Contents
NOTE ............................................................................................................................................................. 4
Economy........................................................................................................................................................ 5
1NC ............................................................................................................................................................ 6
1NC Complexity – Long ......................................................................................................................... 7
1NC Complexity – Short ...................................................................................................................... 10
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 12
2NC Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 13
2NC MPX ............................................................................................................................................. 15
2NC AT: Predictions............................................................................................................................. 17
2NC AT: Experts................................................................................................................................... 19
2NC AT: Empirics ................................................................................................................................. 23
2NC AT: Specificity .............................................................................................................................. 25
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 26
1NC Rationality – Short ....................................................................................................................... 27
1NC Rationality – Long ........................................................................................................................ 33
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 40
Sado-Monetarism Link ........................................................................................................................ 41
Will to Will Link ................................................................................................................................... 44
2NC Impact.......................................................................................................................................... 46
Warming...................................................................................................................................................... 50
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 51
1NC Apoc Fatalism – Long ................................................................................................................... 52
1NC Apoc Fatalism – Short.................................................................................................................. 56
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 59
2NC Link .............................................................................................................................................. 60
2NC Impact.......................................................................................................................................... 61
2NC Anthro Trick ................................................................................................................................. 62
Environment ............................................................................................................................................... 63
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 64
1NC Fem – Long .................................................................................................................................. 65
1NC Fem – Short ................................................................................................................................. 67
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 68
2NC Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 69
Oil ................................................................................................................................................................ 70
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 71
1NC Automobility – Long .................................................................................................................... 72
1NC Automobility – Short ................................................................................................................... 75
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 76
2NC Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 77
2NC Racism Impact ............................................................................................................................. 78
Biodiversity ................................................................................................................................................. 81
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 82
1NC BioSecurity – Long ....................................................................................................................... 83
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 84
2NC Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 85
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 86
1NC Natives Turn – Long ..................................................................................................................... 87
Hegemony ................................................................................................................................................... 89
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 90
1NC Zizek Turn .................................................................................................................................... 91
2NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 93
2NC Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 94
Terrism ........................................................................................................................................................ 95
1NC .......................................................................................................................................................... 96
1NC Terror Talk – Long........................................................................................................................ 97
1NC Terror Talk – Short....................................................................................................................... 99
2NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 100
1NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 101
1NC Ticking Bomb – Long.................................................................................................................. 102
1NC Ticking Bomb – Short................................................................................................................. 105
2NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 107
2NC Overview ................................................................................................................................... 108
China War.................................................................................................................................................. 110
1NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 111
1NC Pan – Long ................................................................................................................................. 112
1NC Pan – Short ................................................................................................................................ 114
Russia Conflict ........................................................................................................................................... 116
1NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 117
1NC Russia- Long ............................................................................................................................... 118
1NC Russia- Short .............................................................................................................................. 120
Random Turns!.......................................................................................................................................... 122
1NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 123
1NC- Baudrillard Security .................................................................................................................. 124
2NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 126
1NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 127
1NC Weaponitis – Long ..................................................................................................................... 128
1NC Weaponitis – Short .................................................................................................................... 131
2NC ........................................................................................................................................................ 133
2NC Overview ................................................................................................................................... 134
NOTE
– MOST EXTENSIONS CAN BE FOUND IN THEIR RESPECTIVE FILES
Economy
1NC
1NC Complexity – Long
There are no states only networks of micro-actors. The aff’s appeal to a “reasonable leap of faith”
between monolithic internal link chains endorses an educationally impoverished model of
debate. The aff’s macro-centric analysis eviscerates policy making and causes their impacts in the real
world.
Srnicek 2k7
Nick, Doctoral Candidate in IR @ the London School of Economics, “Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics – The Political Ontology
of Gilles Deleuze,”
http://lse.academia.edu/documents/0011/3585/Srnicek__Nick.__2007____Assemblage_Theory__Complexity_and_Contentious_Politics.__.pdf
Our modern political world is dominated by discussions of terrorism, by fears of nuclear
proliferation and global warming, by increasing tensions between states, and
by the unsettling dynamics of globalization, all contributing to a palpable sense of uncertainty
about the future. The still ambiguous fate of the nation-state and the increasingly obvious failings of advanced
democracies have all furthered the sense that the future must bring something different – without, however, any obvious alternatives
being available. Moreover, the
rise of technology, and the speed of communication and
interaction have all made the rapid dynamism and change of our world increasingly
difficult to ignore. The proliferation of identities and collective movements, the tendency
towards non-state movements (whether at a global or local level), and the Western world’s recognition of
Otherness and alterity have, in turn, made any notion of a homogeneous people
impossible to sustain. The result of all these tendencies has been to produce an
increasingly complex and dynamic world – one to which political science is
still trying to acclimate. 1 Nevertheless, despite these major shifts in the world, Anglo-American
political science has largely remained bound to ontologies which privilege
simple and static entities. Their very presuppositions about the nature of reality
tend to reflect a previous time in which clarity and simplicity could (more plausibly) be
considered intrinsic properties of the world. Most glaringly, rational choice theory often presents
itself as “a new master social science”2 capable of a single, comprehensive analysis uniting political, sociological, and economic
behaviour. Its
reliance, by its own admission, on axiomatic , unnaturally perfect conditions make
it a frighteningly poor tool to analyze the complexity of contemporary politics, yet its
supporters continue to be blinded by its illusory clarity. More generally, contemporary social
science is dominated by inquiries in which there are almost no “systematic explanations for political and economic outcomes being
integrated with contextually informed analyses of social relations. Yet we need works of such combinatorial weight more than ever
before, in a world where global endeavors cross multiple contexts.”3 The aim of this thesis is precisely to develop an ontology which is
capable of overcoming this deficiency of modern political science. Therefore, in chapter 1 we will examine two predominant ontologies
available to contemporary political science. On the one hand, is social
constructivism which tends to analyze meaning
and base its ontological theories upon discourse and ‘objectivations’. On the other hand, is critical realism, which
searches for the real causal mechanisms which produce our experiences, thereby basing its ontology on a transcendental study of these
both fail to escape the dominant influence of a
classical form of ontological theorizing, characterized by an inability to move beyond the bounds of
anthropocentrism. The result is that they are left impoverished in comparison to a truly
materialist and dynamic ontology, shorn of its traditional prioritizing of Being over Becoming.
mechanisms. We will see that in different ways,
B. Existential risk is systemic, not a flash of instability to be predicted and controlled. The 1AC
brackets the full complexity of crisis and the value questions behind their scenarios—Preventing the
ADAPTATION and RESILIENCE which is our only own hope for a viable future.
Mangalagiu 2011
[Diana Mangalagiu, Prof of Strategy at Smith School of Enterprise and Environment-University of Oxford “Risk and
resilience in times of globalization” An emerging research program for Global Systems Science: Assessing the state
of the art, 10/4/11, http://www.gsdp.eu/]
The recent financial crisis highlights the challenges of, and the potential of catastrophic impacts from the failure to address
global, systemic and long term risks. The crisis was neither prevented, nor effectively anticipated, by the hosts of experts in
risks and futures employed by the industry. Despite the sophisticated strategic planning and risk management approaches adopted by individual banks and regulators, the lack of reflexivity in anticipatory
knowledge processes, coupled with overconfidence in calculable and manageable risks, contributed to the denial, dismissal and ignorance
of new forms of vulnerability and, in particular, systemic risk (Wilkinson and Ramirez, 2010; Selsky et al, 2008). It also highlights that risk management approaches that
focus on stress testing the parts (e.g. individual banks, companies, governments, cities etc.) of a system are no longer enough. The notion of
systemic risk and practices of systemic risk management are being influenced by multiple traditions in scholarship (e.g. complexity science, resilience concepts), contesting theories of risk (e.g.
social, mathematical, psychological) and the practical experiences harvested through professional bodies focused on risk management in banking and financial services, environmental
management, urban planning, insurance and reinsurance, etc. In this WP, we focus on identifying and comparing how risk management, the search for resilience and their respective approaches
to strategic foresight and anticipatory knowledge might be better related and more effectively practiced in a range of different contexts such as at the organizational, sectoral-, national- and international-systems levels. Our aim is
to: - Unpack what systemic risk means and how it is shaped by different disciplines and different traditions of risk management; also unpack what resilience means; - Reveal and clarify how systemic risk and resilience are being
operationalized in a range of settings and situations; - Formulate research questions and develop knowledge, methodologies and guidance in order to reveal, inform and create so-called best and next practices in systemic risk
management and governance and search for resilience. Our first year deliverable is the state of the art concerning risk, systemic risk and resilience in times of globalization. 2.a. General conceptions of risk 4
The
conventional risk management paradigm assumes that a loss event is relatively limited, specific and isolated and with proper analysis can be
anticipated and thus, avoided or contained and mitigated. In the conventional risk management paradigm the default is to forecast the future - or a probabilistic analysis – i.e. the assumption
that the future is knowable. Formal interest in risk and risk management originates from the fields of engineering and epidemiology in the 20th century (Kates & Kasperson, 1983) and from interdisciplinary studies of natural
hazards (White & Haas, 1975). Since then the social sciences created significant independent contributions to risk research (Golding, 1992). Krimsky (1992) summarized the roles theory can take in risk analysis, which are
quantitative laws, taxonomic frameworks, models, functionalist explanations, cognitive explanations, or analogical models and interpretive representations. Beck (1992, 1994) and Giddens (1991, 1999) pointed to the elaborate role
risk plays in the macro organizational levels of modern society. Societies are self-reflective in the sense that they seek to govern their own behavior to avoid catastrophic consequences. As such, the concept of risk is also politically
relevant (Lupton, 1999). Providing an overview of the different perspectives on risk research, Renn (1992) distinguishes the technical perspective on risk (expected or modeled value, probabilistic risk assessment), economic
economic
and technical risk assessments are similar with regard to their reductionist and one-dimensional view of the
world, narrowing down risk analysis to a form of quantifiable expected value, psychometric, sociological, and cultural views take a multi-dimensional view that is concerned with 5 the myriad forms of risk perception. In
perspectives (risk-benefit analysis), psychological perspectives (psychometric and cognitive analyses), sociological perspectives (plurality of approaches), and cultural perspectives (grid-group analysis). While
Renn’s (1992) systemic classification of risk perspectives the main applications of the latter group are therefore seen in policy making, regulations, mediation, and risk communication, whereas the former be applicable for decision
making (insurance, health, environmental protection, and safety engineering). The different research strands can further be summarized regarding their theoretical focus on either the actual assessment of risk, the perception of
risk, or blended approaches. Technical, economic, and quantitative social benefit approaches to measure risk can be counted towards those perspectives concerned with practical risk assessment (see e.g. Just, Heuth, & Schmitz,
1982; Lowrance, 1976; Starr, 1969), also apparent in the broad use of the value at risk concept in finance, which basically attempts to calculate an expected value of losses (see e.g. Jorion, 2007). The psychological perspectives look
into the perception of risk at an individual level (see e.g. Boholm, 1998; Slovic, 1987; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) while the cultural theories of risk are concerned with the perception of risk at a collective level, as they see risk as
the result of what different groups within a society – shaped by their social norms, values, and ontological assumptions – perceive as potential hazards (see Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982; Rayner, 1992; Thompson et al, 1990). In a
way, cultural theories of risk attempt a form of risk assessment in a qualitative and social constructivist manner, while psychological theory examines the different perceptions of objective risks. Cultural theory has been criticized
for seeing individuals only in aggregate, as being too simplistic, rather descriptive, and as being difficult to measure empirically (Renn, 1992). Marris et al. (1998) find some support for both the psychological and the cultural theory
paradigms, although the cultural theory explains only very little variance in risk perception. As the only common denominator of sociological theories of risk is their awareness that human actors can only perceive the world through
subjective social and cultural influences (Renn, 1992), they may best be seen as blended approaches leaning towards either weak or strong constructivist positions. Sociological perspectives further take into account what
consequences arise from risk for the society (see e.g. Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1999) and bring fairness and competences into the picture, which can provide a basis for normative conclusions regarding risk policies (Renn, 1992). The
different theoretical conceptions of risk are non‐exclusive and can nurture each other. One attempt to integrate different perspectives consists in the Amplification of Risk framework, which builds on the analogy of signaling theory
and sees risks to emerge from signals of initial real risks amplified in several steps of social interaction processes influenced by cultural setting (see Kasperson, et al., 1988; Kasperson, 1992; Kasperson, et al, 2003; Renn, et al, 1992).
2.b Systemic risk in the futures literature In the futures literature2, the term ‘systemic risk’ is not featured frequently and has only been used recently (Checkley 2009). Other
terms akin to systemic
risk are in more frequent use. They comprise complex hazards (de Souza Porto & De Freitas 2003), extreme risks (Nakau 2004), emerging risks from science and technology (Wiedemann et al. 2005),
catastrophic risk (Geiger 2005), natural disaster-triggered technological (natech) disasters (Cruz et al. 2006), extreme risks and human extinction (Tonn & MacGregor
2009), and high impact low probability events (Ord et al. 2010). While the last view of systemic risk (high impact with low probability event) comes closest to a definition, no coherent
understanding of systemic risk yet exists. Arguments for post-normal approaches to science and decision-making have been made in the literature, especially so for systemic risk (or close terms), but the explicit treatment of
systemic risk so far is limited to case studies and selective areas of threats in the future. It seems that catastrophic or systemic risks per se have been of greater interest in the futures literature so far than the methods and tools to
deal with them. One stream of literature focuses on a conceptual approach to systemic risk. In this stream, three groups can be distinguished. The first follows a positivistic endeavor akin to classic risk management approaches
quantifying systemic risk to make it measurable and in consequence manageable. The second group applies narrative scenario techniques and describes possible future systemic risks. The third class of works considers a
classification of the severity of threats to mankind, and aims to identify the most threatening ones. In an attempt to answer the question how much costs are bearable to protect against a catastrophic event, Nakau (2004)
proposed a risk evaluation model, which classifies extreme events quantitatively. Based on stochastic probability he introduces tolerable levels of failure probabilities as a sustainability criterion, i.e. how many victims constitute a
certain level of impact. Checkley (2009) employed an empirical test that explains the creation of systemic risk in a venture capitalist context, seeing systemic risk as risks affecting all parties. They argue that such risk occurs as
mutual funds diversify their investment among several venture capitalists, but those syndicate for investment projects – so, diversification effects are unmade and are thus pseudo, which in turn gives rise to systemic risk. A series
of scenario works in 2009 have considered narratives explaining possible paths to the extinction of the human race (see Coates 2009; Goux-Baudiment 2009; Tonn & MacGregor 2009). Tonn & MacGregor (2009) describe a chain of
events that can lead to the extinction of the human race over the next 1000 years. Goux-Baudiment (2009) on the other hand imagines a chain of events that could lead to human extinction in only 150 years. He further investigates
the human agency in this scenario, and whether and how human interaction could break this disastrous chain of events. Tonn (2009) adds to those perspectives as he derives a theoretically acceptable risk level of human extinction
from qualitative criteria (i.e. fairness, unfinished business, and maintaining options). He finds that the objectively acceptable level is lower than the currently (subjectively) expected level and concludes that risk must therefore be
reduced. In a different approach, Coates (2009) discussed extreme risks that humankind faces. He developed a classification system for those events, which centers on the severity of extreme events. The approach is similar to
Nakau (2004) as it attempts to evaluate severity of risks, but different as it does not rely on quantitative criteria. Coates concludes that a nuclear winter, the use of nuclear weapons, and the eruption of a super-volcano are the
most severe threats to civilization and humankind, but that other events such as asteroids also bear some risk. Another stream of literature focuses on the perception and social construction of systemic risk. First, studies look into
the paradoxical situation of policy makers to stimulate innovation but also to regulate risks arising from accelerating innovation. This argument is put forward to support post-normal science and decision-making as the appropriate
, risk perception biases for catastrophic risk have been examined and ultimately,
the classic reductionist treatment of risk management was held responsible for rising occupation with risk in society. Public actors play a paradoxical role in the
approach to modern (systemic) risk management situations. Then
relationship between risk and innovation, between the interests of the public and private actors (Ravetz, 2003). Ravetz sees accelerating innovation as a necessary tool for private companies to compete in a ‘globalizing knowledge
economy’ and the role of the public to ensure an environment in which speedy innovation can take place. On the other hand, public actors need to ensure the safety of new technologies and innovation acting as an agent for their
citizens, remaining the source of public trust and safety provider for citizens. Besides this paradoxical role, technological innovation threatens the global environmental system; so, how much technological 7 innovation is desirable
how much risk in it acceptable? Ravetz argues that finding appropriate answers to this question can only be found in
a policy-making process that involves the public in dialogues about scientific findings and by disclosing ambiguities in scientific finding, thus
embracing policy principles for a post-normal world of science. Continued (8 pages later)… 4. Preliminary state of the art on resilience In
contrast to the conventional risk management approach and linear risk paradigm, the search for resilience tends to emphasize that there
is no such thing as a ‘zero risk society’ and suggests, instead, that there is a need for groups and organizations to collaborate in building the
adaptive capacity that enables the whole system to organize and re-organize in the face of inherent
uncertainty, emergence and inevitable surprise. The resilience approach accepts change as inevitable and endemic and focuses on building the adaptive capacity of the system and its ability to re-organize and
transform after a disturbance. Resilience is most commonly used to describe the ability of an entity to withstand and respond to shocks in the external
and
environment. The concept of resilience is becoming a core concept in the social and physical sciences and in matters of public policy. Definitions of resilience, however, vary. There is neither scientific nor professional agreement on
what constitutes resilience principles and the operationalization of these principles in practice. However, as a general definition of the resilience of a particular system – the ability to maintain critical functions in the face of regular
disturbance from a range of shocks (threats) combined with ability to adopt adaptive behavior when facing unknowable or unexampled disturbances – is the commonly used one. Intellectual traditions on resilience are a still
emerging and chaotic field, fragmented across different disciplines and professional practices. The concept of 'resilience' has already been constructed in a 10 variety of fields and traditions, including engineering, systems ecology,
political sciences, management and organization theory, cultural theory, complex adaptive systems, cybernetics and psychology. An initial review of the literatures relating to resilience reveals a fragmented field. In social ecology,
resilience is concerned with the longer-term survival and functioning of ecosystems – species, populations and services in a changing or fluctuating operating environment. The social ecology approach introduced by Holling (1973)
argues ecological systems are non-deterministic because of inherent complexity. characterizes the ecosystem as complex set of elements and parts existing in dynamic interrelationship and interdependency. The key contribution
of the ecological view of resilience is to provide a focus on the systemic nature of the problems and on the longer-term demands on policy and management. It emphasizes the need to keep options open, while appreciating
dominant management approaches which are concerned with compartmentalizing
issues, limiting change to the margins and views of the future rooted in attempt to preserve the present. The
critical distinction is that between resilience and stability. The stability/equilibrium paradigm approaches the
future with the aim of strengthening the status quo by making the present system “resilient to change”
heterogeneity and keeping a broader than local view organization – this is in contrast to
and aiming to achieve stability and constancy. In the management literature, the focus when using the resilience concept is on the persistence and survival of individual businesses and institutions in face of change. A bulk of the
management literature on organizations focuses on the strategies for individual businesses to be ‘resilient’ to change -- on innovation, experimentation and leadership to ensure survival and growth of a specific institution/business
-- however the ecosystem perspective requires us to think about the health and of the forest and the services its provides rather than the role of individual species! What are the sources of resilience in the system and or an
The process of increasing resilience is different from optimization and improving system performance in existing
conditions – what organizational characteristics build resilience. Successful adaptation requires for individual organizations, agents and businesses to continue to full fill their own goal and function but must also include
organization?
measures of promoting adaptive capacity of the system. Despite the richness in conceptual thinking underpinning the concept of resilience, there is limited evidence of how groups, organizations are societies are translating the
notion of resilience into practice. The constructivist tradition in social theory argues that social response is non- deterministic because of plural perception and the negotiations of values, cultures, choices and epistemologies. The
managers are part of the system that is being managed and define the system and its characteristics in different ways. Understanding the loss, creation and maintenance of resilience through the process of co-discovery – scientists,
policy makers, practitioners, stakeholders and citizens is at the heart of building the capacity to deal with whatever the future might bring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some societies are organizing for resilience. For example,
both the governments of Canada and Singapore have resilience as the goal of their national strategic plans. There is a nascent literature emerging, as yet unmapped, on operationalizing resilience beyond the organizational level.
For example, in an approach to adapting an urban delta to uncertain climate change, Wardekkar et al. (2009) identify five options for resilience: (1) homeostasis: incorporation of feedback loops; (2) omnivory: having several
different ways of fulfilling needs; (3) flatness: preventing a system from becoming too top heavy enables more effective localized responses, self-reliance and self-organization; (4) buffering: the ability to absorb disturbances to a
The resilience frame opens the opportunity
to think in terms of nonlinear and non-deterministic futures and, in doing so, to displace practices in probable futures with plausible and
preferable futures. The resilience frame also invites attention to realizing transformation, rather than future proofing of established structures, identities and values. It invites consideration of the uncertainty
as irreducible and inherent, going beyond the lack of knowledge and encompassing ambiguity and ignorance .
certain extent and (5) redundancy: having multiple options – routes, supply chains, etc – so that if one fails, others can be used. 11
1NC Complexity – Short
There are no states only networks of micro-actors. The aff’s appeal to a “reasonable leap of faith”
between monolithic internal link chains endorses an educationally impoverished model of
debate. The aff’s macro-centric analysis eviscerates policy making and causes their impacts in the real
world.
Srnicek 2k7
Nick, Doctoral Candidate in IR @ the London School of Economics, “Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics – The Political Ontology
of Gilles Deleuze,”
http://lse.academia.edu/documents/0011/3585/Srnicek__Nick.__2007____Assemblage_Theory__Complexity_and_Contentious_Politics.__.pdf
Our modern political world is dominated by discussions of terrorism, by fears of nuclear
proliferation and global warming, by increasing tensions between states, and
by the unsettling dynamics of globalization, all contributing to a palpable sense of uncertainty
about the future. The still ambiguous fate of the nation-state and the increasingly obvious failings of advanced
democracies have all furthered the sense that the future must bring something different – without, however, any obvious alternatives
being available. Moreover, the
rise of technology, and the speed of communication and
interaction have all made the rapid dynamism and change of our world increasingly
difficult to ignore. The proliferation of identities and collective movements, the tendency
towards non-state movements (whether at a global or local level), and the Western world’s recognition of
Otherness and alterity have, in turn, made any notion of a homogeneous people
impossible to sustain. The result of all these tendencies has been to produce an
increasingly complex and dynamic world – one to which political science is
still trying to acclimate. 1 Nevertheless, despite these major shifts in the world, Anglo-American
political science has largely remained bound to ontologies which privilege
simple and static entities. Their very presuppositions about the nature of reality
tend to reflect a previous time in which clarity and simplicity could (more plausibly) be
considered intrinsic properties of the world. Most glaringly, rational choice theory often presents
itself as “a new master social science”2 capable of a single, comprehensive analysis uniting political, sociological, and economic
behaviour. Its
reliance, by its own admission, on axiomatic , unnaturally perfect conditions make
it a frighteningly poor tool to analyze the complexity of contemporary politics, yet its
supporters continue to be blinded by its illusory clarity. More generally, contemporary social
science is dominated by inquiries in which there are almost no “systematic explanations for political and economic outcomes being
integrated with contextually informed analyses of social relations. Yet we need works of such combinatorial weight more than ever
before, in a world where global endeavors cross multiple contexts.”3 The aim of this thesis is precisely to develop an ontology which is
capable of overcoming this deficiency of modern political science. Therefore, in chapter 1 we will examine two predominant ontologies
available to contemporary political science. On the one hand, is social
constructivism which tends to analyze meaning
and base its ontological theories upon discourse and ‘objectivations’. On the other hand, is critical realism, which
searches for the real causal mechanisms which produce our experiences, thereby basing its ontology on a transcendental study of these
both fail to escape the dominant influence of a
classical form of ontological theorizing, characterized by an inability to move beyond the bounds of
anthropocentrism. The result is that they are left impoverished in comparison to a truly
materialist and dynamic ontology, shorn of its traditional prioritizing of Being over Becoming.
mechanisms. We will see that in different ways,
2NC
2NC Overview
War is between networks not states – states don’t have single voices but rather micro-actors like
weapons industries, populations and generals that are real decision makers, ignoring this
oversimplifies our predictions obscuring the contextual nuances
AND - The smallest details are the most important – two implications
A.) This erases their truth claims
B.) Even if they win specificity – a broken clock is right twice a day – a flawed foundation replicates all
their impacts in the future – the 1AC harms prove
Nick
Srnicek, Doctoral Candidate in IR @ the London School of Economics, 2010, “Conflict Networks Collapsing the Global into the Local,”
Journal of Critical Globalization Studies 2, http://criticalglobalisation.com/Issue2/30_64_CONFLICT_NETWORKS_JCGS2.pdf
This leads us to the issue of interactions between actors. The standard natural science perspective is to see a closed realm of causal
interactions between physical entities, yet this viewpoint presumes the rigid and absolute Nature/Culture divide that was rejected
earlier. On the other hand, the
standard social science perspective is to reduce as many
effects as possible to as few causes as possible (the explanatory parsimony principle).
While this principle may produce elegant theoretical systems, as an ontological theory
it fails, and as a pragmatic theory for producing effects, it also underestimates the complexity involved in
any given phenomenon. This is a crucial flaw in attempts to make social science relevant for policy
initiatives or activist movements, i.e. those forced to face up to the complexity of
the world. Parsimony may be graceful for the theorist, and simplifying for a
decision-maker, but if the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes have reminded us of anything,
it is that simple theories are useless (or worse, harmful) in the real world. Moreover, the drive to parsimony
and simplicity reduces knowledge to a series of abstractions that exist nowhere and
that are in need of explanation themselves. As Jane Bennett (2005, p. 455) argues: The active power of assemblages [i.e. actornetworks] is concealed under the rubric of (social) structures, (cultural) contexts,
(religious) settings,(economic) climates, or (environmental) conditions – terms which denote passive
backgrounds or, at most, states of affairs whose sole power is the negative one of constraint or resistance. Structures,
surroundings, contexts, and environments name background settings rather than spirited actants. To remedy this
reduction of the active power of an actor-network, we raise Bruno Latour’s
distinction between ‘intermediaries’ and ‘mediators’. Whereas the former refers to actors who cleanly propagate the causes
that instigate them (e.g.explanations in the form of “an individual is a mere puppet of social forces” , or “the
individual is playing a functional, structural role”), the latter refers to actors who transform the forces that
pass through them. Rather than a social force acting smoothly on an individual
(regardless of how many actors it must pass through ), the notion of mediators
highlights the role that each actor plays in contributing to the propagation of any action. This entails
significant consequences. First, the entire chain of a network becomes
potentially significant to understanding the effects. In actor-network theory’s terms, we
must ‘trace’ the connections – a necessarily empirical and patient project. Second, ontologically
speaking, reduction becomes not an a priori assumption (e.g. “the
phenomenon is clearly caused by power relations, or by knowledge epistemes, or by
balances of power, etc.”), but rather something which must itself be slowly
and painstakingly constructed. The work of reduction in science is something that takes numerous scientists, and numerous
a number of
experiments, to produce. Third, the division between the global and the local – the mystery that we started this paper with, becomes
resolvable. The gap between the two becomes reconfigured in terms of a chain of mediators; the way in which they affect each other is
through 36this network of actors which links them in a highly specific configuration. ANT’s renewed definition thus gives scientific
meaning to the emergence of such distinctions, and provides concrete answers as to how the global interacts with the local.
C. Voting aff reifies a reductionist view of IR within debate literally making us stupider by teaching the
wrong way to look at the world – This leaves future generation unable to cope with complexity,
making every war and existential risk inevitable in the real world – prefer this because it’s an impact
to our education from debate – all their impacts only exist in imagination that disappears after this
round
2NC MPX
A. These macro predictions also obliterate all human agency
Bleiker 2k
(Roland, professor of international relations at the University of Queensland, 2000, “Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics” pg. 48)
Prediction, in particular, is a highly problematic standard to evaluate the
adequacy of theoretical propositions. Indeed, most international relations theories do not fare well when
judged by such a measuring device. Consider, once more, the case of East Germany. None of the influential
contributions to international theory was able to anticipate, let alone predict, the
momentous transformations that took place when the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Sovietlead alliance system fell apart. If existing theories revealed anything, it was how
closely they were intertwined with the Cold War and ensuing perceptions of
world politics. “An empire collapsed,” Jean Elshtain points out, “and many, if not most, practitioners of
international relations were entirely unprepared. It seems that precisely when theories of
international politics should have best served us, they failed rather strikingly, overtaken, as it were, by
politics itself.” For Elshtain, this crucial failure demands a rethinking of what theory is and does. “If 1989 taught us
nothing else,” she stresses, “it should have taught us humility.” For others, such as Martin Hollis and Steve
Smith, the inability of international theory to anticipate the collapse of the Cold War system calls for a more specific, but equally
fundamental, rethinking of the agency problematic. This book is devoted to the latter task—and reassessing questions of evaluation
is an integral part of it. The
very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human
agency. To assert that international relations is a domain of political dynamics
whose future should be predictable through a convincing set of theoretical propositions is to
assume that the course of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantage
point, there is no more room for interference and human agency, no more
possibility for politics to overtake theory. A predictive approach thus runs the risk
of ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image upon a fare more complex set
of transversal political practices. The point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly
changing domain of international relations. Rather, the main objective must consist of facilitating
an understanding of transversal struggles that can grapple with those
moments when people walk though walls precisely when nobody expects
them to do so.
B. Ignoring the actions of the local in constructing violence makes war inevitable
Kappeler ‘95
[Susanne, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 10-11]
‘We are the war’ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society—which would
be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of collective
irresponsibility1, where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility
becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyze the specific and differential
responsibilities of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by
those in a position to make them to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions
our habit of focusing on
the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our
sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our
own responsibility—leading to the –well-known illusion of our apparent ‘powerlessness’ and its accompanying
phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens- even more so those of other nations – have
come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale
political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia
– since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not
responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to
mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not
even for forming our own judgment, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our
and actions without lessening theirs by any collective ‘assumption’ of responsibility. Yet
own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those
events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we
participate in what Beck calls ‘organized irresponsibility’, upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically,
institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned
alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot ‘do’ anything,
say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made.
Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style
of ‘What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?’ Since
we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and
truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of
what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the
comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as ‘virtually no
possibilities’: what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the
range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN — finding expression in ever more prevalent
formulations like ‘I want to stop this war’, ‘I want military intervention’, ‘I want to stop this backlash’, or ‘I want a moral revolution.’7
‘We
are this war’, however, even if we do not command the troops or participate
in so—called peace talks, namely as Drakuli~ says, in our non-comprehension’: our
willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out
our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological
current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking
advantage of the advantages these offer. And we ‘are’ the war in our ‘unconscious cruelty towards you’,
our tolerance of the ‘fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don’t’ — our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one
for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the ‘others’. We
share in the responsibility
for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in
the way we shape ‘our feelings, our relationships, our values’ according to
the structures and the values of war and violence.
C. The aff’s appeal to a “reasonable leap of faith” between monolithic internal link chains
endorses an educationally impoverished model of debate. The aff’s macro-centric analysis
eviscerates policy making and causes their impacts in the real world. That’s Srnicek
2NC AT: Predictions
This misses the boat entirely. We agree that predictions are great, but we think that their predictions
suck. That’s why they wreck policymaking.
We control uniqueness – current predictions suck
Nassim
Taleb, Professor, Sciences of Uncertainty, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2007, The Black Swan, 138-141
Herding Like Cattle / A few researchers
have examined the work and attitude of security analysts,
with amazing results, particularly when one considers the epistemic arrogance of these operators. In a study comparing them with
weather forecasters, Tadeusz Tyszka and Piotr Zielonka document that the analysts are worse at predicting, while having a greater faith in their own
skills. Somehow, the analysts’ self-evaluation did not decrease their error margin after their failures to forecast. / Last June I bemoaned the dearth of
such published studies to Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, whom I was visiting in Paris. He is a boyish man who looks half my age though he is only slightly
younger than I, a matter that I half jokingly attribute to the beauty of physics. Actually he is not exactly a physicist but one of those quantitative
scientists who apply methods of statistical physics to economic variables, a field that was started by Benoit Mandelbrot in the late 1950s. This
community does not use Mediocristan mathematics, so they seem to care about the truth. They are completely outside the economics and businessschool finance establishment, and survive in physics and mathematics departments or, very often, in trading houses (traders rarely hire economists for
their own consumption, but rather to provide stories for their less sophisticated clients). Some of them also operate in sociology with the same hostility
on the part of the "natives." Unlike economists who wear suits and spin theories, they use empirical methods to observe the data and do not use the bell
curve. / He surprised me with a research paper that a summer intern had just finished under his supervision and that had just been accepted for
publication; it scrutinized
two thousand predictions by security analysts. What it showed was that
these brokerage-house analysts predicted nothing—a naive forecast made by someone who
takes the figures from one period as predictors of the next would not do markedly
worse. Yet analysts are informed about companies' orders, forthcoming contracts, and planned expenditures, so this advanced knowledge should
help them do considerably better than a naive forecaster looking at the past data without further information. Worse yet, the forecasters' errors were
significantly larger than the average difference between individual forecasts, which indicates herd- ing. Normally, forecasts should be as far from one
another as they are from the predicted number. But to understand how they manage to stay in business, and why they don't develop severe nervous
breakdowns (with weight loss, erratic behavior, or acute alcoholism), we must look at the work of the psychologist Philip Tetlock. / / Was "Almost"
Right / Tetlock studied the business of political and economic "experts." He asked various specialists to judge the likelihood of a number of
political, economic, and military events occurring within a specified time frame (about five years ahead). The outcomes represented a total number of
around twenty-seven
thousand predictions, involving close to three hundred
specialists. Economists represented about a quarter of his sample. The study revealed that experts' error rates were
clearly many times what they had estimated. His study exposed an expert problem: there was no
difference in results whether one had a PhD or an undergraduate
degree. Well-published professors had no advantage over journalists. The only regularity Tetlock found was the negative
effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse
predictors than those who had none. But Tetlock's focus was not so much to show the real competence of experts
(although the study was quite convincing with respect to that) as to investigate why the experts did not realize that they were not so good at their own
business, in other words, how they spun their stories. There seemed to be a logic to such incompetence, mostly in the form of belief defense, or the
protection of self-esteem. He therefore dug further into the mechanisms by which his subjects generated ex post explanations. / I will leave aside how
one's ideological commitments influence one's perception and address the more general aspects of this blind spot toward one's own predictions. / You
tell yourself that you were playing a different game. Let's say you failed to predict the weakening and precipitous fall of the Soviet Union (which no
social scientist saw coming). It is easy to claim that you were excellent at understanding the political workings of the Soviet Union, but that these
Russians, being exceedingly Russian, were skilled at hiding from you crucial economic elements. Had you been in possession of such economic
intelligence, you would certainly have been able to predict the demise of the Soviet regime. It is not your skills that are to blame. The same might apply
to you if you had forecast the landslide victory for Al Gore over George W. Bush. You were not aware that the economy was in such dire straits; indeed,
this fact seemed to be concealed from everyone. Hey, you are not an economist, and the game turned out to be about economics. / You invoke the
outlier. Something happened that was outside the system, outside the scope of your science. Given that it was not predictable, you are not to blame. It
was a Black Swan and you are not supposed to predict Black Swans. Black Swans, NNT tells us, are fundamentally unpredictable (but then I think that
NNT would ask you, Why rely on predictions?). Such events are "exogenous," coming from outside your science. Or maybe it was an event of very, very
low probability, a thousand-year flood, and we were unlucky to be exposed to it. But next time, it will not happen. This focus on the narrow game and
linking one's performance to a given script is how the nerds explain the failures of mathematical methods in society. The model was right, it worked
well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated. / The "almost right" defense. Retrospectively, with the benefit of a revision of
values and an informational framework, it is easy to feel that it was a close call. Tetlock writes, "Observers of the former Soviet Union who, in 1988,
thought the Communist Party could not be driven from power by 1993 or 1998 were especially likely to believe that Kremlin hardliners almost
overthrew Gorbachev in the 1991 coup attempt, and they would have if the conspirators had been more resolute and less inebriated, or if key military
officers had obeyed orders to kill civilians challenging martial law or if Yeltsin had not acted so bravely." / I will go now into more general defects
uncovered by this example. These "experts" were lopsided: on the occasions when they were right, they attributed it to their own depth of
understanding and expertise; when wrong, it was either the situation that was to blame, since it was unusual, or, worse, they did not recognize that they
were wrong and spun stories around it. They found it difficult to accept that their grasp was a little short. But this attribute is universal to all our
activities: there is something in us designed to protect our self-esteem. / We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random
events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for
the good stuff, but not for the bad. This causes us to think that we are better than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes
believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them
in the top half of French lovers. / The other effect of this asymmetry is that we feel a little unique, unlike others, for whom we do not perceive such an
asymmetry. I have mentioned the unrealistic expectations about the future on the part of people in the process of tying the knot. Also consider the
number of families who tunnel on their future, locking themselves into hard-to-flip real estate thinking they are going to live there permanently, not
realizing that the general track record for sedentary living is dire. Don't they see those well-dressed real-estate agents driving around in fancy two-door
German cars? We are very nomadic, far more than we plan to be, and forcibly so. Consider how many people who have abruptly lost their job deemed it
likely to occur, even a few days before. Or consider how many drug addicts entered the game willing to stay in it so long. / There is another lesson from
Tetlock's experiment. He
found what I mentioned earlier, that many university stars, or "contributors to top journals," are
no better than the average New York Times reader or journalist in detecting changes in the
world around them. These sometimes overspe-cialized experts failed tests in their own specialties.
Also – the harms the 1AC describes only prove our uniqueness args
2NC AT: Experts
1. Their experts are caught in an old-school mode of thought that can’t keep pace with the modern
world – non-state movements, heterogeneous globalization, and political fluidity prove that
monolithic conceptions of states are too big to grasp the complexities around us
2. Experts suck – multiple statistical studies prove
Nassim
Taleb, Professor, Sciences of Uncertainty, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2007, The Black Swan, 138-141
Herding Like Cattle / A few researchers have examined the work and attitude of security
analysts, with amazing results, particularly when one considers the epistemic arrogance of
these operators. In a study comparing them with weather forecasters, Tadeusz Tyszka and Piotr
Zielonka document that the analysts are worse at predicting, while having a greater faith in their
own skills. Somehow, the analysts’ self-evaluation did not decrease their error margin after their
failures to forecast. / Last June I bemoaned the dearth of such published studies to JeanPhilippe Bouchaud, whom I was visiting in Paris. He is a boyish man who looks half my age
though he is only slightly younger than I, a matter that I half jokingly attribute to the beauty of
physics. Actually he is not exactly a physicist but one of those quantitative scientists who apply
methods of statistical physics to economic variables, a field that was started by Benoit
Mandelbrot in the late 1950s. This community does not use Mediocristan mathematics, so they
seem to care about the truth. They are completely outside the economics and business-school
finance establishment, and survive in physics and mathematics departments or, very often, in
trading houses (traders rarely hire economists for their own consumption, but rather to provide
stories for their less sophisticated clients). Some of them also operate in sociology with the same
hostility on the part of the "natives." Unlike economists who wear suits and spin theories, they
use empirical methods to observe the data and do not use the bell curve. / He surprised me with
a research paper that a summer intern had just finished under his supervision and that had
just been accepted for publication; it scrutinized two thousand predictions by security
analysts. What it showed was that these brokerage-house analysts predicted nothing—a
naive forecast made by someone who takes the figures from one period as
predictors of the next would not do markedly worse. Yet analysts are informed about
companies' orders, forthcoming contracts, and planned expenditures, so this advanced
knowledge should help them do considerably better than a naive forecaster looking at the past
data without further information. Worse yet, the forecasters' errors were significantly larger
than the average difference between individual forecasts, which indicates herd- ing. Normally,
forecasts should be as far from one another as they are from the predicted number. But to
understand how they manage to stay in business, and why they don't develop severe nervous
breakdowns (with weight loss, erratic behavior, or acute alcoholism), we must look at the work
of the psychologist Philip Tetlock. / / Was "Almost" Right / Tetlock studied the business of
political and economic "experts." He asked various specialists to judge the likelihood of a
number of political, economic, and military events occurring within a specified time frame
(about five years ahead). The outcomes represented a total number of around twenty-seven
thousand predictions, involving close to three hundred specialists. Economists
represented about a quarter of his sample. The study revealed that experts' error rates were
clearly many times what they had estimated. His study exposed an expert problem: there
was no difference in results whether one had a PhD or an undergraduate degree. Well-published
professors had no advantage over journalists. The only regularity Tetlock found was the negative
effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than
those who had none. But Tetlock's focus was not so much to show the real competence of experts
(although the study was quite convincing with respect to that) as to investigate why the experts
did not realize that they were not so good at their own business, in other words, how they spun
their stories. There seemed to be a logic to such incompetence, mostly in the form of belief
defense, or the protection of self-esteem. He therefore dug further into the mechanisms by
which his subjects generated ex post explanations. / I will leave aside how one's ideological
commitments influence one's perception and address the more general aspects of this blind spot
toward one's own predictions. / You tell yourself that you were playing a different game. Let's
say you failed to predict the weakening and precipitous fall of the Soviet Union (which no social
scientist saw coming). It is easy to claim that you were excellent at understanding the political
workings of the Soviet Union, but that these Russians, being exceedingly Russian, were skilled at
hiding from you crucial economic elements. Had you been in possession of such economic
intelligence, you would certainly have been able to predict the demise of the Soviet regime. It is
not your skills that are to blame. The same might apply to you if you had forecast the landslide
victory for Al Gore over George W. Bush. You were not aware that the economy was in such dire
straits; indeed, this fact seemed to be concealed from everyone. Hey, you are not an economist,
and the game turned out to be about economics. / You invoke the outlier. Something happened
that was outside the system, outside the scope of your science. Given that it was not predictable,
you are not to blame. It was a Black Swan and you are not supposed to predict Black Swans.
Black Swans, NNT tells us, are fundamentally unpredictable (but then I think that NNT would
ask you, Why rely on predictions?). Such events are "exogenous," coming from outside your
science. Or maybe it was an event of very, very low probability, a thousand-year flood, and we
were unlucky to be exposed to it. But next time, it will not happen. This focus on the narrow
game and linking one's performance to a given script is how the nerds explain the failures of
mathematical methods in society. The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out
to be a different one than anticipated. / The "almost right" defense. Retrospectively, with the
benefit of a revision of values and an informational framework, it is easy to feel that it was a
close call. Tetlock writes, "Observers of the former Soviet Union who, in 1988, thought the
Communist Party could not be driven from power by 1993 or 1998 were especially likely to
believe that Kremlin hardliners almost overthrew Gorbachev in the 1991 coup attempt, and they
would have if the conspirators had been more resolute and less inebriated, or if key military
officers had obeyed orders to kill civilians challenging martial law or if Yeltsin had not acted so
bravely." / I will go now into more general defects uncovered by this example. These "experts"
were lopsided: on the occasions when they were right, they attributed it to their own depth of
understanding and expertise; when wrong, it was either the situation that was to blame, since it
was unusual, or, worse, they did not recognize that they were wrong and spun stories around it.
They found it difficult to accept that their grasp was a little short. But this attribute is universal
to all our activities: there is something in us designed to protect our self-esteem. / We humans
are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes
to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We
feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad. This causes us to think that we are better
than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their
driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel
that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers. / The other effect of this
asymmetry is that we feel a little unique, unlike others, for whom we do not perceive such an
asymmetry. I have mentioned the unrealistic expectations about the future on the part of people
in the process of tying the knot. Also consider the number of families who tunnel on their future,
locking themselves into hard-to-flip real estate thinking they are going to live there
permanently, not realizing that the general track record for sedentary living is dire. Don't they
see those well-dressed real-estate agents driving around in fancy two-door German cars? We are
very nomadic, far more than we plan to be, and forcibly so. Consider how many people who have
abruptly lost their job deemed it likely to occur, even a few days before. Or consider how many
drug addicts entered the game willing to stay in it so long. / There is another lesson from
Tetlock's experiment. He found what I mentioned earlier, that many university stars, or
"contributors to top journals," are no better than the average New York Times reader or
journalist in detecting changes in the world around them. These sometimes overspe-cialized
experts failed tests in their own specialties.
3. Here’s a classic – their experts are worse than dart-throwing monkeys
Menand ‘5
(Louis, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1)
It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”
(Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in
newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us.
When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or
blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications
that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work,
just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being
paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future
are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and,
beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can
guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely
inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones. “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a
psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked
two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he
started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in
which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa?
Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many
experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the
experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they
reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how
they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate. Tetlock
got a statistical handle
on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible
futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the
status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured
his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of
happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive.
the experts performed worse than they would have if they had
simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given
each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human
beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words,
On the first scale,
are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their
picks evenly over the three choices.
4. Epistemic arrogance makes experts useless
5. Only our alternative model for debate can solve flaws in current experts such as the Iraq and
Afghanistan fiascoes by preparing debaters to be a better next generation of experts
2NC AT: Empirics
1. Empirics without micro-analysis magnifies the link – we always assume history repeats itself and
ignore contextual nuances
Donald R.
Kinder and Janet A. Weiss ‘78
[*Philip E. Converse Collegiate Professor in the Department of Political Science and professor of psychology and research professor in the Center for
Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research @ the University of Michigan, ** The Mary C. Bromage Collegiate Professor of Organizational
Behavior and Public Policy @ Umich, “Review: In Lieu of Rationality: Psychological Perspectives on Foreign Policy Decision Making”, Journal of
Conflict Resolution, JSTOR]
By the verdict of innumerable social psychological experiments, people prefer to
keep their actions, beliefs, attitudes, and assorted cognitions mutually consistent.
This innocent fact has vast repercussions; it means that we tend to interpret new
information to be consistent with previous information. This is no longer innocent,
for it signals a systematic bias in the use and analysis of evidence in decision making.
As Jervis notes, our yen for consistency is in some ways per- fectly reasonable, supported by
both experience and logic. But in other ways it is not. The three books describe at least three
major mechanisms by which irrational consistency influences decision processes. Jervis
provides a persuasive account of the first of these, the un-critical assimilation of new
information to decision makers' established beliefs, expectation, and preferences. We have
discussed this at some length above. Incoming information that is inconsistent with a
decision maker's previous thoughts about the decision problem may be misunderstood, twisted in meaning until it becomes consistent, inappro- priately
discounted, rejected, or ignored. Decision makers depend too much on established
expectations and preferences, not enough on evidence that challenges their preconceptions.
Both Jervis and Janis and Mann discuss the role played by irrational consistency in
decision makers' justifications for their choices, what is known in the trade as postdecisional rationalization. After an alternative has been chosen, previous
reservations about the wisdom of that choice recede. Evidence that the chosen
alternative is imperfect-that it may have some negative consequences-is
reinterpreted, discounted, or forgotten, because it is inconsistent with the decision
maker's behavior, the selection of that one alternative above all others. No doubt the
political and organizational context of the choice accelerates tendencies toward postdecisional rationalization. Accord- ing to Allison (1971), foreign policy decision
makers in the toils of bureaucratic politics follow the "51-49 principle": they argue
more confidently with more assurance about the merits of even the shakiest
position than would a detached observer. After all, "he who is un- certain about
his recommendation is overpowered by others who are sure" (Allison, 1971: 171).
2. Studies prove that results in colossal error rates in predictions
3. Just because something was true in the past doesn’t mean it always it - There’s not enough info in
the past to verify specific scenarios
4. This makes the specificity over general historically-derived principles superior in prediction
2NC AT: Specificity
1. They’re not specific enough, that’s our whole critique, being specific about abstract nation-state
interactions will never capture the reality of a country’s actions
2. Without actor-network tracing to get past cognitive biases the conjunction fallacy means every
detail added to a scenario makes it a priori less likely.
1NC
1NC Rationality – Short
Their reliance on economic rationality presupposes a neoliberal form of subjectivity that they
superimpose upon the world in order to justify mass violence and homogenization. This also makes
transition wars and economic collapse inevitable, as it fails to understand how the crucial problem
today is one of symbolic exchange.
Bernadri 11 – (Franco Bifo Bernardi, “After the Future,” ed. Genesko & Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-7, CP)
economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of
solution to the crisis; it is the source of the problem. The lead article in The Economist of July 18, 2009 was “What went
wrong with economics?”The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of economic knowledge and the profession of economics. For
neoliberal economists, the central dogma of growth, profit, and competition cannot be questioned,
because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the
intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the
reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an obsession that has nothing to
do with science. It’s a political strategy aimed at identifying humans as calculating machines, as
shaping behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation for social
action. But it’s not an accurate description of social dynamics, the conflicts, pathologies, and
irrationality of human relationships. It’s an attempt to create the anthropological form of homo calculans that Foucault (2008)
has described in his 1979/80 seminar, The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to see human beings as calculating devices
has produced cultural devastation, and has finally shown itself to be based upon flawed assumptions.
Human beings do calculate, but their calculation isn’t perfectly rational, because the value of goods is
not determined by objective reason, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes called
“animal spirits.” In their book of the same name Akerlof and Shiller note, “We will never really understand important
economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature”, echoing
More than ever,
Keynes’s assumption that rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are acknowledging the crisis of neoliberal
thought, but their critique is not radical enough, and does not touch on the legitimacy of economic episteme. Animal Spiritsis also the title of
a book by Matteo Pasquinelli. Pasquinelli deals with bodies, numbers, and parasites, and goes much deeper in his understanding of the
roots of the crisis than Akerlof and Shiller. “Cognitive capitalism
emerges later in the form of a parasite: it
subjects social knowledge and inhibits its emancipator potential.” Beyond the computer screen,
precarious workers and freelancers experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly
devouring their everyday life” Pasquinelli goes to the core of the problem: the virtualization of social production
has caused the proliferation of a parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships,
absorbing and neutralizing the living energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only
the effect of financial craziness, but also the effect of the devitalization of the social field. This is why
the collapse of the economic system is also the collapse of an economic epistemology that has guided
politics for the last two centuries. Economics cannot understand the depth of the crisis, because
below the crisis of financial exchange there is a crisis of symbolic exchange. I mean the psychotic
boom of panic, depression, and the suicide of general decline of desire and social empathy The
question that rises from the collapse is so radical that its answer cannot be found in an economic
conceptual framework. Furthermore one must ask if economics really is a science? If the word science
means the creation of concepts in order to understand and describe an object, economics is not a
science. Its object does not exist. The objects of economics (scarcity, wage labor, and profit) do not
exist before and outside the performative action of the economic episteme. Production, consumption,
and daily life become part of the economic discourse when labor is detached and opposed to human
activity, when it falls under capitalist rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual activity,
and economic description is in fact normative. In this sense, economics is a technique, a semiotization
of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics s a suggestion and a categorical
imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only
power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it. Everything within us would like to say that it does not,
that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is denied, the more it shows itself as the Almighty.
Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankrupsy has been declared, giving money the power of some sacred deity,
demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quite or sit
At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in
abeyance… Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation, depression, lows and
highs, slumps and peak, investments and losses. (Sordello 1983). From the age of the enclosures in England, the
economic process has been a process that produces scarcity (scarification). The enclosures were
intended to scarcify the land, the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to
cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletariats, then waged industrial workers.
Capitalism is based off of the artificial creation of need, and the economic science is essentially a
technique of scarification of time, life, and food. Under conditions of scarcity, humans are subjected
to exploitation of and to the domain of profit oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures)
capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who don’t have property beyond their own life and
body, to lend their life time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making both water
and air scarce. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing,
implementing, and exacerbating scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy.
The technique for economic scarcification is based off a mythology, a narration that identifies wealth
as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and the
transformation of human activity into wage labor. In recent decades, technological change has slowly
eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material
objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the economic concepts of losing their
foundation of legitimacy. The basic categories of economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical
up and do tricks.
justification of private property, as one can read from the writings of John Lock , is based on the need for exclusive consumption. An apple
must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that someone might eat your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial,
infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private
the very foundation of wages, the
relationship between the time needed for production and the value of the product, is vanishing. The
immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the
average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence
becomes the only law able to determine price and wage. The neoliberal school, which has opened the
way to the world wide deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of rational
expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a self-regulated market, primarily the
labor market. But self regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has
property loses its ground, its raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore,
used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the military enforcement
The mythology of free
individuals loyally competing on the basis of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie too. Real human
beings are not perfect, rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally
crashed after the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectations is crucial in
neoliberal thought: The economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and
of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self regulated, the market is militarily regulated.
buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical
Economic exchange cannot be describes as a rational game, because irrational factors play a
crucial role in social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulations are
not exceptions, but the professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants.
The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it
is not science, and it has nothing to do with the natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of theory, the
failure of politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized
power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and
find the way to self-organization
swindle.
As capitalism withers away we must save desire and autonomy by withdrawing from impositions like
the maintenance of a neoliberal subject. We must use the current recession as an opportunity to
proliferate singularities as self creative processes capable of retaining value and sustaining freedom.
Bifo 11 – (Franco, “After the Future,” ed. Genesko & Thoburn, AKPress, p. 147-54)
Activism has generally conceived the process of subjectivation in terms of resistance. In the book he
dedicated to Foucault, Gilles Deleuze speaks about subjectivity, and identifies processes of subjectivation and resistance: “Is not life the
capacity to resist force?” (Deleuze 1988, 77). I think that it’s time to ask: what if society can no longer
resist destructive effects of unbound capitalism? What if society can no longer resist the devastating
power of financial accumulation? The identification of the subject with resistance is dangerous in a
certain sense. Deleuze himself has written that when we escape we are not simply escaping, but also looking for a new weapon. We
have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do that we have to disentangle
desire from energy: the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of Energolatria, a cult of energy has
dominated the cultural scene of the West from Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogmna. Now we
know that energy isn’t boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading. I think we should reframe the concept and practice of
autonomy from this point of view. The social body is unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital, because the
pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force. When workers were strong in the 1960’s and 1970’s, they did not
restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work,
redistributing wealth, sharing things, services, and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply
declare their wish; they enact it. They make things happen, they invest, disinvest, displace, they destroy ad they build. Only force makes
The identification of
desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for
the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is
falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power
with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of
killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias? Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the
struggle against power. And actually suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power.
And actually suicide has become decisive in contemporary history. The dark side of the multitude
meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of
resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed
in the history of society does not mean renouncing it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural
task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal or massive
dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show of
politics. The crucial focus on social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities
autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force? What is force nowadays?
is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force. “Yes we can,”
the slogan of Barack Obama’s campaign, the three words that mobilized the hope and the political energies of the American people in 2008,
have a disturbing echo just one year after his victory. They should much more like an exorcism than a promise. “Yes we can” may be read as
a lapse in the Freudian sense, a sign coming from the collective subconscious, a diversion from the hidden intuition that, in fact, we can’t.
The mantra of Barack Obama has gathered the energies of the best part of the American people, and collected the best of the American
cultural legacy. But what about the results? So far, Obama has been unable to deal with global environmental threats, the effects of
geopolitical disaster produced by Cheney-Bush, the effects of the powerful lobbies imposing the interest of the corporations (for instance, of
the private health insurers). When we think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the
financial politics of neoliberalism, it’s hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work within the world machine.
Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class. The age of
modern social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it’s hard to imagine how society will
be able to react. Modern was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist exploitation
of labor and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator State, the heir of Enlightenment and Socialism has
been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social equilibrium. When, at the end of a furious class struggle between labor and
capital – and within the capitalist class itself – the financial class has seized power by destroying the legal regulation and transforming social
composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble. Social Dawrinist ideology has legitimized the violent imposition
This acceleration destruction
of tolerance, culture, and human feelings have given an unprecedented impetus to the process of
accumulation and has increased the velocity and extent of economic growth throughout the last two
decades of the twentieth century. But it has also created the premises of a war against human society that is underway in the
new century. The war against society is waged at two different levels: at the economic level it is known as
of the law of the strongest, and the very foundations of democracy have been reduced to rubble.
privatization and is based on the idea economic level it is known as privatization and is based on the idea that every fragment and every cell
of the biological, affective, linguistic spheres have to be turned into profit machines. The effect of this privatization is the impoverishment of
daily life, the loss of sensibility in the fields of sex, communication, and human relationships, as well as the increasing inequality between a
At the social level, this war is waged in terms of criminalization
and destabilization of territory and economic life. In large areas of the planet, which are getting bigger, production and
hyperrich minority and a dispossessed majority.
exchange have become the ground of violent confrontation between military groups and criminal organizations. Slavery, blackmail,
extortion, and murder are integral parts of the economic lexicon. Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should
not expect much from them. They’ll
be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization
of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political
power. Just as the long wave of counterglobalization’s moral protests could not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not
find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life and creating Non-Temporary
The world does not
need so much labor and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor time is necessary. Basic
income has to be affirmed as a right to life, independent of employment and disjoined from lending of
labor time. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be separated from the economic context of
exchange value and rethought in terms of free social activity. We should not look at the current
recession only from an economic point of view. We must see it essentially as an anthropological
turning point that is going to change the distribution of world resources and world power. Europe is
doomed to lose its economic privilege, as five hundred years of colonialism are ending. The debt that western people have
accumulated is not only economic but also moral: the debt of oppression, violence, and genocide has
to be paid now, and it’s not going to be easy. A large part of the European population is not prepared to accept the
Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network. Full employment is over.
redistribution of wealth that the recession will impose. Europe, stormed by waves of migration, is going to face a growing racist threat.
Ethnic war will be difficult to avoid. In the US, the expectations raised by Obama’s victory have been largely disappointed. But at the same
time a wave of nonidentitarian, indigenous Renaissance is rising, especially in Latin America. The privatization of basic needs (housing,
transportation, feed) and social services is based on the cultural identification of wealth and well-being with the amount of private property
owned.
In the anthropology of modern capitalism, well-being has been equated with acquisition, never
with enjoyment. In the course of the social turmoil we will live though in the coming years, the
identification of well being with property has to be questioned. It’s a political task, but above all it is a
cultural task, and a psychotherapeutic one too. When it comes to semiotic products, private property
becomes irrelevant; in fact, it’s more and more difficult to enforce. The campaigns against piracy are
paradoxical because the real pirates are corporations that are desperately trying to privatize the
products of collective intelligence, and artificially trying to impose a tax on the community of
producers. The products of collective intelligence are immanently common because knowledge can
neither be fragmented nor privately owned. A new brand of communism was already springing from
the technological transformations of digital networks, when the collapse of the financial markets and
neoliberal ideology exposed the frailty of the foundations of hypercapitalism. Now we can predict a new wave
of transformation from the current collapse of growth, increasing debt, and questioning of private consumption as well being. Because of
these three forces – commonality of knowledge, ideological crisis of private ownership, mandatory communalization is needed – a new
horizon is visible and a new landscape is going to surface. Communism is coming back. The old face of communism, based on the
will and coluntarism of an avant-garde, and the paranoid expectations of a new totality, was defeated at the end of the twentieth century
A totally new brand of communism is going to surface as a form of necessity, the
inevitable outcome of the stormy collapse of the capitalist system. The communism of capital is a
barbaric necessity. We must put freedom in the necessity, we need to make this necessity a conscious
organized choice. Communism is back, but we should give it a different name, because historical
memory identifies this particular form of social organization with the political tyranny of religion. The
historical communism of the twentieth century was based on the idea of the primacy of totality over singularity. But the dialectical
framework that defined the communist movement of the twentieth century has been completely
abandoned and nobody will resurrect it. The Hegelian ascendance played a major role in the formation of that kind of
and will not be resurrected.
religious belief that was labeled “historicism.” The Aufhebung (abolition of the Real to realize the Idea) is the paranoid background of the
Within that dialectical framework, communism was viewed as an allencompassing capitalist totality. The subject (the will and action of the working class) was viewed as
the instrument for the abolition of the old and inauguration of the new. The industrial working class,
being external to the production of concepts, could only identify with the mythology of abolition and
totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general intellect does not need an
expressive subject, such as the Leninist Party in the twentieth century. The political expression of the general
intellect is at on with its activity of understanding and producing signs. We have abandoned the
territory of dialects in favor of the multilayered coevolution of singularities. Capitalism is over, but it’s not going
to disappear. The creation of Non-Temporary Automous Zones will not give birth to any totalization. We
are not going to witness a cathartic event of revolution, won’t see the sudden breakdown of state
power. In the coming years, we’ll witness some sort of revolution without a subject. In order to
subjectivate this revolution, we have to proliferate singularities. This, in my humble opinion, is our
cultural and political task. After abandoning the dialectics of abolition and totalizazation, we are now
trying to build a theory of dynamics of recombination and singularization, concepts clearly drawn from the
whole concept of communism.
works of Felix Guattari, particularly from his last book, Chaosmosis. By the word singularity, I mean the expression of a never before seen
concatenation.
The actor of this expression can be an individual or a collective, but also an event. We call
it singularity if this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its field of existence, following a
principle that is not repetitive or referring to any reexisting form of subjected subjectivity. By the
word singularity, I mean an agency that does not follow any rule conformity or repetition, and is not
framed in any historical necessity or sequential understanding of history – it is an emergent, self
creative process. Rather than a shift change in the social landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends; communities
abandoning the field of the crumbling ruling economies, more individuals giving up their search for a job and creating their own networks of
services. The dismantling of industry is unstoppable for a simple reason that social life does not need industrial labor anymore.
The
myth of growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth and
distribution. Singular communities will transform the very perception of well being and wealth
through a sense of frugality and freedom. The cultural revolution that we need in this transition leads
from the perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing number of goods that we simply
cannot enjoy because we are too busy making the money for acquisition, to the perception of wealth
as the enjoyment of an essential number of things that we share with other people. The deprivation
of services and goods will be made possible by this much needed cultural revolution. This will not
happen in a planned or uniform way; it will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular
individuals and communities, and the creation of an economy of shared use of common goods and
services and the liberation of time for culture, pleasure, and affection. While this process expands at the margins
of society, the criminal class will hang on to its power and enforce more and more repressive legislation,
the majority of people will be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will spread all over Europe,
wreaking the fabric of civil life. The proliferation of singularities (withdrawal and building of Non-Temporary Autonomous
Zones) will be a peaceful process, but the conformist majority is frightened is frightened by the fleeing
intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intellect activity.
1NC Rationality – Long
Their reliance on economic rationality presupposes a neoliberal form of subjectivity that they
superimpose upon the world in order to justify mass violence and homogenization. This also makes
transition wars and economic collapse inevitable, as it fails to understand how the crucial problem
today is one of symbolic exchange. Against this, we should withdraw from necronomics.
Bernadri 11 – (Franco Bifo Bernardi, “After the Future,” ed. Genesko & Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-7, CP)
economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of
solution to the crisis; it is the source of the problem. The lead article in The Economist of July 18, 2009 was “What went
wrong with economics?”The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of economic knowledge and the profession of economics. For
neoliberal economists, the central dogma of growth, profit, and competition cannot be questioned,
because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the
intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the
reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an obsession that has nothing to
do with science. It’s a political strategy aimed at identifying humans as calculating machines, as
shaping behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation for social
action. But it’s not an accurate description of social dynamics, the conflicts, pathologies, and
irrationality of human relationships. It’s an attempt to create the anthropological form of homo calculans that Foucault (2008)
has described in his 1979/80 seminar, The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to see human beings as calculating devices
has produced cultural devastation, and has finally shown itself to be based upon flawed assumptions.
Human beings do calculate, but their calculation isn’t perfectly rational, because the value of goods is
not determined by objective reason, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes called
“animal spirits.” In their book of the same name Akerlof and Shiller note, “We will never really understand important
economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature”, echoing
More than ever,
Keynes’s assumption that rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are acknowledging the crisis of neoliberal
thought, but their critique is not radical enough, and does not touch on the legitimacy of economic episteme. Animal Spiritsis also the title of
a book by Matteo Pasquinelli. Pasquinelli deals with bodies, numbers, and parasites, and goes much deeper in his understanding of the
roots of the crisis than Akerlof and Shiller. “Cognitive capitalism
emerges later in the form of a parasite: it
subjects social knowledge and inhibits its emancipator potential.” Beyond the computer screen,
precarious workers and freelancers experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly
devouring their everyday life” Pasquinelli goes to the core of the problem: the virtualization of social production
has caused the proliferation of a parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships,
absorbing and neutralizing the living energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only
the effect of financial craziness, but also the effect of the devitalization of the social field. This is why
the collapse of the economic system is also the collapse of an economic epistemology that has guided
politics for the last two centuries. Economics cannot understand the depth of the crisis, because
below the crisis of financial exchange there is a crisis of symbolic exchange. I mean the psychotic
boom of panic, depression, and the suicide of general decline of desire and social empathy The
question that rises from the collapse is so radical that its answer cannot be found in an economic
conceptual framework. Furthermore one must ask if economics really is a science? If the word science
means the creation of concepts in order to understand and describe an object, economics is not a
science. Its object does not exist. The objects of economics (scarcity, wage labor, and profit) do not
exist before and outside the performative action of the economic episteme. Production, consumption,
and daily life become part of the economic discourse when labor is detached and opposed to human
activity, when it falls under capitalist rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual activity,
and economic description is in fact normative. In this sense, economics is a technique, a semiotization
of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics s a suggestion and a categorical
imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only
power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it. Everything within us would like to say that it does not,
that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is denied, the more it shows itself as the Almighty.
Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankrupsy has been declared, giving money the power of some sacred deity,
demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quite or sit
At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in
abeyance… Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation, depression, lows and
highs, slumps and peak, investments and losses. (Sordello 1983). From the age of the enclosures in England, the
economic process has been a process that produces scarcity (scarification). The enclosures were
intended to scarcify the land, the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to
cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletariats, then waged industrial workers.
Capitalism is based off of the artificial creation of need, and the economic science is essentially a
technique of scarification of time, life, and food. Under conditions of scarcity, humans are subjected
to exploitation of and to the domain of profit oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures)
capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who don’t have property beyond their own life and
body, to lend their life time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making both water
and air scarce. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing,
implementing, and exacerbating scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy.
The technique for economic scarcification is based off a mythology, a narration that identifies wealth
as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and the
transformation of human activity into wage labor. In recent decades, technological change has slowly
eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material
objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the economic concepts of losing their
foundation of legitimacy. The basic categories of economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical
up and do tricks.
justification of private property, as one can read from the writings of John Lock , is based on the need for exclusive consumption. An apple
must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that someone might eat your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial,
infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private
the very foundation of wages, the
relationship between the time needed for production and the value of the product, is vanishing. The
immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the
average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence
becomes the only law able to determine price and wage. The neoliberal school, which has opened the
way to the world wide deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of rational
expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a self-regulated market, primarily the
labor market. But self regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has
property loses its ground, its raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore,
used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the military enforcement
The mythology of free
individuals loyally competing on the basis of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie too. Real human
beings are not perfect, rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally
crashed after the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectations is crucial in
neoliberal thought: The economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and
of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self regulated, the market is militarily regulated.
buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical
Economic exchange cannot be describes as a rational game, because irrational factors play a
crucial role in social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulations are
not exceptions, but the professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants.
The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it
is not science, and it has nothing to do with the natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of theory, the
failure of politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized
power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and
find the way to self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6, 2009: After the mortgage business imploded
swindle.
last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The
bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash - $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say.
Depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in the Wall Street jargon, by packing
hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors like big pension funds, who will receive the
payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier policyholder dies, the bigger the return – though if people live longer than
expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would
absolutely not do). My insurer, of course, will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the premiums for a long time, rather than paying lots of money
to my family if I die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests in the
hope that I die soon. You don’t need the imagination of Phillip K. Dick to guess how the story ends: financial agents will be motivated to kill
me overnight. The
talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of death. It’s not new, as
capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughter, and genocides. But now the equation becomes
unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that
capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was
dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror
of spectacular accumulation. Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the
substitution of present life with future money that will never come, because death will come first. The
lesson that we must learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going
away, the financial high rollers will not stop their speculation, corporations will not stop their
exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable
to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J.G Ballard (188) wrote: “the most perfect crime of all – when
the victims are either willing, or aren’t aware they are victims.” Democracy seems unable to stop the
criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because decisions are no longer made in the
sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has
been declared the basic standard around which decisions are made, and the economists have
systemically identified the economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political
choice is left, as corporate principles have become embedded in the technical fabric of language and
imagination.
As capitalism withers away we must save desire and autonomy by withdrawing from impositions like
the maintenance of a neoliberal subject. We must use the current recession as an opportunity to
proliferate singularities as self creative processes capable of retaining value and sustaining freedom.
Bifo 11 – (Franco, “After the Future,” ed. Genesko & Thoburn, AKPress, p. 147-54)
Activism has generally conceived the process of subjectivation in terms of resistance. In the book he
life the
capacity to resist force?” (Deleuze 1988, 77). I think that it’s time to ask: what if society can no longer
dedicated to Foucault, Gilles Deleuze speaks about subjectivity, and identifies processes of subjectivation and resistance: “Is not
resist destructive effects of unbound capitalism? What if society can no longer resist the devastating
power of financial accumulation? The identification of the subject with resistance is dangerous in a
certain sense. Deleuze himself has written that when we escape we are not simply escaping, but also looking for a new weapon. We
have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do that we have to disentangle
desire from energy: the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of Energolatria, a cult of energy has
dominated the cultural scene of the West from Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogmna. Now we
know that energy isn’t boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading. I think we should reframe the concept and practice of
autonomy from this point of view. The social body is unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital, because the
pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force. When workers were strong in the 1960’s and 1970’s, they did not
restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work,
redistributing wealth, sharing things, services, and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply
declare their wish; they enact it. They make things happen, they invest, disinvest, displace, they destroy ad they build. Only force makes
The identification of
desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for
the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is
falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power
with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of
killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias? Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the
struggle against power. And actually suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power.
And actually suicide has become decisive in contemporary history. The dark side of the multitude
meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of
resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed
in the history of society does not mean renouncing it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural
task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal or massive
dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show of
politics. The crucial focus on social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities
is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force.
autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force? What is force nowadays?
“Yes we can,” the slogan of Barack Obama’s campaign, the three words that mobilized the hope and the political energies of the American
people in 2008, have a disturbing echo just one year after his victory. They should much more like an exorcism than a promise. “Yes we can”
may be read as a lapse in the Freudian sense, a sign coming from the collective subconscious, a diversion from the hidden intuition that, in
fact, we can’t. The mantra of Barack Obama has gathered the energies of the best part of the American people, and collected the best of the
American cultural legacy. But what about the results? So far, Obama has been unable to deal with global environmental threats, the effects
of geopolitical disaster produced by Cheney-Bush, the effects of the powerful lobbies imposing the interest of the corporations (for instance,
of the private health insurers). When we think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the
financial politics of neoliberalism, it’s hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work within the world machine.
Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class.
The age of modern social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it’s hard to imagine how
society will be able to react. Modern was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist
exploitation of labor and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator State, the heir of Enlightenment
and Socialism has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social equilibrium. When, at the end of a furious class struggle
between labor and capital – and within the capitalist class itself – the financial class has seized power by destroying the legal regulation and
transforming social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble. Social Dawrinist ideology has legitimized the
This acceleration
destruction of tolerance, culture, and human feelings have given an unprecedented impetus to the
process of accumulation and has increased the velocity and extent of economic growth throughout
the last two decades of the twentieth century. But it has also created the premises of a war against human society that is
violent imposition of the law of the strongest, and the very foundations of democracy have been reduced to rubble.
underway in the new century.
The war against society is waged at two different levels: at the economic level it is known as privatization and is
based on the idea economic level it is known as privatization and is based on the idea that every fragment and every cell of the biological,
affective, linguistic spheres have to be turned into profit machines. The effect of this privatization is the impoverishment of daily life, the
loss of sensibility in the fields of sex, communication, and human relationships, as well as the increasing inequality between a hyperrich
At the social level, this war is waged in terms of criminalization and
destabilization of territory and economic life. In large areas of the planet, which are getting bigger, production and
minority and a dispossessed majority.
exchange have become the ground of violent confrontation between military groups and criminal organizations. Slavery, blackmail,
extortion, and murder are integral parts of the economic lexicon.
Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much from them. They’ll
be unable to touch
the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be
able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. Just as the long wave of counterglobalization’s
moral protests could not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and
sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and
The world does not need so much labor and so much
exploitation. A radical reduction of labor time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed as a right
to life, independent of employment and disjoined from lending of labor time. Competence,
knowledge, and skills have to be separated from the economic context of exchange value and
rethought in terms of free social activity.
consciousness of the global network. Full employment is over.
We should not look at the current recession only from an economic point of view. We must see it
essentially as an anthropological turning point that is going to change the distribution of world
resources and world power. Europe is doomed to lose its economic privilege, as five hundred years of colonialism are ending.
The debt that western people have accumulated is not only economic but also moral: the debt of
oppression, violence, and genocide has to be paid now, and it’s not going to be easy. A large part of the
European population is not prepared to accept the redistribution of wealth that the recession will impose. Europe, stormed by waves of
migration, is going to face a growing racist threat. Ethnic war will be difficult to avoid. In the US, the expectations raised by Obama’s victory
have been largely disappointed. But at the same time a wave of nonidentitarian, indigenous Renaissance is rising, especially in Latin
America.
The privatization of basic needs (housing, transportation, feed) and social services is based on the cultural identification of wealth and wellbeing with the amount of private property owned.
In the anthropology of modern capitalism, well-being has been
equated with acquisition, never with enjoyment. In the course of the social turmoil we will live though
in the coming years, the identification of well being with property has to be questioned. It’s a political
task, but above all it is a cultural task, and a psychotherapeutic one too.
When it comes to semiotic products, private property becomes irrelevant; in fact, it’s more and more
difficult to enforce. The campaigns against piracy are paradoxical because the real pirates are
corporations that are desperately trying to privatize the products of collective intelligence, and
artificially trying to impose a tax on the community of producers. The products of collective
intelligence are immanently common because knowledge can neither be fragmented nor privately
owned. A new brand of communism was already springing from the technological transformations of
digital networks, when the collapse of the financial markets and neoliberal ideology exposed the
frailty of the foundations of hypercapitalism. Now we can predict a new wave of transformation from the current collapse
of growth, increasing debt, and questioning of private consumption as well being. Because of these three forces – commonality of
knowledge, ideological crisis of private ownership, mandatory communalization is needed – a new horizon is visible and a new landscape is
going to surface.
Communism is coming back.
The old face of communism, based on the will and coluntarism of an avant-garde, and the paranoid expectations of a new totality, was
A totally new brand of communism is going to
surface as a form of necessity, the inevitable outcome of the stormy collapse of the capitalist system.
defeated at the end of the twentieth century and will not be resurrected.
The communism of capital is a barbaric necessity. We must put freedom in the necessity, we need to
make this necessity a conscious organized choice. Communism is back, but we should give it a
different name, because historical memory identifies this particular form of social organization with
the political tyranny of religion. The historical communism of the twentieth century was based on the idea of the primacy of
totality over singularity. But the dialectical framework that defined the communist movement of the
twentieth century has been completely abandoned and nobody will resurrect it.
The Hegelian ascendance played a major role in the formation of that kind of religious belief that was labeled “historicism.” The Aufhebung
Within that dialectical
framework, communism was viewed as an all-encompassing capitalist totality. The subject (the will
and action of the working class) was viewed as the instrument for the abolition of the old and
inauguration of the new.
(abolition of the Real to realize the Idea) is the paranoid background of the whole concept of communism.
The industrial working class, being external to the production of concepts, could only identify with the
mythology of abolition and totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general intellect
does not need an expressive subject, such as the Leninist Party in the twentieth century. The political expression of
the general intellect is at on with its activity of understanding and producing signs. We have
abandoned the territory of dialects in favor of the multilayered coevolution of singularities. Capitalism is
over, but it’s not going to disappear. The creation of Non-Temporary Automous Zones will not give birth to any
totalization. We are not going to witness a cathartic event of revolution, won’t see the sudden
breakdown of state power. In the coming years, we’ll witness some sort of revolution without a
subject. In order to subjectivate this revolution, we have to proliferate singularities. This, in my
humble opinion, is our cultural and political task.
After abandoning the dialectics of abolition and totalizazation, we are now trying to build a theory of
dynamics of recombination and singularization, concepts clearly drawn from the works of Felix Guattari, particularly from
his last book, Chaosmosis. By the word singularity, I mean the expression of a never before seen concatenation. The actor of this
expression can be an individual or a collective, but also an event. We call it singularity if this actor
recombines the multiple flows traversing its field of existence, following a principle that is not
repetitive or referring to any reexisting form of subjected subjectivity. By the word singularity, I mean
an agency that does not follow any rule conformity or repetition, and is not framed in any historical
necessity or sequential understanding of history – it is an emergent, self creative process.
Rather than a shift change in the social landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends; communities abandoning the field of
the crumbling ruling economies, more individuals giving up their search for a job and creating their own networks of services.
The myth of
growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth and distribution.
Singular communities will transform the very perception of well being and wealth through a sense of
frugality and freedom. The cultural revolution that we need in this transition leads from the
perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing number of goods that we simply cannot
enjoy because we are too busy making the money for acquisition, to the perception of wealth as the
enjoyment of an essential number of things that we share with other people.
The dismantling of industry is unstoppable for a simple reason that social life does not need industrial labor anymore.
The deprivation of services and goods will be made possible by this much needed cultural revolution.
This will not happen in a planned or uniform way; it will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of
singular individuals and communities, and the creation of an economy of shared use of common
goods and services and the liberation of time for culture, pleasure, and affection. While this process expands
the criminal class will hang on to its power and enforce more and more repressive
legislation, the majority of people will be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will spread all
at the margins of society,
over Europe, wreaking the fabric of civil life.
The proliferation of singularities (withdrawal and building of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones) will be a peaceful
process, but the conformist majority is frightened is frightened by the fleeing intelligent energy and
simultaneously is attacking the expression of intellect activity. The situation can be described as a
fight between the mass ignorance produced by media totalitarianism and the shared intelligence of
the general intellect. We cannot predict what the outcome o this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the
field of autonomy, and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with the field of aggressive
mass ignorance. This strategy of nonconfrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes
confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It’s impossible to predict what should be done in the
choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of well being with private property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of
human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from parinoia, creating zones of
human resistance, experimenting with authonomous forms of production using high tech low energy methods –
while avoiding
confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population. Politics and therapy will be one
and the same activity in the coming years. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicky,
because they are unable to deal with the post growth economy, and because they will miss their
dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them in a
way of happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic
In this sense, it is not totalizing or
intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic therapy it should be considered an
unending process.
contagion. The development of autonomy must not be seen as Aufhebung, but as therapy.
2NC
Sado-Monetarism Link
The time of a rational economy has come and gone. Economic science is problematized by the infusion
of ressentiment and abuse-exchange into the economy. The sadistic economy of rational values turns
us all into slaves.
Wiltgen 05 – (James, “Sado-Monetarism or Saint Fond-Saint Ford,” in Consumption in the Age of
Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, Berg, New York, p. 100-3)
One way in which to think the contemporary conjunction, then, might be to appropriate a term
popular amongst various financial analysts and investment bankers in the early 1980’s, namely “sadomonetarism”. The two concepts when joined, alter any analysis of the global situation, in particular
calling into question the pervasive logic of utilitarianism, including certain liberal and Marxist
tendencies toward evaluating everything in terms of a rationalized approach, an instrumental reason
if you rill, based on a measured sense of profit and loss. In terms of analysis, this “profit and loss” must be
complicated by the sub rosa forces driving change in the world order; in other words, the combination
of ressentiment with utility, abuse-value with exchange value (Kroker, 2004: 138). While the original use of the term
demonstrates the Anglo American biases of the commentators, coinciding as it did with the draconian cuts and reconstructings of Reagan
and Thatcher, its larger scope would be the vast and dense shifts the world economy began, if a date is necessary, when Nixon took the
United States off the gold standard in 1972, and the speed of currency trade began to increase exponentially, paving the way for the
explosion in finance would be the vast and dense shifts the world economy began, if a date is necessary, when Nixon took the United States
off the gold standard in 1972, and the speed of currency trade began to increase exponentially, paving the way for the explosion in finance
capital of the 1980s and 1990s. At this point,
various power coefficients that had been building within the global
economy, among them the increasing impact of global corporations, the reach of market relations,
economic and political strains on the nation-state, and the fluidity of currencies, began to have a more
intense impact on the planet’s organization. Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, sado-monetarism
might be interpreted in a number of different ways, including the continued, and by some estimates,
growing immiseration of the world – mass poverty would seem to be a question not of production,
where little doubt exists that enough food and shelter could be produced to enable the entire planet
to have an adequate standard of living – but a matter of political will, or perhaps a dramatically
different articulation of global economic and cultural systems. Is the fabled “permanent labor
reserve” analyzed by Marx a structural element of capitalism, something the system needs in order to
function, and without these “sacrifical” groups or “scapegoats” the system would collapse. Or, was
the system constituted more by a certain “corrupted” will, the product of an ancient emergence, most
powerfully marked by a Christianity in abeyance and ressentiment, and with this will a system of
maliciousness and avowed avarice. Perhaps even more distressing, however one quantifies the
developmental model being employed by the globe at this point, would be to question the entire
growth model itself, based as it is on a rapacious consumption of the resources of the planet, driven
by an unprecedented population surge that has more than doubled the world’s inhabitants in the last
forty years. One might ask what symptoms do these shifts signal, how and why have they occurred,
and what possible courses of action do these nearly hallucinatory alterations close down as well as
open up. Certainly the question “who benefits?” must be posed, and an initial response rests with a nuanced class and cultural analysis,
providing not only an understanding of how wealth is appropriated but also foregrounding the issue of the creation of what Gramsci called a
“hegemonic bloc.” An
analysis of this sort, the “monetarist” component, does function via a computation
of utility employing a type of triumphant rationality, objectifying all of reality and reducing it to
“standing reserve.” At another level, however, what might be termed the “sado” element must be
addressed, as extremely dense forces cut across the entire social and cultural system, including class,
racial, gender, and ethnic lines, in feedback loops linking the macro-aggregates with the microtextures
of production, antiproduction, consumption, and symbolic networks. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in their book
AntiOedipus, with a decidedly Heideggerian echo, “there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves
commanding other slaves;” (1983: 254). Baudrillard will pose the situation even more starkly, “humankind . . . in its blind
will for greater knowledge . . . is sacrificing itself to an experimental destiny unknown to other
species” (2001:33). In other words, control has been so densely embedded in the circuits of capitalism that it
responds to events in a quasiautonomous manner, a systemic configuration capable of fashioning
actions in ways beyond the reach of even the most powerful groupings. Clarity here about this
analysis remains crucial, as it does not seek to eliminate, or even discount agency and the possibilities
of different articulations of the system, but to argue for the necessity of a multilayered approach, one
capable of charting the power of a widely diverse and asymmetrical series of intertwined coordinates,
from the political to the psychological, from the micro to the macro, or if you will from the molecular
to the chaotic. Another way to think the mutations of capitalism has been provided by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, where they
argue that imperialism has ended and the planet has made a fundamental and irreversible shift into a different age, a new age of Empire.
This new mode of global organization “is distributed in networks, through mobile and articulated
mechanisms of control,” which, although beginning in a Eurocentric context, now functions in global
temporal and spatial coordinates (Hardt & Negri, 2000: XII, XIV, 384). 4 While the United States will maintain tremendous
power in this configuration, it will not be the “center,” but only serve as a powerful cluster of nodal points of control and organization;
members of the G-8, factions of developing nations including China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil, to name a few, will also participate
With these
changes a new sovereignty, a new subject has emerged, based on the “logic of a single rule” via an
increasingly unified world market (Hardt & Negri, 2000: XVI). The subject, constructed by the
emerging planetary order, has been sutured into the system by symbolic and existential patterns
based in no small measure on the ability to consume, to participate in the dynamics of the world’s
primary material feedback loop, the nexus between production and consumption. Among the key elements
of their assemblage, clearly influenced by Spinoza’s concept of immanence, the planet becomes a “spatial totality,” but
one where history has been quasi-suspended, with the now fixed as the basic temporal structuration.
In this formulation, if a future still exists it becomes much less clear how it might articulate with the
present, and the primary scene of gratification, of pleasure shifts inexorably to a very current “now”
oriented time frame, what Kroker calls the “standing now” (Kroker, 2004: 61). This analysis does not
eliminate conflict, quite the contrary, but shifts the emphasis to encompass a plurality of sites beside
the traditional nation-state axis, including intraempire competition, regional conflicts, urban civil war,
etc., as the basic contours of the emerging global model are contested. In another register but with a decidedly
similar sense, Pierre Bourdieu analyzes this historical moment as one wherein the law of the market rules, and a “neoliberal vulgate” has created a type of social neo-Darwinism bent on increasing social inequalities and
further deepening class polarities (Bourdieu, 1998: 42, 98, 102; 2003: 11– 12). The market exercises a
series of structural violences, producing a more thorough destruction of all collective institutions,
where the effects of this autonomy result in the increasingly direct relation between the subject and
the market. For example, Xerox has just released an ad promising personalized, customized messages for the individual consumer,
bypassing former mediation and putting the individual face to face with the corporate world, where via complex data banks the
consumption habits of the consumer have been algorithmically charted so as to provide a near perfect
mesh between the individual and the system.
in the networked empire, where an adherence to capitalist logic provides the basis of global articulation and hegemony.
Will to Will Link
Aff embraces a form of capitalism in which all of humanity is enframed under the umbrella of
rationality. With the death of god, the affirmative turns to economic science in a will-to-will that
reduces the world to a standing reserve.
Wiltgen 05 – (James, “Sado-Monetarism or Saint Fond-Saint Ford,” in Consumption in the Age of
Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, Berg, New York, p. 98-100)
On an analytical level, one of the ways to assess the changes taking place would be to see capitalism
via the market as enacting a type of “enframing,” where all of existence has been rendered into what
Heidegger called bestand, standing reserve, as everything, including the human, lies within the
purview of technological modernity. This current configuration of capitalism and modernity seeks to
increasingly control all elements of existence, from the molecular to the cosmic, and with this power
of control to organize – basically in terms of fashioning more complex, as well as less complex organic
and inorganic structures – the processes of the planet. In his book The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism,
Arthur Kroker argues that this enframing has been generated, in a dense series of feedback loops, by the
emergence of Heidegger’s concept of the will to will, the completion of a type of Nietzschean
metaphysics, where the will to power sheds all embodiment and becomes a “pure will,” folded back
upon itself in a “recursive spiral” (Kroker, 2004: 123). 1 At one level, then, growing control by a logic
generated via a rational and instrumental worldview, where the “governing” science, economics, uses
a series of mathematical formulations to order all of existence; the market has come to replace,
certainly in the West, the dominance of Christianity as a way of explaining as well as organizing the
world (Bourdieu, 2003: 34). With the “death of God” as a signal marker, the changes in the
psychological contours of the West, and by extension powerful elements throughout the globe with
which it has resonances, would seem to be still in full process, or perhaps only in a mutating phase, or
then again nearing its “end.” Kroker definitely poses these questions, distilling Nietzsche with the query “what will succeed
Christian nihilism?” and what happens when a culture . . . loses faith in representationality. (Kroker, 2004: 85, 165) What would appear to
basic “ground” upon which reality has been constructed, is the market –
basically in its most tangible aspect as an ability to consume – both in an ontological and an ethical
mode. As ontology, consumption provides the measure upon which the twin poles of the
postchristian era, aggressive control and hedonistic boredom, receive their “philosophical” rationale,
as both creative destruction and the “pursuit of happiness.” On another level, and even more importantly,
have taken the place of Christianity, the
consumption provides the last, faint signal of a possible marker of salvation, because the ability to consume remains predicated in this
schema on moral worth (in the most abstract sense, informed by a certain reactionary, radical materialism), which in turn points to the
existence of God, or life, or the race – a type of transcendence – and on this basis acknowledges the possibility of “continuity,” most
particularly at the individual level, but for the more “perceptive” at higher levels of abstraction. Finally, as a correlative to the moral worth
issue, a second means to interpret consumption holds that it represents the need for strong emotion, as a post-Weberian element of piety,
demonstrating another type of “moral” character, one able to receive powerful emanations from the divine (see Campbell, 1989 and Slater,
As an ethics, there is also a split – on the one hand, a neo-Darwinian imperative to select
everything which enhances the power of the market, its propensity for consumption, and its
continued deepening, while furthering the control mechanisms so many thinkers have analyzed,
certainly with Marx being one of the earliest and most systematic. On the other hand, the unleashing of powerful new
energies, both individual and systemic, provides the locus of one of the great paradoxes of the current
moment. In other words, while an extremely cruel and powerful sociotechnological gird of organization
1997).
has been and is being established, “counter” forces have also emerged, capable of trangressions,
subversions, and resistances. 2 Enmeshed, then, in the “market” are other dense and complicated
forces beside the so-called rational approach derived from the “objective” economic and
mathematical models, ones inspired by a delirium and demented series of tendencies bent upon
possible catastrophe, and perhaps the most sustained and pervasive forces of negation yet to be seen.
In opposition to those forces, in some ways having developed “alongside” the delirium, one can
detect new forms of subjectivity, capable of mutating the dementia in ways yet unknown but driven
by tendencies of unrelenting affirmation.
2NC Impact
Focus on rational economic science has created a bloodthirsty form of capitalism which attempts to
erase affect and makes violence inevitable. Neoliberalism constantly produces crisis to demonstrate
its capacity for control. While this system focuses on total peace, its hatred of uncertainty makes the
destruction of all life immanent.
Wiltgen 05 – (James, “Sado-Monetarism or Saint Fond-Saint Ford,” in Consumption in the Age of
Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, Berg, New York, p. 107-110)
How does digital capitalism intertwine with the concept of uncertainty? What key changes have taken place in the structuring of the world,
via the digital and the biotechnological, what forces have emerged or coalesced, and finally, how do they affect the realm of subjectivity and
consumption? Here, Arthur Kroker has transposed McLuhan into the twenty-first century, performing an interrogation of what he calls
the “digital nerve,” basically the exteriorization of the human sensorium into the digital circuitry of
contemporary capitalism (Kroker, 2004: 81). This (in)formation, “streamed capitalism,” rests not exclusively
on exchange value, nor material goods, but something much more immaterial, – a postmarket,
postbiological, postimage society where the driving force, the “will to will,” has ushered in a world
measured by probability. In other words, this variant of capitalism seeks to bind chaos by ever-increasing
strictures, utilizing an axiomatic based on capture and control, with vast circuits of circulation as the
primary digital architecture. This system runs on a densely articulated composition, similar to the
earlier addressed concept of sado-monetarism, based upon extensive feedback loops running
between exchange value and abuse value. This assemblage, however, has multiple levels, and not all are connected to the
grid at the same speeds; a number of different times exist within this formation, including digital time, urban time, quotidian time,
Spatially, the structure relies not on geography but “strategic digital nodes” for the
core of the system, and connectivity radiates out from these nodal points (Kroker, 2004: 125). For example, a key
transversal time, etc.
site for these points would be the Net corporation, defined as “as a self-regulating, self reflexive platform of software intelligence providing
a privileged portal into the digital universe” (Kroker, 2004: 140). Indeed, his mapping of digital capitalism has clear parallels with the shifts
underlying, driving mechanism whereby information severs itself from
embodiment. Boredom and acquisitiveness become the principle markers of this new form of
capitalism, which provides a rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the
two poles, producing an insatiable desire for both objects and a continuing stream of fresh and
intense experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious parallel would be Marx’s Capital, is
Katherine Hayles analyzes, in particular the
the two volumes by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. With all the concern over the theoretical concepts
developed in these books, it remains extremely important to understand the analysis as possessing a fundamental focus on the question of
Capitalism forms, via its structural and affective matrix, a system capable of
unparalleled cruelty and terror, and even though certain indices of well being have increased,
“exploitation grows constantly harsher, (and) lack is arranged in the most scientific ways” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983: 373). Their framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest law of capitalism
sets limits and then repels those limits, a process well known as the concept of deterrorialization.
Capitalism functions, then, by incessantly increasing the portion of constant capital, a deceptively
concise formulation that has tremendous resonance for the organization of the planet – resources
continually pour into the technological and machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the
increased exclusion of the human component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 466– 7). In other words, it not only
thrives on crisis but one of the principle definitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis;
nostalgia for a “lost time” only drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the
political economy.
most violent and destructive of tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction, abolition pure
and simple, the passion of abolition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 229). Deleuze and Guattari make clear this fourth danger does
not translate as a death drive, because for them desire is “always assembled,” a creation and a composition; here the task of thinking
becomes to address the processes of composition. The current assemblage, then, has mutated from its original organization of total war,
which has been surpassed “toward a form of peace more terrifying still,” the “peace of Terror or Survival” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 433).
this war
machine now targets the entire world, its peoples and economies. An “unspecified enemy” becomes
the continual feedback loop for this war machine, which had been originally constituted by states, but
which has now shifted into a planetary, and perhaps interstellar mode, with a seemingly insatiable
drive to organize insecurity, increase machinic enslavement, and produce a “peace that
technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467). 7 Deleuze has
Accordingly, the worldwide war machine has entered a postfascist phase, where Clausewitz has been dislocated, and
analyzed these tendencies extensively in his own work, in particular with his dissection of active and reactive forces in his book on Nietzsche
sadism that seems capable of attempting a
“perpetually effective crime,” to not only destroy (pro)creation but to prevent it from ever happening
again, a total and perpetual destruction, one produced by a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that
seeks absolute revenge in destroying life and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This tendency far
but also in his work on Sade and Masoch, where he points to a type of
outstrips what Robert Jay Lifton has described as the “Armageddonists,” in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in what he
calls the secular type, both of which see the possibility of a “world cleansing,” preparing the way for a new world order, be it religious or
otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 5– 9). Embedded within the immanence of capitalism, then, one can find forces which would make fascism seem
like “child precursors,” and Hitler’s infamous Telegram 71 would be applied to all of existence, perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467).
One final complication in terms of currently emerging subjectivities, the well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism,
as
basically driven by a certain fundamental insanity, oscillates between “two poles of delirium, one as
the molecular schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as paranoiac molar investment” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983: 315). 8 These two markers offer dramatically different possibilities for the issues of
subjectivities and agency, and questions of consumption and the political can be posed within their
dense and complex oscillations.
Information streamed capitalism ignores the underlying problem of economic rationality is one of
symbolic exchange.
Focus on rational economic science has created a bloodthirsty form of capitalism which attempts to
erase affect and makes violence inevitable. Neoliberalism constantly produces crisis to demonstrate
its capacity for control. While this system focuses on total peace, its hatred of uncertainty makes the
destruction of all life immanent.
Wiltgen 05 – (James, “Sado-Monetarism or Saint Fond-Saint Ford,” in Consumption in the Age of
Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, Berg, New York, p. 107-110)
Boredom and acquisitiveness become the principle markers of this new form of capitalism, which
provides a rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the two poles,
producing an insatiable desire for both objects and a continuing stream of fresh and intense
experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious parallel would be Marx’s Capital, is the two
volumes by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. With all the concern over the theoretical concepts developed in
these books, it remains extremely important to understand the analysis as possessing a fundamental focus on the question of political
Capitalism forms, via its structural and affective matrix, a system capable of unparalleled
cruelty and terror, and even though certain indices of well being have increased, “exploitation grows
constantly harsher, (and) lack is arranged in the most scientific ways” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 373). Their
framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest law of capitalism sets limits and then
repels those limits, a process well known as the concept of deterrorialization. Capitalism functions,
then, by incessantly increasing the portion of constant capital, a deceptively concise formulation that
has tremendous resonance for the organization of the planet – resources continually pour into the
technological and machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the increased exclusion of the human
component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 466– 7). In other words, it not only thrives on crisis but one of the
principle definitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis; nostalgia for a “lost time” only
drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the most violent and destructive of
tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of
abolition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 229). Deleuze and Guattari make clear this fourth danger does not translate as a death drive,
economy.
because for them desire is “always assembled,” a creation and a composition; here the task of thinking becomes to address the processes of
composition. The current assemblage, then, has mutated from its original organization of total war, which has been surpassed “toward a
form of peace more terrifying still,” the “peace of Terror or Survival” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 433). Accordingly, the worldwide war
this war machine now targets the entire
world, its peoples and economies. An “unspecified enemy” becomes the continual feedback loop for
this war machine, which had been originally constituted by states, but which has now shifted into a
planetary, and perhaps interstellar mode, with a seemingly insatiable drive to organize insecurity,
increase machinic enslavement, and produce a “peace that technologically frees the unlimited
material process of total war” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467). 7 Deleuze has analyzed these tendencies extensively in his own
machine has entered a postfascist phase, where Clausewitz has been dislocated, and
work, in particular with his dissection of active and reactive forces in his book on Nietzsche but also in his work on Sade and Masoch, where
he points to a type of sadism
that seems capable of attempting a “perpetually effective crime,” to not only
destroy (pro)creation but to prevent it from ever happening again, a total and perpetual destruction,
one produced by a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that seeks absolute revenge in destroying life
and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This tendency far outstrips what Robert Jay Lifton has described as the
“Armageddonists,” in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in what he calls the secular type, both of which see the possibility
of a “world cleansing,” preparing the way for a new world order, be it religious or otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 5– 9). Embedded within the
immanence of capitalism, then, one can find forces which would make fascism seem like “child precursors,” and Hitler’s infamous Telegram
71 would be applied to all of existence, perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467). One final complication in terms of currently emerging
subjectivities, the well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism,
as basically driven by a certain fundamental
insanity, oscillates between “two poles of delirium, one as the molecular schizophrenic line of escape,
and the other as paranoiac molar investment” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 315). 8 These two markers offer
dramatically different possibilities for the issues of subjectivities and agency, and questions of
consumption and the political can be posed within their dense and complex oscillations.
Warming
1NC
1NC Apoc Fatalism – Long
Their apocalyptic rhetoric produces a fatalism in the face of global warming which makes action
impossible.
Christiana Foust and William Murphy. “Revealing and Reframing Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming
Discourse.” Environmental Communications, 3:2. July 2009.
Apocalyptic rhetoric, we argue, represents a mediating frame in global warming discourse. Certain
versions of this frame may stifle individual and collective agency, due to their persistent placement of
“natural” events as catastrophic, inevitable, and outside of “human” control. Analyzing them could help
explain why some individuals take a fatalistic attitude toward, or consider their agency very small in
comparison to, the challenge of climate change. Moreover, apocalyptic framing helps us understand
two vocal minorities who might well stand in the way of building a collective will – the alarmists, who
believe global warming's “catastrophic consequences” are veritably unstoppable, and the naysayers,
who view global warming as a conspiracy created by environmentalists and the media. In the JudeoChristian religion tradition, the apocalypse refers to prophesying, revealing, or visioning the imminent
destruction of the world. Common connotations of apocalypse are influenced by pre-millennial
theology, which foregrounds the world-ending moment that precedes the second coming of Jesus
Christ. Brummett and O'Leary argue that apocalypse is so prevalent in secular as well as sacred
discourse that it constitutes its own unique genre of rhetoric. Apocalyptic rhetoric typically takes shape
in narrative form, emphasizing a catastrophic telos (end-point) somewhere in the future. A cosmic or
natural force drives the linear temporality in apocalyptic rhetoric, such that “certain events and
experiences are inevitable, unalterable, and determined by external forces beyond human control.” The
narrative in apocalyptic discourse typically posits a tragic ending - “a date or temporal horizon beyond
which human choice is superfluous, a final judgment that forecloses all individual judgments.”
Apocalyptic rhetoric prophesies (directly or implicitly) a new world order, often accompanied by
spectacular, (melo)dramatic, or fantastical images of the destruction of the current order. Common
apocalyptic discourses suggest that the social order is beyond repair. Given the “unrecuperably evil
world” and “bankrupt society on the verge of imminent” collapse – as well as the cosmic force driving
apocalyptic events – there is seemingly no reason to attempt social change once an issue is framed
apocalyptically. Like God's wrath or nuclear war, the apocalyptic scenario is so much greater than
humanity (let alone individual human efforts), that there seems little hope for intervention.
These effects are worsened by the aff's insistence on timeframe. The shorter the time-frame, the less
able to are to assert our agency, and the less likely our agency can actually do anything. By describing
a warming catastrophe in the present tense, we effectively have no agency. We're already dead, so
we might as well give up.
Christiana Foust and William Murphy. “Revealing and Reframing Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming
Discourse.” Environmental Communications, 3:2. July 2009.
A number of discursive features constitute global warming tragically: verbs which express the certainty
of catastrophic effects, a lack of perspective or shortening of time from beginning to telos, and
analogies which equate global warming with foretold apocalyptic outcomes. Each feature forecloses
human agency or frames climate change as a matter of Fate. Within the tragic variation of apocalypse,
global warming (not other “natural” or divinely ordained events or processes, such as a steady decline to
extinction which inevitably feballs all earthly species) is viewed as the demise of humanity. A close
reading of the discourse reveals important differences in the verbs, “is,” “will,” and “could,” which call
attention to variations in human agency. Predicting global warming through the world could frees space
for human action, including adaptation and mitigation. Asserting that the catastrophic telos of climate
change is happening or will occur, however, may reduce the potential for human intervention. As
Ravkin quotes British chemist James E. Lovelock, a 14-degree temperature rise “means roughly that
most of life on the planet will have to move up to the Arctic basic, to the few islands that are still
habitable and to oases on the continent. It will be a much-diminished world.” Declaring with certainty
that these negative impacts of global warming will happen suggests that a cosmic, extra-human force
determines the outcome of events.
Tragic discourse may even describe predicted events through present-tense verbs, heightening the
deterministic effect: “As the Arctic ice melts and ice shelves collapse in the Southern Ocean, vest areas
of open water are exposed. The water absorbs heat from the sun that until now was reflected by the
ice.” Struck qualifies that a warmer ocean “is expected” to reduce ocean circulation; but he concludes
with a tragic analogy: “The previous time” the oceanic conveyor-belt current stopped “15,000 years ago,
the Northern Hemisphere was plunged into a brief by brutal ice age, apparently within decades.”
Importantly, many fragments exhibit a sense of uncertainty about whether the telos is fated comically or
tragically, through the mix of is, will, and could. One of the more complex constructions we discovered is
an “if-will/would,” which pairs the hope for human agency (if) with the preordained tragic outcome
(will/would): Several climatologists believe that it is likely that the ice sheet will begin melting
uncontrollably if global temperatures climb more than 3.6 [degrees Fahrenheit]. A rapid meltdown in
Greenland would quickly raise sea levels around the world and flood coastal cities and farms. As well as
sending large icebergs down the coast, the infusion of cold, fresh water could disrupt ocean currents
such as the Gulf Stream, which help to keep eather in the Northern Hemisphere regulated. “If that
feedback kicks in,” says [climatologist Konrad] Steffen, “then the average person will worry.” The endpoints of human-animal displacements and migrations “could” set in, following an ice sheet melt that
“will begin” “if” a 3.6-degree rise in temperatures occurs. The “if/would” and “if/could” constructions
imply hope for human intervention. However, this hope is quickly diminished, as tragic texts conclude
that humans are unlikely to, or are incapable of, acting. The climatologist above suggests that the
average person will not begin to worry until after a self-reinforcing feedback loop kicks in, suggesting
that human involvement in a potentially comic narrative will not come until it is too late – rendering the
narrative tragic. The shorter the time frame is from beginning to telos, the less likely humans are to
have agency over the effects of global warming. Tragic apocalyptic discourse posits a quickened pace for
global warming: “Global warming has the feel of breaking news these days. Polar bears are drowning;
an American city is underwater; ice sheets are crumbling.” To promote a feeling of immediacy for
global warming may not, by itself, hinder human agency. Warning readers that we currently feel some
effects of global warming may promote a sense of urgency while retaining the potential for human
action. To suggest that “the fastest warming in the history or civilization [is] already under way,”
however, may thoroughly discourage readers from active participation by minimizing human agency.
Moreover, it is possible to read signs of climate change as a catastrophic telos which is already in
process: “the oceans are rising, mountain glaciers are shrinking, low-lying coastal areas are eroding, and
the very timing of the seasons is changing.” Global warming thus appear impervious to human
intervention in the current moment.
This, combined with their insistence on omnicidal doom and appeals to the
government for salvation, only serves a larger project of green governmentality,
which creates an eco-managerial regime to extend biopolitical and material
control to the entire planet, causing the very same disturbances that are the root
cause of ecological problems.
Lovbrand. 06 (Eva, Phd Canidate in environmental science at Kalmar University, Planting
Trees to Mitigate Climate Change: Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green
Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism, Feb. 2006)
Alongside the market-oriented approach to environmental problem-solving proposed by ecological
modernization, a discourse of green governmentality predominates in industrialized societies. This
discourse epitomizes a global form of power tied to the modern administrative state, mega-science and
big business. It entails the administration of life itself--individuals, populations and the natural
environment. According to the original account proposed by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s,
governmentality is associated with a multiplicity of rationalities, authorities and agencies that seek to
shape the conduct of human behavior. By affecting the choices, aspirations and lifestyles of individuals
and groups, these disciplining practices involve the power over and through the individual. Knowledge
and various forms of expertise are intrinsically linked to this bio-political fostering or management of
life. In the late 18th century Europe, when governmentality was associated with the administration of
human health, biology, criminology and medicine represented authoritative areas of expertise. In more
recent years global environmental threats have given rise to a new set of "eco-knowledges" that
extend government control to the entire planet. The current green twist to governmentality is
manifested through a notion of stewardship of nature and an all-encompassing management of its
resources. In the name of sustainable development and environmental risk management a new set of
administrative truths have emerged that expand bio-politics to all conditions under which humans live.
These new eco-knowledges and practices organize and legitimize common understandings of the
environmental reality and enforce "the right disposition of things" between humans and nature. The
numerous scientific expert advisors that have emerged on the environmental arena during the past
decades play an authoritative role in the construction of these eco-knowledges. Resting upon a notion
of sound science, these well-trained environmental professionals provide credible definitions of
environmental risks as well as legitimate methods to measure, predict and manage the same risks.
Since the growth of "big" science in the mid 20th century, a world-wide techno-scientific infrastructure
has developed that today enables environmental experts to monitor and, in many cases, even manage
the Earth's biogeochemical cycles, hydrological flows and human patterns of pollution and
environmental degradation. In the field of climate change, this physical manifestation of the green
governmentality discourse is particularly pronounced. Satellite supervision of the Earth's vegetation
cover, advanced computer modeling of atmospheric and oceanographic processes, a global grid of
meteorological stations and carbon flux towers exemplify the resource-intensive infrastructure used by
expert groups to study, monitor and predict the trajectories of human-induced climate change.
In its technocratic expression green governmentality can be understood as an elitist and totalizing
discourse that effectively marginalizes alternative understandings of the natural world. Through a
detached and powerful view from above--a "global gaze"--nature is approached as a terrestrial
infrastructure subject to state protection, management and domination. In the attempt to rationalize
human and natural conditions of life, this instrumental control over the natural world forms the basis
of a large-scale "terraforming" project that is in the process of reshaping the Earth into a planetary
order of complex socio-technical systems.
1NC Apoc Fatalism – Short
Their apocalyptic rhetoric produces a fatalism in the face of global warming which makes action
impossible.
Christiana Foust and William Murphy. “Revealing and Reframing Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming
Discourse.” Environmental Communications, 3:2. July 2009.
Apocalyptic rhetoric, we argue, represents a mediating frame in global warming discourse. Certain
versions of this frame may stifle individual and collective agency, due to their persistent placement of
“natural” events as catastrophic, inevitable, and outside of “human” control. Analyzing them could help
explain why some individuals take a fatalistic attitude toward, or consider their agency very small in
comparison to, the challenge of climate change. Moreover, apocalyptic framing helps us understand
two vocal minorities who might well stand in the way of building a collective will – the alarmists, who
believe global warming's “catastrophic consequences” are veritably unstoppable, and the naysayers,
who view global warming as a conspiracy created by environmentalists and the media. In the JudeoChristian religion tradition, the apocalypse refers to prophesying, revealing, or visioning the imminent
destruction of the world. Common connotations of apocalypse are influenced by pre-millennial
theology, which foregrounds the world-ending moment that precedes the second coming of Jesus
Christ. Brummett and O'Leary argue that apocalypse is so prevalent in secular as well as sacred
discourse that it constitutes its own unique genre of rhetoric. Apocalyptic rhetoric typically takes shape
in narrative form, emphasizing a catastrophic telos (end-point) somewhere in the future. A cosmic or
natural force drives the linear temporality in apocalyptic rhetoric, such that “certain events and
experiences are inevitable, unalterable, and determined by external forces beyond human control.” The
narrative in apocalyptic discourse typically posits a tragic ending - “a date or temporal horizon beyond
which human choice is superfluous, a final judgment that forecloses all individual judgments.”
Apocalyptic rhetoric prophesies (directly or implicitly) a new world order, often accompanied by
spectacular, (melo)dramatic, or fantastical images of the destruction of the current order. Common
apocalyptic discourses suggest that the social order is beyond repair. Given the “unrecuperably evil
world” and “bankrupt society on the verge of imminent” collapse – as well as the cosmic force driving
apocalyptic events – there is seemingly no reason to attempt social change once an issue is framed
apocalyptically. Like God's wrath or nuclear war, the apocalyptic scenario is so much greater than
humanity (let alone individual human efforts), that there seems little hope for intervention.
These effects are worsened by the aff's insistence on timeframe. The shorter the time-frame, the less
able to are to assert our agency, and the less likely our agency can actually do anything. By describing
a warming catastrophe in the present tense, we effectively have no agency. We're already dead, so
we might as well give up.
Christiana Foust and William Murphy. “Revealing and Reframing Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming
Discourse.” Environmental Communications, 3:2. July 2009.
A number of discursive features constitute global warming tragically: verbs which express the certainty
of catastrophic effects, a lack of perspective or shortening of time from beginning to telos, and
analogies which equate global warming with foretold apocalyptic outcomes. Each feature forecloses
human agency or frames climate change as a matter of Fate. Within the tragic variation of apocalypse,
global warming (not other “natural” or divinely ordained events or processes, such as a steady decline to
extinction which inevitably feballs all earthly species) is viewed as the demise of humanity. A close
reading of the discourse reveals important differences in the verbs, “is,” “will,” and “could,” which call
attention to variations in human agency. Predicting global warming through the world could frees space
for human action, including adaptation and mitigation. Asserting that the catastrophic telos of climate
change is happening or will occur, however, may reduce the potential for human intervention. As
Ravkin quotes British chemist James E. Lovelock, a 14-degree temperature rise “means roughly that
most of life on the planet will have to move up to the Arctic basic, to the few islands that are still
habitable and to oases on the continent. It will be a much-diminished world.” Declaring with certainty
that these negative impacts of global warming will happen suggests that a cosmic, extra-human force
determines the outcome of events.
Tragic discourse may even describe predicted events through present-tense verbs, heightening the
deterministic effect: “As the Arctic ice melts and ice shelves collapse in the Southern Ocean, vest areas
of open water are exposed. The water absorbs heat from the sun that until now was reflected by the
ice.” Struck qualifies that a warmer ocean “is expected” to reduce ocean circulation; but he concludes
with a tragic analogy: “The previous time” the oceanic conveyor-belt current stopped “15,000 years ago,
the Northern Hemisphere was plunged into a brief by brutal ice age, apparently within decades.”
Importantly, many fragments exhibit a sense of uncertainty about whether the telos is fated comically or
tragically, through the mix of is, will, and could. One of the more complex constructions we discovered is
an “if-will/would,” which pairs the hope for human agency (if) with the preordained tragic outcome
(will/would): Several climatologists believe that it is likely that the ice sheet will begin melting
uncontrollably if global temperatures climb more than 3.6 [degrees Fahrenheit]. A rapid meltdown in
Greenland would quickly raise sea levels around the world and flood coastal cities and farms. As well as
sending large icebergs down the coast, the infusion of cold, fresh water could disrupt ocean currents
such as the Gulf Stream, which help to keep eather in the Northern Hemisphere regulated. “If that
feedback kicks in,” says [climatologist Konrad] Steffen, “then the average person will worry.” The endpoints of human-animal displacements and migrations “could” set in, following an ice sheet melt that
“will begin” “if” a 3.6-degree rise in temperatures occurs. The “if/would” and “if/could” constructions
imply hope for human intervention. However, this hope is quickly diminished, as tragic texts conclude
that humans are unlikely to, or are incapable of, acting. The climatologist above suggests that the
average person will not begin to worry until after a self-reinforcing feedback loop kicks in, suggesting
that human involvement in a potentially comic narrative will not come until it is too late – rendering the
narrative tragic. The shorter the time frame is from beginning to telos, the less likely humans are to
have agency over the effects of global warming. Tragic apocalyptic discourse posits a quickened pace for
global warming: “Global warming has the feel of breaking news these days. Polar bears are drowning;
an American city is underwater; ice sheets are crumbling.” To promote a feeling of immediacy for
global warming may not, by itself, hinder human agency. Warning readers that we currently feel some
effects of global warming may promote a sense of urgency while retaining the potential for human
action. To suggest that “the fastest warming in the history or civilization [is] already under way,”
however, may thoroughly discourage readers from active participation by minimizing human agency.
Moreover, it is possible to read signs of climate change as a catastrophic telos which is already in
process: “the oceans are rising, mountain glaciers are shrinking, low-lying coastal areas are eroding, and
the very timing of the seasons is changing.” Global warming thus appear impervious to human
intervention in the current moment.
2NC
2NC Link
The affirmative would have you believe that the world is on the brink of environmental
catastrophe, but luckily for us they have the answer to solve warming, cooling, nuclear war,
the impacts go on forever. However, extend our first piece of Foust and Murphy 09 evidence
that says they only use this apocalyptic rhetoric to instill a sense of fatalism within the
populous in the face of larger than life impacts. This makes change impossible.
Our second piece of Foust and Murphy 09 evidence says that this apocalyptic framing uses
quick time frames in order to destroy human agency. By describing the impacts as already
being underway, elites use this rhetoric to make us give up. This only guarantees their
impacts. This elitism is the new form of millenialism which makes their impacts inevitable.
This all culminates in a form of biopolitics which is the root cause of the problems in the first
place. That is our Lovbrand 06 evidence which says that this is typified in green
governmentality due to its insistence on expertize to naturalize and rationalize all human
behavior.
2NC Impact
Extend our Lovbrand 06 evidence. Their form of biopolitical control dominates all political
life making us passive to the domination of social elites. This denial of agency only
contributes to the system that created the problem in the first place, makes all of their
impacts inevitable.
Biopower is the attempt to secure life in the absence of risk or difference. It risks war,
ecological catastrophe, and extinction. Outweighs all other impacts.
William Bogard. Deleuze and New Technology: “Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of
Technology”. Part 1: Control. 2009. Deleuze Connections Series. Edinburg University Press.
ISBN: 978 0 7486 3338 8. Editors: Mark Poster and David Savat. Pg 21 - 23
the
problem of the information common involves not only class and labour issues but the control
of life in all its complexity. They borrow Foucault's concept of 'biopower' to name the form of sovereignty that today rules over the
new common (Foucault 1978; Hardt and Negri 2004: 1 8-25) . 1 1 Biopower is the negative form of the common. It is a way of life that
threatens the planet with destruction and death (war, ecological catastrophe, the annihilation
of species) . It is not just technical production, however. Hardt and Negri describe the global context of biopower as a
permanent state of civil war, governed by exceptionalism and unilateralism in global politics
and economics, high-intensity police actions, preemptive strikes, and of course network
control. The dominant climate of the new common is fear and greed, accompanied by the
need for security (or the absence of risk) (Beck 1992, 1999) . In postmodernity, the need for security
replaces defence as the moral justification for global police interventions of all kinds, in military matters to be
sure, but also in economic, political and cultural affairs, in matters of health, sexuality, education, entertainment, and so on.
'War' and policing become the frameworks through which all problems are recognised and
addressed, both in the relations of states to other states, but also of states to their own populations. In fact, when
it comes to the multiplicity of wars in postmodernity, the old categories of international or intra-national conflict no longer apply. The regime
of biopower, like the modern system of penality, has no walls and is truly a planetary form of sovereignty
and a totalising form of immaterial enclosure; it dismantles the old oppositions between public and private spheres,
Ultimately, immaterial production is geared not just to the manufacture of goods or services. Hardt and Negri recognise that
erases the economic and political boundaries between states, and aims at the absolute elimination of risk in advance through 'total information
awareness' .12 Biopower is network control of the common, of the production of life itself.
2NC Anthro Trick
Placing warming at the center of debate, making it the first priority of environmental
policy, belies anthropocentrism – reject that shit because you only care about environment
when it has potential to affect you.
Crist, prof. of Science and Technology in Society @ Virginia Tech, 2006 (Eileen, “Beyond the
Climate Crisis: a Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos 141, Winter, pg. 29-55, Online)
The knowledge that biodiversity is in deep trouble has been available for at least three decades,
but this momentous event has never inspired the urgency that climate change has triggered in a
handful of years. This seems to be a blatant manifestation of anthropocentrism (the idée fixe
that human interests, including short-term and non-vital ones, always come before all
others), for climate change is perceived as threatening people directly— as the summer 2003
European heat wave, Hurricane Katrina, and other extreme weather exemplifies. The loss of
life’s diversity and abundance, on the other hand, is not widely regarded as harboring a
survival risk for human beings. After all, countless species, subspecies, ecosystems,
populations of wild animals and plants, ancient forests, wetlands, and so on, have been eclipsed
or diminished, and yet, to cite an anti-environmentalist cliché, “the sky did not fall.”
Environment
1NC
1NC Fem – Long
The discourse of control and making the environment into an OBJECT of intellectual inquiry recreates
the same masculine discourse we critique as well as create a self-fufilling prophecy that makes
environmental destruction inevitable
J. Ann Tickner 92, -[Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 124-6]
Since women have been associated with a devalued nature through these hierarchical dualisms,
women have a particular are often the worst victims of environmental degradation. But just as I have
argued against perceiving women as victims in the protector/protected discourse of national
security, so women must not be seen solely as victims of environmental degradation but also as
agents who must participate equally in the solution of these problems. Since women have not
been well represented in national and international institutions dealing with the environment,
their contribution to working for ecological security has been largely at the grassroots level. For example, the
Chipko movement, which began with women hugging trees as a protest against cutting them down in the Chamoli district of Uttar
Pradesh in 1973, met with some success when Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi issued a fifteen-year ban on the commercial
felling of the forests of Uttar Pradesh. Women are also taking part in projects of reforestation; Kenya's Green Belt Movement, started
in 1977 by the National Council of Women, involves women in the establishment of "Green Belt communities" and small tree
nurseries.69 The kind of knowledge that women bring to these various environmental movements is
gained from experience as producers and providers for daily household needs. However, the belief
that this type of knowledge cannot be "scientific" has kept it from being recognized by development
and environmental "experts" as well as foreign policymakers. As long as metaphors such as "global housekeeping"
associate ecological security with the devalued realm of women, it will not become an issue of priority on the foreign policy agendas
of states or in the mainstream discipline of international relations. While it has paid little direct attention to
environmental issues, the conventional discipline of international relations has relied to a great
extent on modernity's mechanistic view of nature in framing its assumptions about the behavior of
states in the international system. Feminist perspectives on ecology reveal not only the
hierarchical relationship between humans and nature that has grown out of this worldview but also the
extent to which this unequal relationship interacts with other forms of domination and
subordination, including gender relations. The hierarchical dualisms discussed in this chapter, such as
culture/nature, civilized/wild, North/South, rich/poor, public/private, and international/local,
have been characteristic of the way in which we describe world politics and the interaction of
states with their natural environment. A feminist perspective would argue that not until the boundaries of
inequality and domination these dualisms represent are transcended can true ecological security
be achieved. Only through the emergence of a system of values that simultaneously respects
nature, women, and adversity of cultures-- norms that have been missing from the historical practices of
international statecraft-- can models that promise an ecologically secure future be devised.
The continued practice of militarization ensures the continuation of present and future ecocide
Cuomo, 96- [Chris Cuomo, Ph.D., 1992, University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Philosophy University of
Cincinnati Hypatia Fall
1996.Vol.11, Iss. 4; pg. 30]
The feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its destruction in
warfare is easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect the extent to
which military ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transna- tional capitalism and other forms of
human oppression and exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps
and uranium mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of all United States defense con- tracts
One could go on for volumes
about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the disruption
of wildlife, habitats, communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices. There are
many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans aim to kill and harm each
other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices in which we displace, destroy, or seriously
modify nonhuman communities, species, and ecosystems in the name of human interests. An early illustration of these
(Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7).
connections was made by Rachel Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962), in which she described insecticides as the
inadvertent offspring of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace ways in which insecticides were part of the
Western-defined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family farm and made the worldwide system of food
production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto.
Military practices are no different from other human
practices that damage and irreparably modify nature. They are often a result of cost-benefit analyses that pretend
to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider nonhuman entities except in terms of their use value for humans and
they nearly always create unforeseeable effects for humans and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime
practices are actually more destructive than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power,
and, because they function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of
moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by environmentalists,
especially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that "national security" is an adequate excuse
If environmental destruction is a necessary aspect of war and the
peacetime practices of military institutions, an analysis of war which includes its embeddedness in peacetime
militarism is necessary to address the environmettal effects of war. Such a perspective must pay adequate
attention to what is required to prepare for war in a technological age, and how women and other Others are
affected by the realities of contemporary military institutions and practices.
for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16).
1NC Fem – Short
The discourse of control and making the environment into an OBJECT of intellectual inquiry recreates
the same masculine discourse we critique as well as create a self-fufilling prophecy that makes
environmental destruction inevitable
J. Ann Tickner 92, -[Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 124-6]
Since women have been associated with a devalued nature through these hierarchical dualisms,
women have a particular are often the worst victims of environmental degradation. But just as I have
argued against perceiving women as victims in the protector/protected discourse of national
security, so women must not be seen solely as victims of environmental degradation but also as
agents who must participate equally in the solution of these problems. Since women have not
been well represented in national and international institutions dealing with the environment,
their contribution to working for ecological security has been largely at the grassroots level. For example, the
Chipko movement, which began with women hugging trees as a protest against cutting them down in the Chamoli district of Uttar
Pradesh in 1973, met with some success when Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi issued a fifteen-year ban on the commercial
felling of the forests of Uttar Pradesh. Women are also taking part in projects of reforestation; Kenya's Green Belt Movement, started
in 1977 by the National Council of Women, involves women in the establishment of "Green Belt communities" and small tree
nurseries.69 The kind of knowledge that women bring to these various environmental movements is
gained from experience as producers and providers for daily household needs. However, the belief
that this type of knowledge cannot be "scientific" has kept it from being recognized by development
and environmental "experts" as well as foreign policymakers. As long as metaphors such as "global housekeeping"
associate ecological security with the devalued realm of women, it will not become an issue of priority on the foreign policy agendas
of states or in the mainstream discipline of international relations. While it has paid little direct attention to
environmental issues, the conventional discipline of international relations has relied to a great
extent on modernity's mechanistic view of nature in framing its assumptions about the behavior of
states in the international system. Feminist perspectives on ecology reveal not only the
hierarchical relationship between humans and nature that has grown out of this worldview but also the
extent to which this unequal relationship interacts with other forms of domination and
subordination, including gender relations. The hierarchical dualisms discussed in this chapter, such as
culture/nature, civilized/wild, North/South, rich/poor, public/private, and international/local,
have been characteristic of the way in which we describe world politics and the interaction of
states with their natural environment. A feminist perspective would argue that not until the boundaries of
inequality and domination these dualisms represent are transcended can true ecological security
be achieved. Only through the emergence of a system of values that simultaneously respects
nature, women, and adversity of cultures-- norms that have been missing from the historical practices of
international statecraft-- can models that promise an ecologically secure future be devised.
2NC
2NC Overview
The aff’s scenarios for ecological destruction only further the masculine-feminine dichotomy we
critique
This reinforces an inevitable cycle of masculine domination - 2 implications
1. Epistemological indict to the 1AC – all their authors are caught within the privileged circle of
masculinity to further the regime of domination; they can’t imagine to re-evaluate the environment
through a feminist perspective
2. Turns case – inevitably militarizes us to dominate and control the biosphere, destroying the
environment; makes their impacts inevitable.
Oil
1NC
1NC Automobility – Long
A shift to cultures proliferated on the ideologies of efficient travel only serve to continue social
exclusions responsible for global violence
Springs 7 [Mary Alice, School of humanities @ college of charlston “Inequity in transportation: The
Problem with Auto Hegemony]
It is well known that ubiquitous use of the automobile has become a threat to the environment.
However, humans have also become negatively affected by the proliferation of the current autocentered culture, particularly low-income minority groups. Those who have access to a vehicle have a
great advantage in our society while those who do not suffer in many ways. The current style of
American transportation planning virtually ignores the needs of those who do not have access to a
personal vehicle. Since low-income minority groups are disproportionately represented in this
category, traditional transportation planning could be observed as structural discrimination. In recent
history, inadequate appropriation of funds towards public transportation in the United States has
been mostly to blame for the lack of safe, efficient travel options of those who do not have access to a
car. Medical ailments have been linked to the increased frequency with which low-income minorities
live in areas with high vehicular ambient air pollution, even though these individuals are less likely to
produce that pollution. As private car hegemony is globalizing, poor minority groups in developing
nations are at risk of experiencing these same phenomena as more and more of their valuable
agricultural land is starting to be usurped for the purposes of building road infrastructure for the
automobile. Amid all the problems our society is facing, a new paradigm shift towards equitable and
sustainable transportation planning is desperately needed.
Automobility causes a shift away from public transportation to a politics valuing the elites – this
causes racist disparity
Springs 7 [Mary Alice, School of humanities @ college of charlston “Inequity in transportation: The
Problem with Auto Hegemony]
Rising personal income, increased automobile availability, low fuel prices, and substantial public
investment in highway infrastructure have combined to reduce the demand for public transit (Garrett
and Taylor 6). According to Thomas Sanchez et al., eighty percent of all surface transportation funds are
spent on highways in the U.S., while only twenty percent goes towards public transportation (11). Since
the establishment of the Urban Mass Transit Administration in 1964, public transportation has received
approximately fifty billion dollars, while, since 1956, roadway projects have received over two
hundred and five billion dollars (Dittmar and Chen qtd. in Bullard, “Thirteenth” 2). Without adequate
funding, public transportation authorities have had to raise fares to cover their budgets (Sanchez et al.
13). This is having a substantial impact on “the poorest twenty percent of American households, those
earning less than $13,908 (after taxes) per year, who spend 40.2 percent of their take home pay on
transportation” (Surface Transportation Policy Project). When trying to explain why public
transportation services receive inadequate funding, an analysis of the demographics of transit
ridership stirs suspicion of discrimination. John Pucher and John Renne have analyzed data compiled by
the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which examines American travel trends. In their study of
the 2001 NHTS data, they determine that low-income individuals and minorities make up sixty-three
percent of the nation’s transit ridership (49, 67). Pucher and Renne argue that “the poor, racial and
ethnic minorities and the elderly have much lower mobility rates than the general population” (49).
The survey showed that increase in mobility strongly correlates with increasing household income
(Pucher and Renne 54). A higher proportion of the economically disadvantaged, which features a
disproportionately high number of minorities, therefore depend on public transit. The allocation of
state transportation funds is determined by state departments of transportation and Metropolitan
Planning Organizations (MPOs). Under-representation of urban populations occurs frequently as board
representatives are usually selected based on geographical district boundaries that are drawn
regardless of population density, usually resulting in higher suburban representation (Sanchez et al.
33). Individuals within these organizations and other politically influential stakeholders will thus
ultimately determine how public funds are divided and spent on transportation (Sanchez et al. 33).
Whether they are private or public representatives, people with more political power are able to sway
local transportation markets more than the average person. There are no existing effective
mechanisms to ensure that agencies will make an effort to “seek out and consider” the needs of lowincome and minority constituents (Sanchez et al. 33 and Federal Highway Administration 23 CFR
§450.316). Until local governments establish and strictly enforce initiatives to examine the
transportation priorities of transit dependents, inequalities between public and private transportation
and between urban and suburban commuting will continue to disadvantage the poor. There has been
a lack of congressional and state legislative acknowledgment of the importance of public transit. Jason
Henderson notes Vukan Vuchic’s proposal of the “inevitability hypothesis,” which “suggests that present
trends in the growth of automobility are natural and inevitable” (qtd. in Henderson 294). Vuchic
suggests that scholars and organizations such as the Transportation Research Board have also
subscribed to this ideology. The problem is that the U.S. Congress, which is advised by such entities,
does not have much interest “in making cities more transit-friendly or less automobile dependent if it
means limiting parking supply, increasing fuel taxes, or taking away road space—in other words,
directly contesting the spaces of automobility” (Henderson 294-5). When those in power have no
incentive to improve the transportation opportunities for those who depend on public transportation,
the natural consequence is that those in power ignore the needs of the poor, comprised
disproportionately of racial minorities. This, again, suggests a discriminatory and racist aspect of
transportation policies currently pursued in the U.S. People who are dependent on public transit as
their primary mode of transportation are what Mark Garrett and Brian Taylor call “transit
dependents”(6). It is crucial that transit dependents have a well functioning public transit system
because it “is vital for access to jobs, schooling, medical care, and other necessities of life” (Garrett
and Taylor 6). In recent years, transit operators have felt public pressure to expand their services in
order to reduce traffic congestion and pollution (Garrett and Taylor 7). This shift in public transit funds
has primarily gone to serve the suburbs, which draws funds away from downtown bus services “in an
attempt to appease more affluent constituencies and lure middle-class riders back from automobiles”
(Garrett and Taylor 13). Indeed, municipal officials have increasingly geared their policies towards
“discretionary commuters,” as Mark Garrett and Brian Taylor (9) call them, or what Robert D. Bullard et
al. refer to as “choice riders” (179). These titles refer to suburbanites who typically have access to a
private vehicle and do not necessarily rely on public transportation. Unfortunately, the result of this
phenomenon is diminished accessibility for urban residents (Garrett and Taylor 9). As funds are drawn
away from downtown transit services and funneled into suburban commuter services such as express
bus services and light rail systems, fares of inner-city bus and subway systems naturally are driven up
(Garrett and Taylor 7). Because the majority of labor opportunities for low-income workers are in the
city, these urban residents rely most heavily on the inner-city public transit services to get to work
(Qin Shen qtd. in Garrett and Taylor 9). According to Alan Pisarki, “although central cities contain only 20
percent of all workers, they still account for 69 percent of all transit use. In contrast, suburbs have half
of all workers but generate only 29 percent of transit trips” (qtd. in Garrett and Taylor 9). Poor urban
residents, who tend to work within the city and already spend a higher percentage of their income on
transportation, are more vulnerable to price increases because of their dependence on public
transportation (Garrett and Taylor 20). On the other hand, suburban commuter services have to be
heavily subsidized in order to keep fares low so as to keep these services competitive with the
automobile, which suburbanites have the freedom to use as they please (Garrett and Taylor 20, 22). In
order to maintain social equity for low-income individuals who cannot afford a car, more funding needs
to go towards inner-city transportation systems. Another malady of auto hegemony is the phenomenon
of the construction of highways through low income and minority neighborhoods. One case study of this
occurrence took place in Oakland, CA. After the Loma Pleta earthquake damaged the Cypress freeway,
which was originally built through the West Side, residents of that area fought the state highways agency
to cease its rebuilding (Shutkin 77). Community organizations objected to the project because, they
argued, it forcibly dislocated residents, destroyed homes and businesses, impaired local economic
development, and generally disrupted the life of the community (Shutkin 77). The residents had to
resort to civil rights laws in order to protect the vitality of their community, but they did eventually
prevail (Shutkin 77). While this particular community was successful at diverting the rebuilt highway
from their area, this case reveals a trend: communities that contain economically disadvantaged racial and
ethnic minorities are more likely to have highway construction in their locale than any other community.
1NC Automobility – Short
A shift to cultures proliferated on the ideologies of efficient travel only serve to continue social
exclusions responsible for global violence
Springs 7 [Mary Alice, School of humanities @ college of charlston “Inequity in transportation: The
Problem with Auto Hegemony]
It is well known that ubiquitous use of the automobile has become a threat to the environment.
However, humans have also become negatively affected by the proliferation of the current autocentered culture, particularly low-income minority groups. Those who have access to a vehicle have a
great advantage in our society while those who do not suffer in many ways. The current style of
American transportation planning virtually ignores the needs of those who do not have access to a
personal vehicle. Since low-income minority groups are disproportionately represented in this
category, traditional transportation planning could be observed as structural discrimination. In recent
history, inadequate appropriation of funds towards public transportation in the United States has
been mostly to blame for the lack of safe, efficient travel options of those who do not have access to a
car. Medical ailments have been linked to the increased frequency with which low-income minorities
live in areas with high vehicular ambient air pollution, even though these individuals are less likely to
produce that pollution. As private car hegemony is globalizing, poor minority groups in developing
nations are at risk of experiencing these same phenomena as more and more of their valuable
agricultural land is starting to be usurped for the purposes of building road infrastructure for the
automobile. Amid all the problems our society is facing, a new paradigm shift towards equitable and
sustainable transportation planning is desperately needed.
2NC
2NC Overview
The nature of modern transportation is inherently exclusionary to minority groups because of
unequitable fund distribution
That causes a racist disparity between the automobile elite and the motorless minorities –2
implications
1. Epistemological indict to the aff – all their authors exemplify the elitist view of automobile-centered
culture; the aff is caught within a perpetuation of racism
2. Turns case – perpetuating racism undermines all grounds of morality and makes violent politics and
their impacts inevitable; only by internally racially isolating minorities makes possible disposing entire
expendable populations.
2NC Racism Impact
[READ IN THE LONG VERSION]
Automobility causes a shift away from public transportation to a politics valuing the elites – this
causes racist disparity
Springs 7 [Mary Alice, School of humanities @ college of charlston “Inequity in transportation: The
Problem with Auto Hegemony]
Rising personal income, increased automobile availability, low fuel prices, and substantial public
investment in highway infrastructure have combined to reduce the demand for public transit (Garrett
and Taylor 6). According to Thomas Sanchez et al., eighty percent of all surface transportation funds are
spent on highways in the U.S., while only twenty percent goes towards public transportation (11). Since
the establishment of the Urban Mass Transit Administration in 1964, public transportation has received
approximately fifty billion dollars, while, since 1956, roadway projects have received over two
hundred and five billion dollars (Dittmar and Chen qtd. in Bullard, “Thirteenth” 2). Without adequate
funding, public transportation authorities have had to raise fares to cover their budgets (Sanchez et al.
13). This is having a substantial impact on “the poorest twenty percent of American households, those
earning less than $13,908 (after taxes) per year, who spend 40.2 percent of their take home pay on
transportation” (Surface Transportation Policy Project). When trying to explain why public
transportation services receive inadequate funding, an analysis of the demographics of transit
ridership stirs suspicion of discrimination. John Pucher and John Renne have analyzed data compiled by
the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which examines American travel trends. In their study of
the 2001 NHTS data, they determine that low-income individuals and minorities make up sixty-three
percent of the nation’s transit ridership (49, 67). Pucher and Renne argue that “the poor, racial and
ethnic minorities and the elderly have much lower mobility rates than the general population” (49).
The survey showed that increase in mobility strongly correlates with increasing household income
(Pucher and Renne 54). A higher proportion of the economically disadvantaged, which features a
disproportionately high number of minorities, therefore depend on public transit. The allocation of
state transportation funds is determined by state departments of transportation and Metropolitan
Planning Organizations (MPOs). Under-representation of urban populations occurs frequently as board
representatives are usually selected based on geographical district boundaries that are drawn
regardless of population density, usually resulting in higher suburban representation (Sanchez et al.
33). Individuals within these organizations and other politically influential stakeholders will thus
ultimately determine how public funds are divided and spent on transportation (Sanchez et al. 33).
Whether they are private or public representatives, people with more political power are able to sway
local transportation markets more than the average person. There are no existing effective
mechanisms to ensure that agencies will make an effort to “seek out and consider” the needs of lowincome and minority constituents (Sanchez et al. 33 and Federal Highway Administration 23 CFR
§450.316). Until local governments establish and strictly enforce initiatives to examine the
transportation priorities of transit dependents, inequalities between public and private transportation
and between urban and suburban commuting will continue to disadvantage the poor. There has been
a lack of congressional and state legislative acknowledgment of the importance of public transit. Jason
Henderson notes Vukan Vuchic’s proposal of the “inevitability hypothesis,” which “suggests that present
trends in the growth of automobility are natural and inevitable” (qtd. in Henderson 294). Vuchic
suggests that scholars and organizations such as the Transportation Research Board have also
subscribed to this ideology. The problem is that the U.S. Congress, which is advised by such entities,
does not have much interest “in making cities more transit-friendly or less automobile dependent if it
means limiting parking supply, increasing fuel taxes, or taking away road space—in other words,
directly contesting the spaces of automobility” (Henderson 294-5). When those in power have no
incentive to improve the transportation opportunities for those who depend on public transportation,
the natural consequence is that those in power ignore the needs of the poor, comprised
disproportionately of racial minorities. This, again, suggests a discriminatory and racist aspect of
transportation policies currently pursued in the U.S. People who are dependent on public transit as
their primary mode of transportation are what Mark Garrett and Brian Taylor call “transit
dependents”(6). It is crucial that transit dependents have a well functioning public transit system
because it “is vital for access to jobs, schooling, medical care, and other necessities of life” (Garrett
and Taylor 6). In recent years, transit operators have felt public pressure to expand their services in
order to reduce traffic congestion and pollution (Garrett and Taylor 7). This shift in public transit funds
has primarily gone to serve the suburbs, which draws funds away from downtown bus services “in an
attempt to appease more affluent constituencies and lure middle-class riders back from automobiles”
(Garrett and Taylor 13). Indeed, municipal officials have increasingly geared their policies towards
“discretionary commuters,” as Mark Garrett and Brian Taylor (9) call them, or what Robert D. Bullard et
al. refer to as “choice riders” (179). These titles refer to suburbanites who typically have access to a
private vehicle and do not necessarily rely on public transportation. Unfortunately, the result of this
phenomenon is diminished accessibility for urban residents (Garrett and Taylor 9). As funds are drawn
away from downtown transit services and funneled into suburban commuter services such as express
bus services and light rail systems, fares of inner-city bus and subway systems naturally are driven up
(Garrett and Taylor 7). Because the majority of labor opportunities for low-income workers are in the
city, these urban residents rely most heavily on the inner-city public transit services to get to work
(Qin Shen qtd. in Garrett and Taylor 9). According to Alan Pisarki, “although central cities contain only 20
percent of all workers, they still account for 69 percent of all transit use. In contrast, suburbs have half
of all workers but generate only 29 percent of transit trips” (qtd. in Garrett and Taylor 9). Poor urban
residents, who tend to work within the city and already spend a higher percentage of their income on
transportation, are more vulnerable to price increases because of their dependence on public
transportation (Garrett and Taylor 20). On the other hand, suburban commuter services have to be
heavily subsidized in order to keep fares low so as to keep these services competitive with the
automobile, which suburbanites have the freedom to use as they please (Garrett and Taylor 20, 22). In
order to maintain social equity for low-income individuals who cannot afford a car, more funding needs
to go towards inner-city transportation systems. Another malady of auto hegemony is the phenomenon
of the construction of highways through low income and minority neighborhoods. One case study of this
occurrence took place in Oakland, CA. After the Loma Pleta earthquake damaged the Cypress freeway,
which was originally built through the West Side, residents of that area fought the state highways agency
to cease its rebuilding (Shutkin 77). Community organizations objected to the project because, they
argued, it forcibly dislocated residents, destroyed homes and businesses, impaired local economic
development, and generally disrupted the life of the community (Shutkin 77). The residents had to
resort to civil rights laws in order to protect the vitality of their community, but they did eventually
prevail (Shutkin 77). While this particular community was successful at diverting the rebuilt highway
from their area, this case reveals a trend: communities that contain economically disadvantaged racial and
ethnic minorities are more likely to have highway construction in their locale than any other community.
Biodiversity
1NC
1NC BioSecurity – Long
Predictions of ecosystem collapse as a result of species loss are inaccurate and devalues species
whose loss does not cause an apocalypse. Focusing on the effects of slow degradation, not some
future crisis, will do more to protect biodiversity.
Davidson 2000-BioScience 50(5):433-440. 2000 Economic Growth and the Environment:Alternatives to
the Limits Paradigm CARLOS DAVIDSON Carlos Davidson is a conservation biologist with a background in
economics. He is currently studying landscape-scale patterns of amphibian decline in California in the
Section of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis
The original rivet metaphor (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981) referred to species extinction and biodiversity loss
as a limit to human population and the economy. A wave of species extinctions is occurring that is
unprecedented in human history (Wilson 1988, 1992, Reid and Miller 1989). The decline of biodiversity
represents irreplaceable and incalculable losses to future generations of humans. Is biodiversity loss a
case of limits, as suggested by the rivet metaphor, or is it a continuum of degradation with local tears, as
suggested by the tapestry metaphor? In the rivet metaphor, it is not the loss of species by itself that is
the proposed limit but rather some sort of ecosystem collapse that would be triggered by the species
loss. But it is unclear that biodiversity loss will lead to ecosystem collapse. Research in this area is still in
its infancy, and results from the limited experimental studies are mixed. Some studies show a positive
relationship between diversity and some aspect of ecosystem function, such as the rate of nitrogen
cycling (Kareiva 1996, Tilman et al. 1996). Others support the redundant species concept (Lawton and
Brown 1993, Andren et al. 1995), which holds that above some low number, additional species are
redundant in terms of ecosystem function. Still other studies support the idiosyncratic species model
(Lawton 1994), in which loss of some species reduces some aspect of ecosystem function, whereas loss
of others may increase that aspect of ecosystem function. The relationship between biodiversity and
ecosystem function is undoubtedly more complex than any simple metaphor. Nonetheless, I believe that
the tapestry metaphor provides a more useful view of biodiversity loss than the rivet metaphor. A
species extinction is like a thread pulled from the tapestry. With each thread lost, the tapestry gradually
becomes threadbare. The loss of some species may lead to local tears. Although everything is linked to
everything else, ecosystems are not delicately balanced, clocklike mechanisms in which the loss of a part
leads to collapse. For example, I study California frogs, some of which are disappearing. Although it is
possible that the disappearances signal some as yet unknown threat to humans (the miner's canary
argument), the loss of the frogs themselves is unlikely to have major ecosystem effects. The situation is
the same for most rare organisms, which make up the bulk of threatened and endangered species. For
example, if the black toad (Bufo exsul) were to disappear from the few desert springs in which it lives,
even careful study would be unlikely to reveal ecosystem changes. To argue that there are not limits is
not to claim that biodiversity losses do not matter. Rather, in calling for a stop to the destruction, it is
the losses themselves that count, not a putative cliff that humans will fall off of somewhere down the
road.
2NC
2NC Overview
Their notions of saving select species over others devalues the rest of the biosphere; only by gradually
confronting biodiversity losses, not specific crises instances, can preserve biodiversity in the long-run
makes their impacts inevitable – without focusing on the ongoing slow degradation of the biosphere,
eventually the entire biosphere will inevitably collapse
1NC
1NC Natives Turn – Long
Their obsession with biodiversity perpetuates a drive towards ecological sustainability through
colonization and extermination which onlyw supercharges the global engine of violence against
indigenous peoples.
Escobar, Associate professor of anthropology at the university of Massachusetts, 1995 (Arturo,
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, p. 203-5)
The rising discourse of biodiversity in particular achieves this feat. In this discourse, nature becomes a
source of value in itself. Species of flora and fauna are valuable not so much as resources but as
reservoirs of value that research and knowledge, along with biotechnology, can release for capital and
communities. This is one of the reasons why ethnic and peasant communities in the tropical rain-forest
areas of the world are finally being recognized as owners of their territories (or what is left of them), but
only to the extent that they accept to treat it—and themselves—as reservoirs of capital. Communities
and social movements in various parts of the world are being enticed by biodiversity projects to become
"stewards of the social and natural 'capitals' whose sustainable management is, henceforth, both their
responsibility and the business of the world economy" (M. O'Connor 1993, 5). Once the semiotic
conquest of nature is completed, the sustainable and rational use of the environment becomes an
imperative. Here lies the underlying logic of sustainable development and biodiversity discourses. This
new capitalization of nature does not only rely on the semiotic conquest of territories (in terms of
biodiversity reserves and new schemes for land ownership and control) and communities (as "stewards"
of nature); it also requires the semiotic conquest of local knowledges, to the extent that "saving nature"
demands the valuation of local knowledges of sustaining nature. Modern biology is beginning to find
local knowledge systems to be useful complements. In these discourses, however, knowledge is seen as
something that exists in the "minds" of individual persons (shamans, sages, elders) about external
"objects" (plants, species), the medical or economic "utility" of which their bearers are supposed to
"transmit" to the modern experts. Local knowledge is not seen as a complex cultural construction,
involving not objects but movements and events that are profoundly historical and relational. These
forms of knowledge usually have entirely different modes of operation and relations to social and
cultural fields (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). By bringing them into the politics of science, local forms of
knowledge are recodified by modern science in utilitarian ways. A brief example will illustrate the logic
of the two forms of capital in its ecological phase. The Pacific Coast region of Colombia is one of the
areas with the highest biological diversity in the world. Covering about 5.4 million hectares, it is
populated by about eight hundred thousand Afro-Colombians and forty thousand indigenous people
belonging to various ethnic groups, particularly Emberas and Waunanas. Since the early 1980s, the
government has been intent on developing the region and has formulated ambitious development plans
(DNP 1983, 1992). Capital has been flowing to parts of the region in the form of investment in African
palm oil, large-scale shrimp cultivation, mining, timber, and tourism. The plans and the investments
operate in the modern form of capital. They contribute to ecological degradation and the displacement
and proletarization of local people. Parallel to this development, however, the government has also
launched a more modest but symbolically ambitious project for the protection of the region's almost
legendary biological diversity (GEF-PNUD 1993). This project forms part of the global strategy for the
protection of biodiversity advanced by the World Bank's Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the
United Nations. The project has an innovative design, including aspects such as the systematization of
both modern and traditional knowledge of biodiversity and the promotion of organizational forms by
the black and indigenous communities of the region.
Hegemony
1NC
1NC Zizek Turn
The US concern for power projection places us in a state of paranoia- makes impacts inevitable
Zizek 2005, [Slavoj, Give Iranian Nukes a Chance, 8-11-5, http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm,]
Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic rules and legal
constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however, the nature of this link between
power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing power structures no longer relied on
their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible threat in order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather,
the threat was externalized, displaced onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible (and, for that reason, allpowerful and omni-present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structure’s permanent
state of emergency. Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy, Americans the threat
of Communism-all the way up to today’s “war on terror.” The threats posed by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the
logic of the preemptive strike. Precisely because the threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it
to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of
Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense-which, of course, are what pose
the true threat to democracy and human rights (e.g., the London police’s recent execution of the innocent Brazilian
electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes). Classic power functioned as a threat that operated precisely by never actualizing itself, by always
remaining a threatening gesture. Such functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction had to
remain a threat. With
the “war on terror”, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization, not of the
threat itself, but, of the measures against the threat. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the
terrorist strike triggers the endless series of preemptive strikes against potential terrorists. We are thus passing from the logic of MAD
(Mutually Assured Destruction) to a logic in which ONE
SOLE MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed to enact
its paranoia. The power that presents itself as always being under threat, living in mortal danger, and
thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power-the very model of the Nietzschean
ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy. And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, in Daybreak, provided
the best analysis of the false moral premises of today’s “war on terror”: No government admits any more that it keeps an
army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense,
and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the
neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state
must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies
the desire for conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite
and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all
states
are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own
good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it
is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and
thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as
completely as the desire for conquests. Is not the ongoing “war on terror” proof that “terror” is the antagonistic Other of democracy-the point
at which democracy’s plural options turn into a singular antagonism? Or, as we so often hear, “In
the face of the terrorist threat,
we must all come together and forget our petty differences.” More pointedly, the difference between the
“war on terror” with previous 20th century worldwide struggles such as the Cold War is that the
enemy used to be clearly identified with the actually existing Communist empire, whereas today the
terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the description of Linda Fiorentino’s character in
The Last Seduction: “Most people have a dark side … she had nothing else.” Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side … the terrorist
threat has nothing else. The paradoxical result
of this spectralization of the enemy is an unexpected reflexive
reversal. In this world without a clearly identified enemy, it is the United States, the protector against the threat, that is
emerging as the main enemy-much like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient-Express, where, since the entire group of suspects
is the murderer, the victim himself (an evil millionaire) turns out to be the real criminal.
2NC
2NC Overview
Status quo
Terrism
1NC
1NC Terror Talk – Long
Apocalyptic rhetoric regarding terror creates an image of war which is used to justify violence
Kellner 7 (Douglas, Chair of Philosophy @ UCLA, Presidential Studies Quarterly. Vol. 37 (4), 2007, pg.
622+) JPG
From September 11 to the beginning of the U.S. bombing acts on Afghanistan in October, the
U.S. corporate media intensified war fever and circulated highly militarist rhetoric that
legitimated the Bush-Cheney administration's largely unilateralist military action. Media
frames shifted from "America under Attack" to "America Strikes Back" and "America's New
War"--even before any military action was undertaken, as though the media frames were to
conjure the military response that eventually followed. From September 11 and through the
Afghan Terror War, the networks generated escalating fear and hysteria demanding military
response, while the mouthpieces of the military-industrial complex demanded military action
with little serious reflection on its consequences visible on the television networks. There
was, by contrast, much intelligent discussion on the Internet and print media sources
showing the dangers of the takeover of broadcasting by corporations which would profit by
war and upheaval. (23) The brief war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan from
early October through December 2001 appeared to be a military victory for the United States.
After a month of stalemate following ruthless U.S. bombing, the Taliban collapsed in the
north of the country, abandoned the capital Kabul, and surrendered in its southern
strongholds (Kellner 2003b). Yet the Afghanistan Terror War was ambiguous in its outcome.
Although the Taliban regime that hosted Osama bin Laden and A1 Qaeda collapsed under
U.S. military pressure, the top leaders and many militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban
escaped and the country remains perilous and chaotic to this day (the fall of 2007). (24)
Violent warlords that the United States used to fight A1 Qaeda still exert oppressive power
and keep the country in a state of disarray, while sympathizers for Al Qaeda and the Taliban
continue to wield power and destabilize the country. Because the United States did not use
ground troops or multilateral military forces, the top leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda
escaped, Pakistan was allowed to send in planes to take out hundreds of Pakistanis and
numerous top A1 Qaeda militants, and Afghanistan remains a dangerous and unruly territory
(Kellner 2003b; Hersh 2004). (25) Whereas the 1991 Gulf War produced spectacles of
precision bombs and missiles destroying Iraqi targets and the brief spectacle of the flight of
the Iraqis from Kuwait and the liberation of Kuwait City (Kellner 1992), the Afghanistan War
was more hidden in its unfolding and effects. Many of the images of Afghanistan that
circulated through the global media were of civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing. Daily
pictures of thousands of refugees from war and the suffering of the Afghan people raised
questions concerning the U.S. strategy and intervention. Moreover, just as the survival of
Saddam Hussein ultimately coded Gulf War I as problematic, so did the continued existence
of Osama bin Laden and his top Al Qaeda leadership point to limitations of the younger
Bush's leadership and policies.
This causes violence and increases the likely-hood of terrorism
Kapitan and Schulte 2 (Tomis and Erich, Thomas – Prof of Philosophy @ N Illionois U, and Erich – ,
Journal of Political and Military Sociology Vol. 30 Iss. 1, 2002, pp. 172+, Questia) JPG
The 'terrorist' rhetoric typified in Netanyahu's book actually increases terrorism in four
distinct ways. First, it magnifies the effect of terrorist actions by heightening the fear among
the target population. If we demonize the terrorists, if we portray them as arbitrary irrational
beings with a "disposition toward unbridled violence," then we are amplifying the fear and
alarm generated by terrorist incidents. Second, those who succumb to this rhetoric contribute
to the cycle of revenge and retaliation by endorsing terrorist actions of their own government,
not only against those who commit terrorist actions, but also against those populations from
whose ranks the terrorists emerge. The consequence has been an increase in terrorist
violence under the rubric of 'retaliation' or 'counter-terrorism.'18 Third, short of genocide, a
violent response is likely to stiffen the resolve of those from whose ranks terrorists have
emerged, leading them to regard their foes as people who cannot be reasoned with, as people
who because they avail themselves so readily of the 'terrorist' rhetoric know only the language
of force. As long as they perceive themselves to be victims of intolerable injustices and view
their oppressors as unwilling to arrive at an acceptable compromise, then they will reply with
more violence against their oppressors. Fourth, and most insidiously, those who employ the
rhetoric of 'terrorism' for their own political ends, for instance, to solidify American support
for Israeli policies, are encouraging actions that they understand will generate or sustain
further violence directed against civilians. Inasmuch as their verbal behavior is itself
intended to secure political objectives through violence directed against a civilian populus,
then it qualifies as an instance of terrorism just as much as any direct order to carry out a
bombing of civilian targets. In both cases, there is purposeful verbal action aimed at bringing
about a particular result through violence against civilians.19 Let us now examine evidence
for these points.
1NC Terror Talk – Short
Apocalyptic rhetoric regarding terror creates an image of war which is used to justify violence
Kellner 7 (Douglas, Chair of Philosophy @ UCLA, Presidential Studies Quarterly. Vol. 37 (4), 2007, pg.
622+) JPG
From September 11 to the beginning of the U.S. bombing acts on Afghanistan in October, the
U.S. corporate media intensified war fever and circulated highly militarist rhetoric that
legitimated the Bush-Cheney administration's largely unilateralist military action. Media
frames shifted from "America under Attack" to "America Strikes Back" and "America's New
War"--even before any military action was undertaken, as though the media frames were to
conjure the military response that eventually followed. From September 11 and through the
Afghan Terror War, the networks generated escalating fear and hysteria demanding military
response, while the mouthpieces of the military-industrial complex demanded military action
with little serious reflection on its consequences visible on the television networks. There
was, by contrast, much intelligent discussion on the Internet and print media sources
showing the dangers of the takeover of broadcasting by corporations which would profit by
war and upheaval. (23) The brief war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan from
early October through December 2001 appeared to be a military victory for the United States.
After a month of stalemate following ruthless U.S. bombing, the Taliban collapsed in the
north of the country, abandoned the capital Kabul, and surrendered in its southern
strongholds (Kellner 2003b). Yet the Afghanistan Terror War was ambiguous in its outcome.
Although the Taliban regime that hosted Osama bin Laden and A1 Qaeda collapsed under
U.S. military pressure, the top leaders and many militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban
escaped and the country remains perilous and chaotic to this day (the fall of 2007). (24)
Violent warlords that the United States used to fight A1 Qaeda still exert oppressive power
and keep the country in a state of disarray, while sympathizers for Al Qaeda and the Taliban
continue to wield power and destabilize the country. Because the United States did not use
ground troops or multilateral military forces, the top leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda
escaped, Pakistan was allowed to send in planes to take out hundreds of Pakistanis and
numerous top A1 Qaeda militants, and Afghanistan remains a dangerous and unruly territory
(Kellner 2003b; Hersh 2004). (25) Whereas the 1991 Gulf War produced spectacles of
precision bombs and missiles destroying Iraqi targets and the brief spectacle of the flight of
the Iraqis from Kuwait and the liberation of Kuwait City (Kellner 1992), the Afghanistan War
was more hidden in its unfolding and effects. Many of the images of Afghanistan that
circulated through the global media were of civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing. Daily
pictures of thousands of refugees from war and the suffering of the Afghan people raised
questions concerning the U.S. strategy and intervention. Moreover, just as the survival of
Saddam Hussein ultimately coded Gulf War I as problematic, so did the continued existence
of Osama bin Laden and his top Al Qaeda leadership point to limitations of the younger
Bush's leadership and policies.
2NC
1NC
1NC Ticking Bomb – Long
When the pilgrims fought for freedom they were revolutionaries – apparently there is no such thing as
revolutionaries anymore, just terrorists. The war on terror is fed on paranoia that any and everything
can be a weapon. This reduced people to the status of ticking body bombs. The term terrorist
connotes a psychopath beyond the realm of humanity – without compassion or a soul. This is used to
legitimate a form of violence that is not seen as natural and inhumane – the term itself becomes a
way to justify state based violence and war
Oliver 2007
(Kelly, Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy @ Vanderbilt, Women as Weapons of War, 128-30)
How can a few guys with box-cutters cause so much destruction? If box-cutters can be weapons of mass destruction,
what about nail clippers, tennis shoes, Gatorade bottles, or baby formula ... or maybe even the babies themselves? If the body can be a
weapon, then we are surrounded by weapons; we cannot tell the difference between weapons and the
things or people in our midst every day. Suddenly everything and everyone becomes threatening. The
idea that the body can be a weapon or that something as low-tech as a box-cutter can take down an airplane not only
boggles the mind but also seems wrong—the use of everyday objects in this way is just plain evil... too
sinister for words. This attitude suggests that good people use high-tech bombs to blow up people,
preferably other soldiers who are manning military targets. It also suggests that we feel somehow
threatened by bodies themselves; that bodies used as weapons are especially uncanny because they
conjure a deeper ambivalence we feel about our own bodies as well as the bodies of others. Insofar as
bodies are mortal and all bodies die, they are all in a sense ticking time-bombs waiting to kill us. Within
the history of Western thought bodies are figured as finite, inconsistent, even irrational, and so they
have been conceived of as opposed to civilization and culture. Part of the subtext of the exclusion of the
body from politics is its unpredictability, that it could "go off' at any minute. This is one reason suicide bombers, or "bodybombers" as Cavarero calls them, are particularly uncanny. With body-bombers, the body literally explodes back into the
realm of politics. In recent rhetoric, more than identifying a particular form of political violence, the
label "terrorist" connotes a psychopath who commits horrific violence beyond the pale of human society
and politics.27 Terrorists are figured as monsters without any human compassion or ethical values. To
call an act a terrorist act, to call a person a terrorist, to call an organization a terrorist group expels them
from the realm of the political into the realm of the pathological. There is "normal," "civilized" violence
and then there is "abnormal," "sick," and "barbaric" violence. But, as Ghassan Hage emphasizes, "we need to
question that way we are invited to uncritically think of a particular form of violence as 'the worst
possible kind of violence' merely by classifying it as 'terrorist/" The ways that the classification
"terrorist" is used normalize some forms of violence and pathologize others. It thus becomes an inflammatory term
that not only describes a particular form of violence but also legitimates another form of violence, namely the hightech warfare of Western
militaries. Hage maintains that "the struggle between states and opposing groups [is]: first, over the distribution of means of violence and second, and
more importantly, over the classification of the forms of violence in the world, particularly over what constitutes legitimate violence."28 The fight
operates on the material level of the distribution of wealth, in particular high-tech weaponry, and on the symbolic level in terms of who has the
authority to define legitimate force. "Legitimate" means legal; recently we have seen how the most powerful can redefine what constitutes
legitimate force by redefining torture and international law. If it is simply a matter of the more powerful defining the terms of engagement, then it is merely a case of "might makes
right," and our virtuous stand is nothing more than posturing on the part of the powerful. Hage points out that what we call terrorist groups never call
themselves terrorists; rather they call themselves revolutionaries, rebels, martyrs, nationalists, or freedom fighters. He claims that terrorism is a
"violence of last resort" that in many cases results from the will to resist colonial domination or foreign occupation in spite of a lack of
resources or high-tech weaponry. He quotes a Palestinian Australian saying, "Let the Americans give us the monopoly over nuclear power in the region and the strongest army there is, and we are happy to do 'incursions' and hunt down wanted Israeli
terrorists by demolishing their houses and 'accidentally' killing civilians. Who would want to be a suicide bomber if such a luxurious mode of fighting is available to us?"29 Part of the struggle, then, is precisely over who will have
and who won't have access to "luxurious" high-tech weaponry. Those that do have access, the wealthy nations, have not only the military might
to physically force their case but also the symbolic capital to define the terms of the struggle on an ideological level. They are in the position of
power in terms of both the weapons of war and the rhetoric of war. With high-tech weapons they can dominate the material landscape, but
with the power of rhetoric they can also dominate the symbolic landscape. They control and distribute both the armaments of war and the
ideology of war using hightech weaponry and high-tech media. This is to say, they have the power not only to execute deadly force but also to
justify it with the rhetoric of saving civilization from barbarians, good versus evil, humane versus monstrous, and legitimate versus illegitimate
violence.
IMPACT IS PERPETUAL WAR TURNS CASE
Oliver 2007
(Kelly, Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy @ Vanderbilt, Women as Weapons of War, 125-8)
If we cannot distinguish ourselves from our enemies in terms of deadly force, or even legitimate force, how do we see ourselves in relation to
this enemy? On the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September n, 2001, President Bush said that "nineteen men attacked us with a
barbarity unequaled in our history. They murdered people of all colors, creeds and nationalities, and made war upon the entire free world.
Since that day, America and her allies have taken the offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before... On 9/11, our nation saw the face of
evil" (my emphases). Our enemy, then, is evil itself. In the words of President Bush, our
enemies "are evil and kill without
mercy"; they "hate freedom" and plan to attack "civilized nations," thereby waging "war upon the entire
free world." He describes the war on terror as "a struggle for civilization" itself. The war against terror,
then, seems to be a war against barbarians who oppose civilization. It is the fight of Good against Evil, of
freedom against tyranny, of mercy against hatred. Leaving aside the fact that for those entering this realm of ideology, one
man's poison is another man's nourishment, what would it mean to win the fight of good against evil, the fight for
civilization? President Bush lays out the stakes as all or nothing: either we emerge victorious "or the extremists
emerge victorious," "you are [either] with us or against us." Does that mean that either we win and
thereby rule the world, and as Bush says bring democracy to the globe; or we lose, and are then enslaved or
killed by terrorists who will rule the world and bring what the administration has called "Islamic fascism"
to us all? Can we even imagine a triumph or defeat as grand as this, except perhaps in a James Bond movie?4 Could the United States ever
control terrorists across the globe to such an extent that no one would ever be threatened by them again? Could extremists really take over
America and make us slaves to what Bush calls "a perverted vision of Islam"? If the war on terror is a war against the forces of evil that kill
without mercy, then what would it mean to win this war? Either
it means eliminating terror from human existence, or at
least from the lives of Americans, or else the war on terror is really not a war on terror at all, but something
else. If the war on terror truly aims to eliminate fear and dread from our lives then it is impossible to win this war. Even if the aim of the war is
restricted to eliminating the fear or dread of terrorist attacks, how can we wage war against a mental state? This war is not like any other
because it is a war that we cannot even imagine winning. What would it mean to defeat evil itself? Part
of the difficulty in imagining
winning this war is that the stakes have been raised so high: civilization itself is supposedly in danger.
The hyperbolic rhetoric of good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, is not new to this conflict. And it is
used by both sides. The above exercise in imagination, however, has made it apparent that whatever else the war on terror
is about, it is also an ideological war over beliefs and values, over what counts as freedom, justice, good,
evil, torture, and terrorism. Even the idea that we are "at war" seems peculiar given the nature of our enemy and the ways in which
we have gone about "hunting them down." The military campaign includes a massive public relations mission to
drop pamphlets over Iraq and Afghanistan that urge people not to resist but to embrace democracy—a
clear indication that part of this war is being fought through media; but pamphlets are on the low end of the
technologies involved in the media campaign. On our side, the government and military have tried to control what images of war we see; the
administration and the Pentagon even control images of coffins and combat. Moreover, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, our means
of waging this war on terror have actually increased the threat of terrorism by causing a rise in "global
Islamic radicalism" that has "metastasized and spread across the globe."5 We talk as if terrorism is a
disease out of control, a disease that we can fight with our surgical strikes, but a disease that we can
never conquer, because in our war on terror we are in fact creating terrorists. The cure is spreading the
disease. But not only are we creating our own enemy by fueling the "Global Jihadist" movement, we are
creating an image of our enemy as bigger than life, a menacing image that possibly exaggerates their
power—a move that they endorse. In addition, we are moving the theatre of war from Iraq to the entire globe. War everywhere at once. War
without any foreseeable end. As President Bush says, "We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny
and freedom." If these are the early hours, when will dawn break? When can we expect the muchtouted victory of freedom over tyranny? How can the terror of war defeat the terror of terrorism? How can more violence beget
peace? The all-encompassing rhetoric of "forces of evil wherever they lurk" should make us wonder what this war is really about. The 9/11
terrorists are dead. We are hunting down their accomplices. But there must be more to this endless war than revenge for 9/11. Even President
Bush now admits that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers. Still, Bush repeatedly says that this is a
war to maintain our lifestyle and to secure our prosperity. This suggests that there
are economic motives for war. Certainly
war can be profitable not only for military contractors but also for government contractors who rebuild
the infrastructures we destroy. The strong rhetoric on both sides clouds material and economic issues
with self-righteous attributions of good and evil, the Faithful and the Infidels, the Godly and the
Damned. Both sides talk as if they see the world in simple black-and-white without any of shades of gray. The rhetoric of war is
absolute; it is extreme; it admits no ambiguity. It is all or nothing; us or them; we are winners or losers.
And yet this type of hyperbolic rhetoric is both overly simplistic and dangerous. It is a worldview that
pits one side against another in a deadly battle without end, particularly since it is a battle for mental as
much as for physical territory. How do we measure the conquest of minds, or souls, in the war against terror? What constitutes a
triumph in the battle for civilization? The rhetoric of extremes—good or evil, freedom or tyranny, civilized or
barbaric, winners or losers—obscures the ambiguities inherent in life itself. There is no absolute good or
freedom in a war where violent means necessarily contaminate even the most idealistic ends. Moreover,
seeing the world in terms of winners and losers is a deadly game that perpetuates the violence of some against others indefinitely. That kind
of game needs an enemy and even creates one if necessary. Within the logic of good versus evil we are
bound to an eternal war, a holy war, a war without end. The space and time of this war become infinite
because our enemy is infinite. And in a world divided into us versus them, our notion of ourselves as a
nation, as a people, as free and good, becomes dependent upon finding a "them" against whom we can
fight. The war against terror imagined as a war of good against evil creates enemies everywhere; the
very ambiguities of life raise the specter of the enemy.
1NC Ticking Bomb – Short
When the pilgrims fought for freedom they were revolutionaries – apparently there is no such thing as
revolutionaries anymore, just terrorists. The war on terror is fed on paranoia that any and everything
can be a weapon. This reduced people to the status of ticking body bombs. The term terrorist
connotes a psychopath beyond the realm of humanity – without compassion or a soul. This is used to
legitimate a form of violence that is not seen as natural and inhumane – the term itself becomes a
way to justify state based violence and war
Oliver 2007
(Kelly, Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy @ Vanderbilt, Women as Weapons of War, 128-30)
How can a few guys with box-cutters cause so much destruction? If box-cutters can be weapons of mass destruction,
what about nail clippers, tennis shoes, Gatorade bottles, or baby formula ... or maybe even the babies themselves? If the body can be a
weapon, then we are surrounded by weapons; we cannot tell the difference between weapons and the
things or people in our midst every day. Suddenly everything and everyone becomes threatening. The
idea that the body can be a weapon or that something as low-tech as a box-cutter can take down an airplane not only
boggles the mind but also seems wrong—the use of everyday objects in this way is just plain evil... too
sinister for words. This attitude suggests that good people use high-tech bombs to blow up people,
preferably other soldiers who are manning military targets. It also suggests that we feel somehow
threatened by bodies themselves; that bodies used as weapons are especially uncanny because they
conjure a deeper ambivalence we feel about our own bodies as well as the bodies of others. Insofar as
bodies are mortal and all bodies die, they are all in a sense ticking time-bombs waiting to kill us. Within
the history of Western thought bodies are figured as finite, inconsistent, even irrational, and so they
have been conceived of as opposed to civilization and culture. Part of the subtext of the exclusion of the
body from politics is its unpredictability, that it could "go off' at any minute. This is one reason suicide bombers, or "bodybombers" as Cavarero calls them, are particularly uncanny. With body-bombers, the body literally explodes back into the
realm of politics. In recent rhetoric, more than identifying a particular form of political violence, the
label "terrorist" connotes a psychopath who commits horrific violence beyond the pale of human society
and politics.27 Terrorists are figured as monsters without any human compassion or ethical values. To
call an act a terrorist act, to call a person a terrorist, to call an organization a terrorist group expels them
from the realm of the political into the realm of the pathological. There is "normal," "civilized" violence
and then there is "abnormal," "sick," and "barbaric" violence. But, as Ghassan Hage emphasizes, "we need to
question that way we are invited to uncritically think of a particular form of violence as 'the worst
possible kind of violence' merely by classifying it as 'terrorist/" The ways that the classification
"terrorist" is used normalize some forms of violence and pathologize others. It thus becomes an inflammatory term
that not only describes a particular form of violence but also legitimates another form of violence, namely the hightech warfare of Western
militaries. Hage maintains that "the struggle between states and opposing groups [is]: first, over the distribution of means of violence and second, and
more importantly, over the classification of the forms of violence in the world, particularly over what constitutes legitimate violence."28 The fight
operates on the material level of the distribution of wealth, in particular high-tech weaponry, and on the symbolic level in terms of who has the
authority to define legitimate force. "Legitimate" means legal; recently we have seen how the most powerful can redefine what constitutes
legitimate force by redefining torture and international law. If it is simply a matter of the more powerful defining the terms of engagement, then it is merely a case of "might makes
right," and our virtuous stand is nothing more than posturing on the part of the powerful. Hage points out that what we call terrorist groups never call
themselves terrorists; rather they call themselves revolutionaries, rebels, martyrs, nationalists, or freedom fighters. He claims that terrorism is a
"violence of last resort" that in many cases results from the will to resist colonial domination or foreign occupation in spite of a lack of
resources or high-tech weaponry. He quotes a Palestinian Australian saying, "Let the Americans give us the monopoly over nuclear power in the region and the s trongest army there is, and we are happy to do 'incursions' and hunt down wanted Israeli
terrorists by demolishing their houses and 'accidentally' killing civilians. Who would want to be a suicide bomber if such a luxurious mode of fighting is available to us?"29 Part of the struggle, then, is precisely over who will have
and who won't have access to "luxurious" high-tech weaponry. Those that do have access, the wealthy nations, have not only the military might
to physically force their case but also the symbolic capital to define the terms of the struggle on an ideological level. They are in the position of
power in terms of both the weapons of war and the rhetoric of war. With high-tech weapons they can dominate the material landscape, but
with the power of rhetoric they can also dominate the symbolic landscape. They control and distribute both the armaments of war and the
ideology of war using hightech weaponry and high-tech media. This is to say, they have the power not only to execute deadly force but also to
justify it with the rhetoric of saving civilization from barbarians, good versus evil, humane versus monstrous, and legitimate versus illegitimate
violence.
2NC
2NC Overview
Our perception of terrorism is flawed and rooted in a white, Eurocentric logic. The “war on terror” is
just a ruse that the other is going to try to bomb us – the terms that we create in order to justify killing
the only connotes a psychopath in which the population is okay with it – this new form of violence
becomes the tools of the state used to justify violence and war that turns the case – that’s oliver
The figure of the suicide bomber is a construct of the exclusion of the feminine. In a world of
oppression and a lack of symbolic interpretation martyrdom becomes the only option – intervention
creates cycles of violence and suicide bombing in order to explode the body back into the political.
Oliver 2007
(Kelly, Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy @ Vanderbilt, Women as Weapons of War, 142-4)
How does passion for life turn into passion for death? Perhaps the most fascinating manifestations of
passion for death are women suicide bombers, called shahidas, the Arabic word for feminine martyr.
Historically, women within patriarchal cultures have been denied access to education and positions of
power. They have been relegated to the realm of procreation, to a natural role as the bearers of life;
women are associated with giving birth and nurturing children. So how then do they become the
bearers of death? In her book Army of Roses, Barbara Victor chronicles the lives of some women suicide
bombers and discovers that most of them have been shunned by their families because they do not
fulfill their designated functions as wives and mothers.52 Some of them are barren and cannot have
children or choose not to, others have been shamed by rape or sexual assault, and others are divorced
or without husbands. Many of them have been given the seemingly "poisonous" gift of Western
education, which leaves them caught in a no-man's land between opposing values of two cultures. They
are in the impossible situation of trying to navigate one set of prohibitions and another, to the extent
that for some it seems that mar tyrdom becomes not only the way to reach paradise but also the way to
gain recognition from their society. Reuter's history of suicide bombers, which focuses primarily on male
suicide bombers, indicates that these well-educated young people see themselves in a hopeless
situation, fighting against a much stronger enemy, and resort to suicide bombing as a way to make their
lives matter, to make a difference. Rather than looking for virgins in paradise, as the Western media
characterizes them, according to Reuter these passionate young people sacrifice their lives to be
remembered as heroic figures. In his analysis of Palestinian suicide bombers, Ghassan Hage too
maintains that suicide bombing is a last resort in a fight against colonization; but, he argues, it becomes
part of a culture of martyrdom because both material and symbolic resources are so limited by the
colonial situation. In other words, martyrdom becomes a way of gaining symbolic cultural capital when
one's culture is perceived as being under siege. In a situation where both material and symbolic
resources are controlled by dominant forces, resistance becomes valued, even heroic. It becomes
ritualized to the point that suicide bombers make videotapes before their killings to be circulated
afterward, along with posters and pictures of these "martyrs for justice" in the face of seemingly
invincible Western arsenals. In the case of women suicide bombers, Victor's account suggests that for
the most part these are excellent students who want more from their lives than simply being the good
woman as defined by tradition. But everything in their surrounding environment, especially their
families, is hostile to this aspect of their personalities. In a sense they redeem themselves in the eyes of
their traditions by sacrificing themselves for their society. Rather than sacrifice their personal freedoms
to fit into the restrictions placed on them by patriarchal culture (like so many women do in the "East"
and the "West"), they sacrifice themselves for that culture in another, more absolute way. Julia Kristeva
argues that these women (and women in general) have been relegated to the realm of procreation or
physical being (zoe) and denied access to representation (bios). She concludes that as a result these
women occupy the two incompatible universes of family and school, a dilemma that creates in them
"double personalities" or "psychic cleavage" that renders them politically vulnerable to the rhetoric of
extremists.53 Yet insofar as they are, in Kristeva's words, "sent off to sacrifice and martyrdom in
imitation of the warlike man and possessor of power," they are killing in the name of principles that
have excluded them; the repre sentatives of life are sent to kill. This is to say that the very culture that
reduces them to the bearers of life now makes them the bearers of death.54 In her speech before
UNESCO in December 2002, Kristeva comments on shahidas: "Some currents of classic Islam do not
hesitate to pander to this alleged 'equality' between the sexes, without ever envisaging the sexual and
subjective difference of the woman, revelator of new life values and creativity!" 55 She provocatively
suggests that the shahidas represent the triumph of a culture of death that values women's biology over
biography, reproductive life over meaningful life. Even when through education and technology women
are freed from compulsory reproduction, they are still not necessarily free for biography or representing
their lives beyond reproduction.
China War
1NC
1NC Pan – Long
The way that we construct china isn’t neutral – the discourse surrounding Chinese war is used as a
power play in order to securitize against “them” which creates a self fulfilling prophecy of warfare
Pan, PhD degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian National University,
2K4 [Chengxin, The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as
Power Politics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29, 2004]
China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study
in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in
the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market
bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to
deal with it. (1) While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their
debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist
epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality
can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after
expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M.
Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that
"it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what
consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." (2) Like many other China
scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from
and observe with clinical detachment." (3) Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it
is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that
their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering
whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise
the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is
believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways
of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of
"where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se.
Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the
seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR
community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly
significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More
specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always
intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves
(as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such,
they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality
out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that
often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China
threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of
the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the
fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent
in the "China threat" literature--themes that have been overridden and rendered largely
invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new
nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of
some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies,
political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the West in
general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance
to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their
enormous practical implications for international politics. (5) It is in this context that this
article seeks to make a contribution.
Threat theory makes containment and nuclear war inevitable- it influences
policymaker’s suspicions of China’s intentions and causes massive arms buildups.
Only a rejection of the positivist epistemology can foster a sustainable relationship
Pan 4 [PhD degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian
National University Chengxin, , Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29, 2004]
Not only does this reductionist representation come at the expense of understanding China
as a dynamic, multifaceted country but it leads inevitably to a policy of containment that, in
turn, tends to enhance the influence of realpolitik thinking, nationalist extremism, and hardline stance in today's China. Even a small dose of the containment strategy is likely to have a
highly dramatic impact on U.S.-China relations, as the 1995-1996 missile crisis and the 2001
spy-plane incident have vividly attested. In this respect, Chalmers Johnson is right when he
suggests that "a policy of containment toward China implies the possibility of war, just as it
did during the Cold War vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union. The balance of terror prevented
war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of
China." (93) For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile-defence shield to
"guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be
almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current
small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In
consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might
be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely. Neither
the United States nor China is likely to be keen on fighting the other. But as has been
demonstrated, the "China threat" argument, for all its alleged desire for peace and security,
tends to make war preparedness the most "realistic" option for both sides. At this juncture,
worthy of note is an interesting comment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA China
specialist, on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States to contain the thenCommunist "other." Neuhauser says, "Nobody wants it. We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh
doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other side." (94) And, as we know, in an
unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an
estimated two million Vietnamese men, women, and children lost their lives. Therefore, to
call for a halt to the vicious circle of theory as practice associated with the "China threat"
literature, tinkering with the current positivist-dominated U.S. IR scholarship on China is no
longer adequate. Rather, what is needed is to question this un-self-reflective scholarship
itself, particularly its connections with the dominant way in which the United States and the
West in general represent themselves and others via their positivist epistemology, so that
alternative, more nuanced, and less dangerous ways of interpreting and debating China
might become possible.
1NC Pan – Short
The way that we construct china isn’t neutral – the discourse surrounding Chinese war is used as a
power play in order to securitize against “them” which creates a self fulfilling prophecy of warfare
Pan, PhD degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian National University,
2K4 [Chengxin, The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as
Power Politics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29, 2004]
China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study
in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in
the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market
bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to
deal with it. (1) While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their
debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist
epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality
can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after
expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M.
Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that
"it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what
consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." (2) Like many other China
scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from
and observe with clinical detachment." (3) Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it
is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that
their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering
whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise
the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is
believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways
of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of
"where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se.
Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the
seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR
community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly
significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More
specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always
intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves
(as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such,
they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality
out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that
often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China
threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of
the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the
fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent
in the "China threat" literature--themes that have been overridden and rendered largely
invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new
nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of
some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies,
political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the West in
general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance
to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their
enormous practical implications for international politics. (5) It is in this context that this
article seeks to make a contribution.
Russia Conflict
1NC
1NC Russia- Long
Their construction of [Russia] as a threat only fuels imperialism and violence,
creating a cycle where threats are created in order to justify endless military
intervention.
Edwards, 08
(Jason A. Edwards, Bridgewater State College, “Defining the Enemy for the Post-Cold War World: Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy
Discourse in Somalia and Haiti” International Journal of Communication 2 (2008), 830-847,
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/264/196)
Presidential speech-making on foreign policy functions in at least two important ways. Generally, presidential foreign policy rhetoric serves two
broad functions. First, a president’s foreign policy discourse can shape the political reality of foreign affairs. Murray Edelman
(1988) noted that language is a “key creator of the worlds people experience” (p. 103). People do not experience specific
events, but experience the language of events. This is not to say that specific situations and contexts do not influence a speaker, but it is the
language used to discuss various ideas and situations that create and connect people to various “worlds.” In
international affairs, American presidents are the most prominent speakers and they use language shapes the publics understanding
of the world around us. The ability to create and shape political reality comes through the president’s power of definition. David Zarefsky
(2004) argued that political realities are not “given,” but rather are constructed from a variety of possibilities. In foreign
policy, because they have the most knowledge of foreign affairs, along with extraordinary political power and speak with single voice, presidents
have the ability to define how issues, ideas, and situations are viewed. This does not mean that when presidents define the
reality of American international relations it will resonate with everyone. Nevertheless, the president’s prominence within American politics
gives him the power to shape how foreign policy is viewed and understood. A second function of presidential foreign policy
rhetoric is that it is didactic. Edwin Hargrove (1998) argued the first task of presidential leadership is to: teach reality to publics and their fellow
politicians through rhetoric . . . Teaching reality involves the explanations of contemporary problems and issues, but at its best, must invoke and
interpret the perennial ideals of the American national experience as expressed in the past and the present, and as guides for our future. (pp. viiviii) Teaching
reality to the American public involves telling it stories about distant countries, little known cultures,
and abstract values (Kuusisto, 1998). A president’s discourse on foreign policy imparts a reality that outlines a symbolic
universe of allies and adversaries. In this universe, the United States is the defender of civilization through the
promotion and protection of its values. A violation of this order by an adversary — an attack against the United States, one
of its allies, or against innocents — threatens that order. Once a president declares that such a danger exists then it becomes
universal — a threat against civilization itself — and needs to be countered, possibly with military intervention (Bates,
2004; Butler, 2002; Ivie, 1980, 1982; Procter, 1987). To fully demonstrate how this enemy violated America’s foreign policy order, presidents
shape the “other” through articulating images of savagery in defining a particular enemy (Lebow, 2000).
Their relationship to Russia begs an epistemological question of Russian identity as unstable and
unpredictable. The outputs of this relationship demand imperial control by reproducing a static
conception of Russia’s actions.
Øyvind Jæger 2000 [ Peace and Conflict Studies, Volume 7, Number 2, November 2000, SECURITIZING
RUSSIA: DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF THE BALTIC STATES,
http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=18
The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of
what Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24;
cf. Haab 1997). The constitutional ban in all three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet
political structures is indicative of a threat perception that confuses Soviet and postSoviet, conflating
Russia with the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary
opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a
Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of
ethnic minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The
opposite value of these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then
denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this discursive practice
intensifies by shifting onto a security mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of political
existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is (re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are
employed in a discourse of in-security and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and
thus securitised in the Wæverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security
Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish
"[t]hat the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "[s]hould there be no higher
command, self-controlled combat actions of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal."
(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that [t]he power of civic resistance is
constituted of the Nation’s Will and self-determination to fight for own freedom, of everyone citizen’s
resolution to resist to [an] assailant or invader by all possible ways, despite citizen’s age and [or]
profession, of taking part in Lithuania’s defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4).
When this is added to the identifying of the objects of national security as "human and citizen rights,
fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty; rights of the nation, prerequisites for a
free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state territory and its integrity,
and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions thereof;
the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept,
Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2) one approaches a conception of security in which the distinction between state
and nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend
everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to national security that
follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national
values,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has
become a totalising one taking everything to be a question of national security. The chain of equivalence
is established when the very introduction of the National Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of
Lithuania’s century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and subjugation" (see
quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that
follows. In much the same way the "enemy within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the
independence-memory was ritualised and added to the sense of insecurity – already fed by confusion in
state administration, legislation and government policy grappling not only with what to do but also how
to do it given the inexperience of state institutions or their absence – unity behind the overarching
objective of independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the enemy within. This is
what David Campbell (1992) points out when he sees the practices of security as being about securing a
precarious state identity. One way of going about it is to cast elements on the state inside resisting the
privileged identity as the subversive errand boys of the prime external enemy.
1NC Russia- Short
Their relationship to Russia begs an epistemological question of Russian identity as unstable and
unpredictable. The outputs of this relationship demand imperial control by reproducing a static
conception of Russia’s actions.
Øyvind Jæger 2000 [ Peace and Conflict Studies, Volume 7, Number 2, November 2000, SECURITIZING
RUSSIA: DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF THE BALTIC STATES,
http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=18
The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of
what Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24;
cf. Haab 1997). The constitutional ban in all three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet
political structures is indicative of a threat perception that confuses Soviet and postSoviet, conflating
Russia with the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary
opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a
Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of
ethnic minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The
opposite value of these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then
denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this discursive practice
intensifies by shifting onto a security mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of political
existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is (re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are
employed in a discourse of in-security and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and
thus securitised in the Wæverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security
Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish
"[t]hat the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "[s]hould there be no higher
command, self-controlled combat actions of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal."
(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that [t]he power of civic resistance is
constituted of the Nation’s Will and self-determination to fight for own freedom, of everyone citizen’s
resolution to resist to [an] assailant or invader by all possible ways, despite citizen’s age and [or]
profession, of taking part in Lithuania’s defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4).
When this is added to the identifying of the objects of national security as "human and citizen rights,
fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty; rights of the nation, prerequisites for a
free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state territory and its integrity,
and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions thereof;
the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept,
Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2) one approaches a conception of security in which the distinction between state
and nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend
everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to national security that
follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national
values,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has
become a totalising one taking everything to be a question of national security. The chain of equivalence
is established when the very introduction of the National Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of
Lithuania’s century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and subjugation" (see
quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that
follows. In much the same way the "enemy within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the
independence-memory was ritualised and added to the sense of insecurity – already fed by confusion in
state administration, legislation and government policy grappling not only with what to do but also how
to do it given the inexperience of state institutions or their absence – unity behind the overarching
objective of independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the enemy within. This is
what David Campbell (1992) points out when he sees the practices of security as being about securing a
precarious state identity. One way of going about it is to cast elements on the state inside resisting the
privileged identity as the subversive errand boys of the prime external enemy.
Random Turns!
1NC
1NC- Baudrillard Security
We have internalized the blackmail of security, encasing ourselves in cellophane to ensure our shelf
lives. This view reduces the body to a diseased object in need of protection and insurance, making life
nothing more than a process of continual mortification. Baudrillard 76 (Jean, smart Frenchy, Symbolic Exchange
and Death, pp. 177-180, Sage Publications)
Security is another form of social control, in the form of life blackmailed with the afterlife. It is
universally present for us today, and `security forces' range from life assurance and social security to
the car seatbelt by way of the state security police force. 39 `Belt up' says an advertising slogan for seatbelts. Of
course, security, like ecology, is an industrial business extending its cover up to the level of the species: a
convertibility of accident, disease and pollution into capitalist surplus profit is operative everywhere.
But this is above all a question of the worst repression, which consists in dispossessing you of your
own death, which everybody dreams of, as the darkness beneath their instinct of conservation. It is
necessary to rob everyone of the last possibility of giving themselves their own death as the last `great escape' from a life laid down by the
system. Again, in
this symbolic short-circuit, the gift-exchange is the challenge to oneself and one's own
life, and is carried out through death. Not because it expresses the individual's asocial rebellion (the
defection of one or millions of individuals does not infringe the law of the system at all), but because it carries in it a principle
of sociality that is radically antagonistic to our own social repressive principle. To bury death beneath
the contrary myth of security, it is necessary to exhaust the gift-exchange. Is it so that men might live that the
demand for death must be exhausted? No, but in order that they die the only death the system authorizes: the living are separated from
their dead, who no longer exchange anything but the form of their afterlife, under the sign of comprehensive insurance. Thus
car
safety: mummified in his helmet, his seatbelt, all the paraphernalia of security, wrapped up in the
security myth, the driver is nothing but a corpse, closed up in another, non-mythic, death, as neutral and objective as
technology, noiseless and expertly crafted. Riveted to his machine, glued to the spot in it, he no longer runs the
risk of dying, since he is already dead. This is the secret of security, like a steak under cellophane: to
surround you with a sarcophagus in order to prevent you from dying. 40 Our whole technical culture
creates an artificial milieu of death. It is not only armaments that remain the general archetype of material production, but the
simplest machine around us constitutes a horizon of death, a death that will never be resolved because it has crystallised beyond reach:
fixed capital of death, where the living labour of death has frozen over, as the labour force is frozen in
fixed capital and dead labour. In other words, all material production is merely a gigantic `character armour' by means of which
the species means to keep death at a respectful distance. Of course, death itself overshadows the species and seals it
into the armour the species thought to protect itself with. Here again, commensurate with an entire
civilization, we find the image of the automobile-sarcophagus: the protective armour is just death
miniaturised and become a technical extension of your own body. The biologisation of the body and
the technicisation of the environment go hand in hand in the same obsessional neurosis. The technical
environment is our over-production of pollutant, fragile and obsolescent objects. For production lives, its entire logic and strategy are
An economy of stable products and good objects is indispensable: the
economy develops only by exuding danger, pollution, usury, deception and haunting. The economy lives only on the
suspension of death that it maintains throughout material production, and through renewing the
available death stocks, even if it means conjuring it up by a security build up: blackmail and
repression. Death is definitively secularised in material production, where it is reproduced on a large scale as capital. Even our
bodies, which have become biological machinery, are modelled on this inorganic body, and therefore
become, at the same time, a bad object, condemned to disease, accident and death. Living by the
production of death, capital has an easy time producing security: it's the same thing. Security is the
articulated on fragility and obsolescence.
industrial prolongation of death, just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution. A few more bandages on the
sarcophagus. This is also true of the great institutions that are the glory of our democracy: Social Security is the social prosthesis of a dead
a society already exterminated in all its symbolic wheels,
in its deep system of reciprocities and obligations, which means that neither the concept of security
nor that of the `social' ever had any meaning. The `social' begins by taking charge of death. It's the same
society (`Social Security is death!' -- May '68), that is to say,
story as regards cultures that have been destroyed then revived and protected as folklore (cf. M. de Certeau, `La beauté du mort' [in La
The same goes for life assurance, which is the domestic variant of a system
which everywhere presupposes death as an axiom. The social translation of the death of the group -each materialising for the other only as social capital indexed on death. Death is dissuaded at the
price of a continual mortification: such is the paradoxical logic of security. In a Christian context, ascesis played
the same role. The accumulation of suffering and penitence was able to play the same role as character
armour, as a protective sarcophagus against hell. And our obsessional compulsion for security can be
interpreted as a gigantic collective ascesis, an anticipation of death in life itself: from protection into
protection, from defence to defence, crossing all jurisdictions, institutions and modern material
apparatuses, life is no longer anything but a doleful, defensive book-keeping, locking every risk into its
sarcophagus.
culture au pluriel, Paris: UGE, 1974]).
2NC
Extend Baudrillard. The Affirmative is another form of fear mongering politics that attempts to
blackmail you for your ballot. They are the ultimate extension of social control as per security,
because we’ve internalized it. We’ve been taught to fear death. The Affirmative advocates an increase
in transportation while riding their well protected safety car at 10 miles per hour wrapped in
cellophane wrap. This is the actual metaphor that Bauldrillard uses (specific to transportation).
However unbeknownst to them, they are already dead. The body is a diseased object that must be
controlled, lest it be contaminated with the pure ecstasy of life.
We have internalized the blackmail of security, encasing ourselves in cellophane to ensure our shelf
lives. This view reduces the body to a diseased object in need of protection and insurance, making life
nothing more than a process of continual mortification.
1NC
1NC Weaponitis – Long
Weaponitis—Focus on nuclear weapons only distracts us from the flashpoints of conflict and the
structures that make those weapons
Schwartz & Derber, 1990 Command Sergeant Major US Army & Professor of Sociology at Boston College
[William A. & Charles, The Nuclear Seduction p. 186-188, 205-207]
Many believe that nuclear arms control agreements are historic accomplishments politically even if
the military and economic impact is minor. Arms control has in fact become the main public barometer of the prospects for peace
and disarmament. Though the ultimate political consequences of the INF treaty and the START treaty negotiations are not yet
certain, history
suggests that the superpowers' main interest in arms control may lie elsewhere: in
public relations. The signing of the INF treaty, like others before it, did not noticeably reduce the nuclear danger, but it did lead
to a spectacular political bonanza for both superpowers and for their leaders. As James G. Hershberg colorfully puts it, "In a virtuoso
display of method acting, Reagan shed the role of Gary Cooper in High Noon and contracted for a surreal buddy movie with
Gorbachev, in which both salved troubles on the home front by taking dramatic steps to dispel nuclear gloom and spotlight hopes
for global peace." 31 To see the political usefulness of treaties such as INF, imagine that the central symbol of planetary security was
something more realistic, say, the number of people killed by the superpowers' troops and their allies and clients around the world.
In that case, the signing of the 1972 SALT treaty might have seemed unimpressive in comparison to the enormous slaughter then
occurring in Vietnam and, at lower levels, elsewhere around the world. The signing of the 1987 INF treaty likewise might have
seemed a modest achievement in comparison to the wholesale dev-astation of Afghanistan and the many other bloody Third World
con-flicts then fully in progress. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists might not have dramatically rolled back the hands
of their "doomsday clock"; Gorbachev and Reagan might not have been nomi-nated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The INF treaty
prompted both re-sponses (and when we examine the actual significance of the treaty we will see how very remarkable that is).
Arms control provides a low-cost way for both superpowers periodi-cally to convey a
commitment to reducing the nuclear danger without necessarily forgoing the violent foreign
policies that in fact produce the danger. Arms treaties are mutually advantageous devices for
keeping the peace movements of the twentieth century, in the East and the West, at bay. In them, the
superpowers have found a remarkably efficient way to allay worldwide popular alarm about
nuclear war that might other-wise lead to serious political problems for both Moscow and Washington.
Still, even resounding ideological victories do not come without risk. By using nuclear arms
control to project an image of peaceableness, the superpowers invite a widening public
response that they may not be fully able to control. By loudly proclaiming to be "on the road" to nu-clear
disarmament and world peace, they risk that their audiences may take the slogan seriously and even seek to hold them to it. An
analogy is the orchestration of contrived "demonstration elections" in Third World states to project an image of true democracy
even when there is no intention of delivering it. Sometimes this works nicely, for a while at least, as in El Salvador. But in other cases,
as in Haiti, it can backfire. 32
Even those parts of the U.S. peace movement most committed to nu-clear disarmament as a present-day focus of political work are
begin-ning to recognize these problems. In June 1987, for example, a major conference of disarmament activists met in Ringwood,
New Jersey, "to discuss the requirements and the plausibility of a long-term, unified campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons
worldwide. . . . The initial impetus for the conference was a 'Disarmament 2000' campaign pro-posal . . . focused primarily on nuclear
weapons and on the mass move-ment building necessary to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000." But according to Rob
Leavitt, "There was little consensus that nuclear disarmament by 2000 was possible." The participants concluded: "It is difficult to
imagine that total nuclear disarmament is possible in the ab-sence of a new world order," enjoying, among other changes, conventional disarmament and an end to military intervention.' That conclusion may be too pessimistic. A huge global mass move-ment
(ignited, perhaps, by a nuclear accident, a small nuclear war, or some other scare) could force nuclear disarmament on the nations
of the world—if it is prepared to use civil disobedience on a huge scale and to endure the terrible state violence that would likely be
unleashed against it in the West, the East, and the Third World alike. Whether a powerful enough movement could be organized,
and whether it could succeed, no one can know. But it is probably the only way nuclear disarmament could be achieved prior to
radical political changes in the world order. We
must surely abandon the hope that arms control as we know
it is a promising strategy for pursuing nuclear abolition. Many insist that arms control is at least
a "step in the right direction." One bumper sticker reads: "The Freeze: Step One." The communications director of the
largest U.S. antinuclear organization, SANE/Freeze, said in refer-ence to the INF treaty, "Our slogan is 2000 down, 48,000 to go." 72
The metaphor is misleading, another reflection of weaponitis. The path to nuclear
disarmament is not like a continuous road from here to there on which one makes gradual
progress by taking step after step. It is more like a road interrupted by a vast canyon. States can
indeed take gradual steps toward the edge of the canyon—the minimum deterrent. But once
there they would quickly discover not only that they still faced the threat of nuclear annihilation
but also that all the prior "steps in the right direction" had not brought nuclear disarmament any
closer. That goal requires crossing the canyon—getting the most powerful states on a violent
planet to relinquish their ultimate weapons with no guaran-teed assurances that all others
would do the same. That is an entirely different enterprise from junking redundant weapons
that don't really matter anyway. Deep cuts in nuclear arsenals might do some good at a purely
sym-bolic level, suggesting that if reductions are good elimination would be even better. But the
symbolism could cut both ways. Dramatic progress in arms control could in fact hurt the
prospects for abolition by breed-ing complacency about the nuclear peril while doing nothing
to under-mine the real forces that motivate states to get and keep nuclear weapons. Those forces
must be confronted directly by restraining the illegiti-mate violence of our governments wherever we can. Considering the immense power and low moral standards of modern states, world peace will of course not come in a day. But reducing aggression and
inter-vention by the leading states is probably a prerequisite for a long-run institutional solution to international violence, whether
by means of world government, conventional disarmament, the "peace system" that some advocate, or other schemes! In the
meantime, we must do what we can to make sure we survive long enough to find out. In short, peace
is the path to
nuclear disarmament, not the other way around. Paradoxically, a disarmament movement
working to reduce the weapons that it seeks to abolish probably cannot establish the conditions under which abolition might be possible. That requires a peace movement.
The fear of the bomb creates a sense of urgency to create more nuclear weapons; this constant circlerelationship with the nuclear bomb ensures that people will always become fixated on the next best
thing – which inevitably turns out to be the next nuclear bomb strategy.
Malcolmson 85, Professor at Queen’s University at Kingston (Robert W, “Nuclear Fallacies: How We Have Been Misguided Since
Hiroshima”, 1985, p. 16/17, Print.) AW
War-planning, on an increasingly complex scale, has been a central characteristic of u.s. nuclear policy since the late 194Os, and these plans
have been premised on the assumption at least since the Soviet Union obtained its own substantial arsenal and thus could set some of the rules
of play - that nuclear combat (normally referred to as "nuclear exchanges") can be conducted with restraint and prudence.
Some of the
recent critics of this war-planning heritage object to it, not because they feel that it is implausible, but
rather on the grounds that it is not taken sufficiently seriously. That is, they fear that American policymakers are not fully committed to the pursuit of nuclear victory. American policy, they feel, goes part way in the search
for victory, but not all the way. As Colin S. Gray puts it, "the United States should not have an operational ...
policy of being willing to initiate a very small nuclear war ... unless it has a very persuasive theory for the
successful conduct of a very large nuclear campaign. 20 American nuclear policy, according to this view, has been much too
inhibited; "u.s. official thinking and planning," complains Gray, "does not embrace the idea that it is necessary to try to effect the defeat of the
Soviet Union." The fundamental purpose of u.s. military force should be clearly acknowledged: "The United States
should plan to defeat the Soviet Union and to do so at a cost that would not prohibit u.s. recovery. Washington should identify war aims that in
the last resort would contemplate the destruction of Soviet political authority and the emergence of a postwar world order compatible with
Western values ... Once the defeat of the Soviet state is established as a war aim, defense professionals should attempt to identify an optimum
targeting plan for the accomplishment of that goal. ..21 Such
views have not been confined to the margins of the
American "national security" establishment. They have been taken very seriously by people of high
authority. Richard Burt, just before he assumed a senior position in the State Department in 1981, advocated a revamped strategy of
nuclear escalation. " A new emphasis," he said, "must be placed on generating nuclear responses that are
militarily meaningful." He went on to call for "a broader concept for nuclear use" and for "American
forces [that] are capable of waging a large scale, sustained nuclear campaign.,,22 Such thinking has now
become quite common­ place - at least in official circles. As two of its defenders put it in 1984, writing in a journal closely
linked to the Pentagon (one of the authors had helped formulate u.s. nuclear targeting policy): "the u.s. concept of deterrence has
matured. Deterrence is no longer deemed distinct from - 'or antagonistic to the capabilities to conduct
nuclear war operations. Current u.s. strategy recognizes that credible operational capabilities are
essential to effective deterrence." This, they state, is the "concept of a deterrent based on an ability to
conduct nuclear war."23 Such assumptions about the possibility of waging a limited nuclear war have had a considerable impact on the
changing agenda of u.s. strategy during the 1980s, as seen, for example, in the priority that has been given to plans for "prevailing" in a
protracted, global nuclear ~ contest with the USSR.
1NC Weaponitis – Short
Weaponitis—Focus on nuclear weapons only distracts us from the flashpoints of conflict and the
structures that make those weapons
Schwartz & Derber, 1990 Command Sergeant Major US Army & Professor of Sociology at Boston College
[William A. & Charles, The Nuclear Seduction p. 186-188, 205-207]
Many believe that nuclear arms control agreements are historic accomplishments politically even if
the military and economic impact is minor. Arms control has in fact become the main public barometer of the prospects for peace
and disarmament. Though the ultimate political consequences of the INF treaty and the START treaty negotiations are not yet
certain, history
suggests that the superpowers' main interest in arms control may lie elsewhere: in
public relations. The signing of the INF treaty, like others before it, did not noticeably reduce the nuclear danger, but it did lead
to a spectacular political bonanza for both superpowers and for their leaders. As James G. Hershberg colorfully puts it, "In a virtuoso
display of method acting, Reagan shed the role of Gary Cooper in High Noon and contracted for a surreal buddy movie with
Gorbachev, in which both salved troubles on the home front by taking dramatic steps to dispel nuclear gloom and spotlight hopes
for global peace." 31 To see the political usefulness of treaties such as INF, imagine that the central symbol of planetary security was
something more realistic, say, the number of people killed by the superpowers' troops and their allies and clients around the world.
In that case, the signing of the 1972 SALT treaty might have seemed unimpressive in comparison to the enormous slaughter then
occurring in Vietnam and, at lower levels, elsewhere around the world. The signing of the 1987 INF treaty likewise might have
seemed a modest achievement in comparison to the wholesale dev-astation of Afghanistan and the many other bloody Third World
con-flicts then fully in progress. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists might not have dramatically rolled back the hands
of their "doomsday clock"; Gorbachev and Reagan might not have been nomi-nated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The INF treaty
prompted both re-sponses (and when we examine the actual significance of the treaty we will see how very remarkable that is).
Arms control provides a low-cost way for both superpowers periodi-cally to convey a
commitment to reducing the nuclear danger without necessarily forgoing the violent foreign
policies that in fact produce the danger. Arms treaties are mutually advantageous devices for
keeping the peace movements of the twentieth century, in the East and the West, at bay. In them, the
superpowers have found a remarkably efficient way to allay worldwide popular alarm about
nuclear war that might other-wise lead to serious political problems for both Moscow and Washington.
Still, even resounding ideological victories do not come without risk. By using nuclear arms
control to project an image of peaceableness, the superpowers invite a widening public
response that they may not be fully able to control. By loudly proclaiming to be "on the road" to nu-clear
disarmament and world peace, they risk that their audiences may take the slogan seriously and even seek to hold them to it. An
analogy is the orchestration of contrived "demonstration elections" in Third World states to project an image of true democracy
even when there is no intention of delivering it. Sometimes this works nicely, for a while at least, as in El Salvador. But in other cases,
as in Haiti, it can backfire. 32
Even those parts of the U.S. peace movement most committed to nu-clear disarmament as a present-day focus of political work are
begin-ning to recognize these problems. In June 1987, for example, a major conference of disarmament activists met in Ringwood,
New Jersey, "to discuss the requirements and the plausibility of a long-term, unified campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons
worldwide. . . . The initial impetus for the conference was a 'Disarmament 2000' campaign pro-posal . . . focused primarily on nuclear
weapons and on the mass move-ment building necessary to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000." But according to Rob
Leavitt, "There was little consensus that nuclear disarmament by 2000 was possible." The participants concluded: "It is difficult to
imagine that total nuclear disarmament is possible in the ab-sence of a new world order," enjoying, among other changes, conventional disarmament and an end to military intervention.' That conclusion may be too pessimistic. A huge global mass move-ment
(ignited, perhaps, by a nuclear accident, a small nuclear war, or some other scare) could force nuclear disarmament on the nations
of the world—if it is prepared to use civil disobedience on a huge scale and to endure the terrible state violence that would likely be
unleashed against it in the West, the East, and the Third World alike. Whether a powerful enough movement could be organized,
and whether it could succeed, no one can know. But it is probably the only way nuclear disarmament could be achieved prior to
radical political changes in the world order. We
must surely abandon the hope that arms control as we know
it is a promising strategy for pursuing nuclear abolition. Many insist that arms control is at least
a "step in the right direction." One bumper sticker reads: "The Freeze: Step One." The communications director of the
largest U.S. antinuclear organization, SANE/Freeze, said in refer-ence to the INF treaty, "Our slogan is 2000 down, 48,000 to go." 72
The metaphor is misleading, another reflection of weaponitis. The path to nuclear
disarmament is not like a continuous road from here to there on which one makes gradual
progress by taking step after step. It is more like a road interrupted by a vast canyon. States can
indeed take gradual steps toward the edge of the canyon—the minimum deterrent. But once
there they would quickly discover not only that they still faced the threat of nuclear annihilation
but also that all the prior "steps in the right direction" had not brought nuclear disarmament any
closer. That goal requires crossing the canyon—getting the most powerful states on a violent
planet to relinquish their ultimate weapons with no guaran-teed assurances that all others
would do the same. That is an entirely different enterprise from junking redundant weapons
that don't really matter anyway. Deep cuts in nuclear arsenals might do some good at a purely
sym-bolic level, suggesting that if reductions are good elimination would be even better. But the
symbolism could cut both ways. Dramatic progress in arms control could in fact hurt the
prospects for abolition by breed-ing complacency about the nuclear peril while doing nothing
to under-mine the real forces that motivate states to get and keep nuclear weapons. Those forces
must be confronted directly by restraining the illegiti-mate violence of our governments wherever we can. Considering the immense power and low moral standards of modern states, world peace will of course not come in a day. But reducing aggression and
inter-vention by the leading states is probably a prerequisite for a long-run institutional solution to international violence, whether
by means of world government, conventional disarmament, the "peace system" that some advocate, or other schemes! In the
meantime, we must do what we can to make sure we survive long enough to find out. In short, peace
is the path to
nuclear disarmament, not the other way around. Paradoxically, a disarmament movement
working to reduce the weapons that it seeks to abolish probably cannot establish the conditions under which abolition might be possible. That requires a peace movement.
2NC
2NC Overview
Obsession with the bomb causes bigger impacts than the affirmative can solve for – they actually
incentivize the use of nuclear weapons.
Schwartz and Derber 92, professor of property law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law and professor of Sociology at Boston
College (William and Charles, “The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn’t Matter, and What Does”, p59, Print.) AW
At one level, then, nuclear schizophrenia reflects flawed styles of thinking-internal confusion and
obsession with marginal military capabilities-that lead officials to seek new weapons in the vain hope of
increasing real military capabilities. But nuclear schizophrenia is also a deliberate strategy designed in
part, as Warner Schilling explained earlier, to deal with others' supposed weaponitis by feigning one's
own. Kull found that though most American officials know that new weapons cannot change the nature of
nuclear war, they suspect that Soviet and other foreign leaders might not understand that. Hence they
act as if the nuclear balance mattered, buying weapons to impress those leaders-in part to discourage
any lingering misperception that a successful first strike against the United States is possible and even
perhaps to encourage the misperception that a successful U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union is
possible. If foreign perceptions of American military power (however unfounded) grow, then-as
American officials have publicly argued-so will America's ability to intervene abroad without
interference. The Soviets, as Kull found, follow a similar strategy-building weapons to counter supposed American misperceptions. "The
situation resembles nothing so much as a drawing-room comedy," Kull observes. "All of the key
characters know a certain secret­ that strategic asymmetries are militarily irrelevant in an age of over­
kill-but because they think that others do not know the secret they act as if they do not know the secret
either. A farcical quality emerges as all the characters, more or less unconsciously, collude to establish a
norm of behavior based on a failure to recognize the secret.'>33 But in crises leaders-all of whom do
know the secret-do not consult the nuclear balance or indulge in the fantasy that either side can actually
use its new nuclear systems without inviting worldwide destruction.
Dehum
1NC Dehumanization K
The concept of dehumanization endows the speaker with power to declare the
humanity of a victim, this statushood recreates violence, rejecting it solves
Esmeir ‘5 (Samera, Assist Prof. of Rhetoric @ U. of Cal, Berkeley, “On Making Dehumanization Possible”
PMLA, Vol. 121.5)
Can we put the humanity of the other to the side? Can we take it for granted, not question it, so that
we avoid reproducing the logic of "statushood"? Can we rid ourselves of the notion of
dehumanization, so thatwe do not reproduce colonial and neocolonial practices that insist
dehumanization can oc cur and that humanity can be given back? Is it possible to begin to see the
governmental force of the claims of dehumanization and humanization? We may wish to oppose the
idea of humanization and its complement, dehumanization, by refusing to use a language that, in its
insistence on human status hood, leaves little space for a troubled subject formation. The broader challenge is
to understand struggles of citizens and subjects who go about being human in radically different ways
that neither await our recognition nor aspire for law’s recognition. The task is to think humanity and
politics in nonjuridical terms, so that struggles that are not waged under the sign of human rights can
invite our participation. And when we begin to refuse invitations to recognize, and therefore endow, a
fixed juridicalized humanity, we might also begin to participate in struggles in which there are more
possibilities for the emergence of political subjectivities – fluid, flexible, full of contradictions and problems. This
means thinking more modestly (less instrumentally) and thus more politically and strategically about what we
can do (endow humanity or declare its loss).
Disease
1NC Disease Impact K
Their framing of disease as a threat to society leads to genocide
Savage 7 (Rowan Savage, professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of
Technology in Sydney, 25 SEP 2007, ““Disease Incarnate”: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal
Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity”, Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 20, Issue 3, pages
404–440)
This paper traces the development of the concept of the outgroup as a biological threat, and the relationship of this concept to the practice of
genocide. The biopolitical discourse which emerged in the modern period made the practice of genocide conceivable, and constructed
genocide as justifiable and as necessary. Two developments in the modern period are highlighted: firstly, the conception of the boundaried and
ethnically homogenous nation-state, and secondly, new biological
theories about race, and about the spread of disease.
outgroups both literally and metaphorically. This
dehumanisation, in combination with the ideal of the homogenous nation-state and the new technologies of population, provided a
justification and a motivation for genocide, and a model of implementation. Conceptions of the nature of
Discourse emerging from the biological sciences dehumanised
dehumanisation as a process are examined, with specific reference to the role of language and metaphor, and to concepts of hygiene, purity
and contamination. Particular attention is paid to eugenics and Social Darwinism, to the role of physicians in genocide, and to the relationship
between medical and military vocabularies. The
features of this discourse, its persistence, and its commonality in otherwise widely
exposed through an examination of four twentieth-century genocides (Armenia, Nazi
genocide, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia). Nothing is more punitive than to give disease a
meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.– Susan Sontag1 Life is a window of vulnerability, and the
perfection of the fully defended, ‘victorious’ self is a chilling fantasy.– Donna Haraway2 Rudolf Hess's famous statement that “National
Socialism is nothing but applied biology” is a commonplace quotation in commentary on Nazi ideology and rhetoric. But the
different genocidal episodes, are
complex webs of meaning behind this and similar statements, and the context in which they were utterable, are often overlooked or dismissed
as self-evident. This work traces the development of the
concept of the outgroup as a biological threat, with
particular reference to the self-representation of a perpetrator group as a “body politic” threatened by alien
Others depicted and dehumanised as viruses, bacilli, microbes, cancerous growths, and other images drawn from the medical
vocabulary. The new biopolitics arising in the nineteenth century provided not only a literal, “scientific” reason as
to why outgroups were inferior and other-than-human (legitimising their destruction), as well as threatening (necessitating it), but
also a metaphorical representation, revolving around concepts of hygiene and purity, which fulfilled identical psychological necessities on a
symbolic and a populist level. At the same time, the emergence of the nation-state allowed perpetrator groups to conceive of themselves as a
unitary body within defined geographical limits whose ideal state was one of “racial” homogeneity. The
indelible “wrongness” of
an outgroup necessitated, in the eyes of perpetrators, the complete removal of that group from a
geographically bounded territory; a particularly vicious medicalised representation of outgroups as a
biological threat not only legitimised their disappearance, but directly motivated it. This discourse, that is, provided both a
motive and a justification for a new concept, the necessary destruction of a biologically-defined
group, which would come to be known as “genocide”. Many scholars have noted in passing the presence of
dehumanisation as a common element in genocide.3 For the most part, however, extensive work on dehumanisation is found outside the field
of genocide studies. Much writing has also been done on the topic of the connection between genocide and modernity – particularly that of
Zygmunt Bauman, to which this work is indebted. Such writing has for the most part focused on the authoritarian-bureaucratic-rational aspect
of the psychology of perpetrators.4 Here, however, I explore a different genocidal mechanism, one equally contingent upon the discourses and
practice of modernity. This paper is an examination of the new discourse of dehumanisation which was made possible by various converging
aspects of modernity. At the same time, it investigates the function of this dehumanisation in genocide in terms of legitimisation, justification
and motivation. I focus on developments in European history; it should be noted, however, that, as Peter Singer put it, “Western ideas have,
over the past two or three centuries, spread out from Europe until today they set the mode of thought for most human societies”.5 Given the
hegemony of European colonialist powers, ideas premised on, or deriving from, the discourses of Western imperial modernity can shape action
in many non-Western countries, whether through the legacy of colonialism or through global influence. Illustrative examples are drawn from
four twentieth century genocidal episodes. Two of these episodes took place within Europe itself: firstly, genocide and mass killing committed
by the National Socialists, with victims including Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Russians, as well as biologically-defined “life unworthy of life” and,
secondly, “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. I also examine two non-Western episodes which took place under the
strong influence of Western ideals and ideologies: firstly, the genocide of Armenians and other “non-Turkic” peoples in Asia Minor in the 1910s
and 1920s (heavily influenced by Western nationalism); and secondly, the “auto-genocide” committed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in
the 1970s (which took place under an ideological aegis developed from Paris Communism, in a post-colonial environment). This work is an
attempt to combine theoretical discussion with comparative empirical analysis in focusing on the emergence and function of a particular
dehumanising discourse and the role it has played in genocidal episodes. Given that the subject is discourse, and therefore concerns the
construction of meaning, I take an interdisciplinary approach in order to tease out the different historical and theoretical strands which
together illuminate the features of genocidal biopolitics in the modern age. Therefore, while I mainly utilise scholarship from the field of
genocide studies, I have also made use of scholarly work from the fields of political science, anthropology, ecofeminism, and the history of
science and of medicine, among others. My analysis is based on historical material which illustrates the vocabulary of such discourse.
Illustrative examples are thus drawn from the recorded words of perpetrators themselves, and from recorded sources which give insight into
acceptable public opinion in the perpetrator society. This material includes political speech, official and legal terminology and nomenclature,
the writings of elites and intellectuals, scientific and medical narratives and terminology, radio, and newspaper articles and letters and other
popular print media.6 I begin with an examination of the origins of the concept of racial purity and the association between race, nationality
and disease. I then trace the emergence of this biomedical discourse to its roots in the emergence of the nation-state and to developments in
the study of the natural sciences and in medicine, which allowed the creation of literal and metaphorical biopolitical categorisation. I go on to
examine how these conceptual changes translated into a particular metaphorical discourse, one which was both an influence on, and
influenced by, public policy; specific examination is made of the evolution of a militarised metaphorical understanding of medicine, both at the
level of the individual doctor and patient, and at the level of state enactment of public health. Finally, I investigate the nature of
dehumanisation as a tool (whether used wittingly or unwittingly), its specificities in genocide and in biomedical rhetoric, and the relationship
between dehumanising discourse (that is, language) and motivation to action. Modernity, I argue, provided a particular, dehumanising
discourse and rhetoric which allowed “genocide” to be conceivable, justified and necessary. This paper endeavours, firstly, to identify a nexus
between various different discourses contingent upon modernity, and to examine the ongoing consequences in action of their coincidence at a
certain historical moment; and secondly, to demonstrate that this discourse and these consequences are common to many otherwise widely
different episodes of genocide. In doing so, I hope to sketch a preliminary taxonomy of genocidal biopolitical dehumanisation in the modern
era. Racial Purity and Raced Disease: Precursors In the pre-modern period, organised Christianity had instigated and licensed numerous
episodes of mass killing and subjugation.7 Despite this, however, Christianity's emphasis on what might be termed the “salvageability” of all
“mankind” had, in the pre-modern era, exercised some restraint on the actions of Europeans. While the possibility of conversion existed, and
before the rise of scientific race theory, the concept of a group of people as unalterably (that is to say, biologically) threatening was
unthinkable.8 Notwithstanding this, the concept of racial purity had its origins in medieval Christianity. After the Christian Reconquista of Spain
from Muslim rule, and the expulsion of Jews in 1492, the concept of limpieza de sangre (purity or cleanliness of blood) became one of major
importance, necessarily accompanied by extensive hereditary investigation.9 The medieval period also saw the obverse of ethnic purity: ethnic
“dirtiness”. There is a long-standing historical connection between antisemitism and disease. In
the Middle Ages it was alleged
that Jews spread the plague, and as a result they were massacred during epidemics.10 As a result of the Jewish
relation to Christianity and to territoriality, “[t]he conceptual Jew was a semantically overloaded entity, comprising and blending meanings
which ought to be kept apart, and for this reason a natural adversary of any force concerned with drawing borderlines and keeping them
watertight. The conceptual Jew was visqueux (in Sartrean terms), slimy (in Mary Douglas's terms) – an image constructed as compromising and
defying the order of things . . .”11 The association between race or ethnicity and disease is not novel; epidemic
disease, that is,
disease which threatens a society, invariably comes from “somewhere else”12; plagues are “visitations”.13 Susan
Sontag took the example of syphilis, which, when it began to sweep through Europe in the late fifteenth century was the ‘French
pox’ to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the
Chinese disease to the Japanese . . . there is a link between imagining disease and imagining
foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the
alien. A polluting person is always wrong, as Mary Douglas has observed. The inverse is also true: a person judged to be wrong
is regarded as, at least potentially, a source of pollution.14 The advent of modernity allowed the transformation of this
association between ancestry and purity, and between disease and otherness, into a murderous rhetoric which
motivated not only the mistreatment or expulsion of the Other, but their complete destruction.
2NC Disease Impact K
Their framing of disease privileges expertism and demonising target populations as
disease-carriers, while causing the very pandemics it seeks to prevent
Diprose ‘8 (Rosalyn, School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, “Biopolitical
technologies of prevention,” Health Sociology Review, Volume 17, Issue 2, p. 143-144, TH)
The problem with this paradigm of pre-emption is that instead of viewing a life-threatening event, disease, biotechnology, or practice as
specific to context or type, its occurrence is generalised as prototypical of events threatening to health, physical security, and biological life of a
population in all situations. (And underlying this tendency to generalise is that the events, practices and technologies deemed most ‘risky’ and
irresponsible are those that are seen to threaten economic security.) When combined with
a general politics of fear, this way of
thinking justifies a move away from ‘harm minimisation’ policies toward control measures and technical
solutions to health and physical security that aim to dampen the unpredictable aspects of the future, of biomaterial life, and of human ‘agency’ and to thereby predetermine a future of a nation, group, or individual that is continuous
with the past. There are two problematic consequences of the pre-emption approach to physical security of most relevance here. First,
‘risk’ theorists point to how the paradigm fosters conservative government in all senses.5 Not only is ensuring ‘continuity of the future with the
past’ ‘counter- revolutionary’ by definition (Ewald 2002:284), but also the proliferation of imagined
potential threats justifies
‘totalising’ and paternalistic government characteristic of ‘overmanaged democracy’. ‘Totalising’ government involves the increasing
saturation of all spheres of life with regulatory complexes that enframe ‘life’ in a way that delimits what is defined within the paradigm as ‘risky’
practice and that,
in combination with a moralism about particular forms of risk, discourages contestation of the
status quo (including government policy). This stifling of the unpredictable elements of human agency and material ‘life’ can be blatantly
anti-democratic (Hardt and Negri 2005): for example, anti- sedition measures as part of anti-terrorism legislation. But, more typically, this
dampening of agency and dissent is subtle. As Foucault and others have shown (for example, Rabinow and Rose 2006), in governance of the
health and security of the biological life of populations, disciplinary power joins forces with a political rationality of improving health and
welfare authorising techno-scientific
‘experts’ (including within government) to determine what the future self and
healthy nation should look like and fostering compliance with health-prevention, security and surveillance
measures. The second problem with the pre-emption approach is the suspicion that it decreases rather than ensures health and physical
security. Not only is there the worry that dependence on the techno-science mobilised against perceived threats increases our vulnerability or
may be ineffective,6 but also, some argue, strategic protection against incalculable threats fosters
‘autoimmunity’ where ‘a
living being ... works to destroy its own protection’ (Derrida 2003:94). Pre-emptive warfare as an anti-terrorism measure is
the most often cited example of how the logic of autoimmunity plays out in this paradigm, but over-use of antibiotics
would be a comparable example in the biomedical field. I suggest, and go on to argue, that, in the context of the management of life-style
illnesses, the stifling of agency (by prohibiting or discouraging particular practices or by circumventing democratic participation in solutions to
health problems), as well as fostering a bleak and conservative orientation toward the future, contribute
to the proliferation of
those illnesses. The mobilising of the paradigm in some public health campaigns in Australia intensifies the nexus between medicine
and science, on the one hand, and, on the other, a wider moral rhetoric
about the proper future one should pre-empt
for oneself and for the good of the nation (read economy). At the same time medicine is given a central place in a ‘totalising’
government that places responsibility for both the health and security of the population on the shoulders of the individual and the ‘family’ in
the private sphere. It
is a wider trend that demonises and infantilises particular groups in the population who fail to
aspire to a specific preferred image of the future self. In saying this I am expressly not positing a notion of individual rights
and freedom against this trend (the co-constitutive relation between human bodies, bio-material life, and socio-political regimes of meaning, is
too complex to posit such a simplistic counter-force to totalising government). Nor am I pointing the finger at health agencies and health
workers involved in designing these campaigns: there is no telling from the consumer’s perspective how much these campaigns are shaped by
government or advertising companies. Further, the pre-emptive paradigm operates as a general attitudinal atmosphere rather than being
imposed by a single agency and is most often explicit in the sound- bites of politicians (Federal and State) reported in the popular media rather
than in the views of health practitioners. Nevertheless I do want to draw on two of philosophies of the body (biopolitics and phenomenology)
to account for the impact of the wider pre-emptive paradigm on the health of human bodies. And, by formulating a model of both embodied
agency and resistance to such to government of life, I want to indicate why such pre-emptive campaigns
are unlikely to
achieve their expressed aims.
Disease rhetoric dehumanizes entire populations and primes society for destruction
Savage 7 (Rowan Savage, professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of
Technology in Sydney, 25 SEP 2007, ““Disease Incarnate”: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal
Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity”, Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 20, Issue 3, pages
404–440)
With the inception of modernity, various discourses emerged centering
around ideals of integrity and homogeneity.
These converged to form a discourse of biopolitics; under certain conditions, in otherwise widely different circumstances,
this discourse provided both a literal reason and a metaphorical rhetoric calling for the destruction of
alien Others, each of which served the same motivatory and legitimatory purpose at different registers. The first worked at the scientificintellectual-political level; the second at the emotional-populist level. Thus emerged an entirely novel medicalised and
militarised discourse which allowed for “genocide” to be conceivable; and which, furthermore, eased the
path for its enactment by the legitimisation and justification of the acts of perpetrators through the
dehumanisation of victims. This dehumanisation “primes” the society or the perpetrator group, and provides
one motivation for destruction, one reason to follow the “twisted path” to genocide. Once that end is
reached, dehumanising discourse continues, as perpetrators and bystanders justify their acts to themselves and to others. In
the final stages of genocide, this rhetoric is literally imprinted on the bodies of the victims; they are forced to live
under conditions “which (re)produce their essentialized identity”. In the cases examined here, the disease-ridden, dehumanised
state to which victims are reduced makes genocide “seem like a justifiable ‘purification’ process” for
the protection of the national body.”202 Many factors motivate genocide, and many different categorisations and metaphors are
used to understand outgroups as undesirable or as legitimate targets for destruction. But without the specifically modern,
essentialist concept of a group as extraneous and as indelibly wrong, genocide as we know it is
conceptually unthinkable. Not all episodes of genocide demonstrate the specific biomedical discourse which is apparent in the cases
examined in this paper; neither does every episode which employs the discourse of modernity employ its techniques.203 But such discourse is
a common factor in otherwise diverse episodes, and for this reason deserves deeper consideration than it has thus far been accorded. This
work has been intended to expose the features of biopolitical dehumanisation in genocide, both as a common factor and as an essential aspect
of the process when it is present. In doing so I have attempted to weave together a number of seemingly disparate theoretical and historical
threads to create a synthesis which allows this subject to be understood as a coherent and influential narrative of exclusion, rather than
glimpsed in scattershot fashion. The twentieth century is bookended by two of the cases I have examined (namely, genocides in Asia Minor, and
in the former Yugoslavia). In Zimbabwe in 2005 President Robert Mugabe began a campaign to clear “slum” areas, ostensibly to crack down on
illegal housing, and as an effort to prevent the spread of disease (it should be noted that the targeted sections of society form much of
Zimbabwe's internal opposition). The campaign is named Operation Murambatsvina, Shona for “Drive Out Trash”. There is no reason, in other
words, to think that the discourse I have examined has lost its power in the contemporary period. In societies and cultures which remain
wedded to a particular convergence of cultural and social models provided by modernity – in which biopolitical language and imagery is
available for use in a vocabulary of exclusion – the presence of this rhetoric in its typical manifestations should be viewed as a danger sign. In
this work I have traced the way in which biopolitical
dehumanisation in the modern era became a lethal selffulfilling prophecy; but for as long as the discursive formations of any society provide this rhetoric as a
viable manifestation of exclusory practice, biopolitical dehumanisation will continue to play an
integral role as a mechanism of genocide.
Historically, the rhetoric of disease and purity has been mobilized in the service of
biopolitical and genocidal regimes
Savage 7 (Rowan Savage, professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of
Technology in Sydney, 25 SEP 2007, ““Disease Incarnate”: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal
Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity”, Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 20, Issue 3, pages
404–440)
Eugenics and race theory had provided a literal, scientific-intellectual argument as to why biologicallydefined groups posed a threat to society. At the same time, medicine provided a metaphorical rhetoric which, given the
established scientific “proof”, could be employed to call for the destruction of outgroups . The concept of social
disease in the body politic was not novel; but the discovery of germ theory allowed a particularly vicious
conceptualisation of disease and illness as an alien, threatening Other invading the body. The concept that
living organisms had a role in causing disease, the “animacular hypothesis”, was a theory which dated back to classical times; however, from
the 1860s onwards, breakthroughs by scientists, most notably Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, presented increasingly convincing proof of the
relationship between microbes and illnesses. By 1900, “the general principle that microorganisms played a central role in causing
communicable diseases . . . had achieved widespread acceptance in both Europe and America”.72 The new “germ theory” travelled rapidly into
the popular realm, through public health campaigns, lectures and publications in popular science and household issues, and advertising.73 In
the 1930s, growing recognition of the importance of viruses added a new spur to disease rhetoric.74 Illness in general had long been used as
societal metaphor.75 But the advent of germ theory allowed more specific and particular kinds of understandings of illness, which then became
available for metaphorical use. Previous political metaphors which saw “societal illnesses” as treatable by reason, foresight or tolerance were
replaced by a view in which disease equals death, in which the emphasis is on diseases that are loathsome and fatal, diseases which are not to
be managed or treated, but attacked.76 In contrast to previous theories which had seen miasma and vapours as spreading illness, germ theory
created active agents of illness which sought out their victims, agents which could be visualised, confined and destroyed.77 There was a change
from a defensive, to an offensive attitude.78 Disease changed from a punishment, to something to be punished79: hygiene took on religiomoral overtones. As the American pioneer home economist Ellen Richards wrote, even small hygienic chores had become “a step in the
conquering of evil, for dirt is sin”.80 Disease-causing bacteria were described as “invisible enemies”, “baneful”, “lying in wait”, “foreign”,
“base”, “murderous” and “cunning”; and they “were often described in martial terms as attacking, invading, and conquering their human hosts”
(a theme I return to below).81 A purposeful use of Darwinist rhetoric and analogy also emerged. Many of the leading figures in debate were
committed Darwinists, who saw and described the relationship between microbe and host not only as a war, but specifically as a manifestation
of the “survival of the fittest”.82 While germ
theory made disease more comprehensible, it also became more frightening,
for people, not places, were now responsible for disease83– and a closer association was now possible between
particular groups of people and disease.84 The advent of germ theory also gave rise to an important change in understanding of the nature of
incarnated pollution. It
was no longer identifiable by outward appearance, which became deceptive: the cleanestlooking person might harbour hidden and contagious impurity.85 In the metaphors created by germ theory, this tied
in neatly with the view which saw assimilation as an unacceptable, and even a threatening, option. Assimilated minorities and “political
traitors” were more, not less, dangerous because they fitted in and because they could not be readily identified.86 For it was their essential,
immutable inner nature which was the source of the threat. The
rhetoric of victims as disease organisms appeared soon
after the inception of the theory – and, in Germany, in parallel with Jewish emancipation and the entrance of “upstart” Jews into
the previously separate Gemeinschaft (“community”). De Gobineau maintained, in the words of Tatz, that “civilisations degenerate and die
when the primordial race-unit is broken up and swamped by an influx of foreign elements . . . Purity of blood was essential to maintain that
power, and purity had to be protected from dangerous germ plasms, the bacilli – the Jews”.87 By 1886 Paul de Lagarde
could describe
Jews as “nothing but carriers of decomposition” and argue that “with trichinae and bacilli one does not
negotiate . . . they are exterminated as quickly and thoroughly as possible”;88 and in 1895 Hermann Ahlwardt,
attacking Jewish immigration, labelled Jews “cholera bacilli”.89 Richard Wagner's son-in-law, Houston Stuart Chamberlain, wrote that “alien
elements” in Teutonism had not yet been exorcised “and still, like baneful germs, circulate in our blood”.90 From this point onwards, such
rhetoric is commonly found in the words of the perpetrators of genocidal episodes. A 1976 Khmer Rouge Party
Center Report (thought to have been written by Pol Pot himself) states the following: “there is a sickness inside the Party
. . . we cannot locate it precisely. The illness must emerge to be examined . . . we search for the microbes within the Party without
success . . . They will rot society, rot the Party, rot the army . . . We must expose them.”91 Those who exhibited “regressive”
signs were held to have a “sick consciousness” (chhoeu sâtiarâmma); and a Khmer Rouge saying held that the goal was to
“completely annihilate diseases of consciousness” and create a society of pure revolutionaries.92 Advances in health
science, however, were to have political effects beyond making such genocidal rhetoric available for use. As well as providing this symbolic
discourse, they altered the very enactment of government. V. Disease and “Public Health” With the advent of the nation-state, hygienic
medicine as a technique of health assumed an increasingly important place in the administrative system and the machinery of power. The
health of the population as a whole became one of the essential objectives of political power.93 The nation-state, shaped as it was by the new
technology of population (that is, political science), encompassing the tools for internal measurement and regulation, was the only body
equipped to deal with the necessary processes of discipline: identification, categorisation, containment, and (if necessary) elimination.94
The
health of the population would be ensured by the “police” of the social body, and specifically by the new formation,
“medical police”95; thus, with the new conception of illness, public health became more than ever before a question of policing.96
Germ theory redefined the concept of individual liberty, “making it acceptable for governments to investigate citizens and restrict their
movements, since no individual had the right to contaminate others”.97 Furthermore,
the elimination of illness through state
surveillance and state control of the individual could be seen not only as a necessity, but also as humane; such a
view was espoused by important scientists, notably Koch, a founder of bacteriology.98 The Nuremberg Laws passed in Germany in 1935, which
deprived Jews of their citizenship and forbade their marriage to non-Jews, as well as forbidding the marriage of German subjects who were
“genetically ill” (Erbkranken) to the “genetically fit”, were generally considered public health measures.99 The Blood Protection Law was listed
among the official measures of German health legislation, while German medical journals described miscegenation as a “public health hazard”
and scholars analysing community racial makeup claimed to be producing a “racial diagnosis” (Rassendiagnose). The law covering the
“genetically ill” was named the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of German People.100 The sterilisation
of the “unfit”
by gas and injection (in Germany itself) and shooting (in the occupied East) began in 1939,
designated by the government as the year of “the duty to be healthy.”101 The mass murder of Jews, employing many of the same
perpetrators, began in 1941. Many scholars have drawn a link between these events, inasmuch as they involve an
evolutionary progress of the removal and destruction of those who were categorised in essentialised biological terms, and in
metaphorical medical terminology, as a threat to society.102 Götz Aly theorised that the most important connection
began in 1933. “Medical” murder,
between Operation T-4 (the first Nazi mass murder program to target an entire, carefully defined set of people) and the murder of Jews was
“the discovery made by the organisers that all levels of German administration, as well as the German people in general, were willing to accept
such a procedure.”103 Dehumanising
rhetoric which cast particular groups as a threat and excised them from the
national community had worked more than effectively. Walter Gross, head of the Nazi Office of Racial Policy, dated the explicit
link made between genetic health and German blood to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. All subsequent legislation on race and population, Gross
claimed, was based on the distinction these laws drew between “healthy” and “diseased races”.104 The concentration and elimination
of
Jews took place under the guise of “quarantine”: ghettoes were a “hygienic necessity” and Jews were
characterised as “germ-carriers” who spread epidemic disease.105 This rhetoric emerge again in Democratic
Kampuchea (DK), where at times the eradication of “microbes” was likened to a public health decision . . .
‘Leaders justified destruction of the “diseased elements” of the old society . . . We were told
repeatedly that in order to save the country, it was essential to destroy all the contaminated parts . . . It
was essential to cut deep, even to destroy a few good people rather than chance one “diseased” person
escaping eradication.’106
2NC Language Important
The metaphor of disease is important – it legitimizes and justifies atrocities
Savage 7 (Rowan Savage, professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of
Technology in Sydney, 25 SEP 2007, ““Disease Incarnate”: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal
Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity”, Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 20, Issue 3, pages
404–440)
How does particular language function to legitimise and justify the “unthinkable”? The language that
we use to describe action shapes our understanding of the meaning of that action. There is a world of
difference between the murder of a human being and the excision of a cancerous growth, between
“massacre” and “cleansing”. Language which names people as a disease not only justifies their destruction, but the perpetrator may
even feel self-righteous.155 In the context of the “therapeutic” aspect of genocide, Lifton described this as principled mass killing.156 What
such discourse does is to recreate understanding of the meaning of action. Metaphor, according to Murray Edelman, “defines the pattern of
perception to which people respond”.157 Metaphorical
language prevents its users from equating their own
actions “with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies.”158 Metaphorical language thus renders
murder non-murderous.159 Lifton, for example, wrote of the way in which, through the medicalised rhetoric which
concealed killing, Nazi doctors created an “Auschwitz self” in which the doctor knew he selected, but did not
interpret selections as murder, in which the meaning of action was completely disavowed.160 While doctors did not
believe euphemisms such as Rampendienst (“ramp duty”) or Selektion (“selection”), “the language used gave Nazi doctors a
discourse in which killing was no longer killing; and need not be experienced, or even perceived, as killing. As they lived
increasingly within that language – and they used it with each other – Nazi doctors became imaginatively bound to a psychic realm of
derealization, disavowal, and nonfeeling”.161 As one former Nazi doctor said to Lifton in reference to “euthanasia”, “there was a certain . . .
sensibility that this couldn't be, . . . [that] one cannot simply murder a mentally ill or . . . old person or an imbecile.”162 Metaphor, however,
also performs another function intimately connected with maltreatment and murder: metaphors
which name victim peoples as cancers, tumours, viruses and bacilli construct them as a threat, and at
the same time refer, implicitly or explicitly, to the standard solution to that threat – their destruction.
In cases of disease epidemics “[t]he survival of the nation, of civilized society, of the world itself is said to be at
stake – claims that are a familiar part of building a case for repression (an emergency requires “drastic measures,” et cetera.)”.163 These
“drastic measures” trump the moral codes which apply outside of an “emergency” situation. Herbert Hirsch and Roger W. Smith demonstrated
the way in which fear-inspiring images
are used to justify killing and call for action. Out-groups will be called
vermin, infidels, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people . . . [T]he use of such terms by those with
political authority is a clear sign that the society is moving in a genocidal direction. Language becomes
an indicator of a shift in the normative order and serves notice that inhibitions against mass killing
have begun to erode . . . [s]uch terms prepare the victims for destruction by dehumanizing members
of the group and providing a warrant for genocide.164 Dehumanising and demonising metaphorical
language is both “a legitimating mechanism and a call for action”.165
Human Rights
1NC “Human Rights” K
Human rights is a shallow cover up for the theft of all rights by imperialism and
justifies mass extermination
Douzinas ‘10 (Costas, Prof. of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities @ U. of
London, The Idea of Communism, “Adikia: On Communism and Rights” pgs. 94-95 bb)
These developments mean that rights have become both the site and the stake of politics. Marx argued in the nineteenth century that the
rights to property and religious freedom removed them from state intervention, de-politicizing and offering them the strongest protection
possible. What
is the effect of the contemporary proliferation of rights-talk and its colonization of major aspects of
I could claim that rights attempt to legalize social struggle: they
individualize political claims, turning them into technical disputes and removing the possibility of
radical change, in other words, rights de-politicize politics. In this sense, human rights operate on a dual register: they conceal
life? Adjusting Marx's pioneering work, one
and affirm the dominant structure but they can also highlight inequality and oppression. Can they help challenge oppression? This double
operation recalls the distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique) and its influential recent use by Jacques Ranciere.31
Ranciere defines normal politics (or 'policing') as the process of argumentation and negotiation amongst the various
parts of the social whole.32 It aims at (re)distributing benefits, rewards and positions without challenging the
overall balance. Against this routine policing, politics proper is a form of disruption of the established social
order. Badiou similarly defines politics as 'collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new
possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order'.33 Politics proper erupts only when an excluded group or
class, the part of no part', demands to be included and must change the rules of inclusion and the
established equilibrium. This kind of antagonism or 'dissensus' 'is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is a division put in
the "common sense": a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we see something as given'.34 A new political
subject is constituted, in excess of the hierarchized and visible list of groups, places and functions in society.35 The inclusion of the
invisible part overthrows the rules of the game and interrupts the natural order of domination. This is the political's operation par excellence
and reminds one of Alain Badiou s event. Based on this analysis, Ranciere
argues, contra Arendt and Agamben, that
rights do not belong exclusively to subjects or citizens. Those without rights can equally invoke them.
Human rights move back and forth between abstract statements of principle and denial in practice. This dissonance allows the excluded to put
the statements of principle to the test. Freedom
and equality are not qualities people have; they are political
predicates, the meaning and scope of which is the object of political struggles. Ranciere's attempt to save
human rights for radical politics is ingenious but problematic. Rights have become the main stake and tool in the routine politics of consensus'
Ranciere denounces. The evolution of rights from inscriptions of constituent power to central expressions of the established juridico-political
order has all but removed their radical edge. They stabilize intersubjective relations
by giving minimum recognition
to multiple identities; they codify the liberal ideology of limited freedom and formal equality; they
express and promote individual desires, turning them into the litmus test of freedom (of choice). Most
rights claims reinforce the established social order. First, they accept the established balance and aim to
admit peripherally new claims or claimants. Second, they turn law into the gatekeeper and protector of the social order,
transforming the political claim into a demand for admission to the law. Law transforms social and political conflict into a set of technical
problems regulated by rules and hands them over to rule experts. In this sense, rights express and promote established political arrangements
and socioeconomic distributions and belong to the domain of police. The rights claimant is the opposite of Ranciere's political subject whose
task is to transform radically the overall balance. Successful human rights struggles marginally re-arrange social hierarchies and mildly redistribute the social product. Right-claims bring to the surface the exclusion, domination and exploitation and the inescapable strife that
permeate social life. But at the same time, they
conceal the deep roots of strife and domination by framing
struggle and resistance in the terms of legal and individual remedies which, if successful, lead to small
improvements and marginal re-arrangements of the social edifice. Ranciere seems to agree that these liberties each
person has are the liberties, that is the domination, of those who possess the immanent powers of society. It is the empire of the law of the
accumulation of wealth.'36 Human rights promote 'choice' against freedom, conformism versus imagination.
Children are given rights against their parents; patients, students and welfare recipients are termed 'customers' and are offered consumer
rights and fake 'choices'. In Western capitalist societies, freedom and choice have become the mantras of politics. Rights have become rewards
for accepting the dominant order, but they are of little use to those who challenge it. Ranciere s excessive' subjects, who stand for the universal
from a position of exclusion, have been replaced by identity and social groups seeking recognition and limited re-distribution. The
excluded have no access to rights, which are foreclosed by political, legal and military means.
Economic migrants, refugees, prisoners in the war on terror, torture victims, inhabitants of African
camps, these one-use humans' attest to the 'inhuman' in the midst of humanity. They are the
indispensable precondition and proof of the impossibility of human rights. The law not only cannot understand
the 'surplus subject', its operation prevents its emergence. At that point we send those abroad 'medicines and clothes, to people deprived of
medicine, clothes and rights'.37 As Wendy Brown put it, rights
not only 'mask by depoliticizing the social power of
institutions such as private property or the family, they organize mass populations for exploitation
and regulation'.18 The dark side of rights leads to the inexorable rise in the surveillance, classification
and control of individuals and populations.
Failed States
1NC Failed States K
The securitization of “failed states” is a discourse that fears difference justifying
infinite violence in the name of an unattainable global peace.
Abrahamsen ‘5 (Rita, Department of International Politics, University of Wales “Blair's Africa: The
Politics of Securitization and Fear. “Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 30, 2005)
The further securitization of Africa does not follow automatically from the terrorist attacks on the
United States. (43) The al-Qaeda cells responsible for the attacks had no more (and probably fewer) links to
countries in sub-Saharan Africa than to London, Hamburg, or Florida. Nevertheless, 9/11 quickly came to provide
a direct reference for the securitization of Africa since the attacks were widely interpreted to
demonstrate beyond dispute that conflict and unrest in one part of the world could spill over and
destroy the lives of thousands on the other side of the globe. "Interconnectedness" really had become
dangerous. As Blair put it in his speech to the Labour Party conference, "we are realising how fragile are our frontiers in the face of the
world's new challenges. Today conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries"; (44) or in the words of the UK foreign secretary, "It is no longer
necessary to prove a direct link between a troubled faraway country and the order of our own societies.... Six months ago, no American could
have proved a link between the chaos of Afghanistan and the safety of the thousands working in the World Trade Centre." Now, the
changed Manhattan skyline is a constant reminder that "disorder abroad can threaten security at
home." (45) In the same way as Afghanistan's turmoil is seen to have brought devastation to the United
States, so Africa's perceived disorder is believed to threaten the West. Thus, while for Straw a shattered window of the
British ambassador's home in Kinshasa becomes not "an immediate threat to British security ... neither can we take the view that conflicts such
as the war in Congo [are] none of our business." It
has to be "our business" because of globalization and
interdependence. According to Straw, this is the "lesson of September 11" and "we cannot ignore the world
and hope that it will go away." (46) The securitization of Africa is further helped by the association of
underdevelopment with conflict and the discourses on the "failed state" that have gained such prominence in
political studies and international relations in recent years. (47) Indeed, both the British and the U.S. governments have drawn a direct link
between "weak" or "failed states" and the attacks of September 11. Significantly, just as the anniversary of the terrorist attacks was
approaching, Secretary Straw devoted an entire speech to the topic of "failed and failing states." (48) The dreadful events of September 11, he
argued, give us a vision of one possible future: "A future in which unspeakable acts of evil are committed against us, coordinated from failed
states in distant parts of the wurld." The speech refers specifically to Somalia, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), invoking
the Hobbesian image of a "state of nature," without order, where "continual fear and danger of violent death" render life "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short." (49) In common with academic writings on the
"failed state," the foreign secretary represents Africa (and
other poor areas of the globe) as "zones of chaos," prone to barbarism, anarchy, and arbitrary violence. (50) The problem,
according to New Labour, is that these "zones of chaos" cannot be isolated from the "zones of peace" but are
instead connected through numerous licit and illicit networks of finance, trade, and services. The "failed
states" of Africa (e.g., the DRC, Liberia, Sudan, and Somalia) are perceived as lucrative, murky spaces, or "black
holes" in an otherwise ordered world, where criminal organizations and terrorist networks obtain money,
weapons, diamonds, and oil outside the conventional trading, banking, and financial systems. In the catching terms of the
headline writers, "Terror Thrives in the Rich Ruins of Africa." Speculations abound about the links between these "black holes" and terrorism;
for example, the funding of Hizbollah has been traced to the Congolese diamond trade, whereas Sierra Leonean diamonds are said to be a
source of income for al-Qaeda. (51) "Failed states," then, are seen as a "free trade zone for the underworld," and
following September 11 they are not simply dysfunctional states damaging to the local population and a cause of local/regional conflict; first
and foremost they are dangerous states threatening the stability of "the zone of peace." In the words of Robert Cooper, a senior British
diplomat who has been influential in shaping Blair's foreign policy agenda, "failed states" (or "premodern states," in Cooper's vocabulary) may
provide a base from which "non-state actors, notably drug, crime, or terrorist syndicates," may launch "attacks on the more orderly parts of the
world." (52) The point is made even more forcefully by Secretary Straw, who links "failed states" directly to British social problems and national
security: [A]s well as bringing mass murder to the heart of Manhattan, state failure has brought terror and misery to large swathes of the
African continent, as it did in the Balkans in the early 1990s. And at home it has brought drugs, violence and crime to Britain's streets.
Accordingly, "we need to remind ourselves that turning a blind eye to the breakdown of order in any part of the world, however distant, invites
direct threats to our national security and well-being." (53)In a more recent speech, Chris Mullin, the Foreign Office minister for Africa, argues
that there are "sound practical reasons why we cannot afford to ignore the state of Africa. The most immediate of these is terrorism."
According to Mullin, the "fact that in parts of Africa such as Somalia entire societies have imploded makes them a ready breeding ground for
terrorism." The "failed state" of Somalia and other "weak
states" on the continent are seen by Mullin to "present terrorists
with space in which to plan and export attacks. These are no anomalous incidents but symptoms of a problem in Africa
which poses a serious, direct and continuing security threat to us." (54) Similar concerns are clearly evident, but expressed in more
compassionate and careful terms, in Blair's speech to the 2001 Labour Party Conference, where the potential benefits and risks of globalization
form a central theme. The
threat is not simply al-Qaeda or terrorism but is much more broadly conceived.
"Today," according to Blair, the threat is chaos, because for people with work to do, family life to balance, mortgages to pay, careers to
further, pensions to provide, the yearning is for order and stability and if it doesn't exist elsewhere, it is unlikely to exist here. I have long
believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in. (55) The quotation is worth dwelling on. For Blair, "chaos"
is
represented by those who do not go to work, who don't have mortgages to pay or careers to further.
These people exist "elsewhere" and they have the capacity to destroy the order and stability of
"here." This is the seldom-noticed corollary to New Labour's vision of interdependence: the capacity of "elsewhere" to impact on "here."
While "elsewhere" is not defined, the speech soon turns to the former Yugoslavia and to Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the DRC, Zimbabwe, and, more
broadly, "the state of Africa." Clearly
this is where "chaos" lurks, and where order and stability needs to be
imposed through the reasoned intervention of the "world community," lest its disorder travels through the
increasingly interconnected world to the "zones of peace." As a result, the question of how to deal with the "elsewhere" in order to secure the
"here" occupies an increasingly central role in the government's policy toward Africa. The Politics of Securitization Securitization
is not
merely a question of representation, or a symbolic act, but has clear political implications. (56) Identifying
something as a security issue is not an innocent practice: it changes the legitimate modes of engagement with
a particular problem. Framed as a development/humanitarian issue, Africa encourages compassion and particular policy responses
formulated and implemented primarily by the Department for International Development. Approached as a security issue, by contrast, Africa
may encourage fear and unease, and this may in turn potentially facilitate policy responses of a more militarized and illiberal nature, shifting
the institutional responsibility toward the FCO and perhaps also the Ministry of Defence. It is in the prime minister's invocation of the
"elsewhere" that we begin to glimpse the politics and the potential implications of New Labour's securitization of Africa. Like most security
discourses,
the government's securitization of the continent is founded on expectations and fear of harm
or hostility, and the threatened community itself becomes unproblematic, a taken-for-granted unit whose
common values and shared identity need no elaboration or justification in the face of external animosity. (57) Viewed in this light, securitization
can be seen as a powerful political strategy that shapes and maintains the unity of a political community. In the case of New Labour's
securitization of Africa, this logic is clearly evident. Blair's speech to the Labour Party Conference in 2001 is littered with references to
"community," which he insists is the "governing idea of modern social democracy." The
"world community" or the
"international community" is not defined, but it seems to include states that believe "that we are a
community of people" and that respect justice, reason, and tolerance. The problem with "failed
states" is that they are part of global networks, linked to the "zone of peace" through a multiplicity of licit and illicit
relationships, but at the same time they are not part of the prime minister's "international/world community" in
that they do not subscribe to the values he regards as universal (justice, reason, and tolerance). Thus, while Labour's
policy discourse on Africa stops short of identifying a specific enemy (as in, say, a country), there is a clear
elaboration of a sense of threat arising from chaos, instability, and underdevelopment. The effect is twofold.
First, the fear that Africa's underdevelopment may harm or give rise to hostile actions toward the "international community" helps define and
reinforce the unity of that community and also to mobilize political and public support for the "war on
terrorism." The timing of both Blair's speech to the party conference and Straw's address on "failed and failing states" is important in this
regard. The former was delivered barely three weeks after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, just as the attacks on the Taliban's bases in
Afghanistan were about to start. The latter speech was delivered shortly before the anniversary of the September 11 and, importantly, during
the build up to the war on Iraq. Iraq figures prominently in the speech, with the foreign secretary justifying
the impending war and
action on "failed states" in Africa as part of the same "war on terrorism." At a time of intense debate and fierce
opposition to the government's policies, the securitization of Africa can thus be seen as part of a political strategy to unify public and party
support behind the government. In this sense, the securitization of Africa is
part of wider political struggles and closely
linked to other security narratives in a complex and ongoing process. (58) Drawing Africa into these security debates
can nevertheless be seen to help legitimize the government's "war on terrorism," even giving it a "humanitarian face" by
linking it to the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment. Second, the securitization of Africa (and other
poverty-stricken parts of globe) is part of a delineation of who belongs to Blair's "international community" and who
doesn't, or, in Nietzschean terms, who is inside and outside the gates. This same "international
community" and its shared values are then in turn held up to the securitized "outside" as the
exemplar of what they have to become in order to get past the gatekeeper. (59) In this way, securitization
helps define exactly which developments and phenomena are to be opposed and if possible
eradicated. Seen from this perspective, securitization becomes a profoundly political act determining not only
the boundaries of political communities but also how to deal with those on the outside. Rather
schematically, it could be argued that the policies that follow from securitization are formulated to win over,
contain, or destroy the external enemy or threat. In the case of "failed" and "underdeveloped" states, a strategy of
containment is on its own rendered largely ineffective by Labour's understanding of the world as increasingly interconnected and borderless.
Because the "zones of chaos" cannot successfully be sectioned off from the "zones of peace," strategies
to win over the enemy predominate and operate alongside strategies of containment. At the same
time, the possibility of destruction is never ruled out. Conquest and conversion, as William Connolly has
remarked in a different context, remain the two authorized responses to otherness. (60)
Poverty
1NC “Global Poverty” K
“Global poverty” discourse up-scales local solutions to broad populations,
reentrenching poverty through and ignoring that capitalism is the root cause – the K
solves better
Gupta ’11 (Akhil, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, “National Poverty
and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism” Cahiers d'études africaines, Vol. 2-3)
I wish to add a few other critiques that interrogate the concept of “global poverty”.
poverty?
What does it mean to speak of global
In what sense is poverty global and what implications does formulating poverty in these terms have for the kinds of solutions
that are proposed to eradicate it? Thinking Contextually About Poverty 28 We
could talk about poverty as being “global” in
two ways. The first manner in which that term is employed is to indicate a class of people (for instance, those who live on
less than $1/ day). The second way in which we could think about it is to indicate the structural and institutional
mechanisms that operate on a global scale that create poverty. In this meaning, “global poverty” would point to that
aspect of poverty that could be traced to the actions of global institutions and global structures. 29 The problem with the first
definition—the usual way in which global poverty is defined—is that it posits, if only implicitly, that there is some
reason to include all poor people into one category. Counting the poor is certainly an important reason for defining
poverty in this way. However, once defined in this manner, the concept of “global poverty” favors a context-free, or at
least contextually thin, understanding of poverty. It looks for unitary explanations and for universalistic
solutions (more complete markets, empowerment, participation, transparency, decentralization, etc.). The goal is to find what works in a
particular local setting, and then “scale up” to other settings. This is a fundamental premise of major development
institutions, whether it is the World Bank, national governments, or transnational ngos. 30 From an anthropological viewpoint, one should
press for a way of thinking about poverty that first considers the meaning of poverty for the people who experience it before attempting to find
solutions. Indeed the actions of the poor as social agents depend on what poverty means to them. We know from the study of famines that
even when people are dying of starvation, they make culturally and socially significant distinctions in order to decide what kinds of food are
edible, and who gets to eat whatever little food is available, and in what order (Greenough 1982; Sen 1983). Even under the most extreme
conditions, the assumption that certain goods are vital—in the sense of being “beyond” meaning—represents a faulty premise. 31 We can
broach the broader point about context dependence by pointing to three important issues. First, without
understanding how the
poor understand their own existential situation, we cannot have meaningful solutions to poverty. Even
indices for the measurement of poverty, such as the $1/day income measure, fail to ask what those income measures might mean to the
people who are so classified. Although people whose income is below $1/day might be classed as “the poor”, they may find that they have
little in common with each other. 32 Secondly, by
a contextually specific understanding of poverty, I am not making
a classic anthropological case for “the local” (hence for a smaller scale). What I am arguing is for a specific
theory of the articulation of structures that are global, national, regional, and local. Even if global and national
structures are identical, we may need different solutions for different regional and social contexts. I am proposing that “solutions” to poverty
will necessarily need to vary by geographical location, and by gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, etc. My argument for complexity and nonreducibility is no doubt a frustrating conclusion to social engineers who wish to find “broadly applicable” solutions. Nevertheless, it is the only
logical outcome that follows from taking seriously the mantras of decentralization, participation, and empowerment. 33 Such
contextually dependent understandings of poverty acknowledge the role of historically enmeshed
inequalities in creating poverty for certain social groups in a particular region. A one-size-fits-all
approach, scaled up from another setting, might increase inequalities, or push more people into
poverty than an approach tailored for a specific place (Gupta 2010). 34 The ideological shifts that made
neoliberalism and market triumphalism possible also meant that the critique of global and national
inequality could no longer be articulated with any conviction in the public sphere. Once the relation
between poverty and inequality had been sundered, the only way to deal with the non-vanishing
problem of extremely poor people was through an ethical discourse grounded in human rights. In this
sense, “global poverty” as the term has been used here could only emerge as a problem once the
critique of capitalism as a generator of global inequality and extreme poverty was no longer tenable.
35 In a forthcoming book, Anirudh Krishna formulates a critique of certain aspects of anti-poverty policies that are built on the premise that
Policy “solutions” are aimed at lifting those below the poverty line out of
poverty, yet the success of these solutions would be far greater if they prevented people who are not
poor from becoming poor. It is rather ironic to see that the search for invariant solutions towards poverty alleviation leads to a
poverty is a stock rather than a flow.
distancing from the very features that are most responsible for global poverty, namely historically grounded inequalities, asymmetries of
power, and the inability for the poor to access global labor and commodity markets. In focusing resolutely on national poverty eradication
plans, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsps) do not address the fact that the
elimination of global institutional and
economic inequalities may help the poor more than any action taken at a national or local level. The
removal of agricultural subsidies for US and European farmers (including the subsidies for irrigation), the internalization of pollution costs
(caused by vehicle emissions and other factors that contribute to global warming), and the elimination of some of the restrictive aspects of trips
Agreement (that keep the price of medication prohibitively high) would contribute
to change the structural factors that lie
at the root of poverty far more than the “scaling up” of micro-credit. Yet the focus of “development” institutions
and expert knowledge continues to be on the latter type of solutions. If there are invariant conditions that contribute to global poverty, they
are likely to be found in the structures of global institutional arrangements, such as agricultural subsidies, externalization of pollution costs,
restrictive trade regimes such as TRIPs, etc. However, it is precisely these structures of inequality that go largely unaddressed in the current
discourse on global poverty.
Gupta ’11 (Akhil, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, “National Poverty
and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism” Cahiers d'études africaines, Vol. 2-3)
The chief institutional mechanism by which this renewed emphasis on poverty has been implemented is through a
“new Washington
consensus” forged in late 1999 by the World Bank and the imf, namely the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsps).
The prsps are country-driven, result oriented strategies that bring national development plans in line with neoliberal
globalization by emphasizing growth, free markets, and an open economy (Craig & Porter 2003: 53; Weber 2004: 197). However, they
differ from structural adjustment in emphasizing that growth needs to be broad-based, that good governance, decentralization, and
empowerment are critical, that investments in health, education, and human capital are desirable, and that social protection is necessary for
those adversely impacted by adjustment processes. 25 Therefore, it is possible to read them as a
“Third Way” solution to
harmonize economies in the global South to neoliberal globalization but without completely disregarding the
human costs of such “adjustment”. In this view, the renewed interest in poverty exhibited by the coordinated
actions of the World Bank and the imf on prsps is really about inventing a new form of governance to control the
Third World and to prevent the rise of other social and political alternatives (Weber 2004). Taking a broader
perspective, Sindzingre (2004: 176) argues that the wholescale focus on poverty is politically regressive because it
displaces concerns with global inequality, and postpones a real discussion of development. 26 For Noël
(2006: 322), the rhetoric of global poverty has been adopted as a cynical means to legitimize neoliberal
globalization. In this view, the importance of global poverty in the statements of multilateral
organizations, G-8 nation-states, and other global economic elites, is an effort either to conceal the real agenda of structural change,
or to sugar coat it so that it appears more politically palatable. Craig and Porter (2003: 54) argue that the logic of the
prsps is clear: “Global economic integration first, good governance second, poverty reduction following as a result, underpinned by limited
safety nets and human capital development.” In this view, poverty
reduction lies at the margins of a global agenda
aimed at a particularly unequal vision of economic integration (Noël 2006: 323).