1
Interpretation— 1ACs must use the three-tier method of personal experience,
organic, and academic intellectuals to justify the plan’s security coop with
NATO— Absent any of these, the 1AC prevents access, privileges existing
power, and renders debater’s groundless
Reid-Brinkley 8 - PhD from UGA, professor of communications at the University of Pittsburgh (Shanara, “THE HARSH
REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL
PERFORMANCE AND STYLE”)
The process of signifyin’ engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not simply designed to critique the use of
traditional evidence. As Green argues, their goal is to “challenge the relationship between social power and knowledge.”57
In other words, those with social power within the debate community are able to produce and
determine “legitimate” knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to maintain the
dominance of normative knowledge-making practices, while crowding out or directly excluding
alternative knowledge-making 83 practices. The Louisville “framework looks to the people who are
oppressed by current constructions of power.”58 Jones and Green offer an alternative framework for drawing
claims in debate speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A way in which you can validate our
claims, is through the three-tier process. And we talk about personal experience, organic
intellectuals, and academic intellectuals. Let me give you an analogy. If you place an elephant in the room and send
in three blind folded people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the elephant. And they come back
outside and you ask each different person they gone have a different idea about what they was talking about. But, if you let those
people converse and bring those three different people together then you can achieve a greater truth.59 Jones argues that
without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular perspectives that privilege
those with institutional and economic power. The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per se,
instead they seek to augment or supplement what counts as evidence with other forms of knowledge produced outside of
academia. As Green notes in the double-octo-finals at CEDA Nationals, “Knowledge surrounds me in the streets, through my peers,
through personal experiences, and everyday wars that I fight with my mind.”60 The thee-tier process: personal experience, organic
intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of argumentation that taps into diverse forms of knowledge-making
practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and organic intellectuals are placed on par with traditional forms of
evidence. While the Louisville
debaters see the benefit of academic research, they are also critically
aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policy-oriented
discussions because of their lack of training and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical
solutions to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia from being more permanently addressed.
According to Green: bell hooks talks about how when we rely solely on one perspective to make our claims,
radical liberatory theory becomes rootless. That’s the reason why we use a three-tiered process. That’s why
we use alternative forms of discourse such as hip hop. That’s also how we use traditional evidence and our personal narratives so
you don’t get just one perspective claiming to be the right way. Because it becomes a
more meaningful and
educational view as far as how we achieve our education.61 The use of hip hop and personal experience
function as a check against the homogenizing function of academic and expert discourse. Note the
reference to bell hooks. Green argues that without alternative perspectives, “radical libratory theory becomes rootless.” The
term rootless seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the material circumstances that
academics or experts study. In other words, academics and experts by definition represent an intellectual
population with a level of objective distance from that which they study. For the Louisville debaters, this
distance is problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that is rooted in the
community of those most greatly affected by the status of oppression.
Violation— the 1AC is divorced from personal experience, organic, and
academic intellectualism.
Vote Neg
1. Access- normative knowledge-making practices are steeped in expert
vernaculars that crowd out minority participants which is a pre-req to
debate’s benefits- water policy analysis absent the three-tier process
leads to distancing and demobilizes politics towards interpassivity and
locks in psychological violence
2. Cognitive Dissonance- Not only are non-black debaters forced to
acknowledge structural advantages in elite classroom spaces and
mobilize as accomplices to black debaters but non-white students can
remember how lived experience shapes knowledge in this space- their
model represents a view from nowhere that encourages passing
privilege
2
Slavery must be theorized as maximum captivity to produce a structural
analysis capable of coming to terms with the world
Sexton 8 (Jared Sexton, Director of African American Studies at UC Irvine, 2008, “Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and
the Critique of Multiracialism”, pages 111-114) FYI: Randall Kennedy is “one of the first black scholars in this generation to pen a
sustained argument advocating what he terms ‘a cosmopolitan ethos that welcomes the prospect of genuine, loving interracial
intimacy’ ” (page 107-108)
In response to the last question, we examine several comments from Kennedy’s opening chapter, “In the Age of Slavery.” As noted,
Kennedy is at pains to counter the claims of a certain black feminist history regarding the
“extremity of power” exercised by the slaveholder and “the absolute submission required of the slave” (Hartman,
quoted in Kennedy 2003, 532fn11). He is, in other words, attempting to demonstrate, or at least to speculate upon,
the limits of the slave system’s power of domination. Beyond this limit—whose locus proves
frustratingly obscure—the agency of the slave herself was, we are told, able to affect
significantly the conditions of captivity to alternate ends. Kennedy, in other words, proffers a
narrative in which evidence of agency (evidence, that is, confirming an assumption of agency), however
circumscribed or practically ineffective, is taken as a sign of resistance. More properly, this is a
narrative of resistant affection, an insistence that the dehumanizing social order of racial
slavery was unable to achieve its ultimate goal—“the absolute submission of the slave”—
because it could not overcome the irresistible force of affection between men and women,
“regardless of color.” When all is said and done, a human is still a human, as it were, and the family
romance of normative heterosexuality persists “even within” hierarchies that preclude for the
captive all of the recognizable (social, political, economic, cultural, legal) trappings of “human being” in the
modern sense. Here is Kennedy: The slave system failed, however, to perfect the domination that [ Judge
Thomas] Ruffin envisioned. It failed to bind the slaves so tightly as to deprive them of all room to
maneuver. It failed to wring from them all prohibited yearnings. Slavery was, to be sure, a horribly oppressive system that
severely restricted the ambit within which its victims could make decisions. But slavery did not extinguish altogether the possibility
of choice. (43) We
might ask, what is the minimum ambit of decision making? What sort of system,
if not slavery, would bind one so tightly as to deprive one of all “room to maneuver”? Need a
system of domination be “perfect” in order for it to be legally binding or socially effective or
politically determinant? Need the captive body be deprived of all room to maneuver for the
situation to be considered one of extremity? Need the yearnings of slaves be wrung entirely
from them for their prohibition to be considered a constitutive element of life? At what point
does the quantitative measure of the slave’s bondage become difference of a qualitative sort?
What precisely is the “choice” available under slavery, and is it one worthy of belaboring, one
whose sphere of influence is to be considered newsworthy? To put a finer point on it, why is the
categorical discrepancy refused between the free and the enslaved, or more specifically, between the slave
and the slaveholder? Is such refusal not tantamount to denying the very existence of slavery as a
system that produced slaves rather than free people whose freedom was simply “severely
restricted” or whose power was simply “severely limited” or who simply faced “difficult
situations”? Kennedy continues: Bondage severely limited the power—including the sexual power—of slaves. But it did not
wholly erase their capacity to attract and shape affectionate, erotic attachments of all sorts, including interracial ones. In a hard-toquantify but substantial number of cases, feelings of affection and attachment between white male masters and their black female
slaves somehow survived slavery’s deadening influence. The great difficulty, in any particular instance, lies in determining whether
sex between a male master and a female slave was an expression of sexual autonomy or an act of unwanted sex. The truth is that
most often we cannot know for sure, since there exists little direct testimony from those involved, especially the enslaved women.
(44) The
inability to quantify the “number of cases” or, indeed, to “know for sure” anything about them
the paucity of direct testimony,6
“especially [from] the enslaved women,” does not stop the author from extrapolating wildly
does not prevent the author from considering them nonetheless “substantial,” and
about said “feelings of affection and attachment” between them and their “white male masters.” In fact, it is the void in its place—
the great historic silence—that
enables both the reiteration of longstanding alibis for white male
sexual violence—what Hartman (1997) discusses skillfully as the “ruses of seduction”—and the projection of this
newfangled, though no less menacing, story about a maverick interracial intimacy that, almost
undetectably, undermines the injunctions of white supremacy, serving not only as a sign of
agency for enslaved women but a moment of their resistance as well. Their “sexual power” is
expressed as the “capacity to attract”—and “somehow” to manipulate—the erotic
attachments of white male slaveholders. There is here an unsubtle shift in terms: agency is not
in itself subversive; indeed, the entire slave system derives, in large part, from the agency of the
enslaved (its capture, manipulation, redeployment, etc.) (Chandler 2000). Agency may be resistant or complicit
or both, and it may or may not have practical effects in the world; all of this can only be determined contextually. Much more
troubling than Kennedy’s imprecision here, however, is his entirely uncritical suggestion about the “sexual
power” of slaves. Is not one of the principal conceits of power to suggest that though the
dominant may monopolize power political, economic, and social, the dominated nonetheless enjoy a
wily aptitude for “getting their way” by other means, namely, the ars erotica of seduction? Is not
one of the most pernicious elements of the proslavery discourse that the “attractiveness” of
enslaved black women presents a threat of corruption to civilized white manhood and/or an
internal guarantee against the excesses of state-sanctioned violence reserved for white
slaveholders? The same quality that served as temptation was also, or alternately, taken to be that which
would forestall the descent of slaveholding into unrestrained brutality, an essential rationalization for the
upholding of white (male) impunity toward blacks, whether enslaved or nominally “free”
(Hartman 1997).7 Finally, was not the suggestion that enslaved black men might have the power to
seduce white women (whether free or, in earlier periods, indentured) one of the prime alibis for the
construction of regulatory or prohibitory statutes around interracial marriage and sexual
relations from the seventeenth century onward (Bardaglio 1999)? In each case, the focus on the
“sexual power” of slaves was undoubtedly a displacement of the organized violence
consistently required of captivity and, further, a dissimulation of the institutionalized sexual
power of slaveholders in particular (whose authority not only foreclosed the possibility of prosecution and militated
against the extralegal reprisals but also contributed immeasurably to their “capacity to attract and shape affectionate, erotic
attachments of all kinds.” The
asymmetry here approaches the incommensurable—how, after all,
would a slave go on to “court” a master? How would such an exercise in self-objectification,
supplementing structural availability with an affirmation of “willingness,” rightly be called
power?). This is no less the case simply because for Kennedy the “sexual power” of slaves is
something to honor or celebrate rather than to fear.
Their cost-benefit calculation creates anti-black fantasies that condemn blacks
to repetition of impersonal death – infatuation with the “contingency” of
“material change” disavows libidinal investments
Leong 16 – PhD UC Irvine - Assistant Professor, English, University of Utah - Assistant Professor, Environmental Humanities
Graduate Program, University of Utah (Diana, “The Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the
New Materialisms,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1-35)
Black lives matter and black lives matter and black lives matter. This homographic reading of the most salient political statement of recent years speaks to the torsions of
blackness, matter, and life that have come to define our contemporary era. In “Unbearable Blackness,” Jared Sexton (2015) argues with regard to the triangulation of these
antiblack fantasies “do not render blacks, like so much of the planet, subject to death in
an economy of disposability; rather, they subject blacks to ‘the interminable time of
meaningless, impersonal dying’” (p.168). In the wake of recent grand jury decisions not to prosecute the murders of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and
concerns that
Michael Brown, to name only the most widely publicized cases, Sexton’s claims register most strongly in the state’s refusal to allow these deaths to die. They are caught instead
in a biopolitical apparatus that suspends racial blackness between a life unrecognized as such and an illegible form of death that can never pass into reason. Against this
timeless, spectral dying, we can read the declaration that “Black Lives Matter” as a call to return racial blackness to a form that matters, to a form, in other words, that is matter.
On this score, I ask: how do black life and death become matter, and what is at stake in the demand that they should assume such form? Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels
In this
article, I explore hyperempathy as a speculative embodiment of “pornotroping” (Spillers, 2003)
to understand how racial blackness structures current theorizations of matter.
Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) dramatize these questions through protagonist Lauren Olamina and her condition of hyperempathy.
Questions about the proper scale, scope, and
character of matter have assumed a renewed sense of urgency given the emergence of the Anthropocene, a distinct geological epoch in which human activity has become so influential as to alter fundamental aspects of the Earth System. While ecologist Eugene
Stoermer and Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced the current definition of the term in the 1980s, we have since witnessed a growing scientific consensus about the rigor of the concept. A recent article published in the journal Science
by the Anthropocene Working Group (2016) provides the latest example of this support, demonstrating that fluctuations in the content and pace of sediment deposits and extinction rates are anthropogenically driven. However, the very nomenclature of the
“Anthropocene” has been subject to critique from within the humanities for allowing an abstract notion of the “Anthropos” to anchor an implicit philosophy of history. Daniel Hartley (2015), for instance, comments in a recent issue of the UK-based magazine Salvage,
“Inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a one-onone billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect, which is simply inadequate to explain actual social and relational modes of
historical causation” (para. 4). Hartley takes special issue with the presumed origins of the Anthropocene, which many geologists date to the industrial and nuclear revolutions. This determination, he suggests, interprets the environmental impact of technology as
the “net effect” of an undifferentiated “human” activity (Waters et. al., 2016, p. 139). In order to assert a causal link between technological development and ecological catastrophe, any consideration of the roles race, class, and gender have played in engineering
our historical present must be obscured.1 The benefits and consequences of technological development and environmental disast er, after all, are rarely if ever distributed symmetrically among and within human populations. “It is not all people that are indicted by
the onset of the Anthropocene,” writes Nicholas Mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016), “but a specific set: colonial settlers, enslavers, and would-be imperialists” (pp. 19-20). At the same time, this remodeling of human history and ecological philosophy is not unique to
geologists. Indeed, the Anthropocene’s scientific definition may have become matters of debate only recently, but its constitutive concerns—global warming, genetic technology, biodiversity loss, environmental racism—have thrown our prevailing concepts of nature
and culture into crisis well before the epoch’s formal identification. At stake is not only the fate of homo sapiens as a species, but also the basic composition of a world yet to come. The challenges of analyzing the effects of non-human systems (e.g., weather patterns
or ocean currents) and actors (e.g., viruses or pesticides) while attending to the uneven distribution of environmental risks and resources have generated a range of philosophical responses. For example, publications like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009), “The Climate o f
History,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s (2014) The Sixth Extinction, and Roy Scranton’s (2015) Learning to Die in the Anthropocene recommend a universal or existential “species thinking” necessary for grasping the complexities of climate change. Other responses, like Jane
Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (2015) Stone, interrogate fantasies of human mastery as a way of reckoning with the power of non-human agents. Over the last decade, one particular variety of response has acquired critical purchase
within the academic left: the new materialisms. As part of what Richard Grusin (2015) has named “the nonhuman turn” in contemporary thought, the new materialisms join affect theory, critical animal studies, and object-oriented ontology in calling for enhanced
attention to matter and materiality. The popularity of this approach, evidenced by a growing number of monographs, special journal issues, and anthologies, appears grounded in the need to develop strategies of coexistence attuned to the Anthropocene’s political
and ecological crises.2 How, for example, should we understand agency and embodiment in light of recent developments in biotechnology and the increasingly unpredictable behavior of non-human objects? The promise of the new materialisms thus inheres in the
notion that a focus on materiality can offer us more comprehensive and efficacious ways to respond to these developments. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) write in their introduction to the New Materialisms anthology, “What is at stake here is nothing
less than a challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world, including its normative sense of the human and its beliefs about human agency, but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit,
and interact with nature” (p. 4). There is much to recommend an intensified engagement with matter, not least of which is Coole and Frost’s proposal that such engagements can disrupt our “normative sense of the human” and of “human agency.” Given this
professed interest in dismantling human exceptionalism, it is curious then that, as Zakiyyah Jackson (2015) and other critical race scholars point out, the new materialisms have systematically “[ignored] praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people,
particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of ‘the human’ or illegible from within the terms of its logic” (p. 216).3 Black thought has long challenged the enforced description of Africans and their descendants as non-human objects of
science, as specimens for study and experimentation, as commodities for market exchange, as things. In fact, from at least the 16th century onward, black bodies provided crucial raw material for the development of natural history, the natural sciences, and the life
philosophies in Enlightenment thought.4 Both geology and biology, for example, pursued notions of species and evolution that preserved early racial taxonomies; the techniques of observation and interpretation used to analyze geological activity were the same as
those employed by the racial science of phrenology. Mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016) leverages this history to argue that “the very concept of observable breaks between geological eras in general and the definition of the Anthropocene in particular is inextricably
intermingled with the belief in distinct races of humanity” (p. 2). His claim that the concept of the Anthropocene reproduces race-making technologies gestures to the historical fact that the human as such has emerged through the exclusion and extermination of
black bodies. Proscribed from the realm of the human, black intellectuals have had to think within and through the categories of the non-human and the inhuman to pursue new ways of being in the world. Philosophical questions about the vitality and agency of the
human, the animal, and the object are therefore longstanding in the fields of Black studies. Alexander Weheliye (2015) observes in Habeas Viscus that across Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre, “it is the human—or different genres of the human—that materializes as the object
of knowledge in the conceptual mirror of black studies” (p. 21). The scholarly work of Hortense Spillers (2003) and Fred Moten (2003), and the Afrofuturist contributions of Nalo Hopkinson (1998; 2000) and Nnedi Okorafor (2010), similarly confront the “most basic
assumptions that have underpinned the modern world,” including our notions of history, temporality, and modern science.5 And yet, as it is with the Anthropocene’s implied philosophy of history, much of the scholarship produced under the banner of the new
materialisms tends to reduce race to a crude “identity politics” or to endorse a model of difference-withoutrace.6 This reduction and disavowal of race, I contend, is something of a structural necessity for the new materialisms. In what follows, I trace the general
theoretical principles of the new materialisms to a dissatisfaction with the linguistic and cultural paradigms of post-structuralism. I then demonstrate how this dissatisfaction enables an ethics of relation or affect that further legitimizes the reduction and dismissal of
race. However, as a close reading of Butler’s Parable duology reveals, one of the primary figures of the new materialisms—the material body—is defined by and through disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh that are linked to the global legacies of
modern slavery. My examination of the critical responses to Butler’s novels further suggests that such fantasies are necessary to secure a libidinal investment in the ethical potential of materiality. I argue, thus, against a misrecognition of black female flesh as a
resource against the violence of hierarchical differences, rather than the site of their active production. Finally, I turn to a reading of Butler’s Parable duology as an allegory about the dangers of proceeding in the Anthropocene without a robust analysis of the
formation of racial blackness. Because a proper survey of new materialist literature is beyond the scope of this article, the comments below should be taken as entry points for probing the (absent) place of racial blackness in theories about matter.7 The promise of
the new materialisms The new materialisms are drawn from a long genealogy of philosophical materialism, in which Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Marx, and Deleuze are cited as major touchstones. In recognition of this legacy, Coole and Frost (2010) assert that the
interventions loosely gathered by the term “new materialisms” are better “categorized as renewed materialisms,” with the qualifier “new” acknowledging the “unprecedented” ecological, biological, and technological conditions under w hich we currently live and
labor (p. 4, italics in original). Although their specific objects of analysis are appropriately diverse, the new materialisms collectively insist on a post-humanist matter that is lively, self-directed, agential, creative, and always in the process of becoming. In this regard,
matter is better thought of as materialization, or the process by which complex phenomena are temporarily and contingently stabilized to varying degrees. The ontological shift entailed here is towards a philosophical monism, inspired most notably by the work of
Deleuze. Following Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze (1994) develops a notion of the virtual as a generative field of difference, or a “plane of immanence,” where “all the varieties of differential relations and all the distributions of singular points [coexist] in diverse
orders ‘perplicated’ in one another” (p. 206). These differences are then formatted into distinct phenomena or entities by processes of actualization that “[bring] the object back into relation with the field of differential relations in which it can always be dissolved
and become actualized otherwise, as something else, by being linked through other differential relations to other particles” (Cheah, 2010, pp. 85-86). While not all new materialist theories cleave to a strictly Deleuzian philosophy, there is general agreement that the
dynamic interactions among objects, bodies, and phenomena turn us away from the Anthropocene’s “billiard ball model” of causality, and more significantly, away from some of poststructuralism’s critical trends. According to the new materialisms, the linguistic and
cultural turns of the last half century have resulted in both an intellectual and a political poverty. Specifically, social c onstructivism (Coole & Frost, 2010) and cultural representationalism (Barad, 2007) have overdetermined matter to the extent that it appears as a
passive product made meaningful only through cultural and discursive practice. Coole and Frost (2010) even write of a theoretical “exhaustion,” claiming that they “share the feeling current among many researchers that the dominant constructivist orientation to
social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (p. 6). Somewhere and sometime during the rise of the Anthropocene, cultural theory,
broadly conceived, lost its explanatory power. This assessment of inadequacy repeats across much of the recent new materialist scholarship, condensing the cultural turn into a discursive reductionism that rebuffs the empirical for the ideal, or the material for the
symbolic. Elizabeth Grosz’s (2004) The Nick of Time opens with a telling “reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism, and questions of the politics of globalization, that they have forgotten a crucial
dimension of research…not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality” (p. 2). Social,
political, and cultural theory, in other words, have overlooked the material conditions of life that render the body available for inscription and enculturation in the first instance. So too in the recently published Gut Feminism does Elizabeth Wilson (2015) rebuke
Her ensuing conclusion is
that focusing on how social structures produce and discipline bodies comes at the expense of
recognizing the ways bodies radically alter and organize social structures themselves. It appears
that cultural theory harbors an “allergy to ‘the real’” that dissuades “critical inquirers from the
more empirical kinds of investigation that material processes and structures require” (Coole & Frost,
2010, p. 6). However, the very aspects that would make matter more “real” than language or culture are
the same aspects that restrict its ethical potential and facilitate a conceptual rejection of race. In
“social constructionism” for “[tending] not to be very curious about the details of empirical claims in genetics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology or biochemistry” (p. 3).
line with their post-humanist agenda, the new materialisms evoke matter and materiality as existing in excess of human subjectivity and its attendant domains. Mechanistic
theories of causality hold that objects are composed of inert matter acted upon by external forces, which presumes that an object’s potential or possible capabilities are already
present and fixed in some initial moment of creation. But, as the new materialisms emphasize, the virtual field of differential relations is immanent to matter in such a way that
it is impossible to anticipate all of the effects a material configuration may have, or the organizational forms it may take. This ability to act independently of the subject’s will and
desire is variously construed as “impersonal and preindividual forces,” an alterity that “comes from outside the capability or power of the subject” (Cheah, 2010, p. 80, 89),
“degrees of indetermination” that represent the “‘true principle of life’” (Grosz, 2010, p. 149), and a “powerful reminder…that life will always exceed our knowledge and
control” (Bennett, 2010, p.14). Differences in terminology aside, the new materialisms are united by an understanding of materiality as a spectral, impersonal force with material
effects, one that escapes reason and disrupts systems of meaning, including modernist binaries like mind/body, culture/nature, and inside/outside (Dolphijn & van der Tuin,
2012). The latter aspect is key because, while matter can frustrate representation, its “excessive” properties do not mean that it exists “outside” of the subject. Rather, matter
and materiality are “real” because they actively produce reality in unpredictable ways (Cheah, 2010). It is here that the ethical impetus of the new materialist project is located.
If we accept our embeddedness in mutually transformative, nonhuman networks, the ground of ethics shifts accordingly. First, a responsibility to an externalized other gives way
to an accountability for the many relations that constitute becoming. And second, ethics are no longer reducible to the decisions or actions of individuals that are initiated by a
properly historical judgment. In Rosi Braidotti’s (2010) terms, “Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual
codependence is what is at stake in postsecular affirmative ethics” (p. 214). I find nothing immediately problematic with an ethics that aspires to keep pace with advancements
in science, philosophy, and technology. What I find troublesome is how our acquiescence to these ethics is solicited. New materialist ethics necessarily manifest as affective
encounters that operate best on micropolitical scales. Because materiality is figured as an impersonal force of the real, it runs the risk of becoming a transcendental signified
To
circumvent the “tension between universalistic theory and specific mode of inquiry,” chance, contingency,
and creativity in micro-level encounters are prioritized over more obstinate assemblages that congeal at the
global or macro-levels (Zhan, 2016, p. 26). Further, as the nucleus of the new materialisms, the embodied subject or material body compels an ethics that unfolds on a
that merely replaces language or culture as an organizing principle. Doing so would severely diminish its import as an inducement to a posthumanist ethics.
parallel plane, meaning between and within bodies. “This implies,” Rosi Braidotti (2010) proposes, “approaching the world through affectivity and not cognition: as singularity,
force, movement, through assemblages or webs of interconnections with all that lives,” and “accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of
mutual specification and mutual codependence” (p. 214). In the quotation above, Braidotti invokes an ethics of relation, in which sensation and perception comprise the “zone
of [ethical] effectivity,” and attunement and affirmation take precedence over social transformation (Tumino, 2011, p. 555). Because material inter- and intraactions are
preconscious and multisensorial, ethical practice is based not on the ability to evaluate right from wrong, but on a commitment to feeling right. We can observe this adjustment
in appeals to “an ongoing responsiveness to…entanglement” (Barad, 2007, p. 394), “a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages” (Bennett, 2010b), a “wakefulness” to
the
experiences of living under conditions of crisis are fetishized at the expense of addressing the
causes of these conditions themselves. The imperative to “[live] with the open wound...through
a sort of depersonalization of the event” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 213), for example, not only depoliticizes the claims of
historically oppressed communities, but also flattens distinctions between traumas inflicted
through happenstance and persistent intergenerational harm. How else could one, as Braidotti does, list as equivalent
the “feel [of] what makes us laugh, lament, and curse” (Orlie, 2007, p. 127) and an “experience of the vitality of being” (Connolly, 2010, pp. 196-197). As a consequence,
examples: those who survived the Holocaust, Frida Kahlo’s deadly tram ride, and missing the train to the World Trade Center on September 11th (p. 214)? The limits of a new
materialist ethics appear most forcefully, then, as we attempt to move from an embodied “responsiveness” to the dislocation of structures. When patterns of materialization are
addressed, it is generally as the amalgamation of “perpetual circuits of exchange, feedback, and reentry” that thereby “[inflect] the shape of political experience” (Connolly,
2010, pp. 190-191). On the one hand, there is nothing innately objectionable about attributing the creation and transformation of political structures to any number of
it becomes more difficult to
reconcile the effects of chance, unpredictability, and indeterminacy with the endurance and repetition of something like
antiblack violence.9 The new materialisms are therefore at pains to clarify why the structures of global
antiblackness continue to function as if “neither time nor history, nor historiography and its
topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the
passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (Spillers, 2003, p.
208). Interpreting and describing our entanglements with non-human, materialist forces are not
enough to account for, much less dislodge attachments to, social categories and
representational arrangements. By this I mean that becoming more aware of material forces will
not inevitably reduce the weight of discursive or psychic formations. It could even obstruct
change by making forms of affect and sensation newly available for inscription. As Timothy Morton (2007) states,
quotidian, embodied experiences. This is in fact common in political theory and historiography.8 On the other hand,
when “contact becomes content,” perceptions of difference collapse into identity (p. 37). Granted, these complications are not unique to the new materialisms as changes in scale almost always require a recalibration of ethics. The point is, however, that the framing of the new materialisms as inherently more ethical generates, and is generated by, a disavowal or misreading of race as a stagnant analytical
framework. As I submit above, since at least the Enlightenment period intellectual genealogies have maintained an almost overwhelming racial homogeneity. Critical theories produced by non-white scholars may
have increased in terms of production or representation, but these are consistently marked as minority perspectives that have little to do with universal or ontological questions.10 Hence, black bodies especially
are rendered objects for theoretical development, rather than subjects of universal philosophy. Coole and Frost (2010) continue this trend, revealing that even as “feminists and class theorists have often insisted
upon” the importance of material bodies and environments, the authors remain “[concerned] that such material dimensions have recently been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity
politics” (p. 19). The latter, they continue, “had a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in relationships of power, but we are not convinced that they pay sufficient attention to the material efficacy
of bodies or have the theoretical resources to do so” (ibid.). Such a statement is heavy with longstanding racial charges of intellectual primitivism and parochialism. The unfortunate request to be “convinced” of
identity politics’ intellectual merit effectively seals an historically white critical theory as the standard for authoritative knowledge production.11 One must also wonder about the referents for these insufficiently
materialist identity politics, given that the New Materialisms anthology fails to cite even one example that might be taken as representative of a larger trend. Even if Coole and Frost employ “identity politics” as a
shorthand for idealist approaches to subjectivity, their statement betrays both a misunderstanding of studies of “identity,” and a symptomatic desire to abandon race. To be clear, Coole and Frost never openly
reduce “identity politics” to racial identity. But in many if not most of new materialisms’ founding texts, race receives only casual mention alongside the “other socalled axes of social difference” like sex, gender,
and class, and often to specify a concept that has been “paralyzed by [a] ‘binary’ take on dualism” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 88, 143), or to name potential beneficiaries of one’s theorization (Barad, 2007;
Grosz, 2004). We could perhaps attribute this treatment of race to an obdurate politics of attention (Ahmed, 2008) that determines which issues receive consideration.12 Nonetheless, to ascertain if and how the
new materialisms might furnish us with a timelier ethics, we must first ask what purpose the omission of race serves. The Movement for Black Lives has forcefully reminded us that black bodies have historically
provided the standards against which the human subject and non-human objects are measured. This is to say that the “rupture in the quality of being” inaugurated by modern racial slavery is not limited to black
lives (Brand, 2001, p. 29). Black critical theorists repeatedly insist on the world-historical scale of this rupture, tracking how it conditions our thinking about humans and matter, and the movements of this thought
itself. What this means for our current discussion is that “the question of race’s reality has and continues to bear directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of reality itself” (Jackson, 2015, p.
a libidinal
economy of antiblackness to the history of ideas, ensuring, as Spillers (2003) maintains, that “dominant symbolic
activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the
originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation;” “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but
216), or on what Dionne Brand (2001) calls our “cognitive schema” (p. 29). As a conceptual orientation or method of “way-finding,” the prevailing cognitive schema articulates
words will most certainly kill us” (pp. 208-209). By inverting a childhood rejoinder about the supposedly limited reach of the symbolic, Spillers lays out
a provocative proposal: the metaphors of slavery are immanent to the force of the material. Although “‘race’ alone bears no inherent meaning, even though it reifies in
personality,” it “gains its power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning” (Spillers, 2003, p. 380). Black lives matter, and blackness enlivens matter. It
is possible, then, that the elaboration of thought, the conditions of its enunciation and reception, are always part of a racial praxis, even when those “personalities” that absorb
the reification of race are most absent. This is a paradigmatic example of the prevailing cognitive schema at work. Antiblackness conditions the force of materiality by
determining the logic of both its actualization and its theoretical manifestations. These functions become clearer when we turn our attention to Octavia Butler’s Parable
duology.
Cybersecurity produces a digital infrastructure of information that increases
racialized. nationalist and technocratic tendiences
Möllers 21 (.Möllers N. Making Digital Territory: Cybersecurity, Techno-nationalism, and the
Moral Boundaries of the State. Science, Technology, & Human Values. 2021;46(1):112-138.
doi:10.1177/0162243920904436 Norma Möllers received her Ph.D in science and technologies
from Potsdam University)//GUCCISUSHI
How can we make sense of de Maizi`ere’s statement? In this paper, I argue that cybersecurity
has become a key site in
which states mobilize science and engineering to produce state power in the digital age. This is
because the global and distributed nature of Internet infrastructure challenges purely legal-bureaucratic or political approaches to
maintaining state sovereignty. Consider the following example. Like many other administrations, the German state depends on USbased technology, software, and services to run its administration; most notably those provided by Microsoft. However, because
Microsoft data servers are controlled from US territory and are subject to US law, the German state can never fully control data
flows from German to the United States and hence its own bureaucratic apparatus. Microsoft’s anti-piracy technology could also, in
theory, remotely revoke its licenses and thereby incapacitate the entire German administration at the push of a button. States’
dependencies on globally distributed information infrastructure thus create uncertainty about
state sovereignty— for example, what data belong under German jurisdiction and which belong to the US—as well as a
range of vulnerabilities that could be exploited for purposes ranging from election hacking to
cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. This is the problem de Maizi`ere refers to in the quote above, and which he
thinks requires “strong state commitment”: for the German state, the materiality of information infrastructure has
become a key problem for state power. The German state has responded to this problem with sweeping mobilization
of science and engineering to extend control over information infrastructure, placing tasks of government into the hands of
scientists and engineers. In more general terms, cybersecurity
problems—from Germany’s struggle with Microsoft to the
US/Huawei dispute—are primarily about problems of state sovereignty. // Drawing on an analysis of the German
national Cybersecurity Strategy, I develop the concepts of “territorialization projects” and “digital territory” to theorize how the
production of state power in the digital age relies on technoscientific expertise about
information infrastructure. The notion of “territorialization projects” captures how states mobilize scientists and engineers
in order to transform globally distributed information infrastructure into bounded national territory, and how they invest it
with patriotic meaning, thereby making “digital territory.” “Digital territory,” in other words, is nationalized
information infrastructure. It is nationalized in both a material and moral sense because it includes
extending state control over the physical stuff of information infrastructure and normative ideas
about nation—who is a digital citizen, and who isn’t; or what constitutes “good” and “bad”
digital citizens. In the German case, a combination of nationalizing information infrastructure and placing statecraft into the
hands of scientists and engineers might indicate an emerging form of “technonationalism”—it displays both nationalist
and technocratic tendencies— raising questions about the consequences of territorialization
projects for justice, democracy, and civic life.
Surveillance under the guise of cyberoperations operates as a technique of
privacy violation, that uniquely targets black folk.
Li 22 (Li, Tiffany, Privacy As/And Civil Rights (2022). Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2022,
Available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3851404 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3851404_ Tiffany
C. Li University of New Hampshire School of Law (formerly Franklin Pierce Law Center); Yale Law
School - Information Society Project; Yale Law School - Information Society
Project)//GUCCISUSHI
While surveillance
can generate privacy violations and harms to many people, these harms and violations often
disproportionately injure people from marginalized populations. In her book Dark Matters, Simone Browne surveys
the long history of surveillance against Black people in America, from the metaphor of slave ship as surveillance vessel to the phenomenon of TSA
officers searching Black women’s hair. 42 As Browne writes, “Surveillance
is nothing new to black folks. It is the fact of
antiblackness.”43 Other scholars have also researched the disproportionate impact of government surveillance on Black and Brown people,
women,44 the poor,45 immigrants and undocumented people,46 people with disabilities, 47 and more. In The Poverty of Privacy Rights, Khiara Bridges
explains how poor mothers, especially Black and Brown mothers, lack privacy protections.48 It is important to note that for every marginalized group
that suffers from disproportionate privacy harms or civil rights violations, there are also individuals who belong to more than one marginalized identity.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality49 is key to understanding the discriminatory ways in which the law has awarded privacy
protections and allowed for privacy violations. We must keep in mind the intersectional dimensions of civil rights violations, as well as privacy
violations, if we are to work towards a theory of civil rights and privacy hen unequal privacy protections involve targeted surveillance of people from
marginalized groups actively working to advance civil rights. For example, the United States has a long history of surveilling potential civil rights leaders,
including civil rights legend Dr. Martin Luther King.50 In the 1960s, the
Intelligence Program) a program aimed
FBI created COINTELPRO (an abbreviation of Counter
at surveilling Black civil rights leaders in the height of the civil rights
movement.51 While modern Americans would likely like to consider themselves much more progressive than pre-Civil Rights Movement
America, it is clear that things have not changed enough. In 2017, a whistleblower exposed another secret FBI
program specifically aimed at surveilling Black activists as “Black Identity Extremists.”52 Clearly, the
battle for civil rights is not over, and privacy rights are still not afforded to all on an equal basis. Modern civil rights law in the United States attempts to
prohibit discrimination and equalize access to public accommodations and to rights we believe to be fundamental. Civil rights laws are an attempt to
expose an inequity and remedy it. Today, our society faces a crisis of privacy discrimination, in which people are unable to equally access their privacy
rights, and some face disproportionate privacy violation harms. Privacy is not only a foundational civil liberty, but also a core civil right as well.
Conceiving of privacy as a civil liberty, without understanding the interplay between privacy and equality, does a disservice to both privacy and equality.
As Alvaro Bedoya writes, “When
we talk about privacy only as a civil liberty, we erase those patterns of
harm, that color of surveillance. And when we talk about privacy only as a civil liberty, we also ignore the benefits of privacy:
Surveillance threatens vulnerable people fighting for equality. Privacy is what protects them and makes it possible.”53 When we talk about privacy only
as a civil liberty, we erase patterns of harm from privacy violations that amount to or exacerbate discrimination and disparate impacts on marginalized
populations. For example, while surveillance can lead to privacy violations and related harms for many people, these harms are often worse for
marginalized populations. Privacy conceived as a civil liberty ignores the problems of unequal access to privacy and ignores the necessary place privacy
has in creating the conditions for the fight for civil rights to continue.
Cyberspace as a securitization tactic in international relations is structured by antiblack racism.
Howell 20 (Howell A, Richter-Montpetit M. Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack
thought in the Copenhagen School. Security Dialogue. 2020;51(1):3-22. doi:10.1177/0967010619862921)//GUCCISUSHI
Securitization theory has unquestionably made a significant impact. Its founding texts are among the most widely cited international relations scholarship
(see Buzan and Wæver, 2003; Buzan et al., 1998; Wæver, 1995; Wæver et al., 1993), spawning active research programs and new ‘generations’ of
securitization theory. The
concept of securitization has travelled to
disciplines beyond international relations, and even entered public discourse. What is so appealing about this theory? Perhaps the
most tempting aspect of securitization theory is its methodological rigor. It provides a clear set of steps and
standards for identifying how referent objects (e.g. migration,
health, cyberspace) become security problems and decidingwhether they should indeed be ‘securitiz
ed’. This ready made methodology can be applied to all sorts of empirical areas. However, students and scholars of security ought to resist this
temptation of a readymade approach and inquire more deeply into securitization theory’s core theoretical assumptions and methodology. This article
argues that racist
thought is fundamental and integral to classic securitization theory’s conceptual
and methodological project. While other scholarship has worked either to incorporate analysis of race into securitization theory (AminKhan, 2012; Ibrahim, 2005; Mofette and Vadasaria, 2016) or to overcome securitization theory’s Eurocentrism (Bilgin, 2010, 2011; Wilkinson, 2007), this
article offers something different. It is the first to excavate the foundations of securitization theory in racist thought. We demonstrate
that classic
securitization theory is fundamentally and inextricably structured not only by Eurocentrism but also by civilizationism,
racism. What does it mean to excavate the racist foundations of a theory? That we use the ‘r-word’
methodological whiteness, and antiblack
and white supremacy as categories of analysis is sure to raise eyebrows. Even sympathetic readers might wonder if the problem we identify is more
appropriately characterized as Eurocentrism. Critique of the Eurocentric character of much Western scholarship and cultural production has made
significant inroads across academic disciplines, including international relations (Hobson, 2012; Sabaratnam, 2013). Our analysis is inspired by this
research and extends some of its insights. Yet there is more to be said. Black studies and decolonial scholarship demonstrate that much orthodox
and critical
Western social
and political thought ispredicated upon epistemological and ontological premises that are not
simply Eurocentric but racist, specifically white supremacist. In international relations, recent debates have addressed the
question of whether postcolonial international relations should proceed solely through an analytic of Eurocentrism or whether we need to more
specifically address racism and white supremacism (Gruffydd Jones, 2016; Hozić, 2016; Rutazibwa, 2016; Sajed, 2016). Sajed (2016: 168) suggests that
the term ‘Eurocentric’ potentially neutralizes the foundational and continuing racism of the discipline. Rutazibwa (2016: 192) asks, ‘what existing power
structure does this reluctance [to name racism] serve?’ Echoing these concerns, we ask: What is at stake in the reluctance to name racism in analyses of
international security? Racism is a fundamental system of power that has profoundly shaped the world for the past several hundred years. Moreover, as
is now well
established, internationalrelations
emerged to provide intellectual support for the imperial and
(settler-)colonial ambitions of Western states (Agathangelou and Ling, 2004a; Krishna, 2001; Vitalis, 2000, 2015). Drawing on
black studies, indigenous studies, and decolonial scholarship, we illustrate the racist modes of thought that underpin classic securitization theory by
deploying three concepts beyond Eurocentrism: civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack racism.
The alt is Black redaction and annotation of the 1AC – key to defending the
dead
Murillo 16 (Dr. John Murillo III is a graduate of Brown University with a PhD in English. His primary research interests include
twentieth century black literature, afro-pessimism, critical theory, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Review of “In
the Wake: On Blackness and Being”. 10-4-16. http://makemag.com/in-the-wake/ //shree)
Imperative for Sharpe, and for all of we who inhabit the wake of enslavement, is an ensemble of questions aimed at the work of Black being—questions Frank B. Wilderson III might describe as “menacing and
What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to
the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward death?” Further, what might emerge should we-in-theunbearable:” “
wake really harness “the power of sitting with someone as they die,” and really, devotionally be about “the important work of sitting (together) in the pain and sorrow of death as a way of marking,
Against the “dysgraphia” and misnaming that subject
Black being to every order of disaster, Sharpe works to “find the language for this work…to find
the words that will articulate care…[and] to sound a new language,” to consider “how to perform
the labor” of those words and that language. Chapter by chapter she proceeds, carefully working to examine the space and time of Black subjection in the
antiblack world, while also taking care to “insist”—a verb Sharpe returns to repeatedly—upon real, fleeting and/or fractured
glimpses of Black life scattered throughout the violence of the archive. Be that deathly life on or as “The Ship,” (Chapter 2), life
remembering…celebrating” and “[trying] to really see” Black life, “if only momentarily?”
as “boat people,” which is life marked by the figure of the slave ship—itself like the photograph of the young Haitian girl with “ship” mysteriously, menacingly, taped to her forehead (Sharpe returns to this girl and
her image throughout the text). Or, be it in “The Hold” of the ship (Chapter 3), known by all its attendant conditions and resonant images, which continues to hold—bind, contain, strangle—us, the very same hold
which we (are made to) hold within, in the flesh. Or, be it in the gasping for air against the reality of the “disaster” that is “The Weather” and the water (Chapter 4) that is antiblackness. In every iteration of the
space and time of Black life and death, life/death, Sharpe locates a moment, glimpse, or fragment that insists Black life/death through the wake.For Sharpe, this is deathly Black life, and these are its words and
Black life is “anagrammatical.” “Anagrammatical blackness…exists,” as she puts it, “as an index of violability and
potentiality.” This is a Blackness betwixt and between, caught in the opening/rift/tear marked by this index—“blackness anew,
blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is
made.” This is a Black betwixt/betweenness. This betwixt/between region, like the asterisk in Trans*, holds open a space/time in the imagination
for “new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible” with/against the orthographies of the wake, an alternative set of reading and writing practices that carry
doings.
out wake work, what Christina Sharpe calls “Black annotation and Black redaction.” Perhaps most essentially, in relation to the dead, the dying, and “those
living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of death,” Black life—in blips and bits, silences and looks—
insists upon a different kind of holding, an alternative kind of care, and a violent and lifesaving
kind of aspiration—aspiration, in Sharpe’s use, being the process of “keeping and putting breath
back into the Black body” as we approach “the histories and presents” of Black life and death in
the wake. To be, to think, and to move with In the Wake is to meet the look of this insistence
unflinchingly, to linger in that look and to look carefully, with care, and to claim, to accompany,
and to hold those dead, dying, and living in death’s proximity in our memory, our thought, and
our imagination, through, and as our very consciousness. Without and against the desire to
fantasize a Black humanity and subjectivity that fills in the silences, the breaks, the lapses and
absences in the archive, In the Wake, and the wake work it practices and theorizes, insists on a
reimagining of the way we locate, hold, carry, and, again, really try to see Black life as it is lived
bound up with death—as it creates, thinks, and moves with, through, and against storming,
disastrous antiblackness. What precedes is a circumstantial account. I am unable to capture in this limited space the complexity and beauty of the maneuvers Christina Sharpe makes
as she sits with, drifts with, and never abandons, the many Black lives and deaths that give In the Wake, its theorization, and its practices their force; even less am I able to wholly account for the fullness of the
“new language…new modes of writing, [and] new modes of making-sensible” she painstakingly develops, applies, and reexamines in her work. This is, after all, only a sounding of a small note of care and careful
critique for an extraordinary work. Instead, I will conclude with Sharpe’s own summation of the mission of the text, its theorization of the wake, of its wake work and ours, of the past and ongoing works it holds
I want In the Wake to declare that we are
Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be
respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black
death: to think and be and act from there. It is my particular hope that the praxis of the wake
and wake work, the theory and performance of the wake and wake work, as modes of attending
to Black life and Black suffering, are imagined and performed here with enough specificity to
attend to the direness of the multiple and overlapping presents that we face; it is also my hope that the
praxis of the wake and wake work might have enough capaciousness to travel and do work that I
have not here been able to imagine or anticipate. To echo Fanon, perhaps, here, in the wake, and from In the
Wake, and with all the work it holds close, sits with, and aspires/inspires, “might an authentic upheaval be born” (Black Skin White Masks). With In the Wake,
tightly, and of the work it has inspired and is bound to inspire. At the end of the first chapter, “The Wake,” she writes:
Christina Sharpe looks out from the text and really tries to see us, both those here and gone, living and dead, in the wake, for all we are. We might begin, anew, by carefully looking back—double emphasis on care.
3
ASATs under the regime of NATO increase multilateral responses that sustain
western global dominance which actively excludes African nations and reinforces
racial lines of economic oppression.
Qobo 22 (Qobo, M. (2022). Africa and Defective Multilateralism. In: The Political Economy of
China—US Relations. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan,
Cham. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_2 Mzukisi Qobo is Head
of Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He is also a
political economist and Associate Professor of Strategy and International Business at the Wits
Business School.) //GUCCISUSHI
In his work, The Cold War and the Colour, the historian Borstelmann points out that the sluggish economic revival in Western Europe
and anxieties about the spread of communism in 1946 and 1947 softened Truman’s moral qualms about decolonization.
Instead, the
United States preferred to embrace colonial regimes in London, Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon
“aimed to bolster the economies
and military forces of the metropolitan governments butalso served to strengthen them in their
quest to retain control of valuable colonies abroad” (Borstelmann 2003, Kindle Location
990). The United States actively promoted Europe’s recovery after the Second World War. Yet it
had all but ignored Africa at the end of colonialism. Africa’s heavy dependence on commodities and
reliance on the European market stunted its development (Rodney, p. 192). This heavy reliance on
commodities, which was further reinforced by neocolonial relations with the West—and later China—
accentuated Africa’s economic vulnerabilities and dependence on external powers. As Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 43)
have pointed out, “The geographical and racial lines ofoppression and exploitation that were established
during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially.” For
(Borstelmann 2003). The Marshall Plan and NATO, as Borstelmann argues,
developing countries and Africa, the postwar era represents a long period of marginalization and structural
injustice. The
liberal internationalist order is an order that not only benefitted Western Europe, Japan, and a
also
actively excluded African countries from meaningful participation in various multilateral institutio
ns, including those that established the norms for international monetary
stability and reinforced the multilateral trading system. It was no accident that by the 1970s, the triad power that
handful of other countries that were America’s client states but
shaped global decision-making, for example on the international monetary system or the multilateral trade agenda, was constituted
by America, Europe (West Germany), and Japan. In this book, I argue that this postwar order was never faithfully lived out; thus, we
should not lament its demise.// The
liberalorder was indeed successful for the Western world and its allies during the Cold War,
to sustain US global dominance. The same US-led liberal order condemned the Third
World to the margins of the world economic system. It is thus important that we
recognize multilateralism for what it is—an incomplete project that was, to a considerable
extent, wasinstrumentalized by dominant powers to further their interests. Besides, the United States has on
and it helped
many occasions betrayed its own ideals by propping up military Juntas in Latin America, supporting morally questionable leaders in
Africa, and undermined efforts to consolidating democracy in newly independent states. Woodward (1987) offers a comprehensive
account of US government’s covert actions, from 1981 to 1987, through the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East, Central
America, and Africa. For many decades, the United States presided over a world trading system in which the Third World had to
endure unfavorable terms of trade and suffer the effects of both colonial and neocolonial relations that perpetuated structural
inequalities in production and trade patterns. Indeed, the system generated positive outcomes for the United States and its European
allies. For Europe, the financing support from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Marshall Plan, the
creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and for Japan the Dodge Plan and enhanced
market access in
the United States for its merchandise goods, are all evidence of the selective benefits of US
largesse. As Strange (1988, p. 104) point out, in a stretch of just over a decade from 1946 to 1988, “US aid and
government loans to Europe amounted net to $25bn,” and this had a “pump-priming effect on infrastructural
and industrial investment in Africa,” with positive psychological effects on business decisions. This largesse pushed
Europe to move faster in the direction of intra-regional trade liberalization, ironically maintaining high
import tariffs against the United States. International cooperation through multilateral bodies such as the UN, the World Bank, the
IMF, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) had mixed results, and these institutions were mainly in the service of
the interests of major powers. The areas of international cooperation that showed a greater degree of success were, according to
Anne-Marie Slaughter, those to do with regulatory processes, including share of information around anti-trust policy, environmental
policy, criminal law enforcement, and banking supervision (Slaughter 1997). Other areas related to international tax treaties,
accounting and reporting standards, other standard-setting processes in the domains of international communications technologies,
counter-terrorist financing, and anti-money laundering would also prove to be more concrete areas that fostered a degree of
normative convergence in ways that diffused benefits across the world. But these produced limited gains that did not go far in altering
the global power imbalances. The liberal internationalist order was never created with developing countries in mind and less so
African countries. The
peace and prosperity dividends that flowed out of open trade did not benefit
the African continent as much. Africa was on the margins of the GATT processes until the Uruguay Round that lasted between
1986 and 1994, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 3. African countries have remained weakly integrated into production and trade
structures, even as advanced industrial economies warded off developing countries’ attempts to bring their development concerns to
the agenda of multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Trade Organization (WTO). many African countries in their quest
to participate more meaningfully in the global economy. As such, the
participation of developing countries in the
US-led international order has always been at the mercy of powerful countries. Even in the twenty-first
century, many developing countries and emerging economies are still contesting the right to shape global institutions and enhance
their representation around the table as equals. For a long time, they have been pushing for reforms in multilateral institutions such
as the United Nations Security Council and broadening representation in global economic governance institutions such as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Neoliberal capitalism will produce extinction – the system reproduces crises that depoliticize
the left, undermine futural thought, and postpone its demise – the impacts are environmental
collapse, endless war, and the rise of fascism.
Shaviro 15
(Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science
fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981. “No Speed Limit: Three Essays on
Accelerationism” https://track5.mixtape.moe/qdkkdt.pdfrvs)
The problem may be summarized as follows. Capitalism has indeed created the conditions for general prosperity and therefore for
its own supersession. But it has also blocked, and continues to block, any hope of realizing this transformation. We cannot wait for
capitalism to transform on its own, but we also cannot hope to progress by appealing to some radical Outside or by fashioning
ourselves as militants faithful to some “event” that (as Badiou has it) would mark a radical and complete break with the given
“situation” of capitalism. Accelerationism rather demands a movement against and outside capitalism—but on the basis of
tendencies and technologies that are intrinsic to capitalism. Audre Lord famously argued that “the master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house.” But what if the master’s tools are the only ones available? Accelerationism grapples with this
dilemma. What is the appeal of accelerationism today? It can be understood as a response to the particular social and political
situation in which we currently seem to be trapped: that of a long-term, slow-motion catastrophe.
Global warming, and
environmental pollution and degradation, threaten to undermine our whole mode of life. And
this mode of life is itself increasingly stressful and precarious, due to the depredations of neoliberal capitalism. As Fredric
Jameson puts it, the world today is characterized by “heightened polarization,
increasing unemployment, [and] the ever more desperate search for new investments and
new markets.” These are all general features of capitalism identified by Marx, but in neoliberal society we encounter them in
a particularly pure and virulent form. I want to be as specific as possible in my use of the term “neoliberalism” in order to describe
this situation. I define neoliberalism as a specific mode of capitalist production (Marx), and form of governmentality (Foucault), that
is characterized by the following specific factors: 1. The dominating influence of financial institutions, which facilitate transfers of
wealth from everybody else to the already extremely wealthy (the “One Percent” or even the top one hundredth of one percent). 2.
The privatization and commodification of what used to be common or public goods (resources like water and green space, as well as
public services like education, communication, sewage and garbage disposal, and transportation). 3. The extraction, by banks and
other large corporations, of a surplus from all social activities: not only from production (as in the classical Marxist model of
capitalism) but from circulation and consumption as well. Capital
accumulation proceeds not
by direct exploitation but also by rent-seeking, by debt collection, and by outright expropriation (“primitive
accumulation”). 4. The subjection of all aspects of life to the so-called discipline of the market. This is
only
equivalent, in more traditional Marxist terms, to the “real subsumption” by capital of all aspects of life: leisure as well as labor. Even
our sleep is now organized in accordance with the imperatives of production and capital accumulation. 5. The redefinition of human
beings as private owners of their own “human capital.” Each person is thereby, as Michel Foucault puts it, forced to become “an
entrepreneur of himself.” In such circumstances, we are continually obliged to market ourselves, to “brand” ourselves, to maximize
the return on our “investment” in ourselves. There is never enough: like the Red Queen, we always need to keep running, just to
these processes work on a global
scale; they extend far beyond the level of immediate individual experience. My life is precarious, at every moment, but I cannot
stay in the same place. Precarity is the fundamental condition of our lives. All of
apprehend the forces that make it so. I know how little money is left from my last paycheck, but I cannot grasp, in concrete terms,
how “the economy” works. I directly experience the daily weather, but I do not directly experience the climate. Global warming and
worldwide financial networks are examples of what the ecological theorist Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects. They are phenomena
that actually exist but that “stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively
distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience.” Hyperobjects affect everything that we do, but we
cannot point to them in specific instances. The chains of causality are far too complicated and intermeshed for us to follow. In order
to make sense of our condition, we are forced to deal with difficult abstractions. We have to rely upon data that are gathered in
massive quantities by scientific instruments and then collated through mathematical and statistical formulas but that are not directly
accessible to our senses. We find ourselves, as Mark Hansen puts it, entangled “within networks of media technologies that operate
predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception,
etc.).” We cannot imagine such circumstances in any direct or naturalistic way, but only through the extrapolating lens of science
fiction. Subject to these conditions, we live under relentless environmental and financial assault. We
continually find ourselves in what might well be called a state of crisis. However, this involves a paradox. A crisis—whether
economic, ecological, or political—is a turning point, a sudden rupture, a sharp and immediate moment of reckoning. But for us
today, crisis
has become a chronic and seemingly permanent condition. We live,
oxymoronically, in a state of perpetual, but never resolved, convulsion and contradiction.
Crises never come to a culmination; instead, they are endlessly and indefinitely deferred. For
instance, after the economic collapse of 2008, the big banks were bailed out by the United
States government. This allowed them to resume the very practices—the creation of arcane financial
instruments, in order to enable relentless rent-seeking—that led to the breakdown of the economic system in
the first place. The functioning of the system is restored, but only in such a way as to guarantee the renewal of
the same crisis, on a greater scale, further down the road. Marx rightly noted that crises are endemic to
capitalism. But far from threatening the system as Marx hoped, today these crises actually help it to renew itself. As
David Harvey puts it, it is precisely “through the destruction of the achievements of preceding eras by way of war, the
devaluation of assets, the degradation of productive capacity, abandonment and other forms of ‘creative
destruction’” that capitalism creates “a new basis for profit-making and surplus absorption.”What lurks behind
this analysis is the frustrating sense of an impasse. Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the
future. For it turns everything into an eternal present. The highest values of our society—as preached in the business schools—are
novelty, innovation, and creativity. And yet these always only result in more of the same. How often have we been told that a minor
software update “changes everything”? Our society seems to function, as Ernst Bloch once put it, in a state of “sheer aimless infinity
and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was.” This is because, in our
current state of affairs, the future exists only in order to be colonized and made into an investment opportunity. John
Maynard Keynes sought to distinguish between risk and genuine uncertainty. Risk is calculable in terms of probability, but genuine
uncertainty is not. Uncertain events are irreducible to probabilistic analysis, because “there is no scientific basis on which to form
any calculable probability whatever.” Keynes’s discussion of uncertainty has strong affinities with Quentin Meillassoux’s account of
hyperchaos. For Meillassoux, there is no “totality of cases,” no closed set of all possible states of the universe. Therefore, there is no
way to assign fixed probabilities to these states. This is not just an empirical matter of insufficient information; uncertainty exists in
principle. For Meillassoux and Keynes alike, there comes a point where “we simply do not know.” But today, Keynes’s distinction is
entirely ignored. The Black-Scholes Formula and the Efficient Market Hypothesis both conceive the future entirely in probabilistic
terms. In these theories, as in the actual financial trading that is guided by them (or at least rationalized by them), the genuine
unknowability of the future is transformed into a matter of calculable, manageable risk. True novelty is excluded, because all
possible outcomes have already been calculated and paid for in terms of the present. While this belief in the calculability of the
future is delusional, it nonetheless determines the way that financial markets actually work. We might therefore say that speculative
finance is the inverse—and the complement—of the “affirmative speculation” that takes place in science fiction. Financial
speculation seeks to capture, and shut down, the very same extreme potentialities that science fiction explores. Science fiction is the
narration of open, unaccountable futures; derivatives trading claims to have accounted for, and discounted, all these futures
already. The
“market”—nearly deified in neoliberal doctrine—thus works preemptively, as a global practice of what Richard
to deplete the future in advance. Its relentless functioning makes it
nearly impossible for us to conceive of any alternative to the global capitalist world order. Such is the condition
Grusin calls premediation. It seeks
that Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. As Fisher puts it, channeling both Jameson and Žižek, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism.”
The alternative is to affirm the model of the Communist Party – only the Party
can provide effective accountability mechanisms to correct violent tendencies
within organizing, educate and mobilize marginalized communities, and
connect local struggles to a movement for international liberation.
Escalante 18. Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist. Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist
activist. “Party Organizing in the 21st Century. September 2018.
https://theforgenews.org/2018/09/21/party-organizing-in-the-21st-century.
I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not always been
explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to argue that base
building and dual
power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party organizing can
allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the
United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the
United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for
socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and
marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The
base building emphasis on dual power responds
directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to
concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific
conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely
more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political
education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of
course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If
it turns out that establishing
socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of
communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base
builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist
party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of
dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead
have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual
power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply
with establishing endless dual power organizations. We
must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in
order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an
organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a
party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic
centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party
members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals,
and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the
party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve.
Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for
revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local
communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing
communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together,
but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By
working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and
international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we
need to remember that our
struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national
but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party
model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy
to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local
organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows
criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but
rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others
strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the
United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial
society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity
and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these
consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual
power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them
into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by
unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows
community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members
and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating
communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local
conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national
unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established
organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally,
it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational
contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base
builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This
means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist
Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the
Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the
possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual
base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local
organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations,
education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of
armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror.
Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more
than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means
radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model
remains the most useful method for achieving
these ends. The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most
importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel
economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It
is my hope that we will see future unification of the various
local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at
the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national
party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement. Many of the already existing
organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise.
Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship
between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative
economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details
of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating
within. I
hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building
organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the
base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will
be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for
ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation
about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified
socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.
4
We endorse the 1AC minus their use of the words “blind”, “deaf”, and
“disable”.
The 1acs rhetoric of “disabling” nations infrastructure re-entrenches ableism
and leads to endless encounters with violence.
Rajkumar 20 (Shruti Rajkumar is a journalist and recent graduate of Emerson College, Ableist
discourse hurts the disabled community, https://berkeleybeacon.com/ableist-discourse-hurtsthe-disabledcommunity/#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20decade%2C%20the,to%20be%20addressed%20by
%20society, 2/11/20, Barney)
In 2009, Spread the Word gained traction in the public school system of Colchester, Connecticut, my hometown, as well as in schools
across the country. The campaign spread awareness about the derogatory and negative connotations that the “R-word” holds
towards people with cognitive disabilities, and it encouraged people to sign a pledge to stop using it. By 2020, the global campaign
gained over 800,000 online pledges, according to its website. The
impact of the campaign is undeniable, but
what about all of the other ableist slurs that remain embedded within our everyday language
and culture? Over the past decade, the use of the “R-word” decreased, however ableist slurs
such as “crippling,” “handicap,” “differently-abled” and “wheelchair-bound” remain normalized in our language
with complete disregard for the negative connotations they hold toward disabled people, and
this needs to be addressed by society. As a member of the disabled community, I’ve always
felt uncomfortable seeing these slurs used in conversations, written in books and being thrown around as
playful insults between my peers, but because they were so widely used, it was difficult for me to pinpoint why it made me
uncomfortable. Unfortunately,
this normalization remains because of the lack of awareness
surrounding the trauma disabled people face in relation to these slurs. I first became aware of the slur
“cripple” in elementary school while watching the 2009 movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The original book, published in 1843
by Charles Dickens, refers to Bob Cratchit’s son, nicknamed “Tiny Tim,” as a cripple. During the 19th century, slurs with a variation of
the word “cripple” were even more normalized than they are today. However, in the modern age of movie adaptations, the
characters still refer to him as a cripple, even though it is an outdated term. Whenever I watched the movie, I got the sense that
calling the character a cripple portrayed him as inferior, stemming from an able-centric place of pity, a reflection of how all abled
people view disabled people. Consequently, I felt as though I was also viewed this way by those around me. When I hear the word
“handicap” used in conversations, it’s usually in reference to the reserved parking spots or to refer to a specific disability. Most
people, however, don’t understand the negative implication surrounding this word. On Feb. 5, 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden
reflected on his struggle with a stutter throughout his childhood at the CNN Presidential town hall. “You know, stuttering, when you
think about it, is the only handicap that people still laugh about,” Biden said. Putting aside the inaccuracy of his statement, he should
have avoided the term “handicap” because “disabled” is the preferred and politically correct term. When
I hear people
using ableist slurs, they’re usually not in a hateful context. With the word “crippling,” I
normally hear it used in conversations to describe mental illnesses, such as anxiety or
depression, as a way of emphasizing the intensity of their illness. However, people can describe their
mental illnesses without offending other communities. For example, instead of saying “crippling anxiety,” they can say
“overwhelming anxiety.” Similarly, ableist slurs can simply be replaced by more politically correct terms. “Accessible” should replace
“handicap,” “disabled” should replace “differently-abled” and “wheelchair-user” should replace “wheelchair-bound.” Even
if the
use of ableist slurs isn’t always used as an attack on disabled people, the lack of awareness
about them further permits their normalization in our culture and language. Consequently, they act
as a microaggression that ultimately adds to the ableism faced by an already marginalized community. Today, society is making
strides in omitting the slurs and outdated terms that have a history of offending marginalized communities. The disabled community
deserves that same respect.
Case
ADV:
1. No retal or escalation from satellite attacks
Dr. Eric J. Zarybnisky 18, MA in National Security Studies from the Naval War College,
PhD in Operations Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Lt Col, USAF,
“Celestial Deterrence: Deterring Aggression in the Global Commons of Space”,
3/28/2018, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1062004.pdf
PREVENTING AGGRESSION IN SPACE
While deterrence and the Cold War are strongly linked in the public’s mind through the nuclear standoff between the United States
and the Soviet Union, the fundamentals of deterrence date back millennia and deterrence remains relevant. Thucydides alludes to
the concept of deterrence in his telling of the Peloponnesian War when he describes rivals seeking advantages, such as recruiting
allies, to dissuade an adversary from starting or expanding a conflict.6F6 Aggression
in space was successfully
avoided during the Cold War because both sides viewed an attack on military satellites
as highly escalatory, and such an action would likely result in general nuclear war.7F7 In
today’s more nuanced world, attacking satellites, including military satellites, does not
necessarily result in nuclear war. For instance, foreign countries have used highpowered lasers against American intelligence-gathering satellites8F8 and the United States
has been reluctant to respond, let alone retaliate with nuclear weapons. This shift in
policy is a result of the broader use of gray zone operations, to which countries struggle
to respond while limiting escalation. Beginning with the fundamentals of deterrence illuminates how it applies to
prevention of aggression in space.
2. The Aff’s speech act around the securitization of NATO and the West is
empirically used to justify militarization and endless violence—NATO
relies on narrative and threat construction to justify its existence.
Benjamin Herborth and Gunther Hellman 17, Professors at the University of Groningen and
Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, 1-2017, "(PDF) Uses of the West: Security and the
Politics of Order", ResearchGate,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314217000_Uses_of_the_West_Security_and_the_P
olitics_of_Order //AW
Debates over the future of NATO easily transform into debates about whether ‘Western civilization’ and ‘the West’ as a whole might
be in decline or whether they are the winner of the Cold War’s ideological battles (cf. Huntington, 1993; Fukuyama, 1989).
Compared to NATO, however, a Western security community seems to be quite prosperous
despite continuing conflicts between NATO members (Cox, 2005; Pouliot, 2006). In this chapter I have tried to
show that a transatlantic alliance was (re-)constituted via the mobilization and re-articulation of
foundational narratives by the allies in order to justify the existence, continuity, and
transformation of NATO. Foundational narratives, then, direct our attention exactly to the politics of security and identity
where political subjects are formed in the first place and help to understand how security communities are constituted instead of
postulating that they are already existing (Adler and Barnett 1998, p. 3; contrary: Deutsch et al., 1969). In conclusion, I want to
highlight how NATO’s
re-constitution relates to the overall theme of this volume, ‘the West’. It is not
surprising that NATO allies often referred to ‘democracy’, ‘individual liberty’, or ‘the rule of law’
in order to justify NATO as a geo-political community of solidarity with defensive and peaceful intentions.
Accordingly, it is not surprising that the Soviet Union was repeatedly accused of modernizing its military capacities, harboring
expansionist intentions, and being an aggressive opponent in an ideological struggle between ‘freedom’ and ‘communism’. This
rather plain self/other construction, however, was quickly modified in the early 1990s by declaring an ‘end of the Cold War’,
invoking the CEE as a distinct political subject, and by focusing on new risks and challenges different from the past focus on
territorial defense. Moreover, NATO had ‘gone global’ in order to ‘bring stability to other parts of the world’ (Daalder and Goldgeier,
2006, p. 105; Brzezinski, 2009). While this global
NATO is depicted as a result of changing security politics, in
particular as a consequence of globalized terrorist threat, it is short-sighted to argue that these transformations
are merely a reaction to external pressures. Grand narratives about a ‘Cold War’ and a ‘War on Terrorism’
are as much produced by a transatlantic security discourse intended to make sense of the
world as they serve to justify political decisions. It is a moot question whether the global
projection of power by ‘the West’ caused violent opposition around the globe or whether ‘new
wars’ and terror networks caused a transformation of NATO. It is puzzling, though, that NATO has managed to
secure its survival and to transform. I have argued that the creation and repetition of foundational narratives – in particular the
invention of a geopolitical community of solidarity and a political community according to Article 4 of the Washington Treaty – made
sucha two-sided re-constitution of continuity and transformation possible. This also implies that NATO will persist and at once
change as long as the allies carry on re-articulating this foundational narrative. Such a foundational
narrative serves its
integrating function only against the background of ‘the West’
3. Russian ASATs aren’t operational or a unique threat and space weather
and debris thump
Dr. Brian Weeden 18, PhD in Public Policy and Public Administration from George Washington
University in the Field of Science and Technology Policy, Technical Advisor at the Secure World
Foundation, Master of Science Degree in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota,
“Real Talk and Real Solutions to Real Space Threats”, Space News, 11/26/2018,
https://spacenews.com/op-ed-real-talk-and-real-solutions-to-real-space-threats/
It is difficult to read a story about national security space these days without hearing dire warnings
about the ominous threats facing the United States in space and bold proclamations about purported solutions to
address them. Unfortunately, while there are indeed real threats the United States faces in space, the political and public discourse
about both the threats and solutions leaves much to be desired. Whether it’s due
classification or technical complexity, important
to political maneuvering, ideology,
details and nuances are often glossed over or left out.
This a huge problem, as it is critically important that we have a real understanding of the scope,
degree, and diversity of the threats facing future use of space so that we can get the solutions to those threats right.
The space domain today is indeed a more complex and challenging environment than it has been for the past 20 years. The United
States has successfully integrated space capabilities into its military operations, resulting in an unprecedented level of military power
and effectiveness. At the same time, several countries are developing their own space and counterspace capabilities to both boost
their own military power and undermine the military power of other countries, including the United States. Open source analyses of
these developments were detailed earlier this year in reports by both Secure World Foundation and the Center for Strategic and
International Studies.
Yet the public rhetoric and discussion on these threats often leaves out or obscures important details. The
existence of
counterspace capabilities is not new; both the United States and Soviet Union developed, tested
and deployed multiple destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) systems throughout the Cold War. The situation
in space today is a more a return to that historical contested space domain than a uniquely new situation, and
the destructive counterspace threats of today are also neither newly hatched nor yet
operational. Russian and Chinese ASAT programs have been underway since the early 2000s, and
their testing prompted the Obama administration to re-examine U.S. space posture in 2014. In February 2018, Director of National
Intelligence Dan Coats testified that Russian and Chinese destructive ASAT weapons probably will reach initial operational capability
in the next few years. Counterspace threats are also being conflated with hypersonics, despite the latter being a threat to ground
installations and not satellites. Moreover, while destructive ASATs get the most media and political hype, it is non-destructive
attacks such as jamming that are actually being used operationally in conflicts today and pose the most likely military threat.
The focus on counterspace threats also obscures the real and growing environmental threats to
satellites. Talk to any satellite engineer or operator and they will tell you that space has never been a benign environment, and
that it has only gotten more challenging in recent years. Day in and day out, avoiding potential collisions with space
debris and resolving incidental radio-frequency interference are the biggest threats military, commercial,
and civil satellite operators need to contend with, and those threats will only grow along with the rapid
increase in the number of satellites being launched. It is more likely the United States will lose a critical satellite
to a space debris impact or a space weather event than to a hostile attack, yet there is far more political
attention being paid to — and money being spent on — the latter than the former.
4. Russia’s defensive and multiple checks prevent war with the U.S.
Dr. Andrei Tsygankov 16, Professor at the Departments of Political Science and International
Relations at San Francisco State University, PhD in International Relations from the University of
Southern California, “5 Reasons Why The Threat of A Global War Involving Russia is Overstated”,
Russia Direct, 2/19/2016, https://russia-direct.org/opinion/5-reasons-why-threat-great-powerwar-involving-russia-overstated
Why today's world is less dangerous than the Cold War
Today’s world, while threatening and uncertain, is hardly more dangerous than the Cold War, for the following
reasons.
First, whatever the rhetoric, major powers are not inclined towards risky behavior when their
core interests are at stake. This concerns not only the nuclear superpowers, but also countries such as
Turkey. The prospect of confronting Russia's overwhelmingly superior military should give pause even to someone as hot-tempered
as Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Even
if Erdogan wanted to pit Russia against NATO, it wouldn’t work.
So far, NATO has been careful to not be drawn into highly provocative actions, whether it is by
responding to Russia seizing the Pristina International Airport in June 1999, getting involved on Georgia’s side during the military
conflict in August 2008 or by providing lethal military assistance and support for Ukraine. Unless Russia is the clear and proven
aggressor, NATO
is unlikely to support Turkey and begin World War III.
Second, Russia remains a defensive power aware of its responsibility for maintaining
international stability. Moscow wants to work with major powers, not against them. Its insistence on
Western recognition of Russia’s interests must not be construed as a drive to destroy the foundations of the international order,
such as sovereignty, multilateralism, and arms control.
Third, the
United States has important interests to prevent regional conflicts from escalating or
becoming trans-regional. Although its relative military capabilities are not where they were ten years ago, the U.S.
military and diplomatic resources are sufficient to restrain key regional players in any part of
the world. Given the power rivalry across several regions, proxy wars are possible and indeed are happening, but they are
unlikely to escalate.
Fourth, unlike the Cold War era, the contemporary world has no rigid alliance structure. The socalled Russia-China-Iran axis is hardly more than a figment of the imagination by American neoconservatives and some Russia
conspiracy-minded thinkers. The world remains a space in which international coalitions overlap and are mostly formed on an ad
hoc basis.
Fifth, with the exception of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS), there
is no fundamental conflict of
values and ideologies. Despite the efforts to present as incompatible the so-called “traditional” and “Western” values by
Russia or “democracy” to “autocracy” by the United States and Europe, the world majority does not think that this cultural divide is
worth fighting for.
Despite the dangers of the world we live in, it contains a number of important, even
underappreciated, checks on great powers’ militarism. The threat talk coming from politicians is often
deceiving. Such talk may be a way to pressure the opponent into various political and military concessions rather than to signal
real intentions. When such pressures do not bring expected results, the rhetoric of war and isolation subsides.
5. No artic war---expensive and cooperation now
Yegorov 16 (Oleg Yegorov, reporter, “Is a war for the Arctic possible?,” RBTH, 10/18/16,
https://www.rbth.com/politics_and_society/2016/10/18/is-a-war-for-the-arcticpossible_639787) dwc 18
The Arctic
remains an area with low conflict potential, despite territorial disagreements and
the current tension between Russia and the West. But to preserve this state of affairs, the international
community must make serious efforts to work together.//// "The Arctic is one of those few areas in which
international cooperation with Russia has not only not been reduced, but has actually
increased," said Dmitri Rogozin, Chairman of the State Committee for Arctic Development, on Oct. 13 at a conference entitled
"International Cooperation in the Arctic: New Challenges and Vectors of Development" organized by the Russian International
Affairs Council. This
continued cooperation is indicative of the importance of the Arctic, one of the
world’s most unique ecosystems and one of the its richest in terms of natural resources. Scientists
believe that the Arctic contains 13 percent of the world's unproven oil reserves, 30 percent of the world's natural gas and about 10
percent of the world's fish resources. The region is also becoming more accessible as polar ice melts, making dialogue between
circumpolar countries ever more important.//// Unresolved disagreements The Arctic waters are divided into sectors of
responsibility belonging to five countries — Russia, the U.S., Norway, Denmark and Canada — but the borders delineating national
waters have still not been fully defined. Ownership of the sea areas is established according to the continental shelf and is often
difficult to determine. As a result, disputes persist. In 2015, Russia filed an application with the UN to expand its Arctic territory by
1.2 million square kilometers. Russia's request crosses over onto Canada and Denmark's territorial claims. For now the request is
being reviewed (Canada's response will be filed only in 2018) and the fate of the contested territories is unclear. //// "When we
were preparing the application we already knew that it would intersect the interests of other countries, which is why the
preparation was very serious. We are ready to prove scientifically that our country must expand as a result of the Arctic shelf. It is
important that politics do not interfere in this argument," said Arthur Chilingarov, Russia’s Special Presidential Representative for
International Cooperation in the Arctic and Antarctica. //// A region of mutual defense Due to the Arctic's resources and unresolved
territorial issues, the region has the potential to be an area for conflict — even military conflict — between Russia and NATO. In
April, Roger Boyes, a journalist for British newspaper The Times, accused Russia of militarizing the region and planning for a new
Cold War there. //// Russia's solar-powered satellite monitors the Arctic Russia does indeed have a military presence in the
region, but Russian experts say characterizing it as “militarization” is inaccurate. In 2014, a separate military district was
formed at the Northern Fleet base in the Arctic Circle. Military airports in the region are being renovated, and additional navy ships
and submarines suited to the Arctic climate are under construction. However, Igor Petrenko, professor at the Russian Armed Forces
General Staff Academy, says that all of Russia’s moves are legal and done with the aim of guaranteeing its own security. "Today
Russia does not have the concentration of armed forces in the Arctic that the USSR had," Petrenko said. //// He
emphasized
that nowhere in the Arctic does Russia have an advantage over NATO countries — that Russia
has enough armed forces for defense but not for an offensive move — and that it is only trying
to maintain the status quo. The other Arctic countries adhere to the same position. //// Dmitri
Tulupov, assistant professor in the faculty of the theory and history of international relations at
St. Petersburg State University says "the militarization of the Arctic" and "the battle for the
Arctic" are just clichés spread by the media. A military confrontation in the Arctic would be
expensive, economically risky and it would pose an ecological threat to the whole region.
"There exists an orderly mechanism for regulating disputes, including those concerning
resources," Tulupov said. "It is very difficult to imagine that anyone would fight in the Arctic
over its resources." //// According to Igor Petrenko, it would be practically impossible for Russia and the
West to engage in a proxy war in the Arctic. "There is no sacrificial pawn in the Arctic. There
the conflict can only be direct, and no one wants it," Petrenko said.
6. SSA is the perfection of biopolitics—the datafication and reduction of all
life to objects or problems to be managed.
Damjanov ’15 (Katarina, Lecturer of Social Sciences @ U. of Western Australia, “The matter of
media in outer space: Technologies of cosmobiopolitics,” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2015)
*green highlighting
Satellite population and orbital security
Over 6000 military, scientific and commercial satellites have arrived in Earth’s orbital space to
take on a key role in advancing global production, distribution and consumption of media
content.3 Designed to perform specific tasks, they have been disseminated across different
orbital altitudes; Low Earth Orbit has been mostly occupied by the earth observation, remote
sensing, communication and reconnaissance satellites, Medium Earth Orbit by those used for
global positioning, Geosynchronous Orbit by broadcasting satellites and High Earth Orbit has
been increasingly utilised for their disposal. More than 1200 of them are currently operational;4
arrayed around the planet as if to imprison it under omniscient technical armour, they provide a
major logistic backbone for governmental practices that expedite what Deleuze (1992) identified
as the ‘society of control’, extending Foucault’s ideas about ‘disciplinary societies’ onto the
contemporary context of automated, multifaceted systems of ubiquitous global surveillance. Yet
at the same time, satellites are themselves besieged by the same systems of control that they
make possible. Their conduct in space is subjected to exhaustive diagnostic management via
specialised schemes such as The United States Space Surveillance Network and the European
Space Agency’s (n.d.) Space Surveillance and Tracking program, similar projects led by other
states and space agencies, and independent expert groups such as the Union of Concerned
Scientists. The orbital constellation of satellites necessitates another security layer around the
global apparatus of biopolitics — the control of its control infrastructure, forging a double-bind
diagram of networked governance.
Satellite control is guided by the perspective of Space Situational Awareness (SSA), which,
although central to orbital logistics, is thus far without an official definition (Kaiser, 2014). In
essence, SSA is concerned not only with observation and surveillance of satellites as a way of
knowing details of their orbital position, but also with collecting, aggregating and analysing a
wide range of types of data about all objects and events in orbital space as a reference point
from which to estimate the best courses in their management. One of the many descriptions of
the SSA postulates it as the pursuit of ‘a comprehensive knowledge of the population of space
objects, of the space environment, and of the existing risks and threats’ (European Security and
Defence Assembly, 2009). While suggestive of the biopolitical agenda of securing human
activities in the orbital milieu, this formulation symptomatically reveals a turn towards objectoriented governance: SSA focuses upon the ‘population of space objects’. On one hand, the
term ‘space object’ is a legal classification of all human-made items placed in outer space, a
nomenclature introduced by the OST and elaborated in the Liability Convention from 1972,
which gives their legal owners exclusive rights to control and interfere with them. On the other,
the phrase ‘population of space objects’ — an expression which is customarily used in expert
vocabulary surrounding SSAS — signposts a repositioning of the human-centred en masse
purview of biopolitics to incorporate a population of technologies. The biopolitical use of the
term ‘population’ originally specifies a mass of living humans; however, with its application to
the assemblage of human-made satellites, biopolitics in outer space becomes central to
attempts to manage a population whose bodies are neither human, not animate, but that of
technology. This twofold satellite logistics which focuses upon both singular ‘space objects’ and
a collective ‘space population’ to assess multiple variables that determine their productive
capacity and manage risks associated with their occupation of orbital space, reinforces regimes
of satellite management which operate parallel to that of humans.
At both its administrative and executive levels, the governance of satellites regulates their
material presence in space, managing their distribution, traffic, operations and decommission.
Satellite launches require technical and procedural compliance with national and international
protocols. Information about each satellite is stored in the United Nations Register of Space
Objects Launched into Outer Space that functions as an inventory of their births and deaths, and
while apparently excluding undisclosed missions,6 acts as an (always incomplete) global census
on satellite population. Activities of satellites are continuously examined, evaluated and upheld
via a multifaceted management system termed Tracking, Telemetry and Control (TT&C). TT&C
enables ground control centres to monitor satellites via sensors and on-board computers with
which they are equipped, telemetrically measure their ‘health’ by determining the ‘condition
and performance of various subsystems such as fuel status, attitude and output of solar panels’,
and adjust their trajectories, configurations and functions (US. Army Space Division, n.d.). Within
satellite logistics, authority over each satellite is restricted to its owners and allows for its
individual proprietary control, but the overall population of satellites is seen as a shared
matter of global security, which necessitates cooperative collection and exchange of data
between space agencies, commercial and space experts and enthusiasts. There is a range of
satellite tracking software and databases, some with restricted access such as the US Space
Surveillance Network that only provides data to subscribed governmental and commercial
parties, and others which are freely available online such as the UCS Satellite Database or the
website Heaven Above that enable the public to monitor the movement of satellites. Taken
together, these examples of logistical inscription and calculated management suggest attempts
to institute a global system of networked satellite control which corresponds with the twinpoled organisation of power over life. It simultaneously centres on an individual satellite
(aiming to diagnose and restore its health and discipline its conduct in order to maximise its
productivity) and their entire population (overseeing its demographic distribution and
circulation and seeking to uphold its ‘public health’).7
However, like the volatile lives of humans, the orbital life of satellites to some extent eludes its
logistical control; as Foucault (1990: 143) reminds us, ‘it is not that life has been totally
integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them’. Aside
from the stealth or spy satellites constructed to avoid detection by any party external to their
missions and the general techno-scientific limitations of satellite control, a satellite’s life in orbit
could take many unexpected turns which rupture the effective performance of its control grids.
For example, the Eutelsat W2M unexpectedly fell from its orbital pathway (Selding, 2009), the
unforeseen collision between US Iridium 33 and the inactive Russian Kosmos 2251 satellite
demolished them both (lannotta and Malik, 2009), and an Indonesian satellite was damaged ‘by
urine and faecal matter’ left in orbit by manned space missions (China Daily, 2006). Due to
human error or factors beyond human control, a satellite occasionally crashes with another
object in orbit, sometimes it falls back to Earth, its body suffers material damage and its vital
functions fail, the service that it provides is terminated and its ‘death’ takes the hands-on
approach of satellite logistics out of hand. Orbital debris or space waste (Figure 1) presents a
particular encumbrance for the efiiciency of satellite logistics: millions of pieces of obsolete
satellites silently swirl around the planet at ultra-high velocities and are to stay in orbit for years,
centuries and even millennia, posing a constant collision hazard for active spacecraft and
constraining their future launches. Space waste is subject to the same logistic networks of
surveillance and database governance as the active satellites, but while its ‘Tracking’ is possible
to a very limited extent,8 its management does not involve ‘Telemetry’ and certainly not
‘Control’. The unruly blanket of satellite debris participates in satellite circulation as a bad
element, ‘a living dead’ formation that is impossible to command — material evidence of the
effective loss of authority and control in orbital space. The fragmented bodies of defunct
satellites introduce a disorder into satellite logistics, and they are literary ‘non-governable’
objects which, as Ned Rossiter describes in his discussion of the management of electronic
waste, ‘hold a range of implications for biopolitical technologies of control’ (Rossiter, 2009: 37).
They suggest, in this instance, that cosmobiopolitical modes of governance also need to
incorporate the risk produced by the afterlife of space objects as a way of compensating for
deterioration of its aptitude to enforce sovereignty rights and property management over their
‘unruly’ conduct.
The proliferation of spent satellite hardware destabilises the security of the global circulation of
information and knowledge. The movement of each satellite entails a constant risk from
damage that would transform it into uncontrollable ‘living dead’ matter with the potential to
subsequently contaminate others and corrupt their signal transmissions. Foucault’s research
into ways in which historical approaches to epidemics reflect the methodological shifts in
exercising power over life, evolving from the sovereignty model of the exclusion of the
contagious, via disciplinary prescription of normative procedures surrounding the diseased, to
biopolitical strategies of prevention and prediction of outbreaks. In contemporary culture,
metaphors of epidemics and contagion have been extended from their originally biological
context to the circulation of ‘immaterial’ digital content such as computer worms, viruses and
spam (Parikka, 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Sampson, 2011; Thacker, 2005a). With space debris, such
metaphors extend to the technological hardware which sustains information networks and
ultimately global systems of biopolitical control. The application of information technologies to
evaluate the ‘public health’ of satellites mirrors the practice of biosurveillance that monitors the
risks of epidemics among living biota and in this sense, their logistics can be seen as a strategy of
preventive biodefense. The official guidelines that cover the construction, management and
disposal of satellites provide instructions about developing them from materials that would
enable greater control over their bodies, even when they cease to operate (United Nations,
2010; US Government, 1997). Here endeavours to command the matter and ways of life
through the application of advanced technologies are imposed upon the bodies and population
of satellites. The efforts to improve the vitality of satellites physiques and breed them into a
healthy, resistant population, transfer the risk-combating strategies of satellite logistics from
discipline and surveillance to deep ecologies of bioengineering. The materiality of satellites
triggers a biopolitical response, a human attempt to mitigate the contagion risk by attempting to
govern these inanimate objects as if they were living.
The mass of functional and defunct satellites that swarm around the globe has become an
inseparable part of its environs, which reconfigures the circumstances of human medianatures.
Each of their atoms is now a constituent element of orbital space and as such they themselves
become a common that is shared by all. This is a common created by humans at the level of
species — material evidence that the impact of human techno- industrial activities which have
pushed the planet into a new geological period, the Anthropocene, is already overspilling the
globe. Satellite populations facilitate new paths for the biopolitical production of the commons,
revealing the material aspect of information and communication technologies as vital to the
creation of human collectivities. Thacker (2005b) suggests that, in the age in which informatics
becomes central for securing life and its processes, ‘perhaps we can rephrase Foucault’s
formulation of biopolitics, and suggest that biopolitics is the condition in which population,
information, and security become intertwined in a set of practices, responses, and
preparations”. In the context of the satellites that inhabit the orbital commons, this rephrasing
should also include the impact that the matter of technology has upon the global focus and
practices of biopolitics. In this sense, the human relationship with satellites signposts a possible
transformation of biopower as power concerned only with the mere survival of the human
element of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) towards a more technical and perhaps networked
definition of life, which encompasses both humans and objects involved in mediation practices
and whose governance incorporates their living and living-like populations.