*** Suffering Reps (NDI 2014) ***
Neg
1NC – the General
Representations of suffering otherizes the “sufferers” and steals their
subjectivity; the law silences their voice and destroys their agency.
Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of
Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, “
Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white”,
Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)
Representational practices define and constitute the representative as well as the represented, in a
dialectical process. Representation is a rich term with a long history that leaves traces in various
related meanings (Pitkin, 1972). There are three main senses of the term to be explored here,
which may be called political, legal and aesthetic forms of representation. When rulers are
responsible to the ruled, they may be said to represent them, in a political sense. In the context of
legal practice, we refer to lawyers representing their clients. And in the visual arts we say that a
painting or photograph represents its subject. This aesthetic sense can also refer to media
representations of people and events.
Hannah Arendt (1973: 75) pointed out that the new politics of the Jacobins after the French
revolution derived legitimacy from their “capacity to suffer with the immense class of the poor
”, accompanied by the will to raise compassion to the rank of the supreme political passion and
the highest political virtue. This new source of legitimacy replaced other forms of representation,
displacing the republic and forms of government (under the Girondins) by the Jacobins’
invocation of “le peuple, les malheureux”, in Robespierre’s coupling of the concepts. The
continuing appeal of the Jacobin formula in French political rhetoric was seen in the 2007
Presidential election, when both Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolène Royal dedicated their campaigns
to “la France qui souffre” (Renault, 2008: 151).
In political and legal discourse suffering is reconstructed from an experience of pain or
deprivation into a relationship, and this is notably a relationship between those who suffer and
those who do not. Renault (2008: 376) reports on Veena Das’s analysis of reactions to the
Bhopal disaster in India, which found that legitimating tropes of legal discourse detached
suffering from the victims. The discourse of suffering “was used to reduce those who suffered
to silence”, while the negotiations and construction of events, including that of the suffering
itself, were commandeered by politicians and lawyers. The emphasis here is on the victims of
suffering, while the legal mechanisms are shown to have deprived them of a voice.
Images of suffering typically portray the sufferer as the other, as distanced from “us” the
responsible, the actively viewing subject. In a series of photographs by Pierre Gonnord
reproduced in El País under the heading “El silencio de los marginados” (García, 2008), the
mute, closed faces of the marginalised are in contrast to the outgoing, engaging presence of the
photographer himself, depicted by a newspaper photographer.
The representation of suffering forms an essential component in that political economy of
suffering that involves domination, désaffiliation and dispossession. On one hand, suffering is
constituted as a salient political phenomenon by artistic, media and political representations. On
the other hand, responses to suffering are framed by representations of the suffering subject and
its converse, the responsible subject. Where suffering is represented as silence, the role of
those responsible becomes to represent, to speak for, and, finally, to act for the sufferers.
The media, politicians and lawyers play these roles with professional zeal. In the meantime,
responsibility for one’s own actions and legal liability for specific injustices and the spoils of
dispossession are washed away by the tide of a reimagined history, dispersal of collective
responsibilities and the re- presentation of suffering embodied in those who suffer.
The aff’s depictions of suffering can never be objective nor benign; the law
commodifies the subjects of suffering to create a permanent state of
exception, where the law is suspended and militarism becomes normalized.
Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of
Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, “
Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white”,
Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)
Suffering, no matter how “objective” its conditions, cannot be understood in isolation from its
broader social and cultural milieu. It has been noted, above, that the social aspects of suffering
indicate that people do not suffer simply as a result of some natural condition. Their suffering has
social origins and causes, and its very construction as suffering has important consequences for
the way it is experienced and the frame within which solutions may be sought. The concluding
sections of this article explore ways in which the theoretical analysis with which it began may be
applied to understanding, reimagining and responding to the suffering of Indigenous Australians.
I turn first to questions of representations of suffering to see how these constitute subjects who
suffer, before dealing with questions of responsibility.
In earlier discussion it was noted that representation in all three of its forms – aesthetic, political
and legal – may actually compound suffering and render the sufferers more powerless. Mute
suffering is a powerful photographic trope, identified in the work of Pierre Gonnord (García,
2008) and also familiar from television reports of famines and disasters, and advertisements for
aid agencies. The trope is active in depictions of
Aboriginal Australians. An archival photograph on the cover of a leading Australian newspaper’
s weekend magazine section (Good Weekend, 2009) on the anniversary of the Prime Minister’s
apology showed a tribal Aboriginal couple in a classic pose of powerlessness and mute suffering.
The headline read “Lest we forget”, using the motto familiar from invocations to remember the
war dead, thus referring back to the genocidal imaginary of an earlier age, in which the demise of
the Aboriginal race was assumed, and the role of the “white man” was to “ease the dying
pillow” (Dodson et al., 2006). While ostensibly reminding us of injustice or of its redress
through the Apology, the subjects of suffering are silenced, symbolically “killed” by the
unmistakable reference to remembrance and fallen soldiers. These constructions of suffering
represent the suffering subject in two senses: as an aesthetic and moral image, and as a silent
subject who is in need of representation: by a photographer, a politician, or a lawyer.
Representation in these multiple senses came together with devastating impact in Aboriginal
communities of the Northern Territory in 2007 following the release of the Little Children are
Sacred report on child abuse. The “emergency response”, described above, was justified by the
horrifying images of widespread Aboriginal child abuse that were talked up by the government.
The image of suffering was used to justify the suspension of law . Renault (2008: 31) reports
Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s analysis of the same tactic in Brazil.
She has particularly described the way in which the violence and dehumanisation in the favelas
constitute not only factors aggravating social suffering inside these social exclusion zones, but
also arguments to justify armed violence exercised against their inhabitants by the rest of society
(unlimited police repression, death squads, etc).
The constitution of suffering as a social pathology going beyond the experience or
comprehension of those who do not suffer constructs the sufferers in a zone of biopolitics where
police repression, military intervention and extra-judicial killings are justified as the
exception to the law. The Australian government was quite explicit in making this link: the
suffering constituted grounds for an emergency response that justified the suspension of law. In
the first instance the terminology of a state of emergency (Agamben, 2005) was used to suspend
the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act. After its promise at the 2007 election to apply the
Act to the intervention, it took the new Labor government two years to transmute emergency
powers into “special measures”, and other devices described above, to maintain the operation
of the intervention while shielding them from legal appeals on the grounds of racism. With the
pretext of protecting suffering children and women, successive governments have deprived
whole communities of their rights to property and to legal protection from racial
discrimination. The representation of suffering Aboriginal people has been used to
constitute them as a biopolitical substratum, unworthy of the legal protections afforded
citizens as fully-fledged political subjects.
We must refuse the commodification of injury and suffering, and along with
it, the politics of liberalism. Nothing short of total abstinence of liberal ethics,
politics, and episteme can actualize change. Instead of ignoring violence or
suffering, we simply reject the representations that juxtaposition life against
suffering; instead of wishing away violence or suffering, our alternative
allows for new forms of experience and sensuous life.
Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophy
at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies, “Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist
Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics,” Palgrave Macmillion, RJ)
In Martha Nussbaum’s celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of the
invocation of the worst sufferings of
mankind is bound to shut up and line everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as it
may appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one who suffers, as one who
responds to suffering, and as one troubled by each of those questions rather than having settled
them.47 Nussbaum or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to differ- ent metaphysics (even in
explicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do not even consider that their invocation of events of
unimaginable suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the sub- lime in
ways complicit with liberalism’s political economy of suffering. In being so, they inadvertently
evacuate the political in favor of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violent
oblitera- tions, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission to ethical judgments already
made for us. The ethicization of discourse on suf- fering, and the submission to the violence
of violence, is a parallel to the death of the political. Similarly, as long as the aesthetic follows
this logic—that representation is unethical and violent in nature and that we must somehow leave it behind—it will be limited
in its vision, unable to see the deep and necessary ontological connection between suffering and
representation. Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights and interests that privileges the Western scopic and
rhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses). The resulting
essential, ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to radically reimagine our
subjection to injuries, interests, and rights.
The elements of a historical materialism of suffering introduced over the course of this chapter—
necessity, hope, and a materialist sensuous ethos—reconsider woundedness and victimhood in
order to illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to our own and others’
suffering. They expose the presumptions and certainties regarding the imperatives suffering
poses for sufferers that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to insinuate
the question of suffering in our comportments, orientations, and internal relations of
simultaneity to the world.
A righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and relations to our own and
others’ suffering is not my objective here. One only has to consider, to build to a different end,
how the judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but reject consolations
that come from codified knowledges and certi- tudes, such as those pertaining to what suffering
is, how we must despise it, and how we must fix it. Then, one only has to question the imperatives these
knowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of “powerless” institutions
and other conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly different world. This
may involve not
giving lib- eral institutions or fervent recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms
of honoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the power to corner our pathos,
in a moment of ethical noblesse, by emphasizing how another’s suffering is impenetrable and
unknowable. As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a preservation, first and foremost, of
oneself—per- versely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over death
ironically inspires entire cultures built on surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives
It is imperative to reject both the righteous or tolerant
pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not version of seemingly other-centered politics in
favor of seeing our sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit.
(often the courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).
What would it mean, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to “incorpo- rate sickness into one’s sense of how things are supposed to go,”
to convoke a politics that is “good with death” but asks for “more life”? Perhaps
the sufferer not be incidental to
the suffering when suffering is defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve,
only to fail at that, too. Perhaps liberal politics should accept that sta- tistics of diseases,
mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms of the loss in human productivity, on the
one hand, and those of prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are not
graceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death . It is not that there are no sufferings to
be named, interpreted, and tended to. However, it is important to remember that this is not a
random, altruistic, or unme- diated process, and it benefits those with the agency and position to
act on another’s suffering. Perhaps politics should be able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yetto-be-inter- preted-and-recompensed sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberal
capitalist discourse. Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain frames of suf- fering in
order to address the ubiquity and ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps, still, if
politics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of life, then the activities of this making,
when they negotiate with the past, present, and future, necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds are
enacted in order to yield forms that are different.
Ultimately, perhaps liberalism’s colonization of suffering, and its moral dominion over it, needs to
be resisted and loosened. Questioning the forms in which we suffer and are told to do so is
not the same as altogether questioning the reality or centrality of suffering and our
responsibility to it. The ways in which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our bodies can and cannot bear.
Politics must be pushed to engineer the passing of certain forms of suffering, not the passing of
suffering altogether.
The claim to having nailed the problem of suffering becomes sus- pect when politics learns from
suffering not via the question of justice but, more immediately, as it responds to the suffering that
is life; when it is urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when attending to bodies who suffer,
remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary; when the question of the suffering of action is inseparable
from the actions of the suffering; when our experience of the world and its ethical, politi- cal, and aesthetic moments is not prior to or
outside of justice, but constitutive of it; and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the ordinariness of tragedy
is part of the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.
This is an offering toward a politics that is not modeled on the liberal, capitalist, and colonizing
ideals of healthy agents who are asked to live diametrically across from the pole of victimhood.
Such an approach would factor in the material experiences of destruction, tragedy, violence,
defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that risk obliteration even by many well-meaning
victim-centered politics. The imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suf- fering as something to be undone.
Rather, it holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be striven for, grasped anew, and salvaged
from the arbitrary dissipations imposed on it by global powers who not only refuse to take
responsibility for the plight that they have every role in creating and locating but also shamelessly
arbitrate how the wounded can make their suffering matter.
Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering succumb to their own hubris, even
as they set the terms of joy and sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, that
those subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining. Maybe these schemes have no relevance
to those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who
It is time that we confront the nau- seating exploitations and self-affirming
decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where suffering must live and
where it must die—these moralities keep themselves alive and ascendant by always
invoking their choice exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and life
signified in the savage acts of, say blowing up one’s own and others’ bodies, often
regarded as savage for no other reason than their violation of some silly rational choice
maxim . There are many other exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which
are the forms of acculturations, past and present, that see the realm of ethics as deeper and richer
than the space of individual moralities acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor
suffering as an inherently social act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other. If it is indeed the case that the
world is so because the colonized have not stopped regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in
the metropoles today ought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this world is not
that there is not enough liberalism, but that, at best, liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is
complicit . Perhaps the majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to speak to,
and with, their silences, their pain, their losses, their defeats, their victories, their dispensabilities, their mutilations, their self-injuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories, their
justice, their humor, and their hope. At stake in such an imagining is nothing less than the
possibility of newer forms of joy, desire, hope, and life itself.
beseech us.
1NC – Colonel Maoist
The 1AC’s call to action is nothing more than a valorization of poverty and
lack – the affirmative operates under the position of the Maoist – their
endless criticisms do nothing but prop up the very system that produces
alterity in the first place, turning the case.
Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 1993, “Writing
Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies)
The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kind
of representational agency, call the Maoist. Arif Dirlik, who has written extensively on the history of political
movements in twentieth-century China, sums up the interpretation of Mao Zedong commonly found in Western Marxist analyses in
terms of a "Third Worldist fantasy"—"a fantasy of Mao as a Chinese reincarnation of Marx who fulfilled the
Marxist promise that had been betrayed in the West."'6 The Maoist was the phoenix which arose
from the ashes of the great disillusionment with Western culture in the 1960s and which found
hope in the Chinese Communist Revolution.17 In the 1970s, when it became possible for Westerners
to visit China as guided and pampered guests of the Beijing establishment, Maoists came back
with reports of Chinese society's absolute, positive difference from Western society and of the
Cultural Revolution as "the most important and innovative example of Mao's concern with the
pursuit of egalitarian, populist, and communitarian ideals in the course of economic
modernization" (Harding, p. 939). At that time, even poverty in China was regarded as "spiritually
ennobling, since it meant that [the] Chinese were not possessed by the wasteful and
acquisitive consumerism of the United States " (Harding, p. 941). Although the excessive admiration
of the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the
Maoist is very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East
Asian fields. Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is
fed up with capitalism —a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the
one that is supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the way
desire works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an iden-tification with
and valorization of that which she is not/does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other's
deprivation— "having" poverty or "having" nothing —the Maoist's strategy becomes in the
main a rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric.
The discursive representation of the victimized subaltern robs the oppressed
of their vocabulary and denies their political agency; the affirmative draws
on suffering as a way to further their own political agenda and legitimize
their priveleged positions.
Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 1993, “Writing
Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies)
In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the Maoist is disillusioned to watch the China they sanctified crumble before their eyes. This is the
period in which we hear disapproving criticisms of contemporary Chinese people for liking Western pop music and consumer culture,
or for being overly interested in sex. In a way that makes her indistinguishable from what at first seems a political enemy, the
Orientalist, the Maoist now mourns the loss of her loved object—Socialist China—by pointing
angrily at living "third world" natives. For many who have built their careers on the vision of Socialist China, the grief is
tremendous. In the "cultural studies" of the American academy in the 1990s, the Maoist is
reproducing with prowess. We see this in the way terms such as "oppression," "victimization,"
and "subalternity" are now being used. Contrary to Orientalist disdain for contemporary native cultures of the non-West,
the Maoist turns precisely the "disdained" other into the object of his/her study and, in some
cases, identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralism, the Maoist sometimes turns all
people from non-Western cultures into a generalized "subaltern" that is then used to flog an
equally generalized West.**21 Because the representation of "the other" as such ignores (1) the
class and intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as elaborate as
those in the West, and (2) the discursive power relations structuring the Maoist's mode of inquiry
and valorization, it produces a way of talking in which notions of lack, subalternity, victimization,
and so forth are drawn upon indiscriminately, often with the intention of spotlighting the
speaker's own sense of alterity and political righteousness. A comfortably wealthy white
American intellectual I know claimed that he was a "third world intellectual," citing as one of his
credentials his marriage to a West-ern European woman of part-Jewish heritage; a professor of English complained
about being "victimized" by the structured time at an Ivy League institution, meaning that she
needed to be on time for classes; a graduate student of upper-class background from one of the world's poorest countries
told his American friends that he was of poor peasant stock in order to authenticate his identity as a radical "third world"
representative; male and female academics across the U.S. frequently say they were "raped" when they report experiences of
professional frustration and conflict. Whether sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization all
take
the route of self-subalternization, which has increasingly become the assured means to authority
and power. What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical
and oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and
rightful demand. The oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed twice —the first
time of their economic chances, the second time of their language, which is now no longer
distinguishable from those of us who have had our consciousnesses "raised." In their analysis of the
relation between violence and representation, Armstrong and Tennenhouse write: "[ The] idea of violence as
representation is not an easy one for most academies to accept. It implies that whenever we speak
for someone else we are inscribing her with our own (implicitly masculine) idea of order."22 At
present, this process of "inscribing" often means not only that we "represent" certain historic others
because they are/were "oppressed"; it often means that there is interest in representation only
when what is represented can in some way he seen as lacking. Even though the Maoist is usually contemptuous
of Freudian psychoanalysis because it is "bourgeois," her investment in oppression and victimization fully partakes of the Freudian
and Lacanian notions of "lack." By attributing "lack," the Maoist justifies the "speaking for someone else"
that Armstrong and Tennenhouse call "violence as representation." As in the case of Orientalism, which does
not necessarily belong only to those who are white, the Maoist does not have to be racially "white" either.
The phrase "white guilt" refers to a type of discourse which continues to position power and lack
against each other, while the narrator of that discourse, like Jane Eyre, speaks with power but
identifies with powerlessness. This is how even those who come from privilege more often than
not speak from/of/as its "lack." What the Maoist demonstrates is a circuit of productivity
that draws its capital from others' deprivation while refusing to acknowledge its own
presence as endowed . With the material origins of her own discourse always concealed, the Maoist thus speaks as
if her charges were a form of immaculate conception. The difficulty facing us, it seems to me, is no longer simply
the "first world" Orientalist who mourns the rusting away of his treasures, but also students from privileged backgrounds Western and
non-Western, who conform behaviorally in every respect with the elitism of their social origins (e.g., through powerful matrimonial
alliances, through pursuit of fame, or through a contemptuous arrogance toward fellow students) but who nonetheless proclaim
dedication to "vindicating the subalterns." My point is not that they should be blamed for the accident of their
birth, nor that they cannot marry rich, pursue fame, or even be arrogant. Rather, it is that they
choose to see in others' powerlessness an idealized image of themselves and refuse to hear in the
dissonance between the content and manner of their speech their own complicity with violence.
Even though these descendents of the Maoist may be quick to point out the exploitativeness of Benjamin Disraelis "The East is a
career,"23 they remain blind to their own exploitativeness as they make "the East" their career. How do we intervene in the
productivity of this overdetermined circuit?
We must refuse the commodification of injury and suffering, and along with
it, the politics of liberalism. Nothing short of total abstinence of liberal ethics,
politics, and episteme can actualize change. Instead of ignoring violence or
suffering, we simply reject the representations that juxtaposition life against
suffering; instead of wishing away violence or suffering, our alternative
allows for new forms of experience and sensuous life.
Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophy
at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies, “Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist
Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics,” Palgrave Macmillion, RJ)
In Martha Nussbaum’s celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of the
invocation of the worst sufferings of
mankind is bound to shut up and line everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as it
may appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one who suffers, as one who
responds to suffering, and as one troubled by each of those questions rather than having settled
them.47 Nussbaum or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to differ- ent metaphysics (even in
explicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do not even consider that their invocation of events of
unimaginable suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the sub- lime in
ways complicit with liberalism’s political economy of suffering. In being so, they inadvertently
evacuate the political in favor of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violent
oblitera- tions, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission to ethical judgments already
made for us. The ethicization of discourse on suf- fering, and the submission to the violence
of violence, is a parallel to the death of the political. Similarly, as long as the aesthetic follows
this logic—that representation is unethical and violent in nature and that we must somehow leave it behind—it will be limited
in its vision, unable to see the deep and necessary ontological connection between suffering and
representation. Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights and interests that privileges the Western scopic and
rhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses). The resulting
essential, ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to radically reimagine our
subjection to injuries, interests, and rights.
The elements of a historical materialism of suffering introduced over the course of this chapter—
necessity, hope, and a materialist sensuous ethos—reconsider woundedness and victimhood in
order to illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to our own and others’
suffering. They expose the presumptions and certainties regarding the imperatives suffering
poses for sufferers that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to insinuate
the question of suffering in our comportments, orientations, and internal relations of
simultaneity to the world.
A righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and relations to our own and
others’ suffering is not my objective here. One only has to consider, to build to a different end,
how the judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but reject consolations
that come from codified knowledges and certi- tudes, such as those pertaining to what suffering
is, how we must despise it, and how we must fix it. Then, one only has to question the imperatives these
knowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of “powerless” institutions
and other conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly different world. This
may involve not
giving lib- eral institutions or fervent recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms
of honoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the power to corner our pathos,
in a moment of ethical noblesse, by emphasizing how another’s suffering is impenetrable and
unknowable. As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a preservation, first and foremost, of
oneself—per- versely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over death
ironically inspires entire cultures built on surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives
It is imperative to reject both the righteous or tolerant
pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not version of seemingly other-centered politics in
favor of seeing our sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit.
(often the courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).
What would it mean, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to “incorpo- rate sickness into one’s sense of how things are supposed to go,”
to convoke a politics that is “good with death” but asks for “more life”? Perhaps
the sufferer not be incidental to
the suffering when suffering is defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve,
only to fail at that, too. Perhaps liberal politics should accept that sta- tistics of diseases,
mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms of the loss in human productivity, on the
one hand, and those of prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are not
graceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death . It is not that there are no sufferings to
be named, interpreted, and tended to. However, it is important to remember that this is not a
random, altruistic, or unme- diated process, and it benefits those with the agency and position to
act on another’s suffering. Perhaps politics should be able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yetto-be-inter- preted-and-recompensed sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberal
capitalist discourse. Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain frames of suf- fering in
order to address the ubiquity and ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps, still, if
politics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of life, then the activities of this making,
when they negotiate with the past, present, and future, necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds are
enacted in order to yield forms that are different.
Ultimately, perhaps liberalism’s colonization of suffering, and its moral dominion over it, needs to
be resisted and loosened. Questioning the forms in which we suffer and are told to do so is
not the same as altogether questioning the reality or centrality of suffering and our
responsibility to it. The ways in which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our bodies can and cannot bear.
Politics must be pushed to engineer the passing of certain forms of suffering, not the passing of
suffering altogether.
The claim to having nailed the problem of suffering becomes sus- pect when politics learns from
suffering not via the question of justice but, more immediately, as it responds to the suffering that
is life; when it is urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when attending to bodies who suffer,
remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary; when the question of the suffering of action is inseparable
from the actions of the suffering; when our experience of the world and its ethical, politi- cal, and aesthetic moments is not prior to or
outside of justice, but constitutive of it; and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the ordinariness of tragedy
is part of the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.
This is an offering toward a politics that is not modeled on the liberal, capitalist, and colonizing
ideals of healthy agents who are asked to live diametrically across from the pole of victimhood.
Such an approach would factor in the material experiences of destruction, tragedy, violence,
defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that risk obliteration even by many well-meaning
victim-centered politics. The imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suf- fering as something to be undone.
Rather, it holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be striven for, grasped anew, and salvaged
from the arbitrary dissipations imposed on it by global powers who not only refuse to take
responsibility for the plight that they have every role in creating and locating but also shamelessly
arbitrate how the wounded can make their suffering matter.
Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering succumb to their own hubris, even
as they set the terms of joy and sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, that
those subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining. Maybe these schemes have no relevance
to those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who
It is time that we confront the nau- seating exploitations and self-affirming
decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where suffering must live and
where it must die—these moralities keep themselves alive and ascendant by always
invoking their choice exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and life
signified in the savage acts of, say blowing up one’s own and others’ bodies, often
beseech us.
regarded as savage for no other reason than their violation of some silly rational choice
maxim . There are many other exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which
are the forms of acculturations, past and present, that see the realm of ethics as deeper and richer
than the space of individual moralities acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor
suffering as an inherently social act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other. If it is indeed the case that the
world is so because the colonized have not stopped regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in
the metropoles today ought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this world is not
that there is not enough liberalism, but that, at best, liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is
complicit . Perhaps the majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to speak to,
and with, their silences, their pain, their losses, their defeats, their victories, their dispensabilities, their mutilations, their self-injuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories, their
justice, their humor, and their hope. At stake in such an imagining is nothing less than the
possibility of newer forms of joy, desire, hope, and life itself.
1NC – Multiculturalism
The affirmative’s focus on cultural tolerance ignores the exploitative social
structures that creates difference in the first place; their absolute focus on
inclusion necessarily excludes the Other from participating in politics.
Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry – Autumn 2007, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)
Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of
inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, even
armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological operation: the
"culturalization of politics" - political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality,
economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into "cultural" differences, different "ways
of life," which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely "tolerated."
To this, of course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms: from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The cause
of this culturalization is the retreat, failure, of direct political solutions (Welfare State, socialist
projects, etc.). Tolerance is their post-political ersatz:
The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the promulgation of tolerance
today is part of a more general depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from political
life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of
politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a
domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation. [1]
Perhaps, nothing expresses better the inconsistency of the post-political liberal project than its
implicit paradoxical identification of culture and nature, the two traditional opposites: culture
itself is naturalized, posited as something given. (The idea of culture as "second nature" is, of course, an old one.) It
was, of course, Samuel Huntington who proposed the most successful formula of this "culturalization of politics" by locating the main
source of today's conflicts into the "clash of civilizations," what one is tempted to call the Huntington's disease of our time - as he put
after the end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of ideology" has been replaced by the
"velvet curtain of culture . [2] Huntington's dark vision of the "clash of civilizations" may appear to be the very opposite
it,
of Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the End of History in the guise of a world-wide liberal democracy: what can be more
different from Fukuyama's pseudo-Hegelian idea of the "end of history" (the final Formula of the best possible social order was found
in capitalist liberal democracy, there is now no space for further conceptual progress, there are just empirical obstacles to be
overcome), [3] than Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as the main political struggle in the XXIst century? The "clash of
civilizations" IS politics at the "end of history."
The framework of “cultural tolerance” justifies militant aggression and
intervention; every framework of acceptance necessitates a framework of
exclusion.
Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry – Autumn 2007, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)
Contemporary liberalism forms a complex network of ideologies, institutional and non-institutional practices;
however, underlying this multiplicity is a basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies ,
the opposition between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the life-world
into which they were born, and those who merely "enjoy" their culture, who are elevated
above it, free to choose their culture . This brings us to the next paradox: the ultimate source of barbarism
is culture itself, one's direct identification with a particular culture which renders one intolerant
towards other cultures. The basic opposition is thus related to the opposite between collective and individual: culture is
by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while - next paradox
- it is the individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as s/he extricates itself from
and elevates itself above its particular culture. Since, however, every individual has to be
somehow "particularized," it has to dwell in a particular life-world, the only way to resolve this
deadlock is to split the individual into universal and particular, public and private (where "private"
covers both the "safe haven" of family and the non-state public sphere of civil society (economy)). In liberalism, culture
survives, but as privatized: as way of life, a set of beliefs and practices, not the public
network of norms and rules . Culture is thus literally transubstantiated: the same sets of beliefs and practices change from
the binding power of a collective into an expression of personal and private idiosyncrasies.
Insofar as culture itself is the source of barbarism and intolerance, the inevitable conclusion is
that the only way to overcome intolerance and violence is to extricate the core of subject's being,
its universal essence, from culture: in its core, the subject has to be kulturlos. (This, incidentally, gives a new twist to
Joseph Goebbels's infamous formula "when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun" - but not when I hear the word civilization.)
Wendy Brown problematizes this liberal notion on a multitude of levels:
First, it is not truly universal, kulturlos. Since, in our societies, a sexualized division of labor still
predominates which confers a male twist on basic liberal categories (autonomy, public activity,
competition), and relegates women to the private sphere of family solidarity, etc., liberalism
itself, in its opposition of private and public, harbors male dominance. Furthermore, it is only
the modern Western capitalist culture for which autonomy, individual freedom, etc., stand
higher than collective solidarity, connection, responsibility for dependent others, the duty
to respect the customs of one's community - again, liberalism itself privileges a certain
culture, the modern Western one.
Brown's second line of attack concerns the freedom of choice - here, also, liberalism shows a strong bias. It shows
intolerance when individuals of other cultures are not given freedom of choice (cliterodectomy, child
brideship, infanticide, polygamy, family rape...); however, it ignores the tremendous pressure which, for
example, compels women in our liberal society to undergo plastic surgery, cosmetic
implants, Botox injections, etc., in order to remain competitive on the sex market.
Finally, there are all the self-referring paradoxes centered on the impasse of tolerating intolerance. Liberalist
multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance is
fully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military
interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance - some US feminists
supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as a form of helping the women in these
countries... However, Brown tries to get too much mileage from this self-referential paradox which a radical liberal would simply
assume without any inconsistency: if I believe in individual choice and tolerance of different cultures, OF COURSE this obliges me to
be "intolerant" towards cultures which prevent choice and tolerance. Brown makes it easy here with focusing on
today's anti-Islamism - but what about, say, the struggle against Nazism? Is it not also a
"paradox" that the allied block fought a brutal war against Fascism on behalf of tolerance and
peace? So what? There are limits to tolerance, and to be tolerant towards intolerance means
simply to support ("tolerate") intolerance.
Our alternative is to embrace the underground; institutions are propped up
under the framework of tolerance and interpassive action – interrogating and
critiqueing the bankrupt practices of Western episteme allows for a new
paradigm of politics that effectuates change.
Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry – Autumn 2007, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)
Orwell's point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious
token that should achieve the opposite, i.e., PREVENT the change from really occurring - a
today's academic Leftist who criticizes the capitalist cultural imperialism is in reality
horrified at the idea that his field of study would really break down . There is, however, a limit to this
strategy: Orwell's insight holds only for a certain kind of "bourgeois" Leftists; there are Leftists who DO HAVE the courage of their
convictions, who do not only want "revolution without revolution," as Robespierre put it - Jacobins and Bolsheviks, among others...
The starting point of these true revolutionaries can be the very position of the "bourgeois"
Leftists; what happens is that, in the middle of their pseudo-radical posturing, they get caught into
their own game and are ready to put in question their subjective position. It is difficult to imagine a more
trenchant political example of the weight of Lacan's distinction between the "subject of the enunciated" and the "subject of the
enunciation": first, in a direct negation, you start by wanting to "change the world" without
endangering the subjective position from which you are ready to enforce the change; then, in the
"negation of negation," the subject enacting the change is ready to pay the subjective price for it,
to change himself, or, to quote Gandhi's nice formula, to BE himself the change he wants to see in
the world. - It is thus clear to Orwell that, in our ideological everyday, our predominant attitude is that of an ironic distance
towards our true beliefs:
the left-wing opinions of the average 'intellectual' are mainly spurious. From pure imitativeness
he jeers at things which in fact he believes in. As one example out of many, take the publicschool code of honor, with its 'team spirit' and 'Don't hit a man when he's down', and all the rest
of that familiar bunkum. Who has not laughed at it? Who, calling himself an 'intellectual', would dare not to laugh
at it? But it is a bit different when you meet somebody who laughs at it from the outside; just as we spend our lives in abusing England
but grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things. /.../ It is only when you meet someone of a different
culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
There is nothing "inner" in this true ideological identity of mine - my innermost beliefs are all
"out there," embodied in practices which reach up to the immediate materiality of my body - "my
notions-notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-class
notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honor, my table manners, my turns of
speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body"... One should definitely add to
this series smell: perhaps the key difference between lower popular class and middle class
concerns the way they relate to smell. For the middle class, lower classes smell, their members do
not wash regularly - or, to quote the proverbial answer of a middle-class Parisian to why he
prefers to ride the first class cars in the metro: "I wouldn't mind riding with workers in the second
class - it is only that they smell!" This brings us to one of the possible definitions of what a Neighbor means today: a
Neighbor is the one who by definition smells. This is why today deodorants and soaps are crucial - they make neighbors at least
minimally tolerable: I am ready to love my neighbors... provided they don't smell too bad. According to a recent report, scientists in a
laboratory in Venezuela added a further element to these series: through genetic manipulations, they succeeded in growing beans
which, upon consumption, do not generate the bad-smelling and socially embarrassing winds! So, after decaf coffee, fat-free cakes,
diet cola and alcohol-free beer, we now get wind-free beans... [16] Lacan supplemented Freud's list of partial objects (breast, faeces,
penis) with two further objects: voice and gaze. Perhaps, we should add another object to this series: smell.
We reach thereby the "heart of darkness" of habits. Recall numerous cases of pedophilia that shatter the Catholic Church: when its
representatives insists that these cases, deplorable as they are, are Church's internal problem, and display great reluctance to
collaborate with police in their investigation, they are, in a way, right - the pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that
concerns merely the persons who, because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation to the Church as an institution,
happened to chose the profession of a priest; it is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic Church as such, that is inscribed into its
It does not concern the "private" unconscious of
individuals, but the "unconscious" of the institution itself: it is not something that happens
because the Institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinal
life in order to survive, but something that the institution itself needs in order to reproduce
itself. One can well imagine a "straight" (not pedophiliac) priest who, after years of service, gets involved in pedophilia because the
very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution.
very logic of the institution seduces him into it. Such an institutional Unconscious designates the obscene disavowed underside that,
precisely as disavowed, sustains the public institution. (In the army, this underside consists of the obscene sexualized rituals of
fragging etc. which sustain the group solidarity.) In other words, it is not simply that, for conformist reasons,
the Church tries to hush up the embarrassing pedophilic scandals; in defending itself, the Church
defends its innermost obscene secret. What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret side is
a key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest: if a priest seriously (not just rhetorically)
denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community, he is no
longer "one of us" (in exactly the same way a citizen of a town in the South of the US in the 1920s, if he denounced Ku Klux
Klan to the police, excluded himself from his community, i.e., betrayed its fundamental solidarity). Consequently, the
answer to the Church's reluctance should be not only that we are dealing with criminal cases and
that, if Church does not fully participate in their investigation, it is an accomplice after the fact;
moreover, Church AS SUCH, as an institution, should be investigated with regard to the
way it systematically creates conditions for such crimes.
This obscene underground of habits is what is really difficult to change, which is why the motto
of every radical emancipatory politics is the same as the quote from Virgil that Freud chose as the
exergue for his Interpretations of Dreams: Acheronta movebo - dare to move the underground!’
Framework
Representations of suffering are neither objective nor benign; suffering is
commodified in order to justify a permanent suspension of the law whereby
militant policing, violent acts of suppression, and rapeability are inscribed
into the lives of the colonized – that’s Mohr. The question you should ask
yourself in this debate is – what does voting aff do for the oppressed they
describe in the 1AC?
Our kritik tests the intrinsicness between the ballot and their narratives of
suffering – hold the aff to a high threshold to prove that an affirmative ballot
will help _______.
The rest of the debate is irrelevant – we think the team that presents the best
representational relationship to the ______ should win.
That comes prior – the belief that what we say directly changes the lives of
the oppressed is naïve – it’s a question of how we interrogate our own
priveleged positions in relation to the subaltern.
Chow 93 (Rey, professor of English and comparative literature and director of the comparative
literature program at the University of California, “Writing Diaspora: tactics of intervention in
contemporary cultural studies,”)
We need to remember as intellectuals that the battles we fight are battles of words. Those who
argue the oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and are
most certainly not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival in
metropolitan and nonmetropolitan space alike. What academic intellectuals must confront is thus
not their “victimization” by society at large (or their victimization-in-solidarity-with-theoppressed), but the power, wealth, and privilege that ironically accumulate from their
“oppositional” viewpoint, and the widening gap between the professed contents of their words
and the upward mobility they gain from such words. (When Foucault said intellectuals need to
struggle against becoming the object and instrument of power, he spoke precisely to this kind of
situation.) The predicament we face in the West, where intellectual freedom shares a history with
economic enterprise, is that “if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big business,. . . he will
be wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen.”28 Why should we believe in
those who continue to speak a language of alterity-as-lack while their salaries and honoraria keep
rising? How do we resist the turning-into-propriety of oppositional discourses, when the intention
of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the proper? How do we prevent
what begin as tactics – that which is “without any base where it could stockpile its winnings” (de
Certeau, p.37)–from turning into a solidly fenced-off field, in the military no less than in the
academic sense?
The 1AC is the paradigm example of interpassive politics – by claiming to
take action on behalf of the oppressed, the affirmative merely operates within
hegemonic ideological coordinates – the media and academia merely
legitimize themselves via the narratives of suffering.
Zizek 97 (Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, “Repeating
Lenin,” www.lacan.com/replenin)
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to
succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably
ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"),
but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act,
this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic
ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in
(undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and antiracist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they
seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not
respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as
long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect
example of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from
something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct,
etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally,
things will remain the same!” Let us take two predominant topics of today's American radical
academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly
crucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of
the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms
which repress "otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonial
exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is
rooted in our intolerance towards the "Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we
repressed in and of ourselves - the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed
into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true
corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to
buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included - up to a point), but conceptual: notions
of the "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the
Cultural Studies chic. My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics
silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure
tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on
the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the
(relatively) safe life environment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies.
Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World
sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a
kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the
necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!" Symptomatic is
here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will halfconfidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October - in this way, one can indulge in the
jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining
the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture
towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play
their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist
coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way
the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture
which obliges no one to anything determinate.
Impact – Bare Life
And, their depictions of suffering reduces human existence to bare life – that
necessitates the state of exception, when the sovereign suspends the law and
conrols life and death via necropolitics.
Duarte 5 (André, “Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the Arendtian critique of the
present,” April 2005, http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/69/102 //RJ)
These historic transformations have not only wrought more violence at the core of the political
but have also redefined its character by giving rise to biopolitical violence. As we have stated,
what characterizes biopolitics is the dynamic of both protecting and abandoning life through its
inclusion and exclusion from the political and economic community. Thus, in Arendtian terms, the aspect
that best describes biopolitical danger is the risk of converting the animal laborans into what
Agamben has described as the homo sacer, the human being that can be put to death by
anyone and whose death does not imply any crime whatsoever .16 In other terms, when politics is
conceived of as biopolitics, in the sense of increasing life and happiness of the national animal
laborans, the Nation-state becomes more and more violent and murderous. If we link Arendt's thesis from
The Human Condition to those defended in The Origins of Totalitarianism we understand that the Nazi and Stalinist
extermination camps were the most refined laboratories designed for the annihilation of the 'bare
life' of the animal laborans, although they were not the only instances devoted to human
slaughter. Hannah Arendt does not center her analysis only on the process of the extermination itself; she also discusses the
historical process under which large-scale exterminations were rendered possible: the emergence of the animal laborans out of
uprootedness and superfluousness of modern masses. She gives us a hint of this understanding when she affirms, in ”Ideology and
Terror: a new form of government”, a text written in 1953 and later added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, in
1958, that isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives
is destroyed. Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by
the world of things as well , if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary
'metabolism with nature' is of concern of no one. Isolation then become loneliness. Loneliness, the common ground for
terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its
executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have
been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and have
become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of
political institutions and social traditions in our own time . To be uprooted means to have no
place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to
belong to the world at all .17
The historical process of converting the homo faber, the prototype of the human being as the creator of durable objects and
institutions, into the animal laborans and, later on, into the homo sacer, can be retraced in Arendtian terms to the nineteenth century
wave of imperialist colonization. In this process, European countries imposed well-planned administrative
genocide in African territories as a means of domination and exploitation. As argued in the second volume
of The Origins of Totalitarianism, European colonialist countries combined racism and bureaucracy and
thus promoted the ”most terrible massacres in recent history, the Boers' extermination of the
Hottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in German Southeast Africa, the decimation of
the peaceful Congo population - from 20 to 40 million reduced to 8 million people; and finally,
perhaps the worst of all, it resulted in the triumphant introduction of such means of pacification
into ordinary, respectable foreign policies“18 . This vital equation between protecting and
destroying life was also at the core of the two World Wars, as well as in many other local
warlike conflicts, in the course of which whole populations have become stateless or
deprived of a free political space. It is more than symptomatic that, in spite of all their structural political differences,
the United States of Roosevelt, the Soviet Russia of Stalin, the Nazi Germany of Hitler and the
Fascist Italy of Mussolini were all conceived of as States devoted to the production and
reproduction of the needs of the national animal laborans. According to Agamben, since our contemporary
politics does not recognizes no other value than life, Nazism and Fascism, that is, regimes which have taken
bare life as its supreme political criterion, are bound to remain unfortunately
timely. 19 Finally, it is quite obvious that this same vital logic of enforcing and annihilating life still continues to be effective both
in post-industrial and in underdeveloped countries, since economic growth depends on the increase of
unemployment and on many forms of political exclusion.
When politics is reduced to the tasks of enforcing, preserving and promoting life and happiness of
the animal laborans it really does not matter if those objectives require increasingly violent acts,
both in national and international milieus. Therefore, it should not be surprising if today the legality or illegality of the
State's violent acts have become a secondary aspect in political discussions, since what really matters is to protect and stimulate the
life of the National (or, depending on the case, Western) animal laborans. In order to maintain the sacrosanct ideals of
increased mass production and increased mass consumerism developed countries can ignore the
finite character of natural reserves that can jeopardize the future of humanity and thus refuse to
sign International Protocols regarding the conservation of natural resources and diminishing the
emission of dangerous polluting gases. They can also launch preventive humanitarian attacks,
interventions or wars, disregard basic civil rights everywhere, create detention camps that
escape all legislation, like Guantanamo20, enforce the Airport jails where suspects are kept
incommunicable, or multiply refugee camps for those who no longer have a homeland or
have been evacuated from zones of conflict. Some countries have even imprisoned whole populations in ghettos
or built up concrete walls to physically isolate them from other communities and thus give rise to new forms of social, political and
economical apartheid. In short, there are countries that can allow themselves to impose the highest level of
violence possible against suspect individuals or political regimes - the so-called 'rogue-countries',
les …tats voyous21 - which, in one way or another, supposedly interfere with the security,
maintenance and growth of their own national life cycle. If, according to Arendt, the common world is the
institutional in-between space that should survive the natural cycle of life and death of human generations, what happens in modern
mass societies based on continuous laboring and consuming activities is the progressive abolition of the institutional artificial barriers
that separate and protect the human world from the forces of nature.22 This is what explains the contemporary
sensation of vertigo, instability and unhappiness, as well as the impossibility of combining
stability and novelty in order to think and act in a politically creative way.23 However, what should not be
missed in the Arendtian argument is that in the context of a “waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and
discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end”24, it becomes not only
possible, but also necessary, that people be taken as raw material ready to be consumed, discarded or annihilated. Therefore,
when Arendt announces the “grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe
from consumption and annihilation through consumption”25, we should also remember that human
annihilation, elevated to the status of a supreme and managed end in totalitarian regimes, still
continues to occur, although in different degrees and by different methods, in the contemporary dark holes of the oblivion such
as miserably poor Third World neighborhoods and Penitentiaries, underpaid and infra-human labor camps, not to mention slave labor
camps, always in the name of protecting the vital interests of the animal laborans.
To talk about the process of human consumption is not to employ a metaphoric language but to
properly describe the matter in question. Heidegger had already realized it when in the notes written during the late
thirties and later published under the title of Overcoming Metaphysics. In these notes he stated that the differences between
war and peace had already been blurred in a society in which “metaphysical man, the animal
rationale, gets fixed as the laboring animal”, so that “labor is now reaching the metaphysical rank of the unconditional
objectification of everything present”.26 Heidegger had also already understood that once the world becomes
fully determined by the cyclical 'circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption' it is at
the brink of becoming an 'unworld' (Unwelt), since “man, who no longer conceals his character of
being the most important raw material, is also drawn into the process. Man is 'the most important raw
material' because he remains the subject of all consumption”27. After the Second World War and the dissemination of detailed
information concerning the death factories Heidegger pushed his criticisms even further, since he then
acknowledged that even the understanding of man in terms of both subject and object of the
consumption process was inadequate to describe the whole process of planned mass annihilation .
He then came to understand this process of human mass dehumanization in terms of the
conversion of man into nothing more than an 'item of the reserve fund for the fabrication
of corpses' (Bestandsstücke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen), always ready to be manipulated,
managed and destined to technological production and destruction. What happened in the
'extermination camps' (Vernichtungsläger) was not that millions of people met death as their own most
fundamental possibility; much to the contrary, their essential possibility of dying was definitely
stolen from them and they merely 'passed away' in the process of being 'unconspicuously
liquidated' (unauffällig liquidiert).28 Men as an animal laborans (Arendt), as homo sacer (Agamben), as an item of the reserve
fund (Heidegger) are descriptions of the very same process of dehumanization by means of which humankind and human life are
reduced to the lowest status of living and unqualified raw material. As argued by Agamben, when it becomes impossible to
differentiate between bios and zoe, that is, when bare and unqualified life is transformed into a qualified “form of life”29, we can then
recognize the emergence of a biopolitical epoch in which States promote the animalization of man by policies that aim at both
protecting and destroying human life. Such considerations favor Agamben's thesis concerning the
widespread presence of the homo sacer in the contemporary world: “if it is true that un-sacrificial
life is the figure that our time proposes to us, although life has become eliminable in an
unprecedented measure, then the bare life of the homo sacer concerns us in a particular way. If
today there is not a single predetermined figure of the sacrificial man, perhaps that is because all
of us have virtually become homines sacri”.30
By discussing the changes in the way power was conceived of and exercised at the turn of the nineteen-century, Foucault had
firstly realized that when life turned out to be a constitutive political element, one that had to be
carefully managed, calculated, ruled and normalized by means of different “caring” policies,
giving rise to biopolitical measures, these policies soon became murderous ones. When the Sovereign's
actions became destined to promote and stimulate the growth of life beyond the task of merely imposing violent death, wars turned
into more and more bloodshed and extermination became a regular procedure both within and outside of the Nation. After the
constitution of the modern biopolitical paradigm, says Foucault, political conflicts aim at preserving and intensifying the life of the
winners, so that enemies cease to be political opponents and come to be seen as biological entities: it is not enough to defeat them,
they must be exterminated since they constitute risks to the health of the race, people or community. Foucault thus
characterizes the historical consequences that the emergence and consolidation of the modern
biopolitical paradigm implied at the turn to the nineteen-century: death that was based on the
right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to
ensure, maintain or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the
nineteenth-century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on
their own populations. But this formidable power of death Ö now presents itself as the
counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life that endeavors to administer,
optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on
behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital . It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the
technology of wars have caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the
decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end of point of this process: the
power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an
individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle - that one has
to be capable of killing in order to go on living - has become the principle that defines the
strategy of states. But the existence in case is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at
stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of
population..31
Thus, under the biopolitical paradigm “the
other's death is not only merely my life, in the sense of my
personal security; the other's death, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or of the
degenerated or abnormal), is what will render life in general saner; saner and more pure”32 In On
Violence, Arendt argued a similar thesis concerning the violent character of racist or naturalist conceptions of politics. According to
Arendt, “nothing could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of organic thought in political matters”, in which power and
violence are interpreted in terms of biological metaphors that can only induce and produce more violence, especially where racial
matters are involved. Racism as an ideological system of thought is inherently violent and murderous
because it attacks natural organic data that, as such, cannot be changed by any power or
persuasion, so that all that can be done when conflicts become radicalized is to “exterminate” the
other.33 Biopolitical violence, the specific character of different violent phenomena underlying
both totalitarianism and the quasi-totalitarian elements of modern mass democracies, is the tragic
inheritance sustained by all kinds of naturalized conceptions of the political. According to her views, all
forms of naturalizing the political harm the egalitarian political artificiality without which no defense and 'validation of human
freedom and dignity' are possible. It was the analysis of the terrible experience of both political and
economic refugees, of those interned in different kinds of concentration camps, of those left with
no home and all those who have lost their own place in the world, that showed her that nature and, of course, human nature - cannot ground and secure any right or any democratic politics. She
herself suffered the consequences of being left with no homeland between 1933 and 1951. This denial of any rights
whatsoever showed her the paradox that the naturalistic understanding and foundation of the
Rights of Man implied, since once those rights ceased to be recognized and enforced by a
political community, their ”unalienable” character simply vanished, living unprotected exactly
those very human beings that mostly needed them: “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be
unenforceable whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of a sovereign state”.34
The core of her argument is that the loss of the Rights of Man did not per se deprive a human
being of his/her life, liberty, property, equality before the law, freedom of expression or the
pursuit of happiness; the real 'calamity' was that people in these circumstances “no longer belong
to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them”35.
In other words, nationalistic and racialized biopolitics has produced a huge mass of people that
have no access to what Arendt has called as the ”right to have rights” insofar as they have been
stripped of their “right to belong to some kind of organized community”: “Man, it turns out, can lose all socalled Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from
humanity”36. The “abstract nakedness” of merely being a human being is not a trustful substitute for the artificial character of all the
pacts freely consented to by active citizens. By analyzing the dynamic of the extermination camps, Arendt understood that “humanity”
goes far beyond the notion of the human being a mere natural living being with its minimum natural denominator: “human beings can
be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man's 'nature' is only 'human' insofar as it opens up to man the
possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man”37. In other words, humanity, when it is politically understood,
does not reside in the natural fact of being alive, since human beings depend on artificial legal and political institutions to protect
them. The Arendtian rejection of understanding the human being as a living being in the singular,
as well as her postulation of human plurality as the condition of all innovative politics depend on
her thesis that politics has to do with the formation of a common world in the course of people's
acting and exchanging opinions. Politics depends on the human capacities to agree and disagree, so that everything that is
mysteriously given to us by nature becomes politically irrelevant. For Arendt, equality is not a natural gift, but a political construction
oriented by the “principle of justice”. In other words, political equality is the result of agreements through which people decide to
grant themselves equal rights, since the political sphere is based on the assumption that equality can be forged by those who act and
exchange opinions among themselves and thus change the world in which they live in.38 According to Arendt, there can be no
democratic politics worthy of the name unless everyone, regardless of their nationality, is included in the political and economic
community of a definite State intending to recognize and protect them as their citizens; otherwise, no human being can discover
his/her own place in the world. Agamben's thesis goes even further than Arendt's in detecting the perplexities inherent to the
traditional foundation of the Rights of Man. By following up and radicalizing Arendt's reflections, he discovers in the text of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man a fundamental piece of modern biopolitics since these rights constitute the very inscription of naked
life into the political-juridical order. According to Agamben, in the Declarations of the Rights of Man of 1789
natural bare life is both the foundational source and the carrier of the rights of man, since the
man's bare life - or, more precisely, the very fact of being born in a certain territory - is the element that
effects the transition from the Ancient regime's principle of divine sovereignty to modern sovereignty concentrated in the NationState:
It is not possible to understand the development as well as the national and biopolitical 'vocation'
of the National-State in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if one forgets that in its own basis
we find out not man as the free and conscious subject but, mostly, man's bare life, the mere fact
of being born, which, in the transition from the ancient subject to the citizen, was invested as such
as the principle of sovereignty.39
To conclude this text, I would like to emphasize that Arendt's main reflections concerning totalitarianism still remain relevant
nowadays, especially when directed towards the feebleness of actually existing democracies. The core of Arendt's diagnosis of the
present is that whenever politics has mostly to do with the maintenance and increase of the vital metabolism of affluent Nation-states,
it will be indispensable to reduce the animal laborans to the even more degrading status of the
homo sacer, of bare and unprotected life that can be delivered to oblivion and to death . Our
actual understanding of politics as the administrative promotion of abundance and the
happiness of the human being as an animal laborans has as its correlates economic and
political exclusion, prejudices, violence and genocides against the naked life of the homo
sacer . I also believe that Arendt can shed light on our current dilemmas, providing us theoretical elements for a critical diagnosis of
the present as well as for the opening of new possibilities for collective action in the world. Arendt was a master of chiaroscuro
political thinking in the sense that she was never blind to the contrasts between the open possibilities of radically renovating the
political and the strict chains of a logic that binds violence and political exclusion under a biopolitical paradigm. If we still want
to remain with Arendt, then we have to attentively think and consciously seek to participate in
new spaces and new forms of life devoted to political association, action and discussion,
wherever and whenever they seem to subvert the tediously multiplication of the same in its many
different everyday manifestations. Arendt did not want to propose any political utopia but nor was she convinced that our
political dilemmas had no other possible outcome, as if history had come to a tragic end. Neither a pessimist nor an optimist, she only
wanted to understand the world in which she lived in and to stimulate us to continue thinking and acting in the present. At least, if a
radically new political alternative can still come to be in our world, the responsibility for it will
always be ours. Therefore, if we wish to remain faithful to the spirit of Arendt's political thinking,
then we should think and act politically without constraining our thinking and acting to any
previously defined understanding of what politics 'is' or 'should' be. In other words, the political challenge of
the present is to multiply the forms, possibilities and spaces in which we can perform our political actions. These can be strategic
actions destined to enforce political agendas favored by political parties concerned with social justice. They can also be
discrete, subversive actions favored by small groups at the margins of the bureaucratized party
machines that promote political intervention free of teleological or strategic intents, since their
goal is to sustain an intense and radical politicization of existence. Finally, there are also actions in
which ethical openness towards otherness becomes fully political: small and rather inconspicuous
actions of acknowledging, welcoming, and extending hospitality and solidarity towards others.
K Prior
Recognizing our own culpability for violence is a prerequisite to addressing
the aff’s impacts.
Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of
Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, “
Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white”,
Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)
Reappraisal of the role of the political subject of suffering opens the way to a new approach to the
vicious circle of white responsibility: black suffering. Pace Pearson, it is not white guilt that
constitutes black victimhood. Indigenous people suffer as a result of historical and social
conditions, yet they are represented as suffering in a biopolitical space outside the norms of the
Australian polity and its legal framework. Recognising white responsibility for colonial and
postcolonial injustices, right up to the amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act proposed at
the end of 2009, does not deprive Aboriginal people of their responsibility, social cohesion or
will. That is perpetrated by precisely those laws that treat the Indigenous population as
irresponsible, as existing in a lawless state of suffering and victimhood.
Let us be more explicit about the sources of Indigenous désaffiliation, the short French term that
denotes the weakening of intersubjective supports. This was caused by an active process of
colonisation and detachment of people from their land, their laws and their families and
communities. Recognition of these causes and conditions does not lead inevitably to a paralysis
of guilt, nor need it lead to paternalistic policies that seek to oversee the demise of the race or to
supervise the parenting practices of entire communities (under white guidance). This recognition
indicates priorities for both Indigenous and settler communities. Overcoming alienation and
reestablishing intersubjective supports cannot be imposed on or offered to a community from
outside. It must be an autonomous and continuing organising process. Members of the settler
society must remember what it is they are sorry for, and to have sufficient understanding of their
wrongs and the damage caused to ensure that they are not repeated. This will include reminding
the “parliaments of the nation” (Rudd, 2008: 170) who, in the present situation, seem so prone
to ethical amnesia. Indigenous communities need the freedom to fight alienation and the
resources to support themselves and each other.
The discourse of suffering does not only offer insights into the constitution of the political subject
who suffers. As the Australian case indicates, the “other” of the sufferers is likewise
constituted by their position in relation to the sufferers, including their responsibility for the
suffering, or the advantages they have gained from dispossession. The significance of the word
“sorry” was characteristic of the construction of complementary identities of a
community of sufferers and of a responsible collective. By adopting the position that the
settler community as a whole should apologise to the Indigenous community, the former
acknowledged their part in the destructive impact on Indigenous societies.
Since the major impact of the policies of child removal had been on the intersubjective ties
between Indigenous people, the apology was most relevant to the type of suffering that Renault
calls désaffiliation. The suffering caused by dispossession and domination was not explicitly
addressed. While it may have been a sub-text of the demand for an apology, questions of material
loss and benefit were always carefully shielded from the discourse. It has already been mentioned
that the Prime Minister expressly avoided any commitment to reparations, and the entire debate
was about stolen children, not stolen land. The question of land is more sensitive for white
society, since any serious effort to redress that injustice may affect their property. The question of
land rights, through court cases, political conflicts and legislation, notably during the 1990s, is
another major chapter in the history of Australia (Yunupingu, 1997; Motha, 1998; McNamara and
Grattan 1999). While it goes to the heart of dispossession, it cannot be retold here.
The domination suffered by Indigenous people is effected in large part by the operation of law,
and the law itself is the foundation of the nation’s legitimacy. That legitimacy continues to be
disputed, despite the universal claims of the Australian common law, since the prior Aboriginal
laws were never recognised. This is the suffering that never can be recognised within the
scope of a legal system obsessed with its self- referential legitimacy (Veitch, 2007: 112-4).
The law making practices of “the parliaments of the nation” continue to draw on a rhetoric of
suffering and responsibility while reinforcing their legitimacy through incessant legislating and
story telling. At the same time that those laws and stories purport to represent the original
occupants of the territory, they work to legitimate their own domination over them. This is
where we find the wreckage of law as a means to redress suffering or to enforce responsibility.
The laws of Australia continue to exist in the shadows of legitimacy, with the Aboriginal laws of
the land lying beneath like an unstable geological layer, the shifting sands beneath a modern
polity. As the narratives of suffering and identity, of “White Australia” and its “Black History
” proliferate, the communities are themselves constituted by discourses of suffering and
responsibility. These can contribute to the developing self- awareness of Australian society as
long as they can be recognised as competing legitimacy stories, while the underlying conditions
of dispossession, domination and the destruction of intersubjective supports are still visible,
through Indigenous stories,10 under the elaborately coded and codified mantle that we keep
weaving. It is only through conscientious recognition of our own responsibility that we may
develop as political subjects and recognise others in all their own subjectivity.
AT – Permutation
The permutation is incoherent –
A. Framework means perms aren’t responsive – this is a disad to their
method – our links prove that the 1AC’s depictions of suffering are
problematic and reinscribe violence.
B. They can’t sever their representations – (1) severance makes the aff a
moving target which allows them to shift out of the negatives’ best offense –
undermines competitive equity. (2) That’s another link – severance is the
logic which justifies bailing out on helping the subaltern after narratives of
suffering are presented.
C. Their attempts to incorporate criticims of their ideology while endorsing
the ethics of the 1ac is emblematic of liberal violence and prevents alternative
political discussions and fails to question dominant ideologies. Only a total
rejection of the 1ac’s representations creates sites of resistance.
Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophy
at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies, “Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist
Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics,” Palgrave Macmillion)
The dizzying back and forth between professed Kantians and Humeans blurs the fact that,
regardless of whether morality is anchored interior to the acting subject or determined by the
effects of the actions of the subject as they play out in the outside world, the unit of analysis is
quite the same. Thus, when touchy liberals desire better attention to the fact of human pain
and suffering, they manage to talk about cruelty where, ironically, cruel actions are
derivatives of cruel agents and the victim’s suffering is just fallout.
Besides this shared inability to dispel the primacy of the agent and the perpetrator in favor of the
sufferer of pain, the rift between Kant and Hume is deceptive in another way. In terms of
historical evolution, the current status of cruelty betrays a fetish of the active agent. It is no
accident that the terms “good” and “evil” require a focus on cruelty and its infliction,
leaving untouched the suffering of cruelty. Moral psychology ends up being the psychology of
cruelty, which is a moral question, and hence of those who cause it. In the same frame, suffering
is never a moral, let alone political or legal, question unless a moral agent with a conscience has
caused it. All sufferers automatically become victims in the eyes of politics and law when “
recognized.” Suffering is thus relevant as a political question only after it is a moral one,
when it is embodied and located in a certain way, when it surpasses arbitrary thresholds.
It is one thing to claim that liberalism, whether empiricist or idealist, cannot overcome its subjectcenteredness even in its moments of empathy for the “victim.” It is another to understand the
stubborn constitution of the agent at the helm of liberal justice and ask what makes it so incurable
and headstrong and what the temperament of this stubbornness might be: is it pathetic, squishy,
helplessly compas- sionate, humble, philanthropic, imperialist, venomous, neurotic, all of the
above, or none of these? Not figuring out this pathos is bound to reduce all interaction with liberal
assertions to one or another act of editing or “correcting” them. Inadvertently, all protests to
liberalism tread a limited, predictable path and will be, at some point, incorporated within it.
Liberalism’s singular gall and violence is accessed every time a resistance to it is
accommodated by liberalism. Think, for instance, not only of how often liberals affirm their
clumsiness and mediocrity in speaking for the other’s suffering but also of how quickly its
antagonists—purveyors of many a righteous anti-representational politics—“make space” for
the voice of others without challenging the (liberal, colonizing) structures that determine and
distribute the suffering and speaking self, and the suffering and speaking other, to begin with.
This protest leaves unquestioned what it means to speak for one’s own, or others’,
suffering and whether there are other ways of speaking suffering that problematize these as
the only options.
Link – Autobiography
Presentations of autobiography get subsumed within dominant culture and
fail to make broader cultural or political change; it innately priveleges the
literate and articulate while commodifying their narrative and fails to give
the majority of outsiders any agency.
Coughlin 95 (Anne, Associate Professor of Law at the Vanderbilt Law School, “Regulating
the Self: Autobiographical Performances in Outsider Scholarship”, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by strangers,
colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection on her relationship
with her readers and the material benefits that her autobiographical performances have earned for
her. Perhaps William should be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for
behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this literary faux pas - the
incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits their
publications secured her – we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use of
autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's characterization of
autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that autobiography is a lucrative commodity. In our
culture, members of the reading public avidly consume personal stories, which surely explains
why first-rate law journals and academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives.
No matter how unruly the self that it records, an autobiographical performance transforms that
self into a form of "property in a moneyed economy" and into a valuable intellectual asset in an
academy that requires its members to publish. Accordingly, we must be skeptical of the assertion
that the outsiders’ splendid publication record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of their
endeavor.
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author’s life, with the resulting
commercial success and academic renown. As one critic of autobiography puts it, “failures do
not get published.” While writing a successful autobiography may be momentous for the
individual author, this success has a limited impact on culture. Indeed, the transformation of
outsider authors into “success stories” subverts outsiders’ radical intentions by
constituting them as exemplary participants within contemporary culture, willing to
market even themselves to literary and academic consumers. What good does this
transformation do for outsiders who are less fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law
professors? Although they style themselves cultural critics, the storytellers do not reflect on the
meaning of their own commercial success, nor ponder its entanglement with the cultural values
they claim to resist. Rather, for the most part, they seem content simply to take advantage of the
peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, “to have your dissent
and make it too.”
Link – Empathic Identification
The affirmative’s use of empathic identification commodifies the suffering
of the other – the ravaged subject is commodified to create an economy of
pleasure and pain, a frame of reference upon which dominant ideologies
sustain themselves.
Berlant 99 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor in the Department of English in the
University of Chicago, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics,” in Cultural
Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law ed., Sarat Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, Pg. 49 – 54)
Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace in which the United States
seeks desperately to compete “competitively,” as the euphemism goes, signifying a race that will be won by the
nation whose labor conditions are most optimal for profit. In the United States the media of the political public
sphere regularly register new scandals of the proliferating sweatshop networks “at home” and
“abroad,” which has to be a good thing, because it produces feeling and with it something at
least akin to consciousnessi that can lead to action.
Yet, even as the image of the traumatized worker proliferates, even as evidence of exploitation is
found under every rock or commodity, it competes with a normative/utopian image of the U.S.
citizen who remains unmarked, framed, and protected by the private trajectory of his life project,
which is sanctified at the juncture where the unconscious meets history: the American Dream. 4 In
that story one's identity is not borne of suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the U.S. worker is lucky enough to live at an
economic moment that sustains the Dream, he gets to appear at his least national when he is working and at his most national at
leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus manliness (e.g., via sports). In the American
dreamscape his identity is private property, a zone in which structural obstacles and cultural
differences fade into an ether of prolonged, deferred, and individuating enjoyment that he has
earned and that the nation has helped him to earn. Meanwhile, exploitation only appears as a
scandalous nugget in the sieve of memory when it can be condensed into an exotic thing of
momentary fascination, a squalor of the bottom too horrible to be read in its own actual banality.
The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not generally induce more
than mourning on the part of the state and the public culture to whose feeling-based opinions the
state is said to respond. Mourning is what happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no longer living (to you).
Mourning is an experience of irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am living, he is dead, I am
mourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime, experience of emancipation: mourning supplies the subject the
definitional perfection of a being no longer in flux. It takes place over a distance: even if the
object who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness is neither dead nor at any great
distance from where you are . 5 In other words, mourning can also be an act of aggression, of social
deathmaking: it can perform the evacuation of significance from actually-existing subjects. Even
when liberals do it, one might say, "others" are ghosted for a good cause. 6 The sorrow songs of scandal
that sing of the exploitation that is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks away) are in this sense
aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military march of capitalist triumphalism (The TransNationale) can be heard. Its lyric, currently crooned by every organ of record in the United States, is about necessity. It exhorts
citizens to understand that the "bottom line"7 of national life is neither utopia nor freedom but
survival, which can only be achieved by a citizenry that eats its anger, makes no unreasonable
claims on resources or control over value, and uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimate
spheres while scrapping a life together flexibly in response to the market world's caprice. 8
In this particular moment of expanding class unconsciousness that looks like consciousness
emerges a peculiar, though not unprecedented, hero: the exploited child. If a worker can be
infantilized, pictured as young, as small, as feminine or feminized, as starving, as bleeding and
diseased, and as a (virtual) slave, the righteous indignation around procuring his survival
resounds everywhere. The child must not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded image speaks a
truth that subordinates narrative: he has not "freely" chosen his exploitation; the optimism and
play that are putatively the right of childhood have been stolen from him. Yet only "voluntary"
steps are ever taken to try to control this visible sign of what is ordinary and systemic amid
the chaos of capitalism, in order to make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable .
Privatize the atrocity, delete the visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the child to the family,
replace the children with adults who can look dignified while being paid virtually the same
revolting wage. The problem that organizes so much feeling then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable pressure of
feeling dissipates, like so much gas. Meanwhile, the pressure of feeling the shock of being uncomfortably
political produces a cry for a double therapy-to the victim and the viewer. But before "we" appear too
complacently different from the privileged citizens who desire to caption the mute image of exotic suffering with an aversively
fascinated mourning (a desire for the image to be dead, a ghost), we must note that this feeling culture crosses over into
other domains, the domains of what we call identity politics, where the wronged take up voice
and agency to produce transformative testimony, which depends on an analogous conviction about the self-evidence
and therefore the objectivity of painful feeling. The central concern of this essay is to address the place of painful feeling in the
making of political worlds. In particular, I mean to challenge a powerful popular belief in the positive workings of something I call
national sentimentality, a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of social
difference through channels of affective identification and empathy. Sentimental politics
generally promotes and maintains the hegemony of the national identity form, no mean feat
in the face of continued widespread intercultural antagonism and economic cleavage . But
national sentimentality is more than a current of feeling that circulates in a political field: the
phrase describes a longstanding contest between two models of u.S. citizenship. In one, the classic
model, each citizen's value is secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of national identity provides
juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific about them. In the second model, which was initially
organized around labor, feminist, and antiracist struggles of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is
imagined as the index of collective life. This nation is peopled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whose
structural exclusion from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state's claim of
legitimacy and virtue to an acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually
impossible, at certain moments of political intensity. Sentimentality has long been the means by
which mass subaltern pain is advanced, in the dominant public sphere, as the true core of national
collectivity. It operates when the pain of intimate others burns into the conscience of
classically privileged national subjects, such that they feel the pain of flawed or denied
citizenship as their pain . Theoretically, to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever is
necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian odor. Identification with pain, a
universal true feeling, then leads to structural social change. In return, subalterns scarred by the pain of failed
democracy will reauthorize universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, which
involves believing in a redemptive notion of law as the guardian of public good. The object of the nation
and the law in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom. Yet, since
these very sources of protection-the state, the law, patriotic ideology-have traditionally buttressed
traditional matrices of cultural hierarchy, and since their historic job has been to protect universal
subject/citizens from feeling their cultural and corporeal specificity as a political vulnerability,
the imagined capacity of these institutions to assimilate to the affective tactics of subaltern
counterpolitics suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these tactics. For one thing, it may be
that the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of pain implicitly mischaracterizes what a
person is as what a person becomes in the experience of social negation; this model also
falsely promises a sharp picture of structural violence's source and scope, in turn
promoting a dubious optimism that law and other visible sources of inequality, for example,
can provide the best remedies for their own taxonomizing harms. It is also possible that
counterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural injustice actually sustain the
utopian image of a homogeneous national metaculture, which can look like a healed or
healthy body in contrast to the scarred and exhausted ones . Finally, it might be that the tactical use of
trauma to describe the effects of social inequality so overidentifies the eradication of pain with
the achievement of justice that it enables various confusions: for instance, the equation of pleasure
with freedom or the sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, amount to substantial
social change. Sentimental politics makes these confusions credible and these violences
bearable, as its cultural power confirms the centrality of interpersonal identification and
empathy to the vitality and viability of collective life. This gives citizens something to do in
response to overwhelming structural violence . Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called
"national culture," these important transpersonal linkages and intimacies all too frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethically
uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field.9
Link – Empowerment
Discourse of “empowerment” reinforce the legitimacy of antidemocratic
politics and reinscribe the domination of the sovereign; rather, self-alienation
allows for a refusal to engage in colonial institutions – that creates true
political agency while denying passivity.
Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of
Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, “
Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white”,
Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)
Domination, disadvantage and dispossession may be manifested or experienced as victimhood.
Though it is not constituted by or constitutive of white guilt, there are mutual relationships
between the political subjectivities of the dominated and the dominating, the dispossessed and the
possessor. Australian debates over responsibility, redistribution policies, collective identity and
race relations now bring intellectuals, activists, political parties and social movements together
across racial lines to contest the fundamental terms in which the communities understand
themselves and each other. These are some of the practices, names and narratives (Gatti, 2010)
that constitute identities in a single territory that was colonised but never ceded by the first
nations. This analysis recognises these constitutive foundations of identity formation, taking
account of political, economic and historical conditions and the stories that are told about them. It
requires understanding white responsibility for specific injustices, without automatically casting
those who have suffered from them as passive victims. The narratives of nation can only be
effectively told if they are developed as a dialogue.
Passivity arises when the discourse of suffering imagines a “victim” of suffering, posed against
an active dominant group that represents those sufferers, as discussed in the previous section.
Wendy Brown criticises movements that simply
perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of the activity
through which the suffering is produced and without addressing the subject constitution that
domination effects, that is, the constitution of the social categories, ‘workers’, ‘blacks’, ‘
women’, [...] (Brown, 1995: 7)
The problem, then, is to recognise and allocate responsibility for suffering under conditions that
allow those who suffer to constitute and imagine themselves as political subjects. It is only in this
way that we can avoid their simplistic representation as biopolitical or even biological objects.
Renault (2008: 372) calls attention to a critique that began with Gramsci as an analysis of the
barriers to the development of the worker as a revolutionary subject. The critique is continued by
those contemporary figures who “explicitly pose the question of political subjectivity as a
problem”, and Renault names Balibar, Butler, Žižek inter alia.
Renault points out that the three forms of suffering, domination, deprivation and désaffiliation,
have been characterised by specific political movements, through which participants have
constituted themselves as political subjects in various ways according to their times and
circumstances. While the industrial proletariat’s struggles against domination were seen as a
model of political resistance from the nineteenth into the mid twentieth century, the struggles of
peasants and other extremely poor people against deprivation were less developed, or at least less
fully theorised and constructed by Marxist theory. Renault (2008: 33) refers to the more recent
movements of Indigenous and landless interests (specifically in Bolivia and Brazil) as models that
have become better recognised for their struggles against dispossession.
Recognition that the constitution of subjectivity is one of the key obstacles to an effective
response to suffering refocuses attention on désaffiliation. If suffering is in large part a problem
of powerlessness and the social construction of victimhood, then clearly désaffiliation is a key
category of analysis. So, if resistance is the active response to domination, and if appropriation is
the active response to deprivation, how can one respond actively to désaffiliation?
Das’s analysis of Bhopal indicated that the reduction of those who suffer to the status of passive
and silent victims is a process of disempowerment. The natural response, then, would be to call
for their empowerment. Yet we must be careful with what we mean by this “fashionable word”
(Burgi, 2009: 26). Brown contrasts “empowerment”, as a means of “generating one's
capacities... without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power”, to “resistance
[which] implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime
” (1995: 22). Yet even though the term opens up more possibilities than the reactive notion of
resistance, and “articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action”, there are dangers in
the way it imagines subjectivity. “Indeed, the possibility that one can ‘feel empowered’
without being so forms an important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of
liberalism.” (Brown, 1995: 23)
If empowerment is to enable the engagement of active political subjects with the objective
social conditions of their suffering, then we need to reengage with the concept of alienation.
Social suffering, for Renault (2008: 387), is characterised by structures that block the satisfaction
of needs, both organic (psychic and corporeal) and intersubjective needs. The resulting selfalienation requires a realisation of self by engaging with those conditions, or as Brown would put
it, “organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced” (1995: 7).
Link – Multiculturalism
The affirmative’s focus on cultural tolerance ignores the exploitative social
structures that creates difference in the first place; their absolute focus on
inclusion necessarily excludes the Other from participating in politics.
Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry – Autumn 2007, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)
Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of
inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation,
political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist's
basic ideological operation: the "culturalization of politics" - political differences, differences
conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into
"cultural" differences, different "ways of life," which are something given, something that cannot
be overcome, but merely "tolerated." To this, of course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms:
from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The cause of this culturalization is
the retreat, failure, of direct political solutions (Welfare State, socialist projects, etc.).
Tolerance is their post-political ersatz:
The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the promulgation of tolerance
today is part of a more general depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from political
life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of
politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a
domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation. [1]
Perhaps, nothing expresses better the inconsistency of the post-political liberal project than its
implicit paradoxical identification of culture and nature, the two traditional opposites: culture
itself is naturalized, posited as something given. (The idea of culture as "second nature" is, of
course, an old one.) It was, of course, Samuel Huntington who proposed the most successful
formula of this "culturalization of politics" by locating the main source of today's conflicts into
the "clash of civilizations," what one is tempted to call the Huntington's disease of our time - as
he put it, after the end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of ideology" has been replaced by
the "velvet curtain of culture. [2] Huntington's dark vision of the "clash of civilizations" may
appear to be the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the End of History in the
guise of a world-wide liberal democracy: what can be more different from Fukuyama's pseudoHegelian idea of the "end of history" (the final Formula of the best possible social order was
found in capitalist liberal democracy, there is now no space for further conceptual progress, there
are just empirical obstacles to be overcome), [3] than Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as the
main political struggle in the XXIst century? The "clash of civilizations" IS politics at the "end of
history."
Link – Racial Identity
The presentation of racial identity into debate is a way for the community to
assuage it’s guilt for being racist – narratives of non-whiteness are exploited
and commodified to legitimize the white body – you have an obligation to
reject the commodification of racial identity.
Leong 12 (Nancy, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, “
Racial Capitalism”, Harvard Law Review, University of Texas)
A white person or institution who engages in an exchange with a non-white person, therefore,
increases its status as a non- racist and cross-culturally competent actor by signaling those
attributes through affiliation. Because we cannot, generally, probe the inner cognitive processes
of a white individual for racist ideation or infiltrate the internal workplace culture of an institution
to detect racist norms, a white person’s affiliation with a non-white individual serves as a proxy
for making independent judgments along those axes.162 Such affiliation signals to outsiders that
the white person or institution is non-racist because, presumably, if they were racist, they would
not want to participate in the exchange with the non-white person, and the non-white person
would not agree to participate in the exchange with them. Such status-seeking explains the
intensity of the drive to acquire the capital associated with non-whiteness through affiliation. It
also explains why non-whiteness is particularly desirable to market participants seeking
either to distinguish themselves favorably from other participants or simply to avoid
distinguishing themselves unfavorably.
Real world examples reveal the status associated with affiliation with non-white people. First,
closeness with non-white people allows whites to deflect charges of racism. As the popular
satirical blog Stuff White People Like163 puts it, “Obviously, whites want black friends so as
not to appear racist.”164 One commentator has referred to this as the “some of my best friends
” defense - the idea is that, if one has close non-white friends (or friends of other outsider
groups) one cannot also be racist (or prejudiced against those groups). Sociologist Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva identified this defense as a common theme in a series of interviews with white
people about race relations, finding that, while whites harbor prejudice and resentment, a
common tactic was to shelter these views behind claims of having non-white friends and
associates.166 Such capitalization of non-whiteness is valuable given the manifest undesirability
of the “racist” label, which commentators have dubbed the only true equivalent to a racial
epithet for white people.167
The presentation of non-whiteness creates a system of “racial capital” – by
showcasing the non-white body, whiteness reaffirms its supremacy and
solidifies its social power.
Leong 12 (Nancy, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, “
Racial Capitalism”, Harvard Law Review, University of Texas)
Yet showcasing a few select non-white employees does not actually require changing a
workplace culture in which most non- white individuals feel subtly unwelcome.200 Indeed,
employers may actually preserve existing racial hierarchies by hiring and showcasing nonwhite employees. christi cunningham argues that the practice of “tokenism . . . leverages
undervalued identities” and “preserves commodified values of race by parading an exception.
”201 By showcasing non-white employees in prominent positions, employers signal that
unsuccessful non-white employees are responsible for their own failures, while at the same time
maintaining a system in which white employees are in fact preferred.202
Whether overtly furthering a company’s reputation or more covertly maintaining the racial
status quo, showcasing does not actually require numerical diversity within a company’s ranks
to match the appearance of diversity in its leadership. But if an employer does acquire a
numerically diverse workforce, that non- white presence has additional instrumental value.
First, numerical diversity yields racial capital by establishing and maintaining the company’s
good reputation. Wilkins explains that diversity statistics are used to “convey[] a reassuring
message to law schools and the public at large that slow but nevertheless significant progress is
being made on overcoming the legacy of [previous] racist and exclusionary practices.”203
Employers often features diversity statistics on their websites and in promotional materials as a
way of communicating that information as widely as possible.
Moreover, the presence of non-white employees throughout an employer’s workforce adds
racial capital by providing a statistical defense against current litigation or preempting future
litigation. For example, Wal-Mart recently undertook a well- publicized initiative to diversify its
own ranks and to insist on diversity in its business partners.204 Wal-Mart has achieved some
striking numerical results. It wrote to each of its top one hundred law firms, stating that to retain
Wal-Mart as a client that firm had to “demonstrate a meaningful interest in the importance of
diversity”; it also required each firm to submit a slate of candidates to serve as the “
relationship attorney” with Wal-Mart, with at least one female and one person of color on the
slate.205 The initiative resulted in changing forty relationship attorneys and shifting $60 million
worth of Wal-Mart’s legal work to management by female or non-white attorneys.206
These diversity measures have accompanied—and, we might infer, are designed to respond to—a
wave of employment discrimination allegations against Wal-Mart. The company recently
succeeded in securing dismissal of a class action brought by more than 1.5 million women
alleging sex discrimination in hiring and promotion.207 Several of the women who served as lead
plaintiffs in Wal-Mart v. Dukes testified to racial as well as gender discrimination in their
depositions.208 Wal-Mart also faced a smaller class-action lawsuit initiated by two black truck
drivers, alleging race discrimination in hiring.209 And the NAACP’s 2005 Industry Survey
gave Wal-Mart a grade of C minus “within the areas of employment, vendor development,
advertising/marketing, charitable giving and investing/franchising.”210
Regardless whether Wal-Mart committed race discrimination within the meaning of the law, its
diversity initiatives have succeeded in protecting the company’s image. The company has
received awards and considerable media praise for its efforts.211 And by affiliating itself
with non-white employees and racially diverse business partners, Wal-Mart also insulates itself
from future allegations of race discrimination. Racial capitalism yields valuable rewards: WalMart’s diversity initiative may ultimately save the company billions of dollars in adverse
jury verdicts or litigation settlements.
These examples illustrate the way that racial capitalism occurs within institutions. The
phenomenon is so common as to be unremarkable. But in the following Part, I will demonstrate
that racial capitalism has profoundly negative consequences for society
Link – Solidarity
Their position of charity and false solidarity from above are the voyeuristic
investments in suffering that re-entrench existing power structures and make
true solidarity impossible.
El Kilombo Intergalactico 7 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos, Beyond Resistance: Everything, p. 1-2)
In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friend—the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacio- nal (Zapatista Army of
National Liberation, EZLN)—was already taking enormous strides to move toward a politics adequate to our time, and that it was
thus necessary to attempt an evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real ‘
event’ of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the Zapatista uprising had blown into
the US political scene since 1994, we began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo had
been quickly con- tained through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable narrative:
Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent “third world” movements that
demanded and deserved solidarity from leftists in the “global north.” From our position as
an organization composed in large part by people of color in the United States, we viewed this
focus on “solidarity” as the foreign policy equivalent of “white guilt,” quite distinct from
any authentic impulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social change. The
notion of “solidarity” that still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually
served an intensely conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of
the latest rebellion in the “darker nations” while carefully maintaining political action at
a distance from our own daily lives, thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that
more closely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant or active
agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipi- ent to a mere object (of our pity
and mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects and
political action never meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility . In
other words, this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the
narrative that power tells us about itself: that those who could make change don’t need it and that those who need
change can’t make it. To the extent that human solidarity has a future, this logic and practice do not!
For us,
Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it has provided us with the
elements to shatter this tired schema. It has inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of always
viewing our- selves as dignified political subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of The
Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas
have made it even clearer that we must
move beyond appeals to this stunted form of solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficult
challenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we must become “companer@s” (neither
followers nor leaders) in a truly global struggle to change the world. As a direct response to this call, this analysis is
our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of a manual for contemporary political action that eventually must
be written by us all.
Solidarity is the manifestation of the illusion of compassion – the
subaltern becomes the point of reference upon which Western
society exemplifies wealth, satisfaction, and happiness by
convincing the oppressed of its suffering.
Baudrillard 96 (Jean, “The Perfect Crime”, 1996, p. 133 – 137)
Our reality: that is the problem. We have only one, and it has to be saved. `We have to
do something. We can't do nothing.' But doing something solely because you can't not
do something has never constituted a principle of action or freedom. Just a form of
absolution from one's own impotence and compassion for one's own fate.
The people of Sarajevo do not have to face this question. Where they are, there is an
absolute need to do what they do, to do what has to be done. Without illusion as to ends
and without compassion towards themselves. That is what being real means, being in
the real. And this is not at all the `objective' reality of their misfortune, that reality which
`ought not to exist' and for which we feel pity, but the reality which exists as it is -- the
reality of an action and a destiny.
This is why they are alive, and we are the ones who are dead. This is why, in our own
eyes, we have first and foremost to save the reality of the war and impose that -compassionate -- reality on those who are suffering from it but who, at the very heart of
war and distress, do not really believe in it. To judge by their own statements, the
Bosnians do not really believe in the distress which surrounds them. In the end, they find
the whole unreal situation senseless, unintelligible. It is a hell, but an almost hyperreal
hell, made the more hyperreal by media and humanitarian harassment, since that makes
the attitude of the whole world towards them all the more incomprehensible. Thus, they
live in a kind of spectrality of war -- and it is a good thing they do, or they could never
bear it.
But we know better than they do what reality is, because we have chosen them to
embody it. Or simply because it is what we -- and the whole of the West -- most lack. We
have to go and retrieve a reality for ourselves where the bleeding is. All these `corridors'
we open up to send them our supplies and our `culture' are, in reality, corridors of
distress through which we import their force and the energy of their misfortune. Unequal
exchange once again. Whereas they find a kind of additional strength in the thorough
stripping-away of the illusions of reality and of our political principles -- the strength to
survive what has no meaning -- we go to convince them of the `reality' of their
suffering -- by culturalizing it, of course, by theatricalizing it so that it can serve as a
point of reference in the theatre of Western values, one of which is solidarity.
This all exemplifies a situation which has now become general, in which inoffensive and
impotent intellectuals exchange their woes for those of the wretched, each supporting
the other in a kind of perverse contract -- exactly as the political class and civil society
exchange their respective woes today, the one serving up its corruption and scandals,
the other its artificial convulsions and inertia. Thus we saw Bourdieu and the Abbé Pierre
offering themselves up in televisual sacrifice, exchanging between them the pathosladen language and sociological metalanguage of wretchedness. And so, also, our
whole society is embarking on the path of commiseration in the literal sense, under
cover of ecumenical pathos. It is almost as though, in a moment of intense repentance
among intellectuals and politicians, related to the panic-stricken state of history and the
twilight of values, we had to replenish the stocks of values, the referential reserves, by
appealing to that lowest common denominator that is human misery, as though we had
to restock the hunting grounds with artificial game. A victim society. I suppose all it is
doing is expressing its own disappointment and remorse at the impossibility of
perpetrating violence upon itself.
The New Intellectual Order everywhere follows the paths opened up by the New World
Order. The misfortune, wretchedness and suffering of others have everywhere become
the raw material and the primal scene. Victimhood, accompanied by Human Rights as its
sole funerary ideology. Those who do not exploit it directly and in their own name do so
by proxy. There is no lack of middlemen, who take their financial or symbolic cut in the
process. Deficit and misfortune, like the international debt, are traded and sold on in the
speculative market -- in this case the politico- intellectual market, which is quite the equal
of the late, unlamented military--industrial complex. Now, all commiseration is part of the
logic of misfortune [malheur]. To refer to misfortune, if only to combat it, is to give it a
base for its objective repro-- duction in perpetuity. When fighting anything whatever, we
have to start out -- fully aware of what we are doing -- from evil, never from misfortune.
AFF
Speaking for others is inevitable, but the aff resolves the impacts.
Jazeel and McFarlane 09
/Tariq, PhD in Cultural Geography, Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of
Sheffield, and Colin, PhD, Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Durham University,
“The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographiers, The Royal Geographical Society,
2009. Pages 114-115)/
At a banal level, research must be considered as one key optic through which intellectual
communities in the global North find out about the world; the knowledge we disseminate
has effects on the imaginative geographies of our students, readers and fellow conference
delegates, which itself demands a kind of responsible fidelity to the places and
communities we research. In some senses this is no different from calling for a
responsible and transparent press, but in the context of the authority that intellectual
work calls around itself, it is to also remind that the academic knowledge we produce is
constitutive, and powerfully so. At worst then, in contemporary transnational academic
landscapes, our research daily produces the world precisely by ‘computing’ the global
South in this unproblematic way, with the EuroAmerican professional intellectual poised
and positioned as ‘the one who diagnoses’ (Spivak 1999, 255). At best on the other hand,
as Edward Said or David Scott might suggest, research performed as criticism care-ful of,
and attentive to, our own locatedness in the field as well as the EuroAmerican academy
holds that potential of ‘putting back together aspects of our common life so as to make
visible what has been obscured’ (Scott 2008, vi; our emphasis), or we would add, what
can be achieved. This is an insurrectionary, yet in our terms ‘responsible’, disposition
toward knowledge production that we would urge.
Whatever the scenario though, according to Gayatri Spivak (and famously so), ‘speaking
for’ in this sense is entirely unavoidable in EuroAmerican knowledge production. We
believe that this recognition can be enabling. What these thoughts around the double
play of representation in disciplinary knowledge production gesture toward is the
necessity of a due sense of responsibility in the light of such an awareness about the
representational mechanics of knowledge production. Unlike the epistemological
dictums of enlightenment ways of knowing, research is always more than merely
formalised curiosity. The stakes of knowledge production are greater, because knowledge
is in and of the world, generative precisely because of its representational dynamics. If
we are aware of this, then methodologically we are always marked inside messy spaces of
immersion and involvement at all stages of knowledge production. If it is interest that
takes us toward a research project, then responsibility must be stitched into that
interestedness from the very outset. Knowledge production is inseparable from politics
in this respect. Interest can never be innocent.
Conceiving of research and knowledge production this way inevitably reconfigures the
geographies in which we emplace ourselves as researchers. Anyone who produces
knowledge of a thing (people ⁄ place ⁄ community) can never be outside that thing.
Knowledge is never outside power thought this way (Jazeel 2007, 294–6). At every stage
of our research endeavour we must perennially confront those most important questions
concerning what knowledge does, who it is for, and why we are producing it, which in
turn demands an openness to knowledge that drives change, is insurrectionary, just as it
recognises the inevitability of ‘speaking for’. In this respect, our intellectual
representations can make room for interventions. They can humbly stake out opposition
in search of social, political and intellectual openings. But they can also be participatory
and collaborative in the field communities we work with, rather than authoritative and
dogmatic (Said 2004 [1982], 42). As we discuss now, a crucial dimension in all this is a
commitment to uncertainty, humility and unlearning in the research process that might
enable both researcher and researched to move on, change, not stand still. As Doreen
Massey has recently written with regards to theory’s relationship to politics, ‘It is utterly
invigorating to be in a situation where ideas really matter. But also one where they are
not simply taken as ‘‘truth’’‘ (2008, 496).