prof @ University of Cincinnati, 2K4 (Edward Ross, ―Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About ―Modernity,‖ Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March) the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakasble. Both are instances of the ―disciplinary In short, society‖ and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those perspective. But that cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce ―health,‖ such a system can —and historically does— create compulsory But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a ―logic‖ or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of ―liberty,‖ just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not ―opposites,‖ in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept ―power‖ should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively ―the same.‖ Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, ―tactically polyvalent.‖ Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create ―multiple modernities,‖ modern societies with quite radically differing potentials. programs to enforce it. EIGHTH, POWER IS ZERO SUM – THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY SHIFTS POWER ELSEWHERE John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago, 2001 (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics p. 34) states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of means—economic, diplomatic, and military—to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile . Because one state‘s gain in Consequently, Specifically, they 235 Kritik Answers power is another state‘s loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions. 236 Kritik Answers Agamben Answers: 2AC (4/6) NINTH, AGAMBEN ESSENTIALIZES THE STATE, IGNORING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM Heins, Vis Prof Poli Sci @ Concordia U and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt , 2K5 (Volker, ―Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy,‖ 6 German Law Journal No. 5, May, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598) Agamben is not interested in such weighing of costs and benefits because he assumes from the outset that taking care of the survival needs of people in distress is simply the reverse side of the modern inclination to ignore precisely those needs and turn life itself into a tool and object of power politics. By way of conclusion, I will indicate briefly how his view differs from two other, often no less shattering critiques of modern humanitarianism. Martti Koskenniemi warned that humanitarian demands and human rights are in danger of degenerating into "mere talk."[47] The recent crisis in Darfur, Sudan, can be cited as an example for a situation in which the repeated invocation of human rights standards and jus cogens norms, like those articulated in the Genocide Convention, might ultimately damage those norms themselves if states are unwilling to act on them.[48] This criticism implies that human rights should be taken seriously and applied in a reasonable manner. Both David Kennedy and Oona Hathaway have gone one step further by taking issue even with those who proved to be serious by joining treaties or engaging in advocacy. In a controversial quantitative study, Hathaway contended that the ratification of human rights treaties by sets of given countries not only did not improve human rights conditions on the ground, but actually correlated with increasing violations.[49] In a similar vein, David Kennedy radicalized Koskenniemi's point by arguing that human rights regimes and humanitarian law are rather part of the problem than part of solution, because they "justify" and "excuse" too much.[50] To some extent, this is an effect of the logic of legal reasoning: marking a line between noncombatants and combatants increases the legitimacy of attacking the latter, granting privileges to lawful combatants delegitimizes unlawful belligerents and dramatically worsens their status. On the whole, Kennedy is more concerned about the dangers of leaving human rights to international legal elites and a professional culture which is blind for the mismatch between lofty ideals and textual articulations on the one side, and real people and problems on the other side.[51] Whereas these authors reveal the "dark sides" of overly relying on human rights talk and treaties, the moral fervor of activists or the routines of the legal profession, Agamben claims that something is wrong with human rights as such, and that recent history has demonstrated a deep affinity between the protection and the infringement of these rights. Considered in this light, the effort of the British aid organization Save the Children, for instance, to help children in need both in Britain and abroad after World War I —faithful to George Bernard Shaw's saying, "I have no enemies under seven"—is only the flip side of a trend to declare total war on others regardless of their age and situation. This assertion clearly goes far beyond the voices of other pessimists. Agamben's work is understandable only against the backdrop of an entirely familiar mistrust of According to Agamben, democracy does not threaten to turn into totalitarianism, but rather both regimes smoothly cross over into one another since they ultimately rest on the same foundation of a political interpretation of life itself.[52] Like Carl Schmitt, Agamben sees the invocation of human rights by democratic governments as well as the "humanitarian concept of humanity"[53] as liberal democracy and its ability to cultivate nonpartisan moral and legal perspectives. deceptive manouvers or, at least, as acts of self-deception on the part of the liberal bourgeois subject. The difference between Agamben and Schmitt lies in the fact that Schmitt fought liberal democracy in the name of the authoritarian state, while Agamben sees democracy and dictatorship as two equally unappealing twins. Very confronts us with a mode of thinking in vaguely felt resemblances in lieu of distinctly perceived differences. Ultimately, he offers a version of Schmitt's theory of sovereignty that changes its political valence and downplays the difference between liberal democracy and totalitarian dictatorship—a difference about which Adorno once said that it "is a total difference. And I would say," he added, "that it would be abstract and in a problematic way fanatical if one were to ignore this difference."[54] much unlike Schmitt, the Italian philosopher TENTH, DESIRE IS TOO DYNAMIC TO BE CONTAINED BY THE SOVEREIGN – ITS FLUDITY ENABLES BIOPOWER THAT TRANSCENDS THE STATE OF EXCEPTION BY CREATING NEW FORMS OF LIFE OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM *** Neilson 2004 [Brett, University of Western Sydney, ―Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,‖ Contretemps 5, December 2004, www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl] Like Agamben, Hardt and Negri take as a point of departure the Foucauldian account of biopolitics as a system of rule that emerges at the beginning of the modern era with the exercise of power over life itself. Importantly, however, they extend Foucault‘s argument by drawing on Gilles Deleuze‘s ―Postscript on the Society of Control.‖ Foucault describes the modern system of ‗disciplinary rule‘ that fixes individuals within institutions (hospitals, schools, prisons, factories, and so on) but does not , Hardt and Negri trace the emergence of a new mode of power that is ―expressed as a control that extends throughout the consciousness and bodies of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations.‖9 In so doing, they succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices or productive socialization. By contrast combine the Deleuzian emphasis on free-floating and mobile logics of control (data banking, risk management, electronic tagging, and so on) with an attention to the productive dimension of biopower (‗living labour‘) derived from the work of exponents of Italian operaismo like Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi. While Hardt and Negri question the tendency of these thinkers to understand all contemporary forms of production on the horizon of communication and language, they are clearly indebted to their notions of ‗immaterial labour‘ and ‗general intellect‘ (which in turn derive from a reading of the famous ―Fragment on Machines‖ from Marx‘s productive aspect of biopower that places Hardt and Negri at odds with Agamben on bare life—a concept that, for them, excludes the question of labour from the field of theoretical observation. Thus, in a footnote, they comment Grundrisse). It is this emphasis on the critically on a line of Benjamin-inspired interpretations of Foucault (from Derrida‘s ―Force of Law‖ to Homo Sacer itself): It seems fundamental to us, however, that all of these discussions be brought back to the question of the productive dimension of the ―bios,‖ identifying in other words the materialist dimension of the concept beyond any conception that is purely naturalistic (life as ―zoē‖) or simply anthropological (as Agamben in particular has a tendency to do, making the concept in effect indifferent).10 With this identification of what Agamben calls indistinction as indifference (indifference to productive power of cooperation between human minds , Agamben‘s philosophical specification of ―the negative limit of humanity‖ displays ―behind the political abysses that modern totalitarianism has constructed the (more or less heroic) conditions of human passivity.‖11 The apparatus of the sovereign ban condemns humanity to inactivity and despair. By contrast, Hardt and Negri claim that bare life must be raised up to the dignity of productive power. Rather than reducing humanity to mere living matter, the exceptional power of the modern state becomes effective at precisely the moment when and bodies), Hardt and Negri voice their most severe reservations about the concept of bare life. For them 237 Kritik Answers social cooperation is seen ―no longer the result of the investment of capital but an autonomous power, the a priori of every act of production.‖12 Try as it may to relegate humanity to minimal naked life (or zoē), the modern constituted order cannot destroy the enormous creativity of living labour or expunge its powers of cooperative production. 238 Kritik Answers Agamben Answers: 2AC (5/6) ELEVENTH, AGAMBEN MISUNDERSTANDS THE SHIFTS IN SOVEREIGNTY, PAPERING OVER INSIDIOUS VIOLENCE Hardt & Dumm 2000 [Michael & Thomas, ―Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire,‖ Theory & Event 4:3, Muse//uwyo-ajl] The most significant difference between our projects, though, is that Agamben dwells on modern sovereignty whereas we claim that modern sovereignty has now come to an end and transformed into a new kind of sovereignty, what we call imperial sovereignty. Imperial sovereignty has nothing to do with the concentration camp. It no longer takes the form of a dialectic between Self and Other and does not function through any such absolute exclusion, but rules rather through mechanisms of differential inclusion, making hierarchies of hybrid identities. This description may not immediately give you the same sense of horror that you get from Auschwitz and the Nazi Lager, but imperial sovereignty is certainly just as brutal as modern sovereignty was, and it has its own subtle and not so subtle horrors. TWELFTH, AGAMBEN‘S USE OF THE CAMP CONFLATES VICTIM WITH OPPRESSOR, PREVENTING US FROM HOLDING PERPETRATORS RESPONSIBLE AND DESTROYING ANY ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO ACT SINCE WE POSIT EVERYONE AS THE VICTIM Sanyal, Assist Prof of French @ UC Berkeley, 2K2 (Debarati, ―A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism,‖ Representations, Issue 79, Caliber) Agamben‘s radicalization of Levi‘s gray zone has even more disturbing consequences for understanding the relations of power within the camps. The unstable boundary between oppressor and oppressed in the gray zone is radicalized in Agamben‘s account such that the two positions appear to be reciprocal and convertible: ‗‗It seems, in fact, that the only thing that interests him [Levi] is what makes judgement impossible: the gray zone in Beyond the problems inherent in a transhistorical treatment of shame and complicity, which victims become executioners and executioners become victims‘‘ (Remnants, 17).18 While Agamben nowhere suggests that his emphasis on the camps as sites for a potentially endless circulation of guilt nevertheless takes the convertibility of victims and executioners as a structural given. Primo Levi, however, was at pains to emphasize that this convertibility was a politically expedient fiction designed to erase the difference between victim and executioner by forcing Jews to participate in the murder and cremation of their own. He also stressed the singular, unimaginable strain such a predicament must have exerted upon the SK. To transform such a charged, ambiguous lived reality into a formal conception of convertibility has disturbing ethical consequences. It suggests that the perpetrators too, by virtue of occupying this zone of radical inversion and participating in the traumatic conditions of camp life, could be perceived as victims. The fallacy perpetrators and victims truly did exchange positions, of this structural reciprocity, however, is refuted by Levi in a cautionary preface to his discussion of the Sonderkommando: This mimesis, this identification or imitation or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much discussion. . . . I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth. (Drowned, 50) The conceptualization of the gray zone as a transhistorical and trans-subjective site of culpability, ‗‗in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims,‘‘ thus conflates the positions of Muslims, Prominents, Kapos, and SS in a gesture that reaches beyond the concentration camp experience to include ‗‗us‘‘ in a general condition of traumatic culpability. This blurring of subject positions leads to a vision of inescapable guilt, in which we are always already collectively steeped in the eliminationist logic that led to the concentration camp and continue unknowingly to perpetuate its violence. But just as this vision posits an ever-encroaching web of complicity, it also, paradoxically, proposes an infinitely elastic notion of victimhood. If we are obscurely complicit with the logic of the soccer match, the irrealization of violence in daily life, we are also comparably violated by the historical trauma of the camps. The generalization of complicity and victimization not only dismantles the historical specificity of the camps and 239 Kritik Answers the survivors‘ testimonies. It also, more disturbingly, coopts the figure of the victim as an ‗‗other‘‘ who is but an avatar of ourselves, a point I will address in a moment. 240 Kritik Answers Agamben Answers: 2AC (6/6) THIRTEENTH, THEORY IS IRRELEVENT ABSENT SPECIFIC APPLICATION – MUST COMBINE THEORY AND PRACTICE FOR A PHILOSOPHY AS LIFE Foucault ‗82 [Michel, God, ―Politics and Ethics: An Interview,‖ The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 373-4//uwyo-ajl] M.F. That's right. When Habermas was in Paris, we talked at some length, and in fact I was quite struck by his observation of the extent to which the problem of Heidegger and of the political implications of Heidegger's thought was quite a pressing and important one for him. One thing he said to me After explaining how Heidegger's thought indeed constituted a political disaster, he mentioned one of his professors who was a great Kantian, very well-known in the '30s, and he explained how astonished and disappointed he had been when, while looking through card catalogues one day, he found some texts from around 1934 by this illustrious Kantian that were thoroughly Nazi in orientation. has left me musing, and it's something I'd like to mull over further. I have just recently had the same experience with Max Pohlenz, who heralded the universal values of Stoicism all his life. I came across a text of his from 1934 devoted to Fiihrertum in Stoicism. You should reread the introductory page and the book's closing remarks on the Fuhrersideal and on the true humanism constituted by the Volk under the inspiration of the leader's direction-Heidegger never wrote anything more disturbing. Nothing in this condemns Stoicism or Kantianism, needless to say. there is a very tenuous "analytic" link between a philosophical conception and the concrete political attitude of someone who is appealing to it; the "best" theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous political choices; certain great themes such as "humanism" can be used to any end whatever-for example, to show with what gratitude Pohlenz would have greeted Hitler. I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding, prudent, "experimental" attitude is necesary; at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. I have never But I think that we must reckon with several facts: been too concerned about people who say: "You are bor-rowing ideas from Nietzsche; well, Nietzsche was used by the Nazis, therefore. . ."; but, on the I have always been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institu-tions, and knowledge, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality. If I have insisted on all this "practice," it has not been in order to "apply" ideas, but in order to put them to the test and modify them. The key to the Personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophicallife, his ethos. other hand, Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance during the war, one was Cavailles, a historian of mathematics who was interested None of the philosophers of engagement-Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, did a thing. in the development of its internal structures. Merleau-Ponty-none of them FOURTEENTH, EVEN IF THE LAW WAS ORIGINALLY FOUNDED ON VIOLENCE, IT NOW OPERATES IN A NONVIOLENT WAY Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl] this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that it does not do justice to the complex relationship that these authors establish between violence and normativity, that is, in the end the very normative nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying that all law is violent, in essence or in its core, rather that law is dependent upon a form of violence for its foundation. Violence can found the law, without the law itself being violent. In Hobbes, the social contract, despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it creates, also enables individual rights to flourish on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel 29. The problem with 2003: 86). 30. In Schmitt, the decision over the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only because it makes the regular case possible. The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end (Schmitt 1985: 13). What Schmitt has in mind is not the indistinction between fact and law, or their intimate cohesion, to wit, their secrete indistinguishability, but the origin of the law, in the name of the law. This explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the decision is accompanied by the recognition of popular sovereignty, since the decision is only the expression of an organic community. Decisionism for Schmitt is only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous whole, against liberal parliamentarianism. Also, the evolution of Schmitt‘s thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic element, in favour of a strong form of institutionalism. This is because, if indeed the juridical order is totally dependent on the sovereign decision, then the latter can revoke it at any moment. Decisionism, as a theory about the origin of the law, leads to its own contradiction unless it is reintegrated in a theory of institutions (Kervégan 1992). Agamben sees these authors as establishing a circularity of law and violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin of the law, for the law‘s 31. In other words, sake. Equally, Savigny‘s polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his philosophical ally Hegel, does not amount to a recognition of the capture of life by the law, but aims at grounding the legal order in the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27). For Agamben, it 241 Kritik Answers , the origin and the essence of the law are synonymous, whereas the authors he relies on thought rather that the two were fundamentally different. 32. Agamben obviously knows all this. He argues that it is precisely this inability of the decisionists to hold on to their key insight, the anomic core of norms, which gives them the sad distinction of accurately describing an evil order. But this reading does not meet the objection to his problematic use of that tradition. seems 242 Kritik Answers #2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR (1/2) EXTEND THE 2AC KOHN 2006 EV First Agamben‘s alternative is so abstract that it offers no mean of liberation. Delinking the law and justice enables unchecked power that allows totalitarian violence, flipping their argument. SECOND, RIGHTS ARE CRITICAL TO HUMYN DIGNITY-AGAMBEN‘S ALTERNATIVE FAILS BECAUSE: 1. IGNORES THE VALUE OF RIGHTS IN RESISTING EXPLOITATION 2. FOSTERS GESTURAL POLITICS THAT CANNOT ADDRESS THE PROBLEMS OF THE OPPRESSED Frances Daly, Research Fellow, Philosophy Department, Australian National University, ―The non-citizen and the concept of ‗human rights‘,‖ BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL v. 3 n. 1, 2004, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm . , Agamben 27. Certainly calls for making all residents of extraterritorial space (which would include both citizen and non-citizen) as existing within a position of exodus or refuge, and in this we can perhaps see some basis for resistance. A position of refuge, he argues, would be able to "act back onto" territories as states and 'perforate' and alter' them such that "the citizen would be able to recognize the refugee that he or she is" (Agamben, 2000: 26). In this Agamben directs our attention usefully to the importance of the refugee today – both in terms of the plight of refugees and their presence in questioning any assumption about citizen rights, and also in placing the refugee, or "denizen" as he says using Tomas Hammar's term, as the central figure of a potential politics (Agamben, 2000: 23). But he also reduces the concepts of right and the values they involve to forms of State control, eliding all difference within right and thereby terminating an understanding of the reasons for a disjuncture between legality and morality and of an existing separation of rights from the ideal of ethicality, in which liberation and dignity exist to be realized beyond any form of contract. 28. It is always possible to suppose that a self-fashioned potentiality is simply available to us, and in some senses it is, but not because a type of theory merely posits the social and the historical as completely open to our manipulation or 'perforation'. Likewise, we cannot merely assume that changing 'forms of life' necessarily amount to types of refusal. Such a claim would only make sense if it were put forward on the basis of an appreciation of an impulse to freedom from particular types of constraint and oppression. It would also require a sense of how this impulse takes place within a variety of conditions, some of which might be easily altered and some of which might not. In the absence of an engaged sense of what this impulse means, and of the context in which elements of freedom and unfreedom do battle, it is Agamben merely presumes that a strategy by which we all identify as refugees will renew a politics and thereby end the current plight of the refugee, as if no other reality impinges on this identification. This is also assumed on the basis that the State – in Agamben's theorizing, the abstraction of an allencompassing, leviathan State – is equally, readily and easily liable to perforation. This contradiction is indicative of a wider problem where what we encounter is a form of critique that is oddly inappropriate to the type of issue it addresses. 29. Much can be said in criticism of the doctrine of right, of the limited nature of the understanding of freedom and impossible to speculate on the nature of the subjectivity or potentiality which might be emerging or which might be in stages of decomposition. rights in documents on rights, of the assumption of the place of citizen rights as the locus of the fundamental rights of the human, and most significantly, the absence But what must be stated, I feel, is that it would be a serious impoverishment of the ethical problem that we currently face to deny any potential value of rights in carrying forth traces of an impetus towards human dignity, of the ideals of freedom and equality, and to thus reduce rights to what might be termed an absolute politics. Rights cannot be reduced to citizenship rights as if the ideas of rights and citizenship are coterminus. What most critically needs to be understood is, firstly, why values of freedom and equality have such a limited and fragile place within conditions of such inordinate legalism, and, secondly, what the absence of freedom, which the cause of human rights inevitably suggests, means for the installation of any such rights. Without such an understanding we are left with a gestural politics that contains a posture of radicalism but one which fails to connect the aspirations of those who are struggling to achieve elementary rights with a vision of a world that could accord them a degree of dignity. To acknowledge this is not to be seduced by concepts of right or law, but is rather to refuse the denial of a radical questioning of the possibilities with which a discourse presents us. Benjamin's understanding of a genuinely messianic idea is something that is "not the final end of historical progress, but rather its often failed and finally accomplished interruption" (Benjamin, of any sense of the undetermined nature of what being might mean. 243 Kritik Answers We find this in values that resist exploitation and assaults upon human dignity. And it is this realm that currently requires urgent, emphatic and significant renewal. 1974: 1231). 244 Kritik Answers #2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR (2/2) RATIONAL, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS ARE GOOD – ONLY WAY TO PREVENT FUTURE HOLOCAUSTS Robert Tracinski, Received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and studied with the Objectivist Graduate Center and Editorial Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, ―Why It Can Happen Again,‖ Ayn Rand Institute, April 22, 2003, http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7888&news_iv_ctrl=1021, UK: Fisher Most people avoid these stark implications by retreating to a compromise between selfsacrifice and self-interest. Calls for sacrifice are proper, they say, but should not be taken "too far." The Fascists condemned this approach as hypocrisy. They took the morality of sacrifice to its logical conclusion. They insisted, in the words of Italian Fascist Alfredo Rocco, on "the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals." And the Nazis certainly practiced what Rocco preached. A central goal of the concentration camps, wrote survivor Bruno Bettelheim, was "to break the prisoners as individuals, and to change them into a docile mass." "There are to be no more private Germans," one Nazi writer declared; "each is to attain significance only by his service to the state." The goal of National Socialism was the relentless sacrifice of the individual: the sacrifice of his mind, his independence, and ultimately his person. A free country is based on precisely the opposite principle. To protect against what they called the "tyranny of the majority," America's Founding Fathers upheld the individual's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The implicit basis of American government was an ethics of individualism--the view that the individual is not subordinate to the collective, that he has a moral right to his own interests, and that all rational people benefit under such a system. Today, however, self-sacrifice is regarded as self-evidently good. True, most people do not want a pure, consistent system of sacrifice, as practiced by the Nazis. But once the principle is accepted, no amount of this "virtue" can ever be condemned as "too much." We will not have learned the lessons of the Holocaust until we completely reject this sacrifice-worship and rediscover the morality of individualism. 245 Kritik Answers #5 Perm: 1AR EXTEND THE PERM. RECOGNIZING MODERNITY‘S PROBLEM WITH EXCLUSION WHILE USING DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE ENABLES A CONTESTATION OF DIGNITY THAT CHALLENGES THE EXCEPTION, AS SHOWN BY DERANTY 2004 ALSO, SOVEREIGNTY MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY – CRITIQUE CAN BE SIMULTANEOUS Lombardi, Assoc Prof of Political Science @ Tampa, 96 (Mark Owen, Perspectives on ThirdWorld Sovereignty, P. 161) Sovereignty is in our collective minds. What we look at, the way we look at it and what we expect to see must be altered. This is the call for international scholars and actors. The assumptions of the paradigm will dictate the solution and approaches considered. Yet, a mere call to change this structure of the system does little except activate reactionary impulses and intellectual retrenchment. Questioning the very precepts of sovereignty, as has been done in many instances, does not in and of itself address the problems and issues so critical to transnational relations. That is why theoretical changes and paradigm shifts must be coterminous with applicative studies. One does not and should not precede the other. We cannot wait until we have a neat self-contained and accurate theory of transnational relations before we launch into studies of Third-World issues and problemsolving. If we wait we will never address the latter and arguably most important issue-area: the welfare and quality of life for the human race. THE PERM USES POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT TO AVOID THE ESSENTIALISM OF THE SOVEREIGN AND AGAMBEN‘S ALTERNATIVE BY USING CONTINGENCY TO CHALLENGE THE ATROCITY THAT BOTH MAKE INEVITABLE Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl] 49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agamben‘s reduction of the overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegel‘s modal logic a way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegel‘s claim that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt Bauman‘s theory of modernity and his theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and 246 Kritik Answers contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989). 247 Kritik Answers #5 Perm: Ext AMBIGUOUS MODERNITY THAT ACKNOWLEDGES INCOMPLETION PROVIDES THE TOOLS FOR RESISTING OPPRESSION Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl] 50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance. 248 Kritik Answers #7 Good Biopower: 1AR (1/2) AGAMBEN IS WRONG… BIOPOWER DOESN‘T CAUSE EXCEPTION OR VIOLENCE, BUT MAINTAINS LIFE Ojakangas 2005 [Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, ―Impossible Dialogues on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault,‖ Foucault Studies 2 (5-28), www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl] In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form of power which refra The effectiveness of bio-power can be seen lying precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would derive fr ins from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing people‘s lives. om the demand of justice. In biopolitical societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crim e itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: ―One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.‖ However, given that the ―right to k ill‖ is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the bio-political societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely biopolitical. Perhaps, thereneither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present- European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer excep tions. It is the very ―right to kill‖ that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question becaus e of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of bio-political thinking and practice. day For all these reasons, Agamben‘s thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental bio- The biopolitical paradigm of the West is not the concentration camp, but, rather, the presentday welfare society and, instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the biopolitical society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish socialdemocrat. Although this figure is an object – and a product – of the huge biopolitical paradigm of the West, has to be corrected. political machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest ―crim e‖ against the machinery. (In bio-political societies, death is not only ―something to be hidden away,‖ but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most ―shameful thing of all‖. ) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact, the biopolitical machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily – even when, in biological terms, he ―should have been dead longago‖. This is because biopower is not bloody power over bare life f or its own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the li ving, the condition of all life – individual as well as collective – that is the measure of the success of biopower. BIOPOLITICS IS NOT THE PROBLEM IN AND OF ITSELF – IT‘S BIOPOLITICS DEPLOYED IN TOTALITARIANS SOCIETIES WHICH IS BAD – OUR STRENGTHENING OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES SOLVES THEIR IMPACT Dickinson, Prof @ University of Cincinnati, 2K4 (Edward Ross, ―Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About ―Modernity,‖ Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March) In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucault‘s ideas have ―fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its ‗microphysics.‘‖48 The ―broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus‖ on ―technocratic reason and the ethical But the ―power-producing effects in Foucault‘s ‗microphysical‘ sense‖ (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of ―an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice‖ ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the völkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. unboundedness of science‖ was the focus of his interest.49 For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s — indeed, individual states in the Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by National Socialism — mass sterilization, mass ―eugenic‖ abortion and murder of the ―defective.‖ Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor United States had already begun doing so in 1907. 249 Kritik Answers their legal and political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they did not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies. 250 Kritik Answers #7 Good Biopower: 1AR (2/2) BIOPOLITICS DOESN‘T CAUSE ATROCITY Ojakangas 2005 [Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, ―Impossible Dialogues on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault,‖ Foucault Studies 2 (5-28), www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl] For Foucault, the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life was something puzzling: ―It is one of the central antinomies of our political reason.‖ However, it was an antinomy precisely because in principle the sovereign power and bio-power are mutually exclusive. How is it possible that the care of individual life paves the way for mass slaughters? Although Foucault could never give a satisfactory answer to this question, he was convinced that mass slaughters are not the effect or the logical conclusion of bio-political rationality. I am also convinced about that. To be sure, it can be argued that sovereign power and bio-power are reconciled within the modern state, which legitimates killing by bio-political arguments. Especially, it can be argued that these powers are reconciled in the Third Reich in which they seemed to ―coincide exactly‖. To my mind, however, neither the modern state nor the Third Reich – in which the monstrosity of the modern state is crystallized – are the syntheses of the sovereign power and bio-power, but, rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension. This is, I believe, what Foucault meant when he wrote about their ―demonic combination‖. 251 Kritik Answers #9 Essentialism: 1AR (1/2) EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 3, HEINS 2005 EVIDENCE. GROUP IT. THE CRITICISM ESSENTIALIZES OPPRESSION BY COLLAPSING DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM INTO A SINGLE TRANSCENDENT ENTITY, DESTROYING CRTICISIM OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF OPPRESSION ALSO, THAT TAKES OUT THEIR IMPACT BECAUSE AGAMBEN‘S TRANSHITORICAL ARGUMENT CONFLATES DIFFERENT HISTORICAL ERAS. GLOBAL CAPITAL IS MORE DECENTRALIZED THAN FASCISM, MAKING THEIR TERMINAL OFFENSE IMPOSSIBLE. IT ALSO PROVES THAT THE PERM SOLVES BEST BECAUSE WE CAN ENGAGE IN CRITICISM OF THE SHORTCOMINGS OF RIGHTS, WHILE STILL PROVIDING THE MECHANISMS NECESSARY TO PREVENT FULL SCALE FASCISM AGAMBEN ESSENTIALIZES INTERNMENT INTO A TRANSHISTORICAL ENTITY, PREVENTING TESTIMONY NECESSARY TO MOBILIZE AGAINST DIVERSE FORMS OF OPPRESSION AND TO CRITICIZE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF WESTERN RIGHTS DISCOURSE FROM WITHIN *** Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl] 11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernity‘s moral superiority, that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneth‘s reminder that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression. 252 Kritik Answers #9 Essentialism: 1AR (2/2) AND, AGAMBEN‘S FOCUS ON LANGUAGE IGNORES HOW HISTORICAL CONDITIONS HAVE CHANGED, PREVENTING RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION Wark 2004 [McKenzie, ―Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing,‖ posted to nettime mailing list, January 27, amsterdam.nettime.org/ListsArchives/nettime-l-0401/msg00092.html, acc 1-7-2004//uwyo-ajl] What never occurs to Agamben is to inquire into the historical – rather than philological -- conditions of existence of this most radical challenge to the state. Agamben reduces everything to power and the body. Like the Althusserians, he too has dispensed with problem of relating together the complex of historical forces. In moving so quickly from the commodity form to the state form, the question of the historical process of the production of the abstraction and the abstraction of production disappears, and with it the development of class struggle. AGAMBEN‘S TRANSHISTORICAL MODEL OF BIOPOWER COLLAPSES HISTORY, IGNORING ITS CONTEXTUAL FUNCTION Panagia ‗99 [Davide, ―The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and the Tasks of Political Thinking,‖ Theory & Event 3:1, Muse//uwyo-ajl] What emerges through the logic of the paradox of sovereignty is an event Agamben calls the zone of indistinction. In the suspension of the rule through the state of exception, what we are presented with is a complex plateau where such philosophically distinct categories as state of nature and law, outside and inside, exception and rule flow through one another to the point of literal indistinction. On Agamben's account, the operation of sovereignty abandons individuals whenever they are placed outside the law and in so doing, exposes and threatens them to a sphere where there is no possibility of appeal. (Agamben, p. 29) What is crucial for Agamben's entire project, then, is to point out how the zone of indistinction collapses the possibility of making distinctions - which is to say further, to point out how political philosophy finds the limit of thinking in the paradox of sovereignty. In the sphere of indistinction, we cannot think as if distinctions operated as they might in everyday life.6. The political point here is, I think, insightful and worth pursuing. What makes this insight problematic, however, is Agamben's treatment of history and the status of homo sacer therein. Part of the task of this book is to ascertain how the category of homo sacer is a specifically historical category. This is evident in Agamben's constant referral to ancient Roman legal documents as well as his exploration of the reappearance of homo sacer throughout history. But it is precisely the possibility that homo sacer is something that occurs 'throughout history' that makes Agamben's analysis at times difficult to swallow. At the purely conceptual level, one might be willing to accept the meta claim that Agamben seems to be making. But Agamben does not want to limit himself to the conceptual level. He wants to insist on the material dimension of homo sacer and the actuality of this category in contemporary life. There is thus a substantial tension between the particularity of homo sacer as a material instance of modern politics and the trans-historical category of homo sacer as a category constituted by the paradox of sovereignty and the state of indistinction. 253 Kritik Answers #9 Essentialism: Ext AGAMBEN CONFLATES DIFFERENT HISTORICAL PERIODS INTO A SINGULAR AND STABLE TRANSHISTORICAL BIOPOLITICS THAT NEVER EXISTED, MEANING NONE OF THEIR HISTORICAL IMPACTS APPLY Wark 2004 [McKenzie, ―Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing,‖ posted to nettime mailing list, January 27, amsterdam.nettime.org/ListsArchives/nettime-l-0401/msg00092.html, acc 1-7-2004//uwyo-ajl] Eugene asks about Georgio Agamben. Below is a short note on him. I find his writings on the state les interesting and useful than his return to the question of commodity fetishism, which is a refreshing revisiting of a neglected concept. On the state, his approach seems more philological than historical. By not bringing his thinking on the commodity and on the state more closely together, one is not really given much of a handle on how developments in the commodity form may have transformed the state. 'Biopower' becomes a vague, transhistorical notion in Agamben. Agamben is one of the few contemporary thinkers to try to think *past* Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which I think is still an untranscended horizon in its matching of political and theoretical intransigence. And so in the note below I concentrate on his handling of Debord. AND, NAZISM AND CONTEMPORARY DECENTRALIZED CONTROL FUNCTION DIFFERENTLY Neilson 2004 [Brett, University of Western Sydney, ―Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,‖ Contretemps 5, December 2004, www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyoajl] Negri‘s ruse in this review is to suggest that the permanent state of exception specified by the first Agamben describes the new condition of global Empire. But he counters Agamben on his own terms, charging that it is inaccurate to fix everything that happens in the world today ―onto static and totalitarian horizon, as under Nazism.‖ Such an equation, for Negri, is anachronistic and inaccurate, since it conflates the fascist rule of the twentieth century with contemporary modes of decentralized global control. With implicit a reference to the first chapter of Stato di Eccezione, where Agamben describes the current world situation as ‗global civil war‘ (a term initially used by both Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt), Negri questions the notion of a sovereign ban that renders constituent and constituted power indistinct: But things are different—if we live in a state of exception it is because we live through a ferocious and permanent ―civil war,‖ where the positive and negative clash: their antagonistic power can in no way be flattened onto indifference.18 There can be no doubt that Stato di Eccezione finds Agamben writing of a positive counterpower that breaks the connection of violence to law posited by Schmitt‘s exceptionalist model of sovereignty. For Schmitt, the state of exception exists only as a means of maintaining and restoring the constituted sovereign order. By contrast, Agamben follows the argument of Benjamin‘s ―Critique of Violence,‖ which posits a divine or revolutionary violence that intercedes upon the struggle of constituent and constituted power, breaking the connection of violence to law that, in the final instance, undergirds their interrelation. By opening the possibility of a power that operates in complete independence from the law, Agamben claims, Benjamin specifies the nature of the violence that pertains in the permanent state of exception. Furthermore, by virtue of the influence of his essay, Benjamin provokes the negative reaction of Schmitt, whose entire political theory can be read as a fearful response to the prospect of an exception that does not return to the norm. This is not to claim, however, that Stato di Eccezione affirms Negri‘s equation of constituent violence with living counterpower. Rather the Benjaminian violence celebrated by Agamben remains separate from the whole complex of constituent and constituted power, both interceding upon them with an energy that makes the paradigm of modern sovereignty obsolete and, in so doing, maintaining them in indistinction. 254 Kritik Answers #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: 1AR (1/2) EXTEND 2AC NEILSON 2004 EV. GROUP IT. FIRST, THE NEG POSITS BIOPOWER AS AN ALL ENCOMPASSING NEGATIVE STRUCTURE THAT CO-OPTS ALL RESISTANCE, WHICH RENDERS US UNABLE TO INTERVENE BECAUSE EVERY MOVE IS SHUT OFF IN ADVANCE, DOOMING US TO ENDLESS ATROCITY. THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE IS TO USE BIOPOWER AGAINST ITSELF. PURE DESIRE EXPLODES THE SYSTEM‘S COORDINATES, UNDERMINING ITS FOUNDATIONS FROM WITHIN SECOND, THIS TAKES OUT ALL OF THE INTERNALS TO THEIR OFFENSE BECAUSE THE 1AC USES A DIFFERENT KIND OF BIOPOWER THAN AGAMBEN IS CRITICIZING BY APPROPRIATING IT AGAINST ITSELF, RATHER THAN USING IT TO EXCLUDE NON-POLITICAL LIFE THIRD, AGAMBEN‘S MODEL OF BIOPOLITICS CREATES POWERLESSNESS, SUBVERTING RESISTANCE Hardt & Dumm 2000 [Michael & Thomas, ―Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire,‖ Theory & Event 4:3, Muse//uwyo-ajl] But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have to look instead at Agamben's notions of life and biopower. Agamben uses the term "naked life" to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern sovereignty rules over naked life and biopower is this power to rule over life itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben's (and also Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of life. 255 Kritik Answers #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: 1AR (2/2) FOURTH, AGAMBEN‘S CONCEPTION OF POWER IS POLITICALLY DISABLING BECAUSE IT REDUCES EVERY RESISTANCE TO AN ALL PERVASIVE POWER STRUCTURE – ONLY VIEWING IT AS AN EXPLOSION OF DESIRE ALLOWS US TO SUBVERT THE SOVEREIGN BY ALLOWING BIOPOWER‘S OWN PRODUCTIVITY TO DESTROY ITSELF Neilson 2004 [Brett, University of Western Sydney, ―Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,‖ Contretemps 5, December 2004, www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl] How then can Negri maintain that constituent power and sovereignty are opposites, separate even in the absoluteness to which both lay claim? Already in Il potere constituente, three years before the publication of Homo Sacer, Negri fends off the argument that reduces constituent power to an infinite void of possibilities or the presence of negative possibilities. For him, the crucial question is the relation between potentiality (potenza) and power (potere). He recognizes in the definition of potentiality ―that runs from Aristotle and the Renaissance and from Schelling to Nietzsche‖ a metaphysical alternative between ―absence and power, between desire and possession, between refusal and domination.‖8 Far from opening a zone of indistinction, Negri believes this alternative to open a choice, at least when it is not closed off by the dogma that reduces power to a pre-existing physical fact, finalized order, or dialectical result. And the philosophical conduit of this opening is the great current of modern political thought, from Machiavelli to Spinoza to Marx, which understands constituent power as an overflowing expression of desire, an absence of determinations, and a truly positive concept of freedom and democracy. For Negri, the danger of Agamben‘s thought lies not in its Aristotelian rigour or formal elegance but in its inability to open a panorama of revolutionary struggle that can oppose the modern order of sovereignty and the transcendental ideal of power that backs it up. As long as constituent power remains caught in the paradox of sovereignty and the constituted order produces bare life as the limit condition of an exception that has become the rule, there can be no hope of questioning the transcendentalism of sovereign power or imagining a form of political conduct that remains free of the impositions of the modern state. Thus it is the concept of bare life that becomes the primary object of Negri‘s critique of Agamben‘s understanding of sovereignty. This much is clear in Empire, where Negri and his co-author Michael Hardt distance themselves from the notion of bare life. 256 Kritik Answers #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: Ext (1/3) CRITICISM OF BIOPOLITICS OBSCURES THE CONTROL OF LIFE, JUSTIFYING THE STATUS QUO Virno 2002 [Paolo, ―Paolo Virno‘s criticism of Agamben,‖ www.generationonline.org/p/fpagamben1.htm, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl] when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then, the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words. sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the THEIR ALTERNATIVE ENSURES THE PERPETUAL REPLICATION OF SOVEREIGNTY – ONLY WORKING THROUGH THE SPECIFIC PRACTICES OF SOVEREIGNTY CAN SUCCEED – ATTEMPTS TO MOVE AWAY FROM IT OUTSIDE OF THE STATE REPRODUCE SOVEREIGN POWER Walker, Prof of International Relations @ Arizona State U, 2K2 (RBJ, Reframing the International, P. 3-5) 257 Kritik Answers #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: Ext (2/3) AND, THE NEGATIVITY OF BARE LIFE NEUTRALIZES REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL WHICH IS TOO DYNAMIC TO BE CONSTRAINED BY POWER, AS IS PROVEN BY HISTORICAL STRUGGLES Neilson 2004 [Brett, University of Western Sydney, ―Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,‖ Contretemps 5, December 2004, www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl] In these articulations with Hardt, Negri‘s disagreement with Agamben stems from an equation of constituent power with living labour and a refusal to ground ontology in the condition of bare life. If, in Empire, this quarrel with Agamben is relatively marginal (confined to footnotes and passing comments), it assumes prominence in a subsequent essay, ―Il mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza.‖ In this piece, which traces the philosophical and historical consequences of eugenics (from classical Greece to contemporary biotechnology), the concept of bare life is understood as an ideological device for neutralizing the transgressive potentiality of human existence. Here Negri‘s criticism of Agamben is more rhetorical and direct: Were the Vietnamese combatants or the blacks who revolted in the ghettos naked? Were the workers or the students of the 1970s naked? It doesn‘t seem so if you look at photos. At least if the Vietnamese weren‘t denuded by napalm or the students hadn‘t decided to give witness naked as a sign of their freedom.13 Human struggle, by this account, cannot be held ransom to the biopolitical machine that produces bare life. Even in the case of the Nazi camps, Negri contends, it is mistaken to equate bare life with powerlessness. The mussulmani (or denuded concentration camp victims) of whom Agamben writes in Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) are humans before they are naked. And to make bare life an absolute and assimilate it to the horrors of Nazism is a ruse of ideology: Life and death in the camps represents nothing more than life and death in the camps—an episode of the civil war of the twentieth century, a horrific spectacle of the destiny of capitalism and the ideological masking of its will, of the capitalist motive against every instance of liberty.14 For Negri, the concept of bare life denies the potentiality of being. Like Hobbes‘s Leviathan, which promotes a vision of life as subjugated and unable to resist, the theory of bare life represents a kind of foundation myth for the capitalist state. It is a cry of weakness that constructs the body as a negative limit and licenses a nihilistic view of history. More pointedly, ―bare life is the opposite of Spinozan potential and corporeal joy.‖15 With this statement, Negri reaches the nub of his disagreement with Agamben. As an alternative to the Aristotelian notion of potentiality (as intrinsically and paradoxically connected to 258 Kritik Answers the act), he poses the Spinozan vision of potentiality (potenza) as the unstoppable and progressive expansion of desire (cupiditas). By this view, fully developed by Negri in The Savage Anomaly, the construction of politics is a process of permanent innovation. Desire is the determinant force of the constitution of the social—a creative project that is continually reopened and defined as absolute in this reopening. At once conflictual and constituent, desire in this analysis functions without lack and provides the basis for an absolute democracy that reaches beyond modern political representation. 259 Kritik Answers #10 Criticism Causes Powerlessness: Ext (3/3) EACH EXERCISE OF POWER IS CO-PRODUCTIVE WITH ITS OWN IMMANENT RESISTANCE THAT USES IT AS ITS TARGET, ALLOWING BETTER SUBVERSION THAN AN ISOLATED REJECTION FROM THE OUTSIDE Foucault ‗78 [Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 95-6//uwyo-ajl] -Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram-pant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous prin-ciples; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fash-ion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobiliz-ing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. 260 Kritik Answers A2 ―Neilson Conclude Negative‖: 1AR FIRST, NO HE DOESN‘T. HE ONLY SAYS THAT NEITHER AUTHOR TAKES THE OTHER SERIOUSLY ON CERTAIN POINTS, WHICH IS NON-RESPONSIVE TO THE ARGUMENT THAT WE‘RE MAKING SECOND, EVEN IF AGAMBEN AVOIDS OUR ARGUMENT, THE NEGATIVE CRITICISM DOESN‘T BECAUSE IT STILL POSITS POWER AS BEING SO TOTAL THAT EVERY ACTION GETS COOPTED, PREVENTING PRODUCTIVE RESISTANCE. CROSSAPPLY NEILSON 261 Kritik Answers #11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: 1AR THEIR PICTURE OF THE CAMP OBSCURES THE DAILY VIOLENCE OF SOVEREIGNTY Hardt & Dumm 2000 [Michael & Thomas, ―Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire,‖ Theory & Event 4:3, Muse//uwyo-ajl] TD: In that regard, my sense is that you both recognize the power of Giorgio Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer concerning the extraordinary violence of sovereignty at the end of modernity and yet you seek to overcome what may (not too unjustly) be thought of as a terrifying passivity that his position could result in.14. MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben's Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the notions of sovereignty and biopower. Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on Carl Schmitt's notions of the decision on the exception and the state of emergency, in which the modern functioning of rule becomes a permanent state of exception. He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or excluded person back as far as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of modern sovereignty thus becomes the Nazi concentration camp: the zone of exclusion and exception is the heart of modern sovereignty and grounds the rule of law. My hesitation with this view is that by posing the extreme case of the concentration camp as the heart of sovereignty it tends to obscure the daily violence of modern sovereignty in all its forms. It implies, in other words, that if we could do away with the camp then all the violence of sovereignty would also disappear. BIOPOWER DOESN‘T EMERGE FROM THE SOVEREIGN, BUT FROM SOCIAL RELATIONS THAT ARE BEYOND PLAN Lazzarato no date [Maurizio, ―From Biopower to Biopolitics,‖ Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez, www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl] Foucault needs a new political theory and a new ontology to describe the new power relations expressed in the political economy of forces. In effect, biopolitics are ―grafted‖ and ―anchored‖ upon a multiplicity of disciplinary [de commandemant et d'obéissance] relations between forces, those which power ―coordinates, institutionalizes, stratifies and targets,‖ but that are not purely and simply projected upon individuals. The fundamental political problem of modernity is not that of a single source of sovereign power, but that of a multitude of forces that act and react amongst each other according to relations of command and obedience. The relations between man and woman, master and student, doctor and patient, employer and worker, that Foucault uses to illustrate the dynamics of the social body are relations between forces that always involve a power relation. If power, in keeping with this description, is constituted from below, then we need an ascending analysis of the constitution of power dispositifs, one that begins with infinitesimal mechanisms that are subsequently ―invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed and institutionalized by ever more general mechanisms, and by forms of global domination.‖ Consequently, biopolitics is the strategic coordination of these power relations in order to extract a surplus of power from living beings. Biopolitics is a strategic relation; it is not the pure and simple capacity to legislate or legitimize sovereignty. According to Foucault the biopolitical functions of ―coordination and determination‖ concede that biopower, from the moment it begins to operate in this particular manner, is not the true source of power. Biopower coordinates and targets a power that does not properly belong to it, that comes from the ―outside.‖ Biopower is always born of 262 Kritik Answers something other than itself. 263 Kritik Answers #11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: Ext (1/2) AGAMBEN IS WRONG. BIOPOWER IS DISPERSED THROUGH SOCIETY, MAKING RESISTANCE POSSIBLE AND UNDERMINING SOVEREIGN POWER Lazzarato no date [Maurizio, ―From Biopower to Biopolitics,‖ Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez, www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05//uwyo-ajl] Agamben 2. Giorgio , recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being undertaken on the concept of biopolitics, insisted that the theoretical and political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between man as a living being [simple vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is ―now nearly unknown to us.‖ The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the polis is, for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a is this impossibility of distinguishing between zoe and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject, the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which power has ―no control?‖ Agamben‘s response is very ambiguous and it oscillates continuously between these two alternatives. Foucault‘s response is entirely different: biopolitics is the form of government taken by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction, express power relations that the classical world could not have known. Foucault described this dynamic, in keeping with the progress of his research, as the emergence of a multiple and heterogeneous power of resistance and creation that calls every organization that is transcendental, and every regulatory mechanism that is extraneous, to its constitution radically into question. The birth of biopower and the redefinition of the problem of sovereignty are only comprehensible to us on this basis. Foucault‘s entire work leads toward this conclusion even if he did not coherently explain the dynamic of this power, founded on the ―freedom‖ of ―subjects‖ and their capacity to act upon the ―conduct of others,‖ until the end of his life. radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. But POWER ISN‘T STATE-CENTERED OR INSTITUTIONAL – BUT RATHER, A MULTIPLICITY OF DISPERSED SOCIAL FORCES Foucault ‗78 [Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 92-3//uwyo-ajl] Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowl-edge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings-misunderstandings with re-spect to its nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not mean "Power" as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domi-nation exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless strug-gles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the con-trary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystalliza-tion is embodied in the state apparatus, in the . Power's condi-tion of possibility, formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more "peripheral" effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mech-anisms as a grid must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and de-scendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is of intelligibility of the social order, everywhere; not because it em-braces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. and "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that I;ests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their move-ment. One needs to be nominalistic, 110 doubt: power is not an institution, and not a 264 Kritik Answers structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib-utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. 265 Kritik Answers #11 Agamben Misunderstands Sovereignty: Ext (2/2) BIOPOWER OCCURS IN THE SHIFT TO POPULAR ADMINISTRATION AND ISN‘T LOCATED IN THE SOVEREIGN Foucault ‗78 [Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 135-7//uwyo-ajl] For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi-cal theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and un-conditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to over-throw him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly proposing their death," he was empowered to "expose their life": in this sense, he wielded an "indirect" power over them of life and death. I But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct power over the offender's life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign?2 ln any case, in its modern form-relative and limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dlissymmetrical one. The sovereigm exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be re-ferred to a historical type of society in which Power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelewement), a subtraction meclhanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax: of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on. the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a riglht of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it. Since the classical age the West has undergome a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" hasl tended to be no longer the major form of power but merelly one element among others, wlorking to incite, reinforce, control" monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one Idedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a Parallel shift in the right of death, (or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-adminis-tering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now mamifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or deveIop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and, all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicisom with which it has so greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeawors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to Iprecise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no Ronger waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on 1behalf of the existence of everyone:; entire popula-tions are mobilized for the purpose of wholes:ale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as manage:rs of life and survival, of bodies amd the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so' many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars bias caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiattes them and the one that terminaltes them are in fact increa:singly informed by the naked questtion of survival. The atomilc situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an irudividual's con-tinued existence. The principle underlying tbie tactics of bat-tle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent returm of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the largescale phenomema of population. 266 Kritik Answers #13 Praxis: 1AR PROTEST ISN‘T ENOUGH – MUST LINK IT TO PRACTICE AND DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION Foucault ‗82 [Michel, God, ―Politics and Ethics: An Interview,‖ The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//uwyo-ajl] Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because the lines are drawn by others. . . . M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being. Let's take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of para- troopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account. 267 Kritik Answers #14 Liberalism Doesn‘t Cause Exception: 1AR AGAMBEN HAS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THE INDISTINCTION BETWEEN THE FOUNDING AND CONTINUED OPERATION OF THE LAW Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl] grounding in the political is just the result of a theoretical decision, 35. But this and the alternatives should be confronted more explicitly. This lack of a substantial engagement with other legal alternatives becomes obvious a few pages Agamben later, when analyses once more the specific problem of the application of the law. When he writes that "in the case of the juridical norm, the reference to the concrete case supposes a "process" that always implies a plurality of subjects, and that culminates in the last instance in the enunciation of a sentence, that is to say, a statement whose operative reference to reality is guaranteed by institutional powers" (Agamben 2003: 69), simply formulates a classical distinction that can receive an entirely different treatment with no less plausibility. A recent philosophical solution to the gap between justification and application has been famously given by Habermas (1990 and 1996). Chapters 5 he and 6 of Between facts and norms in particular provide an excellent overview of plausible alternatives to Schmitt‘s decisionistic theory of adjudication, from Kelsen to Critical Legal Studies. Agamben cannot simply use the fact that "the application of a norm is not contained in it" as leading directly to the theory of the state of exception, since from the very same premise another form of political grounding of the legal could be advanced, one, for instance, that focuses on intersubjectivity and the institutionalisation of dissensus. The "violence" that realizes the statement is not necessarily "without logos". For Schmitt, it draws its authority from the 36. But then political, that is, the logos of the polis as ethnos; for another tradition, it would do so from the logos of intersubjectively constituted and essentially contested institutions . RIGHTS ONLY JUSTIFY EXCLUSION IF THEY‘RE ABSTRACT – MODERNITY DISTILLS THEM INTO UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP PREVENTING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION Deranty 2004 [Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, ―Agamben‘s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,‖ borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl] . Agamben 17 quotes Arendt‘s critical conclusion: ‗the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all fails to quote the very next line, which makes all the difference: "The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299). 18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political "commonwealth" do human rights have any meaning. They are an abstraction otherwise. More important than the right to freedom or the right to justice is "the right to have rights", that is, to be the member of a political community. Arendt therefore asserts the opposite of what Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he considers to be a fiction, namely the citizen. Her point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise that man never really existed as a subject of rights. This is the exact opposite of Agamben for whom the citizen is just a travesty. other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human‘ (Arendt 1966: 299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he 19. Despite this opposition, Agamben borrows Arendt‘s critical interpretation of the French revolution and modernity in general, even though this human rights lose all significance if they are not reinscribed within a political community that transforms them into constitutional principles, and the American constitution also defines a clear link between individual freedom and a political order interpretation itself is not beyond doubt. The French declaration makes it clear that whose goal is freedom‘s protection. Yet, Agamben reads the first article of the Declaration of 1789, "all men are born and remain free and equal in . Birth here refers not to nationality, but simply to the fundamental fact of the equality of all human beings in right. The term effectuates the radical break with ancient and absolutist natural law, a break that is synonymous with legal modernity. In ancient natural law, rights were associated with the social position or the notion of a perfect cosmic order underpinned by God . rights" as proof that modern sovereign power applies to bare life, here in the form of birth (Agamben 1995: 128). But this seems disingenuous 268 Kritik Answers 269 Kritik Answers Agamben Collapses the State AGAMBEN‘S ALTERNATIVE MAKES NO SENSE ON A PUBLIC LEVEL – THE NET RESULT IS COMMUNITIES AT WAR WITH THE STATE WHICH WOULD COLLAPSE THE STATE Cmiel, Prof of Cultural History @ Iowa, 96 (Kenneth, ―The Fate of the Nation and the Withering of the State‖, American Literary History, Spring, P. 196, http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/8/1/184) If community cannot be a closed thing, if it is forever open to the potentially new, then the dream of a national community is simply impossible. In Agamben's community, the idea of something being "un-American" makes no sense, for there is no defining essence in a "whatever singularity." Yet Agamben is also aware that capitalism and the state will continue. Indeed, he recognizes that after the fall of Communism, they are sweeping the globe. Politics, in the future, Agamben argues, will not be community building but the perpetual project of communities against the state, "a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization" (84). I doubt Agamben's new community is actually coming. It remains far from clear that communities without identities are emerging anywhere except in the febrile imaginations of a few philosophers. It is not that I dislike the dream. It is for me the most attractive dream there is. It is that I am skeptical that such "whatever singularities" are possible on more than the level of personal behavior. Politics is too clunky for such subtlety. Even the new social movements seem far more down-to-earth and prone to defining themselves than Agamben's theorizing. Politics, alas, xdemands more leaden language. Still, the image of the state fighting communities is one worth pondering. Its distance from earlier welfare state thinking could not be more dramatic. Instead of the state embodying the will of the nation, we have a picture of numerous communities at war with the state. It is, and I say this with no relish, a far more plausible picture of our emerging politics than Walzer's happy pluralism. Just think of insurance companies, Perotistas, and gay and lesbian activists—all communities distrustful of the state, all committed to struggling with the state. Agamben does not ask what this perpetual warfare will do to government. Like Walzer, he assumes that the state will trudge on as before. Yet if this warfare between humanity and the state is constant, is it not plausible to surmise that hostility to the state will become permanent? With the fiction that the state embodies the nation's will dying, who will defend the state? Who will keep it from becoming the recipient of increasing rancor and from being permanently wobbly? Isn't that a good way of understanding recent politics in the US? And as for Agamben's own Italy— the past decade has revealed a public far more disgusted with the state than even in America. 270 Kritik Answers **Foucault** Foucault Answers: 2AC (1/3) FIRST, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE BECAUSE IT CHALLENGES A MORE VIOLENT FORM OF UNILATERAL BIOPOWER. THIS CREATES A DOUBLE BIND: EITHER THE END RESULT OF THE ALT IS PLAN AND THERE‘S NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL OR IT DOES THE STATUS QUO AND DOESN‘T SOLVE SECOND, PERM: DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE… OUR ADVOCACY IS THE FIRST TEMPORARY EXPRESSION OF THE CRITIQUE ALTERNATIVE. REFORM IS NECESSARY TO ENGAGE THE PUBLIC SPHERE Foucault, French Sociologist, 1988 (Michel, ―On Criticism‖ in Michel Foucault: Politics Philosophy Culture Interviews and other writings 1977- 1984) D.E. You mean it will be possible to work with this government? FOUCAULT: We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against . After all, it is possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together. D.E. After Michel Foucault the critic, are we now going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that the criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing. FOUCAULT First I‘ll answer the point about ―that leads to nothing.‖ There are hundreds and thousands of people who have worked for the emergence of a number of problems that are now on the agenda. To say that this work produced nothing is quite wrong. Do you think that twenty years ago people were considering the problems of the relationship between mental illness and psychological normality, the problem of prison, the problem of medical power, the problem of the relationship between the sexes, and so on, as they are doing today? Furthermore, there are no reforms as such. Reforms are not produced in the air, independently of those who carry them out. One cannot not take account of those who will have the job of carrying out this transformation. And, then, above all, I believe that an opposition can be made between critique and transformation, ―ideal‖ critique and ―real‖ transformation. A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacrilization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought. Thought exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is something that is often hidden, but which always animates everyday behavior. There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation. as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible. On the other hand, It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do the transforming, the work of deep transformation can only be carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism. those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality. In fact I think D.E. But do you think the intellectual must have a programmatic role in this transformation? A reform is never only the result of a process in which there is conflict FOUCAULT , confrontation, struggle, resistance To say to oneself at the outset: what reform will I be able to carry out? That is not, I believe, an aim for the intellectual to pursue. His role, since he works specifically in the realm of thought, is to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality. It is a question of making conflicts more visible, of making them more essential than mere confrontations of interests or mere institutional immobility. Out of these conflicts, these confrontations, a new power relation must emerge, whose first, temporary expression will be a reform. If at the base there has not been the work of thought upon itself and if, in fact, modes of thought, that is to say modes of action, have not been altered, whatever the project for reform, we know that it will be swamped, digested by modes of behavior and institutions that will always be the same. THIRD, NO LINK – PLAN DOESN‘T EXERCISE POWER OVER THE BODIES AT GUANTANAMO. IT ONLY OVERRULES ONE ASPECT OF DETAINMENT 271 Kritik Answers Foucault Answers: 2AC (2/3) FOURTH, NO IMPACT – FOUCAULT DOESN‘T SAY THAT BIOPOWER IS NECESSARILY BAD, BUT THAT IT‘S DANGEROUS. PLAN IS AN INSANTIATION OF POWER CREATING ITS OWN RESISTENCE, CHALLENGING VIOLENCE FIFTH, DEMANDS ON THE STATE ARE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN RADICAL REJECTION – THEIR ALTERNATIVE‘S FEAR OF COOPTION PARALYZES POLITICAL PRAXIS – ONLY THROUGH THE DEMANDS OF THE PLAN CAN WE CHANGE THE SYSTEM Zizek, Senior Researcher @ Libjulian, Slovenia, 98 The dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the system also enables us to denounce the ultimate racist and/or sexist trick, that of 'two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand": when women demand dimple equality, quasi -"feminists" often pretend to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of society/'elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination...)- the only proper answer to this offer, of course. Is "no, thanks! Better is the enemy of the good! We do not want more, just equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("why reach for the moon. When we. Can have the stars?") Are wrong. It is homologous with the Native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a politically correct progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that he is thereby renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic native culture and tradition- no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation! ... A modest demand of the excluded group for the full participation at the society's universal rights is much more threatening for the system than the apparently much more "radical" rejection of the predominant social values" and the assertion of the superiority of one's own culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are "ontologically false." lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the false elevation of' women that makes them 'too good" for the banality of men's rights. Finally, the point about is not that every opposition, every attemot at subversion is automatically "co-opted." On the contrary, the very fear of being co-opted that makes us search for more and more ―radical,‖ "pure" attitudes, is the supreme strategy of suspension or marginalization. The point is rather that true subversion is not always where it seems to be sometimes. A small distance is much more explosive for the system that an ineffective radical rejection. In religion. A small heresy can be more threatening than an outright atheism or passage to another religion; for a hardline Stalinist, a Trotskyite is infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social democrat. As Le Carre put it, one true revisionist in the Central Committees is worth more than thousand dissidents outside it. It was easy to dismiss Gorbachev for aimi ng only at improving the system, making it more efficient - he nonetheless set in motion its disintegration. So one should also bear in mind the obverse of the inherent transgression inherent transgression: one is tempted to paraphrase Freud‘s claim from the Ego and the Id that man is not only much more immoral than he believes, but also much more moral than he knows - the system is not only infinitely more resistant and invulnerable than it may infinitely more vulnerable (a small revision etc. Can have large unforeseen catastrophic consequences). appear (it can co-opt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as its support), it is also SIXTH, FOUCAULDIAN CRITIQUE DENIES AGENCY BY IGNORING ANY SOCIAL JUSTICE OR USEFUL HUMAN ACTION Anthony Cook, Associate Professor at Georgetown Law, NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW, Spring, 1992 Unless we are to be trapped in this Foucaultian moment of postmodern insularity, we must resist the temptation to sever description from explanation. Instead, our values should act as magnets that link our particularized struggles to other struggles and more global critiques of power. In other words, we must not, as Foucault seems all too willing to do, forsake the possibility of more universal narratives that, while tempered by postmodern insights, attempt to say and do something about the oppressive world in which we live. Second, Foucault's emphasis on the techniques and discourses of knowledge that constitute the human subject often diminishes, if not abrogates, the role of human agency. Agency is of tremendous importance in any theory of oppression, because individuals are objective should be to explain what we describe in light of a vision embracing values that we make explicit in struggle. These 272 Kritik Answers not simply constituted by systems of knowledge but also constitute hegemonic and counterhegemonic systems of knowledge as well. Critical theory must pay attention to the ways in which oppressed people not only are victimized by ideologies of oppression but the ways they craft from these ideologies and discourses counter-hegemonic weapons of liberation. 273 Kritik Answers Foucault Answers: 2AC (3/3) SEVENTH, NO ALTERNATIVE – FOUCAULDIAN POWER IS SO ALL ENCOMPASSING THAT NO BREAK FROM CO-OPTATION IS POSSIBLE EIGHTH, FOUCAULT MISUNDERSTANDS POWER… LIBERAL SOCIETY IS SUBSTANTIVELY DIFFERENT FROM INTERNMENT Walzer, Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies & Former Professor at Harvard, 1983 (Michael, ―The Politics of Michel Foucault,‖ Dissent, Fall) For it is Foucault's claim, and I think he is partly right, that the discipline of a prison, say, represents a continuation and intensification of what goes on in more ordinary places-and wouldn't be possible if it didn't. So we all live to a time schedule, get up to an alarm, work to a rigid routine, live in the eye of authority, are periodically subject to examination and inspection. No one is entirely free from these new forms of social control. It has to be added, however, that subjection to these new forms is not the same thing as being in prison: Foucault tends systematically to underestimate the difference, and this criticism, which I shall want to develop, goes to the heart of his politics. NINTH, THEIR TOTALIZING CRITICISM OF POWER PREVENTS REFORM—WE MUST USE THE STATE FOR INCREMENTAL ENDS. James D. Faubian, professor of anthro @ Rice University, Michel Foucault: Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xxxi-xxxii Foucault wanted, then, to move both the descriptive and prescriptive functions of political analysis away from the ―juridico-discursive‖ language of legitimation. To try to put the matter as simply as possible: he does not think that all power is evil or all government unacceptable, but does think that theorems claiming to confer legitimacy on power or government are fictions; in a lecture of 1979, he expresses sympathy with the view of earlier political skeptics that ―civil society is a bluff and the social contract a fairy tale.‖ This does not mean that the subject matter of political philosophy is evacuated, for doctrines of legitimation have been and may still act as political forces in history. But his analytic quarrel with legitimation theory is that it can divert us from considering the terms in which modern government confers rationality, and thus possible acceptability, on its activity and practice. This is the main reason why he argues political analysis is still immature, having still not cut off the king‘s head.1o The deployment and application of law is, for Foucault, like everything else, not good or evil in itself, capable of acting in the framework of liberalism as an instrument for economizing and moderating the interventions of governmental power, necessary as an indispensable restraint on power in some contexts, uses, and guises; it is to be resisted as an encroaching menace in others. In his governmentality lectures, Foucault investigates the evolution, from the era of the police states through the development of parliamentary liberal government, of the ambiguous and dangerous hybridization of law with a rationality of security and with new theories of social solidarity and social defense. This historical analysis and diagnosis informs Foucault‘s commentary on the civil liberties politics of seventies France, with its distinctive contemporary recrudescence of raison d‘etat and the police state. But at the same time, in a way we tend not to think of as typically French, he dryly mocked and debunked the excesses of what he called ―state phobia‖—the image of the contemporary state as an agency of essential evil and limitless despotism. The state, he said, does not have a unitary essence or indeed the importance commonly ascribed to it: what are important to study are the multiple governmental practices that are exercised through its institutions and elsewhere. (In a lecture describing the seventeenth-century 274 Kritik Answers theory of raison d‘etat, Foucault characterized it as a doctrine of the ―permanent coup d‘etat‖—a piquant choice of phrase, because it had been the title of a polemical book written against de Gaulle by Francois Mitterrand. We know that Foucault did not share the view, common in the French Left, of de Gaulle‘s government as an antidemocratic putsch with crypto-fascistic tendencies.‖ The Left, he also suggested, should expect to win elected power not by demonizing the state (never a very convincing platform for a socialist party) but by showing it possessed its own conception of how to govern. 275 Kritik Answers #2 Perm: 1AR PERM SOLVES BEST - MICROPOLITICS AND LARGER STRUGGLES AGAINST OPPRESSION SHOULD BE COMBINED, CREATING A RADICAL REFORMISM IN OPPOSITION TO TOTALIZING POLITICS May ‗93 [Todd, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 118//wfi-ajl] The risk of a totalizing theory of politics is that it will unsuspectingly promote what it struggles against, because it is ignorant of oppressions at the micropolitical level. The alternative to this, though, is not a bourgeois reformism but what one critic has called a "radical reformism" (Gandal 1986, p. 122). This radical reformism recognizes both that a change of power which comes solely at the top hazards a repetition of the old forms of domination and that not just any small reform will change micropolitical domination. Instead, what the radical reformist seeks are changes at the micropolitical level which actually change the relations of power between groups. Those changes involve very different types of struggle, depending upon the situation of the groups involved. They cannot be cast in a common form or be reduced to a common goal. But they possess a solidarity that derives from a complementarity investing all struggles against domination under capitalism. I , Micropolitical struggles do not replace the struggle against exploitation, and no one of them can be substituted for the others. What binds them is the recognition that in the modern epoch power operates in many and diffuse ways, and that to end the domination of such power is a matter of many independent but mutually reinforcing struggles both at the micropolitical and the macropoliticallevel. And thus, there is a need for the kinds of analyses which are situated not in the region of general political theory, but in the domains of struggles which occur both beneath and across that region. "I am attempting. . . apart from any totalization-which would be at once abstract and limiting-to open up problems that are as concrete and general as possible, problems that approach politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal, problems that are at once constituents of our history and constituted by that history" (Foucault 1984b, pp. 375-76). 276 Kritik Answers Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (1/2) WE SHOULD JUXTAPOSE FOUCAULDIAN CRITICISM IN OPPOSITION TO THE IDEAS HE CRITICIZES Cook ‗92 [Anthony E., prof at Georgetown School of Law, New England Law Review, 1992, LN//wfiajl] Thus, Foucault has prompted an entirely different approach to social criticism. Rejecting modernist attempts to develop master narratives in the fashion of Hegel, Marx, and Kant, Foucault instructs us to "develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems." n14 "Believe," he advises us, "that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic." n15 JUXTAPOSITION OF INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS AVOIDS THE PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL THEORY AND ENABLES A PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM Marcus '98 [George E., Professor of Anthro at Rice University, Ethnography through Thick and Thin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 186-7//uwyo-ajl] The postmodern notions of heterotopia (Foucault), juxtapositions, and the blocking together of incommensurables (Lyotard) have served to renew the long-neglected practice of comparison in anthropology, but in altered ways. Juxtapositions do not have the obvious meta-logic of older styles of comparison in anthropology (e.g., controlled comparisons within a cultural area or "natural" geographical region); rather, they emerge from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose controus are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account which has different, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation. The postmodern object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of seeming incommensurables or phenomena that might conventionally have appeared to be "world apart." Comparison reenters the very act of ethnographic specificity by a postmodern vision of seemingly improbably juxtapositions, the global collapsed into and made and integral part of a parallel, related local situations rather than something monolithic and external to them. This move toward comparison as heterotopia firmly deterritorializes culture in ethnographic writing and simulates accounts of cultures composed in a landscape for which there is as yet no developed theoretical comparison 277 Kritik Answers Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (2/2) JUXTAPOSING FOUCAULDIAN ACCOUNTS OF POWER WITH TRADITIONAL SOVEREIGN MODELS EXPOSES DISCIPLINARY RELATIONS Boyle ‗97 [James, Prof. Law at Washington College of Law, ―Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors,‖ University of Cincinatti Law Review, Fall, LN//wfi-ajl] From the point of view of this Article, one of Foucault's most interesting contributions was to challenge a particular notion of power, power-as-sovereignty, and to juxtapose against it a vision of "surveillance" and "discipline." n21 At the heart of this project was a belief that both our analyses of the operation of political power and our strategies for its restraint or limitation were inaccurate or misguided. In a series of essays and books Foucault argued that, rather than the public and formal triangle of sovereign, citizen, and right, we should focus on a series of subtler private, informal, and material forms of coercion organized around the concepts of surveillance and discipline. The paradigm for the idea of surveillance was the Panopticon, Bentham's plan for a prison constructed in the shape of a wheel around the hub of an observing warden. At any moment the warden might have the prisoner under observation through a nineteenth century version of the closed-circuit TV. n22 Unsure when authority might in fact be watching, the prisoner would strive always to conform his behavior to its presumed desires. Bentham had hit upon a behavioralist equivalent of the superego, formed from uncertainty about when one was being observed by the powers that be. The echo of contemporary laments about the "privacy-free state" is striking. To this, Foucault added the notion of discipline-crudely put, the multitudinous private methods of regulation of individual behavior ranging from workplace time-andmotion efficiency directives to psychiatric evaluation. n23 278 Kritik Answers #5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR (1/4) OUR DEMAND TURNS THE TABLES ON THE BIOPOLITICAL APPARATUS. WE UTILIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN FREEDOM AND CONTROL TO ARTICULATE A SERIES OF DEMANDS WHICH ARE A STRATEGIC REVERSAL OF POWER RELATIONS Campbell, Prof of IR @ Newcastle U, 98 (David, Writing Security, September 1, P. 203-5) The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. I suggested above in a tentative way how we might think differently about some issues Were those possibilities explored, the boundaries of American identity and the realm of ―the political‖ would be very different from that which currently predominates, for the distinction between what counts as ―normal‖ and what is thus ―pathological‖ would have been refigured. Besides, the evident differences in emergent discourse of danger pertinent to United States Foreign Policy. demonstrates how even those articulations with the most affinity do not mechanically reproduce a monolithic identity. Of course, the pursuit of new possibilities through different interpretations is often strongly contested. Even recommendations to redirect political practices so as to confront new challenges sometimes do not escape old logic. For example, the effort to address environmental issues within the parameters of international relations and nation security often involves simply extending the old registry of security to cover his new domain. Usually signified by the appropriation of the metaphor of ―war‖ to a new problem, this is evident in some of the literature that advocates the importance of global cooperation and management to counter environmental degradation, where ecological danger often replaces fading military threats as the basis of an interpretation designed to sustain sovereignty. 35 Yet as I noted in Chapter 7, As a danger that can be articulated in terms of security strategies that are de-territorialized, involve communal cooperation, and refigure economic relationships, the environment can serve to enframe a different rendering of ―the political.‖ Recognizing the possibility of rearticulating danger environmental danger can also be figured in a manner that challenges traditional forms of American and western identity. leads us to a final question: what modes of being and forms of life could we or should we adopt? To be sure, a comprehensive attempt to answer such a question is beyond the ambit of this book. But it is important to note that asking the question in this way mistakenly implies the extensive and intensive nature of the relations of power associated with the society of security means that there has been and remains a not inconsiderable freedom to explore alternative possibilities. While traditional analyses of power are often economistic and negative, Foucault‘s understanding of power emphasizes its productive and enabling nature. 36 Even more important, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and normalizing practices. Put simply, there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need to that such possibilities exist only in the future. Indeed, institute negative and constraining power practices comes about only because without them freedom would abound. Were there no possibility of freedom, subjects would not act in a way that required containment so as to effect order. 37 Freedom, though, is not the because it is only through power that subjects exercise their agency, freedom and power cannot be separated. As Foucault maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and absence of power. ON the contrary, constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an ―agonism‖ – of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle: less of a face-toface confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. 38 The political possibilities enable by permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the ―bio-power‖ discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in western nations have been increasingly directed towards modes of being and forms of life – such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government – the ongoing agonism between those practices and the freedom of the counter demands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual orientation, human rights activist have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are a consequence of the permanent provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the ―strategic reversibility‖ of power relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistances, then the ―history of government as the conduct of conduct is interwoven with the history of dissenting counter-conducts‖ Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation of ―the political‖ has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, the core of what we now call citizenship … consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of there struggle over means of state action, especially in the making of war. In more recent times, constituencies associated with women‘s, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on society. These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive / non discursive dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation underlining this analysis is (to put in conventional terms) not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted.. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of ―the political‖ has been a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy‘s concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: ―The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.‖ 279 Kritik Answers #5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR (2/4) FOUCAULT'S MODEL OF POWER DOOMS EVERY RESISTANCE TO INEVITABLE CO-OPTATION BECAUSE OF A LACK OF SUBJECTIVITY… ANTAGONISM EXCEEDS ITS POSITIVE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS AND CAN BREAK THE POWER CYCLE BY USING THE EDIFICE'S EXCESS AGAINST ITSELF Zizek '99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl] Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well aware of the retroactive process by means of which oppressive power itself generates the form of resistance – is not this very paradox contained in Hegel's notion of positing the presuppositions, that is, of how the activity of positingmediating does not merely elaborate the presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms the very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour to return is already mediated-posited by the process of modernization, which deprived them of their ethnic roots. This argumentation may appear Eurocentrist, condemning the colonized to repeat the European imperialist pattern by means of the very gesture of resisting it – however, it is also possible to give it precisely the opposite reading. That is to say: if we ground our resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some kernel of previous ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the position of a victim resisting modernization, of a passive object on which imperialist procedures work. If, however, we conceive our resistance as an excess that results from the way brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can claim that our resistance is grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist system – that the imperialist system itself, through its inherent antagonism, activates the forces that will bring about its demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of how to ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus at which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order emerge, this in no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but provides it with an even stronger detonating force.) Or – to put it in yet another way – the premise according to which resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance, including in the eternal game Power plays with itself – the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall. It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from the fact that every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power edifice itself, from this absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he seems to draw the conclusion that resistance is co-opted in advance, that it cannot seriously undermine the system – that is, he precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the philosophical point to be made here is that this is the fundamental feature of the dialectical-materialist notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be ontologically 'higher' than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian notion of an all-encompassing power edifice which always-already contains its transgression, that which allegedly eludes it: what if the price to be paid is that the power mechanism cannot even control itself, but has to rely on an obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other words: what effectively eludes the controlling grasp of Power is not so much the external In-itself it tries to dominate but, rather, the obscene supplement which sustains its own operation. And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualization of the repressive measures themselves. This insufficiency of Foucault's theoretical edifice can be discerned in the way, in his early 280 Kritik Answers History of Madness, he is already oscillating between two radically opposed views: the view that madness is not simply a phenomenon that exists in itself and is only secondarily the object of discourses, but is itself the product of a multitude of (medical, legal, biological...) discourses about itself; and the opposite view, according to which one should 'liberate' madness from the hold exerted over it by these discourses , and 'let madness itself speak'. 281 Kritik Answers #5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR (3/4) FOUCAULT IGNORES THE WAY THAT THE POWER EDIFICE IS SPLIT FROM WITHIN AND HOW THE ITS DISAVOWED FOUNDATION CAN UNDERMINE IT Zizek '97 [Slavoj, The Game, The Plague Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 26-7//uwyo-ajl] We are now in a position to specify the distinction between the Foucauldian interconnection between Power and resistance, and our notion of ìnherent transgression'. Let us begin via the matrix of the possible relations between Law and its transgression. The most elementary is the simple relation of externality, of external opposition, in which transgression is directly opposed to legal Power, and poses a threat to it. The next step is to claim that transgression hinges on the obstacle it violates: without Law there is no transgression; transgression needs an obstacle in order to assert itself. Foucault, of course, in Volume I of The History of Sexuality, rejects both these versions, and asserts the absolute immanence of resistance to Power. However, the point of ìnherent transgression' is not only that resistance is immanent to Power, that power and counter-power generate each other; it is not only that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can no longer dominate; it is also not only that - in the case of sexuality - the disciplinary `repression' of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of repression itself, as in the case of the obsessional neurotic who derives libidinal satisfaction from the very compulsive rituals destined to keep the traumatic jouissance at bay. This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative identity, Power is always-already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a Foucauldian way, that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it and being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is alwaysalready mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the exercise of power. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the `repression' of some libidinal content retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of `repression' - this èroticization' of power is not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its `constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill depicted in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, for example, is not a secondary eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the constitutive obscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative. Judith Butler27 provides a perfect example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very formulation of the text of the anti-pornography law~ displays the contours of a particular fantasy - an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity with another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his own perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the obscene libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography. 282 Kritik Answers #5 Demands on the State Good: 1AR (4/4) THE INNER LAW OF THE SUBJECT EMERGES FROM THE FAILURE OF THE EXTERNAL LAW, ALLOWING THE SUBJECT TO DISRUPT DISCIPLINARY POWER Zizek '99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 279-80//uwyo-ajl] Butler's elaboration of the logic of melancholic identification with the lost object in fact provides a theoretical model which allows us to avoid the ill-fated notion of the 'internalization' of externally imposed social forms: what this simplistic notion of 'internalization' misses is the reflexive turn by means of which, in the emergence of the subject, external power (the pressure it exerts on the subject) is not simply internalized but vanishes, is lost: and this loss is internalized in the guise of the 'voice of conscience', the internalization which gives birth to the internal space itself: In the absence of explicit regulation, the subject emerges as one for whom power has become voice, and voice, the regulatory instrument of the psyche . . . the subject is produced, paradoxically, through this withdrawal of power, its dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as a speaking topos. This reversal is embodied in Kant, the philosopher of moral autonomy, who identifies this autonomy with a certain mode of subjection, namely, the subjection to even the humiliation in the face of the universal moral Law. The key point here is to bear in mind the tension between the two forms of this Law: far from being a mere extension or internalization of the external law, the inner Law (Call of Conscience) emerges when the external law fails to appear, in order to compensate for its absence. In this perspective, liberation from the external pressure of norms embodied in one's social conditioning (in the Enlightenment vein) is strictly identical to submission to the unconditional inner Call of Conscience. That is to say: the opposition between external social regulations and internal moral Law is that between reality and the Real: social regulations can still be justifted (or pretend to be justified) by objective requirements of social coexistence (they belong to the domain of the 'reality principle'); while the demand of the moral Law is unconditional, brooking no excuse 'You can, because you must!', as Kant put it. For that reason, social regulations make peaceful coexistence possible, while moral Law is a traumatic injunction that disrupts it.. One is thus tempted to go a step further and to invert once more the relationship between 'external' social norms and the inner moral Law: what if the subject invents external social norms precisely in order to escape the unbearable pressure of the moral Law? Isn't it much easier to have an external Master who can be duped, towards whom one can maintain a minimal distance and private space, than to have an ex-timate Master, a stranger, a foreign body in the very heart of one's being? Doesn't the minimal definition of Power (the agency experienced by the subject as the force that exerts its pressure on him from the Outside, opposing his inclinations, thwarting his goals) rely precisely on this externalization of the extimate inherent compulsion of the Law, of that which is 'in you more than yourself? This tension between external norms and the inner Law, which can also give rise to subversive effects (say, of opposing public authority on behalf of one's inner moral stance), is neglected by Foucault. 283 Kritik Answers #6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (1/2) THEY ARE IN A DOUBLE BIND – EITHER FOUCAULT IS A NIHILIST OR THE ALTERNATIVE DOESN‘T SOLVE Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V., ―Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond,‖ Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia) Here Foucault seems less interested in defining a purpose for ―incitation and struggle‖ than underscoring its ―potential creativity‖: bringing into the struggle ―as much Given his belief that even our modern discourses of liberation, rights, and humanism are all deeply entangled in the inarticulable and inescapable background ―web‖ of power practices, Foucault's only option to passive nihilism seems to be ―the perpetuation and amelioration of the conditions that make struggle itself possible‖ 77 And this political task of promoting the ―pathos of struggle‖ functions as an alternative to the ascetic ideal: creating and maintaining ―many sites of resistance‖ to the numerous forms of domination, exploitation, and subjectification present in the social and political body. 78 Admittedly, the ―pathos of struggle‖ has a strong (and from a Nietzschean perspective, a possibly suspect) negative component: struggling against any system of constraints or technologies of power that prevent individuals (affected by the systems) from having ―the possibility of altering them‖ or ―the means of modifying‖ them. 79 As an ethico-political ideal, the ―pathos of struggle‖ would call for the negation of all political, social, and cultural conditions that preclude the possibility of struggling to change these conditions. As Foucault writes, ―perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against gaiety, lucidity and determination as possible.‖ 76 nonconsensuality.‖ 80 But it would also contain an affirmative component as well, a ―struggle for‖ something: ―Minimally, it will be a struggle for the establishing of conditions in which self-creation is made possible, in which the assertion of individuality and otherness is viable.‖ 81 As with Nietzsche's alternative ideals (of ―recurrence‖ and ―will to power‖), the final trajectory of the ―pathos of struggle‖ remains undetermined. It can't tell us beforehand what our goals should be, only that (a) the conditions of their conception and articulation must remain ―polymorphous‖ and ―unhierarchical, ‖ and that (b) whatever they are, they should remain rooted in gratitude and service to life— ―a joyful… creative, and self-constituting engagement‖ —rather than resentment against it. 82 But as with Nietzsche's nonascetic ideals, the ―pathos of struggle‖ might also supply some affirmative content as well: the doing of what is necessary to affirm your creative freedom and enhance the ongoing process of self-definition and social definition (within the constraints of not excluding or disempowering the viable ―other‖). For example, overcome the oppression of your present situation if it prevents you from getting a sufficient sense of power and effectiveness in relation to life except by devaluing life. 83 In a we might view Foucault as attempting to instill an ―agonistic education‖— a will to struggle within ―an overarching aesthetics of life‖—to prepare ―the ground for, and manifest, our creative freedom.‖ 84 According to Foucault, glimpses of freedom and creation of the self as a ―work of art‖ are prompted by continuous acts of resistance and political struggle that serve to loosen the hold of those vast matrices of disciplinary power and technologies of the body that threaten to overwhelm and homogenize us (cf. HS, 2,:io-n). 85 As Foucault sees it, then, a will to struggle, an ―aesthetic agonism, ‖ becomes the defining characteristic and alternate (nonascetic) ideal that allows us to best live out our ―unresolved existence‖—surrounded by ubiquitous, inescapable power arrangements and tottering on the abyss of nihilism. manner somewhat reminiscent of Schiller's attempt to instill an ―aesthetic education‖ in humanity to promote political freedom, FOUCAULT IS FASCINATING, AND IRRELEVANT TO PUBLIC POLICY McClean 01 David E. , New School University, ―The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,‖ Presented at the 20 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm. Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may reasonably be described as a very long and eccentric footnote to Nietzsche (I have once been accused, by a Foucaltian true believer, of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks). Foucault, who has provided the Left of the late 1960s through the present with such notions as "governmentality," "Limit," "archeology," "discourse" "power" and "ethics," creating or redefining their meanings, has made it overabundantly clear that all of our moralities and practices are the successors of previous ones which derive from certain configurations of savoir and connaisance arising from or created by, respectively, the discourses of the various scientific schools. But I have not yet found in anything Foucault wrote or said how such observations may be translated into a political movement or hammered into a political document or theory (let alone public policies) that can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary aesthetic experimentalism. In fact, Foucault would have shuddered if any one ever did, since he thought that anything as grand as a movement went far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly rehabilitate Habermas, for at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the abstractions of various Marxian-Freudian social critiques. 284 Kritik Answers #6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (2/2) RESISTANCE DOESN‘T REQUIRE REJECTION OF DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES, ONLY THEIR INTERROGATON May ‗93 [Todd, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 125//wfi-ajl] Resistance in contemporary society does not require the complete abandonment of psychology. What it does require is an understanding of the ways in which psychology has contributed to our present, particularly the dangers it poses and the damages it has fostered in that present. It is indeed important for us to get free of psychology. But to get free of psychology is not necessarily to abandon it. It is to understand its hold on us, theoretically and practically, and to be able to make choices about what place, if any, we want it to have in our future. If Foucault's last works on Greek and Roman sexuality were not written in order to offer concrete alternatives to contemporary methods of self-formation, neither is the idea of experimentation which motivated them an implicit advocacy of the complete abandonment of psychology. They are an attempt to understand who we are and what our present is like, by reference to histories of practices rather than to the unfolding of truths or falsehoods. REJECTING DISCIPLINE CREATES NEW FORMS OF UTOPIAN DOMINATION… ONLY ANALYZING HOW POWER CONSTITUTES KNOWLEDGE ALLOWS RESISTANCE Cook ‗92 [Anthony, Associate Professor of Law @ Georgetown, Hangs out with Gingrich, New England Law Review, LN//wfi] Third, Foucault's intervention at these localized sites of domination is not a mere seizing of power that replaces one utopian vision with another that is likely to be as dominating as its predecessor when based on the same techniques and knowledge systems embedded in the displaced system. Instead, Foucault's intervention has a theoretical dimension that is of primary importance. He wants first and foremost to challenge the specific ways in which knowledge is produced and constituted. That is, he wants to explore the ways in which we are socialized into seeing the world and its possibilities in a certain way and dismissing other visions as "unreasonable" or "impossible." We must understand the extent to which we all carry around in our heads fascist, [*759] racist, homophobic, and sexist constructs that are produced and reproduced by received discourses of knowledge that are inextricably connected to the exercise of power and domination of certain groups. When this is realized, the possibility of building around rather than on these constructs is enhanced. All of this, I believe, is good. 285 Kritik Answers #10 Reformism Good: 1AR FOUCAULT IGNORES JURIDICAL POWER AS A KEY SOURCE OF VIOLENCE FOR THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATE. WE CAN STRATEGICALLY REFORM THE LAW AND USE THE EXTENSION OF RIGHTS TO HEDGE AGAINST POWER – FOUCAULT HIMSELF WAS ENGAGED IN THESE VERY SAME POLITICAL LIKE THE AFF Habermas, Permanent Visiting Prof @ Northwestern U, 87 (Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, P. 289-291) Foucault begins by analyzing the normative language game of rational natural law in connection with the latent functions that the discourse on authority has in the age of Classicism for the establishment and the exercise of absolutist state power. The sovereignty of the state that has a monopoly on violence is also expressed in the demonstrative forms of punishment that Foucault depicts in connection with the procedures of torture and ordeal. From the same functionalist perspective, he then describes the advances made by the Classical language game during the reform era of the Enlightenment. They culminate, on the one hand, in the Kantian theory of morality and law and, on the other hand, in utilitarianism. Interestingly enough, Foucault docs not go into the fact that these in turn serve the revolutionary establishment of a constitutionalized slate power, which is to say, of a political order transferred ideologically from the sovereignty of the prince to the sovereignty of the people. This kind of regime is, after all, correlated with those normalizing forms of punishment that Because Foucault filters out the internal aspects of the development of law, he can inconspicuously take a third and decisive step: Whereas the sovereign power of Classical formations of power is constituted in concepts of right and law, this normative language game is supposed to be inapplicable to the disciplinary power of the modern age; the latter is suited only to empirical, at least nonjuridical, concepts having to do with the factual steering and organization of the behavioral modes and the motives of a population rendered increasingly manipulable by science: "The procedures of normalization come to be ever more constantly constitute the proper theme of Discipline and Punish. engaged in the colonization of those of the law. I believe that all this can explain the global functioning of what I would call a society of the complex life-context of modern societies as a whole can as a matter of fact be less and less construed in the natural-law categories of contractual relationships. However, this circumstance cannot justify the strategic decision (so full of consequences for Foucault's theory) to neglect the development of normative structures in connection with the modern formation of power. As soon as Foucault takes up the threads of the biopolitical establishment of disciplinary power, he lets drop the threads of the legal organization of the exercise of power and of the legitimation of the order of domination. Because of this, the ungrounded impression arises that the bourgeois constitutional state is a dysfunctional relic from the period of absolutism. This uncircumspect leveling of culture and politics to immediate substrates of the application of violence explains the ostensible gaps in his presentation. That his history of modern penal justice is detached from the development of the constitutional state might be defended on methodological grounds. The theoretical narrowing down to the system of carrying out punishment is more questionable. As soon as he passes from the Classical to the modern age, Foucault pays no attention whatsoever to penal law and to the law governing penal process. Otherwise, he would have had to submit the unmistakable gains in liberality and legal security, and the expansion of civil-rights guarantees even in this area, to an exact interpretation in terms of the theory of power. However, his presentation is utterly distorted by the fact that he also filters out of the history of penal practices itself all aspects of legal regulation. In prisons, indeed, just as in clinics, schools, and military installations, there do exist those "special power relationships" that have by no means remained undisturbed by an energetically advancing enactment of legal rights — Foucault himself has been politically engaged for this cause. This selectivity does not take anything away, from the importance of his fascinating unmasking of the capillary effects of power. But his generalization, in terms of the theory of power, of such a selective reading hinders Foucault from perceiving the phenomenon actually in need of explanation: In the welfare-state democracies of the West, the spread of legal regulation has the structure dilemma, because it is the legal means for securing freedom that themselves endanger the freedom of their presumptive beneficiaries. Under the premises of his theory of power, Foucault so levels down the complexity of societal modernization that the disturbing paradoxes of this process cannot even become apparent to him. normalization."33 As the transition from doctrines of natural law to those of natural societies shows,34 286 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Body Cannot Be a Site of Resistance FOUCAULT PLACES AGENCY WITHIN THE BODY WHICH OFFERS LITTLE CHANCE FOR RESISTANCE. Kenneth Rufo, ―Rhetoric and Power: Rethinking and Re-linking,‖ ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY v. 40 n. 2, Fall 2003, ASP. The grounds on which Foucault believed such a liberation to be possible are problematic given that power is always already a relational domination. Therein lies his emancipatory failure; as Murphy (1995, p. 7) notes: "The oxymoron of an 'active subject' has been the Achilles' heel of any project, such as critical rhetoric, influenced by Foucault." If all are produced as subjects, then to whom and from whom can we speak? Certainly, Foucault's body is not the only agency within the "body of discourse" or the "body politic." The placement of agency within the body offers little chance of resistance, for even the body is constituted within the discursive realm. As Kevin Olson (1996, p. 32) explains, speaking of punk rockers' attempt to cast off the social norm: We cannot claim ... that such power is mobilized from the body or that the source of resistance arises from some innate corporeal rebellion. It is difficult to imagine a property of the body that could constitute an alternative to the structuring force of power, since there is no sense in which we can say that bodies are 'elastic' or that they can resist the impression of power ... the idea of resistance to the effects of power is incoherent in the terms Foucault uses to discuss it. His analysis fails to explain how the body can resist power or take on a structure not completely determined by disciplinary regimes. 287 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Cannot Escape Subjectivity YOUR METHODOLOGY IS BANKRUPT BECAUSE IT STILL PRIVILEGES THE NOTION OF A SUBJECT AS A UNITARY ACTOR Jon Simons, professor of political philosophy and feminist theory @ the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICAL, 1995, p. 25-26 Moreover, Foucault‘s analysis of the systematic arrangement of the elements of discourse3 leads him to conclude that the figure of Man ‗was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge‘. The existence of Man is contingent on the rules of regulation and systematic relations that constitute the modern episteme. Humanism presupposes the existence of Man, who for Foucault is a figure of discourse which appeared only at the end of the eighteenth century. The startling implication of this is that ‗[i]f those arrangements were to disappear .. . then one can certainly wager that Man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea‘ (1973b: 387). Indeed, Foucault suggests that the modern episteme is coming to an end, having exhausted the possible constellations of theory available between the three sets of doubles (l972a: 70). Humanism is a failed philosophical project because it takes Man to be its foundation for knowledge, whereas he is one of its effects. Foucault not only declares the demise of the modern episteme but aims to contribute to it. What Foucault was trying to achieve in his archaeological discourse was his (in)famous ‗decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre‘, especially the subject (1972a: 205). Foucault argues that Man, the subject or the author cannot be considered as the foundation, origin or condition of possibility of discourse. Rather, the subject, and especially the author, can be defined as an element within a discursive field, a particular space from which it is possible to speak or write and which must be filled if the discourse is to exist (1972a: 95—6). For example, the subject of a discourse such as medicine is a function of legal rights, criteria of competence, institutional relations and professional hierarchy. Doctors can only operate as the subjects of medical discourse if they speak from the correct institutional sites: the hospital, laboratory, the professional journal. They also have different roles depending on the object of discourse they speak about, sometimes observing, sometimes questioning, listening or seeing, which also vary with the institutional site they are in. Since, in relation to medical discourse, we find a variety of subject roles in different positions, it is concluded that ‗discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but ... a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined (1972a: 54—5). Discourses of knowledge should not be analysed as unities by reference to psychological individuality or to the opinions of a particular person (63, 70). 288 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Geneologies Don‘t Produce Change GENEALOGIES, ALTHOUGH INTERESTING, DON‘T GENERATE POLITICAL CHANGE—THEY JUST LEAD US DOWN AN ENDLESS PATH OF QUESTIONS Michel Foucault, SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE 1975-1976, 2003, p. 3-4. So what was I going to say to you this year? That I‘ve just about had enough; in other words, I‘d like to bring to a close, to put an end to, up to a point, the series of research projects— well, yes, ―research‖—we all talk about it, but what does it actually mean?—that we‘ve been working on for four or five years, or practically ever since I‘ve been here, and I realize that there were more and more drawbacks, for both you and me. Lines of research that were very closely interrelated but that never added up to a coherent body of work, that had no continuity. Fragments of research, none of which was completed, and none of which was followed through; bits and pieces of research, and at the same time it was getting very repetitive, always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same concepts. A few remarks on the history of penal procedure; a few chapters on the evolution, the institutionalization of psychiatry in the nineteenth century; considerations on sophistry or Greek coins; an outline history of sexuality, or at least a history of knowledge about sexuality based upon seventeenth-century confessional practices, or controls on infantile sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; pinpointing the genesis of a theory and knowledge of anomalies, and of all the related techniques. We are making no progress, and it‘s all leading nowhere. It‘s all repetitive, and it doesn‘t add up. Basically, we keep saying the same thing, and there again, perhaps we‘re not saying anything at all. It‘s all getting into something of an inextricable tangle, and it‘s getting us nowhere, as they say. I could tell you that these things were trails to be followed, that it didn‘t matter where they led, or even that the one thing that did matter was that they didn‘t lead anywhere, or at least not in some predetermined direction. I could say they were like an outline for something. It‘s up to you to go on with them or to go off on a tangent; and it‘s up to me to pursue them or give them a different configuration. And then, we—you or I—could see what could be done with these fragments. I felt a bit like a sperm whale that breaks the surface of the water, makes a little splash, and lets you believe, makes you believe, or want to believe, that down there where it can‘t be seen, down there where it is neither seen nor monitored by anyone, it is following a deep, coherent, and premeditated trajectory. 289 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Remains Enmeshed in Power EVEN IN SELF-EXAMINATION, WE ARE STILL ENSNARED BY THE WEB OF CONSTITUTIVE POWER Jon Simons, professor of political philosophy and feminist theory @ the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICAL, 1995, p. 36 Analysis at self-formation contributes to a broader social critique. Modern subjection of the insane took the form of an ethical self-recognition. In Tuke‘s asylum, the inmates were made to feel guilty for the negligence which led to their loss of reason. They became aware of themselves as guilty, as objects of punishment and therapy and as unequal to their keepers, who had not exceeded their liberty but submitted it to the reason of morality and reality. It was through awareness of themselves as objects that the mad were restored to awareness of themselves as responsible subjects, capable of restraining their own behaviour rather than being restrained by the paternal authority of the asylum. ‗The asylum. . . organized. . . guilt. . . for the madman as a consciousness of himself‘ (1965: 247—50). On a grander scale, the definition of European Man, identified with his reason, can be drawn by its opposition to the experience of madness, now understood as mental illness. That form of human selfrecognition and type of subjecting thought puts ‗in question . . . the limits rather than the identity of a culture‘ (xiii). We are limited to the identities in which we recognize ourselves as ethical as well as scientific beings. 290 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Praxis THEORY IS IRRELEVENT ABSENT SPECIFIC APPLICATION – MUST COMBINE THEORY AND PRACTICE FOR A PHILOSOPHY AS LIFE Foucault ‗82 [Michel, ―Politics and Ethics: An Interview,‖ The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 373-4//wfi-ajl] Q. There is much talk in America these days comparing your work to that of Jurgen Habermas. It has been suggested that your work is more concerned with ethics and his with politics. Habermas, for example, grew up reading Heidegger as a politically disastrous heir of Nietzsche. He associates Heidegger with German neoconservatism. He thinks of these people as the conservative heirs of Nietzsche and of you as the anarchistic heir. You don't read the philosophical tradition this way at all, do you? M.F. That's right. When Habermas was in Paris, we talked at some length, and in fact I was quite struck by his observation of the extent to which the problem of Heidegger and of the political implications of Heidegger's thought was quite a pressing and important one for him. One thing he said to me has left me musing, and it's something I'd like to mull over further. After explaining how Heidegger's thought indeed constituted a political disaster, he mentioned one of his professors who was a great Kantian, very well-known in the '30s, and he explained how astonished and disappointed he had been when, while looking through card catalogues one day, he found some texts from around 1934 by this illustrious Kantian that were thoroughly Nazi in orientation. I have just recently had the same experience with Max Pohlenz, who heralded the universal values of Stoicism all his life. I came across a text of his from 1934 devoted to Fiihrertum in Stoicism. You should reread the introductory page and the book's closing remarks on the Fuhrersideal and on the true humanism constituted by the Volk under the inspiration of the leader's direction-Heidegger never wrote anything more disturbing. Nothing in this condemns Stoicism or Kantianism, needless to say. But I think that we must reckon with several facts: there is a very tenuous "analytic" link between a philosophical conception and the concrete political attitude of someone who is appealing to it; the "best" theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous political choices; certain great themes such as "humanism" can be used to any end whatever-for example, to show with what gratitude Pohlenz would have greeted Hitler. I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding, prudent, "experimental" attitude is necesary; at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. I have never been too concerned about people who say: "You are bor-rowing ideas from Nietzsche; well, Nietzsche was used by the Nazis, therefore. . ."; but, on the other hand, I have always been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institu-tions, and knowledge, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality. If I have insisted on all this "practice," it has not been in order to "apply" ideas, but in order to put them to the test and modify them. The key to the Personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophicallife, his ethos. Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance during the war, one was Cavailles, a historian of mathematics who was interested in the development of its internal structures. None of the philosophers of engagement-Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty-none of them did a thing. 291 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Praxis GIVING UP ON RESISTANCE THROUGH AGENCY ALLOWS OPPRESSION TO REMAIN DOMINANT – ONLY THE PERM SOLVES Cook ‗92 [Anthony, Associate Professor of Law @ Georgetown, Hangs out with Gingrich, New England Law Review, LN//wfi] Several things trouble me about Foucault's approach. First, he nurtures in many ways an unhealthy insularity that fails to connect localized struggle to other localized struggles and to modes of oppression like classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia that transcend their localized articulation within this particular law school, that particular law firm, within this particular church or that particular factory. I note among some followers of Foucault an unhealthy propensity to rely on rich, thick, ethnographic type descriptions of power relations playing themselves out in these localized laboratories of social conflict. This reliance on detailed description and its concomitant deemphasis of explanation begins, ironically, to look like a regressive positivism which purports to sever the descriptive from the normative, the is from the ought and law from morality and politics. Unless we are to be trapped in this Foucaultian moment of postmodern insularity, we must resist the temptation to sever description from explanation. Instead, our objective should be to explain what we describe in light of a vision embracing values that we make explicit in struggle. These values should act as magnets that link our particularized struggles to other struggles and more global critiques of power. In other words, we must not, as Foucault seems all too willing to do, forsake the possibility of more universal narratives that, while tempered by postmodern insights, attempt to say and do something about the oppressive world in which we live. Second, Foucault's emphasis on the techniques and discourses of knowledge that constitute the human subject often diminishes, if not abrogates, the role of human agency. Agency is of tremendous importance in any theory of oppression, because individuals are not simply constituted by systems of knowledge but also constitute hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge as well. Critical theory must pay attention to the ways in which oppressed people not only are victimized by ideologies of oppression but the ways they craft from these ideologies and discourses counter-hegemonic weapons of liberation. PROTEST ISN‘T ENOUGH – MUST LINK IT TO PRACTICE AND DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION Foucault ‗82 [Michel, God, ―Politics and Ethics: An Interview,‖ The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//wfi-ajl] Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because the lines are drawn by others. . . . M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being. Let's take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of para- troopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a 292 Kritik Answers nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account. 293 Kritik Answers Alt Fails: Suspicion ALT‘S SUSPICION FORECLOSES UPON PRODUCTIVE ACTION James D. Faubian, Professor, Anthropology, Rice University, MICHEL FOUCAULT: POWER, ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xviii-xix One of the key clarifying points Foucault makes is that what is most interesting about links between power and knowledge is not the detection of false or spurious knowledge at work in human affairs but, rather, the role of knowledges that are valued and effective because of their reliable instrumental efficacy. Foucault often uses the French word savoir—a term for knowledge with connotations of ―know-how‖ (a way to make a problem tractable or a material manageable)—for this middle sort of knowledges, which may fall short of rigorous scientificity but command some degree of ratification within a social group and confer some recognized instrumental benefit. The reason the combining of power and knowledge in society is a redoubtable thing is not that power is apt to promote and exploit spurious knowledges (as the Marxist theory of ideology has argued) but, rather, that the rational exercise of power tends to make the fullest use of knowledges capable of the maximum instrumental efficacy. What is wrong or alarming about the use of power is not, for Foucault, primarily or especially the fact that a wrong or false knowledge is being used. Conversely, power and the use of knowledge by power are not guaranteed to be safe, legitimate, or salutory because (as an optimistic rationalist tradition extending from the Enlightenment to Marxism has inclined some to hope) the knowledge that guides or instrumentalizes the exercise of power is valid and scientific. Nothing, including the exercise of power, is evil in itself—but everything is dangerous. To be able to detect and diagnose real dangers, we need to avoid equally the twin seductions of paranoia and universal suspicion, on the one hand, and the compulsive quest for foundationalist certainties and guarantees, on the other—both of which serve to impede or dispense us from the rational and responsible work of careful and specific investigation. 294 Kritik Answers **Benjamin** Benjamin Answers: 2AC BENJAMIN IS GOOD FOR AESTHETICS, BAD FOR POLICY McClean 01 David E. , New School University, ―The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,‖ Presented at the 20 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm. Cavell meant this reflection to be taken non-pejoratively because he seems to take Benjamin more seriously as an aesthetician and literary metaphysician (in Rorty-speak, as a "strong poet") than as a serious, social commentator with good ideas. Keeping Benjamin and his cohorts in the box of aesthetics and metaphysics is, I believe, good intellectual policy for social critics seeking to be relevant. They should be cited for seasoning and not for meat. Yet I am not at all convinced that anything I have described is about to happen, though this essay is written to help force the issue, if only a little bit. I am convinced that the modern Cultural Left is far from ready to actually run the risks that come with being taken seriously and held accountable for actual policy-relevant prescriptions. Why should it? It is a hell of a lot more fun and a lot more safe pondering the intricacies of high theory, patching together the world a priori (which means without any real consideration of those officers and bureaucrats I mentioned who are actually on the front lines of policy formation and regulation). However the risk in this apriorism is that both the conclusions and the criticisms will miss the mark, regardless of how great the minds that are engaged. Intellectual rigor and complexity do not make silly ideas politically salient, or less pernicious, to paraphrase Rorty. This is not to say that air-headed jingoism and conservative rants about republican virtue aren't equally silly and pernicious. But it seems to me that the new public philosopher of the Political Left will want to pick better yardsticks with which to measure herself. 295 Kritik Answers **Chaloupka** Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (1/3) FIRST, TURN – EVEN IF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AREN‘T CONTROLLABLE, PLAN SOLVES SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED ACTIONS THAT CAUSE THEIR USE SECOND, CHALOUPKA DOESN‘T UNDERSTAND IR. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ONLY REMAIN TEXTUAL BECAUSE DETERRENCE WORKS. OUR SCENARIOS INDICATE A BREAKDOWN ON MAD THAT ACTUALIZES NUCLEAR WAR. THIRD, PERM: TO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE. THE CRITIQUE ALONE IS A FALSE CHOICE THAT DOOMS ACTIVISM Sankaran Krishna, Professor of Political Science, U of Hawaii, Alternatives 1993, v. 18. p. 400-1 The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to ―nostalgic,‖ essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the move mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing ―facts‖ and ―realities,‖ while a ―postmodern‖ President Reagan easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4) Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls ―nuclear opposition‖ or ―antinuclearists‖ at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms. This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the ―failure‖ of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives. The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka, between total critique and ―ineffective‖ partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics. FOURTH, TURN – DEBATE ISN‘T A TRAGIC PERSPECTIVE ON NUCLEAR WAR – IT‘S A COMICAL GAME IN WHICH WE THROW AROUND SCENARIOS THAT WE TAKE WITH A 296 Kritik Answers GRAIN OF SALT, OVERCOMING THE PERSPECTIVE CHALOUPKA CRITICIZES 297 Kritik Answers Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (2/3) FIFTH, NO LINK – CHALOUPKA IS CRITICIZING ANTINUCLEARISTS WHO DEFEND UNSPEAKABILITY. THE 1AC IS AN EXPLICITY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE TEXTUAL SPEAKABILITY OF NUKES SIXTH, CLAIMING THAT NUKES ARE ONLY TEXTUAL ERASES THE HISTORY OF FOURTH WORLD NUCLEAR VIOLENCE Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 1993, Alternatives vol. 18, p. 339 , from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the ―unthinkable‖ single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of reptetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the ―real‖ of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be Thus observed even in Stewart Fith‘s Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of ―nuclear testing‖ in the Pacific: ―Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere … were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going to battle against nature itself.‖ AND, THAT LEGITIMIZES NUCLEAR VIOLENCE Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 1993, Alternatives vol. 18, p. 339 , the problematic division/distinction between the ―nuclear explosions‖ and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject (―we‖) is located higher than the ―real‖ of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological division/heirarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. Although Firth‘s book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of ―nuclear testing‖ in the Pacific SEVENTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A PROJECT OF SURVIVAL – THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES REPRESSION AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR MORE LIKELY Lenz, Science and Policy Professor at SUNY, 90 (―Nuclear Age Literature For Youth,‖ p. 9-10) A summary of Frank‘s thought in ―Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race‖ notes how all people have difficulty grasping the magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this psychological unreality is a basic obstacle to eliminating that threat. Only events that people have actually experienced can have true emotional impact. Since Americans have escaped the devastation of nuclear weapons on their own soil and ―nuclear weapons poised for annihilation in distant countries cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched,‖ we find it easy to imagine ourselves immune to the threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither Victims nor Executioners of the inability of most people really to imagine other people‘s death (he might have added ―or their own‖). Commenting on Camus, David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that this distancing from death‘s reality is yet another aspect of our insulation from life‘s most basic realities. ―We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding.‖ If we are to heed Camus‘s call to refuse to be either the victims of violence like the Jews of the Holocaust, or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of 298 Kritik Answers the death camps, we must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here, of course, that the literature of nuclear holocaust can play a significant role. Without either firsthand experience or vivid imagining, it is natural, as Frank points out, to deny the existence of death machines and their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to exclude from awareness, because ―letting [the instruments of destruction] enter consciousness would create too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions.‖ In most lifethreatening situations, an organism‘s adaptation increases chances of survival, but ironically, adapting ourselves to nuclear fear is counterproductive. We only seal our doom more certainly. The repressed fear, moreover, takes a psychic toll. 299 Kritik Answers Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (3/3) EIGHTH, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS OF NUCLEAR PRESENCE DOESN‘T PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and Postmodernism, Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2 This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very important – meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship – is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida the paradox doesn't matter when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, usually replies that Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like ìmpossible; `self-contradictory' and ùnrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more . I am all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress. " psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss We have been given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect which the Enlightenment offered. that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky. NINTH, MEDIA IMAGES PLAY THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF REVEALING THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS Jean Baudrillard, professor of philosophy of culture and media at Univ. or Paris, 1994, Illusion of the End, pg. 60-61 And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the simulacrum of their revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known. The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre (Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of millions of people by means of television — a crime of blackmail and simulation. What penalty is laid down for such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the ‗Timisoara syndrome‘. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose [destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real. There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we should be grateful to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant illusionism of the world of communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality — soaking up all these things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture, every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference distance, scepticism and 300 Kritik Answers unconditional apathy. Through the world‘s becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the imagination, provokes a sickened abreaction, together with a surge of adrenalin which induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would render reality [le reel] dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute advance in the consciousness — or the cynical unconscious — of our age. 301 Kritik Answers **CLS** CLS Answers: 2AC (1/4) FIRST, TURN – WE EXPOSE THE FLAWS IN EX PARTE QUIRIN, SOLVING BETTER THROUGH HISTORICAL ANALYSIS SECOND, CRITIQUE DOESN‘T SOLVE – THERE‘S NO REASON POINTING OUT FLAWS IN THE SYSTEM WILL LEAD TO A HUGE MINDSET SHIFT. THE LAW WILL STILL UNILATERALLY DETAIN ENEMY COMBATANTS. PREFER OUR SPECIFIC TRIBE AND KATYAL EV THIRD, TURN- UPHOLDING LEGAL PRINCIPLES PROVES THE LAW‘S FRAUDULENCE AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE Václav Havel, playwright, political prisoner, and president elect of Czechoslovakia, 1986 (Living in Truth, p. 137-38) A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws — not just to the laws concerning human rights, but to all laws — does not mean at all that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our system the law is anything other than what it is. They are well aware of the role it plays. But precisely because they know how desperately the system depends on it — on the ‗noble‘ version of the law, that is — they also know how enormously significant such appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is hopelessly tied down by the necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is compelled to react in some way to such appeals. Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity. Over and over again, such appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear to society and to those who inhabit its power structures. They draw attention to its real material substance and thus, indirectly, compel all those who take refuge behind the law to affirm and make credible this agency of excuses, this means of communication, this reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their will could not be made to circulate through society. They are compelled to do so for the sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make on outsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the system‘s own mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion), or simply out of fear that they will be reproached for being ‗clumsy‘ in handling the ritual. They have no other choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attend more carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges means to undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual communications system. To assume that the laws are a mere facade, that they have no validity and that therefore it is pointless to appeal to them would mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create the facade and the ritual. It would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and enabling those who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest (and therefore the most mendacious) form of their excuse. I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors or judges — if they were dealing with an experienced Chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to public attention (as individuals with a name, no longer protected by the anonymity of the apparatus) — suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in the ritual. This does not alter the fact that a despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but the very existence of the officials‘ anxiety necessarily regulates, limits and slows down the operation of that despotism. 302 Kritik Answers CLS Answers: 2AC (2/4) FOURTH, PERM – DO BOTH. FIGHTING WITHIN THE SYSTEM BY PRETENDING THAT WE CAN CHANGE IT IN SPITE OF ITS LIMITATIONS PRODUCES A MORE EFFECTIVE CLS THAT ENGAGES IN PRAXIS Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] From this background, Gordon traces an emerging "interpretative" Critical legal theory that emphasizes the role of legal doctrine in "belief-systems that people have externalized and allowed to rule their lives." n121 It is "belief systems" that count, even though "many constraints on human social activity," such as finite resources, do exist. Given these belief systems, not even the "organization of the working class or capture of the state apparatus will automatically" produce conditions which lead to "the utopian possibilities of social life." He then concludes: , this does not mean that people should stop trying to organize the working class or to influence the exercise of state power; it means only that they have to do so pragmatically and experimentally, with full knowledge that there are no deeper logics of historical necessity. . . . Yet, if the real enemy is us -- all of us, the structures we carry around in our heads, the limits on our imagination -- where can we even begin? Things seem to change in history when people break out of their accustomed ways of responding to domination, by acting as if the constraints on their improving their lives were not real and that they could change things; and sometimes they can, though not always in the way they had hoped or intended; but they never knew they could change them at all until they tried. n122 Gordon's conclusion is profound. But it contradicts the view that a negative attack on liberal legal doctrine is the key path to a liberated future. n123 People break out of their accustomed ways of responding to [*558] domination by acting as if they could change things. "Acting as if they could Of course change things" does not mean confining scholarly endeavor to negative doctrinal analysis, even though negative doctrinal analysis may be one helpful step towards . Acting means struggling for and living a different way, even if only "experimentally," and this requires praxis, theory which guides and is in turn influenced by action. n124 Yet the whole of Gordon's piece, until his conclusion, is an exposition which acting becomes a polemic -- almost an apology -- for the negative Critical analysis which constitutes virtually the sole response to the practitioners' yearning for helpful theory . FIFTH, SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS – PREFER OUR TRIBE AND KATYAL EV SHOWING THAT OVERRULING QUIRIN CREATES EFFECTIVE DUE PROCESS RIGHTS SIXTH, HERE‘S MORE EV – INDETERMINACY MEANS YOU HAVE TO EVALUATE THE EMPIRICAL JUSTIFICATION OF OUR SOLVENCY CLAIMS Hasnas ‗95 [John, JD & PhD Phil @ duke, Asst. prof. Bus Ethics @ Georgetown, ―Back to the Future,‖ 45 Duke L.j. 84, October, LN//uwyo-ajl] I have suggested that this greatly overstates what the indeterminacy argument actually implies. Rather, the proper inference to draw from a demonstration that the law is indistinguishable from politics is that the cases in which the law should be employed to reform society are limited to those in which the desired reforms can be effectively realized through political action. The insight the legal realists provided long ago was that to identify these cases, one must undertake the pragmatic examination of how the law works in practice relative to alternative methods of social control. Thus, there is a need for empirical investigation to determine how the expected outcomes of collective political action compare with those of politically unrestrained individuals functioning in a market environment. Further, to be valid, this investigation must compare like with like; it must compare what can reasonably be achieved [*131] through real-world political processes staffed by less than perfect human beings with what is likely to result from unrestrained human interaction in the flawed markets that actually exist, not the utopian results of an ideal political system with those of imperfect, 303 Kritik Answers real-world markets. Because this is the case and because the Crits have resisted undertaking such investigations, I have argued that they have missed the point of the indeterminacy argument, and that if this argument is in fact correct, the way forward into our jurisprudential future lies in a return to the uncompleted project of the realists. 304 Kritik Answers CLS Answers: 2AC (3/4) SEVENTH, EXPERIENTIAL DECONSTRUCTION: ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS MUST CONTEXTUALIZE CRITICISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SPECIFIC OPPRESION, STRATEGICALLY USING HEGEMONIC NORMS TO CREATE THEIR ALTERNATIVE **** Cook ‗90 [Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, ―Beyond Critical Legal Studies,‖ 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl] Because he appreciated the dialectic of theory and the broad-based confrontational strategies of socially transformative action, King stands as the paradigmatic organic intellectual of twentieth-century American life. King's method and practice offer direction to progressive scholars concerned about the exclusionary, repressive, and non-communal dimensions of American life. [*1013] Gramsci's conception of the organic intellectual provides a useful framework for understanding the thought of King and what it has to offer CLS. The organic intellectual brings philosophy to the masses, not for the merely instrumental purposes of unifying them, "but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc Gramsci's organic intellectual struggles to transform those who are oppressed as a means of transforming the conditions under which they are oppressed. n79 Gramsci understands domination in terms of both coercion and consent, the latter which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups." n78 constituting what he refers to as hegemony. Under his formulation, hegemony consists, then, of "[t]he 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group." n80 Gramsci argues that "this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." n81 Thus, oppression is not only physical and psychological but also cultural. n82 King, like Gramsci's organic intellectual, empowered his community through a practical effort to bridge the gap between theory and lived experience. King's work consisted of four interrelated activities. First, he used theoretical deconstruction to free the mind to envision alternative conceptions of community. Second, he employed experiential deconstruction to understand the liberating dimensions of legitimating ideologies like liberalism and Christianity, dimensions easily ignored by the abstract, ahistorical, and potentially misleading critiques that rely exclusively on theoretical deconstruction. Third, he used the insights gleaned from the first two activities to postulate an [*1014] alternative social vision intended to transform the conditions of oppression under which people struggle. Drawing from the best of liberalism and the best of Christianity, King forged a vision of community that transcended the limitations of each and built upon the accomplishments of both. Finally, he created and implemented strategies to mobilize people to secure that alternative vision. I refer to this multidimensional critical activity as "philosophical praxis." Although many critical theorists engage primarily in theoretical deconstruction, and some appreciate certain forms of experiential deconstruction, n83 few have reconstructive theorizing and socially transformative struggle. n84 These dimensions of critical activity directly confront the material conditions of oppression whereas the preoccupation with deconstructing theory does not. King went further than these critical theorists by examining the subtle and complex ways in which consent was shaped, while fully appreciating the role of state and private coercion in legitimating authority in the lives of the oppressed. This Part examines how King filtered his theoretical deconstruction of hegemonic theologies through his knowledge of the history and experience of oppression, and thereby made that theoretical deconstruction richer, more contextual, and ready to engage the existential realities of oppression. The interplay between King's theoretical and experiential deconstruction is best illustrated by reference to the African-American Church -- the embraced either a full experiential deconstruction or the third and fourth dimensions of philosophical praxis -- institution providing the organic link between philosophy and the masses, theory and praxis. n85 My analysis proceeds in four steps. First, I examine how African-American religion served at once to legitimate slave society, delegitimize that society, and inform alternative visions of community. Second, I examine King's use of theoretical deconstruction and illustrate its dependence on the historic mission of the AfricanAmerican Church. Like a true organic intellectual engaged in a philosophical praxis, King used theoretical deconstruction to illustrate the possibilities [*1015] of his reconstructive vision and the centrality of social struggle in realizing that vision. Third, I discuss King's experiential deconstruction, his unwillingness to be distracted the combination of theoretical and experiential deconstruction results in a more contextual framework -- one more appreciative of the conditions of choice within which authority is legitimated and challenged through reconstructive vision and struggle. by the reified abstractions of theoretical deconstruction. Finally, I show how 305 Kritik Answers CLS Answers: 2AC (4/4) EIGHTH, LIBERALISM IS INEVITABLE AND NECESSARY TO ACCOMPLISH CLS‘S LIBERATORY GOALS Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] The thrust of CLS critique is devoted, in turn, to the exposure of the contradictions in liberal philosophy and law. This strand of the Critical legal critique is quite , the critique lends itself to exaggeration. This observation may be appreciated by considering what happens when Critical legal theorists themselves make tentative gestures at the social direction in which we should move. Such gestures, even from the most vigorous critics of liberalism, do not escape from liberalism and, indeed, liberal rights theory. Nevertheless, those gestures have great merit, particularly because of their use of liberal rights. For example, Frug, while expounding his vision of the city as a site of localized power and participatory democracy, attacks liberal theory and its dualities as an obstacle to his vision. n19 At the same time, without [*518] acknowledging the significance of what he is doing, Frug relies on the liberal image of law and rights to defend the potential of his vision. He writes: It should be emphasized that participatory democracy on the local level need not mean the tyranny of the majority over the minority. Cities are units within states, not the state itself; cities, like all individuals and entities within the state, could be powerful and makes a much-needed contribution. In my view, however, it suffers from two general problems. First subject to state-created legal restraints that protect individual rights. Nor does participatory democracy necessitate the frustration of national political objectives by . The liberal image of law as mediating between the need to protect the individual from communal coercion and the need to achieve communal goals could thus be retained even in the model of participatory democracy. n20 local protectionism; participatory institutions, like others in society, could still remain subject to general regulation to achieve national goals 306 Kritik Answers #4 Permutation: 1AR (1/2) WE MUST RECOGNIZE THE LIMITATIONS OF LAW WHILE USING IT AS A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL. Ruthann Robson, Professor of Law, CUNY Law School, New York, Lesbian (Out)law, 1992, p. 89-90 Yet these legal strategies can also afford concrete improvements as we live our lives within the dominant culture. They can even make us validate our own experiences because they have been recognized by the law. Within our own communities, theories, and relationships, the implementation of equality in the form of antidiscrimination rules of law would bring out change. Gone would be the Latina Lesbian Caucus, womenonly space, sliding scales, anthologies of older lesbians. If we accepted the rule of law as the rule of lesbianism, we would not discriminate between lesbians and nonlesbians. For many of us, this is unacceptable. I am not proposing that we must either totally adopt antidiscrimination discourse into all facets of our lives, or we must totally abandon it as a legal strategy. Such a duality is a false one. We are not hypocritical, inconsistent, or contradictory if we recognize antidiscrimination as a potential strategy for legal change, yet recognize its limitations. Our desires are as complex as we are. Concepts such as equality and antidiscrimination cannot fulfill our desires. Yet we can use these legal notions to effect the type of legal change that can facilitate our survival. Our formidable task is strategizing, theorizing, and actualizing our own desires against a legal background of discrimination, all the while resisting our own domestication. REJECTION FAILS- MUST COMBINE THE PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE HUTCHINSON AND MONAHAN 84 (Allan and Patrick, Asst Prof @ NYU and Asst Prof @ Ottawa U, January, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 199, CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM: Law, Politics, and the Critical Legal Scholars: The Unfolding Drama of American Legal Thought, MosE) The development and implementation of such an enlarged notion of legal doctrine would require a complete restructuring of the existing order. Unger, of course, is not blind to this. With a truly grand sweep, he drafts the essential framework of such a society; he substantiates and formalizes the "structure of no-structure." He envisages the establishment of a "rotating capital fund" n150 to finance individual projects and to effect a decentralization of production and exchange. The legal counterpart of this notion would be "the disaggregation of the consolidated property right." n151 Yet Unger recognizes that some regime of rights would be necessary for his proposals to succeed. n152 He therefore suggests the creation of four kinds of rights: immunity rights which give individuals the power to resist interference and domination by any other individual or organization, including the state; destabilization rights which entitle individuals to demand the disruption of established institutions and forms of social practice; market rights which give a conditional claim to divisible portions of social capital, in place of the existing absolute property rights; and solidarity rights which foster mutual reliance, loyalty, and communal responsibility. Such arrangements, according to Unger, need not be established all at once, but can be introduced gradually. n153 Unger finds this scheme attractive because it accommodates continuing conflict between transitory factions of society; it allows [*233] "history itself [to] become a source of moral insight." n154 307 Kritik Answers #4 Permutation: 1AR (2/2) REFORM INSTITUTIONS FROM THE INSIDE. IT‘S THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVE AND PRESERVE DEMOCRACY Thomas F. McInerney III, Associate, Dorsey & Whitney LLP, New York, Creighton Law Review, 31 Creighton L. Rev. 805, May, 1998 Herein lies the normative turn in Habermas' thought. He claims that not only has this new paradigm in law emerged, but also that such new understanding of law and politics must be guided by an understanding of the limits of human reason, of which an intersubjective, or discourse-oriented approach to rationality, entails. n240 Communicative, and hence intersubjective, rationality provides the means of reassessing modernist legal institutions in light of a proceduralist reconstruction of law and democracy. n241 As such, his discourse theory provides a critical tool to evaluate existing political, legal, and social institutions. Such a critical program need not advocate the elimination of current institutions, but can build on the principles on which such institutions are based. It may thus be used to reinterpret existing traditions and institutions to realize a certain kinetic power for reinvigorating democracy. n242 This rather thin normative argument requires only the critical reappraisal of legal and political institutions in accordance with the discourse principle in an attempt to implement the principle in existing practice. After mapping the earlier paradigms, Habermas makes the descriptive claim that a new paradigm has emerged to replace the traditional liberal-bourgeois paradigm and welfare-bureaucratic [*832] paradigm. n238 This new paradigm attempted to overcome the inadequacy of the previous orders. It represents a departure from modernism and can be termed a post-modern paradigm. Unlike modernist ideologies, the post-modern paradigm arises from an intersubjective n239 notion of rationality. No longer can political and legal decisions be considered the product of a singular will within this paradigm but, instead, must be viewed as a consensus-oriented process of decision-making involving communication by and among all concerned participants. Under this paradigm, law must be understood procedurally. This normative stance may at first appear inconsistent. On the one hand, Habermas asks that we accept his descriptive claims that a new post-modern paradigm has emerged. On the other hand, he claims that we must adopt a proceduralist view of law and an intersubjective notion of reason. Because our current political and legal systems are not to be abandoned completely, Habermas intends his communicative sense of rationality to be more completely realized in the existing legal order. n243 Habermas does not conceive the possibility of realizing such changes in existing institutions as problematic. He [*834] argues that through a process of reification, we have come to believe, incorrectly in his view, that existing social and political institutions are fixed entities which cannot undergo change. n244 Rights, such as freedom of speech, although justified by appeal to modernist ideals when implemented originally, have taken on new meaning within this new paradigm. As such, these rights become essential to the more complete realization of intersubjective rationality and communicative decision-making. n245 Having established the methodological basis upon which Habermas's theory is founded, attention may be given to more foundational aspects to the theory beginning with his under standing of communicative action. n243. Put in critical theoretical terms, The critical enterprise must now be a critique of the inherent potential for reaction within the existing power structure - i.e., the question is not one of dismantling the structure and replacing it by another, but rather one of buttressing the existing power structure against the threat looming from the right - whether the political, the economic, or the religious right. 308 Kritik Answers #7 Experiential Deconstruction Turn: 1AR BLACK CHRISTIANITY PROVES OUR ARG… READING THE INSTITUTION AGAINST ITSELF ALLOWS COUNTERHEGEMONIC FREEDOM Cook ‗90 [Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, ―Beyond Critical Legal Studies,‖ 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl] 2. The Role of Religion in the Delegitimation of Authority. -- Although the use of religion as an instrument of social control often necessitated oversight by white masters, n101 strict enforcement was not maintained, and slaves often met separately for religious services, including weekly and Sunday evening services. n102 It was within the freedom provided for religious worship that Africans began to assert some control over how the void created by the disintegration of their historical identity and community would be filled. In this small space of freedom, an alternative conception of community was defined and the history of a new American people began to emerge. African-American religion and its primary vehicle of expression, the African-American Church, supplied the needed catalyst for the reconstruction of community destroyed by slavery. n103 To the surprise and fear of many whites, slaves transformed an ideology intended to reconcile them to a subordinate status into a manifesto of their God-given equality. n104 This deconstruction was both revolutionary and pragmatic in nature. The Africans' appropriation of conservative evangelicalism as a bulwark against the degradation and countless microaggressions of slavery proved that there were alternate interpretations of the text that supposedly justified their subjugation. Slaves demonstrated that scripture was subject to an alternative interpretation that called for the eradication of the very social structure evangelicals sought to legitimate. n105 In short, slaves deconstructed ideology through their struggles against oppression. Although slavemasters and evangelicals attempted to limit the transmission of counterhegemonic interpretations of scripture, their [*1019] efforts met with limited success. African gospel preachers and slaves who learned to read against their masters' wishes (and, many times, against state law as well) were determined to read the Bible in light of their own experiences. Many slaves realized that the message of submission, docility, and absolute obedience to the master was a distorted picture of the Bible's eternal truths. n106 STRUGGLE IS A CATALYST FOR MAKING RIGHTS DETERMINATE, DISMANTLING OPPRESSION Cook ‗90 [Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, ―Beyond Critical Legal Studies,‖ 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl] Unlike some CLS scholars, King understood the importance of a system of individual rights. CLS proponents have urged that rights are incoherent and indeterminate reifications of concrete experiences; they obfuscate, through the manipulation of abstract categories, disempowering social relations. n158 King, on the other hand, understood that the oppressed could make rights determinate in practice; although "law tends to declare rights - it does not deliver them. A catalyst is needed to breathe life experience into a judicial decision." n159 For King, the catalyst was persistent social struggle to transform the oppressiveness of one's existential condition into ever closer approximations of the ideal. The hierarchies of race, gender, and class define those conditions, and the struggle for substantive rights closes the gap between the latter and the ideal of the Beloved Community. Under the pressures of social struggle, the oppressed can alter rights to better reflect the exigencies of social reality -- a reality itself more fully understood by those engaged in transformative struggle. King's Beloved Community accepted and expanded the liberal tradition of rights. King realized that notwithstanding its limits, the liberal vision contained important insights into the human condition. For those deprived of basic freedoms and subjected to arbitrary acts of state authority, the enforcement of formal rights was revolutionary. African-Americans 309 Kritik Answers understood the importance of formal liberal rights and demanded the full enforcement of such rights in order to challenge and rectify historical practices that had objectified and subsumed their existence. 310 Kritik Answers A2 ―Religious Institution Rationalized Oppression‖: 1AR FIRST, OUR 2AC COOK EV PRE-EMPTS THIS. INSTITUTIONS MAINTAINED HEGEMONY BY NOT CONTEXTUALIZING THEMSELVES IN TERMS OF ACTION AGAINST OPPRESSION. PLAN SOLVE BY ENGAGING SUBORDINATION SECOND, THIS IS A DISAD TO THE ALT. PRAXIS IS NECESSARY TO AVOID CO-OPTATION Cook ‗90 [Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, ―Beyond Critical Legal Studies,‖ 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl] King's synthesis of pragmatic and revolutionary evangelicalism was most powerfully expressed in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." n151 Conservative evangelicalism's dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular caused many religious leaders, just as in the days of slavery, to continue to oppose any interpretation of Christianity demanding that equality before God in the spiritual realm also be embodied in the legal and social relations defining the secular realm. These leaders still offered patience as a panacea for the pain of persecution and the joys of an afterlife as an answer for the sufferings of this life. If integration was the will of God, He and not humans would change people's hearts in His own way and time. Be patient, they urged, and wait on the Lord. n152 King discerned the hegemonic role of this theology and boldly challenged the injustice to which it gave rise wherever he encountered it. To those who urged that nonviolent, [*1033] direct action was "unwise and untimely," King sharply retorted: We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well-timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the words "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." . . . We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." n153 King expressed his great disappointment with this otherworldly orientation of the white Church: In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular. n154 Thus, King spent his life leading African-Americans into direct confrontation with oppressive institutions and practices. Through direct action the African-American community exposed the contradictions and violence endemic to American society. In this way, the civil rights movement King led was itself a powerful form of experiential deconstruction, one that provided fertile ground for a new vision of community in America. 311 Kritik Answers #8 Liberalism Good Turn: 1AR CLS FORECLOSES STRATEGIC LIBERALISM, DESTROYING LIBERATORY MOVEMENTS AND REINFORCING OPPRESSION Cook ‗90 [Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, ―Beyond Critical Legal Studies,‖ 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March, LN//uwyo-ajl] ther are some liberating as well as legitimating aspects of the line-drawing or boundary-setting enterprise we critique. Democratic socialism, the American Revolution, the African-American civil rights movement, and other social movements were based, in part, on the liberating dimensions of liberal theory. Failing to recognize this, some scholars unwittingly fall into too simplistic an analysis of the problem and its possible solutions. When we appreciate the liberating dimension of ideology, revealed by experiential deconstruction, we might conclude that there are Second, when we adopt this more contextual and experiential approach to understanding oppression, we will realize that many dimensions of the present system that are good and quite enabling. Thus, although I share critical methods, I question the conclusions of CLS. The CLS critique rightly points out that we need not accept oppressive institutions and practices as unalterable expressions of truth, because the premises on which they are based are contradictory and indeterminate at best. The critique suggests, therefore, that we are free to envision and construct alternative forms of community that represent a more accurate or at least more plausible conception of human nature -- one believed to be fundamentally good, which may replace "our pervasive alienation and fear of one another with something more like mutual trust." n74 But From this optimistic view, one might envision emerging a quite oppressive community in which groups, behind the guise of love and mutual dependency, legitimate [*1011] behavior that is more oppressive than anything imagined by Hobbes' sovereign. When, therefore, CLS proponents argue that liberalism's public-private dichotomy undermines a society's transformative potential, we should also ask how and when does it advance those efforts. Indeed, if CLS' primary concern is one of legitimation and power, it is important to ask under what conditions the liberal discourse of rights may be strategically delegitimizing and substantively empowering. should we be so certain that this optimistic view of human nature is clearly more liberating than the insights provided by Hobbes or Locke? EVEN IF THEY‘RE RIGHT, WE SHOULD STILL FIGHT FOR RIGHTS TO MAKE A HUMANE SOCIETY… THE ALTERNATIVE IS ETHICAL ABDICATION Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] My point is that both liberal and radical theory (including Critical legal theory) must balance competing values. Of course, the same problem affects any statement of . There is no way of generalizing a resolution of all potentially contradictory values in This impossibility, however, does not necessarily implicate the virtues of and need for rights themselves. Nor does it mean that we should not struggle to alter the political and social context in which rights operate or to win preference for certain rights over others. The significance of the CLS overemphasis on and exaggeration of contradictions is that it increases the tendency on the part of some Critical legal theorists to emphasize negative critique because they are overwhelmed by the very deficiencies they criticize in liberal legal theory. n21 At the same time, some Critical legal theorists lose an appreciation [*519] of the potential contribution of rights, a potential contribution which coexists with their negative potential. Exaggeration thereby promotes an "undialectical" approach despite Critical theory's emphasis on dialectics. "rights" as well all situations. CLS DISEMPOWERS BY IGNORING THE LIBERATORY POTENTIAL OF LIBERALISM Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al, Professor of Law, Columbia University, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 110-111 Finally, in addition to exaggerating the role of liberal legal consciousness and underestimating that of coercion, CLS scholars also disregard the transformative potential that liberalism offers. Although liberal legal ideology may indeed function to mystify, it remains receptive to some aspirations that are central to black demands; it may also perform an important function in combating the experience of being excluded and oppressed. This receptivity to black aspirations is crucial, given the hostile social world that racism creates. The most troubling aspect of the critical program, therefore, is that trashing 312 Kritik Answers rights consciousness may have the unintended consequences of disempowering the racially oppressed while leaving white supremacy basically untouched. 313 Kritik Answers No Links (1/2) YOUR ARGUMENT ASSUMES THE WRONG LIBERAL LEGALISM- THE AFF HAS A COMMITMENT TO NEUTRALITYWE CAN NEVER ACHIEVE WHAT YOUR ALTERANTIVE CALLS FOR ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 102-103) PHM This chapter has examined three important lines of argument in the CLS literature. All three attempt to establish that liberal theory is internally inconsistent, and all three claim that the inconsistency arises from the liberal embrace of pluralism, neutrality, and the rule of law. The central contention of these arguments is that it is impossible to satisfy both the demands of legality and those of neutrality in a context of moral, religious, and political pluralism. I found that the three main lines of argument deployed to support such a contention are all wanting. The arguments rest to a large degree on a confused understanding of the liberal commitment to neutrality. In addition, the more radical CLS arguments rest on a seriously inadequate understanding of linguistic meaning. Once those confusions and inadequacies are remedied, it becomes clear that the requirements of legality and neutrality can be met in a pluralist context. NO LINK- SOCIAL REALITY IS NOT CONSTITUED BY LAWMULTIPLE ALTERNATE FACTORS ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 151) PHM To join the issue with the rule conception, one must deny the claim that socially meaningful behavior must be explained by reference to social rules. This denial became more and more frequent in the 1960s and 1970s. The view became widespread that social rules must be explained by reference to individual presocial motivation. According to this view, rules do not constrain and channel individual behavior at all or do so only in sporadic and marginal ways. By and large, rules are resources and instruments that individuals manipulate to get what they want or think good, and what they want or think good, at the most fundamental level, is not determined by social rules. Rules exert no power (or little power) of their own over individual thought, desire, and action; they are mere words. Nonetheless, rules can be invoked by those who wield power to rationalize their actions and even to convince those over whom they exercise power that their subordination is right and proper. Let us call this the instrumentalist view of social rules. Edgerton summarizes the influence of this view on contemporary thinking: In most social theory today, rules are seen as ambiguous, flexible, contradictory, and inconsistent; they are said seldom to govern the actions of people, much less to mold these people by being internalized by them. Instead, they serve as resources for human strategies.4 314 Kritik Answers No Links (2/2) NO LINK- LIBERAL LEGAL PHILOSOPHY DOESN‘T SAY THAT LAW SOLVES ALL OUR PROBLEMS, BUT THAT IT IS BETTER THAN DOING NOTHING- YOU MUST WIN EVERY INSTANCE OF LAW IS BAD ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 200) PHM In the course of criticizing liberal legal philosophy, Robert Gordon has argued against "the kind of rule fetishism that supposes salvation comes through rules, rather than through the social practices that the rule makers try to symbolize and crystallize."65 It should now be apparent that Gordon's criticism of liberalism in this regard rests on several misconceptions. First, liberal theory does not promise salvation through legal rules; what it promises is a society that does a better job of protecting people from intolerance, prejudice, and oppression than it would if law was dispensed with. Second, Gordon poses a false dichotomy: Protection must be attempted either through rules (presumably he has legal rules in mind) or through the nonlegal practices of society. The soundest version of liberal theory will reject this dichotomy and argue that protection from intolerance, prejudice, and oppression requires both legal rules and at least some complementary social practice. 315 Kritik Answers Turns: Ricoeur CLS CREATES AN EXTREME LEGAL HERMEUTICS OF SUSPICION, PREVENTING ANY LEGAL REFORM Hasnas ‗95 [John, JD & PhD Phil @ duke, Asst. prof. Bus Ethics @ Georgetown, ―Back to the Future,‖ 45 Duke L.j. 84, October, LN//uwyo-ajl] the irrationalists offer no specific program for legal reform. Unlike the mainstream Crits, n83 This is because, as their designation [*104] suggests, they believe that reason is impotent to resolve legal and moral issues. Heavily influenced by the philosophy of Richard Rorty n84 and the deconstructionist school of literary criticism associated with Jacques Derrida, n85 the irrationalists believe that objective knowledge is impossible. Following Rorty, they reject the correspondence theory of truth that holds that a statement is true when it is an accurate representation of an underlying reality. n86 They assert that since it is impossible "to step outside our skins--the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism--and compare ourselves with something absolute," n87 reality is socially constructed, i.e., the result of social practices that "embody contingent choices concerning how to organize the thick texture of the world in consciousness." n88 Thus, the irrationalists adopt the coherence theory in which "the meaning of words are not determined by external referents, but This, however, implies that "the attempt to fix the meaning of an expression leads to an infinite regress," n90 and hence, that "meaning is ultimately instead by their coherence with other words or judgments within our total body of knowledge." n89 indeterminate." n91 Since this is true generally, it obviously must be true within the legal realm as well. n92 Therefore, for the irrationalists, the indeter- [*105] minacy of the law is merely a consequence of the inherent indeterminacy of human language. n93 This philosophical position, which has been described as radical subjective idealism, n94 leads the irrationalists to embrace an extreme form of epistemic skepticism in which "it is impossible to say anththing true about the world." n95 This, of course, entails a commitment to ethical relativism such that "any action may be described as right or wrong, good or bad." n96 Thus, for the irrationalists, reason is irrelevant to our normative pursuits. Since there are no objective moral or legal truths, reason cannot help us find them: "Legal and moral questions are matters to be answered by experience, emotion, introspection, and conversation, rather than by logical proof." n97 Hence, when judges decide cases, they should do what we all do when we face a moral decision. We identify a limited set of alternatives; we predict the most likely consequences of following different courses of action; we articulate the values that are important in the context of the decision and the ways in which they conflict [*106] with each other; we see what relevant people (judges, scholars) have said about similar issues; we talk with our friends; we drink enormous amounts of coffee; we choose what to do. n98 SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE – THEIR PARANOIA FORECLOSES UPON REVOLUTION Berman 2001 [Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, LN] , one might view this as a positive development. One might think people should stop being lulled into a false sense of believing that the rhetoric of public life really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of entrenched power, so the argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a truly revolutionary political movement. I doubt that such an eventuality is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture of suspiciousness is the most effective way to seek political (or personal) change anyway. Of course Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed, Without the means of experiencing more profound enchantments, without communal rituals those beliefs ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from forms of enchantment in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted, construct and maintain. 112 316 Kritik Answers Turns: Judicial Oppression THE ALTERNATIVE FREES JUDGES FROM LEGAL RULES, ALLOWING UNCHECKED OPPRESSION Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] This is not the place for extended consideration of this conception of freedom. I do wish, however, to make an observation [*500] about its implications: the sort of freedom brought about by acceptance of the strong indeterminacy thesis disassociates internal critique from programmatic social change. This radical sort of freedom might enable individual legal adjudicators, practitioners, and scholars to undergo "conversions," liberating them from the constraints of doctrine. But the nature of such a liberation is ambiguous. It is hardly clear that liberating those who wield legal power from the "mistaken" belief that legal doctrine constrains their actions will have a progressive effect. If the mystification thesis is correct, then acceptance of the indeterminacy thesis also will awaken those in power to the fact that legality is no barrier to repression. n111 Singer recognizes the argument that "if we let judges do just what they want, they would inevitably exercise judicial power in oppressive ways," and responds: But people do not want just to be beastly to each other. To suppose so is to ignore facts. People want freedom to pursue happiness. But they also want not to harm others or be harmed themselves. The evidence is all around us that people are often caring, supportive, loving, and altruistic, both in their family lives and in their relations with strangers. It is also not true that, if left to do "just what they like," government officials will necessarily harm us or oppress us. They may do these things if that is what they want to do. But it is simply not the case that all government officials admire Hitler and Stalin and use them as role models. n112 It is possible that all that stands between us and a progressive system of justice is the elimination of the myth that legal rules constrain judges, but the violent lessons of human history place a heavy burden of persuasion on those who make that claim. Singer's view is profoundly optimistic. 317 Kritik Answers Turns: Criticism Perpetuates Capitalism THEIR CRITIQUE OF THE LAW PREVENTS SOCIAL ORGANIZATION NECESSARY TO CREATE SOCIALISM Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] I have already described Critical legal scholarship as ambivalent in its diagnosis of our social and personal ills, and, of course, uncertainty of diagnosis leads to uncertainty in the prescription of a remedy. There is a further problem with the remedy itself, and the vacuity of Critical scholarship when faced with the task of proposing remedies stems partly from a reluctance to come to grips with this problem. The issue can be put quite simply: If we assume that leftist political movements aim to create "socialism," and that "socialism" means something like individual self-determination within an ethic of cooperation, does this goal imply a centralization or a decentralization of power? Not many years ago socialism meant nationalization -- ownership and control of the economy by the national government. But government management of industry and agriculture has been tried on a large scale in many countries, and the results have not been exactly what the pioneers of socialism had hoped. Inequalities of wealth have no doubt been reduced, but the bureaucratic state provides no cure for alienation, competitive individualism, greed, power-seeking, or other ills previously associated with capitalism. Furthermore, bureaucracies operate "by the book," and therefore even the most benign bureaucracy is inherently hostile to individual selfdetermination. Anyone with experience in public employment cannot fail to be aware of this fact. To escape the rigidity of bureaucracy, socialists must reduce the scale of economic and political organizations. Hence, they have been interested in worker control of individual factories, in small-scale cooperatives, and in semi-independent local geographical units where social cooperation might flourish. But how is a decentralized socialist [*285] society to prevent those small-scale units from adopting antisocialist policies? Some localities are sure to set up new hierarchies, or to refuse to share the wealth with the disadvantaged or the unproductive.If local units are permitted to trade with each other, market forces will again begin to operate. Unless there is pervasive control by a national bureaucracy, what is to prevent self-governing economic units from turning capitalist and attracting most of the movable capital and the most ambitious people? It is not for me to say whether socialists should prefer the rigidities of bureaucracy or the risks of autonomy, but any socialist or "radical" author who evades the dilemma or attempts to straddle it is peddling sheer fantasy. Neither will it do to propose that a "balance" be struck between national and local authority. Power will inevitably gravitate to the authority that does the balancing. 318 Kritik Answers Turns: Law Key to Solving Atrocity TRASHING THE LAW DESTROYS OUR BEST MEANS OF PROTECTING THE WEAK AGAINST THE STRONG, ALLOWING FOR ENDLESS OPPRESSION AND ATROCITY Hegland ‗85 [Kenney, Prof. of Law @ Arizona, ―Goodbye to Deconstruction,‖ 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1203, July, ln//uwyoajl] I fear deconstruction because people might come to believe in it, come to believe that the Rule of Law is a hoax masking illegitimate power. I believe this would be a bad thing. I offer, in support, one war story So, what are these chips? and one literary quote. In the summer of 1965, I went south as a member of the Law Student Civil Rights Research Council. I worked with attorney C.B. King in Albany, Georgia. That summer there were many civil rights marches, and the police often refused to protect the demonstrators. I recall sitting in a Federal District Court with C.B. King and listening to the judge tell a rural sheriff, "The law requires you to protect the demonstrators. If you don't, I have no choice but to hold you in contempt." Be this illusion, I would not blithely dispel it. Law can protect the weak from the strong. Economic and racial minorities would be in a worse condition in a deconstructed world, for our southern sheriff would argue, "The only reason I must protect them folks is to protect their first amendment rights, and the only reason they have first amendment rights is to get their voices heard, and, what with television being what it is, I can assure them of a much larger audience by turning my dogs on them." Right on, Sheriff! n38 [*1220] A character in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, argues that he would "cut down every law in England" to get the Devil. n39 Sir Thomas More responds: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you -- where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? n40 I realize that one war story and one literary quote will not prove the need for the Rule of Law. I realize there are counter examples and, indeed, conflicting images: "In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb," Grant Gilmore assures us, while "[i]n Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be , the issue of the importance of the Rule of Law ultimately resolves itself into a vision of human nature. Morton Horwitz has written that to see the Rule of Law as an "unqualified human good" is to "succumb to Hobbesian pessimism" and to embrace a "conservative doctrine." n42 One hates to admit to being suspicious, fearful and, perhaps, even mean-spirited. Yet, we live in a century that has produced Hitler and Stalin. Perhaps now is not the time to dump the Rule of Law. meticulously observed." n41 No doubt "Goodbye to Deconstruction" -- I stole the title. In 1936 Fred Rodell of Yale wrote a delightful essay, "Goodbye to Law Reviews." n43 Mostly he pokes fun at the pomposity of law reviews. There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is style. The other is content. That, I think, about covers the ground. [*1221] . . . [I]t seems to be a cardinal principle of law review writing and editing that nothing may be said forcefully and nothing may be said amusingly. This, I take it, is in the interest of something called dignity. n44 Rodell's ultimate point goes, however, to content. And in this he is quite serious. . With law as the only alternative to force as a means of solving the myriad problems of the world, it seems to me that the articulate among the clan of lawyers might, in their writings, be more pointedly aware of those problems, might recognize that the use of law to help toward their solution is the only excuse for the law's existence, instead of blithely continuing to make mountain after mountain out of tiresome technical molehills. n45 Articulate deconstructionists, instead of blithely denying the existence of the mountain with tiresome epistemology, might better devote their obvious talents to making it more habitable. n46 I do not wish to labor the point but perhaps it had best be stated once in dead earnest THE ALTERNATIVE TO LAW IS A WORLD WHERE THERE IS NO ORDER AND PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY WANT- JUSTIFIES EVEN WORSE ATROCITIES THAN YOUR IMPACT ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 128) PHM Consider the legal duty to aid a person to whom one owes no contractual or statutory obligation. The traditional common law rule is that there is no legal duty to aid such a person (a "stranger"). But there are a series of rules that qualify and carve out exceptions to the traditional rule. Thus, there is a rule that if the actions of the defendant helped to create the dangerous situation in which the plaintiff found himself, the defendant may have had a duty to render aid.32 There is a rule that if the plaintiff and the defendant stand in some "special relationship," there may be a duty to render aid, even if there is no statute or valid contract between the two requiring the aid.33 319 Kritik Answers 320 Kritik Answers Turns: Law Key to Solving Exploitation LAW ALLOWS A COLLECTION OF RULES TO SETTLE SOCIETAL PROBLEMS LIKE VIOLENCE- THE ALTERNATIVE HOMOGONIZES IDENTITY AND ELIMINATES PROTECTION FROM THE ADVANTAGED ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 192-193) PHM «"Let it be conceded that law typically operates at a higher level of abstraction than other social rules, at least in a liberal society that exhibits moral, religious, and political pluralism. The law there will often exclude considerations that would be viewed as relevant from the perspective of a certain ethical system, religious doctrine, or political morality. If it did not, legal reasoning could not be clearly distinguished from unconstrained moral inquiry and political choice. Moreover, the liberal conception of the rule of law requires that public and private power be regulated by norms that are generalizable across situations and can be applied in a regularized, predictable manner. This again requires that certain aspects of a case be deliberately disregarded in the name of predictability. Where institutions cannot presuppose that all officials share the same set of background moral, religious, and political ideas, the authoritative norms that they lay down cannot regularly call for highly contextsensitive judgments without threatening the regularity, predictability, and perhaps even the stability of the system. Liberal law, then, does require a high level of abstraction, in the sense that it sometimes prescribes a deliberate disregard for certain particulars of a case that could be quite relevant to a decision if one were involved in more context-sensitive moral or political deliberation. Thus, the liberal should concede that legal reasoning will often take place at a significantly higher level of abstraction than context-sensitive normative deliberation. But he will contend that there are two very good arguments for institutions that regulate power in accordance with reasoning that proceeds at a relatively high level of abstraction, given a context of moral, religious, and political pluralism. First, it settles the terms of social life in a way that allows us to avoid reopening fundamental questions about society and human life every time a conflict or dispute breaks out. This liberates our energies from constant moral and ideological battles and enables us to pursue vigorously other aims: commercial, scientific, artistic, and so forth. Second, legal abstraction can materially assist in protecting people from intolerance and prejudice: When the Jew, the black, or the homosexual is regarded as "just anybody" by the existing system of legal rules, he or she is protected from the inclinations of intolerance and prejudice that could well playa role in more contextsensitive modes for regulating public and private power. Let us examine the CLS response to each of these liberal arguments. RULE OF LAW IS THE ONLY OPTION IN A WORLD OF THE NATION-STATE- THE ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS THE PRIVELEDGED TO EXPLOIT THE DISADVANTAGED ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 200-201) PHM Morton Horwitz has correctly pointed out that the rule of law can constrain not only oppressive and misguided uses of power but also benevolent and beneficial ones.66 Whether the rule of law is to be prized, then, hinges on the question of whether there is a greater need to confine through the rule of law the intolerant and oppressive impulses of humans or to liberate the tolerant and benevolent impulses from the constraints of legality. I do not believe that there is an a priori answer to this question. To that extent, Horwitz is quite right to say that it is a mistake to characterize the rule of law as an "unqualified human good," a characterization made by E. P. Thompson.67 However, the sorry human history of 321 Kritik Answers persecution, prejudice, and intolerance over the past several centuries makes one conclusion inescapable: Within the context of the nation-state and over the foreseeable future, the need to confine the impulses of intolerance and oppression with the requirements of legality will continue to be far greater than the need to liberate the impulses of of tolerance and benevolence from the restrictions of the rule of law.68 322 Kritik Answers Turns: Rights Good (1/4) RIGHTS ALLOW RESISTANCE, EMPOWERMENT AND RECONFIGURING OF LAW OUTSIDE THE LEGAL SYSTEM Martha Minow, Professor of Law, Harvard University, Yale Law Journal, Interpreting Rights: An Essay for Robert Cover, pg L/N 1987 Before drawing on these interpretive themes, I should try to clarify what I mean by "rights," an overused word in legal, philosophical, and political debates. Defining "rights" is a difficult task because there is considerable ambiguity in the meanings invoked in the debates about rights, and because much ink has been spilled by legal and political theorists on this subject. One meaning is the formally announced legal rules that concern relationships among individuals, groups, and the official state. "Rights" typically are the articulation of such rules in a form that describes the enforceable claims of individuals or groups against the state. n25 [*1867] Yet a second meaning will become important in this essay. "Rights" can give rise to "rights consciousness" so that individuals and groups may imagine and act in light of rights that have not been formally recognized or enforced. Rights, in this sense, are neither limited to nor co-extensive with precisely those rules formally announced and enforced by public authorities. Instead, rights represent articulations -- public or private, formal or informal -- of claims that people use to persuade others (and themselves) about how they should be treated and about what they should be granted. I mean, then, to include within the ambit of rights discourse all efforts to claim new rights, to resist and alter official state action that fails to acknowledge such rights, and to construct communities apart from the state to nurture new conceptions of rights. Rights here encompass even those claims that lose, or have lost in the past, if they continue to represent claims that muster people's hopes and articulate their continuing efforts to persuade. Consciousness, or cognizance, of rights, then, is not simply awareness of those rights that have been granted in the past, but also knowledge of the process by which hurts that once were whispered or unheard have become claims, and claims that once were unsuccessful, have persuaded others and transformed social life. The connections between past and future claims of rights are voiced through interpretations of inherited understandings of rights. Interpretation engages lawyers and nonlawyers in composing new meanings inside and outside of legal institutions. Charges against new rights express opposition to this interpretive process. 323 Kritik Answers Turns: Rights Good (2/4) RIGHTS ARE PART OF THE DECONSTRUCTIVE ENTERPRISE – THEY OVERLOOK THE FACT THAT RIGHTS DEMANDS ARE MADE BY SPECIFIC OPPRESSED GROUPS THAT USE THEIR DEMANDS TO CALL INTO QUESTION SOCIETY‘S DOMINANT IDEOLOGIES Goldfarb, Associate Law Professor at Boston College, 92 (Phyllis, ―A DIVERSITY OF INFLUENCE: From the Worlds of "Others": Minority and Feminist Responses to Critical Legal Studies,‖ New England Law Review, Spring, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683) Because some CLS scholars have focused narrowly on legal consciousness as the predominant ideological support of civil society, they view appeals to legal consciousness -- through rights rhetoric, for example -- as ultimately legitimating the prevailing social conditions and as fundamentally counterproductive to meaningful social change. n23 This argument is not without merit in the terms in which it is phrased. Nevertheless, it overlooks the fact that challenges captured in abstract rights language are presented, not by generic groups, but by specific groups with identifiable histories whose relationship to the social order may influence the way in which others perceive their rights claims. African-Americans acquired a place in American society through chattel slavery which persists in the form of an entrenched race hierarchy that denies recognition of African-Americans' full humanity. Against this backdrop, African-Americans' assertions of rights have been a radical challenge to social arrangements, a challenge containing sufficient threat at various historical moments to provoke violent resistance. n24 One must first appreciate the central ideological importance of racism in American society in order to fully comprehend the radical Civil rights claimants, who understood experientially the were not likely to underestimate the challenge posed to the traditional social order by their assertion of mainstream equality. n26 As Crenshaw suggests, [*692] people of color knew that when powerful elements in society had defined particular racial characteristics as conclusive proof of inferiority, an equality claim was a potent assault on these collective psychological structures. n27 By proclaiming the unthinkable -- that people understood to be inferior were entitled to equality -- the civil rights movement, through simple assertion of rights routinely granted to whites, began delegitimating the ideology of race consciousness. In a powerful deconstructive move, the reified abstractions harbored by masses of white Americans concerning the characteristics attributed to African-Americans were thrown into question by African-Americans' assertion of mainstream equality. n28 Crenshaw and others suggest that the feature of this story that African-Americans continue to need most to deconstruct is the racist imagery, not the rights imagery. n29 Liberal legal notions, such as rights, represent strategies to be deployed in this deconstructive enterprise. n30 The recognition of African-Americans as rights-bearers, as members of the American community, transformed the experience of race oppression . In Patricia Williams' words: [*693] Rights imply a respect which places one within the referential range of self and others, which elevates one's status from human body to social being. For blacks , then, the attainment of rights signifies the due, the respectful behavior, the collective responsibility properly owed by a society to one of its own . n31 The civil rights movement reinforced one ideological support of American society -- legal consciousness -- to undermine another ideological support of American society -- race consciousness. As Crenshaw explains, the effect of the latter ideology had been to isolate African-Americans so effectively that no other route to social power was available. Only by playing the logic of the two prevailing ideologies against one another, applying the language of rights to the situation of African-Americans, could the movement hope to achieve any progress at all. The contradiction between American legal mythology and the systemic treatment of African-Americans created the only room within which the racially subordinated could maneuver. n32 The weight of daily oppression created an urgency that impelled African-Americans to seize the only viable opportunity for change that presented itself. n33 nature of nonwhites' claims to equal rights in a context of deeply-felt white supremacy. n25 intransigent daily realities of their own race domination, 324 Kritik Answers Turns: Rights Good (3/4) RIGHTS EXPOSE OPPRESSION AND GIVE SILENCED VOICES A FORUM FOR RECOGNITION Martha Minow, Professor of Law, Harvard University, Yale Law Journal, Interpreting Rights: An Essay for Robert Cover, pg L/N 1987 What, then, is the equality signaled by rights discourse? The equality registered by rights claims is an equality of attention. The rights tradition in this country sustains the call that makes those in power at least listen. Rights -- as words and as forms -- structure attention even for the claimant who is much less powerful than the authorities, and for individuals and groups treated throughout the community as less than equal. n70 The interpretive [*1880] approach construes a claim of right, made before a judge, as a plea for recognition of membership in a community shared by applicant and judge, much as reader and author share the world of the text. n71 The language of rights voices an individual's desire to be recognized in tones that demand recognition. n72 Rights discourse implicates those who use it in a form of life, a pattern of social and political commitment. n73 Which claims will persuade, and how? With what consequences for prior and subsequent claims? Which claims, indeed, will be recognized as even deserving communal attention? n74 These are difficult and persistent questions in a community committed to rights discourse. There is a risk that those points of view that have been silenced in the past will continue to go unheard, and will be least adaptable to the vocabulary of preexisting claims. These are issues for struggle, and some struggles may well take place beyond rights discourse, beyond language. Some people may feel so shut out that the appeal to a communal commitment to rights makes no sense to them. Nonetheless, an interpretive conception of rights is a way to take the aspirational language of the society seriously n75 and to promote change by reliance on inherited traditions. It is a way to challenge those who want to close the doors now that some of the previously excluded have fought and found their way in. n76 [*1881] The metaphors of interpretation and conversation enable a conception of community connections forged through the exchange of words in the struggle for meaning. n77 In a powerful novel about contemporary South Africa, Nadine Gordimer's Rosa Burger responds to a critic of liberalism by saying: I'm not offering a theory. I'm talking about people who need to have rights -- there -- in a statute book, so that they can move about in their own country, decide what work they'll do and what their children will learn at school. . . . People must be able to create institutions -- institutions must evolve that will make it possible in practice. That utopia, it's inside . . . without it, how can you . . . act? n78 The use of rights discourse affirms community, but it affirms a particular kind of community: a community dedicated to invigorating words with power to restrain, so that even the powerless can appeal to those words. It is a community that acknowledges and admits historic uses of power to exclude, deny, and silence -- and commits itself to enabling suppressed points of view to be heard, to make covert conflict overt. n79 Committed to making available a rhetoric of rights where it has not been heard before, this community uses rights rhetoric to make conflict audible and unavoidable, even if limited to words, or to certain forms of words. n80 If there is [*1882] conflict experienced in the introduction of rights rhetoric to a new area, it is over this issue: Should the normative commitment to restrain power with communal dedication reach this new area? The power in question may be public or private. For example, with children's rights, large disagreements persist over whether and how communal limits should constrain the exercise of private, especially parental, power. n81 Children's rights may enlarge state power over both children and adults, not simply recognize children's pre-existing autonomy. n82 But it is the meaning of autonomy, and its relation to rights, that claims attention next. 325 Kritik Answers Turns: Rights Good (4/4) DEMANDS OUTSIDE OF RIGHTS RHETORIC FAIL – DEMANDING RIGHTS MAY REIFY THE DOMINANT SYSTEM BUT ARE THE ONLY TO PROTECT THE LIVES AND LIBERTY OF THE OPPRESSED Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, ―RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,‖ Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331) Rights discourse provided the ideological mechanisms through which the conflicts of federalism, the power of the Presidency, and the legitimacy of the courts could be orchestrated against Jim Crow. Movement leaders used these tactics to force open a conflict between whites that eventually benefited Black people. Casting racial issues in the moral and legal rights rhetoric of the prevailing ideology helped create the political controversy without which the state's coercive function would not have been enlisted to aid Blacks. Simply critiquing the ideology from without or making demands in language outside the rights discourse would have accomplished little. Rather, Blacks gained by using a powerful combination of direct action, mass protest, and individual acts of resistance, along with appeals to public opinion and the courts couched in the language of the prevailing legal consciousness. The result was a series of ideological and political crises. In these crises, civil rights activists and lawyers induced the federal government to aid Blacks and triggered efforts to legitimate and reinforce the authority of the law in ways that benefited Blacks. Simply insisting that Blacks be integrated or speaking in the language of "needs" would have endangered the lives of those who were already taking risks -- and with no reasonable chance of success. President Eisenhower, for example, would not have sent federal troops to Little Rock simply at the behest of protesters demanding that Black schoolchildren receive an equal education. Instead, the successful manipulation of legal rhetoric led to a crisis of federal power that ultimately benefited Blacks. n192 Some critics of legal reform movements seem to overlook the fact that state power has made a significant difference -- sometimes between life and death -- in the efforts of Black people to transform their world. Attempts to harness the power of the state through the appropriate rhetorical/legal incantations should be appreciated as intensely powerful and calculated political acts. In the context of white supremacy, engaging in rights discourse should be seen as an act of self-defense. This was particularly true because the state could not assume a position of neutrality regarding Black people once the movement had mobilized people to challenge the system of oppression: either the coercive mechanism of the state had to be used to support white supremacy, or it had to be used to dismantle it. We know now, with hindsight, that it did both. n193 LIBERAL LEGAL THEORY INTEGRATES NON-LEGAL SOLUTIONS AS A COMPANION TO LAW- THERE IS NO NORMATIVE VIEW INHERENT IN OUR REPRESENTATIONS AND ONLY THE AFF CAN CREATE A FRAMEWORK FOR RIGHTS ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 101-102) PHM In addition, it would be a distortion of liberal theory to suggest that it has no place for nonlegal modes of social regulation, such as mediation. Liberals can and do acknowledge the value of such nonlegal mechanisms in certain social contexts and can consistently allow a place for them in liberal society. And those who reject the rule of law can argue in the political arena for extending the role of such informal mechanisms. Of course, a liberal state could not allow the antinomians to eradicate legal institutions; in that sense, one might say that the liberal rule of law is not neutral. But the kind of political neutrality which the liberal defends does not aim to guarantee that any normative view has an opportunity to remake society wholly in its vision. It does guarantee an opportunity to negotiate and compromise within a framework of individual rights, and there is no reason why those who defend nonlegal modes of social regulation cannot seize the opportunity under a liberal regime to carve out a significant role for nonlegal modes of social regulation within the liberal state. 326 Kritik Answers The liberal version of political neutrality demands that antinomians have such an opportunity, but there is nothing remotely inconsistent in liberal thought in making that demand or prohibiting anti legalism from going so far as to destroy all legal institutions. 327 Kritik Answers Turns: Alternative Causes Rights Rollback THE ALTERNATIVE‘S DIALECTICAL CONCEPTION OF RIGHTS PUTS ALL GUARANTEES AT RISK, JEOPARDIZING LIBERATION Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] Kennedy, however, adds a second reason for agreeing with Klare [*525] rather than Lynd: "[T]he left doesn't need a counter-theory that ends with rights" because "our program for the future must emerge dialectically from our past, rather than as a deduction from it." n38 This point causes me some concern. Kennedy is no longer talking about rights theory but about rights themselves. His refusal to develop a counter-theory which "ends" with rights is due not merely to the inadequacy of rights alone to protect and imprve the workers' situation; that could be achieved by making clear that much more is needed, even for the adequate functioning of the rights themselves. Rather, his refusal is based on a disavowal of an ongoing (one might say "principled") commitment to rights. n39 What "our program for the future" is must emerge "dialectically" (rather than as a "deduction" from our past). Does this mean that Kennedy's "future program" may not include the right of working people to organize? This very possibility is why -- given the deductions from past history and present experience discussed later in this essay -- some of us feel it is appropriate to make a principled commitment to the legal right of working people to organize and engage in concerted activities, just as we would make a commitment to the right to dissent. We cannot trust future programs that emerge "dialectically," but which are not based on at least limited deductions from our past. 328 Kritik Answers Turns: Minorities CLS DISEMPOWERS MARGINALIZED GROUPS WHO USE LEGAL DISCOURSE IN TRANSFORMATIVE WAYS Phyllis Goldfarb, Associate Professor, Boston College Law School, New England Law Review, Spring, 1992, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683 Viewed through Minow's eyes, rights talk represents a demand for public airing that makes pre-existing conflicts "audible and unavoidable." It is a "process by which hurts that once were whispered or unheard have become claims, and claims that once were unsuccessful, have persuaded others and transformed social life." Rights, Minow argues, can remake relationships; in relating her view, Minow helps us remake our relationship to rights. This transformative approach to rights, adopted by movements of the disempowered, is a view that feminist scholars and scholars of color have urged proponents of Critical Legal Studies to embrace. The foregoing descriptions comprise content-oriented critiques of certain CLS theories. Feminists and minorities would offer a methodological critique as well, a critique rooted in sensitivity to the methods by which one builds theory. Each has implicitly and explicitly criticized certain CLS literature for its contextual failures, its inattention to the specific ways that diverse groups of people experience society and feel its impact in their everyday lives. Each would contribute to CLS a theory-building epistemology grounded in political struggle, attentive to the conditions in which people live, and inclusive of the perspectives they express. The infusion of these diverse perspectives, especially from the voices of the disempowered, and attention to political practice are likely to affect CLS theories. For feminists and critical race scholars, this infusion of voices and involvement in practice represent a moral and epistemological imperative for a transformative project aimed at reducing hierarchy. 329 Kritik Answers Turn: Working in System Good (1/2) THERE‘S NO ALTERNATIVE TO RIGHTS STRATEGIES THAT WILL SOLVE – DEMANDS CAN ONLY BE MADE USING THE INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC OF THE PRESENT SYSTEM – DEMANDS FOR RIGHTS CREATE INSTITUTIONAL CRISES THAT CAUSE REAL REFORMS Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, ―RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,‖ Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331) The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling , even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore, liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic. n137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions that they are challenging . n138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective . n139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. n140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. n141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology , Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wres protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the "rights" that citizenship entailed. 330 Kritik Answers Turn: Working in System Good (2/2) WE‘VE GOT TO WORK THROUGH THE SYSTEM TO CHANGE IT. Andrew Sullivan, Editor of the New Republic, Virtually Normal, 1995, p. 88-91 Moreover, a cultural strategy as a political strategy is a dangerous one for a minority-and a small minority at that. Inevitably, the vast majority of the culture will be at best uninterested. In a society where the market rules the culture, majorities win the culture wars. And in a society where the state, pace Foucault actually does exist, where laws are passed according to rules by which the society operates, culture, in any case, is not enough. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. To achieve actual results, to end persecution of homosexuals in the military, to allow gay parents to keep their children, to provide basic education about homosexuality in high schools, to prevent murderers of homosexuals from getting lenient treatment, it is necessary to work through the, very channels Foucault and his followers revile. It is necessary to conform to certain disciplines in order to reform them, necessary to speak a certain language before it can say something different, necessary to abandon the anarchy of random resistance if actual homosexuals are to be protected. As Michael Walzer has written of Foucault, he 11 stands nowhere and finds no reasons, Angrily he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or projects for turning the cage into something more like a human home." The difficult and compromising task of interpreting one world for another, of reforming an imperfect and unjust society from a criterion of truth or reasoning, is not available to the liberationists. Into Foucault's philosophical anarchy they hurl a political cri de coeur. When it eventually goes unheard, when its impact fades, when its internal nihilism blows itself out, they have nothing left to offer. Other homosexuals, whose lives are no better for queer revolt, remain the objects of a political system which the liberationists do not deign to engage. The liberationists prefer to concentrate-for where else can they go?-on those instruments of power which require no broader conversation, no process of dialogue, no moment of compromise, no act of engagement. So they focus on outing, on speech codes, on punitive measures against opponents on campuses, on the enforcement of new forms of language, by censorship and by intimidation. Insofar, then, as liberationist politics is cultural, it is extremely vulnerable; and insofar as it is really political, it is almost always authoritarian. Which is to say it isn't really a politics at all. It's a strange confluence of political abdication and psychological violence. 331 Kritik Answers Indeterminacy False (1/4) THE LAW REASONABLY GUIDES IMPLIMENTATION EVEN IN HARD CASES Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] What then is the truth about indeterminacy? There is certainly room for dispute, but as practical boundaries for the debate, three conclusions are firm. First, legal doctrine underdetermines the results in many, but not all, actual cases. That is to say that aside from the easiest cases, aspects of the outcome are rule-guided but not rule-bound. For example, in the most routine cases, the amount of a traffic fine or of a damage award may vary within some range. Second, although there may be some cases in which the result is radically underdeterminate, in the sense that any party could "win" under some valid interpretation of legal doctrine, it does not follow that the doctrine itself is indeterminate over all cases. For example, the three-pronged test for impermissible state establishment of religion, articulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman, n97 is often criticized as highly underdeterminate. But, in spite of any uncertainty about some applications of the Lemon test, we can be quite sure that a court applying the Lemon test would strike down any law giving parochial school teachers a pay raise out of state funds. n98 Third, it is pure nonsense to say that legal doctrine is completely indeterminate even with respect to very [*495] hard cases. Even in the hardest hard case, legal doctrine limits the court's options. One of the parties will receive a judgment, not some unexpected stranger; the relief will be related to the dispute at hand and will not be a declaration that Mickey Mouse is the President of the United States. EVIDENCE OF INDETERMINACY IS FLAWED: SELECTION BIAS Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] Furthermore, one of the primary criteria for inclusion in a casebook may be indeterminacy itself: practically indeterminate cases may be useful pedagogically because they can be used to illustrate both the methods and limits of formal legal reasoning as well as the role of principle and policy. The generalization that the law is practically indeterminate may thus stem from the predominance of such examples in the materials with which legal scholars work on a daily basis. n104 Finally, critical legal scholars have a strong practical motive for belief in the indeterminacy thesis. If one believes that the rules are strongly determinate, but fundamentally wrong, one is left with very little room to maneuver within the limited horizons of legal scholarship. The notion that it is possible to achieve radical results working with the existing body of legal doctrine -- because the seeming constraints are illusory -- has powerful attraction for those committed to social change, but whose professional lives are confined to the academy and not the capitol buildings. 332 Kritik Answers Indeterminacy False (2/4) INDETERMINACY IS AN UNPROVABLE FARCE – THE LAW IS ONLY UNDERDETERMINED AND USUALLY WORKS Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] [*475] This confusion between indeterminacy and underdeterminacy is also reflected in Duncan Kennedy's definition of formalism in his early essay, Legal Formality: "The essence of rule application, as I have defined it above, is that it is mechanical. The decision process is called rule application only if the actor resolutely Kennedy has defined rule application in such a way that only a completely determined decision will count as a decision that is not indeterminate. The difficulty with this definition is that legal rules (or, more broadly, doctrines) can significantly constrain outcomes even if they do not mechanically determine them. My general argument against the internal skeptic's defense is that underdeterminacy is not the same as indeterminacy and limits himself to identifying those aspects of the situation which, per se, trigger his response." n47 that a case need not be indeterminate to be hard. With all this in mind, I can agree with critical scholars that there are some cases that appear easy on their surface but are actually hard. But the internal skeptics believe that by demonstrating that easy cases are hard cases, they have also demonstrated that the law is indeterminate. At this stage in the argument, I part company with these advocates of indeterminacy. , the internal skeptic cannot demonstrate that all law is indeterminate through conventional legal argumentation. The first reason is conceptual: if a decision is not determinate, it does not follow that it is also not underdeterminate and, therefore, indeterminate. Neither does it follow that For two principal reasons because a case is hard, it is indeterminate. Even if all seemingly easy cases were actually hard cases, it would not follow that the law is indeterminate with respect to all these cases -- although it would follow that the law is less determinate than we might have thought. Hard cases can be very hard, even if their results are not completely indeterminate. I submit further that even the hardest of hard cases are merely underdetermined by the law, not indeterminate. But I defer discussion of this point until later in this essay. there are at least some very easy cases that are completely determinate. For example, if I were sued by Gore Vidal for slander on the basis of the first paragraph of this [*476] article, the only possible outcome would be a verdict for me. A skeptic might respond that it is possible to think of an argument suggesting that I should lose the case, or that the judge could simply rule against me without explanation. But it is simply incredible to say that any such argument or arbitrary ruling would be considered acceptable by the legal profession. That is, this sort of defense of indeterminacy is not internal to the law. It may, however, have some critical bite -- a matter I turn to in the The second reason internal skepticism cannot prove complete indeterminacy is rooted in the standards implicit in the practice of acceptable legal argument: following discussions of external skepticism and the epiphenomenalist defense. THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES ARE DETERMINATE… YOU JUST DON‘T HEAR ABOUT THEM Hegland ‗85 [Kenney, Prof. of Law @ Arizona, ―Goodbye to Deconstruction,‖ 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1203, July, ln//uwyoajl] Let us return to the mundane -- can legal doctrines determine the outcome of specific legal controversies? I think the acne case establishes, at least in theory, that legal rules and doctrines can determine outcomes and that they can constrain judicial discretion and immunize decisions from subjective preference. But even if I have won my quarrel theoretically, I have not done much to save the legal order if all I have shown is that legal doctrine determines outcome only in what I must now concede to be the most ridiculous of hypotheticals. What of the real world of judges, lawyers and clients? Does doctrine determine outcome there? My sense is that legal doctrines determine the outcomes in most cases. I do not believe this is due to the litigants' lack of imagination or resources. It is because doctrines are not mirages; they have real substance and are what they appear to be. Law professors teach the difficult cases of the casebooks, read the novel cases of the advance sheets, and fret over "major" Supreme Court decisions. Law professors overestimate the degree of legal uncertainty. I teach a course in contracts, and last summer I took a week to read every appellate decision in my home state dealing with that subject over the last several years. It is, by and large, boring stuff: "The rule is X, the facts are Y, and therefore we hold for the plaintiff." I realize that in the process of writing an opinion an uncertain case may become certain. Nonetheless, in most of the opinions I read, there was simply no sign of doctrinal uncertainty: seldom were there dissenting opinions, seldom were cases distinguished, and seldom did the court discuss "social policy" to convince the reader that the legal doctrine should apply. Typically, the doctrine was recited and then applied. It was a long week. 333 Kritik Answers Now it may be that, for some dark or benign purpose, the judges of Arizona are out to hoodwink us, or for perhaps some climatic reason, Arizona lawyers have been made dumb and their clients poor. But, if my reading of the cases is fair, I think that as an empirical matter the deconstructionists have some explaining to do -- and it will not do to simply assert, rather than prove, that Sun-Belt lawyers lack imagination and resolve. 334 Kritik Answers Indeterminacy False (3/4) INDETERMINACY DOES NOT MEAN WE CANNOT MAKE REASONABLE PREDICTIONS Robert Gordon, Professor of Law, Stanford University, Stanford Law Review, January, 1984, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 57, The other argument rests, I think, on a misunderstanding of what the Critics mean by indeterminancy. They don't mean -- although sometimes they sound as if they do -- that there are never any predictable causal relations between legal forms and anything else. As argued earlier in this essay, there are plenty of short- and medium-run stable regularities in social life, including regularities in the interpretation and application, in given contexts, of legal rules. Lawyers, in fact, are constantly making predictions for their clients on the basis of these regularities. The Critical claim of indeterminacy is simply that none of these regularities are necessary consequences of the adoption of a given regime of rules. The rulesystem could also have generated a different set of stabilizing conventions leading to exactly the opposite results and may, upon a shift in the direction of political winds, switch to those opposing conventions at any time. YOUR INDETERMINACY ARGUMENT ASSUMES THE PAST DON‘T MANIFEST IN FUTURE DECISIONS- PAST MISTAKES GUIDE FUTURE- ADDITIONALLY, YOUR ARGUMENT THAT LAW CANNOT HAVE A POSITIVE EFFECT IS WRONG- POWER DISTRIBUTION PROVES ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 177-178) PHM Ultra-theory relies, in fact, upon a seriously flawed conception of social reality and rests upon several fallacious inferences. We may begin the criticism of it with a point to which I have already alluded, concerning the issue of whether the social past can control the social future. The CLS ultra-theorist correctly believes that the social past can never guarantee the character of the social future. It is never a necessary truth that the social world will continue to turn in the way it has been turning up to now. However, ultra-theorists fallaciously infer from this that the social past cannot control the social future, that social rules cannot constrain and channel human social behavior and thought. This inference is a fallacy because control is ·always a matter of degree; it may never reach the point of constituting a necessary connection between past and future, but it does not follow that there is no control. 35 CLS ultra-theorists have been led astray here by an ill-conceived reliance on the metaphysical categories of contingency and necessity. They reason that the social future is contingent, that it does not have to be a certain way; in particular, it does not have to be a repetition of the social past. They fallaciously conclude that the social past can exert no control over the social future. Underlying this fallacious inference is the mistaken belief that there can be a relation of control between x and y only if x's prescription that y behave in a certain way necessarily leads to y behaving in that way. Moreover, the ultra-theorist's view that control requires necessary connections contradicts his own view that one individual can control another. Recall that the CLS ultra-theorist denies that social rules have the power to control the behavior and thought of individuals but that he simultaneously affirms that individuals (e.g., slaveowners) can control other individuals (e.g., their slaves). Yet the ultra-theorist argument explaining why rules cannot control individuals also defeats the possibility of individuals controlling other individuals. Nothing makes it impossible for slaves to revolt, for workers to rebel, for the oppressed to rise up. The ultra-theory argument would force one to conclude that masters exert no control over slaves, bosses no control over workers, the oppressors no control over the oppressed. These conclusions are flatly inconsistent with the claims of CLS ultra-theorists, 335 Kritik Answers in addition to being wholly implausible. The conclusion to draw from the fact that the oppressed can revolt at any time is not that the oppressors do not exert control over them but that the control is not total. And exactly the same conclusion should be drawn about social rules: The fact that such rules can be trashed at any moment does not show that they exert no control, only that the control is not total. 336 Kritik Answers Indeterminacy False (4/4) EVEN IF THEY‘RE RIGHT, THAT ONLY MEANS THAT JUSTIFICATIONS ARE DISPARATE… LEGAL OUTCOMES ARE STILL DETERMINATE Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] I pause now to examine this argument in some detail. It is easy to agree that existing legal rules are not fully determined by any unified and consistent social theory. Even if we had a fully satisfactory theory justifying the broad outlines of the modern state, it would be hard to argue that any such theory required a particular set of it does not follow from this admission that critical scholars have made out a case for complete indeterminacy of justification. Some specific legal rules may necessarily follow from a broad social theory; many legal rules may be incompatible with a given theory. [*467] Moreover, indeterminacy of justification does not entail indeterminacy in a set of legal rules. n16 A number of competing theories could be used to justify or critique a wide range of legal doctrines, while the legal doctrines themselves nonetheless would constrain the outcome of particular cases. n17 For example, one could make consequentialist arguments for and against the doctrine of promissory estoppel, while the doctrine legal rules, much less the precise set of rules we have now. However, itself remained determinate in application. Of course, if (as is often the case) the justification for a rule is used to guide its application, indeterminacy of justification will lead to greater indeterminacy of legal outcomes. n18 337 Kritik Answers A2 ―Language Makes Law Indeterminate‖: 2AC LINGUISTIC INDETERMINACY CAN GO EITHER WAY, CANCELLING OUT ANY EFFECT ON THE LAW Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] But the difficulty with appealing to Wittgenstein's skeptical paradox is that it costs the indeterminacy thesis its critical bite. Wittgenstein makes the following observation: This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. n56 Thus, we may admit the paradox but reject its significance because it has no consequences for human conduct. Like other skeptical paradoxes, it has no existential force. As Saul Kripke puts it, "It holds no terrors in our daily lives." n57 My argument, therefore, relies on the distinction between logical and practical possibility. This distinction can be illuminated by a brief discussion of an analogous problem with epistemological skepticism. An epistemological skeptic might claim that we can never really know anything. An anti-skeptic might respond with an [*479] example of an "easy case" of knowledge: you know that you are currently sitting in a chair and reading this peculiar article. The skeptic might respond by raising a skeptical possibility: for all you know you are only a brain in a vat being manipulated by an evil scientist to think you are sitting and reading this essay, when in fact you are doing neither of these things. n58 Very roughly, it is my view that rule-skepticism can be shown to be toothless for the same reason that this sort of epistemological skepticism is toothless: worrying about being a brain in a vat will not have any effect on what you do. Likewise, worrying about rule-skepticism will not have any effect on the way cases are decided. The skeptical possibilities invoked by both rule-skepticism and epistemological skepticism are not practical possibilities, and only practical possibilities affect the way one acts. 338 Kritik Answers CLS Recreates Oppression (1/2) TURN- CLS CONFLATES AND CREATES OPPRESSION; WE MUST CRITICIZE FROM THE OPPRESSED‘S PERSPECTIVE Anthony Cook Professor of Law, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 8990 The third problem with the CLS critique is that it threatens to conflate the unique histories of the various forms of alienation and oppression engendered by the subconscious acceptance and assimilation of liberal ideology. the experiences of racism and sexism—to name but two—are certainly related to the way individuals experience liberalism as oppressive but cannot be reduced to that experience. Therefore, exploration of the various histories of oppression, often ignored by CLS‘s account can provide an essential basis for any reconstructed community. Finally, deconstruction should ultimately lead to a reconstructive vision, which will involve some line-drawing and boundary-setting. CLS should not only explain why liberalism‘s boundary-setting is problematic; it must also suggest how to redraw those boundaries to satisfy other goals. I believe CLS too often falls victim to a myopic preoccupation with the limited role of theoretical deconstruciton and a too narrowly tailored experiential deconstruction that focuses exclusively on how individuals experience liberalism. Hegemonic ideologies are never maintained by logical consistencey alone; knowledge of the full range of conditions under which they remain oppressed, exposes new problems and possibilities. When one begins to contemplate how alternative visions of community might look and be implemented, one must consider carefully the view from the bottom— not simply what oppressors say but how the oppressed respond to what they say. The view from the bottom may offer insights into why individuals accept their subordinate status in society despite the illogic and inconsistency of the dominant ideology. 339 Kritik Answers CLS Recreates Oppression (2/2) TRASHING THE LEGAL SYSTEM LEAVES OPPRESSION INTACT AND RESULTS IN REAL WORLD SUFFERING– THE RISK OF OUR IMPACT IS WORSE THAN THEIRS Goldfarb, Associate Law Professor at Boston College, 92 (Phyllis, ―A DIVERSITY OF INFLUENCE: From the Worlds of "Others": Minority and Feminist Responses to Critical Legal Studies,‖ New England Law Review, Spring, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683) Some CLS theories imply that the use of rights rhetoric by people of [*694] color to try to remove some of the harshest manifestations of racial domination exemplifies a false legal consciousness or a counterproductive faith in the power of liberalism to produce social change. n34 Certain critical race theorists have responded that this implication stems from a misapprehension of the options for genuine social struggle open to the socially, economically and politically The decision to pursue a rights strategy may well represent a conscious and critical assessment of the constraints imposed by the conditions of racial subjugation. n36 The denial of this possibility may itself represent a form of false consciousness. n37 As Crenshaw observes: "In the context of white supremacy, engaging in rights discourse should be seen as an act of self-defense." n38 [*695] Richard Delgado suggests that rights can protect minorities from those who, in the absence of legal sanctions, would feel freer to act upon racist impulses . n39 Although certain CLS scholars despair of the vision of atomized individuals that underlies rights language, n40 Delgado states that minorities, who regularly experience the intrusions of oppression, value the distance that rights place between themselves and others . n41 Such distance offers a measure of safety from race-based violence, contempt and abuse. In the sort of informal community that some CLS writers prize, a community operating by fluid and flexible exercises of discretion unbounded by rights and rules , n42 Delgado wonders what structures would protect minorities from racist behavior. n43 For minorities, Delgado indicates, abandoning formality may mean abandoning security, making the informal community a setting of disproportionate vulnerability for people of color. n44 These different attitudes about rights and rule structures are vividly portrayed in a story related by Patricia Williams. In renting an apartment in dispossessed. n35 New York City, Williams insists on a conventional lease to demonstrate her trustworthiness, while Peter Gabel, her white male colleague, demonstrates his trustworthiness by avoiding a lease and engaging in an informal conversational transaction. n45 Williams rejects the CLS critique of legalism and formality not because it is inaccurate, but because it voices a single perspective that grows from a particular social experience, ignoring the experiences of other social groups. n46 Her conclusion is that we should not abandon rights language for all purposes, but that we should "listen intently to each other," to "bridge the experiential distance" between us, n47 and to "attempt to become multilingual in the semantics of each others' rights-valuation." n48 Robert Williams also ties differential rights-valuation to the social experiences of different social groups. Williams asserts that CLS theory [*696] has underestimated peoples of color when it worries that they have come to believe in the "truth" of rights rather than in the simple instrumental character of attaining rights. n49 From the standpoint of the empowered, Williams observes, from the standpoint of the subordinated, rights have a more palpable reality: One cannot experience the pervasive, devastating reality of a "right," . . . except in its absence. One must first rights represent abstract, metaphysical concepts, but be denied that seat on the bus, one must see the desecration of one's tribe's sacred lands, one must be without sanitary facilities in a farm field, to understand that a "right" can be more than a concept. A right can also be a real, tangible experience. . . . What else could a right be other than an abstraction to someone who has never had their abstractions taken away or denied. . . . Arising from the historical experience of peoples of color in United States society "concepts" such as "rights" or "justice" assume a life of their own in an experiential sense. It is in this struggle for the tangible benefits of these "concepts" that peoples of color mobilize themselves to forge their own discourse. Unavoidably and irredeemably derivative in part of the majority society's discursive practices . . . . this type of discourse which finds its genesis in the historical struggles of peoples of color strategically employs those concepts, such as "rights," which speak most directly and forcefully to the prejudices many people of color reject the CLS critique of rights consciousness in its present form. They view the CLS emphasis on delegitimating legal ideology as a project that relinquishes too much, since appeals to legal ideology represent one of the only strategies that has effectively elicited a response to the desperate needs of subordinated people . Minority scholars of the dominant culture. n50 Because differences in rights-valuation grow out of their different social experiences, seem to read CLS rights critiques simply as cautionary tales about the dangers of engaging liberal ideology, while they continue to make realistic decisions, given the Debunking legal ideology may indeed meet the needs of those who experience oppression primarily in terms of feelings of alienation from community. People of color, however, have often chosen another strategy, for regardless of the status of legal consciousness, they have identified racism as an ideology more threatening to their lives limited array of options, to risk such engagement. 340 Kritik Answers CLS is Nihilistic CLS COLLAPSES INTO NIHILISM Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] The seemingly sophisticated tendency of Critical scholars to see "politics" at the root of every practice is also unsatisfying. Politics deals with the accommodation and adjustment of claims backed by power, and to see nothing but politics in law is to adopt the claim of Thrasymachus that justice is the will of the stronger. n110 That amounts to nihilism, which is a coherent position only if one is prepared to accept the implication that might makes right. It is clear that the Critical scholars do not want to accept that implication, which, after all, would make them very wrong indeed. They want to escape the impasse of nihilism by liberating themselves from an inherited burden of false consciousness that makes hard choices seem inevitable. 341 Kritik Answers No Alternative (1/2) CLS HAS NO HARD REFERENCE, PREVENTING THE CONSTRUCTION OF A REALISTIC ALTERNATIVE Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] The second major problem with a purely negative use of Marxism is that criticism itself is meaningless without a standard of reference, whether express or implied. Critical scholars who describe "capitalist" society as oppressive or hierarchical are like New Yorkers who speak of Cleveland as being in the "West." Contemporary capitalist society may be oppressive and hierarchical judged by some ideal standard and yet have less oppression and hierarchy than most or even all other societies that have ever existed. Critical legal writing systematically evades the question, "Compared to what?" My point is not that one always has to propose an alternative [*261] when one criticizes, but rather that failure to specify the standard of reference robs the criticism of meaning. When Critical scholars say that life in a capitalist society is alienating, I do not know if they mean that this is true because of some particular characteristic of capitalist society or because life in every known from of society is alienating. If the latter is the case, then blaming alienation on capitalism is absurd. In a word, the relationship of Critical legal though to Marxism or any other ideological position is obscure. Without a firm ideological basis the Critical viewpoint is itself obscure, and indeed it is not easy to explain how Critical scholarship differes from "liberal" or "traditional" scholarship, except in its greater obscurity. n42 Liberal scholarship itself is strongly Critical, and may even have prepared the way for nihilism by undermining so much that had seemed certain. THE CRITICAL LEGAL ALTERNATIVE IS SO VAGUE THAT IT JUSTIFIES MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] There is no mystery about what the Critical legal scholars are against: They are against capitalism, liberalism, and illegitimate hierarchy. It is much harder to say what they are for. In fact, Critical legal writing has practically nothing to suggest in the way of a positive political program. For a movement that claims to be political, this is truly an astonishing vacuum. At the 1981 Yale Symposium on Legal Scholarship, for example, Duncan Kennedy called for "utopian speculation," "dreaming up the ways we think things might be better than they are," because radicals need to ask, " What would we do with power, anyway?" n89 On the same occasion, Alan Freeman chided his colleagues for failing to follow through on the radical implications of their papers. The most he could propose himself, however, was that radicals should escape from liberal thinking by incorporating "insights from other methods: structuralism, phenomenology, advanced Marxist thought, radical empiricism, and comparative methods." n90 Roberto Mangabeira Unger concluded his book Law in Modern Society by observing that the solution to the conflict between personal autonomy and community "could be fully worked out only with the help of a metaphysics we do not yet possess." n91 Whatever may have been their authors' intentions, the political [*282] implications of these messages seem concervative to me. If we not only don't know how to get there from here, but also don't know where "there" is, doesn't it follow that we should stay here until more information comes along? 342 Kritik Answers No Alternative (2/2) CLS HAS NO ALTERNATIVE, REPLACING POLITICAL ACTION WITH USELESS DREAMING Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] The Critical scholars sincerely want to be radicals: Indeed, some of them formed their standards of right and wrong in a counterculture that associated radical politics with goodness itself and identified liberalism with "selling out." They are also aware that the existing legal order is not as securely founded upon reason as some people like to pretend. Unfortunately, they do not have a radical alternative to propose. Their strategy in this awkward situation is to retreat into a mystical utopianism that is couched in political language but in fact has little to do with politics. The "incoherence" of liberalism is their incoherence, its "failure" their failure. Critical legal writing provides a way of sounding like a radical when you don't know how to be one. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO LAW- IT IS THE MOST COHERENT WAY TO SETTLE SOCIAL ISSUES ALTMAN 90 (Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique, Pg. 119) PHM There are serious problems with this CLS view of the implications of the patchwork thesis. Even if there are incompatible principles that underlie different segments of doctrine, it does not follow that the judge is free to choose which principle to rely on in deciding a case. Recall from the discussion in chapter 2 that our legal culture incorporates a convention that requires that cases be decided in a way that provides the greatest degree of logical coherence with the settled rules and decisions. Suppose that in most cases a decision relying on a particular principle fits better with the settled materials than one relying on a competing principle. The supposition is not inconsistent with the patchwork thesis, but if it is true, then it would be wrong to claim, as Dalton does, that equally forceful legal arguments could be given for both sides in almost any case. The better legal argument would be the one that displays the better fit with the settled decisions and norms, and the law itself would be highly determinate, even if the patchwork thesis were true. CLS HAS NO RECONSTRUCTIVE VISION Anthony Cook Professor of Law, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 8990 The third problem with the CLS critique is that it threatens to conflate the unique histories of the various forms of alienation and oppression engendered by the subconscious acceptance and assimilation of liberal ideology. the experiences of racism and sexism—to name but two—are certainly related to the way individuals experience liberalism as oppressive but cannot be reduced to that experience. Therefore, exploration of the various histories of oppression, often ignored by CLS‘s account can provide an essential basis for any reconstructed community. Finally, deconstruction should ultimately lead to a reconstructive vision, which will involve some line-drawing and boundary-setting. CLS should not only explain why liberalism‘s boundary-setting is problematic; it must also suggest how to redraw those boundaries to satisfy other goals. I believe CLS too often falls victim to a myopic preoccupation with the limited role of theoretical deconstruciton and a too narrowly tailored experiential deconstruction that focuses exclusively on how individuals experience liberalism. Hegemonic ideologies are never maintained by logical consistencey alone; knowledge of the full range of conditions under which they remain oppressed, exposes new problems and possibilities. When one begins to contemplate how alternative visions of 343 Kritik Answers community might look and be implemented, one must consider carefully the view from the bottom—not simply what oppressors say but how the oppressed respond to what they say. The view from the bottom may offer insights into why individuals accept their subordinate status in society despite the illogic and inconsistency of the dominant ideology. 344 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Elitism THE ALTERNATIVE IS ELITIST SELF-PRESERVATION, SHORT-CIRCUITING ANY RADICAL POTENTIAL White ‗84 [G. Edward, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: The Inevitability of Critical Legal Studies,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 649, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] . In calling for the transformation of social institutions, they were calling for the transformation of a world in which they have been comfortable and prominent. Few of the designated beneficiaries of their cells for change share their close identification with a hierarchical educational system in which the most prestigious members of the hierarchy get the fewest The Critical theorists therefore cannot have it both ways apparent demands made on their time. How many members of the oppressed classes would applaud a world in which persons designated law professors got paid rather well for teaching five hours a week, or perhaps not at all? How many would be inclined to think that persons living that kind of life have any idea what it means to be oppressed? And while some Critical theorists might willingly work one month out of a year as janitors or secretaries, others might not like to have their salaries . There are powerful forces of self-preservation operating to retard the impact of transformative proposals, and when one adds to those forces a newly emergent skepticism about the wisdom of elites, one can readily imagine a scenario in which Critical legal scholars preach their transformative proposals to audiences wearing headsets. equalized even with other law professors, let alone with maintenance workers CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY IS INSULATED WITHIN THE ACADEMY, REINSCRIBING CAPITAL Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] nothing is more vulnerable to a Marxist critique than the CLS movement itself. Most of these scholars are law professors at prestigious universities, predominantly at Harvard and Stanford; such a career implies acceptance by the legal intellectual establishment. From this platform they preach a sort of nihilistic utopianism, a most unconvincing doctrine that in no way threatens the existing order of society. Their visibility at the elite universities lends credibility to the image of neutrality and tolerance that the Ruling Hegemony wishes to project. Their rhetoric reassures law students that the only alternatives to the present system are "utopian." The obvious Marxist explanation of the CLS movement is that it permits a few harmless academic leftists to adopt a radical pose, while receiving good salaries and excellent fringe benefits for serving the interests of the capitalists. n54 The irony is that YOUR ALTERNATIVE HAS BEEN FRACTURED- CLS IS ONLY COMPREHENSIBLE WITHIN ELITE CIRLCES AND IT IS DEAD NEASCU 00 (Dana, Former Asst. Corporate Counsel, 8 J.L. & Pol'y 415, ―CLS stands for Critical Legal Studies, if Anyone Remembers, MosE) Critical Legal Studies ("CLS"), n1 which started as a Left movement within legal academia, n2 has undergone so many [*416] changes, that one may liken it to products of pop culture, such as the television cartoon show, South Park. n3 South Park features a character named Kenny, totally unlike any other cartoon hero, tragic or otherwise. Like Kenny, who is an outsider and who speaks a language unintelligible to all except, astonishingly, his classmates, CLS no longer seems to possess a voice comprehensible to anyone outside its own small circle. Kenny, unlike all other cartoon figures, dies in every episode. n4 Significantly, often Kenny's death has been self-inflicted - though not necessarily intentional - when, for instance, he ignores warnings of imminent danger. Like Kenny, CLS has suffered many often self-inflicted injuries. Like South Park, generally, CLS is certainly colorful, but often little more than that and, as in the cartoon, except for the certainty of Kenny's death and later resurrection, there seems more flash than substance in its existence. We are left to guess whether CLS will prove to be as resilient after apparent death, as Kenny . 345 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Fractures Movement YOUR ALTERNATIVE FAILS- FRACTURED LEFT NEASCU 00 (Dana, Former Asst. Corporate Counsel, 8 J.L. & Pol'y 415, ―CLS stands for Critical Legal Studies, if Anyone Remembers, MosE) As a result of this array of dissenting and conflicting interests, CLS has been left with no cohesive voice, and it appears now as a mere witness to the powerless atomization of an emasculated radical Left discourse. This atomization may have promoted certain group solidarities, and possibly offered short term relief. But, despite CLS's influence on legal discourse, it never seemed able to attain even a partially-unified leftist discourse. This failure might be the cause of mutual estrangement among all of its "members" - or at least a failure to offer a common core - that eventually risks oblivion for the movement as a whole. In response, CLS now must rediscover its voice in the legal community, even though the old leftist habits and texts have far less luster and glitter than fashionable literary theories. 346 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Indeterminacy Kills Criticism CLS‘S FOCUS ON INDETERMINACY NEUTRALIZES CRITICISM OF THE LAW, PREVENTING THE CREATION OF A NEW ORDER Solum ‗87 [Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, ―On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,‖ 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl] Far from enabling a progressive transformation of legal practice, the indeterminacy thesis, at least the strong version, disempowers the critique of legal ideology that critical scholars hope will facilitate emancipatory social change. Seen in broad terms, their critique has two parts. First, the But this appeal is superficial. mystification thesis will unveil the structures of domination masked by legal doctrine. Second, the indeterminacy thesis will explain how domination circumvents the apparent autonomy of the law and frees legal actors from the apparent constraints imposed by the existing rules. Thus, mystification and indeterminacy are the intellectual foundations both for a program of external critique that will reveal the law to the layman for what it is, and for an internal critique through which progressive legal actors will freely use legal practice to achieve emancipatory ends. the strong indeterminacy thesis undercuts, rather than advances, the projects of both internal and external critique. Because the strong indeterminacy thesis calls for disengagement from the form and conventions of discourse that makes legal practice possible, the thesis blunts an internal critique of the law. Stanley Cavell puts the point as follows: My contention is that The internal tyranny of convention is that only a slave of it can know how it may be changed for the better, or know why it should be eradicated. Only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history. To demand that the law be fulfilled, every jot and tittle, will destroy the law as it stands, if it has moved too far from its origins. Only a priest could have confronted his set of practices with its origins so deeply as to set the terms of Reformation. n105 Cavell's idea can be put into a legal context by examining the critical legal theory of Roberto Unger. Unger identifies "deviationalist doctrine" as the positive alternative for legal scholarship. The project of deviationalist doctrine must maintain "the minimal characteristics of doctrine" that is "the willingness to take the extant [*499] authoritative materials as starting points." n106 Like the Reformation, Unger's program acknowledges the structure from which it hopes to deviate. The indeterminacy . If there is a measure of determinacy in the law, and legal discourse and reasoning are more than mere apologies for domination, then Unger's deviationalist doctrine begins with a flawed, but at least functional, language with which to embark on the creation of a more humane legal order. But if the law is indeterminate, and legal reasoning a sham, then they cannot serve as the raw material for constructing a body of doctrine with emancipatory potential -- deviationalist doctrine itself would be incapable of effecting real change. Instead, the social order would remain governed by the underlying ideology or political and economic forces -- and if the forces were to change, then the doctrine would not need to do so. Under the strong indeterminacy thesis, legal doctrine thesis, however, undercuts the project of deviationalist doctrine at its starting point becomes "a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it," and so it "is not part of the mechanism." n107 347 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Historical Record of Marxism MARXISM‘S LONG HISTORY OF BLOODSHED AND OPPRESSION DELEGITIMIZES THE FOUNDATION OF THEIR ALTERNATIVE CLAIMS Johnson ‗84 [Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, ―Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You Sincerely Want To Be Radical?‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] A similar uncertainty about the cause of our ills is reflected in the uneasy relationship between Critical legal scholarship and Marxism. Some of the articles from the CLS movement are explicitly Marxist, and the movement as a whole employs Marxist jargon and methods of analysis. Marxist remedies, however, are rarely recommended. Although they do not dwell upon the point, the Critical scholars seem to be aware of the consistently horrible record of Marxist regimes n31 -- the slave labor camps, the mass deportations, the suppression [*258] of labor unions, the denial of freedom of conscience, the bureaucratic rigidity, the personality cults. They appear to recognize that refugee traffic between Marxist and non-Marxist societies is a one-way affair. Understandably, even radical scholars in a sophisticated intellectual community hesitate to embrace such an inviting target for "Critical" scrutiny by others. This ambivalence can lead to amusing equivocations.The prolific Mark Tushnet, for example, pays Marxism the compliment of saying that it "generates the central position to which all theories of knowlede respond," n32 and he has tried his hand at sketching a Marxist analysis of American public law. n33 But we must not assume that Tushnet is therefore a Marxist, for he has also written that he "uses Marxism" merely as a "rhetorical mode" to show that he realizes that those in positions of power will not peacefully relinquish those positions when the time comes, and to demonstrate that he is a real radical and not just another reformer like John Hart Ely or Lawrence Tribe. n34 How a rhetorical mode can generate a central position to which all theories must respond is not explained. What Tushnet and other Critical legal scholars seem to like about Marxism is its doctrine of historical contingency, its insistence that "all knowledge is a social product and thus that knowledge can have no transcendent validity." n35 This "Critical" side of Marxism is useful for attacking "capitalism" or "liberalism" (although it could be equally useful in undermining Marxism itself), n36 and as such it can [*259] be detached from the Marxist program of party dictatorship. Marxism as a practical revolutionary program is attrative mainly to those who, like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, n37 believe that the important thing is to feed the hungry and that human liberty is worth sacrificing to that end. The Critical scholars are well aware that man does not live by bread alone. Their primary concern is for social equality, for abolition of hierarchies of power. n38 Marxist dictatorship is no solution to that problem. But discarding the vulnerable positive program of Marxism generates at least two further difficulties, neither of which has been adequately addressed in any of the Critical legal literature with which I am familiar. First, how are we to judge the validity of a Marxist critique of capitalist society if Marxism is so wrong in its positive program? There is an analogy here to the predicament of psychoanalytic theory that the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment has been strongly called into question. n39 Conceivably the Freudian theories of the personality might be true even if treatment based on those theories has no special power to cure, but the power to cure has always been an important argument for the truth of the theory. n40 The failure of Marxism as a remedy for exploitation and oppression is so spectacular as to call into question its central doctrines, [*260] including the premise that economic or political institutions are to blame for our psychological and spiritual ills. How are we to verify or falsify a Marxist or Marxist-style analysis? Critical legal scholarship seems to rule the question out of order. We are entitled to be suspicious, especially since Critical Theory appeals so powerfully to the egotism of disaffected intellectuals like the CCLS members by granting them special insight and a pivotal role in history. n41 348 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Non-Rights Strategies Bad NON-RIGHTS STRATEGIES FAIL BECAUSE DOMINANT SOCIETY CAN MORE EASILY IGNORE DEMANDS NOT MADE FROM WITHIN THE DOMINANT RIGHT DISCOURSE Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, ―RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,‖ Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331) Rights have been important. They may have legitimated racial inequality, but they have also been the means by which oppressed [*1385] groups have secured both entry as formal equals into the dominant order and the survival of their movement in the face of private and state repression . The dual role of legal change creates a dilemma for Black reformers. As long as race consciousness thrives, Blacks will often have to rely on rights rhetoric when it is necessary to protect Black interests. The very reforms brought about by appeals to legal ideology, however, seem to undermine the ability to move forward toward a broader vision Critics are correct in observing that engaging in rights discourse has helped to deradicalize and co-opt the challenge. Yet they fail to acknowledge the limited range of options presented to Blacks in a context where they were deemed "other," and the unlikelihood that specific demands for inclusion and equality would be heard if articulated in other terms . This abbreviated list of options is itself contingent upon the ideological power of white race consciousness and the continuing role of Black Americans as "other." Future efforts to address racial domination, as well as class hierarchy, must consider the continuing ideology of white race consciousness by uncovering the oppositional dynamic and by chipping away at its premises. Central to this task is revealing the contingency of race and exploring the connection between white race consciousness and the other myths that of racial equality. In the quest for racial justice, winning and losing have been part of the same experience. The legitimate both class and race hierarchies. Critics and others whose agendas include challenging hierarchy and legitimation must not overlook the importance of until whites recognize the hegemonic function of racism and turn their efforts toward neutralizing it, African-American people must develop pragmatic political strategies -- selfconscious ideological struggle -- to minimize the costs of liberal reform while maximizing its utility. A primary revealing the contingency of race. Optimally, the deconstruction of white race consciousness might lead to a liberated future for both Blacks and whites. Yet, step in engaging in self-conscious ideological struggle must be to transcend the oppositional dynamic in which Blacks are cast simply and solely as whites' subordinate "other." n200 The dual role that rights have played makes strategizing a difficult task. Black people can afford neither to resign themselves to, nor to attack frontally, The subordinate position of Blacks in this society makes it unlikely that African-Americans will realize gains through the kind of direct challenge to the legitimacy of American liberal ideology that is now being waged by Critical scholars. On the other hand, delegitimating [*1386] race the legitimacy and incoherence of the dominant ideology. consciousness would be directly relevant to Black needs, and this strategy will sometimes require the pragmatic use of liberal ideology. This vision is consistent with the views forwarded by theoreticians such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Antonio Gramsci, and Roberto Unger. Piven and Cloward observe that oppressed people sometimes advance by creating ideological and political crisis, but that the form of the crisis-producing challenge must reflect the institutional logic of the system. n201 The use of rights rhetoric during the civil rights movement created such a crisis by presenting and manipulating the dominant ideology in a new Challenges and demands made from outside the institutional logic would have accomplished little because Blacks, as the subordinate "other," were already perceived as being outside the mainstream. The struggle of Blacks, like that of all subordinated groups, is a struggle for inclusion, an attempt to and transformative way. manipulate elements of the dominant ideology to transform the experience of domination. It is a struggle to create a new status quo through the ideological and political tools that are available. Gramsci called this struggle a "War of Position" and he regarded it as the most appropriate strategy for change in Western societies. direct challenges to the dominant class accomplish little if ideology plays such a central role in establishing authority that the legitimacy of the dominant regime is not challenged. Joseph Femia, interpreting Gramsci, states that "the dominant ideology in modern capitalist societies is highly institutionalized and widely internalized. It follows that a concentration on frontal attack, on direct assault against the bourgeois state ('war of movement' or 'war of manoeuvre') can result only in disappointment and defeat." n202 Consequently, the challenge in such societies is to create a According to Gramsci, counter-hegemony by maneuvering within and expanding the dominant ideology to embrace the potential for change. Gramsci's vision of ideological struggle is rather than discarding liberal legal ideology, we should focus and develop its visionary undercurrents : echoed in part by Roberto Unger in his vision of deviationist doctrine. Unger, who represents another strand of the Critical approach, argues that, [T]he struggle over the form of social life, through deviationist doctrine, creates opportunities for experimental revisions of social life in the direction of the ideals we defend. An implication of our ideas is [*1387] that the elements of a formative institutional or imaginative structure may be replaced piecemeal rather than only all at Liberal ideology embraces communal and liberating visions along with the legitimating hegemonic visions. Unger, like Gramsci and Piven and Cloward, seems to suggest that the strategy toward meaningful change depends on skillful use of the liberating potential of dominant ideology . once. n203 349 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Praxis (1/3) CLS‘S FOCUS ON THEORY ALIENATES ITSELF FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, MAINTAINING DOMINATION Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." n108 The commitment to theory which contributes to, and in turn is informed and developed by, social practice concerned with changing the world, is a theme occasionally encountered in Critical legal writing. n109 In this essay, I use [*553] the word "praxis" to refer to such a unity of theory and action. n110 The need for praxis should be selfevident to scholars such as those in Critical studies, whose view is that domination and exploitation of human beings characterizes our social life, since mere tinkering with a legal system misleads us. Therefore, fundamental transformation of social relations, including those involved in the production process, is necessary. Richard Flacks, a sociologist, puts it this way: [I]t seems urgent for academic radicals and Marxists to develop a more reflexive understanding of the implications for anc relevance of their intellectual work to political practice. It may be a characteristic of late capitalism that even Marxism can become nothing more than a token in the game of professional achievement. n111 Despite such a warning, the practical relationship of Critical legal theory to social movement and struggle in the United States today is, at best, very limited. Neither lawyers nor political activists receive much enlightenment from Critical legal theory with regard to their actual work. Nor is Critical legal theory itself much affected by the practical work of such people. While there are exceptions to these generalizations, n112 the absence of praxis in current Critical legal work seems to be one of its most marked features. Gordon, a Critical legal theorist, writes: THE ALTERNATIVE IS REDUCTIONISTIC AND MIRED IN THEORY, PREVENTING THE ORGANIZATION OF MOVEMENTS AGAINST OPPRESSION Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] Gabel is entirely right when he insists on understanding people and social relations in the real, concrete, specific world in which they exist. But surely that part of the concrete world he summarizes with such eloquence is not "the social totality within which the psyche is formed." At least a fair number of people do have experience with a more genuine, personal love. Some people do seek something better in "work" than "mechanical functioning," at least when they are assured of a job to support their existence. People, at least a fair number, are frequently dissatisfied with the "packaged emptiness" on which they spend their wages. n126 I agree with Karl Klare when he writes: "I regard as inaccurate the view that . . . it is possible to describe the working class as in any sense satisfied with current standards of living in either the material or cultural aspects." n127 But if this is so, then it should be possible to struggle now over the conditions which Gabel describes. Nevertheless, neither Gabel's work nor that of most other Critical legal theorists provides theory that can aid such struggle. Indeed, it does not even recognize the need for new directions in scholarship which [*560] would aid such struggle. In the course of constant efforts at delegitimation, some Critical legal theorists begin to think and talk about "the law" as if it were no more than litigation, doctrines, and case outcomes -- precisely the narrow view of most conventional legal theorists. Critical theorists rarely conceive of legal strategies to employ outside the 350 Kritik Answers courtroom for the purpose of building social movement.Somehow, the affirmative relationship of law to social movement becomes lost. n128 351 Kritik Answers Alternative Fails: Praxis (2/3) DELEGITIMIZING THE LAW CREATES HELPLESSNESS, DRIVING ACTIVISTS AWAY FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] Therein lies the source of the real sadness (a word more accurate here than "cynicism") of some Critical legal theorists who are also [*573] law school teachers. In some respects, of course, what we address here is essentially a continuation of the praxis issue discussed in the last part. But it is more. The Critical legal professors are not only scholars; they are also teachers.The people they teach are, in the main, not going to be scholars. They are going to be practitioners. Do the Critical legal professors have anything to say to these students -except that they assume the students will discover in their practice those successful methods of change which the teachers not only have not found but do not care to seek? The more logical assumption, by far, is that such law teaching will be simply one more law school factor in the decisions of students once concerned with social change to pursue corporate careers. What, after all, can the student do as a lawyer in the face of monumental, overpowering, and all-pervasive injustice other than pursue the same buck that everybody else does? The radical law teacher's responsibility is not simply to expose doctrinal incoherencies and build historical accounts. It is to point the way to a different kind of practice, one which utilizes that historical account. The practice needed is not one which focuses primarily on the law school, however much change in the law school is needed. It is a practice located "out there," in the world outside the law school, where injustice, legal procedures and programs, incipient protest, and social movement constantly intermingle. n174 [*574] The radical teacher's responsibility is to study such practice, analyze its conditions, and demonstrate it, if need be, by personal example. When I say the "radical law teachers's" responsibility, I do not mean, of course, the responsibility of each and every law teacher who professes a radical faith. Not everybody does everything. I do mean that it is central to the tasks of radical law teachers, just as are the activities and study Freeman espouses. Without at least a collegial relation to those engaged in social movement practice and theory, the radical teacher will lead more students away from, rather than into, the social struggle to reconstruct our world by democratizing our civil life. CLS IS CUT OFF FROM PRACTICE, PREVENTING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE Sparer ‗84 [Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, ―Fundamental Human Rights, Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement,‖ 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl] Critical legal scholarship contributes so little to those engaged in social change efforts and learns so little from social change practice is its deeply held belief that delegitimation of liberal legal scholarship (which includes virtually all scholarship outside the Critical legal camp) is the principal contribution that it can make to significant change. The reasoning is that only by breaking the hold that current liberal thinking has on our minds can we [*556] even begin to create a The first reason that vision of the sort of society towards which we should be struggling. Because the principal ideological support of our current social structure is liberalism, exposing that ideology is the obvious task for scholars seeking to end the oppression and domination that characterize present society. Not all Critical legal theorists subscribe to this formulation. Kennedy, for example, is insistent that "the critique of liberal legalism is only a small contribution to a valid strategy of legal leftism." n115 He seeks "a unity of theory and practice" and has some specific suggestions as to what scholars might do in the law schools This silence results beca

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