***Social Movements Surveillance Neg
Case
Counternarrative Turn
Discursive archeology re-entrenches domination- empirics prove
Hernando ‘13 [Dr. Almudena Hernando Gonzalo, Associate Professor at the Department of
Prehistory of the Complutense University of Madrid, her work focuses on archeological theory,
“Change, individuality and reason, or how Archaeology has legitimized a patriarchal modernity,”
http://www.academia.edu/3984983/Change_individuality_and_reason_or_how_archaeology_h
as_legitimized_a_patriarchal_modernity._In_A._GonzalezRuibal_ed._Reclaiming_Archaeology._Beyond_the_tropes_of_Modernity._Routledge_London_p
p._155-67._2013]
In terms of legitimation procedures, archaeology as a discourse was actually not much different
from myth. Mythological discourses project the group’s social order onto sacred levels of agency, and then turn this relation of
analogy on its head, interpreting that the group’s survival as the¶ elect ¶ , the¶ chosen ones¶ , is precisely
confirmed and ¶ guaranteed by its resemblance to that supernatural sphere. In similar fashion modern archaeology influenced by positivist and evolutionist paradigms - constructs the past through a projection of those
elements of present day society it aims at legitimating: ignoring all other factors, the past is
selectively scanned for evidence of change, power, individuality, rationality or technology, and
the obvious conclusion is then triumphantly established: our (western) culture has developed all
those characteristics far beyond and in advance of all others, which means it stands a far greater
chance of succeeding(surviving). This discursive operation was typical of historicist and processual archaeology: it was taken
for granted that no other logic but our own could preside any viable human interaction with the world. Consequently, the
worldviews of present-days scholars were straightforwardly and unquestioningly projected onto other times and cultures, churning
out veritable exercises in ethnocentric evolutionism that demoted all human groups in previous ages (and by the same token, also
those societies with a similar level of technology in present times) to the status of mere precedents or harbingers of all that our own
advanced, fully mature culture has achieved (Trigger 1984; McNiven and Russell 2005; Hernando 2006). Although postprocessual
archaeology rejected the ethnocentric bias, along with positivism and evolutionism. the
deep structures underpinning
the discourse of archaeology remained, however, unchanged in most cases: as a discourse, it was
now legitimating postmodernism’s ontology of the present, which was based on the
transcendental subject. Particular subjects and their differences became the aspect of the past to be scanned for (Hodder
2003: cap. 9), and individuality as a mode of personhood was hypostatized into universality (Knapp and Meskell 1997; Knapp and
VanDommelen 2008; Machin 2009). Unsatisfied with the modernist subject presented by archaeology, some researchers shifted
their attention to issues such as ‘things’ (Olsen2010), but many archaeologists (including historicist, processual and postprocessual) kept
producing the same kind of narratives centred on change, conflict, power,
such as stability, recurrence, relational
identity, bonding and emotion were deemed of secondary relevance or not relevant at all. Thus even
when the present-day bearers of these values were taken into account (such as women and indigenous peoples), and indeed postprocessual archaeologists were the first to pay attention to them, they were frequently pictured through the same
modernist lens emphasizing power, change and individuality (Montón-Subías and Sánchez-Romero, 2008;
individuality, personal subjectivity, technology or rationality. Factors
McNiven and Russell 2005; Atalay 2006;C. Gnecco and A. Haber, both in this volume).
Aff Fails – Too Individualized
Their counterhegemonic storytelling method fails in the context of surveillance
because it is too individualized – this just allows the dominant system to adapt
and maintain control
Monahan in 6 - Associate Professor of Human and Organizational Development and Medicine at
Vanderbilt University. Member of the International Surveillance Studies Network <Torin.
“Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention?” SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4
(DECEMBER 2006) Pgs 515-531>
Another example of the dance of surveillance and counter-surveillance can be witnessed in the
confrontations occurring at globalization protests throughout the world. Activists have been quite savvy
in videotaping and photographing police and security forces as a technique not only for deterring abuse, but also for documenting
and disseminating any instances of excessive force. According to accounts by World Trade Organization protesters, the police, in
turn, now zero-in on individuals with video recorders and arrest them (or confiscate their equipment) as a first line of defense in
what has become a war over the control of media representations (Fernandez 2005). Similarly, vibrant Independent Media Centers
are now routinely set up at protest locations, allowing activists to produce and edit video, audio, photographic, and textual news
stories and then disseminate them over the Internet, serving as an outlet for alternative interpretations of the issues under protest
(Breyman 2003). As was witnessed in the beating of independent media personnel and destruction of an Indymedia center by police
during the 2001 G8 protests in Genoa, Italy (Independent Media Center Network 2001; Juris 2005), those with
institutional
interests and power are learning to infiltrate ‘‘subversive’’ counter-surveillance collectives and
vitiate their potential for destabilizing the dominant system. A final telling example of the
learning potential of institutions was the subsequent 2002 G8 meeting held in Kananaskis, which is
a remote and difficult to access mountain resort in Alberta, Canada. Rather than contend with widespread public
protests and a potential repeat of the police violence in Genoa (marked by the close-range shooting and
death of a protester), the mountain meeting exerted the most extreme control over the limited
avenues available for public participation: both reporters and members of the public were
excluded, and a ‘‘no-fly-zone’’ was enforced around the resort. It could be that grassroots publicizing
of protests (through Indymedia, for example) are ultimately more effective than individualized countersurveillance because they are collective activities geared toward institutional change. While the
removal of the 2002 G8 meetings to a publicly inaccessible location was a response to previous experiences with protestors and
their publicity machines, this choice of location served a symbolic function of revealing the exclusionary elitism of these
organizations, thereby calling their legitimacy into question. So, whereas mainstream news outlets seldom lend any sympathetic ink
or air time to anti-globalization protests, many of them did comment on the overt mechanisms of public exclusion displayed by the
2002 G8 meeting (CNN.com 2002; Rowland 2002; Sanger 2002).
Counternarratives Fail
Their form of counternarrative fails because it simply critiques the existing
dominant narratives without replacing it with an alternative – ensures that
their method will fail to stop violence
Tramblay in 10 <Jessika. ” STORIES THAT HAVEN’T CHANGED THE WORLD: NARRATIVES AND
COUNTERNARRATIVES IN THE CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY” PlatForum Vol.
11 (2010) Pgs 90-104>
This leads me to a brief but crucial discussion of Roe’s analytical framework for understanding rural development programs, as I will
be applying it to a number of development alternatives proposed in recent years. Roe proposes that the key to successful
development requires a
“politics of complexity” that is non-existent in the crisis scenarios or narratives
that have guided policy to date (1999:4). Roe explains that when faced with highly complex and
uncertain development scenarios, practitioners are often obliged to come up with a narrative or story
that will stabilize policy-making. Evidence is often conflicting, contradictory, or sparse in these
situations, which complicates decision-making. Crisis scenarios emerge as a solution to these conditions when they
ignore the complexity of a situation and simplify the factors to make way for quick and (apparently) easy solutions. The
desertification scenario, for example, proposes the “insidious, spreading process that is turning many of the world’s marginal fields
and pastures into barren wastelands” (Roe 1999:4-5). Where the development community has insisted for years that desertification
is a major threat on the African continent, and that the problem is worsening each year, more recent studies suggest there is no
evidence to support the claim. So why do we continue to act as if desertification is a major priority? Crisis scenarios and other
narratives of the sort persist because no alternatives have emerged to replace them. Roe explains that simply
criticizing the
narrative by appealing to empirical evidence does nothing for policy; what is needed is a
counternarrative, or a “rival hypothesis or set of hypotheses that could plausibly reverse what appears to be the case, where the
reversal in question, even if it proved factually not to be the case, nonetheless provides a possible policy option for future attention
because of its very plausibility” (1999:9). If we follow Roe, then, in his application of literary theory to extremely difficult public
policy issues such as development, it becomes evident that what
is needed is not only a fastidious critique of the
existing development narratives, but an alternative narrative that can act as a plausible solution
to the repeated failures of previous development approaches (1994:1). Let me take it one step further in
suggesting that a simple alt ernative is not sufficient in this sense; what is necessary is an alternative that breaks
far enough away from the norm to escape the oft invisible and pernicious premises from which
these narratives have sprung. And this is where my argument comes in: Sen and Easterly, in my view, have actually
developed the counternarratives to which other authors have laid claim.
Aff = Academic Colonialism
Their reading of the aff and asking for the ballot reproduces the
commodification of the lives of the oppressed by exploiting them and
colonizing the work of subjugated communities
Thompson in 3 <Audrey. “Tiffany, friend of people of color: White investments in antiracism”
QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION, 2003, VOL. 16, NO. 1, 7–29>
Indeed, Collins finds it suspicious that black feminism is “so well received by White women.”20 Such suspicions are prompted by the
history of whites’ appropriation of black and brown bodies, words, songs, and symbols. As Nell Irvin Painter observes, white
women have long taken up black women’s texts and voices for our own activist purposes –
profiting much more from the commodification of black voices than have the black women
invoked in the white texts. Whereas Sojourner Truth had to sell photographic cartes de visite for 33 cents apiece to
support her abolitionist work, Harriet Beecher Stowe earned money by writing about Truth and other African Americans.21
Tapping “a marketable subject” in an era when “material on the Negro was very much in
demand,” Stowe – who had already made a fortune from Uncle Tom’s Cabin but found herself in need of further funds –
“min[ed] the vein that had produced her black characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Writing for the
prestigious Atlantic Monthly, Stowe “made Truth into a quaint and innocent exotic who disdained feminism.”22 Later, in a reversal
of her symbolic fortunes, Truth was appropriated for white feminist purposes. In the white feminist reform literature, Sojourner
Truth became a suffragist more than an abolitionist symbol, famous mostly for having said “and ar’n’t I a woman?” – a line that
Frances Dana Gage, a white woman, composed and attributed to Truth.23 Like Stowe and Gage, white
academics who
take up the texts (and lives and projects) of people of color for progressive purposes risk
exploiting them for our own insufficiently examined ends. Writing an open letter to Mary Daly in 1979,
Audre Lorde told her, “The history of white women who are unable to hear Black women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is
long and discouraging.”24 Rather than “ever really read the work of Black women” and other women of color, white feminists tend
to “finger through [such work] for quotations” that they think will “support an already-conceived idea concerning some old and
distorted connection between us.”25 The question Lorde asked Daly might be asked of white feminists and white progressives in
general: “Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to
find words that would legitimize your” own claims about race and racism?26 When white
scholars strategically quote
material by scholars of color to “support an already-conceived idea,” we colonize the work of
the Other to enrich our writing and enhance our authority. Like Stowe, we mine the lives and
writings of people of color to produce a more marketable commodity.27 Indeed, even when we are true
to the work we study, whites may profit in ways wholly out of proportion to our historical contribution
to the field. Long before the academy began to accept whiteness as a distinctive area of research, it had been the subject of
countless works of theory, fiction, art, and journalism by people of color. Although some of the contemporary scholarship on
whiteness by white authors recognizes our indebtedness to classic and pathbreaking work by James Baldwin, Vine Deloria, Toni
Morrison, and others, whiteness theory nevertheless seems to be “ours.” The
and privilege can be turned to our advantage.
very acknowledgement of our racism
Aff Commodifies Suffering
The aff relies on images of suffering which become commodified for the ballot –
this destroys personal identity, value to life and obscures other forms of
oppression like capitalism and hegemony
Ticktin 99 <Miriam. “Selling Suffering in The Courtroom and Marketplace:An Analysis of the
Autobiography of Kiranjit Ahluwalia” [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 1. Pgs 24-28>
Such a double bind is part of the dilemma of the transition to a more just society. How is one to act in the world, short of putting all
one's energies toward revolution? How was Kiranjit supposed to act in her situation of abuse, and then in court, faced with a charge
of life imprisonment? Such a double bind exists for many Asians in Britain. Already fighting poverty, racism and oppression, should
they not have the ability to fight discrimination and violence by selling images, including those of suffering, on the market,
counteracting other derogatory images? I want first to discuss what Radin describes as the key elements of personhood: freedom,
identity, and contextuality. Next, I will relate these to Circle of Light to ask if alienating suffering in thiscontext diminishes the
possibility for human flourishing. It must be noted that of course thereis no formula for what is "personal" or what ultimately
constitutes personhood; as Radin herself remarks, a moral judgment is required in each case (1987:1908).7Radin asserts that
freedom must be understood in relation to the contextuality aspect ofpersonhood. In other words, contextuality implies that
physical and social context are integralto personal individuation and self-development; thus, self-development in accordance
withone's own will (freedom) requires one to will certain interactions with the physical and socialcontext. Commodification
undermines personal identity by conceiving of personal attributes, relationships, and moral
commitments as monetizable and alienable from the self: examples of these are one's politics,
religion, family, experiences, or sexuality. These are things and people that are at once part of
one's surroundings and integral to the self. Radin argues that to think that people's experiences or
moral commitments could be fungible and commensurate with those of another, or that a
person without her moral commitments is still the same person, "is to do violence to our
deepest understanding of what it is to be human" (Radin 1987:1906). If these are commodified, human
flourishing is diminished, degrading the person. To answer if Circle of Light alienates aspects integral to personhood by
commodifying Kiranjit's suffering, we can examine how freedom, identity and contextualization are affected in this particular case.
Radin suggests that for non ideal circumstances, the double bind of market-inalienability just discussed can be solved by incomplete
commodification, or degrees ofcommodification determined by each specific case. We must begin by noting that suffering isalready
commoditized in many circumstances; people receive damages for pain and suffering.Media and news reporting sell the suffering
associated with war and with famine in magazines,on cable television.8 How is suffering different in this case? In what capacity is it a
contestedcommodity? Who is benefiting, and who is being disempowered by the commoditization?In the case of Circle of Light, I
have argued that the narratives of dominance (legal and market)occupy the subjects in very specific ways, shaping them and their
stories. The subjects -Kiranjit, battered women, and South Asian women - each get silenced at points, and silence each other at
other points. The question is, have their experiences of suffering been altered in such a way as to lead to a degradation of
personhood? Are their identities, contexts and freedombeing violated through the objectification and transformation of suffering in
the book? First, I want to point out some of the contradictions in Circle of Light that let the subjects speak beyond the dominant
narratives, and then I will explore whether the commodification of suffering in the book leads to empowerment or not. Circle of
Light describes Kiranjit's life, but it also relates how she became a legal subject. Theprocess of "reconstructing" her is not hidden;
SBS makes it clear in the "SBS story." If we readtheir construction of the process, sometimes pushing beyond it, we can see the
conflicts betweensubjects (Kiranjit, SBS, Rahila Gupta) that permeate the text. As such, the book constructs split and contradictory
subjects, not fully captured by either of the dominant narratives. For instance, Kiranjit's resistance to telling her story comes out in
several places. In one example,a woman from SBS named Pragna was working with Kiranjit to get her information straight forthe
appeal - trying to get "the truth." She admits that she was skeptical of Kiranjit. The SBSstory reveals that "trying to uncover the truth
was to become almost an end in itself for Pragna,amounting to obsession" (p.347). Kiranjit's lack of acquiescence is implied in the
text, in thephrase, "[Pragna] cited an example of her problems with Kiranjit." Similarly, Pragna claimsthat "[Kiranjit] was giving me
contradictory statements..." (p.347). After her release, at thecelebration, the SBS story recounts how Pragna asked Kiranjit if she had
told her the wholetruth. "Kiranjit laughed. 'Do you really want to know?' she said. It was partly tease and partlywarning" (p.322).
Finally, in the writing up of the book, Rahila Gupta writes in her introduction how Kiranjit dealt with the power imbalance involved in
the writing up process, "she wouldwant to trade information refusing to continue until I had answered a personal question"
(p.xvi).These are glimpses of a subject not completely erased, not completely encompassed by largernarratives of the dominant
ideology. Similarly, the Southall Black Sisters themselves demonstrate their doubts and concerns in theirhighly self-conscious
production of culture and identity. They reveal their initial abhorrence ofthe idea of using a medical defense, but show how
eventually they are driven by pragmatics. Inanother example, after deciding to bring culture into the appeal, Pragna had to write a
report onviolence in the Asian community. The process of writing it was described as tortuous: "She hadto tread very carefully in
order to describe common aspects of Asian women's experience inthis country without creating a new racial stereotype - the
battered Asian woman" (p.374). The question here would be how
is the process of construction itself sold, how
much is it appropriated by the racialized end product? One could see the process of deliberation adding to the
validity of such images - we are urged to think that they did their best to avoid stereotypes, and that
therefore the product we now consume is free of prejudice. Finally, Circle of Light contradicts itself in places.
For instance, right after describing how thePrincess of Wales advised Kiranjit to write a book, Rani la Gupta writes, "none of us
wanted thestory to be sensationalized" (p.xii). The very act of including Diana sensationalizes - there isperhaps no figure in the world
who can match her status as a popular icon/commodity; but this
demonstrates the contradictions built into this
form of representation, the difficulty of fitting empowering images and identities into
narratives that will win criminal court cases and sell books. Do these contradictions mediate the alienation of
suffering, by letting the complexity of experience be seen? In asking this question, it might be argued that I'm missing the most
important point of the book: the fact that Kiranjit Ahluwalia was released -that she won hercase. Is that not empowerment? Does it
really matter that her experience was altered in court,that her suffering was turned into a commodity through the book? I do not
want to make themistake that Spivak warns against - that of confusing darstellung with vertretung. In simpleterms, I realize that this
book is an example of darstellung, or speaking about; although itspeaks about the trial, it cannot substitute for vertretung, or
speaking for, in the political orlegal sense. In the end, is Kiranjit not free to walk around outside? Does this not alter the wayin which
her representation is performed in the book, despite the imperial tropes? Is thatintervention not more material and ultimately more
salient than one made by speaking about?Here, I draw on Sherene Razack's work on domestic violence in the context of claims
forasylum on the basis of gender persecution, for the problems that she so eloquently names inthat context mirror the ones that I
find with this collective self-representation. Razack agreesthat if a story of cultural othering must be told to save a woman from
violence, then who can complain if we "fight sexism with racism"? (1995:72). Yet she argues that there are indeed built-in limitations
to this practical approach. First, victims must be able to access readily understood racial tropes. What if Asian women were not
perceived as passive and weak, inneed of a saviour from Asian men? Razack explores this reality in the context of Asian andAfrican
Caribbean women in Canada, and in this same vein, I would hazard a guess that the strategies used for Kiranjit would not work for
African immigrants in Britain. Second, if onemust always pathologize one's culture, there need not be a discussion of the conditions
inwhich these women live; in other words, there is no need to touch on the reasons for migration,or the subsequent economic
vulnerability of many abused women. As Razack states, "the lightneed never be shone on First World complicity" (p.73). Finally,
racist constructs operate under the logic that Third World women are to be pitied, and ironically, if women emerge as strong enough
to have escaped violent situations, this does not work in their favour. This is clear inKiranjit's case: when she was conceived of as a
killer, able to muster the means to escapeabuse, she was convicted; only by turning her into a pitiable battered woman was she
released.On a purely practical basis, what do women do who cannot fit their realities into imperialframes? These are the women
that are discriminated against. These are the women that thisrepresentation erases. Kiranjit first got a life sentence; this was not a
typical sentence given toa woman for killing her husband. As one letter printed in Circle of Light points out, a whitewoman who
suffered domestic violence and committed a similar crime got two years probation.It was only when Kiranjit became a subject of a
racialized imperial framework that she wasgranted the privilege that other (white) citizens often automatically possess.Yes, she was
released. What does this mean for notions of personhood, empowerment, andhuman flourishing? What kind of victory is it? It is a
victory, a form of empowerment for her,as an individual - but let us be clear - in a strange twist, it is empowering to her only if we
seeher as an abstract individual, devoid of context. In other words, it violates the elements thatRadin describes as integral to
personhood. The
context in which she both suffered and acted is transformed, reinterpreted; her
cultural and historical background are traded in for the empowerment of universal
womanhood. Her identity - intimately connected to the context,and to her multiple
commitments and histories as both a gendered, and racialized subject – is therefore also
altered. Thus, for other battered Asian and minority women - the other "subjects" of this story - the case of
empowerment is unclear. While glimpses of their subjectivities canbe traced in the contradictions of the narratives, we are
left with an overwhelming sense thatAsian women cannot be strong and still Asian, in Britain; this forces on them the
unacceptable choice of either being pathologized to be empowered, or having their historical
specificity, andtheir cultural context, erased.Before I conclude, let me return to my goal in writing this piece: this is
an attempt to makeroom for silences, or for that which cannot be easily articulated. My goal has been to show thecomplexity
involved in representing suffering in the courtroom and the marketplace, ratherthan to dismiss the political and ethical agendas of
the book. I am not criticizing their strategiesbecause I disagree with the overall project of the book; on the contrary, because their
project isso important - and because some sort of public depiction of violence is inevitable in campaignsagainst violence - it
is
essential to examine the broader implications of "selling suffering." Commodifying one form of
suffering meant obscuring others, such as the violence of poverty,racism, and the violence
done by Western hegemony. The legal and market narratives precludedtheir appearance. In this case, I would therefore
conclude that suffering be market-inalienable,as the amount that Circle of Light empowers is negligible compared to the ways in
which itserves to efface the experience of suffering and of violence endured.
War Turns Structural Violence
Systemic impacts do not cause war but war causes structural violence –
prioritize our impacts
Goldstein, American University International Relations Professor, 2001 [Joshua, “War
and Gender. How Gender shapes the War System and Vice Versa”, p.411-412]
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war—an understanding that would improve the
caches of someday achieving real peace, by deleting war from our human repertoire. In following the thread of gender running
through war, I found the deeper understanding I had hoped for - a multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement with the subject. Yet
I became somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end. The
war system emerges, from the
evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous and robust. Efforts to change this system must
overcome several dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war
and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, "if you want peace, work for justice." Then, if one
believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among
others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement
(women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book
suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism,
imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence
wars' outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other
injustices.9 So, "if you want peace, work for peace." Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace.
Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals,
societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes
towards war and the military may be the most important way to "reverse women's oppression." The dilemma is that peace work
focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book's evidence, the
emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
Framework
1NC
A – Interpretation
Topical affirmatives must affirm the resolution through instrumental defense of
action by the United States Federal Government.
B – Definitions
Should denotes an expectation of enacting a plan
American Heritage Dictionary 2000 (Dictionary.com)
should. The will to do something or have something take place: I shall go out if I feel like
it.
Federal government is the central government in Washington DC
Encarta Online 2005,
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_1741500781_6/United_States_(Government).html#howtocite
United States (Government), the combination of federal, state, and local laws, bodies, and
agencies that is responsible for carrying out the operations of the United States. The federal
government of the United States is centered in Washington DC.
Resolved implies a policy
Louisiana House 3-8-2005, http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm
Resolution A legislative instrument
that generally is used
making decisions where some other form is not
required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause;
for making declarations, stating policies, and
a
resolution uses the term "resolved". Not subject to a time limit for
introduction nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art.
III, §17(B) and House Rules 8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4)
.
C – Vote neg
1 – Predictability - The resolution proposes the question the negative is
prepared to answer. Even if it is good to talk about their 1AC, they must prove
we could have logically anticipated it. This question comes prior to the merits
of the aff because it implicates our ability to debate.
Ruth Lessl Shively, Assoc Prof Polisci at Texas A&M, 2000 Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 181-2
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to—they must
reject and limit—some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to
some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that
they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to
discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that
agreement marks the end of contest—that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is
perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are
highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on
principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting
condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we
can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to
assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can
be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In
other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on
the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as
evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated
before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone
who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target
audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one
demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is
meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested.
Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the
terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of
the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the
contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about
intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.
Debate over a clear and specific controversial point of government action creates
argumentative stasis – that’s a prerequisite to the negative’s ability to engage in the
conversation — that’s critical to deliberation
Steinberg 8, lecturer of communication studies – University of Miami, and Freeley, Boston based attorney who focuses on
criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, ‘8
(David L. and Austin J., Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making p. 45)
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of
interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need
for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless
to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy
about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of
ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot
produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be
answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration.
How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our
economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do
they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of
employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the
opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do
work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to
their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their
status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should
we build a wall on
the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite
immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a
conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to
be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on
a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be
discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in
unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the
failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the
summer of 2007. Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly
educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible
job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more
than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at
an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with."
Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to
express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for
their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding
points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is
posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is
opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more
judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary
debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement
a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher
program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They
provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing
limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely
talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have
an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the
statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to
provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more
effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical
force for a specific purpose. Although
we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still
too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned
with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness"
mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what?
A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of
our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as
"Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this
proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This
is not to say that debates should
completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot
occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may
be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus
on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
2 - government knowledge – learning about the nuts and bolts of policy are necessary to
create political change
Zwarensteyn 12, Ellen, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY In Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements For the Degree of Masters of Science, “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education:
Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning,” August,
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=theses
The first trend to emerge concerns how debate
fosters in-depth political knowledge. Immediately, every
resolution calls for analysis of United States federal government action. Given that each debater may debate
in over a hundred different unique rounds, there is a competitive incentive thoroughly research as many
credible, viable, and in-depth strategies as possible. Moreover, the requirement to debate both
affirmative and negative sides of the topic injects a creative necessity to defend viable arguments from a
multitude of perspectives. As a result, the depth of knowledge spans questions not only of what, if
anything, should be done in response to a policy question, but also questions of who, when, where, and why. This
opens the door to evaluating intricacies of government branch, committee, agency, and even
specific persons who may yield different cost-benefit outcomes to conducting policy action. Consider the following responses:
I think debate helped me understand how Congress works and policies actually happen which is different than what government
classes teach you. Process counterplans are huge - reading and understanding how delegation works means you understand that it is
not just congress passes a bill and the president signs. You
understand that policies can happen in different
methods. Executive orders, congress, and courts counterplans have all helped me understand
that policies don’t just happen the way we learn in government. There are huge chunks of
processes that you don't learn about in government that you do learn about in debate. Similarly,
Debate has certainly aided [my political knowledge]. The nature of policy-making requires you to be
knowledgeable of the political process because process does effect the outcome. Solvency questions, agent
counterplans, and politics are tied to process questions. When addressing the overall higher level of awareness
of agency interaction and ability to identify pros and cons of various committee, agency, or branch activity, most respondents traced
this knowledge to the politics research spanning from their affirmative cases, solvency debates, counterplan ideas, and political
disadvantages. One of the recurring topics concerns congressional vs. executive vs. court action and how all of that works. To be
good at debate you really do need to have a good grasp of that. There is really something to be said for high school debate - because
without debate I wouldn’t have gone to the library to read a book about how the Supreme Court works, read it, and be interested in
it. Maybe I would’ve been a lawyer anyway and I would’ve learned some of that but I can’t imagine at 16 or 17 I would’ve had that
desire and have gone to the law library at a local campus to track down a law review that might be important for a case. That aspect
of debate in unparalleled - the competitive drive pushes you to find new materials. Similarly, I think [my political
knowledge]
comes from the politics research that we have to do. You read a lot of names name-dropped in articles.
You know who has influence in different parts of congress. You know how different leaders would feel
about different policies and how much clout they have. This comes from links and internal links. Overall,
competitive debaters must have a depth of political knowledge on hand to respond to and
formulate numerous arguments. It appears debaters then internalize both the information itself and
the motivation to learn more. This aids the PEP value of intellectual pluralism as debaters seek not
only an oversimplified ‘both’ sides of an issue, but multiple angles of many arguments. Debaters uniquely approach
arguments from a multitude of perspectives – often challenging traditional conventions of argument. With knowledge of
multiple perspectives, debaters often acknowledge their relative dismay with television news and
traditional outlets of news media as superficial outlets for information.
A focus on policy is necessary to learn the pragmatic details of powerful
institutions – acting without this knowledge is doomed to fail in the face of
policy pros who know what they’re talking about
McClean, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Molloy College in New York, ‘1 (David E., “The Cultural Left
and the Limits of Social Hope”, Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy,
http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/)
Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may reasonably be described as a very long and eccentric
footnote to Nietzsche (I have once been accused, by a Foucaltian true believer, of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks).
Foucault, who has provided the Left of the late 1960s through the present with such
notions as "governmentality,"
"Limit," "archeology," "discourse" "power" and "ethics," creating or redefining their meanings, has made it
overabundantly clear that all of our moralities and practices are the successors of previous ones which derive from certain
configurations of savoir and connaisance arising from or created by, respectively, the discourses of the various scientific schools. But
I have not yet found in anything Foucault wrote or said how such observations may be translated into
a political movement or hammered into a political document or theory (let alone public
policies) that can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary aesthetic experimentalism.
In fact, Foucault would have shuddered if any one ever did, since he thought that anything as grand as a movement went far beyond
what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly rehabilitate Habermas, for at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's
shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the abstractions of
various Marxian-Freudian social critiques. Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country,
a book that I think is long overdue, leftist
critics continue to cite and refer to
the
eccentric and often a priori
ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and
Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy
prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty,
market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social
critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they
have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of
recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and
multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure,
than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether
private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!),
in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our
children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately
theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or
some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile
attempts to philosophize one's way into
political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and
adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice
produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of
Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or
an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's
own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as
the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the
Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than
some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally
evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural
Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a
disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they
bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge
public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson
and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George
Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always
ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single
yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions
and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not
We who
fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a
new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing
the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and
"interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to
seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism.
develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost
more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the
need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might
seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of
international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the
politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This
means going down deep into the guts
of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are
loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult
and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means
making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the
actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from
being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking
about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and
who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers
and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
And this turns the case - unauthorized, invasive surveillance is coded in the law – loose
definitions and expansions in government authority are what create injustice which means
engaging the state is key
Rackow in 2 - B.A. 1998, Williams College; J.D. Candidate 2003, University of Pennsylva <Sharon.
”How the USA Patriot Act Will Permit Governmental Infringement upon the Privacy of
Americans in the Name of "Intelligence" Investigations” University of Pennsylvania Law Review,
Vol. 150, No. 5 (May, 2002), pp. 1651-1696>
Section 218 of the USA PATRIOT Act amends FISA ? 1804(a) (7) (B). Now, in an application to the FISC, a federal
officer no longer has to demonstrate that "the purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign
intelligence information,",132 but may obtain surveillance authorization under the less stringent
showing that "a significant purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign intelligence
information."'133 This slight alteration in the language of 1804 is highly significant in that it is
extremely likely to increase the types of court ordered investigations that are carried out in
the name of "foreign intelligence investigations" under FISA. Considering the fact that the FISC has only
turned down one surveillance application since its inception,134 it becomes even more likely that
the court will authorize all forthcoming applications under this more lenient standard. The concern
raised by this amendment is that under the new broadened scope of ? 1804, both intelligence and law enforcement agents will bring
applications for electronic surveillance to the FISC when the primary purpose of the surveillance is an investigation of criminal
activities. Thus, the
amended FISA will be used as a means to undertake surveillance without
demonstrating the heightened standard of probable cause required under Title III for criminal
wiretaps. This potential end-run around the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement for criminal investigations
contradicts the rationale for permitting a lower threshold for obtaining FISA wiretaps. No longer will this lesser standard
solely authorize investigations of primarily foreign intelligence activities where the rights of
Americans are generally not implicated. Instead, FISA will be employed to approve investigations
of predominantly criminal activities, including purely domestic criminal acts-in explicit violation
of the Fourth Amendment.135 Now, under section 218 a criminal investigation can be the primary purpose of a FISA
investigation, with foreign intelligence information as a secondary, albeit "significant purpose."'36 Senator Leahy recognized that by
amending the language of FISA, "the USA ActI37 would make it easier for the FBI to use a FISA wiretap to obtain information where
the Government's most important motivation for the wiretap is for use in a criminal prosecution."'38 The Senator further
acknowledged that "[t] his is a disturbing and dangerous change in the law."139 Furthermore, as
the USA PATRIOT Act's
amendment to FISA does not provide a definition of "significant purpose," it is unclear how far
the FISC will stretch its interpretation of this phrase to accommodate law enforcement and
intelligence agencies in their quest to increase surveillance as a response to the September 11th
terrorist attacks. Yet, the consequences of this amendment to FISA go far beyond investigations of the September 11th
tragedy. Now, surveillance authority for investigations seeking information primarily pertaining to
purely domestic criminal activities may be granted under FISA with no showing of probable
cause that a serious crime has been or will soon be committed.
3 – Switch Side Debate - Switch side policy debates empirically promotes critical thinking and
greater knowledge on social issues
Keller, et. al, 01 – Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago
(Thomas E., James K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of
Chicago, professor of Social Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, “Student debates
in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge through active learning,”
Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001, EBSCOhost)
Discussion ¶ The results of the surveys suggest that debates
have value as an active learning strategy to
enhance student learning. On survey questions and in written comments, students expressed satisfaction
with the debates. The majority of students were pleased with the debates as a class assignment. Most indicated that
participation in the debates raised the level of their policy skills and knowledge. In addition, the
educational value of debates was rated as higher than more traditional assignments. It should be noted, however, that a desire to
report favorably on class experiences may have influenced reported satisfaction with the debates (i.e., acquiescence bias). ¶ Student
comments supported the view that
debates promote critical thinking by encouraging serious
consideration of both sides of a policy issue. Comments also indicated that the active learning approach had
generated more classroom interest and energy than usual. On the other hand, some comments noted how the debates might have
detracted from a positive learning experience. ¶ All four hypotheses regarding changes in student-rated knowledge were supported
by the analysis. Students
reported statistically significant increases in knowledge on topics covered
during the course--a result which is reassuring for the instructors. Gains in self-reported knowledge from simply observing
debates were equivalent to gains based on traditional forms of instruction. Observing a debate appears comparable to acquiring
debate participation generated significantly
greater increases in self-reported knowledge than were obtained by observing debates or by
learning through traditional forms of instruction. This result, which is consistent with the principles of
experiential learning, suggests the educational advantage of using debates to engage students in
learning. ¶ The findings are noteworthy considering the use of conservative nonparametric statistics on a small sample. However,
information through a class lecture or discussion. By contrast,
the results should be interpreted somewhat cautiously due to certain study limitations. First, the dependent variable was selfreported and highly subjective in nature. The study did not contain objective measures of knowledge, and the findings pertain only
to students' self-perceptions of their knowledge regarding particular topics. Second, although attrition from pretest to posttest was
not associated with the pretest measures, differential attrition related to unmeasured factors, including objective knowledge of the
topics, is a potential source of bias. Third, the assumption of independence among cases may be questionable given that students
worked closely as members of debate teams. Finally, other plausible explanations for the general increase in knowledge over time,
besides taking the class, cannot be ruled out. Nevertheless, the differential improvement in self-rated knowledge in favor of
debaters would still be a credible finding, and this was a main objective of the analysis. ¶ Conclusion ¶ The purposes of this article
were to examine the potential of student debates for fostering the development of policy practice knowledge and skills, to
demonstrate that debates can be effectively incorporated as an in-class assignment in a policy course, and to report findings on the
educational value and level of student satisfaction with debates. Based on a review of the literature, the authors' experience
conducting debates in a course, and the subsequent evaluation of those debates, the authors believe the development of policy
practice skills and the acquisition of substantive knowledge can be advanced through structured student debates in policy-oriented
courses. The authors think debates
on important policy questions have numerous benefits: prompting
students to deal with values and assumptions, encouraging them to investigate and analyze
competing alternatives, compelling them to advocate a particular position, and motivating them
to articulate a point of view in a persuasive manner. We think engaging in these analytic and
persuasive activities promotes greater knowledge by stimulating active participation in the
learning process. ¶ However, the use of debates in a classroom setting is not without certain drawbacks. Schroeder and Ebert
(1983) noted several limitations which were also encountered in this experience. First, staging debates presents logistical challenges
for the instructor. These administrative concerns include creating teams, selecting topics, determining the debate format, and
scheduling. Second, the amount of time devoted to the specific topic of a debate can detract from covering a wider scope of course
material. Third, although debating encourages the examination of issues from two opposing positions, many policy dilemmas can be
approached from several angles. A structured debate does not necessarily foster a multidimensional examination of policy options.
Fourth, as in most group projects, some debate team members may have contributed more to the effort than others. Finally, the
competitive aspects of debating may polarize the issue. ¶ For those interested in using debates as an instructional technique, the
importance of thorough advance planning with respect to the mechanics of conducting the debates must be stressed. Flexibility to
make adjustments during the process is equally important. Special attention should be given to debriefing sessions after debates to
discuss perceptions of the debate experience, areas of common agreement, and possibilities for policy compromise and consensus.
The integration of opposing views into a coherent and purposeful course of action is a central feature of the theoretical framework
presented earlier, and students expressed a need for more resolution and closure. For example, one student suggested, "I think it
would be more effective to do an active brainstorming/planning session for identifying solutions/alternatives following the debates."
on debates should come from students themselves. In the debriefing session immediately following a
debate, one student stated, "I thought the debate was good because it forced me to articulate
the position, and that is something we will need to do to be advocates." Another student described how
¶ The final word
her opinion of debating changed, "When I first heard about this assignment, I really questioned its value. I thought it would be a
waste of class time. But I learned so much about family preservation services. I learned more than I ever would have any other way."
External contestation of our personal convictions is critical to ethical decision making – our
blindspots about the limits of our knowledge must be tested in order for debate to produce
ethical subjects – the aff results in dogmatism
Button, 2011 (Oct 5, Mark E., associate professor of political science at the University of Utah,
“Accounting for Blind Spots: From Oedipus to Democratic Epistemology,” p.3-5)
A moral blind spot refers to the ineluctable limitations and partialities that are folded into our
moral knowledge or beliefs, and therewith, the judgments and actions that human beings make on the
basis of that knowledge or belief. A moral blind spot designates the boundaries of moral identity
and the limits of human knowing and judging, a limit (of practical reason and moral sentiment) that can be
intuited or postulated by moral and political theory, but one whose full dimensions—its span and depth—
are not available to our selfconscious perception or articulation, except perhaps a posteriori, Oedipuslike.
The problem to which a moral blind spot refers overlaps with but is not identical to substantive moral or
political ignorance. Substantive ignorance is a matter about which moral agents are, by and large,
capable of self-conscious discernment and critical awareness; we can know and readily admit to the
fact that there are numerous branches of knowledge about which we know that we do not
presently know, or about which we know that we lack epistemic or practical competence relative to others. Unless we are
acting in bad faith or vainly putting on airs from any one of a number of ulterior motives, a certain robust sense of
epistemic–cognitive limitation is within most people’s self-conscious reach. By contrast, a blind
spot is a feature of our moral perception, of ourselves and others, about which we are largely unaware.
The social environments and the moral and linguistic traditions in accordance with which we
judge and make meaning of the world; the economic, social, and racial or gendered privileges
about which individuals are not always consciously aware; the self- and group biases that
personal introspection do not fully disclose; the partialities, commitments, and attachments that
define the contours of our everyday lives as culturally situated moral subjects with an identity:
all of these, and more, are the sources of our potential moral blind spots. Since we have diverse motives
(both conscious and unconscious) for affirming and extending the elements of this list, individuals and groups also have
strong incentives to keep blind spots in place and to avoid or resist a moral and political
consideration of their operation and effects on others. The solidity of identity is served by the
construction of cultural difference,5 but this sense of solidity is also protected (and partially grounded)
in accordance with that which the subject does not (or will not) “see” or feel. As the above list already
indicates, to speak of moral blind spots is to address a basic sociocultural and linguistic condition of
human being, but it is also a tragic condition of human existence. Blind spots define us both individually and
socially and thus have a powerful influence on judgment and agency, but they also mark our
(unselfconscious) moral limitations, for they exist at the periphery of our perception of what
objects and relations have moral value for us by virtue of the kind of social and linguistic beings
that we are and thus mark the limits of our moral sympathies. Consider the following example drawn from
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. An economically impoverished person, according to Smith, “feels that [his poverty]
places him out of the sight of mankind,” or if other members of society “take any notice of him, they have scarce any fellow-felling
with the misery and distress which he suffers.”6 And, Smith continues, as “obscurity covers us from the daylight of honor and
approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent
desire, of human nature.” In this example, Smith illuminates a blind spot in the dominant pattern of moral beliefs and affective
sentiments among the members of a modern commercial middle class. As Smith explores the full consequences of a distribution of
moral sentiments that follows from a condition in which “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers of wealth and
greatness,” he highlights the most visible advancements (economic growth), and the largely hidden
corruption of moral sympathies for shared humanity) that attend these particular
ethical costs (the
blind spots in perception and
moral valuation.7 In accordance with this way of thinking about them, moral blind spots are socially and culturally variable;
different subjects or questions will cross into the domain of ethical and political consideration at different stages in the life of a
political society or social group, and, largely as
a consequence of this broader sociocultural variation, moral
blind spots are also subject to modification in the temporal span of an individual subject or
group. Significantly, moral blind spots are historically contingent, and while they are recalcitrant, they
are not incorrigible (a point to which I will return). The central point to make in regard to the first-order level of experience
with moral identity and agency is that blind spots attend and facilitate judgment and action in the way that
all forms of partiality and moral identity do by filtering the phenomenal world so as to navigate
within its complexities. Yet the constitutive occlusions embedded within moral perception also
shape judgment and action in ways that can subvert both individual and collective well-being.
Surely one of the most illuminating instances of this problematic condition is provided by the example of Oedipus. In turning to
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, we can also introduce the significance that second-order moral blindness has for the life of an
individual and a political society.
2NC State Good
Even if engaging in the state isn’t perfect it is necessary – withdrawing from institutions allows
right wing hawks to take over – the only way to prevent social injustices is by engaging with
the institutions that cause or control them in the first place
Mouffe 2009 (Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of
Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for
the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extraparliamentary politics. They
see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So
they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them
altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in
the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its
power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these
authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power,
that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful
form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was
dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the
existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active selforganising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the
present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri
claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people.
They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They
advocate a
withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical politics
today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often
characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem.
Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best
suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from
Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the
approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe,
2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is
necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the
workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of
capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be
reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they
deny
the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or
practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as
‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every
hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices
– feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social
movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim,
and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless
attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we
talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity
and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a
heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this
hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This
means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as
acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc
Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists
manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s,
harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming
them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the
strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and
the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode
of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view,
what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism
involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to
post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their
analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a
situation where demands
which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing
system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive
potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a
framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role
and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term.
Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once
we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices,
radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have
no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is
crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge
the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door
open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical
(and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and
authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as
the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two
perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political
subject. But in both cases the
state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be
transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and
sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my
approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is
precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility
of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As
far as politics is
concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting
hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life.
A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the
‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a
result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic
interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly
political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing
hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to
challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another
important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands
(such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that
will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique
involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in
our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated
politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires
the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem
to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the
People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-
hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an
‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common
adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a
state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of
these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms
like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances
in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be
challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific
relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new
hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but
‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of
sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by
establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example.
The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and
often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive
the nature of radical politics.
development and progress. In
Policy simulation key to creativity and decisionmaking—the detachment and disembodiment
the aff criticizes are necessary skills to create meaningful change outside of the debate space
Eijkman 12 <The role of simulations in the authentic learning for national security policy development: Implications for Practice
/ Dr. Henk Simon Eijkman. [electronic resource] http://nsc.anu.edu.au/test/documents/Sims_in_authentic_learning_report.pdf. Dr
Henk Eijkman is currently an independent consultant as well as visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales at the Australian
Defence Force Academy and is Visiting Professor of Academic Development, Annasaheb Dange College of Engineering and
Technology in India. As a sociologist he developed an active interest in tertiary learning and teaching with a focus on socially
inclusive innovation and culture change. He has taught at various institutions in the social sciences and his work as an adult learning
specialist has taken him to South Africa, Malaysia, Palestine, and India. He publishes widely in international journals, serves on
Conference Committees and editorial boards of edited books and international journal
Policy simulations stimulate Creativity Participation
in policy games has proved to be a highly effective way
of developing new combinations of experience and creativity, which is precisely what innovation
requires (Geurts et al. 2007: 548). Gaming, whether in analog or digital mode, has the power to stimulate creativity, and is
one of the most engaging and liberating ways for making group work productive, challenging and enjoyable. Geurts et al. (2007)
cite one instance where, in a National Health Care policy change environment, ‘the many parties involved accepted the
invitation to participate in what was a revolutionary and politically very sensitive experiment
precisely because it was a game’ (Geurts et al. 2007: 547). Data from other policy simulations also
indicate the uncovering of issues of which participants were not aware, the emergence of new ideas not
anticipated, and a perception that policy simulations are also an enjoyable way to formulate
strategy (Geurts et al. 2007). Gaming puts the players in an ‘experiential learning’ situation, where they
discover a concrete, realistic and complex initial situation, and the gaming process of going through multiple learning cycles helps
them work through the situation as it unfolds. Policy
gaming stimulates ‘learning how to learn’, as in a game,
and learning by doing alternates with reflection and discussion. The progression through
learning cycles can also be much faster than in real-life (Geurts et al. 2007: 548). The bottom line is that
problem solving in policy development processes requires creative experimentation. This cannot be primarily taught via ‘camp-fire’
story telling learning mode but demands hands-on ‘veld learning’ that allow for safe creative and productive experimentation. This
is exactly what good policy simulations provide (De Geus, 1997; Ringland, 2006). In simulations participants
cannot view issues solely from either their own perspective or that of one dominant
stakeholder (Geurts et al. 2007). Policy simulations enable the seeking of Consensus Games are popular because historically
people seek and enjoy the tension of competition, positive rivalry and the procedural justice of impartiality in safe and regulated
environments. As
in games, simulations temporarily remove the participants from their daily
routines, political pressures, and the restrictions of real-life protocols. In consensus building,
participants engage in extensive debate and need to act on a shared set of meanings and beliefs to guide the
policy process in the desired direction
State is inevitable and best agent of change – engagement is key
Rorty 98 - (Richard, Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford, Achieving Our Country)
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics.
government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent
capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It
The trouble with this claim is that the
is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up
a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich
do not think any replacements are needed, and they
are likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that “the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism,” but it remains
the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about social justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking
beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx’s philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally
irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of
resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the
cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semi-conscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This
Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to
construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the
academy – and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a
nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any
effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard’s account of America
as Disneyland – as a country of simulacra—and and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people
who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing
would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The
existence of such a list – endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of
professional people and of those who clean the professionals’ toilets – might revitalize leftist politics.
2NC Stasis
Policy debate is good for education, the development of empathy, and producing real
world engagement from participants. Clear rules, a stable topic, and institutional role
playing and simulation are integral to the process. The things you criticize about
debate make it a unique exercise in active learning.
Lantis 8 (Jeffrey S. Lantis is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Chair of the
International Relations Program at The College of Wooster, “The State of the Active Teaching
and Learning Literature”,
http://www.isacompss.com/info/samples/thestateoftheactiveteachingandlearningliterature_sa
mple.pdf)
Simulations, games, and role-play represent a third important set of active teaching and learning
approaches. Educational objectives include deepening conceptual understandings of a particular phenomenon,
sets of interactions, or socio-political processes by using student interaction to bring abstract
concepts to life. They provide students with a real or imaginary environment within which to act
out a given situation (Crookall 1995; Kaarbo and Lantis 1997; Kaufman 1998; Jefferson 1999; Flynn 2000; Newmann and
Twigg 2000; Thomas 2002; Shellman and Turan 2003; Hobbs and Moreno 2004; Wheeler 2006; Kanner 2007; Raymond and
Sorensen 2008). The aim is to enable students to actively experience, rather than read or hear about, the
“constraints and motivations for action (or inaction) experienced by real players” (Smith and Boyer
1996:691), or to think about what they might do in a particular situation that the instructor has dramatized
for them. As Sutcliffe (2002:3) emphasizes, “Remote theoretical concepts can be given life by placing them in a situation with
which students are familiar.” Such exercises capitalize on the strengths of active learning techniques:
creating memorable experiential learning events that tap into multiple senses and emotions by utilizing visual
and verbal stimuli. Early examples of simulations scholarship include works by Harold Guetzkow and colleagues, who created
the Inter-Nation Simulation (INS) in the 1950s. This work sparked wider interest in political simulations as teaching
and research tools. By the 1980s, scholars had accumulated a number of sophisticated simulations of
international politics, with names like “Crisis,” “Grand Strategy,” “ICONS,” and “SALT III.” More recent
literature on simulations stresses opportunities to reflect dynamics faced in the real world by
individual decision makers, by small groups like the US National Security Council, or even global summits organized
around international issues, and provides for a focus on contemporary global problems (Lantis et al.
2000; Boyer 2000). Some of the most popular simulations involve modeling international organizations, in particular United
Nations and European Union simulations (Van Dyke et al. 2000; McIntosh 2001; Dunn 2002; Zeff 2003; Switky 2004; Chasek
2005). Simulations may be employed in one class meeting, through one week, or even over an entire semester.
Alternatively, they may be designed to take place outside of the classroom in local, national, or international
competitions. The scholarship on the use of games in international studies sets these approaches apart slightly from
simulations. For example, Van Ments (1989:14) argues that games
are structured systems of competitive
play with specific defined endpoints or solutions that incorporate the material to be learnt.
They are similar to simulations, but contain specific structures or rules that dictate what it means to
“win” the simulated interactions. Games place the participants in positions to make choices
that 10 affect outcomes, but do not require that they take on the persona of a real world actor. Examples range from
interactive prisoner dilemma exercises to the use of board games in international studies classes (Hart and Simon 1988; Marks
1998; Brauer and Delemeester 2001; Ender 2004; Asal 2005; Ehrhardt 2008) A final subset of this type of approach is the roleplay. Like simulations, roleplay places students within a structured environment and asks them to
take on a specific role. Role-plays differ from simulations in that rather than having their actions prescribed by a set of
well-defined preferences or objectives, role-plays provide more leeway for students to think about how
they might act when placed in the position of their slightly less well-defined persona (Sutcliffe 2002).
Role-play allows students to create their own interpretation of the roles because of role-play’s less “goal oriented” focus. The
primary aim of the role-play is to dramatize for the students the relative positions of the actors
involved and/or the challenges facing them (Andrianoff and Levine 2002). This dramatization can be very simple
(such as roleplaying a two-person conversation) or complex (such as role-playing numerous actors interconnected within a
network). The reality of the scenario and its proximity to a student’s personal experience is also
flexible. While few examples of effective roleplay that are clearly distinguished from simulations or games have been
published, some recent
work has laid out some very useful role-play exercises with clear procedures
for use in the international studies classroom (Syler et al. 1997; Alden 1999; Johnston 2003; Krain and Shadle
2006; Williams 2006; Belloni 2008). Taken as a whole, the applications and procedures for simulations, games, and role-play
are well detailed in the active teaching and learning literature. Experts recommend a set of core considerations
that should be taken into account when designing effective simulations (Winham 1991; Smith and Boyer
1996; Lantis 1998; Shaw 2004; 2006; Asal and Blake 2006; Ellington et al. 2006). These include building the simulation
design around specific educational objectives, carefully selecting the situation or topic to be
addressed, establishing the needed roles to be played by both students and instructor, providing
clear rules, specific instructions and background material, and having debriefing and assessment
plans in place in advance. There are also an increasing number of simulation designs published and disseminated in the
discipline, whose procedures can be adopted (or adapted for use) depending upon an instructor’s educational objectives
(Beriker and Druckman 1996; Lantis 1996; 1998; Lowry 1999; Boyer 2000; Kille 2002; Shaw 2004; Switky and Aviles 2007;
Tessman 2007; Kelle 2008). Finally, there is growing attention in this literature to assessment. Scholars have found that
these methods are particularly effective in bridging the gap between academic knowledge
and everyday life. Such exercises also lead to enhanced student interest in the topic, the
development of empathy, and acquisition and retention of knowledge.
Competition in debate is good—it encourages education, strong community, and increases
quality of work
GILLESPIE AND GORDON 2006 (William and Elizabeth, Kennesaw State University, “Competition, Role-Playing, and
Political Science Education,” Sep 1,
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/5/1/0/0/pages151007/p151007-1.php)
But, for the most part, coaches report that the
competitive element enhances learning in several ways. First,
motivates their students to put in the time and do their best
work. Some indicate that no other means of motivation is as effective. Engaging in competition allows
students to measure their progress. It also provides a goal, raises the stakes of the activity, and
provides more rewards. Second, as one coach said, “the activity faithfully recreates many of the
dynamics of the adversarial model, and my students report learning a lot.” For the goal of substantive
learning about how American law functions, especially in litigation, competition is an essential
element. Mock trial allows students to experience some of the processes, constraints, and emotions associated with competition
in a courtroom. Third, the stress of competition itself helps students gain flexibility and adaptability.
Many coaches mention the ability to “think on one’s feet” as a skill that students acquire in the
fluid environment of a mock trial competition. “Competition enhances the learning experience. The
students seem to absorb lessons more quickly and thoroughly under fire,” writes one coach. Another
writes: “They also learn to adjust and adapt quickly to the different evaluators. That is something
they don't get from their regular classes.” Fourth, some coaches explain that competing against other
schools allows their students to learn by seeing different approaches to the same case.
many coaches perceive that competition
Representative comments along these lines include: “Students get to see what other teams do and learn from those experiences.”
“[Competition] exposes the students to different techniques and approaches that the other teams use.” Fifth, many coaches explain
that the competition
enhances camaraderie and teamwork among their students. One coach explains
that competition “gives a sense of duty to fulfill an obligation to their fellow teammates.”
“Students learn teamwork in an interactive and dynamic setting,” reports another.
2NC Switch Side Debate
Beginning this process with a topical advocacy is essential to effective dialogue
– negative strategies are constructed in expectation of refuting a topical
advocacy. Failing to present a topical advocacy denies the negative an equal
ability to voice their opinion, short-circuiting debate’s ability to serve as a
dialogue by preventing the neg from effectively informing this process
Galloway, 2007 (Ryan, professor of communication at Samford University, “Dinner
and Conversation at the Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate as an
Argumentative Dialogue,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28
(2007), p.5-7)
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair
opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their
position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set
by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact,
the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central
point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches
to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and
critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team.
According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side
takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due
to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies
the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes
this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a
dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request
for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand
that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not
be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative
strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully
participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power
(Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other
because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition
is
necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk,
among free an informed people who subordinate themselves to rules of discussion, are the best ways
to decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement
which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find
expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the
exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the
conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state
nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the
arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect.
Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case
and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team,
preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a
meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical
benefits of topical advocacy.
It is only through the process of contestation that the truth claims of the 1AC
can be verified – you cannot evaluate the affirmative in the absence of an
effective process for testing it’s epistemic merit
Galloway, 2007 (Ryan, professor of communication at Samford University, “Dinner
and Conversation at the Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate as an
Argumentative Dialogue,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28
(2007), p.7-9)
A Siren’s Call: Falsely Presuming Epistemic Benefits In
addition to the basic equity norm, dismissing the idea
that debaters defend the affirmative side of the topic encourages advocates to falsely value affirmative
speech acts in the absence of a negative response. There may be several detrimental consequences
that go unrealized in a debate where the affirmative case and plan are not topical. Without ground,
debaters may fall prey to a siren’s call, a belief that certain critical ideals and concepts are
axiological, existing beyond doubt without scrutiny. Bakhtin contends that in dialogical exchanges “the
greater the number and weight” of counter-words, the deeper and more substantial our
understanding will be (Bakhtin, 1990). The matching of the word to the counter-word should be
embraced by proponents of critical activism in the activity, because these dialogical exchanges
allow for improvements and modifications in critical arguments. Muir argues that “debate puts
students into greater contact with the real world by forcing them to read a great deal of
information” (1993, p. 285). He continues, “[t]he constant consumption of material…is significantly
constitutive. The information grounds the issues under discussion, and the process shapes the
relationship of the citizen to the public arena” (p. 285). Through the process of comprehensive understanding,
debate serves both as a laboratory and a constitutive arena. Ideas find and lose adherents. Ideas
that were once considered beneficial are modified, changed, researched again, and sometimes
discarded altogether. A central argument for open deliberation is that it encourages a superior consensus
to situations where one side is silenced. Christopher Peters contends, “The theory holds that antithesis
ultimately produces a better consensus, that the clash of differing, even opposing interests and ideas in
the process of decision making…creates decisions that are better for having been subjected to this
trial by fire” (1997, p. 336). The combination of a competitive format and the necessity to take points
of view that one does not already agree with combines to create a unique educational experience for
all participants. Those that eschew the value of such experience by an axiological position short-circuit
the benefits of the educational exchange for themselves, their opponents, as well as the judges and
observers of such debates. The Devil’s Advocate: Advancing Activism by Learning Potential
Weaknesses Willingness to argue against what one believes helps the advocate understand the
strengths and weaknesses of their own position. It opens the potential for a new synthesis of
material that is superior to the first (Dybvig & Iverson, 2000). Serving as a devil’s advocate
encourages an appreciation for middle ground and nuance (Dell, 1958). Failure to see both sides
can lead to high levels of ego involvement and dogmatism (Hicks & Greene, 2000). Survey data
confirms these conclusions. Star Muir found that debaters become more tolerant after learning
to debate both sides of an issue (Muir, 1993). Such tolerance is predictable since debate is firmly
grounded in respect for the other through the creation of a fair dialogue. Ironically, opponents
of a debate as dialogue risk falling prey to dogmatism and the requisite failure to respect
potential middle grounds. Perceiving the world through the lens of contingency and probability
can be beneficial to real-world activism when its goal is creating consensus out of competing
interests. The anti-oppression messages of critical teams would benefit from a thorough
investigation of such claims, and not merely an untested axiological assumption.
We should play Devil’s advocate—failure to present an alternative, worst-case look at their
ideas only silences dissent, makes them hard to implement, and allows flaws to slip through
CHANDRA 2008 (Sarvajeet,
Managing Partner in Master Sun Consulting, MBA in Marketing Communications from MICA,
Ahmedabad. He is a mechanical engineer from MS University, “Role of Strategy Execution Team - Be a Devil's Advocate, Bad News
Messenger,” Dec 17, http://ezinearticles.com/?Role-of-Strategy-Execution-Team---Be-a-Devils-Advocate,-Bad-NewsMessenger&id=1797944)
Become a Devil's Advocate to a Specific Strategy and look at the What Will Go Wrong We are all
over-confident and over-optimistic beings. While that has spurred us on as a civilization, this over-confidence gets
translated into strategic choices or strategic plans that we make. Most of us tend to believe in the
veracity of our ideas, tenacity of our plans and our destiny to win (regardless of market condition and competitive activity) It
is the job of the execution team therefore to assume the role of a Devil's advocate. It is the job of the execution team to do so, since
they have to drive the execution. They have to question the unrealistically precise estimates of time, resources and targets. They
have to imagine a worst case scenario (most strategists do not come up with very gloomy worst case scenarios).
Someone has to be given the role of challenging the false consensus or group-think that may
have cause the dissenters to stay quiet. The execution team has to confront and ensure that worst case
scenarios is put on the table. This will help the strategy become more 'implementable', give the
strategic plan more flexibility and force the strategists to become more realistic. However for this to
happen the management must encourage the culture of challenge and recognize the role of the strategy execution team as a '
Devil's Advocate'
2NC T-Versions
A topical version of the aff could be to impose tougher restrictions and
definitions on fusion centers, which have too little oversight and too much
flexibility in the status quo allowing for surveillance of people based on race,
religion or ideological association
Monahan in 11 - Associate Professor of Human and Organizational Development and Medicine
at Vanderbilt University. Member of the International Surveillance Studies Network <Torin. “The
Future of Security? Surveillance Operations at Homeland Security Fusion Centers” Social Justice
Vol. 37, Nos. 2–3 (2010–2011) Pgs 84-94>
**fusion center = center established for information sharing purposes between agencies such as
the CIA, FBI, U.S. Military and state/local governments
Given the secretive nature of fusion centers, including their resistance to freedom of
information requests (German and Stanley, 2008; Stokes, 2008), the primary way in which the
public has learned about their activities is through leaked or unintentionally disseminated
documents. For instance, a “terrorism threat assessment” produced by Virginia’s fusion center
surfaced in 2009 and sparked outrage because it identified students at colleges and
universities—especially at historically black universities—as posing a potential terrorist threat
(Sizemore, 2009). In the report, universities were targeted because of their diversity, which is
seen as threatening because it might inspire “radicalization.” The report says: “Richmond’s history as the
capital city of the Confederacy, combined with the city’s current demographic concentration of African-American residents,
contributes to the continued presence of race-based extremist groups...[and student groups] are recognized as a radicalization node
for almost every type of extremist group” (Virginia Fusion Center, 2009: 9). Although the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and
others have rightly decried the racial-profiling implications of such biased claims being codified in an official document, the report
itself supports the interpretation that minority students will be and probably have been targeted for surveillance. The report argues:
“In order to detect and deter terrorist attacks, it is essential that information regarding suspected terrorists and suspicious activity in
Virginia be closely monitored and reported in a timely manner” (Ibid: 4). Other groups identified as potential threats by the Virginia
fusion center were environmentalists, militia members, and students at Regent University, the Christian university founded by
evangelical preacher Pat Robertson (Sizemore, 2009). Another
threat-assessment report, compiled by the
Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), found “the modern militia movement” to be
worthy of Homeland Security Fusion Centers 89 focused investigation. The 2009 report
predicted a resurgence in right-wing militia activities because of high levels of unemployment
and anger at the election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, who many right-wing
militia members might view as illegitimate and/or in favor of stronger gun-control laws (Missouri Information Analysis Center, 2009).
The greatest stir caused by the report was its claim that “militia members most commonly associate with 3rd party political
groups.... These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr” (Ibid.: 7).
When the report circulated, many libertarians and “Tea Party” members took great offense, thinking the document argued that
supporters of third-party political groups were more likely to be dangerous militia members or terrorists. In response, libertarian
activists formed a national network called “Operation Defuse,” which is devoted to uncovering and criticizing the activities of fusion
centers and is actively filing open-records requests and attempting to conduct tours of fusion centers. Operation Defuse could be
construed as a “counter-surveillance” group (Monahan, 2006) that arose largely because of outrage over the probability of political
profiling by state-surveillance agents. Fusion centers have also been implicated in scandals involving covert infiltrations of
nonviolent groups, including peace-activist groups, anti-death penalty groups, animal-rights groups, Green Party groups, and others.
The most astonishing of the known cases involved the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC). In response to an ACLU
freedom of information lawsuit, it
came to light in 2008 that the Maryland State Police had conducted
covert investigations of at least 53 peace activists and anti-death penalty activists for a period of 14
months. The investigation proceeded despite admissions by the covert agent that she saw no indication of violent activities or
violent intentions on the part of group members (Newkirk, 2010). Nonetheless, in the federal database used by the police and
accessed by MCAC, activists were listed as being suspected of the “primary crime” of “Terrorism—anti-government” (German and
Stanley, 2008: 8). Although it is unclear exactly what role the fusion center played in these activities, they were most likely involved
in and aware of the investigation. After all, as Mike German and Jay Stanley (2008: 8) explain: Fusion centers are clearly intended to
be the central focal point for sharing terrorism-related information. If the MCAC was not aware of the information the state police
collected over the 14 months of this supposed terrorism investigation, this fact would call into question whether the MCAC is
accomplishing its mission. Police spying of this sort, besides being illegal absent “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing, could have a
“chilling effect” on free speech and freedom of association. The fact that individuals were wrongly labeled as terrorists in these
systems and may still be identified as such could also have negative ramifications for them far into the future. Another dimension of
troubling partnerships between fusion centers and law enforcement was revealed with the 2007 arrest of Kenneth Krayeske, a
Green Party member in Connecticut. On January 3, 2007, Krayeske was taking photographs of Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell at
her inaugural parade. He was not engaged in protest at the time. While serving as the manager of the Green Party’s gubernatorial
candidate, he had publicly challenged Governor Rell over the issue of why she would not debate his candidate (Levine, 2007). At the
parade, police promptly arrested Krayeske (after he took 23 photographs) and later charged him with “Breach of Peace” and
“Interfering with Police” (Ibid.). Connecticut’s fusion center, the Connecticut Intelligence Center (CTIC), had conducted a threat
assessment for the event and had circulated photographs of Krayeske and others to police in advance (Krayeske, 2007). The police
report reads: “The Connecticut Intelligence Center and the Connecticut State Police Central Intelligence Unit had briefed us [the
police] on possible threats to Governor Rell by political activist [sic], to include photographs of the individuals. One of the
photographs was of the accused Kenneth Krayeske” (quoted in Levine, 2007). Evidently, part of the reason Krayeske was targeted
was that intelligence analysts, most likely at the fusion center, were monitoring blog posts on the Internet and interpreted one of
them as threatening: “Who is going to protest the inaugural ball with me?... No need to make nice” (CNN.com, 2009). According to a
CNN report on the arrest, after finding that blog post, “police began digging for information, mining public and commercial data
bases. They learned Krayeske had been a Green Party campaign director, had protested the gubernatorial debate and had once been
convicted for civil disobedience. He had no history of violence” (Ibid.). The person who read Krayeske his Miranda rights and
attempted to interview him in custody was Andrew Weaver, a sergeant for the City of Hartford Police Department who also works in
the CTIC fusion center (Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, 2008). These
few examples
demonstrate some of the dangers and problems with fusion centers. Fusion center threat
assessments lend themselves to profiling along lines of race, religion, and political affiliation.
Their products are not impartial assessments of terrorist threats, but rather betray biases
against individuals or groups who deviate from—or challenge—the status quo. According to a
Washington Times commentary that became a focal point for a congressional hearing on fusion
centers, as long as terrorism is defined as coercive or intimidating acts that are intended to
shape government policy, “any dissidence or political dissident is suspect to fusion centers”
(Fein, 2009). Evidence from the Maryland and Connecticut fusion center cases suggests that their representatives are either involved
in data-gathering and investigative work, or are at least complicit in such activities, including illegal spying operations (German and
Stanley, 2008). The Connecticut case further shows that individuals working at fusion centers are actively monitoring online sources
and Homeland Security Fusion Centers 91 interviewing suspects, a departure from the official Fusion Center Guidelines that stress
“exchange” and “analysis” of data, not data acquisition through investigations (U.S. Department of Justice, 2006). One important
issue here is that fusion centers occupy ambiguous organizational positions. Many of them are located in police departments or are
combined with FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, but their activities are supposed to be separate and different from the routine
activities of the police or the FBI. A related complication is that fusion center employees often occupy multiple organizational roles
(e.g., police officers or National Guard members and fusion center analysts), which can lead to an understandable, but nonetheless
problematic, blurring of professional identities, rules of conduct, and systems of accountability. Whereas
in 2010 DHS and
the Department of Justice responded to concerns about profiling by implementing a civil
liberties certification requirement for fusion centers, public oversight and accountability of
fusion centers are becoming even more difficult and unlikely because of a concerted effort to
exempt fusion centers from freedom of information requests. For example, according to a police official,
Virginia legislators were coerced into passing a 2008 law that exempted its fusion center from the Freedom of Information Act; in
this instance, federal officials threatened to withhold classified intelligence from the state’s fusion center and police if they did not
pass such a law (German and Stanley, 2008). Another tactic used by fusion center representatives to thwart open-records requests is
to claim that there is no “material product” for them to turn over because they only “access,” rather than “retain,” information
(Hylton, 2009). Although it may be tempting to view these cases of fusion center missteps and infractions as isolated examples, they
are probably just the tip of the iceberg. A handful of other cases has surfaced recently in which fusion centers in California, Colorado,
Texas, Pennsylvania, and Georgia have recommended peace activists, Muslim-rights groups, and/or environmentalists be profiled
(German, 2009; Wolfe, 2009). The Texas example reveals the ways in which the
flexibility of fusion centers affords
the incorporation of xenophobic and racist beliefs. In 2009, the North Central Texas Fusion
System produced a report that argued that the United States is especially vulnerable to terrorist
infiltration because the country is too tolerant and accommodating of religious difference,
especially of Islam. Through several indicators, the report lists supposed signs that the country is gradually being invaded and
transformed: “Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis refuse to carry passengers who have alcohol in their possession; the Indianapolis
airport in 2007 installed footbaths to accommodate Muslim prayer; public schools schedule prayer breaks to accommodate Muslim
students; pork is banned in the workplace; etc.” (North Central Texas Fusion System, 2009: 4). Because “the threats to Texas are
significant,” the fusion center advises keeping an eye out for Muslim civil liberties groups and sympathetic individuals, organizations,
or media that might carry their message: hip-hop bands, social networking sites, online chat forums, blogs, and even the U.S.
Department of Treasury (Ibid.). Recent
infiltration of peace groups seems to reproduce some of the
sordid history of political surveillance of U.S. citizens, such as the FBI and CIA’s COINTELPRO
program, which targeted civil rights leaders and those peacefully protesting against the Vietnam
War, among others (Churchill and Vander Wall, 2002). A contemporary case involves a U.S. Army agent who infiltrated a
nonviolent, anti-war protest group in Olympia, Washington, in 2007. A military agent spying on civilians likely violated the Posse
Comitatus Act. Moreover, this agent actively shared intelligence with the Washington State Fusion Center, which shared it more
broadly (Anderson, 2010). According to released documents, intelligence representatives from as far away as New Jersey were kept
apprised of the spying: In a 2008 e-mail to an Olympia police officer, Thomas Glapion, Chief of Investigations and Intelligence at New
Jersey’s McGuire Air Force Base, wrote: “You are now part of my Intel network. I’m still looking at possible protests by the PMR SDS
MDS and other left wing antiwar groups so any Intel you have would be appreciated.... In return if you need anything from the
Armed Forces I will try to help you as well” (Ibid.: 4). Given that political surveillance under COINTELPRO is widely considered to be a
dark period in U.S. intelligence history, the fact that fusion centers may be contributing to similar practices today makes it all the
more important to subject them to public scrutiny and oversight.
Another topical version of the aff could be to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to
review biased surveillance of activists and oversight enforcement
Pasquale in 14 - Professor of Law at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of
Law <Frank. “We must confront the recent surveillance abuses to develop better policy moving
forward” January 2014.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/58503/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_reposi
tory_Content_American%20Politics%20and%20Policy_2014_January_blogs.lse.ac.ukWe_must_confront_the_recent_surveillance_abuses_to_develop_better_policy_moving_forwa
rd.pdf>
In his recent speech on surveillance, President Obama treated the misuse of intelligence gathering as a relic of American history. It
was something done in the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover, and never countenanced by recent administrations. But the
accumulation of menacing stories—from fusion centers to “joint terrorism task forces” to a New
York “demographics unit” targeting Muslims—is impossible to ignore. The American Civil
Liberties Union has now collected instances of police surveillance and obstruction of First
Amendment‐protected activity in over half the states. From Alaska (where military intelligence spied on an
antiwar group) to Florida (where Quakers and anti-globalization activists were put on watchlists), protesters have been considered
threats, rather than citizens exercising core constitutional rights. Political dissent is a routine target for surveillance by the FBI.
Admittedly, I am unaware of the NSA itself engaging in politically driven spying on American citizens. Charles Krauthammer says
there has not been a “single case” of abuse. But the NSA is only one part of the larger story of intelligence gathering in the US, which
involves over 1,000 agencies and nearly 2,000 private companies. Moreover, we
have little idea of exactly how
information and requests flow between agencies. Consider the Orwellian practice of “parallel construction.”
Reuters has reported that the NSA gave “tips” to the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Drug Enforcement Administration,
which also shared them with the Internal Revenue Service. The
legal status of such information sharing is murky
at best: the national security data is not supposed to be used for law enforcement purposes.
Apparently the SOD sidestepped these niceties by re-creating criminal investigations from scratch, fabricating alternative grounds
for suspecting the targets. Thus the “parallel construction” of two realities for the law enforcers: one actual, secret record of how
targets were selected, and another specially crafted for consumption by courts. Two senior Drug Enforcement Administration
officials defended the program and called it legal, but did not disclose their reasoning. At present, the practice looks like little more
than intelligence laundering. Five senators asked the Department of Justice to assess the legality of “parallel construction;” it has yet
to respond. I have little doubt that the DEA used parallel construction in cases involving some pretty nasty characters. It must be
tempting to apply “war on terror” tactics to the “war on drugs.” Nevertheless, there are serious legal and ethical concerns here. One
of the American revolutionaries’ chief complaints against the British Crown was the indiscriminate use of “general warrants,” which
allowed authorities to search the homes of anyone without particularized suspicion they had committed a crime. Thus the 4th
Amendment to the US Constitution decrees that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause.” Law enforcers aren’t supposed to set up “dragnet surveillance” of every communication,
or use whatever data stores are compiled by the National Security Agency, unless there is a true
security threat. Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program engaged in domestic covert action designed to
disrupt groups engaged in the civil rights, antiwar, and communist movements. As Lawrence Rosenthal has observed, “History
reflects a serious risk of abuse in investigations based on the protected speech of the targets,” and politicians at the time responded.
Reviewing intelligence agency abuses from that time period, the Church Committee issued a series of damning reports in 1975-76,
leading to some basic reforms. If a new Church Committee were convened, it would have to cover much of the same ground.
Moreover, it would need to put in place real
safeguards against politicized (or laundered) domestic
intelligence gathering. Those are presently lacking. I have yet to find a case where the parties involved in any of the
intelligence politicization (or laundering) were seriously punished. Nor have I seen evidence that the victims of such incidents have
received just compensation for the unwarranted intrusion on their affairs. Before
we can develop better surveillance
policy, we need something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to review (and rebuke) the
politicization of intelligence gathering post-9/11. Too many privacy activists have been unwilling to admit the
persistence of catastrophic threats that may only be detected by spies. But the US government has been even less
moored to reality, unwilling to admit that a runaway surveillance state has engaged in precisely the
types of activities that the Bill of Rights is designed to prevent. To have a debate about the
proper balance between liberty and security, we need to confront the many cases where
misguided intelligence personnel spied on activists with neither goal in mind.
2NC Turns Case
Secrecy and abuse of power in government surveillance are caused by vague
legal codes – changing the law is necessary to effectively curtail surveillance
White in 8 <Scott. “Academia, Surveillance, and the FBI: A Short History” Surveillance and
Governance: Crime Control and Beyond
Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 10, 151–174>
One of the more troubling aspects of the law for librarians was the secrecy written into the
legislative code of the Patriot Act, in the form of a ‘‘gag rule’’ in section 215 (Schulhofer, 2002). Businesses or
libraries contacted during terrorism related investigations were prohibited from disclosing any
details about an FBI visit, as it could have compromised investigations. In the original Patriot Act, section 215 read as
follows: (Sec. 215.501.(d)) No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible
things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section. (USA
PATRIOT Act, 2001) In a previous part of Sec. 215, the law states: Sec. 215.501.(c)(1) Upon an application made pursuant to this
section, the judge shall enter an ex parte order as requested, or as modified, approving the release of records if the judge finds that
the application meets the requirements of this section. Examining the language in these two sections, one could surmise that a
judge is required to grant a surveillance order if it meets pre-determined criteria, and no one can talk about the order after the
surveillance is executed. The
text of Section 215 made it unclear what would happen if someone were
to disclose that the FBI had asked for information from a business or library when conducting a
terrorism investigation (Albitz, 2005; Jaeger et al., 2003). Many librarians believed this rule concentrated broad
power in the hands of the executive branch of the government, and did not adequately protect library users
from unwarranted FBI surveillance (Foerstel, 2004; Klinefelter, 2004). While it is often necessary for investigations to remain secret,
Section 215, as originally written, diminished the ability to conduct proper judicial and
legislative oversight of FBI surveillance activities (Swire, 2005). In its original form, Section 215 of the Patriot Act
conflicted with state privacy laws requiring court orders to allow librarians to disclose information about personal library records
(Foerstel, 2004). Confusion arose regarding how librarians should respond to a request for information from the FBI. For example,
could managers discuss the order with their directors, or the directors with a legal entity
representing the organization? The gag rule suggested that when someone is asked for
information, they could not disclose any information concerning the request. The potential for
abuse by investigators is large, but could remain undetected, given the way the law is written.
Unauthorized, invasive surveillance is coded in the law – loose definitions and expansions in
government authority are what create injustice which means engaging the state is key
Rackow in 2 - B.A. 1998, Williams College; J.D. Candidate 2003, University of Pennsylva <Sharon.
”How the USA Patriot Act Will Permit Governmental Infringement upon the Privacy of
Americans in the Name of "Intelligence" Investigations” University of Pennsylvania Law Review,
Vol. 150, No. 5 (May, 2002), pp. 1651-1696>
Section 218 of the USA PATRIOT Act amends FISA ? 1804(a) (7) (B). Now, in an application to the FISC, a federal
officer no longer has to demonstrate that "the purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign
intelligence information,",132 but may obtain surveillance authorization under the less stringent
showing that "a significant purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign intelligence
information."'133 This slight alteration in the language of 1804 is highly significant in that it is
extremely likely to increase the types of court ordered investigations that are carried out in
the name of "foreign intelligence investigations" under FISA. Considering the fact that the FISC has only
turned down one surveillance application since its inception,134 it becomes even more likely that
the court will authorize all forthcoming applications under this more lenient standard. The concern
raised by this amendment is that under the new broadened scope of ? 1804, both intelligence and law enforcement agents will bring
applications for electronic surveillance to the FISC when the primary purpose of the surveillance is an investigation of criminal
activities. Thus, the
amended FISA will be used as a means to undertake surveillance without
demonstrating the heightened standard of probable cause required under Title III for criminal
wiretaps. This potential end-run around the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement for criminal investigations
contradicts the rationale for permitting a lower threshold for obtaining FISA wiretaps. No longer will this lesser standard
solely authorize investigations of primarily foreign intelligence activities where the rights of
Americans are generally not implicated. Instead, FISA will be employed to approve investigations
of predominantly criminal activities, including purely domestic criminal acts-in explicit violation
of the Fourth Amendment.135 Now, under section 218 a criminal investigation can be the primary purpose of a FISA
investigation, with foreign intelligence information as a secondary, albeit "significant purpose."'36 Senator Leahy recognized that by
amending the language of FISA, "the USA ActI37 would make it easier for the FBI to use a FISA wiretap to obtain information where
the Government's most important motivation for the wiretap is for use in a criminal prosecution."'38 The Senator further
acknowledged that "[t] his is a disturbing and dangerous change in the law."139 Furthermore, as
the USA PATRIOT Act's
amendment to FISA does not provide a definition of "significant purpose," it is unclear how far
the FISC will stretch its interpretation of this phrase to accommodate law enforcement and
intelligence agencies in their quest to increase surveillance as a response to the September 11th
terrorist attacks. Yet, the consequences of this amendment to FISA go far beyond investigations of the September 11th
tragedy. Now, surveillance authority for investigations seeking information primarily pertaining to
purely domestic criminal activities may be granted under FISA with no showing of probable
cause that a serious crime has been or will soon be committed.
A2 Kappeler
Kappeler is wrong – roleplaying is key to democracy and engagement
Rawls 99 (John, Professor Emeritus – Harvard University, The Law of Peoples, p. 54-7)
Developing the Law of Peoples within a liberal conception of justice, we work out the ideals and principles of the foreign policy of a reasonably just
liberal people. I distinguish between the public reason of liberal peoples and the public reason of the Society of Peoples. The first is the public reason of
equal citizens of domestic society debating the constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice concerning their own government; the second is
the public reason of free and equal liberal peoples debating their mutual relations as peoples. The Law of Peoples with its political concepts and
principles, ideals and criteria, is the content of this latter public reason. Although these two public reasons do not have the same content, the role of
public reason among free and equal peoples is analogous to its role in a constitutional democratic regime among free and equal citizens. Political
liberalism proposes that, in a constitutional democratic regime, comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right are to be replaced in public reason by an
idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. Here note the parallel: public reason is invoked by members of the Society of
Peoples, and its principles are addressed to peoples as peoples. They are not expressed in terms of comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right, which
may hold sway in this or that society, but in terms that can be shared by different peoples. 6.2. Ideal of Public Reason. Distinct from the idea of public
ideal of public reason. In domestic society this ideal is realized, or satisfied, whenever judges, legislators, chief
executives, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the idea of public reason and explain to
other citizens their reasons for supporting fundamental political questions in terms of the political conception of justice that
reason is the
they regard as the most reasonable. In this way they fulfill what I shall call their duty of civility to one another and to other citizens. Hence whether
judges, legislators, and chief executives act from and follow public reason is continually shown in their speech and conduct. How is the ideal of public
reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative government, citizens vote for representatives-chief executives,
legislators, and the like-not for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote directly on referenda questions, which are not
usually fundamental questions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally,
citizens are to think of themselves as if they were
legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most
reasonable to enact.7l When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate
government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of
liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their
duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government
officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it
would be incompatible with freedom of speech.
Also that turns the case – key to social change
Milbrath ’96
(Lester W., Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology – SUNY Buffalo, Building Sustainable Societies, Ed.
Pirages, p. 289)
In some respects personal change cannot be separated from societal change. Societal transformation will not be successful without
change at the personal level; such change is a necessary but not sufficient step on the route to sustainability. People hoping to live
sustainably must adopt new beliefs, new values, new lifestyles, and new worldview. But lasting
personal change is
unlikely without simultaneous transformation of the socioeconomic/political system in which people
function. Persons may solemnly resolve to change, but that resolve is likely to weaken as they perform daytoday within a system reinforcing different beliefs and values. Change agents typically are met with
denial and great resistance. Reluctance to challenge mainstream society is the major reason most efforts emphasizing
education to bring about change are ineffective. If societal transformation must be speedy, and most of us believe it
must, pleading with individuals to change is not likely to be effective.
Cap
Link – General
The focus on racialized surveillance becomes an alibi for acquiescence of class struggles – they
obscure the logic of capital and ensure repetition of oppression
Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'Ud, The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production": In
the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left," College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 3, The Politics of Teaching
Literature 2 (Oct., 1994),pp. 92-114)
Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of "production" as the determining force in organizing
human societies and their institutions, and its insistence on "consumption" and "distribution" as the
driving force of the social.5 The argument of the post-al left (briefly) is that "labor," in advanced industrial
"democracies," is superseded by "information," and consequently "knowledge" (not class struggle over the rate of
surplus labor) has become the driving force of history. The task of the post-al left is to deconstruct the "metaphysics
of labor" and consequently to announce the end of socialism and with it the "outdatedness" of the praxis of abolishing private
property (that is, congealed alienated labor) in the post-al moment. Instead of abolishing private property, an enlightened radical
democracy which is to supplant socialism (as Laclau, Mouffe, Aronowitz, Butler, and others have advised) should make property
holders of each citizen. The post-al left rejects the global objective conditions of production for the local subjective circumstances of
consumption, and its master trope is what R-4 [France] so clearly foregrounds: the (shopping) "mall"?the ultimate site of
consumption "with all latest high-tech textwares" deployed to pleasure the "body." In fact, the post-al left has "invented" a whole
new interdiscipline called "cultural studies" that provides the new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics from
"production" to "consumption." (On the political economy of "invention" in ludic theory, see Transformation 2 on "The Invention of
the Queer.") To prove its "progressiveness," the post-al left devotes most of its energies (see the writings of John Fiske, Constance
Penley, Michael Berube, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Ross, Susan Willis, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson), to demonstrate how
"consumption" is in fact an act of production and resistance to capitalism and a practice in which a Utopian vision for a society of
equality is performed! The
shift from "production" to "consumption" manifests itself in post-al left theories
through the focus on "superstructural" cultural analysis and the preoccupation not with the "political economy" ("base") but
with "representation"? for instance, of race, sexuality, environment, ethnicity, nationality, and identity. This is,
for example, one reason for [Hill's] ridiculing the "base" and "superstructure" analytical model of classical Marxism (Marx, A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) with an anecdote (the privileged mode of "argument" for the post-al left) that the
base is really not all that "basic." To adhere to the base/superstructure model for [him] is to be thrown into an "epistemological
gulag." For
the post-al left a good society is, therefore, one in which, as [France] puts it, class antagonism is
bracketed and the "surplus value" is distributed more evenly among men and women, whites and
persons of color, the lesbian and the straight. It is not a society in which "surplus value"?the exploitative
appropriation of the other's labor-is itself eliminated by revolutionary praxis. The post-al left's good society is not one in which
private ownership is obsolete and the social division of labor (class) is abolished. Rather it
is a society in which the fruit
of exploitation of the proletariat (surplus labor) is more evenly distributed and a near-equality of consumption
is established. This distributionist/consumptionist theory that underwrites the economic interests of the (upper)middle classes is the
foundation for all the texts in this exchange and their pedagogies. A good pedagogy in these texts therefore is one in which power is
distributed evenly in the classroom: a pedagogy that constructs a classroom of consensus not antagonism (thus opposition to
"politicizing the classroom" in OR-1 [Hogan]) and in which knowledge (concept) is turned through the process that OR-3
[McCormick] calls "translation"?into "consumable" EXPERIENCES. The more "intense" the experience, as the anecdotes of
[McCormick] show, the more successful the pedagogy. In short, it
is a pedagogy that removes the student
from his/her position in the social relations of production and places her/him in
the personal relation of consumption: specifically, EXPERIENCE of/as the consumption of pleasure. The
post-al logic obscures the laws of motion of capital by very specific assumptions and moves-many of which are rehearsed in
the texts here. I will discuss some of these, mention others in passing, and hint at several more. (I have provided a full account of all
these moves in my "Post-ality" in Transformation 1.) I begin by outlining the post-al assumptions that "democracy" is a never-ending,
open "dialogue" and "conversation" among multicultural citizens; that the source of social inequities is "power"; that a post-class
hegemonic "coalition," as OR-5 [Williams] calls it-and not class struggle-is the dynamics of social change; that truth (as R-l [Hill]
writes) is an "epistemological gulag"? a construct of power and thus any form of "ideology critique" that raises questions of
"falsehood" and "truth" ("false consciousness") does so through a violent exclusion of the "other" truths by, in [Williams'] words,
"staking sole legitimate claim" to the truth in question. Given the injunction of the post-al logic against binaries (truth/falsehood),
the project of "epistemology" is displaced in the ludic academy by "rhetoric." The question, consequently, becomes not so much
what is the "truth" of a practice but whether it "works." (Rhetoric has always served as an alibi for pragmatism.) Therefore, [France]
is not interested in whether my practices are truthful but in what effects they might have: if College Literature publishes my texts
would such an act (regardless of the "truth" of my texts) end up "cutting our funding?" [he] asks. A post-al leftist like [France], in
short, "resists" the state only in so far as the state does not cut [his] "funding." Similarly, it is enough for a cynical pragmatist like
[Williams] to conclude that my argument "has little prospect of effectual force" in order to disregard its truthfulness. The
post-al
dismantling of "epistemology" and the erasure of the question of "truth," it must be pointed out, is
undertaken to protect the economic interests of the ruling class. If the "truth question" is made
to seem outdated and an example of an orthodox binarism ([Hill]), any conclusions about the truth
of ruling class practices are excluded from the scene of social contestation as a violent
logocentric (positivistic) totalization that disregards the "difference" of the ruling class. This is why a
defender of the ruling class such as [Hill] sees an ideology critique aimed at unveiling false consciousness and the production of class
consciousness as a form of "epistemological spanking." It is this structure of assumptions that enables [France] to answer my
question, "What is wrong with being dogmatic?" not in terms of its truth but by reference to its pragmatics (rhetoric): what is
"wrong" with dogmatism, [he] says, is that it is violent rhetoric ("textual Chernobyl") and thus Stalinist. If I ask what is wrong with
Stalinism, again (in terms of the logic of [his] text) I will not get a political or philosophical argument but a tropological description.6
The post-al left is a New Age Left: the "new new left" privileged by [Hill] and [Williams]- the laid-back, "sensitive," listening, and
dialogic left of coalitions, voluntary work, and neighborhood activism (more on these later). It is, as I will show, antiintellectual and populist; its theory is "bite size" (mystifying, of course, who determines the "size" of the "bite"), and its model of
social change is anti-conceptual "spontaneity": May 68, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, in [Hill's] text, Chiapas. In the classroom, the
New Age post-al pedagogy inhibits any critique of the truth of students' statements and instead offers, as [McCormick] makes clear,
a "counseling," through anecdotes, concerning feelings. The
rejection of "truth" (as "epistemological gulag"?[Hill]), is
accompanied by the rejection of what the post-al left calls "economism." Furthermore, the post-al logic
relativizes subjectivities, critiques functionalist explanation, opposes "determinism," and instead of closural
readings, offers supplementary ones. It also celebrates eclecticism; puts great emphasis on the social as discourse and
on discourse as always inexhaustible by any single interpretation? discourse (the social) always "outruns" and "exceeds" its
explanation. Post-al logic is, in fact, opposed to any form of "explanation" and in favor of mimetic description: it regards
"explanation" to be the intrusion of a violent outside and "description" to be a respectful, caring attention to the immanent laws of
signification (inside). This notion of description which has by now become a new dogma in ludic feminist theory under the concept of
"mimesis" (D. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation)?regards politics to be always immanent to practices: thus the banalities about not
politicizing the classroom in [Hogan's] "anarchist" response to my text7 and the repeated opposition to binaries in all nine texts.
The opposition to binaries is, in fact, an ideological alibi for erasing class struggle, as is quite clear in
[France's] rejection of the model of a society "divided by two antagonistic classes" (see my Theory and its Other).
Class should be the starting point of this debate – the plan becomes a peace meal that
destroys attempts to overcome universal capitalist oppression
GIMENEZ (Prof. Sociology at UC Boulder) 2001
[Martha, “Marxism and Class; Gender and Race”, Race, Gender and Class, Vol. 8, p. online:
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html)
There are many competing theories of race, gender, class, American society, political economy, power, etc. but no specific theory is
invoked to define how the terms race, gender and class are used, or to identify how they are related to the rest of the social system.
To some extent, race, gender and class and their intersections and interlockings have become a mantra to be invoked in any and all
theoretical contexts, for a tacit agreement about their ubiquitousness and meaning seems to have developed among RGC studies
advocates, so that all that remains to be dome is empirically to document their intersections everywhere, for everything that
happens is, by definition, raced, classed, and gendered. This pragmatic acceptance of race, gender
and class, as
givens, results in the downplaying of theory, and the resort to experience as the source of
knowledge. The emphasis on experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as a corrective to theories that,
presumably, reflect only the experience of the powerful. RGC seems to offer a subjectivist understanding of theory as simply a
reflection of the experience and consciousness of the individual theorist, rather than as a body of propositions which is collectively
and systematically produced under historically specific conditions of possibility which grant them historical validity for as long as
those conditions prevail. Instead, knowledge and theory are pragmatically conceived as the products or reflection of experience and,
as such, unavoidably partial, so that greater accuracy and relative completeness can be approximated only through gathering the
experiential accounts of all groups. Such is the importance given to the role of experience in the production of knowledge that in the
eight page introduction to the first section of an RGC anthology, the word experience is repeated thirty six times (Andersen and
Collins, 1995: 1-9). I
agree with the importance of learning from the experience of all groups,
especially those who have been silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the effects of
ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To learn how people describe their understanding
of their lives is very illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -- real or illusory -- of (our) actual relations and activities"
(Marx, 1994: 111), because "social existence determines consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given that our existence is shaped by the
capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in
the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience
in itself, however, is suspect because,
dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing and,
at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which
individuals may know little or nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick,
"Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow, Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in
contemporary RGC and feminist research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973: 37- 49). Given the
emancipatory goals of the RGC perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist
theory that it can move
forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor. This would
require, however, a) a rethinking and modification of the postulated relationships between race, class
and gender, and b) a reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located at the
intersection of these structures, all social relations and interactions are "raced," "classed," and
"gendered." In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class are presented as equivalent systems of
oppression with extremely negative consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization of the connections
between these systems require "a working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997:74). Whether or not it is possible to view class
as just another system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within the traditional
sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population aggregates
ranked on the basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference
between gradational and relational concepts of class, see Ossowski, 1963). Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no
claims to being more fundamental than gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place
individuals within an aggregate or strata arbitrarily defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research purposes,
anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be identified). From the standpoint of Marxist theory, however, class
is qualitatively different from gender and race and cannot be considered just another system
of oppression. As Eagleton points out, whereas racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even
though socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was instrumental in ushering a new era in
historical development, one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put forth the ideals of
liberty, equality and fraternity. Today, however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and deepens the rule of
capital over the entire globe. The working class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against capital and,
consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996: 57). While racism
and sexism have no redeeming
feature, class relations are, dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and,
objectively, a site where the potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class
is the fundamental agent of change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The working class is of
course composed of women and men who belong to different races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures,
and so forth, so that gender and racial/ethnic struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given the patterns of
wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial
struggles are overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members of the working class, people who need to work for
economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class exploitation matter. But this vision of a
mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not subsumed but are nevertheless related requires a class conscious
effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC remains a neutral concept, open
to any and all theoretical meanings, just one oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary potential.
Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds
for my argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very assumptions of
RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity
of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves,
so that while one person might think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class,"
highlight the basic issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power
relations underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness
of power ought not to obfuscate the fact that some power relations are more important and consequential than others. For
example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor
or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In my view, the flattening or erasure of the
qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the recognition that it is
important to deal with "basic relations of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class relations. In
the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the RGC
perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating some
other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to the relations between capitalist and wage
workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in
"contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) -- are of paramount importance, for most people's economic survival is determined by
them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that
power is used is through their choosing the identity they impute their workers. Whatever identity
workers might
claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and "read" their "doings" differently as
"raced" or "gendered" or both, rather than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and
the class nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce"
gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless"
power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in
"intersectionality" is class power.
Link – Race Focus
Racism was create to protect the labor production of chattel slavery – it was
manufactured by elites as a means of protecting their interests – anti-racism
strategies are co-opted and divide resistance – universal consciousness is key
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle Alexander is an associate professor
of law at Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has
worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has
served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law
School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)
The concept of race is a relatively recent development. Only in the past few centuries, owing
largely to European imperialism, have the world’s people been classified along racial lines. Here, in
America, the idea of race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery- as well as the extermination of American Indians – with
the ideals of freedom preached by whites in the new colonies. In
the early colonial period, when settlements remained
relatively small, indentured servitude was the dominant means of securing cheap labor. Under this system, whites and blacks
struggled to survive against a common enemy, what historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes as “the big planter
apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.” Initially, blacks brought to this country
were not all enslaved; many were treated as indentured servants. As plantation farming expanded, particularly tobacco
and cotton farming, demand increased greatly for both labor and land. The demand for land was met by invading and
conquering larger and large swaths of territory. American Indians became a growing impediment to white European “progress,” and
during this period, the images of American Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative. As
sociologists Keith Kilty and Eric Swank have observed, eliminating “savages” is less of a moral problem than eliminating human
beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race- uncivilized savages- thus providing a justification for
the extermination of the native peoples. The growing demand for labor on plantations was met through slavery.
American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves, largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear
of raids by Indian tribes left plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free labor. European immigrants were also
deemed poor candidates for slavery, not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement
would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation owners thus view Africans, who were
relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The systemic enslavement of Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage,
emerged with all deliberate speed- quickened by events such as Bacon’s
Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a white property
owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to united slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a
revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite. Although slaves clearly occupied the lowest
position in the social hierarchy and suffered the most under the plantation, the condition of indentured whites
was barely better, and the majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty. As explained by historian Edmund
Morgan, in colonies like Virginia, the planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a vastly superior position to
workers of all colors. Southern colonies did not hesitate to invent ways to extend the terms of servitude, and the planter
class accumulated uncultivated lands to restrict the options of free workers. The simmering resentment against the
planter class created conditions that were ripe for revolt. Varying accounts of Bacon’s rebellion abound, but the
basic facts are these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to acquire more property for himself
and others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia support for his scheme,
Bacon retaliated, leading to an attack on the elite, their homes, and their property. He openly condemned the rich for
their oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond laborers, as well as slaves,
who demanded an end to their servitude. The attempted revolution was ended by force and false promises
of amnesty. A number of the people who participated in the revolt were hanged. The events in Jamestown
were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers
and slave. Word of Bacon’s rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type
followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted
their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of
the importation of more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves from the West Indies, who were more likely to be
familiar with European language and culture, many more slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier
to control and far less likely to form alliances with poor whites. Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient to
protect
their interests, the planter class took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later come to be
known as a “racial bribe.” Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special
privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White
settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols
and militias, and barriers were created so
that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave
labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves
and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a racebased system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not
slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the logic of their
situation and sought ways to expand their racially privileged position. By the mid-1770s, the system
of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The
degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even
more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized
the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for
all. Before democracy, chattel slavery was born.
Their account of race erases connection to economics – this masks class based
violence and allows it to continue
Young 6
(Robert, Prof. Critical Studies at Oxford, “Putting Materialism Back Into Race Theory”, Red
Critique, Spring)
I foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts
of race, which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance, humanism and
poststructuralism represent two dominant views on race in the contemporary academy. Even though they
articulate very different theoretical positions, they produce similar ideological effects: the suppression of
economics. They collude in redirecting attention away from the logic of capitalist exploitation and
point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference (poststructuralism). In developing my
project, I critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary instances of humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race,
especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and, in doing so, I
foreground the historically
determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this link that forms the core of what I am calling a
transformative theory of race. The transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of democratic
multiculturalism, ultimately, requires the transformation of capitalism.
Capitalism racializes subjects to entrench competition and destroy class
consciousness – it produces white supremacy to paper over class contradictions
SAN JUAN 3
[E., Fulbright Lecturer @ Univ. of Leuven, Belgium, “Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A
Re-Articulation”, p. online: http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html)
It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical circumstances change
gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal
or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class
exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It
is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen
and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the
routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist
relations of exploitation and domination. 30. We might take a passage from Marx as a source of
guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of racism which is not empiricist but
dialectical in aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historically informed and configured
determinations. This passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains why the Irish
struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat: . . . Every industrial and commercial center in England
possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker
hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of
the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening
their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards
him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back
with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the
disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It
is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993). Here
Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism in modern capitalist society. First,
the economic competition among workers is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the
labor-market via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is
contextualized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers, which can be
manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white workers, with
their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or
compensation. Like
religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the
real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class reinforces
and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its
ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide. 31. Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in
which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in
recent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear
social movements (Bottomore 1983). The
concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that
subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or
"submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective
agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center
and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from
colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in
prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten
million persons and growing). National
oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class
exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the
domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nationstate acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism
arose with the creation and
expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived
as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social
organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as
collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the
exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political
segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994).
Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together
with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value
and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic groups are placed in
relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions.Within
this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men
allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation
of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because
they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily
structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence
race relations and
race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given
society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class
exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world
system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of
domination and subordination.
Link - Surveillance
The aff doesn’t challenge imperialism it recreates it – without first addressing
the system of capitalism the discourse produced by the aff is commodified and
used in order to justify US moral superiority and invasions – only challenging
the economic incentive for those invasions stops violence
Monahan in 6 - Associate Professor of Human and Organizational Development and Medicine at
Vanderbilt University. Member of the International Surveillance Studies Network <Torin.
“Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention?” SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4
(DECEMBER 2006) Pgs 515-531>
Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri (2000) would describe these ongoing exchanges between dominant
and subordinate groups as a mutual and perhaps unwitting advancement of ‘‘Empire’’*/the
larger system of global capitalism and its colonization of lifeworlds. They note, for instance, how
humanitarian efforts by western countries first establish discursive universal orders*/such as
‘‘human rights’’*/as justification for intervention, and then how these universals are capitalized
upon by military and economic institutions as rationales for imperialistic invasions. Similarly,
activist struggles appear to teach the system of global capitalism, or those manning its
operations, how to increase strategic efficiency by controlling spaces available for political
opposition. From this perspective, the flexible ideologies of the 1960s counterculture movements may have
disturbed the capitalist system, but in doing so also described a new territory (the self) and a new
mode of operation for the growth of capitalism: Capital did not need to invent a new paradigm
(even if it were capable of doing so) because the truly creative moment had already taken place. Capital’s
problem was rather to dominate a new composition that had already been produced autonomously and defined within a new
relationship to nature and labor, a relationship of autonomous production. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 276) The post-Fordist
colonizations of public spaces and resources today are outgrowths of an earlier colonization of ‘‘flexibility’’ as a viable and successful
challenge to the rigidities of technocratic bureaucracies. I would build upon these observations to say that the conflicts
between surveillance and counter-surveillance practices today represent a larger struggle over
the control of spaces and bodies. It is doubtful that police or security forces are intentionally
manipulating spaces and bodies with surveillance and other strategies because they explicitly
wish to neutralize democratic opportunities; in fact, they most likely believe that their actions of
social control are preserving democracy by safeguarding the status quo (Monahan 2006b). Be that as it
may, such activities advance neoliberal agendas by eliminating spaces for political action and
debate, spaces where effective alternatives to economic globalization could emerge and gain
legitimacy if they were not disciplined by police and corporate actions. Therefore, it should not be seen as a coincidence that the
demise of public spaces is occurring at the same time that spatial and temporal boundaries are being erased to facilitate the
expansion of global capital. The two go hand in hand. Whereas one can readily critique Hardt and Negri for their attribution of
agency to capitalism or to the amorphous force of ‘‘Empire,’’ their systemic viewpoint is worth preserving in what has become a
contemporary landscape of social fragmentation, polarization, and privatization. Dominant and
subordinate groups
serve as asymmetrical refractions of each other in emerging global regimes. Surveillance and
counter-surveillance are two sets of overlapping practices selectively mobilized by many parties
in this conflict, but the overall effect is unknown. Conclusions Are counter-surveillance activities
political interventions? Yes, they are clearly political. The central question remains, however, as to which counter-surveillance
configurations provide productive critiques and interventions. Because counter-surveillance movements, in my definition of them,
seek to correct unequal distributions of power, they do destabilize status quo politics on a case- by-case basis*/on the ground, at
specific, temporally bounded sites of contestation. If our vantage point is once removed, however, then individualized
counter-surveillance efforts appear to provide the necessary provocations for those with
institutional power to diagnose and correct inefficiencies in their mechanisms of control.
Link – Counternarratives
Their method of counternarration will be coopted by capitalism and reproduce violence –
their focus on the cultural impact of white supremacy masks the way that labor creates the
violence outlined in the aff through commodity fetishism
Saha in 12 <Amelia. “Locating MIA: ‘Race’, commodification and the politics of production”
2012. European Journal of Cultural Studies 0(0) 1–17>
The importance of this argument, and why it still represents a critical intervention, is in the way that it foregrounds the
capitalist, industrial context of the politics of representation and recognition that other cultural
studies approaches to ‘race’ and difference tend to ignore. Too often these accounts of popular music
and culture focus solely on the textual, ignoring the way that cultural texts are in effect cultural
commodities and the product of industrial, rationalized production that is inextricably bound up
in the way that the cultural text appears at the point of consumption. When eventually the concept of
‘commodification’ is evoked in these accounts, it is often in a fleeting way, as a shorthand to describe capitalism’s co-option of
potentially resistive subcultures. At best, such references to commodification are cursory, on the way to another point, but at worst
they represent a somewhat lethargic description of capitalism’s supposed co-option of the counter-narratives of
difference and the production of its own form of corporate multiculture. The term ‘commodification’ derives from Marxist theory,
where it is
conceptualized in terms of the conversion of an object or aspect of life which has not
been previously considered in economic terms into a commodity with exchange value. Within this
account, the commodification of culture, and the vast proliferation of cultural goods that has resulted, is critiqued subsequently in
terms of how capitalists make sounds, styles, images, symbols and so on into private property, restricting access to others (primarily
through copyright law). Additionally, it highlights how, through
commodity fetishism, the exploitation of
labour that has gone into its production is masked (see Hesmondhalgh, 2007). In light of this, critical political
economists such as Mosco (1996) and Garnham (2001[1979]) write against an understanding of commodification that attributes too
much importance to ideology and representation (which Mosco attributes to a particular tradition of communications research). An
excessive focus on its cultural dimensions risks deflecting attention away from the real effects
of commodification: that is, the extraction of surplus value and the concealment of absolute
and relative forms of labour exploitation through commodity fetishism (Mosco, 1996)
Link – Commodifying Suffering
The aff reproduces both colonialism and capitalism by commodifying the lives
the experiences of the oppressed as objects that can be exchanged in the
debate – the methodology relies on capitalist assumptions about personhood
because it allows for the people the aff talks about to become commodified,
dislocated subjects
Ticktin 99 <Miriam. “Selling Suffering in The Courtroom and Marketplace:An Analysis of the
Autobiography of Kiranjit Ahluwalia” [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 1. Pgs 24-28>
Second, I will look at the market narrative or narrative as commodity; how is this bookdetermined by its nature as a commodity?
How is language that will sell employed without selling the suffering of these women? The two dominant narratives work together in
framing identities through concepts of abstract individualism. As noted by Collier et. al. (1995), the legal practices developed in
Europe and its colonies since the eighteenth century are intimately connected to the development of capitalism; Pashukanis used
the term "bourgeois law" to emphasize the fact that the
creator and beneficiary of law is the property-owning
individual(1989). As interconnected systems, both the law and capitalism are based on notions of
personhood that encourage the distinction between subject and object, inside and outside,
person and thing. As Radin suggests, this world of abstract beings, equal before the law and politically
equal, facilitates conceiving of concrete personal attributes as commodified objects
(Radin1987:1892). In this vein, I will argue that the two dominant narratives further the commodification of
suffering. Both the legal narrative and the market narrative require intermediaries for Kiranjit. In the legal case, she speaks only
through various lawyers and through representatives from the women's activist group Southall Black Sisters. These legal stories are
themselves told through the book, which is in turn mediated by Rahila Gupta, the woman chosen because (as stated inher preface)
"Kiranjit's English would not quite mould itself to the 'words from the heart' thatwere waiting to tumble out" (p.xii). Thus, Kiranjit
never speaks directly. In
order to enter a discourse in which her story can be made public, in order to
be represented, we realize that she must be a dislocated subject (Spivak 1988).This makes it apparent that
we are dealing with several different subjects of Circle of Light, each occupying different positions and having unequal access to the
means of representation: South Asian women, battered women, and Kiranjit Ahluwalia. And the question is this: do the two
dominant discourses occupy these subjects so completely, do they take the subjects over in such
a way that they simply cannot speak the violence, the oppression? And just as importantly, how
do the subjects colonize or oppress one another? Finally, which subjects - if any – are
empowered by this commoditized representation of suffering?
Turns the Case/Root Cause
They misunderstand the root cause of the violence in the aff – it was the desire
to manage labor that created the incentive for racialized surveillance and
slavery by providing poor whites with psychological compensation that
disincentivized them from organizing with Blacks to challenge the plantation
system – their author
Kundnani and Kumar in 15 - Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and
Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. Arun Kundnani teaches at New York University. His
latest book is The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on
Terror. <Arun and Deepa. “Race, surveillance, and empire” International Socialist Review. Issue
96, Spring 2015.>
Class, gender, and racial security While
racial security was central to the settler-colonial project in North
America, territorial dispossession was only one aspect of the process of capital accumulation for
the new state; the other was the discipline and management of labor. As Theodore Allen shows in The
Invention of the White Race, the “white race” did not exist as a category in Virginia’s colonial records until the end of the
seventeenth century. Whiteness as an explicit racial identity had to be cultivated over a period of decades before it could become
the basis for an organized form of oppression.17 A
key moment in the production of whiteness was the
response of the ruling Anglo elite to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. The rebellion was begun by
colonial settlers who wanted a more aggressive approach to securing the territory against
Indigenous peoples. But it also involved African and Anglo bond laborers joining together in a
collective revolt against the system of indentured servitude. This threatened not only the
profitability but also the very existence of the plantation system. Over the following three decades, the
Virginia Assembly passed a series of acts that racialized workers as Black and white. Those who
could now call themselves white were granted some benefits by law, whereas those designated
Black were turned from bond laborers (who could therefore expect to be free after a period of time) into slaves—
property with no rights whatsoever and no hope of freedom. To win them to the side of the
plantation bourgeoisie, poor white men were given privileges—they had access to land and
enjoyed common law protections such as trial by jury and habeas corpus that were denied to
Black enslaved people.18 In practice this meant that white men, for instance, could rape Black women and not be charged
with a crime (because Blacks were property and so only “damages” were to be paid to the slave owner). Further, property rights and
the legal notion of settled land not only denied Native American property claims but even erased the existence of Indigenous people
on the basis that, because white settlers had transformed the pristine North American wilderness into productive land, they were
the real “natives.”19 Once
the legal and ideological work had been done to naturalize race as a visible
marker of inherent difference and to separate “us” from “them,” it could be made use of as a
stable category of surveillance; the patrols set up to capture runaway slaves—arguably the
first modern police forces in the United States20—needed only to “see” race in order to
identify suspects. Moreover, the plantation system was stabilized by enabling non-elite whites
to see security as a racial privilege and shared responsibility. W. E. B. Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction
that, in the slave plantations of the South, poor whites were brought into an identification with the planter elite by being given
positions of authority over Blacks as overseers, slave drivers, and members of slave patrols. With the associated feeling of
superiority, their hatred for the wider plantation economy that impoverished them was displaced onto Black enslaved people: class
antagonism was racialized and turned into a pillar of stability for the system. Meanwhile, in the North, labor leaders had little
appetite for abolition, fearing competition from a newly freed Black workforce.21 After abolition, the same racial anxieties were
mobilized to disenfranchise the Black laborer in the South. Du Bois used the term “psychological wage” to describe this sense of
superiority granted to non-elite whites in the South: It
must be remembered that the white group of laborers,
while they received a low wage, were compensated by a sort of public and psychological wage.
They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were
admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best
schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent under their votes,
treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.… On the other hand, in the same
way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of
children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to
submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes
could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always
being threatened by the substitution of white labor.22 We suggest below that, since the 1970s,
neoliberalism has involved a similar kind of process, in which the social wage of the New Deal
welfare state was progressively withdrawn and racialized notions of security offered in its place
as a psychological compensation.
History has been one of class struggles – confronting capitalism is a necessary prerequisite to
breaking down the hierarchies of oppression the aff talks about – their method prevents a
transition to a society beyond oppression
TUMINO 1
(Stephen, Prof. English @ Pitt, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique)
theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated
understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a
Any effective political
guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox
Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing
social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free
from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political
theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the
very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps
more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of
Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now.
I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I
will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes
the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but
inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This
systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability,
ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by
the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of
Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my
main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such
arguments authorize capitalism without
gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of
human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on
cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the
bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy."
This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,.
. . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For
all, capitalism is here to stay and
the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This
humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism,
feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the
fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human
labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective
conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism
recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this
paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of
Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory
("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory.
Even if we don’t win the racial bribe still functions today – economic conditions are right for a
rising up of the poor against the rich, but law-and-order politics have painted poor blacks as a
degenerate culture to be fought and controlled – the alt is key, otherwise the aff just gets
coopted
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle Alexander is an asociate professor
of law at Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has
worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has
served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law
School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)
Competing images of the poor as “deserving” and “undeserving” became central components of
the debate. Ultimately, the racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for
conservatives, who succeeded in using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the
resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden
progress of African Americans. As explained by Thomas and Mary Edsall in their insightful book Chain Reaction, a
disproportionate share of the costs of integration and racial equality had been borne by lowerand lower-middle-class whites, who were suddenly forced to compete on equal terms with blacks for jobs and
status and who lived in neighborhood adjoining black ghettos. Their children-not the children of wealthy whites-attended schools
most likely to fall under busing orders. The affluent white liberals who were pressing the legal claims of blacks and other minorities
“were often sheltered, in their private lives, and largely immune to the costs of implementing minority claims.” This reality made
it possible for conservatives to characterize the “liberal Democratic establishment” as being out
of touch with ordinary working people- thus resolving one of the central problems facing
conservatives: how to persuade poor and working-class voters to join in alliance with corporate
interests and the conservative elite.
“Riot” PIC
1NC “Riot” PIC
____and I advocate the method of the 1AC without endorsing the use of the
term “riot”
The term “riot” is associated with illogical, violent acts and serves to criminalize
Blackness and social protest – turns the case – it is their argument that the
discourse we use has a material effect on the world
Campbell et al in 4 <”Remote Control: How Mass Media Delegitimize Rioting as Social Protest”
Shannon Campbell, Phil Chidester, Jamel Bell and Jason Royer
Source: Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 11, No. 1, Race, Gender, Class and the 1992 L.A. "Riots"
(2004), pp. 158-176>
A key result of the newspapers' coverage of the Los Angeles and Cincinnati riots is the encouragement of readers to associate
rioting as a concept with perceptions of race and racial difference. At first glance, this association is
anything but surprising; after all, the riots in question were racially motivated, and this motivation may well be the only aspect of the
events upon which all involved clearly agreed. A
more in-depth consideration of this mediated theme,
however, reveals the troublesome nature of the cognitive linkage of "race" and "rioting" as
necessarily associated terms in readers' minds. Dyer (1988) alleges that the concept of "race" has come to embody
very specific connotative meanings for many Americans. According to the critic, Whiteness can function as a human
norm precisely because White people are not racially seen or named, and thus have the power
to speak for all of humanity rather than speaking exclusively for their own race. Indeed, Dyer claims, ". .
. race is something only applied to non- White peoples" (p. 1). Nakayama and Krizek (1995) concur, noting that one of the strategies
supporting the systemic power base of Whiteness in the U.S. today is a refusal to label Whiteness in a racial sense. As a result,
Nakayama and Krizek suggest, the term "race" is left to be applied exclusively to the "other." Finally, Warren and Twine (1997) assert
that Blackness serves as a metonym against which Whiteness is measured and given meaning in our contemporary society. Because
of this, Whiteness exists as two general categories: White and non- White. Through this process, non-Whiteness becomes
synonymous with Blackness in many Americans' minds. The implications of this cognitive association are particularly clear when it
comes to media coverage of riot events. Because viewers and
readers are encouraged to see riots as largely
racial events, and because for many readers the term "race" is synonymous with their
conceptualization of "Blackness" (Warren & Twine, 1997), riots become for these readers events that
are by, for and about African Americans. Coupled with the associated framing of riots as illogical
acts in response to necessary societal controls, this cognitive linkage of rioting with a specific
racial group can have a staggering impact on the way readers process the "facts" about violent
urban uprisings
2NC “Riot” PIC
Using the term “riot” divorces activism from its political context and criminalize
it
Waldman in 15 <Katy. “Is Baltimore Beset by Protests, Riots, or an Uprising?” April 29, 2015.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/04/29/protest_versus_riot_versus_uprising_t
he_language_of_the_baltimore_freddie.html>
As Subtirelu points out, venues that present themselves as conservative are more likely to opt
for riots over protests, thereby “eras[ing] the political messages and purposes of people in
Baltimore.” More “moderate and progressive venues” are likelier to reach for the terms that “imbue many of the people in the
streets with political purpose.” (As seen in the chart above, Slate has used both terms.) Here’s exhibit C. On Monday night’s live
coverage of the fracas, CNN
commentator Marc Lamont Hill laid bare the reasoning behind such
linguistic sleights-of-hand. “I’m not calling these people rioters,” he told Van Jones and Don Lemon. “I’m
calling these uprisings and I think it’s an important distinction to make. …There have been
uprisings in major cities and smaller cities around this country for the last year because of the
violence against black female and male bodies forever and I think that’s what’s important.”
What exactly is at stake in the semantic tug-of-war between riots and protests, riots and
uprisings? As both Subtirelu and Hill suggest, the second two options demand that we take the
people involved more seriously, as agents with purpose and grievance. The verb protest especially carries
intimations of virtue; in the mid-15th century, it meant “to declare formally or solemnly,” as in “to protest one’s innocence.” Today
the word implies principled disapproval and moral fiber: The stalwart protester stands in the rain, picketing for equal pay. Indeed,
one protests against something, not just for the hell of it. The act requires fortitude but—perhaps thanks to Gandhi and Martin
Luther King Jr.—it is an effort of will and ethical imagination, not arm and hammer. Protest’s connotations of self-discipline seem to
counter the threat of wanton violence.
The word “riot” attributes activism to criminality and meaningless violence
Campbell et al in 4 <”Remote Control: How Mass Media Delegitimize Rioting as Social Protest”
Shannon Campbell, Phil Chidester, Jamel Bell and Jason Royer Source: Race, Gender & Class, Vol.
11, No. 1, Race, Gender, Class and the 1992 L.A. "Riots" (2004), pp. 158-176>
According to Olzak and Shanahan (1996), riots are the violent expression of two very different types of social unrest: race/ethnic protests and
race/ethnic conflicts. The first type of uprising, the researchers suggest, finds a distinct group expressing a grievance or demonstrating against the
existing power structure on the basis of ethnic or racial identity, while race/ethnic conflicts involve one group attacking anotheracial/ethnic collective
or a group representing the sociopolitical structure, such as the police or the military. Olzak and Shanahan conclude that large-scale riots may erupt as
a result of either type of demonstration, though violence is generally not an intended purpose of race/ethnic protests, and is rarely instigated by the
protesters themselves. In similar fashion, Lieberson
and Silverman (1965) define riots as "... a generalized
response directed at a collectivity rather than the offender" (p. 891), and further note that such
actions are . . frequently misunderstood" (p. 898), often attributed to criminals and rabble rousers rather
than to respectable citizens in desperate search of a means to express their dissatisfaction with
current conditions and policies. Oberschall (1993) concurs, noting that such acts do indeed contain "normative
and rational elements" (p. 257). In other words, while riots are clearly the by-product of more legitimate and legitimized - forms of unrest, because the attendant violence is rarely directed at those
responsible for the unrest, or even aimed specifically at larger groups seen to represent the
guilty party or system, it becomes far too easy to frame these moments of collective brutality
and terror as nothing more than meaningless, futile expressions of violence.
Using the word “riot” reinforces racist stereotypes and separate protests and uprisings from
their political context
Eckel in 8 - BA in Political Science from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and MA in Social
Science from the University of Chicago <Matt. ”The planning of ‘ethnic’ violence” January 24th,
2008. http://rationalinternational.blogspot.com/2008/01/planning-of-ethnic-violence.html>
Today's BBC has a worthwhile article pointing out Human Rights Watch allegations that much of the "ethnic" (I'll explain the quotes
in a second) violence ravaging Kenya is being planned and directed by political elites there. Again, worth reading, but hardly
surprising to anyone who has looked at historical patterns of communal violence. The nature of media coverage of such strife is a
persistent complaint of people who study ethnic conflict and ethno-nationalist politics. By framing violence as "ethnic," without
adding much context to the term, reporters unwittingly frame it as a result of ancient, hardened, immutable social divisions that
spontaneously flare up from time to time (I - along with many others, prefer the term "communal," because it leaves open the
possibility for boundaries to change). Furthermore, by
using the word "riot" to describe the actual incidents,
reporters conjure up images of pent-up anger, randomly exploding into wanton destruction (in
the context of Africa, it also unwittingly reinforces racist stereotypes about tribal conflict).
Recent history - from the Kristallnacht to the Rwandan Genocide to the 2002 Hindu-Muslim
clashes in Gujarat - has shown that such violence is nearly always planned and directed by
communal elites. "Pogrom" might be a more appropriate term.
Visibility/Opacity K
1NC
Their call for counternarratives rely on empathetic identification by conjuring
the judge/debater’s liberal self-worth to get a ballot. This reinscribes suffering
by making fungible the experience of the other and simultaneously destroying
their experience – turns the case by recreating colonialism
Hartman, 97 <Saidya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University
specializing in African American literature and history. She grew up in Brooklyn and received her
B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University, Scenes of Subjection>
In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of the coffle, detailing the
obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves how many of them were
separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say-and having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag
of American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn, heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the
town." 1 Rankin, aghast at the spectacle and shocked by "seeing the most oppressive sorrows of suffering innocence mocked with all
the lightness of sportive music,'' decried: ''My soul abhors the crime.'' The violation of domesticity, the parody of liberty, and the
callous defiance of sorrow define the scene in which crime becomes spectacle. The "very dangerous evil" of slavery and the
"agonizing groans of suffering humanity" had been made music.2¶ Although Rankin conceded that the cruelty of slavery "far
exceed[ed] the power¶ of description," he nonetheless strove to render the horrors of slavery, And in so doing, Rankin makes
apparent that the crimes of slavery are not only witnessed but staged. This is a result of the recourse to terms
like "stage," "spectacle,” and "scene” in conveying these horrors, and, more important, because the “abominations of slavery" are
disclosed through the reiteration of secondhand accounts and circulating stories from "unquestionable authorities" to which Rankin
must act as surrogate witness. In the effort to "bring slavery close," these circulating reports of atrocity, in essence, are reenacted in
Rankin epistles. The
grotesqueries enumerated in documenting the injustice of slavery are intended
to shock and to disrupt the comfortable remove of the reader/spectator. By providing the
minutest detail of macabre acts of violence, embellished by his own fantasy of slavery's bloodstained gate, Rankin
hoped to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery by exhibit ing the suffering of the
enslaved and facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved: "We are naturally
too callous to the sufferings of others, and consequently prone to look upon them with cold indifference, until, in imagination
we identify ourselves with the sufferers, and make their sufferings our own .... When I bring it near,
inspect it closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women, who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my
sensibility is roused" (56-57). By bringing suffering near, the ties of sentiment are forged. In letter after
letter, Rankin strove to create this shared experience of horror in order to transform his slaveholding brother, to whom the letters
In this case, pain provides the common language of
humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn, remedies the indifference of the
callous. ¶ The shocking accounts of whipping, rape, mutilation, and suicide assault the¶ barrier of indifference, for the
abhorrence and indignity roused by these scenes of terror, which range from the mockery of the
coffle to the dismemberment and incineration of a slave boy, give rise to a shared sentience
between those formerly indifferent and those suffering. So intent and determined is Rankin to establish that
were addressed, as well as the audience of readers.
slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby establish the common humanity of all men on the basis of this
extended suffering, that he
literally narrates an imagined scenario in which he, along with his wife and
child, is enslaved. The "horrible scenes of cruelty that were presented to [his] mind as a consequence of this imagining
aroused the ''highest pitch of indignant feeling.'' In addition this scenario enables Rankin to speak not only for
but literally in the place of the enslaved. By believing himself to be and by phantasmically becoming the enslaved, he
creates the scenario for shared feelings:¶ My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for he
moment, that 1 myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for
myself, my wife, and my children-the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and capricious master, aroused the
strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was. Approaching my wife and children, and my imagination
depicted in lively colors, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was exerted to
the highest degree. (56)¶ The nature of the feelings aroused here is rather complicated. While this flight of imagination enables a
vicarious firsthand experience of the lash, excoriates the pleasure experienced by the master in this brutal exercise of power, and
unleashes Rankin's fiery indignation and resentment, the
phantasmic vehicle of this identification is
complicated, unsettling, and disturbing. Although Rankin's fantasy culminates in indignant
outcries against the institution of slavery and, clearly, the purpose of this identification is to
highlight the crimes of slavery, this flight of imagination and slipping into the captive's body
unlatches a Pandora's box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore is the difficulty and slipperiness of
empathy. Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better under
stand the other or "the projection of one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own
emotions."4 Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with the enslaved
because in making the slave's suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for
those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting
the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others,
the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires
definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin's empathic
identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to
the fungibility of the captive body.
Our alternative is to remain opaque – this is necessary to challenge the imperial
strategy that discursively seeks to know, conquer and reproduce colonialism
Walker in 11 - Ph.D., The College of William and Mary, former Chair of the Department of
Africana Studies at Brown University <Corey. “How Does It Feel to be a Problem?': (Local)
Knowledge, Human Interests, and The Ethics of Opacity” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2)>
I have chosen the ground of ethics in wrestling with the question of epistemology for this particular endeavor in order to highlight
“the very fact that ethics exist as unscientific” – that is resistant to and restrictive of the epistemic hegemony of Science proper –
speaks to its critical dimension that “cannot be reduced to the disciplining of science,” indeed of the modern, rational episteme.15
Hence the
recourse to ethics in pursuit of an emancipatory project of knowledge holds out the
possibility of unmasking and “denouncing all myth, all mystifications, all superstitions” that
inhere in a disciplinary and disciplining logic of our contemporary categorization and
organization of knowledge, particularly in the North Atlantic academy.16 Moreover, it reminds us that the
question of epistemology cannot be approached without critical attention to the question of ethics, particularly for those projects
that claim to be emancipatory. With
this understanding, ethics is transformed into a critical discursive
practice that evades uncritical “sentimentality and development, and pre[over]determined
categories such as good and bad.”17 Ethics proper is a discourse derived from a rigorous, vigilant, and militant
theoretical site of struggle. Such struggles are not merely over “values,” but rather expose the “conflicts
in which [groups, formations, and classes] express their means of reproducing the very struggle that
creates them – and finds emancipatory expression in their practices of resistance, pleasure, and
authority.”18 Ethics thus rendered is transformed into a critical terrain that fields the necessary
interrogatory practices that question the normative assumptions and methodological
presuppositions in raising a critical consciousness in the ongoing battle of challenging the
disciplinary dictates and epistemological demands of the modern organization of knowledge.
The ethics of opacity operates from a similar position as announced by Alain Badiou, “Ethics does not exist.
There is only the ethics of (of politics, of love, of science, of art).”19 Such an ethical
understanding seeks to temper the imperial strategy of traditional ethics, particular ethical
formulations, traditions, and prescriptives that gather under the logics and technologies of
coloniality. Indeed, as Badiou puts it, “it might well be that ethical ideology, detached from the religious teachings which
at least conferred upon it the fullness of ‘revealed’ identity, is simply the final imperative of a conquering
civilization: ‘Become like me and I will respect your difference’” (28). Inspired by the work of Charles Long, the ethics of
opacity establishes the critical principle that those hegemonic knowledge systems unleashed by
coloniality/modernity necessarily introduce what Long calls “that ‘thing’ [which] must be
suppressed, but the very act of suppression introduces the thing suppressed into the symbolic
universe that it stakes out.”20 Long continues with recourse to the work of Paul Ricoeur who writes, “Now defilement
enters into the universe of man through speech, or the word; its anguish is communicated through speech . . . the opposition of the
pure and the impure is spoken. . . a stain is a stain because it is there, mute; the impure taught in the words that institute the taboo”
(204). Within this nexus, the
ethics of opacity suggest a critical site for the production and reproduction
of the knowledges of those on the underside of modernity. Long writes, Black, the colored races,
caught up into this net of the imaginary and symbolic consciousness of the West, rendered mute
through the words of military, economic, and intellectual power, assimilated as if by osmosis
structures of this consciousness of oppression. This is the source of the doubleness of consciousness made famous
by W.E.B. Du Bois. But even in these symbolic structures there remained the inexhaustibility of the opaqueness of this symbol for
those who constituted the "things" upon which the significations of the West deployed its meanings. (204)
Opacity is a necessary strategy to resolve the aff by interrupting the economy
of knowledge that justifies violence against the colonized – the aff just
reproduces violence and makes the infiltration they decry more likely
Walker in 11 - Ph.D., The College of William and Mary, former Chair of the Department of
Africana Studies at Brown University <Corey. “How Does It Feel to be a Problem?': (Local)
Knowledge, Human Interests, and The Ethics of Opacity” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2)>
Thus, the ethics of opacity
establishes a critical movement, indeed produces an ethical demand,
that speaks to and is founded upon a responsibility to interrogate hegemonic epistemological
production, which is “the context for the communities of color, the opaque ones of the modern world” (Long 204). Such an
ethics calls into question traditional formulations and rehearsal of ethics proper and radically
calls into account those “radical” formulations of emancipatory theoretical projects, i.e. scientific
Marxism, dogmatic theology, Western democracy, and the host of “post-” prefixed theoretical formulations. Such an ethics of
opacity also entails, or rather prescribes a critical intellectual practice that affirms the worth, value, and dignity of the “human.”
Long writes, “Octavio Paz tells us that they were filled with poets, proletarians, colonized peoples, the colored races. ‘All these
purgatories and hells lived in a state of clandestine ferment. One day in the twentieth century, the subterranean world blew up. The
explosion hasn’t yet ended and its splendor has illumined the agony of the age” (204).21 The ethics of opacity is animated by this
vision in seeking to articulate the depth of meaning that is announced that these continuing events. In this sense, the
ethics of
opacity pushes the discourse of ethics to the limit. Accordingly, recourse to Levinas is quite appropriate when he
suggests, “My task does not consist in constructing ethics, I only try to seek its meaning.”22 The ethics of opacity
presents “more than an accusation regarding the actions and behavior of the oppressive
cultures; it goes to the heart of the issue. It is an accusation regarding the world view, thought
structures, theory of knowledge, and so on, of the oppressors. The accusation is not simply of bad
acts but, more importantly, of bad faith and bad knowledge.”23 An ethics of opacity is thus
defined by its critical orientation to liberation as articulated by and with the opaque ones. It is a
critical intellectual posture that disrupts the dominant logic of coloniality/modernity in exploring
the hidden and unknown, the repressed and submerged narratives, histories, and
epistemologies – the sites of opacity that are the conditions of im/possibility of the
contemporary world. Such an ethic is available because, as Long writes, “the strategies of obscuring these
peoples and cultures within the taxonomies of the disciplines of anthropology as primitives or
the classification of them as sociological pathologies is no longer possible” (211). The ethics of opacity
helps to structure our ability “to effect the deconstruction of the mechanisms by means of which we continue to make opaque to
ourselves, attributing the origin of our societies to imaginary beings, whether the ancestors, the gods, God, or evolution, and natural
selection, the reality of our own agency with respect to the programming and reprogramming of our desires, our behaviors, our
minds, ourselves, the I and the we.”24 Such
a move has significant implications for “reimagining our forms
of life” and opens up potentially emancipatory possibilities for a critical theory of knowledge in
the interests of those on the underside of modernity (204). In a crucial sense, it is the emergence and
existence of the opaque ones that conditions the im/possibility of the project of Enlightenment
rationality. Long states, “As stepchildren of Western culture, the oppressed have affirmed and opposed the
ideal of the Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment worlds. But in the midst of this ambiguity, for better or for
worse, their experiences were rooted in the absurd meaning of their bodies, and it was for these
bodies that they were regarded not only as valuable works but also as the locus of the
ideologies that justified their enslavement . . . . The totalization of all the great ideals of Western universalization
met with the factual symbol of these oppressed ones.”25 The infinite meaning and depth of the “factual symbol of these oppressed
ones” is the location of ethics of opacity and in turn structures the relation to epistemology. Indeed, highlighting the relation of
ethics and epistemology thus becomes a critical process that cannot be evaded. The
disruption produced by the ethics
of opacity suggests the primacy of method of procedure as opposed to the fundamental
question of ontology for the project of critical theory in the interests of humanity.26 To this end,
such an ethical imperative interrupts the imperial/colonial economy of knowledge that
privileges a conceptualization of knowledge that conquers through a commitment to clarity of
content and transparency of method. The will to clarity and transparency within this theoretical
enterprise rests on a fundamental violence that denies difference and negates alternative
possibilities of thought as well as of action. The character of this will to know is marked by a
process that necessarily seeks to conquer epistemologically and otherwise. Instead, an ethic of opacity
develops a critical posture that welcomes the “opaque ones” as fundamental partners in the quest for knowledge. It is a reflexive
injunction that reminds us that we always already think in and against particular epistemic traditions and conditions that in/form us.
The challenge thus becomes how do we develop a theory of knowledge in critical relation with an ethics of opacity?
Turns Case
The aff’s call for counternarratives assumes that visibility and the
representational inclusion of excluded groups is inherently liberatory but is
based on a false binary that erases the power of the unspoken and increases
surveillance, fetishism, and colonialism – turns case
Phelan in 93 <Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked : The Politics of Performance. Florence, KY, USA:
Routledge, 1993. ProQuest ebrary. Web.>
The current contradiction between “identity politics” with its accent on visibility, and the psychoanalytic/deconstructionist mistrust
of visibility as the source of unity or wholeness needs to be refigured, if not resolved. 13 As the Left dedicates ever more energy to
visibility politics, I am increasingly troubled by the forgetting of the problems of visibility so successfully articulated by feminist film
theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. I am not suggesting that continued invisibility is the “proper” political agenda for the
disenfranchised, but rather that the
binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of
invisibility is falsifying. There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious
limitations to visual representation as a political goal. Visibility is a trap (“In this matter of the visible,
everything is a trap”: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts: 93); it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes
voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession. Yet it retains a certain political
appeal. Visibility politics have practical consequences; a line can be drawn between a practice (getting someone seen or read) and a
theory (if you are seen it is harder for “them” to ignore you, to construct a punitive canon); the two can be reproductive. While
there is a deeply ethical appeal in the desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and
certainly under-represented communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, the
terms of this visibility often enervate the putative power of these identities. A much more nuanced
relationship to the power of visibility needs to be pursued than the Left currently engages. 14 Arguing that communities
of the hitherto under-represented will be made stronger if representational economies reflect
and see them, progressive cultural activists have staked a huge amount on increasing and
expanding the visibility of racial, ethnic, and sexual “others.” It is assumed that disenfranchised
communities who see their members within the representational field will feel greater pride
in being part of such a community and those who are not in such a community will increase
their understanding of the diversity and strength of such communities. Implicit within this
argument are several presumptions which bear further scrutiny: 1 2 3 4 Identities are visibly marked so the resemblance
between the African-American on the television and the African-American on the street helps the observer see they are members of
the same community. Reading physical resemblance is a way of identifying community. The relationship between representation
and identity is linear and smoothly mimetic. What one sees is who one is. If one’s mimetic likeness is not represented, one is not
addressed. Increased visibility equals increased power. Each presumption reflects the ideology of the visible, an
which erases the power of the unmarked, unspoken, and unseen.
ideology
Empathetic Identification
The aff’s solvency relies on empathetic identification with the suffering and
injustice outlined in the aff – it seeks to make suffering visible and intelligible
which denies and erases the experience of the other
Hartman, 97 <Saidya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University
specializing in African American literature and history. She grew up in Brooklyn and received her
B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University, Scenes of Subjection, Accessed:
4/25/14>
By making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only confirmed the difficulty of understanding the
suffering of the enslaved? Can
the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of
black sentience only by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black
sentience is inconceivable and unimaginable but, in the very ease of possessing the abased and
enslaved body, ultimately elide an understanding and acknowledgment of the slave's pain?
Beyond evidence of slavery's crime, what does this exposure of the suffering body of the bondsman yield? Does this not
reinforce the "thingly" quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort
to establish the humanity of the enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the
powerless? The purpose of these inquiries is not to cast doubt on Rankin's motives for
recounting these events but to consider the precariousness of empathy and the thin line
between witness and spectator. In the fantasy of being beaten, Rankin must substitute himself
and his wife and children for the black captive in order that this pain be perceived and
experienced. So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the other's pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined,
yet by virtue of this substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order to
convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must volunteer himself and his family for abasement. Put differently, the
effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering requires that the white
body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and
intelligible.Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only
through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in
making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is occluded by the others obliteration.
Given the litany of horrors that fill Rankin's pages, this recourse to fantasy reveals an anxiety about making
the slave's suffering legible. This anxiety is historically determined by the denial of black
sentience, the slave's status as object of property, the predicament of witnessing given the legal
status of blacks, and the repression of counterdiscourses on the "peculiar institution." Therefore,
Rankin must supplant the black captive in order to give expression to black suffering, and as a
consequence, the dilemma-the denial of black sentience and the obscurity of suffering-is not
attenuated but instantiated. The ambivalent character of empathy-more exactly, the repressive effects of
empathy-as Jonathan Boyarin notes, can be located in the "obliteration of otherness" or the facile
intimacy that enables identification with the other only as we "feel ourselves into those we
imagine as ourselves." And as a consequence, empathy fails to expand the space of the other but
merely places the self in its stead. 5 This is not to suggest that empathy can be discarded or that Rankin's desire to exist
in the place of the other can be dismissed as a narcissistic exercise but rather to highlight the dangers of a too-easy intimacy, the
consideration of the self that occurs at the expense of the slave's suffering, and the violence of identification.6
Their call for counternarratives rely on empathetic identification by conjuring
the judge/debater’s liberal self-worth to get a ballot. This reinscribes suffering
by making fungible the experience of the other and simultaneously destroying
their experience – turns the case by recreating colonialism
Hartman, 97 <Saidya Hartman, Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University
specializing in African American literature and history. She grew up in Brooklyn and received her
B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University, Scenes of Subjection>
In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of the coffle, detailing the
obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves how many of them were
separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say-and having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag
of American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn, heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the
town." 1 Rankin, aghast at the spectacle and shocked by "seeing the most oppressive sorrows of suffering innocence mocked with all
the lightness of sportive music,'' decried: ''My soul abhors the crime.'' The violation of domesticity, the parody of liberty, and the
callous defiance of sorrow define the scene in which crime becomes spectacle. The "very dangerous evil" of slavery and the
"agonizing groans of suffering humanity" had been made music.2¶ Although Rankin conceded that the cruelty of slavery "far
exceed[ed] the power¶ of description," he nonetheless strove to render the horrors of slavery, And in so doing, Rankin makes
apparent that the crimes of slavery are not only witnessed but staged. This is a result of the recourse to terms
like "stage," "spectacle,” and "scene” in conveying these horrors, and, more important, because the “abominations of slavery" are
disclosed through the reiteration of secondhand accounts and circulating stories from "unquestionable authorities" to which Rankin
must act as surrogate witness. In the effort to "bring slavery close," these circulating reports of atrocity, in essence, are reenacted in
Rankin epistles. The
grotesqueries enumerated in documenting the injustice of slavery are intended
to shock and to disrupt the comfortable remove of the reader/spectator. By providing the
minutest detail of macabre acts of violence, embellished by his own fantasy of slavery's bloodstained gate, Rankin
hoped to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery by exhibit ing the suffering of the
enslaved and facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved: "We are naturally
too callous to the sufferings of others, and consequently prone to look upon them with cold indifference, until, in imagination
we identify ourselves with the sufferers, and make their sufferings our own .... When I bring it near,
inspect it closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women, who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my
sensibility is roused" (56-57). By bringing suffering near, the ties of sentiment are forged. In letter after
letter, Rankin strove to create this shared experience of horror in order to transform his slaveholding brother, to whom the letters
In this case, pain provides the common language of
humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn, remedies the indifference of the
callous. ¶ The shocking accounts of whipping, rape, mutilation, and suicide assault the¶ barrier of indifference, for the
abhorrence and indignity roused by these scenes of terror, which range from the mockery of the
coffle to the dismemberment and incineration of a slave boy, give rise to a shared sentience
between those formerly indifferent and those suffering. So intent and determined is Rankin to establish that
were addressed, as well as the audience of readers.
slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby establish the common humanity of all men on the basis of this
extended suffering, that he
literally narrates an imagined scenario in which he, along with his wife and
child, is enslaved. The "horrible scenes of cruelty that were presented to [his] mind as a consequence of this imagining
aroused the ''highest pitch of indignant feeling.'' In addition this scenario enables Rankin to speak not only for
but literally in the place of the enslaved. By believing himself to be and by phantasmically becoming the enslaved, he
creates the scenario for shared feelings:¶ My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for he
moment, that 1 myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for
myself, my wife, and my children-the thoughts of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and capricious master, aroused the
strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was. Approaching my wife and children, and my imagination
depicted in lively colors, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of my bloody nature was exerted to
the highest degree. (56)¶ The nature of the feelings aroused here is rather complicated. While this flight of imagination enables a
vicarious firsthand experience of the lash, excoriates the pleasure experienced by the master in this brutal exercise of power, and
unleashes Rankin's fiery indignation and resentment, the
phantasmic vehicle of this identification is
complicated, unsettling, and disturbing. Although Rankin's fantasy culminates in indignant
outcries against the institution of slavery and, clearly, the purpose of this identification is to
highlight the crimes of slavery, this flight of imagination and slipping into the captive's body
unlatches a Pandora's box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore is the difficulty and slipperiness of
empathy. Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better under
stand the other or "the projection of one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own
emotions."4 Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with the enslaved
because in making the slave's suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for
those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting
the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others,
the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires
definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin's empathic
identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to
the fungibility of the captive body.
External Validation
Their method relies on the external validation of suffering in order to attain
empowerment and resistance – this recreates academic colonialism – the right
to conquer is intimately connected to the right to know
Tuck and Yang 2014 [Eve, & K.W., “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M. T. Winn
(Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp.
223-248). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 223-6]
Research is a dirty word among many Native communities (Tuhiwai Smith,¶ 1999), and arguably, also among ghettoized (Kelley,
1997), Orientalized¶ (Said, 1978), and other communities of overstudied Others. The ethical¶ standards of the academic industrial
complex are a recent development, and like¶ so many post–civil rights reforms, do not always do enough to ensure that social¶
science research is deeply ethical, meaningful, or useful for the individual or community¶ being researched. Social
science often
works to collect stories of pain and¶ humiliation in the lives of those being researched for
commodification. However,¶ these same stories of pain and humiliation are part of the collective
wisdom that¶ often informs the writings of researchers who attempt to position their
intellectual¶ work as decolonization. Indeed, to refute the crime, we may need to name it. How¶
do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over)¶ hear, while
refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial¶ gaze? How do we
develop an ethics for research that differentiates between¶ power—which deserves a denuding,
indeed petrifying scrutiny—and people? At¶ the same time, as fraught as research is in its complicity with power, it is
one of¶ the last places for legitimated inquiry. It is at least still a space that proclaims to¶ care about curiosity. In this essay, we
theorize refusal not just as a “no,” but as a¶ type of investigation into “what you need to know
and what I refuse to write inӦ (Simpson, 2007, p. 72). Therefore, we present a refusal to do research, or
a refusal¶ within research, as a way of thinking about humanizing researchers.¶ We have organized
this chapter into four portions. In the first three sections,¶ we lay out three axioms of social science research. Following the work of
Eve¶ Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), we use the exposition of these axioms to articulate¶ otherwise implicit, methodological, definitional,
self-evident groundings (p. 12)¶ of our arguments and observations of refusal. The
axioms are: (I) The subaltern¶
can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain; (II) there are some forms of¶ knowledge
that the academy doesn’t deserve; and (III) research may not be the¶ intervention that is
needed. We realize that these axioms may not appear self evident¶ to everyone, yet asserting them as apparent allows us to
proceed toward¶ the often unquestioned limits of research. Indeed, “in dealing with an open secret¶ structure, it’s only by being
shameless about risking the obvious that we¶ happen into the vicinity of the transformative” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 22). In the¶ fourth
section of the chapter, we theorize refusal in earnest, exploring ideas that¶ are still forming.¶ Our thinking and writing in this essay is
informed by our readings of postcolonial¶ literatures and critical literatures on settler colonialism. We locate much of¶ our analysis
inside/in relation to the discourse of settler colonialism, the particular¶ shape of colonial domination in the United States and
elsewhere, including¶ Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Settler colonialism can be differentiated¶ from what one might call
exogenous colonialism in that the colonizers arrive at a¶ place (“discovering” it) and make it a permanent home (claiming it). The
permanence¶ of settler colonialism makes it a structure, not just an event (Wolfe, 1999).¶ The
settler colonial nation-state is dependent on destroying and erasing¶ Indigenous inhabitants in
order to clear them from valuable land. The settler¶ colonial structure also requires the
enslavement and labor of bodies that have¶ been stolen from their homelands and transported
in order to labor the land stolen¶ from Indigenous people. Settler colonialism refers to a triad
relationship, between¶ the White settler (who is valued for his leadership and innovative mind), the
disappeared¶ Indigenous peoples (whose land is valued, so they and their claims to it¶ must be extinguished), and the
chattel slaves (whose bodies are valuable but¶ ownable, abusable, and murderable). We believe that this triad is the
basis of the¶ formation of Whiteness in settler colonial nation-states, and that the interplay of¶
erasure, bodies, land, and violence is characteristic of the permanence of settler¶ colonial
structures.¶ Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think, therefore¶ I am”)
transforms into ego conquiro (“I conquer, therefore I am”; Dussel, 1985;¶ Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni,
2011). Nelson Maldonado-Torres¶ (2009) expounds on this relationship of the conqueror’s sense-of-self to his¶ knowledge-of-others
(“I know her, therefore I am me”). Knowledge
of self/Others¶ became the philosophical justification for
the acquisition of bodies and territories,¶ and the rule over them. Thus the right to conquer is
intimately connected to¶ the right to know (“I know, therefore I conquer, therefore I am”). Maldonado-¶ Torres
(2009) explains that for Levi Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigm¶ is the methodological rule for the birth of ethnology as a
science (pp. 3–4).¶ Settler
colonial knowledge is premised on frontiers; conquest, then, is an exercise¶
of the felt entitlement to transgress these limits. Refusal, and stances of refusal in¶ research, are
attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowledge¶ by marking what is
off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what is¶ sacred, and what can’t be known.¶ To
speak of limits in such a way makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, and¶ may, to them, seem dangerous. When access to
information, to knowledge, to the¶ intellectual commons is controlled by the people who generate that information¶ [participants in
a research study], it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of¶ justice and truth. (Simpson, 2007, p. 74)¶ By
forwarding
a framework of refusal within (and to) research in this chapter, we¶ are not simply prescribing limits to social science
research. We are making visible¶ invisibilized limits, containments, and seizures that research
already stakes out.
Opacity Alt
Our alternative is necessary to recognize the inherent lack of safety when
working within academic spaces as well as its inherent colonial foundation that
must be abolished instead of survived in
Rodriguez in 12 – chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California
<Dylan. Racial/Colonial Genocide and the "Neoliberal Academy": In Excess of a Problematic",
American Quarterly. Volume 64. Number 4. December 2012>
My place of employment reflects how the
U.S. academy remains constituted by its gendered racist,
apartheid, colonial foundations. As several students and colleagues remind me, the desecration of Indian burial grounds
has guided the construction and expansion of the land grant institution at which I work, the University of California, Riverside—that
is, desecration is not an incidental and fleeting moment in the campus’s creation, it is the continual condition of UCR’s existence as
such.1 Second, recent UCR police practices are saturated with antiblack racism and “racial profiling,” landmarked by a set of early2000s exchanges between renowned African American historian Sterling Stuckey and then Chancellor Raymond Orbach. Stuckey
detailed the UCRPD’s yearlong harassment of one black graduate student in particular (detained multiple times by campus police
while walking to the library), remarking that “circumstances at UCR [have] made it impossible for me to go on recruiting black
graduate students.”2 These local examples express the
academy’s paradigmatic ordering of bodies,
vulnerabilities, and intellectual hierarchies. That is, such everyday dehumanization illustrates the
systemic logics, institutional techniques, rhetorics, and epistemologies of violence and power
that undergird the academy’s racial and colonial foundations even—especially—as they
resurface in our current working and thinking conditions. These dehumanizing violences exceed the effects of
the academy’s neoliberalization; they require an urgent, strategic, mutual centering of the analytics of racial/colonial genocide.
Framed in the long historical scope of modernity, racial/colonial genocide is a logic of human extermination that encompasses
extended temporal, cultural, biological, and territorial dimensions:3 the mind-boggling body counts associated with commonly
recognized “genocides” are but one fragment of a larger historical regime that requires the perpetual social neutralization (if not
actual elimination) of targeted populations as (white, patriarchal) modernity’s premise of [End Page 809] historical-material
continuity. This is why Indian reservations, the U.S. prison and criminalization regime, and even Arizona’s ban on ethnic studies need
to be critically addressed through a genocide analytic as well as through focused critiques of neoliberalism’s cultural and economic
structures: the
logics of social neutralization (civil death, land expropriation, white supremacist curricular enforcement)
always demonstrate the capacity (if not the actually existing political will and institutional inclination) to effectively
exterminate people from social spaces and wipe them out of the social text. To appropriate a wellknown phrase, I’m advancing an abolitionist praxis without guarantees—of either victory or survival. Here “abolitionist”
invokes and identifies the genealogies of freedom struggle that emerge in direct, radical
confrontation with genocidal and protogenocidal regimes: lineages of political-intellectual
creativity and organized, collective (and at times revolutionary) insurgency that have established the
foundations on which people have relied to build life-sustaining movements to liberate
themselves from racial chattel enslavement and its extended aftermath, colonialist conquest
and contemporary settler states, apartheid (Jim Crow), the prison industrial complex,
militarized border policing, and so forth. If the ethical imperative is to abolish (rather than merely
render temporarily survivable) the social logics and institutionalized systems of violence that
are mutually structured by the genealogies of neoliberalism and racial/colonial genocide, then
there are places of collective power that can be cherished at the same time that they are
critiqued and transformed. For better or worse, the U.S. academy (both the specific institutional site of the
college/university and the broader, shifting political-intellectual terrains of “the academy”) may be one fruitful place from which to
catalyze this work. Activisms
that form in confrontation with the academy’s long historical
complicities in racial/colonial genocide might be understood within an “urgency imperative”
that seeks to denaturalize and ultimately dismantle the conditions in which these systems of
massive violence are reproduced.4 There are thriving circuits of radical thought that aim to do just that: for example,
the very presence of anticolonialism, black radicalism, Native American feminism, and prison abolitionism as recognizable streams of
scholarly and pedagogical labor within institutional spaces—and more importantly, the vibrant and urgent ways in which many
(though still far too few) people inhabit these spaces—has become a matter of life and death in more ways than one. The
capacities to produce such scholarship (including the creation of counterarchives, vital
epistemological and theoretical tools, course syllabi, and mentorship) have been hard-won by
multiple histories of liberation struggle and intense intellectual innovation, and cohere in the
academy through affinities of ideas, analytics, and scholars whose [End Page 810] work is mutually
nourishing and critically enabling. The “activist” importance of these circuits cannot be overstated; at their best, their
political-intellectual work is engaged in something resembling a collective standoff with the
most mundanely violent forms of dehumanization, humiliation, displacement, and
immobilization. The interrogations are grave: What are the ethical and political implications of
chronicling the racial-sexual violence of U.S. lynching in continuity with less spectacular (and
differently gendered) forms of antiblack state and state-condoned violence such as police abuse,
welfare policy, and school segregation? To what degree have the critical renarrations of the U.S.
racial colonialist project —from the Americas to the Philippines—enabled a productive denaturing of the
violent, teleological mythologies of liberal white humanism, multiculturalist democracy, and
national progress (all of which require a code of silence on the actual existence of colonized peoples on U.S. sovereign and
occupied soil)?5 These are just two examples in which dedicated activist scholarly labor has uncovered the unexceptional normal of
genocidal and protogenocidal social logics. Such intellectual practices can renarrate racial terror and misery—the forms of suffering
endemic to multicultural civil society. Within this collective work, there is possibility for effective (though never permanent)
denaturalizations—and politicizations—of the forms of human suffering, entrapment, and vulnerability that are otherwise routinely
embedded in the current world’s institutional protocols, and death-inducing organization of resources. In such instances, radical
intellectuals’ inhabitation of existing institutional sites can enable both ethical opposition to structures of domination and creative
knowledge production that strives to glimpse the historical possibilities that are always just on the other side of terror and
degradation. Intellectuals engaged in such projects are always more than “academics,” in the sense that their scholarly engagement
is not secured by the academy proper. This expansive grounding is an “antidisciplinarity” of a certain kind: if what animates their
intellectual work is what I have tentatively named an abolitionist desire, such
radical intellectuals always understand
themselves to be working in alien (if not hostile) territory. The academy is never home: some of
us are subject to eviction and evisceration, alongside the surveillance, discipline, and lowintensity punishment that accrues to those of us who try to build modalities of sustenance
and reproduction within liberationist genealogies, particularly when we are working and
studying in colleges and universities.6 I am undecided as to whether the university is capable or worthy of being
“transformed” from its dominant historical purposes, or if it ought to be completely abolished. For now, I am interested in the
radical creativity that can [End Page 811] come from the standoff position in-and-of-itself. Such
a position reveals that
the fundamental problem is not that some are excluded from the hegemonic centers of the
academy but that the university (as a specific institutional site) and academy (as a shifting material network)
themselves cannot be disentangled from the long historical apparatuses of genocidal and
protogenocidal social organization. Placed in the context of the United States, we can see that (1) genocidal
methodologies and logics have always constituted the academically facilitated inception of a hemispheric “America,” and (2)
genocidal technologies are the lifeblood of national reproduction across its distended temporalities and geographies. The
recent
flourishing of scholarship that rehistoricizes regimes of incarceration, war, sexuality, settlercolonialist power, and gendered racist state violence—including much of the work that has
recently appeared in this very journal—constitutes a radical reproach of institutional
multiculturalism and liberal pluralism. The point to be amplified is that multiculturalism and
pluralism are essential to both the contemporary formation of neoliberalism and the historical
distensions of racial/colonial genocide.7 It is for this reason that I do not find the analytics of neoliberalism to be
sufficient for describing the conditions of political work within the U.S. academy today. It is not just different structures of
oppressive violence that radical scholars are trying to make legible, it is violence of a certain depth, with specific and morbid
implications for some peoples’ future existence as such. If
we can begin to acknowledge this fundamental
truth—that genocide is this place (the American academy and, in fact, America itself)—then our
operating assumptions, askable questions, and scholarly methods will need to transform. At a
moment of historical emergency, we might find principled desperation within intellectual
courage.
Our alternative is to remain opaque – this is necessary to challenge the imperial
strategy that discursively seeks to know, conquer and reproduce colonialism
Walker in 11 - Ph.D., The College of William and Mary, former Chair of the Department of
Africana Studies at Brown University <Corey. “How Does It Feel to be a Problem?': (Local)
Knowledge, Human Interests, and The Ethics of Opacity” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2)>
I have chosen the ground of ethics in wrestling with the question of epistemology for this particular endeavor in order to highlight
“the very fact that ethics exist as unscientific” – that is resistant to and restrictive of the epistemic hegemony of Science proper –
speaks to its critical dimension that “cannot be reduced to the disciplining of science,” indeed of the modern, rational episteme.15
Hence the
recourse to ethics in pursuit of an emancipatory project of knowledge holds out the
possibility of unmasking and “denouncing all myth, all mystifications, all superstitions” that
inhere in a disciplinary and disciplining logic of our contemporary categorization and
organization of knowledge, particularly in the North Atlantic academy.16 Moreover, it reminds us that the
question of epistemology cannot be approached without critical attention to the question of ethics, particularly for those projects
that claim to be emancipatory. With
this understanding, ethics is transformed into a critical discursive
practice that evades uncritical “sentimentality and development, and pre[over]determined
categories such as good and bad.”17 Ethics proper is a discourse derived from a rigorous, vigilant, and militant
theoretical site of struggle. Such struggles are not merely over “values,” but rather expose the “conflicts
in which [groups, formations, and classes] express their means of reproducing the very struggle that
creates them – and finds emancipatory expression in their practices of resistance, pleasure, and
authority.”18 Ethics thus rendered is transformed into a critical terrain that fields the necessary
interrogatory practices that question the normative assumptions and methodological
presuppositions in raising a critical consciousness in the ongoing battle of challenging the
disciplinary dictates and epistemological demands of the modern organization of knowledge.
The ethics of opacity operates from a similar position as announced by Alain Badiou, “Ethics does not exist.
There is only the ethics of (of politics, of love, of science, of art).”19 Such an ethical
understanding seeks to temper the imperial strategy of traditional ethics, particular ethical
formulations, traditions, and prescriptives that gather under the logics and technologies of
coloniality. Indeed, as Badiou puts it, “it might well be that ethical ideology, detached from the religious teachings which
at least conferred upon it the fullness of ‘revealed’ identity, is simply the final imperative of a conquering
civilization: ‘Become like me and I will respect your difference’” (28). Inspired by the work of Charles Long, the ethics of
opacity establishes the critical principle that those hegemonic knowledge systems unleashed by
coloniality/modernity necessarily introduce what Long calls “that ‘thing’ [which] must be
suppressed, but the very act of suppression introduces the thing suppressed into the symbolic
universe that it stakes out.”20 Long continues with recourse to the work of Paul Ricoeur who writes, “Now defilement
enters into the universe of man through speech, or the word; its anguish is communicated through speech . . . the opposition of the
pure and the impure is spoken. . . a stain is a stain because it is there, mute; the impure taught in the words that institute the taboo”
(204). Within this nexus, the
ethics of opacity suggest a critical site for the production and reproduction
of the knowledges of those on the underside of modernity. Long writes, Black, the colored races,
caught up into this net of the imaginary and symbolic consciousness of the West, rendered mute
through the words of military, economic, and intellectual power, assimilated as if by osmosis
structures of this consciousness of oppression. This is the source of the doubleness of consciousness made famous
by W.E.B. Du Bois. But even in these symbolic structures there remained the inexhaustibility of the opaqueness of this symbol for
those who constituted the "things" upon which the significations of the West deployed its meanings. (204)
Opacity is a necessary strategy to resolve the aff by interrupting the economy
of knowledge that justifies violence against the colonized – the aff just
reproduces violence and makes the infiltration they decry more likely
Walker in 11 - Ph.D., The College of William and Mary, former Chair of the Department of
Africana Studies at Brown University <Corey. “How Does It Feel to be a Problem?': (Local)
Knowledge, Human Interests, and The Ethics of Opacity” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2)>
Thus, the ethics of opacity
establishes a critical movement, indeed produces an ethical demand,
that speaks to and is founded upon a responsibility to interrogate hegemonic epistemological
production, which is “the context for the communities of color, the opaque ones of the modern world” (Long 204). Such an
ethics calls into question traditional formulations and rehearsal of ethics proper and radically
calls into account those “radical” formulations of emancipatory theoretical projects, i.e. scientific
Marxism, dogmatic theology, Western democracy, and the host of “post-” prefixed theoretical formulations. Such an ethics of
opacity also entails, or rather prescribes a critical intellectual practice that affirms the worth, value, and dignity of the “human.”
Long writes, “Octavio Paz tells us that they were filled with poets, proletarians, colonized peoples, the colored races. ‘All these
purgatories and hells lived in a state of clandestine ferment. One day in the twentieth century, the subterranean world blew up. The
explosion hasn’t yet ended and its splendor has illumined the agony of the age” (204).21 The ethics of opacity is animated by this
vision in seeking to articulate the depth of meaning that is announced that these continuing events. In this sense, the
ethics of
opacity pushes the discourse of ethics to the limit. Accordingly, recourse to Levinas is quite appropriate when he
suggests, “My task does not consist in constructing ethics, I only try to seek its meaning.”22 The ethics of opacity
presents “more than an accusation regarding the actions and behavior of the oppressive
cultures; it goes to the heart of the issue. It is an accusation regarding the world view, thought
structures, theory of knowledge, and so on, of the oppressors. The accusation is not simply of bad
acts but, more importantly, of bad faith and bad knowledge.”23 An ethics of opacity is thus
defined by its critical orientation to liberation as articulated by and with the opaque ones. It is a
critical intellectual posture that disrupts the dominant logic of coloniality/modernity in exploring
the hidden and unknown, the repressed and submerged narratives, histories, and
epistemologies – the sites of opacity that are the conditions of im/possibility of the
contemporary world. Such an ethic is available because, as Long writes, “the strategies of obscuring these
peoples and cultures within the taxonomies of the disciplines of anthropology as primitives or
the classification of them as sociological pathologies is no longer possible” (211). The ethics of opacity
helps to structure our ability “to effect the deconstruction of the mechanisms by means of which we continue to make opaque to
ourselves, attributing the origin of our societies to imaginary beings, whether the ancestors, the gods, God, or evolution, and natural
selection, the reality of our own agency with respect to the programming and reprogramming of our desires, our behaviors, our
minds, ourselves, the I and the we.”24 Such
a move has significant implications for “reimagining our forms
of life” and opens up potentially emancipatory possibilities for a critical theory of knowledge in
the interests of those on the underside of modernity (204). In a crucial sense, it is the emergence and
existence of the opaque ones that conditions the im/possibility of the project of Enlightenment
rationality. Long states, “As stepchildren of Western culture, the oppressed have affirmed and opposed the
ideal of the Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment worlds. But in the midst of this ambiguity, for better or for
worse, their experiences were rooted in the absurd meaning of their bodies, and it was for these
bodies that they were regarded not only as valuable works but also as the locus of the
ideologies that justified their enslavement . . . . The totalization of all the great ideals of Western universalization
met with the factual symbol of these oppressed ones.”25 The infinite meaning and depth of the “factual symbol of these oppressed
ones” is the location of ethics of opacity and in turn structures the relation to epistemology. Indeed, highlighting the relation of
ethics and epistemology thus becomes a critical process that cannot be evaded. The
disruption produced by the ethics
of opacity suggests the primacy of method of procedure as opposed to the fundamental
question of ontology for the project of critical theory in the interests of humanity.26 To this end,
such an ethical imperative interrupts the imperial/colonial economy of knowledge that
privileges a conceptualization of knowledge that conquers through a commitment to clarity of
content and transparency of method. The will to clarity and transparency within this theoretical
enterprise rests on a fundamental violence that denies difference and negates alternative
possibilities of thought as well as of action. The character of this will to know is marked by a
process that necessarily seeks to conquer epistemologically and otherwise. Instead, an ethic of opacity
develops a critical posture that welcomes the “opaque ones” as fundamental partners in the quest for knowledge. It is a reflexive
injunction that reminds us that we always already think in and against particular epistemic traditions and conditions that in/form us.
The challenge thus becomes how do we develop a theory of knowledge in critical relation with an ethics of opacity?
Fugitivity Alt
We advocate a method of fugitivity as an alternative to the aff’s call to confront
colonialism and the academy – we should steal away from the aff’s liberal call
for cultural reform and identification with the history of the oppressed in order
to truly challenge the structure of domination
Hartman in 97 <Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of
Subjection, 1997 p. 65-7>
When the enslaved slipped away to have secret meetings, they would call it "stealing the meeting," as if to
highlight the appropriation of space and the expropriation of the object of property necessary to make these
meetings possible. Just as runaway slaves were described as "stealing themselves," so, too, even shortlived
"flights" from captivity were referred to as "stealing away." "Stealing away" designated a wide range of
activities, from praise meetings, quilting parties, and dances to illicit visits with lovers and family on neighboring
plantations. It encompassed an assortment of popular illegalities focused on contesting the authority of the slave-owning
class and contravening the status of the enslaved as possession. The very phrase "stealing away" played upon
the paradox of property's agency and the idea of property as theft, thus alluding to the captive's condition as
a legal form of unlawful or amoral seizure, what Hortense Spillers describes as ''the violent seizing of the captive body from its motive
will, its active desire.'' 49 Echoing Proudhon's "property is theft," Henry Bibb put the matter simply: "Property can't steal property." It is the
play upon this originary act of theft that yields the possibilities of transport , as one was literally and
figuratively carried away by one's desire.5o The appropriation of dominant space in itinerant acts of defiance
contests the spatial confinement and surveillance of slave life and, ironically, reconsiders the meaning of
property, theft, and agency. Despite the range of activities encompassed under this rubric, what these events shared was the centrality of
contestation. Stealing away was the vehicle for the redemptive figuration of dispossessed individual and
community, reconstituting kin relations, contravening the object status of chattel, transforming pleasure, and
investing in the body as a site of sensual activity, sociality, and possibility, and, last, redressing the pained
body. The activities encompassed in the scope of stealing away played upon the tension between the owner's possession and the slave's
dispossession and sought to redress the condition of enslavement by whatever limited means available. The most direct expression of the desire for
redress was the praise meeting. The appeals made to a "God that saves in history" were overwhelmingly focused on freedom.51 For this reason
William Lee said that slaves "couldn't serve God unless we stole to de cabin or de oods."52 West Turner confirmed this and stated that when
patrollers discovered such meetings they would beat the slaves mercilessly in order to keep them from serving God. Turner recounted the words
of one patroller to this effect: ''If I ketch you here servin' God, I'll beat you. You ain't got no time to serve God. We bought you to serve us. "53
Serving God as a crucial site of struggle, as it concerned issues about styles of worship, the intent of worship, and, most important, the very
meaning of service, since the expression of faith was invariably a critique of the social conditions of subordination, servitude, and mastery. As Turner's
account documents, the threat embodied in serving God was that the recognition of divine authority superseded, if not negated, the mastery of the
slave owner. Although by the 1850s Christianity was widespread among the enslaved and most owners no longer opposed the conversion or
religious instructions of slaves, there was nonetheless an ethical and political struggle waged in religious practice that concerned contending
Even those slaves whose owners encouraged religion or sent
them to white churches found it important to attend secret meetings. They complained that at white churches
they were not allowed to speak or express their faith in their own terms . "We used to slip off in de woods in de old slave
interpretations of the word and styles of religious _worship.
days on Sunday evening way down in de swamps to sing and pray to our own liking. We prayed for dis day of freedom. We come from four and five
miles to pray together to God dat if we don't live to see it, to please let 0ur chillen live to see it, to please let our chillen live to see a better day and be
free, dat they can give honest and fair service to the Lord and all mankind everywhere. nd we'd sing 'our little meetin's abo ut to break, chillen, and
we must part. We got to part in body, but hope not in mind. Our little meetin's bound to break.' Den we used to sing 'We walk about and shake
hands, fare you well my sister's, I am going home.' "54 These meetings held in "hush arbors" or covertly in the quarters illu mi- nate the significant
difference between the terms of faith and the import of Chris- tianity for the master and the enslaved. For example, the ring shout, a form of
devotional dance, defied Christian proscriptions against dancing; the shout made the body a vehicle of divine communication with God in contrast
to the Christian vision of the body as the defiled container of the soul or as mere commodity. And the attention to the soul contested the object
status of the enslaved, for the exchange of blacks as commodities and their violent domination were often described in terms of being treated as if
one did not have a soul 55. Freedom was the central most important issue of these meetings. According to William Adams, at these meetings they
would pray to be free and sing and dance. 56 The avid belief in an imminent freedom radically challenged and nullified the gospel of slavery, which made
subordination a virtue and promised rewards in the ''kitchen of heaven." Elizabeth Washington stated that ministers would "preach the colored people
if they would be good niggers and not steal their master's eggs and chickens and things that they might go to the kitchen of heaven when they died." It
was not uncommon for slave owners to impart a vision of Christianity in which the enslaved would also attend to them in the afterlife. As one mistress
stated, "I would give anything if I could have Mal'ia in heaven with me to do little things for me. "57 For the enslaved the belief in a divine authority
minimized and contained the do- minion of the master. As well, these meetings facilitated a sense of collective identification through the invocation of
a common condition as an oppressed people and a shared destiny. Serving God ultimately was to be actualized in the abolition of slavery. Stealing away
involved unlicensed movement, collective assembly, and an abrogation of the terms of subjection in acts as simple as sneaking off to laugh and talk with
friends or making noctumal visits to loved ones. 58 Sallie Johnson said that men would often sneak away to visit their wives.59 These nighttime visits to
lovers and family were a way of redressing the natal alienation or enforced "kinlessness" of the enslaved, as well as practices of naming, running away,
and refusing to marry a mate not of one's choosing or to remarry after a husband or wife was sold away; all of these were efforts to maintain, if not
reconstitute, these ties. 60 Dora Frank's uncle would sneak off at night to see his woman. On one occasion, he failed to return by daylight, and "nigger
hounds" were sent after him. He was given 100 lashes and sent to work with the blood still running down his back.61 Dempsey Jordan recognized that
the risks involved in such journeys were great but slipped off at night to see his girl in spite 0f them: ''I was taking a great chance. I would go and see my
girl lots of nights and one time I crawled 100 yards to her room and got in the bed with her and lay there until nearly daylight talking to her. One time I
was there with her and them patterollers come that night and walked all around in that mom and this here negro was in her bed down under that moss
and they never found me. I sure was scared."62 The fact that the force of violence and the threat of sale did not prevent such actions illustrates the
ways in which the requirements of property relations were defied in the course of everyday practices. The consequences of these small-scale challenges
were sometimes life threatening, if not fatal. Fannie Moore remembered the violence that followed the discovery of a secret dance. They were dancing
and singing when the patrollers invaded the dance and started beating people. When Uncle Joe's son decided it was "time to die" because he couldn't
sustain another beating and fought back, the patrollers beat him to death and whipped half a dozen others before sending them home. 63 According to
Jane Pyatt, if slaves had a party or a prayer meeting and they made too much noise, patrollers would beat them and sometimes would sell them. The
patrollers took two of her brothers, and she never saw them again.64 Generally, the punish- ment for unlicensed assembly or travel was twenty-five to
fifty lashes. Stealing
away was synonymous with defiance because it necessarily involved seizing the master's
property and asserting the self in transgression of the law. The trespasses that were invariably a part of stealing away were a
source of danger, pride, and a great deal of boasting. Garland Monroe noted that the secret meetings he participated in were held in the open, not in
huts or arbot. They were confident that they could outwit and defy patrollers. If the patrollers came, the slaves took advantage of a superior knowledge
of the territory to escape capture or detection.6s Physical confrontations with patrollers were a regular feature of these accounts, and a vine stretched
across the road to trip the patrollers' horses was the most common method of foiling one's pursuers.66 As James Davis bragged, "I've seen the Ku Klux
in slavery times and I've cut a many grapevine. We'd be in the place dancin' and playin' the banjo and the grapevine strung across the road and the Ku
Klux come ridin' along and run right into it and throw the horses down. "67 The
enslaved were empowered by the collective
challenge posed to power and the mutual reinforcement against fear of discovery or punishment. From this
perspective, pastoral and folksy slave gatherings appear like small-scale battles with the owners, local whites, .and the Law. These day-today and routine forms of contestation operated within the confines of relations of power and simultaneously
challenged those very relations as these covert and chameleonic practices both complied with and disrupted
the demands of the system through the expression of a counterdiscourse of freedom. In the course of such gatherings,
even the span of the Potomac could be made a bridge of community and solidarity. As James Deane remembered, they would blow c onch shells at
night to signal a gathering. "We would all meet on the bank of the Potomac River a nd sing across the river to the slaves in Virginia, and they would
sing back to us."68 Such
small-scale infringements of the law also produced cleavages in the spatial organization of domination. The play on "stealing," "taking or appropriating without right or leave and with the intent to keep or make use of
wrongfully" or "to appropriate entirely to oneself or beyond one's proper share," articulates the dilemma of the subject without
rights and the degree to which any exercise of agency or appropriation of the self is only intelligible as
crime or already encoded as crime. 69 As well, it highlights the transgression of such furtive and clandestine peregrinations since the
very assertions and activity required to assemble at praise meetings, dances, et cetera, were nothing less than a fundamental challenge to and
The
agency of theft or the simple exercise of any claims to the self, however restricted, challenged the figuration of
the black captive as devoid of will. 70 Stealing away ironically encapsulated the impossibility of self-possession as it exposed the link
breach of the claims of slave property-the black captive as object and the ground of the master's inalienable right, being, and liberty.
between liberty and slave property by playing with and against the terms of dispossession. The use of the term "play" is not intended to make light of
the profound dislocations and divisions experienced by the enslaved or to imply that these tentative negotiations of one's status or condition were not
pained or wrenching but to highlight[s] the performative dimension of these assaults as staged, repeated, and rehearsed-what Richard Schechner terms
"twice-behaved behavior. "71 Through
stealing away, counterclaims about justice and freedom were advanced that
denied the sanctity or legitimacy of rights of property in a double gesture that played on the meaning of
theft. Implicit within the appropriation of the object of property was an insistence that flew in the face of the
law: liberty defined by inalienable rights of property was theft. Stealing away exploited the bifurcated condition of the black captive as subject and
object by the flagrant assertion of unlicensed and felonious behavior and by pleading innocence, precisely because as an object the slave was the very
negation of an intending consciousness or will. The disruptive assertions, necessarily a part of stealing away, ultimately transgressed the law of property.
Similarly,
stealing away defied and subversively appropriated slave owners' designs for mastery and controlprimarily the captive body as the extension of the master's power and the spatial organization of domination.
Stealing away involved not only an appropriation of the self but also a disruption of the spatial organization
of dominance that confined slaves to the policed location of the quarters unless provided with written permission of the
slaveholder to go elsewhere.n As well, the organization of dominant space involved the separation of public and private realms; this separation
reproduced and extended the subordination and repression of the enslaved. If the public realm is reserved for the bourgeois citizen subject and the
private realm is inscribed by freedom of property ownership and contractual transactions based upon free will, then in what space is the articulation of
the needs and desires of the enslaved at all possible?73 How does one contest the ideological codification and containment of the bounds of the
political? Ultimately, the struggle waged in everyday practices, from the appropriation of space in local and pedestrian acts, holding a praise meeting in
the woods, meeting a lover in the canebrake, or throwing a sun-eptitious dance in the quatters to the contestation of one's status as transactable object
or the vehicle of another's rights, was about the creation of a social space in which the assertion of needs, desires, and counterclaims could be
collectively aired, thereby granting property a social life and an arena or shared identification with other slaves. Like de Cetteau's walker who challenges
the disciplinary apparatus of the urban system with his idle footsteps, these
practices also create possibilities within the space of
domination, transgress the policed space of subordination through _unlicensed travel and collective
assembly across the privatized lines of plantation households, and disrupt boundaries between the public
and private in the articulation of insurgent claims that make need the medium of politics .74