A2 T
2AC T Surveillance
We meet: Targeting includes surveillance.
Targeting requires identification
US Department of Defense 05, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms,
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/targeting
The process of selecting and prioritizing targets and matching the appropriate
response to them, taking account of operational requirements and capabilities.
See also joint targeting coordination board; target.
Stopping targeting means stopping response to targets. Response in the status quo
includes continued surveillance. Stopping targeting means stopping surveillance.
Stopping surveillance falls under their interpretation of curtail.
Counter interpretation
Curtail includes stopping
YourDictionary 15 YourDictionary definition and usage example. Copyright © 2015 by LoveToKnow
Corp
http://www.yourdictionary.com/curtail#websters
curtail [kər tāl′] verb
To curtail is defined as to restrict something, stop something or deprive of something.
An example of curtail is when a town wants to stop drunk driving.
Prefer our counter-interp:
On limits,
Even if we don’t meet their interp, limits are the very thing Derrida critiques, extend
our Kuswa and Walsh 07 card which talks about how debate is exceptional at working
around inherent barriers to epistemology which plague other educational settings.
Reintroducing the dangers of contemporary teaching into debate is what kills
education, not limits.
2AC T Domestic
Surveillance is never just foreign or just domestic – it crosses borders all the time –
their interpretation fails the real world test. Only our interpretation allows for
research and sustainable debate.
Sanchez, 2014
Julian Sanchez, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, 6-5-2014, "Snowden: Year One," Cato Unbound,
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/06/05/julian-sanchez/snowden-year-one
The second basic fact is that modern
communications networks obliterate many of the assumptions about the
importance of geography that had long structured surveillance law. A “domestic” Internet communication between a
user in Manhattan and a server in Palo Alto might, at midday in the United States, be routed through nocturnal Asia’s less congested pipes, or
to a mirror in Ireland, while a “foreign” e-mail service operated from Egypt may be hosted in San Antonio. “What
we really need to
do is all the bad guys [people] need to be on this section of the Internet,” former NSA director Keith
Alexander likes to joke. “And they only operate over here. All good people operate over here. All bad
guys[people] over here.” It’s never been quite that easy—but General Alexander’s dream scenario used to be closer to the
truth. State adversaries communicated primarily over dedicated circuits that could be intercepted
wholesale without much worry about bumping into innocent Americans, whereas a communication
entering the United States could generally be presumed to be with someone in the United States. The
traditional division of intelligence powers by physical geography—particularized warrants on this side of
the border, an interception free-for-all on the other—no longer tracks the reality of global information
flows.
1AR Domestic
There’s no meaningful distinction between foreign and domestic.
Forcese, 2011
Craig. Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Canada"Spies Without Borders:
International Law and Intelligence Collection." Journal of National Security Law and Policy 5 (2011).
Spying – whether involving human sources or electronic surveillance – has a variable geography. Neither
form of intelligence gathering need be exclusively foreign or domestic. For example, while human
intelligence may involve covert communications between a state agent and his or her intelligence
source that take place in a foreign state, there is no requirement that this be the case. The intelligence
source could, for instance, be an employee of an embassy located in the state agent’s own capital.
Alternatively, the communication may straddle borders, consisting of electronic or paper
communications between source and agent located in different countries.
T- Surveillance – Andrea Smith
We meet and Counterinterpretation - Surveillance is the state itself, the state’s power
to see and not-see, to police and not police bodies creates the violence of settler
colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy
Andrea Smith, 2015 “Not-Seeing: State Surveillance, Settler Colonialism, and Gender Violence”
associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. In Feminist Surveillance Studies eds. Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Shoshana Amielle Magnet
As Patrick Wolfe (1999) notes, settler
colonialism is a structure, not an event; that is, settler colonialism requires
the continual disappearance of the indigenous peoples on whose land the settler state is situated (2).
Consequently, these colonial heteropatriarchal logics continue. As Jacqui Alexander's critique of the heteropatriarchal postcolonial state
demonstrates, on one hand, the postcolonial state (or states that strive to be postcolonial) is imagined to be incapable of self-governance
through its previously described presumed sexual perversity. It thus seeks to prove its ability to self-govern by continuing the colonial policing
of supposed sexually perverse "nonprocreative noncitizens" within its borders to legitimate its claims to govern.
In policing the gender
and sexual boundaries of the nation-state by purifying it of imagined racialized and gendered
contaminants, Alexander (2005) argues, the postcolonial state succeeds in obfuscating the permeability of its
boundaries to multinational capital. This policing, structured under the logics of what Maria Josefina SaldanaPortillo (2003) terms "aggrieved masculinity," then serves to allay the anxiety of the postcolonial state and
postcolonial aspirants in the wake of the postcolonial state's feminization within the heteropatriarchal
logics of global capital. While Lyon's analysis points us to the surveillance strategies of the state, an anticolonial feminist analysis
demonstrates that the problem is instead the state itsself as surveillance strategy. Consequently, it is no surprise that
states that have "decolonized" perpetuate the same surveillance strategies, because surveillance is structured into the logic of
the state itself. That is, if we relocate the focus of surveillance studies from the bureaucratic state to the
settler colonial, white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal state, we may then reformulate our analysis
of surveillance.
In particular, I would like to foreground the focus of the field of surveillance studies on "seeing." According to
Lyon, "Surveillance studies is about seeing things and, more particularly, about seeing people" (2007, 1). The "watchful gaze," as Lyon
labels it, is what gives surveillance its "quintessential characteristic" (2007, 1). A focus on gendered settler
colonialism would instead foreground how surveillance is about a simultaneous seeing and not-seeing.
That is, the purposeful gaze of the state on some things and peoples serves the purpose of simultaneously
making some hypervisible through surveillance while making others invisible. The colonial gaze that surveils
native communities to monitor, measure, and account for their "dysfunctional" behaviors conceals from view the settler colonial state that
creates these conditions in the first place. A feminist surveillance studies focus on gendered colonial violence highhghts that which cannot be
seen-indigenous disappearance.
We’ll impact turn debating from the perspective of Surveillance studies [their 1NC
Cohen ev] – these debates perpetuate white supremacy because they fail to challenge
the violence of the state itself.
Andrea Smith, 2015 “Not-Seeing: State Surveillance, Settler Colonialism, and Gender Violence”
associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. In Feminist Surveillance Studies eds. Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Shoshana Amielle Magnet
After 9/11, even radical scholars framed George Bush's policies as an attack on the U.S. Constitution.
According to Judith Butler, Bush's policies were acts against "existing legal frameworks, civil, military, and international" (2004, 57). Amy Kaplan
similarly describes Bush's policies as rendering increasingly more peoples under U.S. jurisdiction as "less deserving of ... constitutional rights"
(2005, 853). Thus, Bush's strategies were deemed a suspension of law. Progressive activists and scholars accused him of eroding U.S. democracy
and civil liberties. Under
this framework, progressives are called in to uphold the law, defend U.S. democracy,
and protect civil liberties against "unconstitutional" actions. Surveillance studies often carries similar
presumptions. That is, this field is concerned with the "rapidly increasing influence of surveillance in our
daily lives and in the operation of very large-scale operations" (Lyon 2007, 9). It is concerned with what is presumed to be the increasing
erosion of civil liberties and the loss of privacy that this surveillance entails. It
takes the state for granted, but is concerned
that the state not overstep its proper boundaries. And yet, from the perspective of indigenous peoples,
the eye of the state has always been genocidal, because the problem is not primarily the surveillance
strategies of the state, but the state itself. If we were to employ a settler colonial analytic, we would
see the growth in surveillance strategies less as a threat to the democratic ideals of the United States
than as a fulfillment of them. As these surveillance strategies grow, they impact everyone, not just native peoples, because the logic
of settler colonialism structures the world for everyone. In particular, surveillance strategies not only allow the state to see
certain things, but prevent us from seeing the state as the settler colonial, white supremacist, and
heteropatriarchal formation that it is.
A2 Gender K
A2 “Gender K”
The neg’s use of “women’s rights” as a justification for the War on Terror justifies
colonial violence and is the underlying logic of imperial interventions in the Middle
East.
Maira, 2009
Sunaina. Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis "" Good" and" Bad"
Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and US Orientalisms." Feminist Studies (2009): 631-656.
The desire to perform "good" Muslim citizenship has inevitably altered the politics of Muslim American
communities after 9/11. It has heightened class and religious cleavages within targeted communities and reinforced distinctions
between "good" and "bad" Arabs, and "good" and "bad" South Asians, similar to those between "good" and "bad" Muslim citizen- ship."
Furthermore, it
has profound implications for movements resisting the War on Terror, particularly feminist
movements. As Pakistani activist Farida Shaheed commented, the "self-serving use of women's rights as a U.S.
flagstaff' for the war on Afghanistan or other interventions in the Middle East is dangerous for indigenous
feminist movements, for it can lead to the perception that they are complicit with U.S. imperial policies,
creating false polarities on the ground 47 However, if what was hijacked on September 11, 2001, was not just the
airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon but also a particular feminist discourse, there are strategies
for walking the fine line between apologizing for fundamentalism and patriarchy and justifying imperial policies that depend on a deeper
analysis of the linkages between Orientalism, feminism, and U.S. imperialism. The figures
of the "terrorist" and the "feminist"
are part of an imperial allegory about terror that obscures these linkages while reflecting deeper
anxieties in the United States about religion, gender, and race. It is an allegory that tries to create a
national consensus by uniting liberals and (neo)conservatives through opposition to the "terrorist"
and sympathy with "the feminist," thus glossing over tensions of racialization, class, gender, and
nationalism that shape the realities of terror in all forms. The allegory helps consolidate an alliance between
sometimes unlikely bedfellows, such as (neo)conservatives, Right-wing thinkers, religious evangelicals, and mainstream feminists—who are
often but not always white—that essentially works, as Razack has noted, to
"install the colour line between modern white
subjects and pre-modern white subjects, between those who help and those who require assistance."
Imperial benevolence conceals the racial color line, and it also mystifies violence. As Spivak observes,
"The impulse to help by enforcing human rights, by giving things, giving money, ... ignoring gender-consciousness,
has a relationship with the impulse to kill." The notion of the terrorist obscures the role of state terror and the
violence of poverty and starvation, created directly in some cases by state sanctions (as in Iraq) and in other cases indirectly by the
equally willful policies of economic institutions. The feminist, in her/his liberal and Orientalist guise, participates in
this regime of terror by sanctioning which forms of violence are "just," which ones are knowable, and
which groups deserve them.48
The Neg’s “concern” for Muslim women is a clear example of the patriarchal
orientalist colonialism that underlies the War on Terror.
Maira, 2009
Sunaina. Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis "" Good" and" Bad"
Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and US Orientalisms." Feminist Studies (2009): 631-656.
The War on Terror waged by the United States since 2001 has focused on religion, nationalism, and gender as
linchpins in the U.S. discourse about bringing "democracy" and "human rights," particularly "women's rights," to regions that
presumably need to catch up with Western modernity. In this social Darwinist model human subjects trapped in
antidemocratic, patriarchal, and tribalistic cultures need to be liberated in order to achieve the "freedom" of individual autonomy prom- ised to
the fittest by neoliberal capitalism. Muslim
and Arab femininities and masculinities are a central focus of this politics of
rescuing and reshaping subjects. Missionary feminism and liberal humanitarianism have infused the rhetoric
used to justify the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and to warn of the threats attributed to Iran and Pakistan. Within
the United States, notions of "freedom" and autonomy shape liberal definitions of citizenship that divide
certain subjects as worthy of belonging from others who must be expelled from the nation. However, this
moralized logic of virtue and the rhetoric of "national security" mask U.S. imperial designs and strategic interests in the Middle
East and South/Southwest Asia. The reasons that certain individuals or groups are "anti-American" and resist U.S. occupation and corporate
control are obscured through a
discourse of "anti-terrorism" that targets Muslim and Arab males but is also
preoccupied with women's bodies. This article describes how constructions of gender are intertwined with
religion and nationalism in a state dlscourse about "terror" and how "good" and "bad" Muslim citizenship
are interpreted in the United States after September 11, 2001. What do these gendered performances tell us about U.S.
nationalisms, feminisms, and race politics in the War on Terror? This article builds on earlier work by feminist and postcolonial scholarship,
extending it to the current moment of U.S. empire.
The logic of the War on Terror is embedded in the gendered
politics of colonialism, nationalism, and liberalism. Feminist critics Minoo Moallem and Laura Nader argue that the
"Muslim Woman," especially the veiled woman, is a foundational trope for Orientalism and
colonialism. In the post-9/11 period, too, notions of the assimilability of Muslim women and men are
intertwined with gendered discourses of neoliberal citizenship and imperial nationalism that are
couched in rhetorics of Western modernity, democracy, and the "American way of life."
A2 White Terror CP
Not Competitive
Perm Do the CP is legit – white terror organizations are not included in the plan
because the USFG doesn’t include white terror in its own definition of terrorist
organizations.
Beck, Colin J., and Emily Miner 2013, "Who gets designated a terrorist and why?." Social forces
(2013): sos200.
The American Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list evolved from a congressionally mandated annual report Patterns of
Global Terrorism begun in 1985. Originally, the report served the purpose of providing information on acts of terrorism
against American citizens. In 1997, a formalized list of terrorist organizations with accompanying legal sanctions was introduced. For
listing purposes, the American Government primarily defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against
noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents” (United States Department of State 2010a). Groups
designated as
terrorists on the FTO list must be foreign, engage in terrorist activity and threaten the security of the
United States, including attacks against American citizens (United States Department of State 2010b). The list is updated
every 2 years with additions and removals of groups who no longer meet these criteria. In addition, the U.S. Government also maintains lists of
terrorist organizations under Executive Order 13224 issued in September 2001 and the Terrorist Exclusion List (part of the 2001 Patriot Act) for
financial sanction and immigration control respectively.
A2 State PIC
Solvency
State good
Must consider each use of sovereignty as unique – cannot universalize our opposition to the
state or we will create the same problems of universal sovereignty and give ourselves over
to multiple other forms of oppression
Derrida 3
(Jacques, THE "WORLD" OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO COME (EXCEPTION, CALCULATION,
SOVEREIGNTY), Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: 2003. Vol. 33 pg. 9, 44 pgs)
And yet, in the second place, it would be imprudent and hasty, in truth hardly reasonable, to oppose
unconditionally, that is, head on, a sovereignty that is itself unconditional and indivisible. One
cannot combat, head on, all sovereignty, sovereignty in general, without threatening at the
same time, beyond the nation-state figure of sovereignty, the classical principles of freedom and
self-determination. Like the classical tradition of law (and the force that it presupposes), these classical
principles remain inseparable from a sovereignty at once indivisible and yet able to be shared. Nation-state
sovereignty can even itself, in certain conditions, become an indispensable bulwark against
certain international powers, certain ideological, religious, or capitalist, indeed linguistic,
hegemonies, which, under the cover of liberalism or universalism, would still represent, in a
world that would be little more than a market, a rationalization in the service of particular
interests. Yet again, in a context that is each time singular, where the respectful attention paid to
singularity is not relativist but universalizable and rational, responsibility would consist in orienting
ourselves without any determinative knowledge of the rule. To be responsible, to keep within
reason [garder raison], would be to invent maxims of transaction for deciding between two just
as rational and universal but contradictory exigencies of reason as well as its enlightenment.
Reformism good
Taking particular action against wrong you perceive in the world is necessary to overcome
ressentiment
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
A set of pertinent skills and dispositions to the enterprise of theory can be distilled from leading
philosophers of time as becoming, particularly if you allow each to be adjusted in the light of
considerations advanced by the others. I refer to Priedrich Nietzsche, William James, Alfred North
Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze, though, as we have seen, others such as Ilya Prigogine,
Smart Kauffman, Marcel Proust, Merleau-Ponty, and Catherine Keller could be added to the list. I will
concentrate here, however, on the first group. Taken together, at least four commendations can be
distilled from them: i. To work upon the self and the culture to which you belong,
amplifying the feeling of attachment to the most fundamental character of existence as
such, as you yourself confess those terms in a theistic or nontheistic vein. 2. To cultivate the
capacity to dwell sensitively in historically significant, forking moments. 3. To seek
periodically to usher new concepts and experimental actions into the world that show
promise of negotiating unexpected situations.. To recoil on those interventions periodically to
improve the chance that they do not pose more dangers or losses than the maxims they seek to correct.
The first task, to amplify attachment to this world, is important to all five thinkers, but it finds perhaps its
most fervent expression in the work of Nietzsche and Deleuze. To them, life in a world of becoming
carries the obdurate risk of fomenting cultural formations infused with drives to existential revenge seeking available outlets. Both those who embrace and those who deny this image
of time face this risk, however. So it is imperative to overcome resentment of the fundamental
terms of existence as such, as you understand them, in order to marshal the energy and drive
to address the specific dangers and injustices you perceive. Otherwise what starts as a
fight in favor of something positive can all too easily be twisted into a crushing demand
to punish others for faults you secretly resent about the most fundamental order of being
itself (as you understand it). Bergson, James, and Whitehead concur on this point too, though it may find
less dramatic expression in their work. Bergson and James embrace a limited God as they cultivate
gratitude for being, while Nietzsche and Deleuze, at theft best, exude gratitude for an abundant world of
becoming without divinity. Whitehead, whose thought is still relatively new to me, seems to support the
idea of an impersonal divinity that absorbs "external objects" and sets limits of the possible in a world of
becoming. His stance is perhaps tied to a more beneficent view of the outer reaches of possibility tinn that
advanced by Nietzsche, Deleuze, and me. We seek to amplify attachment to the most
fundamental character of this world, amidst the tragic possibilities that inhabit a world
neither providential in the last instance nor susceptible to consummate human mastery.
We must cultivate a belief in the world that goes beyond merely negative breaks with the
features of the world we abhor
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
Such a characterization, as stated, is broad and not subjected to the pertinent qualifications. But such a condensation may be needed
to show how these diverse pressures affect each other. Ewe collect the pertinent shifts in contemporary experience -from altered
experiences of time to the minoritization of the world -we also sense how suth pressures can accumulate for many to disconnect
participation in the world from an automatic sense of belonging to the world. We can see or at least feel the exaggeration in
Merleau-Ponty's sense that the layering of embodiment suffices to secure essential belonging. Today what Nietzsche called
ressentiment- a
resentment of the most fundamental terms of human existence as you
yourself understand them - too readily becomes insinuated into the pores of experience.
The distribution of such a disposition is uneven, but it is not confined to the interior souls of individuals. It
can haunt entire
constituencies; it can even become embedded to varying degrees in institutions of
investment, consumption, electoral campaigns, governing, media reporting, church presentations, Internet debates, and
military life. It is perhaps at this point that Gilles Deleu.ze can enlarge our grasp of this condition and suggest at least one way to
forge the beginnings of a response to it. I refer to Deleu.ze's claim, one that touches the thought of Charles Taylor in advance in a
way that may surprise some, that today
we need to find ways to "restore belief in this world?' Deleuze
contends that today, though not for the first time, the distance between involvement in the world and
belief in it has grown. Recent developments in cinema simultaneously express these larger developments, amplify them
arid may suggest preliminary strategies of response that supersede existential resentment. To put it another way, both Taylor and
Deleuze think that part
of our predicament today is existential, even though neither thinks that
the predicament can simply be resolved at this level of being. Here area few of Deleuze's
formulations about what has been happening, since at least the end of the Second World War: - It is clear from the outset that
cinema had a special relationship with belief. There is a Catholic quality to cinema (there are many explicitly Catholic authors... ).
Cinema seems wholly within Nietzsche's formula: "How we are still pious." Or better, from the outset, Christianity and revolution,
the Christian faith and revolutionary faith, were the two poles which attracted the art of the masses. - The modern fact is that we no
longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us... It is not we who make cinema; it is the
world which looks to us like a bad film. - The
link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this
link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored
within a faith.. . Man is in the world as if in a pure optical or sound situation. The reaction of which man has become
dispossessed can be replaced only by belief.. . The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only
link. - Because the point is to discover or restore belief in the world before or beyond words... It is only, it is simply believing in the
body. - Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. 19 Deleuze
thus speaks to the element of "schizophrenia" to be addressed by both atheists and theists. He surely would not, then, endorse that
group of new atheists who think that simply following the logic of traditional science will dissolve the issues involved. Let me
follow Deleuze further down this trail: we will consider Taylor's response more closely in the next chapter. I am, of course, not
confident that Taylor, Deleuze, or I can forge a response that is sufficient to the issue. But perhaps it is pervasive and deep enough
to warrant making some preliminary attempts. How to restore belief in this world? Some writers, says Deleuze, (e.g., Artaud,
Kafka, and Proust), artists (Bacon and Magritte), philosophers (Nietzsche and Kierkegaard), and film directors (Welles, Duras, and
Rcantis) help us to think through this issue. They begin by first dramatizing a fugitive sense already there in life of jumps and
interruptions in experience, by portraying interruptions in smooth narratives. This is very active in film, and such cinematic
experience readily becomes coded into the sensitivity of experience beyond the theater. The depth-of-field shots that conjoin dissonant elements of past and future, the irrational cuts through which sound and visual experience confound each other, the aberrant
modes of behavior in comedies that convey fugitive experiences exceeding habitual experience, the flashbacks that mark a previous
point of bifurcation at which one path was pursued and another was allowed merely to fester as incipient potentiality- these cinema
techniques both dramatize features of everyday life already dimly available to us and place them at the forefront of attention for
further reflection. The film tactics reviewed by Deleuze anticipate new media experiments presented by Hansen earlier in this
chapter. They expose us to experiences of dissonance that cannot readily be submerged again, so that attempts to do so must be
more virulent than under other conditions of life. But such cinematic labors
of the negative are not sufficient;
they certainly do not suffice to promote positive attachment to this world. Even a "negative
dialectic" does not suffice. If things are left there, the embers of ressentiment can easily become
more inflamed. That is one reason Deleuze is never happy with negative critique alone: the next task is to highlight how our
participation in a world of real creativity that also finds expression elsewhere in the universe depends on and draws from such
the more people
who experience a positive connection between modes of interruption and the possibility
of our modest participation as individuals, constituencies, states, and a species in
creative processes extending beyond us, the more apt we are to embrace the new
temporal experiences around us as valuable parts of existence as such. Certainly, absent a
world catastrophe or a repressive revolution that would create worse havoc than the
conditions it seeks to roll back, these consummate features of late-modem life are not
apt to dissipate soon. The fastest zones of late-modem life, for instance, are not apt to
slow down in the absence of a catastrophe that transforms everything. So the radical
task is to find ways to strengthen the connection between the fundamental terms of
late-modem existence and positive attachment to life as such. This should be
accomplished not by embracing exploitation and suffering, but by challenging them as
we come to terms with the larger trends.
fugitive interruptions. To put it too starkly (for situational nuances and adjustments are pertinent here),
PIC’s Bad
A2: Baudrillard K
The force of communication/capital/whatever is not a reason to turn away from the world –
their fear of the fundamental terms of human existence is ressentiment
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
During a time when the expansion of capital, inter-territory media communication, and
population migration generate a more rapid minoridzation of the world, part of the contemporary
predicament is how to respond to the obdurate plurality of being in positive ways. The
pluralization of the world, in conjunction with bellicose movements that turn militantly
against it, forms a critical part of the contemporary predicament. Today, it is important,
first, to articulate comparative readings of the human predicament, second, to affirm the
reading that makes the most sense of evidence, argument, and experience to you, third,
to cultivate a presumption of agonistic respect for other readings, and fourth, to find
ways to embrace without existential resentment the most fundamental character of
being as you yourself confess it to be. The "you" refers to intra-individual, micro- and
macro-assemblages of desire.
Acting in a world of becoming is life affirming – taking on the role of the seer is
powerful
Connolly 11
(William E., A World of Becoming, Duke University Press)
Today, however, it
is important for more people to hone some of the capacities of a seer
and to exercise them periodically. When a period of turbulence arises in a zone that had been
relatively quiescent, you revisit a habitual pattern of thought by slipping into a creative suspension of
actionoriented perception, doing so to allow a new insight or tactic to bubble forth if it will, as if from
nowhere. You may then intervene in politics on the basis of that insight, ready to recoil
back on the insight in the light of its actual effects. You soon launch another round as
you maintain a relation of torsion between following a train of thought, dwelling in
duration, and exploring a revised course that has just emerged, until your time runs out. Even
those trains of thought will be punctuated by little jumps and bumps, as they ride on rough
tracks more akin to those between New York and Washington than the smooth ones on the Kyoto-Tokyo
line. Such are the joys, risks, and travails of thinking and action in a world of
becoming -composed of multiple force-fields, and marked by small and large moments
of real creativity.