Negative
1nc
1nc – cosmopolitanism
The domestic limit codifies the idea that sovereign borders matter – they fiat a
loophole that authorizes greater state surveillance even if the executive complies
Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has
Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN) ICT = Information and
Communications Technology
When we consider questions of accountability and oversight, we most often do so within a national
framework. Canadian commentators, for example, point to systems of oversight south of the border and
argue that in comparison our own framework is inadequate and in need of reform.33 The framing of the
question is then how to ensure that Canadian surveillance activities occur within a framework of law, or
that Canadians and persons within Canada receive the protection of the law. However, I argue that is
also important to question the extent to which national jurisdiction remains a meaningful category in
relation to questions of oversight. As I outline in this section, in the context of a global communications
infrastructure, ideas of national law and status categories (like non-US person) are currently more
likely to create the legal “loopholes” that enable broad surveillance than to create forms of
accountability and oversight.
Our increasingly borderless system of communication is one that follows the technical imperatives of
the nature of information. It is widely agreed that the classic point of departure for information theory is
Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which purported to
provide a theory that would allow one to measure information and system capacity for storage and
transmission of information.34 As he so strikingly outlines in his introduction, the “semantic aspects” of
communication—the meaning of messages—“are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”
“Information,” on this model, is not something that is dependent on the context of disclosure or of
receipt. One can see how, despite developments in information theory and practice in the intervening
decades, this still captures an important aspect of information and communications technology (ICT).
ICT easily shifts information from one context to another partly because what information is is seen to
be independent of these contexts. This logic is further extended in the context of the so-called digital
revolution in ICT, which has largely erased the differences between different mediums of transmission
and led to an ever-greater proliferation of networking.
The basic “logic” of information, therefore, is that it does not respect context. This is one of the reasons
that ICT raises so many privacy concerns. Both privacy norms and justifications for the breach of privacy
norms depend upon many contextual factors, yet ICT facilitate practices that render those contextual
factors irrelevant.35 Disclosing information in a context and for a purpose different than the context and
purpose for which it was initially collected is one example, taking information that is relatively
innocuous in one context and aggregating it to create revealing profiles is another. Geographical borders
are another “contextual” feature that ICT increasingly renders irrelevant in many practical details. With
so many of our personal and professional activities mediated by the internet, many of us physically sit in
one jurisdiction and at the same time talk, shop, write, and read in an entirely different jurisdiction. The
rapid adoption of cloud computing has meant that we can now be in one jurisdiction but have what are
essentially our own personal digital archives stored in another jurisdiction (or multiple jurisdictions).
Several NSA surveillance programs exploit these features of modern communications technology,
through leveraging the fact that much of the world’s internet traffic passes through the United States
and that many of the most central players in cloud computing are US companies, giving it a “home-field
advantage”.36 Although the NSA’s internet surveillance programs operated extra-legally in the
aftermath of 9/11 37, they now operate within a legal infrastructure that allows them to take advantage
of US dominance of the internet. Prior to 2008, US authorities could only conduct surveillance on nonUS person targets outside of the US by showing reasonable and probable grounds that the target was a
foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, and by obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC).38 With the passage of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in 2008 39, FISC can
approve surveillance of non-US persons outside of the US without individualized orders.40 These
changes have provided the legal basis for NSA programs like PRISM, which involve obtaining
communications data from internet companies like Microsoft and Google.
From an American perspective, these legal changes remove obstacles to the timely acquisition of
important intelligence information while not compromising US constitutional guarantees, since the US
constitution is widely held to not apply to non-US persons abroad.41 However, from the perspective of
a non-US person this can enable state surveillance on standards that fall below their own domestic
statutory and constitutional guarantees. Consider Canada. A Canadian using Gmail, for example, has her
email routed through the US and stored on US servers, making it vulnerable to collection under the FAA.
Under s. 702, the Attorney General and the Director of National intelligence are permitted to jointly
authorize the targeting of individuals located outside of the US “to acquire foreign intelligence
information.” This is not an individualized warrant regime. FISC approves annual certifications for the
collection of categories of foreign intelligence information and the AG and DNI can then determine
which individuals to target, without any additional oversight.42 Foreign intelligence information includes
information that “relates to” “the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”43 Such a broad
definition can easily include things like political speech, for example; while there are protections in FAA
for freedom of expression, these all apply to US persons only.44 There are also a variety of
“minimization” provisions to reduce the privacy impact of authorized surveillance but these provisions
also only apply to US persons.
Canadians do not face a similar threat of surveillance from the Canadian state. For example, the
National Defence Act does not allow CSEC to target Canadians, much less to do so on such lax standard.
Canadians can be targeted by CSIS or the RCMP, and then CSEC can assist through its assistance
mandate, but such targeting is then subject to both the warrant requirements that apply to these
agencies as well as our Charter guarantees. Of course, CSEC has a controversial metadata program that
has raised numerous questions regarding both its statutory authorization and its constitutionality.
Nonetheless, what is important here is that, in relation to non-US persons, FAA permits access to
content as well as metadata with fairly limited statutory restrictions and no constitutional restrictions at
all. Canadians who use USbased cloud computing therefore are subject to US state surveillance on
standards that, if applied within Canada, would be clear violations of our statutory and constitutional
rights.
Many have also claimed that these standards are clear violations of international human rights
standards. This debate is ongoing, but the official position of the US government is that the protections
of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights only extend to individuals both within its
territory and within its jurisdiction.45 The split that cloud computing makes possible – that an individual
would be outside its territory but her information subject to US jurisdiction – also creates a space where
international human rights norms (arguably) do not apply.
There has been pressure to amend US law in order to erase this distinction between US and non-US
persons. The President’s Review panel offered one of the most serious attempts to justify some form of
such a distinction. The justification they offer is not based upon the reach of the Fourth Amendment,
but an understanding of democratic community. It is worth reproducing at some length:
To understand the legal distinction between United States persons and non-United states persons, it is
important to recognize that the special protections that FISA affords United States persons grew directly
out of a distinct and troubling era in American history. In that era, the United States government
improperly and sometimes unlawfully targeted American citizens for surveillance in a pervasive and
dangerous effort to manipulate domestic political activity in a manner that threatened to undermine the
core processes of American democracy. As we have seen, that concern was the driving force behind the
enactment of FISA.
Against that background, FISA’s especially strict limitations on government surveillance of United States
persons reflects not only a respect for individual privacy, but also—and fundamentally—a deep concern
about potential government abuse within our own political system. The special protections for United
States persons must therefore be understood as a crucial safeguard of democratic accountability and
effective selfgovernance within the American political system. In light of that history and those
concerns, there is good reason for every nation to enact special restrictions on government surveillance
of those persons who participate directly in its own system of self-governance.46
The justification for the distinction therefore remains rooted in ideas of the importance of national
jurisdiction and traditional ideas of the significance of the state and its coercive powers . This just
underscores the fundamental tension: we have a global communications network where increasingly
borders do not matter, we have surveillance practices responding to this reality, and yet we seek to
justify and hold surveillance powers to account through asserting that borders matter . Even the idea
that concerns about abuse of state authority are restricted to the context of domestic political activity is
difficult to accept when so many of us frequently cross borders for both personal and professional
reasons. The Canadian example of Maher Arar is a stark reminder of this—Arar was apprehended by US
authorities while in-transit in New York, and removed to Syria where he was tortured .47
Apart from the issue of Canadians crossing the border and becoming directly subject to US jurisdiction,
there is the issue of information sharing between the US and Canada, as well as with other allies. If US
authorities can collect information about Canadians on lower standards than are permitted within
Canada, and then share this information with Canadian authorities, then this effectively creates an endrun around our constitutional guarantees even if it is , on some level, “lawful” . Although we do not
know enough about Canadian practices to assess the seriousness of this worry, recent evidence suggests
it is not that far-fetched.
Codifying borders creates a shared sense of national identity – this ontology of
sovereignty eliminates effective politics and conceals violence
Shaw, 99 - Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria
(Karena, “Feminist Futures: Contesting the Political” 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 569, lexis)
So, for example, over the past few centuries, the patterns of inclusion and exclusion expressed by
sovereignty have been inscribed and reinforced through immigration policies, citizenship and voting
policies, border patrols, nationalist struggles, the creation of new states, and the divisions of others. It
would be difficult to assert that these patterns of inclusion and exclusion simply "made sense," given the
violences that have been effected to maintain them. However, the structures and functioning of
mechanisms of communication, transportation, war, economy, and so on, were such that sovereignty
"worked" in some cases to the benefit of citizens within particular states, protecting them from the
vagrancies of capitalism, environmental disaster, particular kinds of violences, some forms of
discrimination and injustice. It has never "worked" as effectively for others, which is no accident, of
course, given the particularity, the historical, social and cultural specificity, of the ontology of
sovereignty. However, as technologies--particularly of capitalism, war, and communication--have
changed, so have both the potential dangers to citizens and the ability of any given sovereign power to
ameliorate them. Given this, it is important to pose the question of whether a territorially bounded ,
identity-grounded sovereignty is either possible or desirable. If it is not, the perpetuation of the
mythology of sovereignty will provoke ever-increasing levels of violent resistance.
To pose this question is to open the problem of whether we should read the movements that Benhabib
argues are struggles for identity as, rather, expressions of political conflicts that exceed the possibilities
of an identity-based sovereignty to effectively address. What if, according to sovereignty discourse, the
"non-politics" of what happens prior to relations of governance (the effects of the production of the
ontological foundation that enables governance), is really where the action is these days? n41 What if,
for example, instead of only or primarily reading contemporary movements as demands for "inclusion"
at the level of relations of governance, we read them as resistances and challenges to the violences of
sovereignty-constitution and subjectivity constitution? In other words, what if we read them not only as
calls for more inclusive identities, but as effects of the violence produced by and thus as critiques of the
identity/difference architecture for the basis of legitimate political authority?
It is crucial to recognize that if we assume sovereignty, these questions are foreclosed , rendered
unrealistic, irresponsible. If we simply refuse to consider what sovereignty discourse effects (the
distinctions between inside and outside, domestic and international , politics and war, legitimate and
[*586] illegitimate violence, citizens and foreigners , men and women, sane and mad, modern and
primitive) and what it conceals (the traditions under which these distinctions are made) we thus
contribute to a continuation of the mythology that these distinctions (and their constitutive violences)
are beyond the political . We reinscribe them as necessary and natural, rather than as necessary and
contingent and produced through violences that are both crippling and constitutive of personal and
political possibility. What difference might it make to open these questions? Rather than exclusively
focusing on making nicer identities, we could ask questions about the conditions--themselves highly
political and often intolerable--under which we come to rely on identity as the basis for political
authority, and the effects of this reliance. We could ask questions about whether we can reconstitute
these conditions, about whether we can rearticulate the necessities and violences of political possibility.
The impact is state extermination of the periphery and endless war
Shaw, 99 - Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria
(Karena, “Feminist Futures: Contesting the Political” 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 569, lexis)
If sovereignty is broadly constitutive of political possibility, why not simply assume it so that we can get
on with our analyses and our progressive practices? As Benhabib notes, many contemporary
movements articulate their demands in languages of sovereignty and identity, and thus lend themselves
to being read as she does: as demands for identity production or recognition. After all, that these
exclusions and violences have been resisted through the appropriation of the same discourses used to
effect them-- discourses of sovereignty expressed in identity politics, human rights discourses,
humanism--is a testament to the power of sovereignty discourse, and to its domination of discursive
spaces of power. So why not accept these demands at "face value" and work to facilitate these ideals, to
"include" those previously excluded from the polis, to grant them sovereignty and thus (apparently)
political subjectivity? Why not, in other words, accept the ontology of sovereignty--not as perfect, but as
what we have to work with-- and turn it to the empowerment of its previous victims? Why not accept
the modern state as the container for politics and work to facilitate adequate representation for each
and all at the state level?
[*582] To be clear, this is a necessary strategy under some conditions. But it is also both insufficient
and potentially dangerous . The danger of assuming sovereignty is twofold. First, the assumption of
sovereignty forecloses the questions that we most need to address, forcing us into a reading of politics
that leaves us unable to respond to contemporary political challenges. In particular, the assumption of
sovereignty prevents us from subjecting the discourses and practices of sovereignty themselves to the
kind of critical scrutiny that is required, given changing material conditions for the production of political
authority. Second, if we continue to assume that sovereignty is the necessary precondition for political
authority, and thus remain unable to engage the question of its character or appropriateness, we will
continue to impose and enforce--however violently--the necessities of sovereignty onto material
conditions that may be increasingly resistant to such an imposition. By maintaining the mythology that
sovereignty is necessary and natural as a precondition for politics, we will-however unintentionally-continue to sanction the violences done in the name of sovereignty, considering them necessary and
natural rather than contingent upon the particularity of the ontology of sovereignty. To open the
discourses and practices of sovereignty to question, on the other hand, enables a range of questions
about the conditions of possibility for political authority to be opened and engaged. I believe that the
future of feminist politics depends upon an engagement with these questions.
The dangers of assuming sovereignty emerge from the ways in which the assumption of sovereignty-the assumption of the necessity of the particular ontological resolutions that have enabled modern
political authority--shapes and constrains our thinking about politics and our political action. As I have
emphasized, one of the particularly powerful aspects of Hobbes' architecture of sovereignty is that it
convincingly persuades us that there is no alternative to sovereignty . It is the necessary precondition
for all that is good; all else is war, conflict and violence. If we believe this particular mythology of
sovereignty, of course, we will be compelled--as theorists and practitioners of politics--to do everything
we can to create, protect and strengthen the ontology of sovereignty; we certainly do not want to be
responsible for leading our fellow beings into the alternative. It is this particular element of the
architecture of sovereignty discourse that has led to perhaps its greatest violences. Because the
ontology of sovereignty is not assumed to be contingent, but necessary and natural, whatever violences
go into its production are also rendered necessary and natural rather than political.
However, the ontology of sovereignty is neither natural nor neutral. On the contrary, both the
particularity of the ontology of sovereignty and the belief in its necessity have been responsible for
incredible violences . It is not difficult to think of many examples of this: the extermination and
colonization of indigenous peoples on the grounds that they lacked the social [*583] and political
institutions to survive in the modern world; n36 the exclusion of large numbers of people--not least
women--from political authority because they were not adequately "sovereign individuals;" various
forms of religious persecution; and so on. In each of these cases, it is the naturalization of the ontology
of sovereignty that has produced the victims of sovereignty discourse; they are those who mark the
edges of sovereignty: the non-rational, non-modern, and so on. This "othering" in turn enables
campaigns to either convert or destroy them as non-sovereign , as dangerous or feeble. But the
examples do not end there. Many of the violences that have accompanied recent nationalist struggles
are legitimated through the same logics. The necessity of producing a coherent, shared (and
ontologically homogeneous) identity has accounted for exclusions and violences in the name of the
greater good: the achievement of sovereignty, the precondition for political subjectivity. n37 Given the
particularly violent past of sovereignty discourse (or at least its complicity in this past), to continue to
assume, or even triumph, sovereignty's necessity or to continue to believe its own account of its
necessary alternatives is highly problematic. It certainly runs the risk of perpetuating further violences
under its tattered banner.
The alternative is to align with a transnational cosmopolitan humanism – the
perceived risk to digital freedom mobilizes transnational resistance
Beck, 13 - Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany
(“The digital freedom risk: too fragile an acknowledgment” Open Democracy, 8/30,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/ulrich-beck/digital-freedom-risk-too-fragileacknowledgment
The Prism scandal has opened up a new chapter in the world risk society. In the past decades we have
encountered a series of global public risks, including the risks posed by climate change, nuclear energy,
finances, September 11 and terrorism – and now the global digital freedom risk.
All these global risks (with the exception of terrorism) are more or less part of technological
development, as well as of the misgivings usually expressed in the phases of modernization of any
respective new technology. And now we have Edward Snowden’s disclosures. All of a sudden,
something is happening that turns the global risk – in this case the digital freedom risk – into a globally
public problem. However, the risk logic at work here is different from what we have known so far.
Whereas the accidents in the reactors of Chernobyl and later on Fukushima triggered a public debate
about the nuclear power risk, the discussion about the digital freedom risk was not triggered by a
catastrophe, because the real catastrophe would actually be an imposed hegemonic control on a global
scale. The self-image of the information hegemony imposed, however, does not allow for this global
risk.
In other words: this particular catastrophe would normally happen without anyone noticing. We have
become aware of the potential catastrophe only because a single secret service expert from the United
States applied the means of information control in order to tell the world about the global risk, and we
are faced with a complete inversion of the normal situation.
Our awareness of this global risk is, at the same time, an extremely fragile one, because, unlike the other
global risks, the risk we are dealing with does not focus on, result from or repeatedly refer to a
catastrophe which is physical and real in space and time. It rather – and unexpectedly – interferes with
something we have taken for granted, i.e. our capacity to control information, which has almost become
our second nature. But then, the mere visibility of the matter triggers resistance.
Let us try and explain the phenomenon in a different way: first of all there are some features all global
risks seem to share. In one way or another they all bring home to us the global interconnectedness in
our everyday lives. These risks are all global in a particular sense, i.e. we are not dealing with spatially,
temporally or socially restricted accidents, but with spatially, temporally and socially delimited
catastrophes. And they are all collateral effects of a successful modernization, which questions
retrospectively the institutions that have pushed modernization so far. In terms of the freedom risk, this
includes: scenarios in which the capacity of the nation state to exercise democratic control fails and
other cases in which the calculation of probabilities, or insurance protection, etc. do so too.
Furthermore, all these global risks are perceived differently in the different parts of the world. We are
faced with a “clash of risk cultures”, in order to offer a variation of Huntington’s concept. We are also
faced with an inflation of existential catastrophes, and with one catastrophe threatening to outdo the
other: the financial risk “beats” the climate risk; and terrorism “beats” the violation of digital freedom.
This is, by the way, one of the main barriers to any public recognition of the global risk to freedom,
which, therefore, has not yet become the subject matter for public intervention.
The latter is, clearly, changing today. Yet, the acknowledgement of this fact is a rather fragile one. Who
could the powerful player be, with an interest in keeping this risk alive in public awareness and thus
pushing the public towards political action? The first candidate to come to my mind would be the
democratic state. Alas, this would be like asking the fox to look after the chickens . Because it is the
state itself, in collaboration with the digital trusts, that has established its hegemony in order to
optimize its key interest in national and international security. Any movement here could, however,
constitute a historic step away from the pluralism of nation states towards a digital global state, which is
free from control.
The citizen is the second potential player on our list. However, the users of the new digital information
media have, actually, become cyborgs. They employ these media as if they were senses, and consider
them an integral part of their concept of how they understand and act in the world. The members of the
Facebook generation, because of their dependence on social media, are on living within these media, in
doing so, relinquish a relevant part of their individual freedom and privacy.
Who, then, could exercise this kind of control? It could be, for example, the Basic Law. Alas in Germany,
Article 10 stipulates that postal and telecommunication secrecy is sacrosanct. That sounds like a phrase
from a world long gone, and by no means fits the communication and control options provided by a
globalized world. In other words: Europe, for example, provides excellent supervisory agencies, a whole
range of institutions who try to assert fundamental rights against their powerful opponents, e.g. the
European Court of Justice, data protection officers, and parliaments.
But paradoxically enough, these institutions fail, even if they work . Because the means of defence they
have at hand are restricted to national territories . While we are dealing with global processes, they are
bound to use the tools of intervention developed in the last century. This applies, by the way, to all
global risks: The national answers and the political and legal instruments our institutions offer can no
longer meet the challenges posed by the global risk society today.
All this might sound very pessimistic. Yet, we must go one step further and ask, whether we – social
scientists, normal citizens, and users of digital tools – know the right terms in order to describe how
profoundly and fundamentally these are transforming our societies and politics. I believe that we lack
the categories, maps or compasses we need to navigate the New World. This, again, corresponds to the
situation in the global risk society at large. Successful modernization and an escalating technological
evolution have catapulted us into fields where we may and must act, without providing us with the
vocabulary we need to adequately describe or name these fields and our options for action.
An example might help explain our position concerning the freedom risk. We tend to say that a new
digital empire is coming into being. But none of the historical empires we know – neither the Greek, nor
the Persian, nor the Roman Empire – was characterized by the features that mark the digital empire of
our times.
The digital empire is based on characteristics of modernity which we have not yet truly reflected upon. It
does not rely on military violence, nor does it attempt to integrate distant zones politically and culturally
into its own realm. However, it exercises the extensive and intensive, profound and far-reaching control
that ultimately pushes any individual preference and deficit into the open – we are all becoming
transparent.
The traditional concept of the empire, however, does not cover this type of control. In addition, there is
an important ambivalence: We provide major tools of control, but the digital control we exercise is
extremely vulnerable. The empire of control has not been threatened by a military power, or by a
rebellion or revolution, or by war, but by a single and courageous individual. A thirty year-old secret
service expert has threatened to topple it by turning the information system against itself. The fact that
this kind of control seems unfeasible, and the fact that it is much more vulnerable than we imagine, are
the two sides of one and the same coin.
The individual can, indeed, resist the seemingly hyper-perfect system, which is an opportunity that no
empire has ever offered before. The brave can resort to counter-power, if they choose to offer
resistance on the job. One of the key questions is, therefore, whether we should not oblige the major
digital companies to legally implement a whistleblower union and, in particular, the duty of resistance in
one’s profession, maybe first on a national scale, and subsequently at European level, etc.
However, John Q. Citizen – unlike Snowden – does not know much about the structures and the power
of this so-called empire. The young Columbus travels towards the New World and uses social networks
as an extension of his communicating body. The world vision of the new generation incorporates the
benefits offered – be it with respect to the organization of protest movements, to global
communication, or to digital love. From all we can see, the young do not fear being controlled by the
system.
An important consequence becomes evident here. How we assess the risk posed by the violation of
freedom rights differs from our assessment of a – perhaps health-related – violation as a consequence
of climate change. The violation of our freedom does not hurt. We neither feel it, nor do we suffer a
disease, a flood, a lack of opportunities to find a job, and so on. Freedom dies without human beings
being physically hurt. The power and legitimacy of the state are based on the promise of security.
Freedom comes or seems always secondary. Being a sociologist, I am convinced that the freedom risk is
the most fragile among the global risks we have experienced so far.
What should we do? I suggest that we formulate a kind of digital humanism. Let us identify the
fundamental right of data protection and digital freedom as a global human right, which must prevail
like any other human right, if needs be against all odds.
Is a lesser approach feasible? No, there is no lesser goal. Currently we are being told to apply the new
methodologies of encryption in order to protect us from attacks by those who want to track us. This
approach, however, implies the individualization of a problem that is, in fact, a global one. And the true
catastrophe is, as we have seen, that the catastrophe disappears and becomes invisible, because the
control exercised is becoming an increasingly perfect one. This happens to the extent to which our
reaction in view of the imminent death of freedom remains an exclusively technical and individual one.
We lack, indeed, an international body to enforce such claims. In this respect there is no difference
between the freedom risk and the risk posed by climate change. The litany has always been the same:
The nation-state cannot do it. There is no international player who can be addressed either. But there is
general concern. The global risk has an enormous power of mobilization that goes far beyond what we
have ever had before, e.g. the working class. A crucial factor would be to politically combine the unrest
that has activated social movements and political parties in different countries to varying degrees, in
order to push them towards the idea mentioned above.
But, is this the way to implement standards on a global scale? The permanent reflection about the
dangers for friend and foe alike could, indeed, trigger the creation and implementation of global norms.
The sense of what is right or wrong with respect to global norms would result ex post from a global
public shock about the violation of these norms . We are bound within a historical development that
brings us to this point time and again: We need a transnational invention of politics and democracy.
Framework
2nc – framework
Debating about what policy action to take guarantees the enforcement of sovereignty
discourse – unpacking how we understand sovereign politics is a prior question
Shaw, 99 - Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria
(Karena, “Feminist Futures: Contesting the Political” 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 569, lexis)
Consequently, politics today is at least as much about probing and rearticulating the limits of how we
conceptualize the political as it is about mobilizing resources to include people in existing political
arrangements. We cannot assume (and leave others to document) what is going on politically. Nor can
we assume how we should come to understand what is going on, or consider it to be obvious, and only
debate "what to do." In an important sense it is the obvious that is our greatest enemy . It is in the
obvious that our most deeply held assumptions are lodged. Thus, we must simultaneously pursue the
questions of what is going on and how we should understand what is going on. We can only pursue
these questions through a critical relation to our own categories and assumptions. More precisely, our
work must come to grips with the spatial and temporal preconditions for the constitution of subjectivity,
political authority and sovereignty. We must come to grips with the architecture articulated by Hobbes,
as it is instantiated today. It is through seeing how the spatial and temporal preconditions for the
constitution of subjectivity and sovereignty are already being reconstituted and rearticulated that we
can come to develop a critical perspective on the categories through which we discipline the political.
The focus of the debate should be on exposing the root of social problems – this
requires a radical orientation that refuses to accept the confines of legal change
Shantz, 13 – professor of critical criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. (Jeff, “In
Defense of Radicalism”, Radical Criminology, Summer,
http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/article/view/34/html
Anti-radicalism is inherently elitist and anti-democratic. It assumes that everyone, regardless of status,
has access to channels of political and economic decision-making, and can participate in meaningful
ways to address personal or collective needs. It overlooks the exclusion of vast segments of the
population from decisions that most impact their lives and the unequal access to social resources that
necessitate, that impel, radical changes.
Activists, as well as sociologists and criminologists, must defend radicalism from below as the necessary
orientation to struggle against injustice, exploitation, and oppression and for alternative social relations.
Actions should be assessed not according to a legal moral framework provided by and reinforced by
state capital (for their own benefit). Assessment should be made on real impacts in ending (or hastening
the end of) injustice, exploitation, and oppression, on the weakening of state capital. As Martin Luther
King suggested, a riot is simply the language of the unheard.
Self-righteous moralizing and reference to legal authority, parroting the voices of state capital, is an
abdication of social responsibility for activists. For sociologists and criminologists it is an abandonment
of the sociological imagination which in its emphasis on getting to the roots of issues has always been
radical (in the non-hegemonic sense). Critical thinkers and actors of all stripes must defend this
radicalism. They must become radicals themselves.
Debates should focus on the effectiveness of perspectives and practices in getting to the roots of
social problems, of uprooting power . They should not center on fidelity to the law or bourgeois
morality. They should not be constrained by the lack of imagination of participants or by the sense that
the best of all worlds is the world that power has proposed.
Again, radicalism is not a tactic, an act, an event. It is not a matter of extremes, in a world that takes
horrifying extremes for granted. It is an orientation to the world. The features of radicalism are
determined by, and in, specific contexts. This is the case now in the context of mass mobilizations, even
popular uprisings against statist austerity offensives in the service of neoliberal capitalism. Radicalism
always threatens to overflow attempts to contain it. It is because it advances understanding-poses social
injustice in stark relief-that it is by nature re/productive. It is, in current terms, viral.
AT Surveillance Debate Good
Traditional surveillance debates play into the hands of the surveillance state – it
allows tweaks to maintain overall power. Thinking radically is vital to crafting an
ethical response
Birchall 14 – Institute of North American Studies at King's College London (Clare, “Aesthetics of the
Secret”, New Formations, 12/20/14,
http://www.academia.edu/10193232/Aesthetics_of_the_Secret)//DBI
These debates treat the Snowden event either in macro conceptual terms (e.g. privacy versus security)
or in terms of micro legal and procedural issues (such as the data/metadata distinction). Both
approaches involve assumptions that do not lend the Snowden event to radical politics. The
opposition between privacy and security, for example, positions the citizen as an individual first and
foremost, for whom collectivity is envisaged and imagined by the securitised state (as a ‘nation-in-needof-protection’). Just as limiting, the micro legal and procedural questions reduce the problem to one of
scope rather than ethics or politics. For example, an Obama administration fact- sheet entitled ‘Proposal
for Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program’ states that the president is
recommending restricting NSA queries regarding metadata to ‘within two hops of the selection term
being used, instead of three’.12 (Two hops, as Trevor Timm points out, still means tens of thousands of
people.13) There has been much discussion of how intelligence operations should be regulated and
reformed, but beyond the concern about privacy, little has been said about the effect of dataveillance
on agency and subjectivity and even less regarding ways we might think differently about the
geopolitical value currently ascribed to intelligence.
For those interested in configuring secrets as a properly political subject, it is necessary to sidestep the
debate as constructed by mainstream discourse . It is more productive, I would argue, to stay with the
secret, interrupt the configuration of the secret as a rhetorical problem subject to legal tweaking, or as
an entrenched component of the security industrial complex. It is the secret, prior to any appropriation
by the state, which can aid the subjectivisation necessary for a radical political response to the state’s
treatment of its citizens as data objects of only algorithmic import.14 If secrets are left only to the
securitising state, or passed over in favour of privacy, the Left will have missed an opportunity.
Links
Link – surveillance reform
State reform merely provides the illusion of protection – circumvention is inevitable
because the state depends upon surveillance for its existence
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
Another way of opposing surveillance is for governments to pass laws and establish agencies and
systems to protect privacy. Many writers on privacy favour this approach. Laws, regulations and privacy
commissions can, indeed, accomplish many things. They can allow citizens to see and correct files held
on them; they can outlaw certain practices, such as sharing of databases; they can ensure that privacy
considerations become a factor in policy making; they can establish organisations that keep tabs on
technical developments; they can impose penalties on violators of people's privacy.
This sounds well and good. The people who propose and implement these solutions are undoubtedly
well-intentioned. But the whole approach is fundamentally flawed.
One big problem is that the path of legal regulation assumes a trade-off between privacy and other
benefits, such as profit or bureaucratic efficiency. In the balance, privacy usually comes off second best.
There are clear and direct advantages to corporations and government departments in expanding their
capacities to gather and manipulate information on citizens. By contrast, there are few powerful groups
with any direct interest in protecting the privacy of the "ordinary citizen." The result is that privacy
concerns are routinely squashed by the steamroller of surveillance.
It is risky to rely mainly on governments to provide protection against surveillance when governments
themselves are responsible for much of it. The very existence of the government depends on collecting
taxes. So when government needs for tax money meet citizen resistance to further impositions, it
becomes difficult to argue against extra measures to stop "tax cheats," even when these measures
involve accumulating ever more information about individuals. The state also depends for its existence
on the police, military and spy agencies to detect and thwart external and internal challenges. These
arms of the state are well known to thrive on information collected through surveillance.
In practice, the main role of laws protecting privacy may be to give the illusion that the problem is
being dealt with . Certainly that is the case for the Privacy Commission in Australia, whose task is to
make recommendations on how to maintain privacy within the present laws. The Commission can do
nothing to challenge existing laws. So when the Australian government decided to allow tax records and
other records to be combined -- something it had earlier promised not to do -- the Privacy Commission
could only sit there and make recommendations within the framework of the new policy.[5]
It is unrealistic to expect governments to take the lead in countering the driving forces behind increasing
surveillance. True, the state is not a unified entity, so there can be groups inside pushing against as well
as for surveillance. But as long as the state depends fundamentally on maintaining power over citizens -and it must, in order to extract resources to support itself and to defend itself against internal and
external enemies -- the state cannot be a reliable ally against surveillance, since surveillance grows out
of and supports the power of the state.
The power to undertake surveillance and use the information obtained is corrupting. That explains why
reform solutions are inadequate.
Link – US person
The concept of a citizenship-based rights produces exclusion by deeming nonmembers second class citizens
Cohen, 99- Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia
University
(Jean, September 1999, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos”,
International Sociology 14.3, 245-268)//Yak
It is this paradigmatic conception of citizenship that has lost its power to convince today. But it always
had a disturbing ambiguity that has now become apparent: are the uniform equal rights and respect
owed to every citizen due to their individual status as legal persons or to their membership status as
belonging to a particular political community? To put this differently, is the legal recognition of the
rights-bearing individual presumptively granted to all human beings on this model or only to the citizens
of a particular state? Marshall's happy consciousness regarding citizenship as a principle of inclusion and
equality and his assumption that the components of the citizenship principle come together in a
frictionless way paper over this ambiguity. In fact, he never confronted it because he simply assumed,
like so many others, that the identity component of the citizenship principle into which he hoped to
integrate the working class through social rights was a given: the cultural identity of the demos
construed as a nation.
If we shift perspective away from the substantive rights of citizenship (Marshall's focus) to the formal
dimension of membership things look rather different. The background presupposition of the modern
paradigm of citizenship is that citizenship involves membership in a sovereign, territorial nation-state
within a system of states. The nation-state is not only a territorial organization monopolizing legitimate
rule within a bounded space, it is also, as Brubaker rightly argues, a membership organization (Brubaker,
1992). Citizenship in such a state is an instrument of social closure. It always has an ascriptive dimension
and it always establishes privilege insofar as it endows members with particular rights denied to nonmembers (today, primarily, the resident alien or foreigner). Thus, in the modern system of states, the
republican ideal of the self-determining demos merges with the sovereign state's interest in control over
all those in the territory through the construction of national citizenship as a formal category of
membership. Exclusion and inequality, not inclusion, thus attach to citizenship seen as a membership
principle (Brubaker, 1992).
To be sure, certain republican political theorists noted long ago the tendency of the nation-state to
violate the egalitarian logic of constitutional democracy by fostering inequality and exclusion vis-a-vis
national minorities and aliens. Hannah Arendt (1973) argued that this danger is intrinsic to the nationstate system. Because the nation-state equates the citizen with the member of the nation it collapses a
political/legal category into a category of identity and perverts the egalitarian logic of the constitutional
state by rendering those who are not members of the nation implicitly into second-class citizens. On the
republican account, the problem lies in the reduction of the political principle of citizenship to a
substantive exclusionary conception of collective identity: nationality. Accordingly Arendt argued for
disaggregating citizenship from ascriptive criteria of national belonging (ethnic or cultural) and insisted
that civil and political rights of citizens should not be allocated on the pre-political basis of nationality.
States should not be nation-states but civic polities that grant citizenship on legal criteria (Arendt, 1973).
This is true even if they broaden what constitutes a US person
Cohen, 99- Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia
University
(Jean, September 1999, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos”,
International Sociology 14.3, 245-268)//Yak
Until quite recently the dilemma was resolved everywhere in the same way: legal personhood was
attached to citizenship status in a discrete state. Rights of non-citizens depended on the state's (as
representative of the sovereign demos') will and on little else. Arendt and other democratic republican
political theorists tried to reconcile the egalitarian universalistic principles they believed in with the
discreteness and exclusionary logic of democratic citizenship in the modern paradigm in two ways: first,
by applying universalism to the idea of citizenship as membership, such that citizenship itself becomes
the core human right: everyone born into a territorial state has the right to citizenship within it and
ought not to be deprived of it (Arendt, 1949). Second, democracy and the rule of law could be
reconciled if, internally, the claim to unified sovereignty by the state (representing the demos) is
resisted, disaggregated and controlled through a constitutionalism which establishes and limits powers
by guaranteeing rights, by creating an overall separation and balance of powers, and by creating
counter-powers through erecting a federalist structure. Constitutionalism of this sort would reconcile
democratic self-rule of the demos, state power and the rule of law by denying the claim of absolute
sovereignty (in the sense of legibus solutus) of 'the state' or any of its particular organs (Arendt, 1963;
Arato, 1995: 202-4.)
There are several theoretical and normative inadequacies with this solution. I address three of them.
First, the assumption that the 'exclusiveness of the demos' is simply a function of rules of access to
citizenship that stress pre-political (ethno/cultural) instead of universalistic legal criteria is wrong . As I
already indicated, if the democratic component of the citizenship principle is interpreted to entail selfrule by a self-determining demos (directly or through its representatives), and if this idea merges with
the concept of the sovereign state that rules all the inhabitants of a territory, then such a polity will be a
nation-state, and the demos will inevitably understand itself as a nation. Democratic citizenship in a
state entails a distinction between members and non-citizens, and it inevitably becomes a pole of
identity-formation and identification even in the most liberal democratic constitutionally articulated
states. The very ambiguity of the term 'national' implies as much: it is used both as a synonym for a
state's citizenry (to be a French national is to be a French citizen) and, at the very least, as a cultural
category of collective identity. Even if citizenship laws are open and 'civic', even if civic patriotism is all
that is legally required of new and old citizens, even if the identity of the nation is understood as an
amalgam and open to constant reinterpretation, national citizenship tends to 'thicken' and to take on a
cultural connotation and identity over time (Hollinger, 1995; Lind, 1995).
Applying universal moral principles to constitutional patriotism fails to avoid exclusion
of non-citizens - it merely recreates a larger nation-state
Cohen, 99- Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia
University
(Jean, September 1999, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos”,
International Sociology 14.3, 245-268)//Yak
Habermas acknowledges the discreteness of the political and the unavoidable 'ethical' dimension of any
actual, institutionalized constitution (Habermas, 1993:1-19). Constitutional patriotism entails allegiance
to 'our' particular constitution, not to any and every constitution. This entails attachment to the
particular way in which a specific polity has institutionalized and interpreted abstract liberal and
democratic principles, provided that these are open to reinterpretation. Accordingly, political
identification with the specific constitution of a specific polity, and the political identity of the demos
construed as those who so identify, is particular but not anti-universalist or illegitimately exclusionary.
With this synthesis of liberal and democratic principles of constitutionalism Habermas apparently avoids
the illiberal thrust of citizenship construed as membership in a territorially based, culturally specific,
national identity. The trick is accomplished by linking the three components of the citizenship principle
in a specific way: the 'ethical' or particular constitutional ethos is seen as a specification of universal
moral principles through democratic procedures and discussion on the part of a particular political
community.
But there's the rub. The ethical component of constitutional patriotism cannot be reduced to a mere
specification of universal moral principles (liberal or democratic). What makes a constitution American,
German, French and so on, entails a lot more culture, tradition, habits of the heart, than this conception
allows (McCarthy, 1991:181-99). The ethical-political or collective identity component cannot be
reduced to a contextual application of universal moral principles of justice.
Moreover the problematic of the 'exclusiveness of the demos' is not resolved either on the national or
supranational (regional) level so long as one assumes, as Habermas clearly does, that the various
components of the citizenship principle will come together on the same institutional level. Habermas's
constitutional patriotism remains within the modern paradigm of citizenship, even as he applies it to the
supranational level of the European Union understood as a federal polity in the making (Habermas,
1996b). Europe, in this approach, once it has a democratically legitimate constitution and a Europeanwide societe politique (involving European political parties), would simply be a federalist mega-state
with a new ethos forming around it. No other word would better capture the political identity that such
a sovereign liberal democratic constitutional European federalist mega-state would foster, if successful,
than nation. Constitutional patriotism even on this level would not avoid the paradoxical dialectic
inherent in the modern paradigm of citizenship that drives republican or liberal democratic conceptions
into the arms of thicker, more communitarian understandings of identity. It certainly does not exclude
exclusion.
Link – domestic / foreign
Codifying distinctions between national and foreign is the constitution of otherness –
it’s what allows enemy creation
Neocleous, 8 - Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of
Security, p. 122
In other words, the ideology of (national) security served and continues to serve as a means of
delineating, framing and asserting identity. Security functions as a means not just for identifying and
dealing with potential military threats, but also as a mechanism for the political constitution and cultural
production of identity and, as such, for the unity of political community. Thus the struggle for security
against the enemy – be it the communist menace or global terrorism – becomes a reaffirmation of the
historical burden of a distinctive identity around which the nation must unite. And yet we might equally
say that the ideology of national identity serves to delineate, frame and assert national security: identity
becomes a mechanism for the constitution of security. This is a double-edged process. On the one hand,
it involves simultaneously distancing this identity from the Other, often through distinguishing the
values central to this identity from the values of the enemy (or, more usually, the ‘lack’ of values of the
enemy).60 In Michael Shapiro’s terms, as a key dimension of foreign policy, national security involves
the making of the ‘foreign’ and the constitution of ‘Otherness’. The making of the Other as something
foreign is not simply an exercise in differentiation, but is integrally linked to how the self is understood.
A self constructed with a security-related identity leads to the constitution of Otherness in terms of the
level of threat the Other is said to offer to that security.61 On the other hand, this reasserts and
reinforces the acceptability of only certain forms of behaviour, modes of being, and political
subjectivities. In so doing it steers us away from other alliances – those which might encourage us to
contemplate a possible society not organised around security, private property and bourgeois order –
and impresses on us the importance of loyalty.
Invoking national identity mobilizes loyalty to the state and creates a permanent state
of emergency
Neocleous, 8 - Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of
Security, p. 141)
Fascism aside, the attempt to secure the imagined community of the nation goes hand in hand with the
politics of loyalty in reinforcing a system of symbolic representation of and concrete difference from the
Other, the extensive policing of organisations and associations, and the political administration of
human subjectivity. Thus alongside and as part of the national security state we find a security–identity–
loyalty complex, held together by fear and violence. Deployed in the name of security, loyalty and
identity help organise the political imagination around the state. Identity is mobilised for loyalty – to the
state; loyalty is mobilised for identity – with the nation; and both loyalty and identity are thereby
mobilised for security. It is as though identity could be borne only through the political cultivation of a
devoted loyalty to the state and the ‘values’ it purports to defend, and only a permanently expressed
loyalty to this identity will keep us secure.118 ‘Security’ is thus always much more than a dimension of
foreign policy, military technology and external defence. Rather, it is integral to the logic of (national)
identity, a key moment in the cultivation of loyalty within the garden of security. And the real beauty of
this security–identity–loyalty complex is that permanent emergency and the collapse of any distinction
between war and peace mean that the constant testing of loyalty, reassertion of identity and
improvement in security can be carried out by and across the whole social body: the police are
everywhere.
Link – privacy
Privacy focus is a link – it reduces opposing surveillance to an individual, rather than
collective problem
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
Note that I have couched this discussion in terms of surveillance and power rather than in terms of
privacy and individual rights. Many of the writers in this area focus on privacy, assuming that there is a
right to privacy and that violations of individual privacy must be weighed up against other competing
values (such as increasing efficiency or stopping crime). This language of privacy and rights is typical of
liberalism. It assumes that individuals are isolated entities who have agreed to participate in society
according to a "contract."
There are a lot of problems with this picture. Individuals are not isolated and autonomous but are
inevitably products of and participants in society. Furthermore, few individuals can be said to have
genuinely agreed to their place in society -- as if there is any real alternative!
Another problem with the focus on privacy is that privacy means different things to different people and
means different things in different cultures. (Even so, there may be commonalities in attitudes to privacy
across the most divergent cultures.[4]) But people who have different concepts of privacy may agree to
oppose particular types of surveillance.
A focus on privacy directs attention to the individual whose privacy is invaded; a focus on surveillance
directs attention to the exercise of power and to the groups that undertake it. Whether antisurveillance
is a better rallying point than privacy, though, remains to be seen.
Permutation
AT: Permutation
Combining a cosmopolitan ethics with state action ends up subverting the
cosmopolitan goal – the affirmative’s domestic categorization means the permutation
devolves into statism – that turns the case
Bauman et al, 14 – professor at the University of Leeds (Zygmunt, “After Snowden: Rethinking the
Impact of Surveillance” International Political Sociology (2014) 8, 121–144)
The transformation of territorial lines into a Mobius strip rearticulates the sovereign games that states
usually play. While big data collection blurs categorizations of what is “domestic” and what is “foreign,”
the consequent reconfiguration of the boundaries of the sovereign state into a Mobius strip has in turn
become a site, in and of itself, of political struggles, resistance and dissent. Along the Mobius strip,
states, social movements, and individuals can play a variety of games, reenacting the meanings of
sovereignty and citizenship, security, and liberty. In the case of states, reactions against mass
surveillance have varied from assertions of universal rights to reconstitutions of sovereign territorial
boundaries, from the digitization of security to the digitization of geopolitics. Several dimensions of the
Brazilian government’s recent reaction against techniques of mass surveillance are exemplary of the
different games that states play along the Mobius strip. This section will address these games and how
they shape political struggles around the digitized reason of state.
How to Turn the Mobius Strip Back into Sovereign Lines
Edward Snowden’s exposure of NSA surveillance operations in Brazil—including the monitoring of
President Rousseff’s mobile phone and the collection of data from the country’s oil company and,
indiscriminately, from Brazilian citizens— triggered a series of actions in several arenas. In addition to
the postponement of a state visit to the United States, originally scheduled for October 2013, President
Rousseff dedicated her statement at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly to the issue of
mass surveillance or, as she called it, “a global network of electronic espionage.” The statement
condemned the NSA’s practices on two grounds: violation of human rights and “disrespect to national
sovereignty.” Consistent with Rousseff’s speech, the most noticeable outcome was the inclusion of
privacy rights in the agenda of the UN Human Rights Committee and the introduction of a Resolution at
the UN General Assembly, with the support of the German government. Even though the resolution did
not mention the United States, its proposal was a way to censure the practices of mass surveillance
conducted by American agencies. Nevertheless, contrary to the many accusations of violations of
national sovereignty (vocalized by many governments, Brazil and Germany included), what distinguished
this reaction was the stage on which it took place and the vocabulary through which it was articulated.
At the UN, states are supposed to employ a universal vocabulary, enabling therefore claims for the
recognition of privacy as a human right.
The enactment of a universal vocabulary destabilizes the core of mass surveillance practices, bringing to
the fore the ways in which they constitute their main object of concern: the “data subject.” The “data
subject” is a conditional form of existence whose rights are dependent upon its behavior within digital
networks. The observation and analysis of specific behaviors make it possible to draw generic profiles
and to identify threats and targets. Hence, the degree of separation between the subject and an
identified target triggers specific surveillance techniques and defines the rights to which the “data
subject” is entitled. Under the digitized reason of state regime, individual rights are conditioned by a
specific series of relationships and by the particular positions that the subject occupies within these
boundless networks. “Data subjects” are constituted and accessed with regards to their particular
position. Their rights depend upon how distant—or not—they are from given targets. This positional
articulation is at odds with the cosmopolitan assumptions that underpin the universal rights campaign
by the Brazilian and German governments. Their attempts to reconstitute individual rights, and
ultimately the regulative idea of an autonomous subject, against the digitized reason of state, might
appear outdated and, perhaps, conservative. In this sense, political debates regarding the techniques of
mass surveillance at the General Assembly were primarily a struggle between two modes of existence:
the data subject and the cosmopolitan subject of universal rights. Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan
leaning of the General Assembly resolution was a way to reconstitute the promises of the modern
international, not only through the safeguarding of individual autonomy, but also through the assertion
of the responsibility of states in protecting it. Against the practices of mass surveillance, states such as
Brazil and Germany have tried to turn the Mobius strip back into sovereign territorial lines.
Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan move was not made at the expense of state sovereignty, at least not in
the case of the Brazilian government. Within this particular game, the enactment of a cosmopolitan
vocabulary authorizes the state to act in order to protect its citizens’ rights , including the right of
privacy and, as will be discussed below, to protect data. Hence, at the UN, the game that Brazilian
authorities are playing is actually an attempt to reconcile individual autonomy, state sovereignty, and
universal rights. Although strategically this game challenges the foundations of the digitized reason of
state, the techniques mobilized and eventually deployed to protect citizens’ rights may, in effect,
reinforce it . Claiming that privacy is a human right, Brazilian authorities support the creation of a
multilateral and multi-stakeholder arrangement “capable of ensuring freedom of expression, privacy of
individuals and respect for human rights” (Rousseff). Yet, the same claim authorizes the Brazilian
government to declare its resolve to “do everything within its reach to defend the human rights of all
Brazilians and to protect the fruits born from the ingenuity of [its] workers and [its] companies”
(Rousseff). That is, what President Rousseff has in mind is a set of domestic measures intended to build
up national capabilities to protect the privacy of Brazilian citizens against the threat of US mass
surveillance.4 Even though the multilateral regulation of cyberspace and the national capacity for the
protection of citizens’ privacy might complement each other, the prospects for the development of
techniques of national protection may trigger another game: a digitized geopolitics.
The Digitized Reason of State and Its Digitized Geopolitics
The policies announced by the Brazilian government to contain the threats presented by US mass
surveillance techniques include the increase of international Internet connectivity and domestic content
production. According to Brazilian authorities, the production of domestic content, such as a national
email service or a national social media, would allow Brazilian citizens to keep their data within national
borders. The debate regarding the creation of a “European data cloud” raises similar issues. Indeed,
Brazilian authorities are not alone. In a similar vein, Dutch authorities have tried to keep the
government’s data out of the reach of American companies, while the European Union is discussing the
possibility of isolating data storage from US mining techniques, and the German government is trying to
keep traffic local by warning Internet users when they pull out of European cyberspace. Not to mention
the well-known cases of the Chinese “Great Firewall” or the Iranian “Halal Internet.” In every case,
states are thickening their digital borders. Although one should not overlook the differences between
what Brazilian or German authorities are doing to protect data and privacy, and what the Chinese
government is doing with its firewall, in each of these cases a massive infrastructure has to be built.
Hence, a vast array of technologies, legislations, and expertise has to be developed and deployed either
to protect data, to control traffic or even for surveillance. On top of all of these investments in state
capacities for protection or surveillance, security professionals and intelligence experts have to be
mobilized to manage the national systems.
By building their fortresses in the clouds, states shift from the cosmopolitan move to strategic play .
While the first move is based on claims to universal rights, the strategic game is based on claims to
state sovereignty , or in this case cybersovereignty. Within these strategic games, very often, the
reference to universal rights fades and ends up being replaced by a strategic reasoning embedded in
uncertainty and fear . Concepts such as national interest, national or state security, espionage, and war
come to the fore when state representatives go public to support policies and techniques that protect a
given society. Cyberspace is, then, described as a US-centered space, and so US cyber power should be
balanced through the development of national cyber capabilities or international coalitions.
In the Brazilian case, attempts to expand international Internet connectivity (within the regional space
but also on a global scale) are consistent with the idea of protecting national data as well as of balancing
or competing with the US position in cyberspace. The program comprises three articulated initiatives:
the construction of intercontinental undersea fiber cables, many of them connecting Southern
countries; a satellite program, planning to launch a “Geostationary Defense and Strategic
Communications satellite” in 2016; and, finally, an overland fiber cable connecting countries in South
America. One of the core moves in this game has been the announcement of a BRICS cable, connecting
all of the BRICS countries independently from the United States.5 Every single initiative articulates
different branches of the Brazilian government with Brazilian or transnational corporations, and every
project is transnational by its own nature.6
This new game results in an expansion of the digitized reason of state. Instead of evading the Mobius
strip, states play geopolitics within it. The digitized geopolitics assumes that cyberspace is a battlefield
and that states must build up their own cyber capabilities in order to defend themselves and/or must
engage in international coalitions in order to face the challenges posed by mass surveillance and digital
espionage. The paradoxical effect of this particular game seems to be that states’ resistance against
mass surveillance ultimately reinforces the digitized reason of state regime. Reproducing the opposition
between security and freedom, while playing the digitized geopolitics game, states might end up
subsuming citizenship and rights to the positional logic of a data subject. While fighting against mass
surveillance, states may create the appropriate conditions to conduct mass surveillance themselves .
Legal reform isn’t a negative state action – it sucks advocacy in to support the state
and deradicalizes the alternative
Neocleous, 8 - Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of
Security, p. 72-75)
But there is a wider argument to be made, one with political implications. The idea that the permanent
emergency involves a suspension of the law encourages the idea that resistance must involve a ‘return
to legality’, a return to the ‘normal’ mode of governing through the rule of law. This involves a serious
misjudgement in which it is simply assumed that legal procedures – both international and domestic –
are designed to protect human rights from state violence. ‘Law’ itself comes to appear largely
unproblematic and the rule of law ‘an unqualified human good’.108 What this amounts to is what I have
elsewhere called a form of legal fetishism, in which Law becomes a mystical answer to the problems
posed by power. In the process, the problems inherent in Law are ignored. Law is treated as an
‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ reality, explained according to its own dynamics, a Subject in itself
whose very existence requires that individuals and institutions ‘objectify’ themselves before it. This
produces the illusion that Law has a life of its own, abstracting the rule of law from its origins in class
domination, ignoring the ways in which the rule of law is deployed as a political strategy, and obscuring
the ideological mystification of these processes in the liberal trumpeting of the rule of law. To demand
the return to the ‘rule of law’ is to seriously misread the history of the relation between the rule of law
and emergency powers and, consequently, to get sucked into a less-than-radical politics in dealing with
state violence. Part of what I am suggesting is that emergency measures are part of the everyday
exercise of powers, working alongside rather than against the rule of law as part of a unified political
strategy in the fabrication of social order.
The question to ask, then, is less ‘how can we bring law to bear on violence?’ and much more ‘what is it
that the law permits emergency measures to accomplish?’109 This question – the question that Schmitt,
with his fetish for the decision cannot understand,110 which is also why contemporary Left
Schmittianism is such a dead loss – disposes of any supposed juxtaposition between legality and
emergency and allows us to recognise instead the extent to which the concept of emergency is deeply
inscribed within the law and the legal condition of the modern state, and a central part of liberalism’s
authoritarian moment: the iron fist in the velvet glove of liberal constitutionalism. Far from suspending
law or bracketing off the juridical, emergency powers lie firmly within the legal domain. How could they
not, since they are so obviously central to state power and the political technology of government – part
of the deployment of law, rather than its abandonment? Once this is recognised, the supposed
problematic of violence disappears completely, for it can then be seen that emergency powers are
deployed for the exercise of a violence necessary for the permanent refashioning of order – the violence
of law, not violence contra law. Liberalism struggles with this, and thus presents it as an exceptional
moment; fascism recognises it for what it is, and aestheticises the moment. As David Dyzenhaus points
out, while the stripping of liberties in the name of emergency, the denial of rights on the grounds of
necessity, and the suspension of freedoms through the exercise of prerogative might appear quite minor
compared to what happens in fascist regimes, the fact that the stripping, denial and suspension does
happen under the guise of emergency and in full view of the courts brings the legal order of liberal
democracies far closer to the legal order of fascism than liberals would care to admit.111 But in a
wonderful ideological loop, the rule of law is also its own ideological obfuscation of that fact.112
The political implications of this are enormous. For if emergency powers are part and parcel of the
exercise of law and violence (that is, law as violence), and if historically they have been aimed at the
oppressed – in advanced capitalist states against the proletariat and its various struggles, in reactionary
regimes against genuine politicisation of the people, in colonial systems against popular mobilisation –
then they need to be fought not by demanding a return to the ‘normal’ rule of law , but in what
Benjamin calls a real state of emergency, on the grounds that only this will improve our position in the
struggle against the fascism of our time. And this is a task which requires violence, not the rule of law. As
Benjamin saw, the law’s claim to a monopoly of violence is explained not by the intention of preserving
some mythical ‘legal end’ such as security or normality but, rather, for ‘the intention of preserving the
law itself’. But violence not in the hands of the law threatens it by its mere existence outside the law. A
violence exercised not by the state, but used for very different political ends. For ‘if the existence of
violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, [then] this furnishes proof that
revolutionary violence . . . is possible’.113
That this possibility of and necessity for revolutionary violence is so often omitted when emergency
powers are discussed is indicative of the extent to which much of the Left has given up any talk of
political violence for the far more comfortable world of the rule of law, regardless of how little the latter
has achieved in just the last few years. But if the history of emergency powers tells us anything it is that
the least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on the rule of law. Rather than aiming to
counter state violence with a demand for legality , then, what is needed is a counter-politics: against
the permanent emergency, by all means, but also against the ‘normality’ of everyday class power and
the bourgeois world of the rule of law . And since the logic of emergency is so deeply embedded in the
rhetorical structure of liberalism’s concept of security, this means being against the politics of security.
For the very posing of political questions through the trope of emergency is always already on the side
of security. To grasp why, we need to now refocus our attention more specifically on security as a
political technology.
Using the legal system creates a legal fetishism that inevitably reinforces sovereign
boundaries – only wholesale rejection solves
Kienscherf, 13 – professor of sociology at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at
the Free University of Berlin (Markus, US Domestic and International Regimes of Security: Pacifying the
Globe, Securing the Homeland, p. 152-155)
Kyle Grayson (2012: 36) suggests that what is at the heart of the debate about the liberal practice of
targeted killing is a fundamental dilemma about liberalism itself Is liberalism a good system that can
produce bad outcomes or a bad system that can produce good outcomes?" This question can be
rephrased as follows: Can liberalism still provide the grounds for challenging the increasing use of
illiberal, and sometimes even lethal, practices of security in the name of liberalism?
First, governmentalities of security in general, and certain security practices (such as targeted killings) in
particular, can be challenged in the name of effectiveness. In fact, the overall field of security is marked
by contradictions and controversies. Security professionals often disagree on the priority of specific
insecurities as well as on questions of tactics, operations and strategy The afore- mentioned critique of
drone attacks serves as a good example of tactical and operational differences, both amongst security
professionals and between them and political decision-makers. However, critical accounts of the
supposed (in) effectiveness of particular rationalities and practices of security completely tend to ignore
the fundamental problematic at the heart of liberal security, namely the biopolitical division between
good" and bad" circulations. Moreover, the very ineffectiveness of governmentalities of security in
promoting sustainable security and their tendency to even reinforce existing insecurities, ultimately
drives their perpetual (re)adjustment and expansion. For, if security is but a response to perceived
insecurities, then the more that threats proliferate, the louder will be the calls for ever more security.
Ultimately, critiques of the effectiveness of particular governmentalities of security are bound to be
complicit in the search for ever more and better security.
Second, the expansion of governmentalities of security can be challenged in the name of peace. This
critique is based on two interrelated assumptions: (1) that governmentalities of security are a mere
extension of warfighting into hitherto civilian domains, and (2) that there is still a clear-cut difference
between war and peace. This view implies a resurrection of the inside/outside binary, in order to be able
to critique the militarization of security from a civilian position of peace. However, if war and peace are
completely intermingled, and if security increasingly operates according to a "logic" of pacification waging 'savage wars of peace" (Kipling 1899) within a global homeland, then 'peace' can hardly offer a
vantage point for the critique of liberal security. For, although global peace may indeed be desirable the,
often violent, means of pacification deployed in pursuit of global peace and stability are clearly not.
Third, the expansion of governmentalities of security can be challenged in the name of the rale of law. If
security hinged on declaring mere exceptions to the normality of the rule of law, we could just attempt
to strengthen legal mechanisms to make it much harder or even impossible to declare a state of
exception. However, if the use of emergency powers has become a routine technology of government, if
the passage and enforcement of laws itself has become a security tactic, and if we can no longer
distinguish between normality' and the 'exception', this is clearly not a viable option . What is more,
challenging the expansion of security in the name of law also entails what Neocleous calls "a form of
legal fetishism' (2008: 73: see also 2000). Legal fetishism treats law as 'a mystical answer to the
questions of power', while ignoring how law is bound up in relations of power and how it sometimes
even serves as a mere tactic of power (2008: 73).
Last but not least, the expansion of governmentalities of security can be challenged in the name of the
perhaps most cherished principle of liberalism - freedom. Doing so rests on the assumption that
freedom and security have become unbalanced m favor of security, so that we have to somehow
rebalance them. However, if liberty and security are completely wrapped up in one another, this is
surely pointless. For, as shown in the course of this book, liberal security aims to promote the freedom
of some circulations by interdicting others. To put it crudely, liberal security has so far primarily tended
to ensure the freedom of well-to-do white people , while severely curtailing that of poor people of
color , both domestically and globally.
Liberal security is increasingly set to respond to insecurities and threats that are held to circulate across
local, national, regional and global levels. These insecurities and threats are, moreover, held to emanate
from particular spaces and populations that more often than not also happen to be amongst the most
deprived. The security solutions prescribed in response to these problems tend to take the form of
pacification campaigns, targeting particular spaces and populations, in order to (re)integrate them into a
global order, while containing and/or eradicating elements within these populations and spaces that are
seen as threats to the global order. Contemporary liberal security thus marks both an externalization of
domestic order maintenance, projecting rationalities and practices of liberal government onto the global
level, and an internalization of external order building, re-importing colonial violence into the homeland.
Authoritarian practices, or emergency powers, have been and continue to be used in, and by, liberal
regimes in the name of securing liberal order. These authoritarian practices are no mere aberration, but
have become a permanent feature of liberal rule, leading to what some critics have called a permanent
state of exception. Yet, these authoritarian practices are not directed at all and sundry. They tend to
target some more than others. In fact, liberal authoritarianism in general, and liberal violence in
particular, tends to be aimed at individuals, populations and spaces that are seen as either recalcitrant
to liberal rule or as threats to the liberal capitalist order The actual degree of authoritarianism is,
moreover, supposed to be adjusted to the perceived level of risk embodied by the targeted individuals,
populations and spaces. However, liberalism's nuanced calculations of risk always tend to bleed into a
much cinder friend/enemy binary.
Liberal rule is torn between a universalistic deterritorializing tendency of temporal development, of
becoming-liberal, on the one hand, and a particularistic, reterritorializing tendency of spatial separation,
on the other. Liberal rule constantly seeks to extend its fundamental promises of freedom (the rule of
law and peace) to ever more populations and spaces, working towards "a decentered and
deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its
open expanding frontiers' - that is to say, towards the becoming-liberal of the entire globe (Hardt and
Negri 2000: vii). Yet at the same time, liberal rule constantly draws and redraws borders between
those who can be ruled liberally, and those who either have to be rendered amenable to liberal rule or
have to be violently excluded . The contradiction between the deterritorializing and the
reterritorializing forces at play in liberal rule manifests itself in attempts to distinguish between those
circulations that need to be promoted and those that need to be interdicted. As these ‘bad' circulations
are held to threaten processes at the local, national, regional and global level, the universal promotion
of liberal rule entails both the externalization of internal forms of liberal government and the
internalization of external forms of violence. Liberalism's tendency to project the hitherto domestic
promotion of the processes of the population onto the global level encounters both resistance and the
emergence of circulations that are seen as pulling the processes of the population at risk. Consequently,
attempts to include ever more populations and spaces in the liberal order, while violently excluding
dangerous ones , inevitably reinforce existing divisions and engender new ones. Indeed, liberal
governmentalities of security are constantly expanding to make the biopolitical distinction between
‘good' and 'bad' circulations on an increasingly wider scale, potentially including the entire globe. The
constant expansion of liberal security is geared towards (re)producing a liberal capitalist order, but it
also ultimately reinforces the social, economic, political and cultural divisions this order invariably
entails.
Liberal security can thus hardly be challenged on liberal grounds. After all, liberal governmentalities of
security are deployed in the name of freedom, the rule of law and peace and with the express purpose
of securing a liberal order. In fact, a critique of liberal security has to be a critique of liberalism itself.
The expansion of liberal governmentalities of security can only be challenged if we constantly ask the
follow ing set of questions: Whose freedom and security do they seek to provide for and at what costs
to others? On what fundamental economic, social, political and cultural inequalities is the provision of
security based, and to what extent does it reproduce these inequalities?
Impact
2nc impact – extinction
Reinforcing national borders prevents addressing global existential threats – a
counter-politics of security oriented towards cosmopolitanism must be the starting
point of debate
Graham, 12 - Ph.D. in Science and Technology Policy (Stephen, “Digital Medieval”, 27 March 2012,
Surveillance & Society, 9(3), 321-327.)//gg
A final, crucial question emerges here. Above all these concerns, caveats, and crises we must consider
how a successful counter-politics of security might be mobilized, which resists and recasts the violent
shift towards a biopolitics of preemption, exception and managing the consequences of extreme
polarization. Such a counterpolitics must seek to challenge not only the mythologies sustaining
ubiquitous bordering. It must also confront the transnational complexes that feed off the way the
extending and all-pervasive mantra of militarized ‘security’ now works to permeate every crevice of
everyday urban life (Parr 2006).
In the current context it is profoundly subversive to ask the simple question: What might a politics of
security be that actually addresses the real risks and threats that humankind faces in a rapidly urbanizing
world prone to resource exhaustion, spiraling food, energy and water insecurity, biodiversity collapse,
hyper-automobilisation, financial crises, and global warming and does this from a cosmopolitan rather
than xenophobic and militaristic starting point? Or where it is the human, urban or ecological aspects of
security that are foregrounded, rather than tawdry machinations and imagineering which surrounds
constellations of states and transnational corporations, integrated through the dubious and corrupt
relationships with burgeoning security-industrial-military complexes?
Such a process must clearly begin by contesting the increasingly widespread mobilisation of ‘hard’ – i.e.
profitable – borders and security strategies to question whether these actually do anything but
exacerbate vicious circles of fear and isolation, and quests for the holy grail of certainty, through
technological omniscience combined with architectures of withdrawal for the wealthy, mobile, or
powerful. “The growth of enclave societies,” Bryan Turner (2007) writes, “makes the search for
cosmopolitan values and institutions a pressing need, but the current trend towards the erection of
walls against the dispossessed and the underclass appears to be inexorable” (301).
Such cosmopolitan notions of urban, human and ecological security must be open to – indeed forged
through – difference. They must work against the habitual translation of difference into objectification,
Otherness and violence. They must assert the reinstatement of rights within states of reception as
means to overcome the murderous sovereignties which surround the states of exception which
increasingly characterize neoliberal capitalism. Finally, such a counter-politics must reject and reverse
tendencies toward the ubiquitous bordering of mobility, circulation and social life based on ideas of
ubiquitous bordering deployed both within and without the territorial limits of ‘homeland’ states.
A useful starting point here is provided by the work of philosopher, Adrian Parr. He urges that a viable
counter politics to the ubiquitous border must start by opening up the “parameters of this debate in a
way that no longer understands the outside as terrifying and a source of contamination, against which
the inside defensively freezes itself in an effort to contain and ward-off encroachment” (2006: 106).
National identity prevents an effective response to global problems --- only
articulating a shared identity can prevent extinction.
Smith, 3 - Professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania and PhD Harvard University.
(Rogers, Stories Of Peoplehood, The Politics and Morals of Political Membership, p. 166-169)
It is certainly important to oppose such evolutionary doctrines by all intellectually credible means. But
many have already been widely discredited; and today it may well prove salutary, even indispensable, to
heighten awareness of human identity as shared membership in a species engaged in an ages-long
process of adapting to often dangerous and unforgiving natural and man-made environments.20 When
we see ourselves in the light of general evolutionary patterns, we become aware that it is genuinely
possible for a species such as ourselves to suffer massive setbacks or even to become extinct if we
pursue certain dangerous courses of action. That outcome does not seem to be in any human's interest.
And when we reflect on the state of our species today, we see or should see at least five major
challenges to our collective survival, much less our collective nourishing, that are in some respects truly
unprecedented. These are all challenges of our own making, however, and so they can all be met
through suitably cooperative human efforts. The first is our ongoing vulnerability to the extraordinary
weapons of mass destruction that we have been building during the last half century. The tense
anticipations of imminent conflagration that characterized the Cold War at its worst are now behind us,
but the nuclear arsenals that were so threatening are largely still with us, and indeed the governments
and, perhaps, terrorist groups possessed of some nuclear weaponry have continued to proliferate. The
second great threat is some sort of environmental disaster, brought on by the by-products of our efforts
to achieve ever-accelerating industrial and post-industrial production and distribution of an incredible
range of good and services. Whether it is global warming, the spread of toxic wastes, biospheric
disruptions due to new agricultural techniques, or some combination of these and other consequences
of human interference with the air, water, climate, and plant and animal species that sustain us, any
major environmental disaster can affect all of humanity. Third, as our economic and technological
systems have become ever more interconnected, the danger that major economic or technological
failures in one part of the world might trigger global catastrophes may well increase. Such
interdependencies can, to be sure, be a source of strength as well as weakness, as American and
European responses to the East Asian and Mexican economic crises of the 1990s indicated. Still, if global
capitalism were to collapse or a technological disaster comparable to the imagined Y2K doomsday
scenario were to occur, the consequences today would be more far-reaching than they would have been
for comparable developments in previous centuries. Fourth, as advances in food production, medical
care, and other technologies have contributed to higher infant survival rates and longer lives, the
world's population has been rapidly increasing, placing intensifying pressures on our physical and social
environments in a great variety of ways. These demographic trends, necessarily involving all of
humanity, threaten to exacerbate all the preceding problems, generating political and military conflicts,
spawning chronic and acute environmental damages, and straining the capacities of economic systems.
The final major challenge we face as a species is a more novel one, and it is one that may bring
consciousness of our shared "species interests" even more to the fore. In the upcoming century, human
beings will increasingly be able to affect their own genetic endowment, in ways that might potentially
alter the very sort of organic species that we are. Here as with modern weapons, economic processes,
and population growth, we face risks that our efforts to improve our condition may go disastrously
wrong, potentially endangering the entire human race. Yet the appeal of endowing our children with
greater gifts is sufficiently powerful that organized efforts to create such genetic technologies capable of
"redesigning humans" are already burgeoning, both among reputable academic researchers and less
restrained, but well-endowed, fringe groups.21 To be sure, an awareness of these as well as other
potential dangers affecting all human beings is not enough by itself to foster moral outlooks that reject
narrow and invidious particularistic conceptions of human identity. It is perfectly possible for leaders to
feel that to save the species, policies that run roughshod over the claims of their rivals are not simply
justified but morally demanded. Indeed, like the writers I have examined here, my own more egalitarian
and cosmopolitan moral leanings probably stem originally from religious and Kantian philosophical influences, not from any consciousness of the common "species interests" of human beings. But the ethically
constitutive story which contends that we have such interests, and that we can see them as moral
interests, seems quite realistic, which is of some advantage in any such account. And under the
circumstances just sketched, it is likely that more and more people will become persuaded that today,
those shared species interests face more profound challenges than they have in most of human history.
If so, then stressing our shared identity as members of an evolving species may serve as a highly credible
ethically constitutive story that can challenge particularistic accounts and foster support for novel
political arrangements. Many more people may come to feel that it is no longer safe to conduct their
political lives absorbed in their traditional communities, with disregard for outsiders, without active
concern about the issues that affect the whole species and without practical collaborative efforts to
confront those issues. That consciousness of shared interests has the potential to promote stronger and
much more inclusive senses of trust, as people come to realize that the dangers and challenges they face
in common matter more than the differences that will doubtless persist. I think this sort of awareness of
a shared "species interests" also can support senses of personal and collective worth, though I
acknowledge that this is not obviously the case. Many people find the spectacle of the human species
struggling for survival amidst rival life forms and an unfeeling material world a bleak and dispiriting one.
Many may still feel the need to combine acceptance of an evolutionary constitutive story with religious
or philosophical accounts that supply some stronger sense of moral purpose to human and cosmic
existence. But if people are so inclined, then nothing I am advocating here stands in the way of such
combinations. Many persons, moreover, may well find a sustaining sense of moral worth in a conception
of themselves as contributors to a species that has developed unique capacities to deliberate and to act
responsibly in regard to questions no other known species can yet conceive: how should we live? What
relationships should we have, individually and collectively, to other people, other life forms, and the
broader universe? In time, I hope that many more people may come to agree that humanity has shared
responsibilities of stewardship for the animate and physical worlds around us as well as ourselves,
ultimately seeking to promote the flourishing of all insofar as we are capable and the finitude of
existence permits. But even short of such a grand sense of species vocation, the idea that we are part of
humanity's endeavor to strive and thrive across ever-greater expanses of space and time may be one
that can inspire a deep sense of worth in many if not most human beings. Hence it does not seem
unrealistic to hope that we can encourage increased acceptance of a universalistic sense of human
peoplehood that may help rein in popular impulses to get swept up in more parochial tales of their
identities and interests. In the years ahead, this ethical sensibility might foster acceptance of various
sorts of transnational political arrangements to deal with problems like exploitative and wildly fluctuating international financial and labor markets, destructive environmental and agricultural practices,
population control, and the momentous issue of human genetic modifications. These are, after all,
problems that appear to need to be dealt with on a near-global scale if they are to be dealt with
satisfactorily. Greater acceptance of such arrangements would necessarily entail increased willingness to
view existing governments at all levels as at best only "semi-sovereign," authoritative over some issues
and not others, in the manner that acceptance of multiple particularistic constitutive stories would also
reinforce. In the resulting political climate, it might become easier to construct the sorts of systems of
interwoven democratic international, regional, state and local governments that theorists of "cosmopolitan democracy," "liberal multicultural nationalism," and "differentiated democracy" like David
Held, Will Kymlicka, Iris Young, William Connolly, and Jurgen Habermas all envision.
National identity is invoked to prop up the national security state and is responsible
for millions of deaths and widespread structural violence
Neocleous, 8 - Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of
Security, p. 101-105)
Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘intervention’,
fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious and
frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face
is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe
when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and
perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations
decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution
to address its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois
concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’
becomes the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of
security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly reorder the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong side of
history’.104
‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent commented in 1991, ‘there have been about
3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt,
destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert operation has been
rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’.105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy,
France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand,
Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay,
Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama,
Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan,
Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries
identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have
varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security – ‘making the economy scream’
via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other
techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health
Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and
the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain
old fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the
remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to
undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism
flowed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, ‘national
security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory ‘security partnerships’ could be
established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile,
Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central
Asian republics that emerged with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole world
was to be included in the new ‘secure’ global liberal order.
The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock - well, who was part of a CIA project in
Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this:
Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have
been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we
can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are:
one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia,
one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in
Nicaragua.109
Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other
interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history.
All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June
2002, which became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United States in
September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any
government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it.
While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first
century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine.
The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat
to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more
compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such
hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.110
In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still
underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘economic order’. The
National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on
‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic
liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111 Economic security (that is,
‘capitalist accumulation’) in the guise of ‘national security’ is now used as the justification for all kinds of
‘intervention’, still conducted where necessary in alliance with fascists, gangsters and drug cartels, and
the proliferation of ‘national security’- type regimes has been the result. So while the national security
state was in one sense a structural bi-product of the US’s place in global capitalism, it was also vital to
the fabrication of an international order founded on the power of capital. National security, in effect,
became the perfect strategic tool for landscaping the human garden.112 This was to also have huge
domestic consequences, as the idea of containment would also come to reshape the American social
order, helping fabricate a security apparatus intimately bound up with national identity and thus the
politics of loyalty.
2nc – circumvention
Legal restrictions on the state fail – security is driven by politics, not law
Rana 12- Ph.D. in political science at Harvard and a J.D. at Yale Law School
(Aziz Rana, July 2012, “Who Decides on Security?”, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1417)//Yak
But this mode of popular involvement comes at a key cost. Secret information generally is treated as
worthy of a higher status than information already present in the public realm—the shared collective
information through which ordinary citizens reach conclusions about emergency and defense. Yet,
oftentimes, as with the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, although the actual content of this secret
information is flawed,322 its status as secret masks these problems and allows policymakers to cloak
their positions in added authority. This reality highlights the importance of approaching security
information with far greater collective skepticism ; it also means that security judgments may be more
Hobbesian—marked fundamentally by epistemological uncertainty as opposed to verifiable fact—than
policymakers admit.
If the objective sociological claims at the center of the modern security concept are themselves
profoundly contested, what does this mean for reform efforts that seek to recalibrate the relationship
between liberty and security? Above all, it indicates that the central problem with the procedural
solutions offered by constitutional scholars—emphasizing new statutory frameworks or greater judicial
assertiveness—is that they mistake a question of politics for one of law. In other words, such scholars
ignore the extent to which governing practices are the product of background political judgments about
threat, democratic knowledge, professional expertise, and the necessity for insulated decision-making.
To the extent that Americans are convinced that they face continuous danger from hidden and
potentially limitless assailants—danger too complex for the average citizen to comprehend
independently—it is inevitable that institutions ( regardless of legal reform initiatives) will operate to
centralize power in those hands presumed to enjoy military and security expertise. Thus, any
systematic effort to challenge the current framing of the relationship between security and liberty
must begin by challenging the underlying assumptions about knowledge and security upon which
legal and political arrangements rest . Without a sustained and public debate about the validity of
security expertise, its supporting institutions, and the broader legitimacy of secret information, there
can be no substantive shift in our constitutional politics. The problem at present, however, is that it
remains unclear which popular base exists in society to raise these questions. Unless such a base fully
emerges, we can expect our prevailing security arrangements to become ever more entrenched.
International intelligence gathering circumvents domestic restrictions
Bauman et al, 14 – professor at the University of Leeds (Zygmunt, “After Snowden: Rethinking the
Impact of Surveillance” International Political Sociology (2014) 8, 121–144)
The potential field of suspicion is massive in the sense that it has no end and spreads through networks.
But it is not massive in terms of global reach or the surveillance of everyone. This is indeed the main
argument made by the different intelligence services. They say that they have objective criteria to
restrict their searches and that they cover only foreign intelligence (cf. US-FISA and FISC, GCHQ
requirements, French internal directives)—thus, communications involving a “foreigner” at one end will
be examined, in priority, in a special circuit. However, it also seems that the system may identify
suspicious behaviors of nationals (and will in those cases have to ask for a warrant in the UK and US
jurisdictions). The bulk collection of data and the visualization through networks makes it impossible to
be certain about the difference between nationals and foreigners. Legality requirements threaten the
functioning of the system and so they presume that the law must adjust, not the system. To avoid this
“complication,” transnational networking between different services has enabled a blurring of the
boundaries of domestic and foreign jurisdiction . It seems that the different services in charge of their
own national security, working through the gathering and exchange of information, ask other security
services to perform some of their tasks, bypassing limitations on foreign intelligence by using “a citizen
privacy shopping ” to exchange surveillance of their own citizen with another service. In this way,
what is national and what is foreign becomes mostly irrelevant for transnationally organized
operations.
The federal government will sub-contract surveillance
Lyon, 15 - director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Surveillance Research Chair, Professor Sociology
and Law at Queen’s University (David, The Snowden Stakes: Challenges for Understanding Surveillance
Today. Surveillance & Society 13(2): 139-152. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
The second issue is that it is hard to pin down exactly who is conducting surveillance. Although the term
‘state’ surveillance is common in everyday parlance, those who stand in for ‘state’ employees are many
and varied, and this follows from the point above about the blurring between public and private sectors.
Snowden’s own position before his departure with the documents illustrates this. He worked for Booz
Allen Hamilton, whose expertise was subcontracted to the NSA. Didier Bigo (e.g. 2008; see also Ball and
Snider 2013; Bauman et al. 2014: 124-131; Lyon and Topak 2013) has for some time drawn attention to
the ways in which “security professionals” now form an international network, operating in different
countries but with extensive cooperation. These are intelligence agents, technical experts, police (both
public and private), advisers and others whose immediate genesis lies in post-9/11 international
antiterrorism cooperation but has now expanded into a clearly discernible network of some
considerable influence.
Importantly, older distinctions break down as this network of “unease managers” (as Bigo calls them)
develops. They connect public and private agencies, internal and external security, national and
international interests and so on. This development grows alongside the digitization of security and
surveillance such that, paradoxically, ‘national’ security is no longer ‘national’ in “…its acquisition or
even analysis, of data…” which helps to blur “…the lines of what is national as well as the boundaries
between law enforcement and intelligence” (Bauman et al. 2014: 125). This issue is related to the one
mentioned above, about the uncertainty of who actually carries out surveillance , although the further
point here is that a loose affiliation of professional organizations can be identified. They work together,
learning from each other and developing their own protocols, rationales and surveillance practices.
As the examples from the US show, similar surveillance practices occur across the board, whether in the
DHS, CIA, FBI or the NSA (or, for that matter, in the UK’s GCHQ or Canada’s CSEC). These ‘acronym’
policing and intelligence organizations also rely on similar subcontracting organizations that also
display similar technical, statistical and political-economic activities (see Ball and Snider 2013). Both
policing and intelligence agencies have military connections that also influence their practices and as
well the traffic is two way: information handling is crucial to each, such that policing becomes more
data-heavy (Haggerty and Ericson 1997) and also more inflected by military method (Brodeur 2010). In
all cases it is also clear that such organizations do not just react to perceived threats to national security
or to criminal acts. They actively construct the target populations and refine the rationales for so-doing.
This is where the commercial connections with technology corporations also become centrally
significant, in conjunction with government actors. Policy influences and is influenced by the corporate
and technical approaches and practices. At an organizational and network level, then, relationships are
manifold and complex.
--xt international outsourcing
Multiple redundant paths for surveillance – circumvention is easy via cooperation with
other states
Keiber, 15 – professor of political science at Otterbein University (Jason, “Surveillance Hegemony”
Surveillance & Society 13(2): 168-181. http://www.surveillanceand- society.org
In order to situate the NSA activity within the broader context of US surveillance abroad, the paper
makes two claims. First, the US exercises surveillance hegemony. Hegemony requires material power
(e.g. technological capability) and a normative and institutional framework that supports and provides
legitimacy to that power. Since 9/11 strong anti-terrorism norms have evolved calling on states to
develop domestic capacity to keep track of “bad guys” and share information with other states. There
are institutions that promulgate this norm—such as the United Nations—and many more that facilitate
information sharing on suspected terrorists more generally.
Surveillance hegemony is the reason why the US can rely on myriad avenues for surveillance .1 The
hegemonic triad of material power, legitimizing norms, and supporting international institutions greases
the wheels of US efforts to get information on suspected and known terrorists throughout the world. In
addition to secretive efforts like the NSA’s, hegemony is reflected in surveillance programs with other
states conducted more above board. I review two of these programs in this paper.
This leads to the second claim. US surveillance hegemony fosters an information ecology that connects
secret and public surveillance efforts. Information gains in one part of the ecology has effects for other
programs in the system. NSA activity cannot be fully understood without understanding how the
information with which it works interacts within this information ecology.
In fleshing out US surveillance hegemony, the paper brings an International Relations (IR) perspective to
Surveillance Studies to emphasize the interaction of states and the role of international norms and
organizations. IR is well suited to note the ways in which states cooperate, clash, and project power
abroad to collect information on individuals living in other sovereign states. In addition, focusing on the
US’s surveillance hegemony acts as a corrective to the obsession with NSA power. While the NSA
disclosures display US technology and willingness to go-it-alone, much of the US surveillance apparatus
is actually a product of cooperation and negotiation with other states and is fostered by norms and
institutions.
The US has formal surveillance sharing agreements with 37 countries
Keiber, 15 – professor of political science at Otterbein University (Jason, “Surveillance Hegemony”
Surveillance & Society 13(2): 168-181. http://www.surveillanceand- society.org
The extraordinary material surveillance capabilities of the US is perhaps most easily “measured” by its
exorbitant funding. Nearly a third of the US’s $52.6 billion intelligence budget is dedicated to fighting
terrorism (Gellman and Miller 2013).4 The NSA in particular gets one fifth of the overall budget. This
money sustains a talented workforce and produces cutting edge surveillance techniques. These
capabilities are often put to use covertly and unilaterally. The US, however, can also influence others to
participate in its broader, strategic surveillance efforts. One of the more striking examples of secret
cooperation is the recently disclosed RAMPART-A program in which over a dozen countries allow the US
to install equipment to “congested” cables so that the US can intercept phone and internet traffic
(Gallagher 2014). With some caveats, both the US and the host country reportedly get access to the
fruits of that surveillance . In general there are 37 states that are “approved SIGINT partners”
(Greenwald 2014).
Domestic limits won’t challenge US surveillance hegemony
Keiber, 15 – professor of political science at Otterbein University (Jason, “Surveillance Hegemony”
Surveillance & Society 13(2): 168-181. http://www.surveillanceand- society.org
The second takeaway concerns the future. US surveillance hegemony suggests—and the recently
disclosed NSA activity makes clear—an ambition to insinuate state power into the lives of people across
the globe. Even if the US makes reforms to address these concerns domestically, the US is unlikely to
significantly dial down its foreign surveillance activity. Underpinned as it is by hegemony, the US has
coopted others—particularly the UK (MacAskill et al. 2013)—into playing integral roles in global
surveillance. The goal, it seems, is to make populations everywhere “legible” to the US (Scott 1998). This
“conquest of illegibility” is quintessentially a state making activity. If the present continues on the
trajectory of more surveillance by states over individuals globally, surveillance will be normalized as a
global phenomenon dealt with by international— not domestic —states structures. It could be argued
that what we are seeing is an instance of international state formation along a particular dimension of
state power. There are obvious implications for those concerned with privacy and the democratic deficit
of international state power. While privacy concerns may seem increasingly quaint in the digital age,
global publics will surely clamor for more accountability and transparency. Whether or not enough
pressure builds for states to make meaningful changes remains to be seen.
The transnational nature of intelligence gathering means intelligence elites circumvent
domestic limits
Bauman et al, 14 – professor at the University of Leeds (Zygmunt, “After Snowden: Rethinking the
Impact of Surveillance” International Political Sociology (2014) 8, 121–144)
These ways of gathering and sharing information have paradoxical effects on national security
requirements. National security is no longer national in its acquisition, or even analysis, of data and
allies’ different national security imperatives may clash, causing trust to disappear. Digitization creates
big data gathered at a transnational scale, blurring the lines of what is national as well as the boundaries
between law enforcement and intelligence. These trends encourage the move from the judicial
framework of criminal policing to preventive, preemptive and predictive approaches and from a high
degree of certainty about a small amount of data to a high degree of uncertainty about a large amount
of data. The hybridization of private and public actors destabilizes socialization through national state
interests and secrecy, opening possibilities for major leaks by persons with different values.
To put this more theoretically, the change and uncertainty surrounding the categories of “foreign” and
“domestic” is dispersing them through the webs of connections and transforming the sovereign line that
separated them clearly into a Mobius strip (Bigo 2001). By projecting national security “inside out”—
through a transnational alliance of the professionals of national security and sensitive data, both public
and private—an unexpected “outside in” effect of suspicion is created for all Internet subjects. Many of
these “data subjects” react and reject the situation in which all Internet users are treated as potential
suspects, rather than as innocent in principle.
The practices of large-scale surveillance by the NSA and its counterparts must thus be understood, not
as media-driven scandal which will soon pass, but as indicators of a much larger transformation affecting
the way the boundaries of national security function. This is due to the conjunction of three processes
that have become interwoven: transnationalization, digitization, and privatization.
This conjunction creates an overarching effect of dispersion that challenges the very idea of a reason of
state conducted by a “state” in which the government determines national interests and national
security and asks its own services to operate accordingly. Even if it has always rested on exaggerated
claims about autonomy and self-determination, the concept of reason of state is now less and less
encapsulated in the formula of a national security performed by intelligence services socialized into
secrecy and public responsibility, patriotism, and suspicion of services in other nations. Rather, we see
the transformation of a reason of state through the emergence of a digitized reason of state performed
by a heterogeneous complex of professionals, of sensitive information hybridizing private and public
actors. The transnational nature of gathering information that crosses the boundaries of states
dissociates the discursive, homogeneous nature of national security interests while reconstructing an
aggregate of professionals. These professionals exchange information through digital technologies,
produce intelligence according to their own interests, and despise the idea that the rights of all Internet
users can create limitations to their projects.
Consequently these transnational guilds of professionals are directly challenging the authority of the
professionals of politics which, in principle at least, and within the limits of an international order, had
the capacity and authority to define the content of national interests and security (Bigo 2013). They also
challenge the authority of national citizens by reconfiguring the ideas of privacy, secrecy of
communication, presumption of innocence, and even democracy. It may not be going too far to suggest
that what we still call national security has been colonized by a new nobility of intelligence agencies
operating in an increasingly autonomous transnational arena.
Domestic protections fail – surveillance reform requires international oversight due to
intelligence cooperation
Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has
Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN) ICT = Information and
Communications Technology
What these various examples underscore is that we cannot simply focus on domestic institutions and
domestic laws if we are to bring surveillance practices within an effective regime of oversight and
accountability. Some form of international treaties is likely required, with international oversight
bodies. Early in the life-cycle of the Snowden revelations there was speculation about the existence of
“no spy” agreements between members of the Five Eyes alliance58, protecting the citizens of each
country from spying from other members. Although there seem to be informal practices and
conventions, the United States has publicly and emphatically denied any formal agreements.59
Whatever we might think about these relationships “based on decades of familiarity, transparency, and
past performance between the relevant policy and intelligence communities”, these are not legal
protections.60 They are secret, of uncertain scope, can be discarded in the interests of national
sovereignty61, exist to protect the interests of the state and not the citizens of that state, and are in no
way subject to independent oversight.
--xt private outsourcing
The state will outsource surveillance to private corporations
Verde Garrido, 15 – Berlin Forum on Global Politics (BFoGP), Germany (Miguelángel, “Contesting a
Biopolitics of Information and Communications: The Importance of Truth and Sousveillance After
Snowden” Surveillance & Society, 13(2): 153-167. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
• States outsource prior state functions, such as surveillance, censorship, and policing of information
and communications, to corporations; although numerous corporations perform these functions as their
raison d'être, in the case of others, ‘outsourcing’ does not necessarily imply that the corporation in
question is a contractor, since corporations can also be legally coerced to perform these functions under
national security claims;
Snowden’s revelations have evidenced that the NSA and the GCHQ collaborate with a number of global
internet corporations, even if the exact terms in which these collaborations occur continue to be unclear
(New York Times 7th June 2013). In addition, a number of corporations gather information and provide
analyses and advice to states as commercial services—for example, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc and
Lockheed Martin to the US government (New York Times 9th June 2013). Furthermore, an international
surveillance technology industry is expanding: various corporations specialize in providing states with
advanced communication surveillance technologies. This global trade, calculated to be worth 3 to 5
billion US dollars a year, has already reached an annual growth rate of 20 per cent (Amnesty
International 4th April 2014). These facts show, without a doubt, a swelling neoliberalization of state
functions, especially those concerned with security and intelligence, as well as a number of industries
that commercialize the monitoring, collection, and meticulous processing of vast amounts of
information and communications.
AT: Fiat
Legalism means executive agencies use creative wordplay to stick to the letter of the
plan, but interpret it differently
Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE
SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES”
11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalismisn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
LEGALISM AND WORDPLAY: Don’t be “led astray” by common definitions
How does Margo’s concept of legalism account for the surveillance community’s misleading wordplay?
Take for example the doublespeak NSA and Department of Defense (DoD) officials use when they talk
about surveillance rules. A Defense Intelligence Agency “intelligence law handbook” explains that a DoD
document regulating NSA conduct has special definitions of commonly used words, so that analysts
should “adjust their vocabulary” lest they be led astray by relying on commonly understood definitions.
One such word is “collect”. When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper whether the NSA collects any information at all on millions or hundreds of millions of
Americans, Clapper said “no, not wittingly.” We now know, as the Senate and Clapper both knew at the
time, that the NSA does in fact collect such information. Yet, in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell,
Clapper refused to admit that he had lied to Congress. Rather, he justified his answer with a legalism. He
said that “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying
no.” Clapper indicated that his response to Wyden turned on a definition of “collect:” “There are honest
differences on the semantics of what — when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific
meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.”
Clapper thinks that “collect” doesn’t mean “gather.” It means “taking the book off the shelf and opening
it up and reading it.”
To understand surveillance, you must also free your mind from traditional definitions of other words,
including “target,” “relevant,” “incidental.” As cryptographer Matt Blaze once said, crafting a question to
get meaningful answers from the NSA is a lot like crafting a wish to get a genie to give you what you
actually want. The agency is warping language in order to make rules mean something very different
from what ordinary people would take them to mean . Do these word games demonstrate respect for
rules, or subversion of them? I think it’s subversion.
Legal complexity and creative lawyering mean it’s easy to find a loophole
Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has
Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN)
In addition to secrecy, and sometimes working in conjunction with it, legal complexity undermines
accountability. One aspect of this complexity, within Canada, is the different institutions that deal with
national security concerns, including the RCMP, CSIS and CSEC. Oversight of each is handled differently,
with limited ability to coordinate between oversight bodies even in relation to the ways in which these
bodies cooperate and assist one another.17⁠ However, the complexity that I want to highlight here
concerns law reform itself, given these interrelationships. That is, even if the state pursues public law
reform rather than secret legal interpretations, it is often difficult to understand the full implications of
legal changes. Instead of understanding themselves as participants in an open, transparent, and public
debate, lawyers concerned about civil liberties need to approach proposed legislation with a “hacker”
mentality, looking for non-obvious ways to read the legislation in order to locate the little-understood
legal vulnerabilities the government might exploit behind its wall of secrecy and protective official
statements.
Fiat doesn’t solve – the executive will interpret their actions as compliant with the
plan
Austin, 14 – professor of law at the University of Toronto (Lisa, “Lawful Illegality: What Snowden Has
Taught us About the Legal Infrastructure of the Surveillance State∗” SSRN)
Without an accountability mechanism that allows for the government’s interpretation of the law to
effectively be contested as well as for a final determination by an objective body, like a court, then
“lawfulness” turns out to simply mean a claim to operate within one’s own interpretation of the law.
Oversight, on this model, means independent assurance that one’s activities conform to one’s own
interpretation of the law. To be subject merely to one’s own interpretation of the law looks a lot like
getting to be one’s own judge, and it lies in deep tension with the ideal of law as an objective constraint
on state power.
This unilateralism is exacerbated by several other layers of secrecy that remove a number of potential
informal constraints that can operate to ensure balanced, rather than biased, legal advice. People seek
legal advice because they want to do things and need to find out how to do them legally. There is a
natural pressure, in such a context, to provide a permissive interpretation of the law. Many factors
typically operate to provide a countervailing pressure but most of these depend upon the understanding
of the parties involved that the actions taken pursuant to that legal advice will be public and can be
called into question by those affected by them. If there is reason to think that those affected can argue
that the actions taken are in fact contrary to law, then there is a risk of legal liability that will factor into
the original advice offered. More generally, public scrutiny through the press and academia provide
another set of informal constraints, albeit less direct. But state surveillance operations, both in terms of
general programs and in terms of particular operations, are secret . If surveillance is secret, then the
people likely affected by the surveillance are in no position to contest it, and this removes one of the
informal constraints that can operate to provide balance in determining the lawfulness of the
surveillance. In other words, the layers of secrecy surrounding state surveillance structurally enable onesided legal advice.
If the legal opinions establishing lawfulness are secret, if the activities at issue are secret, if the legal
opinions are ones that even those tasked with oversight must defer to, then the “lawfulness” of
surveillance is very one-sided indeed. The systematic effect of this on civil liberties should not be
underestimated. David Cole has argued, for example, that post 9/11 it has been civil society groups that
have been one of the most important guardians of constitutional and rule-of-law values, and not the
more “formal mechanisms of checks and balances” in the US.13 Such groups cannot perform this
function when they have no way of knowing the legal opinions and actions of the state, apart from what
they learn from whistleblowers.
Creative lawyering guarantees circumvention
Redmond, 14 – J.D. Candidate, 2015, Fordham University School of Law (Valerie, “I Spy with My Not So
Little Eye: A Comparison of Surveillance Law in the United States and New Zealand” FORDHAM
INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 37:733
In the United States, the current state of surveillance law is a product of FISA, its amendments, and its
strictures. An evaluation of US surveillance law proves that inherent loopholes undercut FISA’s
protections, which allows the US Government to circumvent privacy protections.182 The main problems
are the insufficient definition of surveillance , the ability to spy on agents of foreign powers, the lack of
protection against third party surveillance, and the ability to collect incidental information.183
First, a significant loophole arises in the interpretation of the term “surveillance.”184 In order for
information collection to be regulated by FISA, it must fall under FISA’s definition of surveillance.185
This definition does not apply to certain National Security Letters , which are secret authorizations for
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) to obtain records from telephone companies, credit agencies,
and other organizations if they merely certify that the information is relevant to an international
terrorism investigation.186 National Security Letters are regularly used to circumvent FISA’s warrant
procedures.187
Additionally, FISA’s definition of surveillance is antiquated because it distinguishes between data
acquired inside of the United States and outside of the United States.188 This distinction allows the NSA
to process surveillance that is received from other countries irrespective of whether the target is a US
citizen .189 Therefore, the NSA is unrestrained when a communication is not physically intercepted
within the United States.190
AT: NSA compliance culture
The intelligence community hasn’t followed the rules – it has a history of noncompliance since 9/11
Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE
SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES”
11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalismisn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
Margo Schlanger has written a great article forthcoming in the Harvard National Security Journal about
intelligence legalism, an ethical framework she sees underlying NSA surveillance. Margo makes the case
that NSA and the executive branch haven’t been asking what the right surveillance practices should be,
but rather what surveillance practices are allowed to be. She takes the concept of legalism from political
theorist Judith Shklar: “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following,
and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules.” In the model of legalism
that Margo sees the NSA following, any spying that is not legally prohibited is also right and good
because ethics is synonymous with following the rules. Her critique of “intelligence legalism” is that the
rules are the bare minimum, and merely following the rules doesn’t take civil liberties concerns seriously
enough.
My question is whether legalism serves as a moral code for US Intelligence Community (IC) leadership,
or only as a smokescreen. I believe the evidence shows that since 9/11,the IC, and specifically the NSA
has not followed the rules. Rather, the agency has resorted to legalistic justifications in pursuit of other
goals—namely whatever might be useful in countering terrorism. Before 9/11, the agency may have
been focused on complying with FISA. But after that day, the NSA’s approach was that it “could
circumvent federal statutes and the Constitution so long as there was some visceral connection to
looking for terrorists.” In other words, since 9/11, the moral center of gravity in the surveillance world
has focused on doing whatever is necessary for hunting terrorists, not following the rules.
Compliance claims are putting lipstick on a pig – creative lawyering will subvert the
intent of the plan
Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE
SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES”
11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalismisn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
In February of 2014, The NSA sent out two of its senior lawyers, Director of Compliance John DeLong
and its General Counsel Rajesh De, to make the pitch that the agency is actually an intensely-regulated,
closely-watched, and law-abiding good citizen. It is true that today, in response to NSA failures to follow
FISC post-collection rules, the agency has a large bureaucracy devoted to compliance, headed by Mr.
DeLong. Margo calls this bureaucratic structure an “Office of Goodness”, because the compliance office
is tasked with furthering a value not primary for the NSA and it wouldn’t be there unless the NSA
believed compliance to be A Good Thing. The first part of that argument, at least, makes sense. I have
no doubt that compliance is a major expense for NSA or that today the agency takes it very, very
seriously. But I don’t know whether the NSA leadership supports the compliance department because
they think its ethical to do so, or because they think its politically necessary to preserve NSA’s
relationship with the FISA court judges it pissed off, and who have to continue to approve at least some
of NSA’s surveillance activities.
Either way, if the public laws that Congress passes don’t mean what they say, then compliance is just
lipstick on a pig . Chris Sprigman wrote about this here at Just Security, and he sees the culture of
lawyering at the NSA, far from assuring the agency’s lawfulness, as actually aiding and abetting the
essential lawlessness of the mass surveillance programs.
“There is a danger here that the role of the NSA’s lawyers – and this goes for both De and DeLong –
creates the appearance but not the reality of lawfulness , and, in the end, does not vindicate the law,
but subverts it.”
If Chris is right that De and DeLong and the agency’s other lawyers have very little, if any, input into the
Administration’s interpretation of the agency’s legal authority (and neither lawyer has claimed to have
such input), then NSA lawyers aren’t empowered, they are rubber stamps . De is the agency’s general
counsel, responsible to ensure that the agency’s employees operate within the law. Yet he emphasizes
repeatedly that he relies on the expansive interpretation of the NSA’s authority that he says has been
approved by Congress, and the courts, and the Administration. De hasn’t engaged with the arguments
that the agency is overrunning whatever surveillance authority Congress and the courts have actually
given it.
Margo argues that legalism actually both crowds out the consideration of policy and interests (as
opposed to law and rights), and legitimates the surveillance state, making it less susceptible to policy
reform. Chris says that De and DeLong’s approach to agency lawyering is actually lawlessness in
disguise . Who is right, and does it matter for reform?
AT: FISC review
The intelligence community can bend the FISC to justify any result – regardless of
statutory rules otherwise
Granick, 14 – Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (Jennifer, “THE
SURVEILLANCE STATE’S LEGALISM ISN’T ABOUT MORALS, IT’S ABOUT MANIPULATING THE RULES”
11/13, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/surveillance-state%E2%80%99s-legalismisn%E2%80%99t-about-morals-it%E2%80%99s-about-manipulating-rules
This disorganized scramble to get something, anything, on paper and then lock it away so no one could
see how crappy it is demonstrates neither an ethical respect for rules nor the empowerment of lawyers.
And if these machinations could be forgiven in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, things didn’t get better
as the years wore on. Instead, as a whole, the IC and the FISA court have worked together to rubber
stamp surveillance decisions, not just when the rules allow it, as Margo suggests, but also when the
rules prohibit it .
Just take a look at judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s sloppy 2004 FISA court opinion approving one aspect of
STELLARWIND, the collection of all American Internet transactional data, under the FISA pen
register/trap and trace statute. For the first time in American history, a judge in a secret court set up just
for the Intelligence Community was ruling that Congress authorized domestic bulk collection. It’s a big
deal.
But, at NSA’s behest, the judge overlooked the clues that showed the pen register statute was written
for targeted, and not mass, collection. As Orin Kerr writes, key words of the pen register statute prove it
was written for micro-scale surveillance, not the macro-scale.
The pen register statute requires a mere certification of “relevance.” As Christopher Sprigman and I have
said, relevance is a concept that is fundamentally incompatible with the mass collection of data. For
hundreds of years, government has asked judges to authorize the collection of evidence based on a
“relevance” standard. Those efforts always involve some argument linking specific evidence sought to a
specific instance of suspected wrongdoing. In this framework, the mass collection of all data
unconnected to any suspected wrongdoing could never meet the relevance standard. The entire
enterprise makes a mockery of the concept of relevance.
Under the pen register statute, the authorizing judge has almost no opportunity for pre- or postcollection oversight. The court is not allowed to investigate the basis for the certification. Nor does the
statute authorize the judge to put any controls on the government’s subsequent use of bulk collected
data. Failure to provide post-collection oversight would be just crazy for a statute that lets the
government collect everything on everyone—another sign that’s just not what the pen register statute
does. Even Kollar-Kotelly was uncomfortable with this lack of rules, and—over government objections—
only authorized the bulk collection in conjunction with usage rules to ensure that NSA and other
government agencies would not abuse the privilege. Yet, the statute did not so empower the judge, and
the NSA didn’t follow Kollar-Kotelly’s rules anyway.
This isn’t legalism. It’s simply cowardice: allowing fear of terrorism to trump law. And this 2004 opinion
was the basis for the 2006 approval of STELLARWIND’s phone records collection under section 215 of
the USA Patriot Act, but despite the use of a different statute, that judge didn’t even bother to write an
opinion justifying her reasoning. Surprise, surprise: the NSA didn’t follow those rules either.
The attitude hasn’t changed. In December of 2013, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy
(D-VT) asked Deputy Attorney General James Cole about a pending version of the USA FREEDOM Act
intended by all sponsors to end NSA dragnet collection of Americans’ communication data. Cole said
that, despite the Senators’ intentions, their reform efforts wouldn’t necessarily inhibit the NSA’s
surveillance capabilities. “[I]t’s going to depend on how the court interprets any number of the
provisions that are in [the legislation].” Comments like this betray a serious problem inside the executive
branch. The Administration and the intelligence community believe they can do whatever they want,
regardless of the laws Congress passes, so long they can convince one of the judges appointed to the
secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to agree. This isn’t legalism, or even the rule of
law. As I wrote at the time, it’s collusion within the IC to reach a predetermined result, a common law
coup d’etat .
Impact – presumption
Presume neg – governmental reform is a total failure – even allowing fiat, the net
effect of the plan is to strengthen the surveillance state
Greenwald, 14 – constitutional lawyer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Snowden story
for the Guardian; he also runs The Intercept (Glenn, The Intercept, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS
SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD” 11/19
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-masssurveillance/
All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should
look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments
don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of
empires.
The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to
enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it
somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that
the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight
means they’d easily co-opt the entire reform process. That’s what happened after the eavesdropping
scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence committees and a
special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme
servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen
Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with
subservient judges who operate in total secrecy.
Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began
radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: Enact something
that is called “reform”—so that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and
responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes almost nothing, thus strengthening the very
system he can pretend he “changed. ” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this
bill: Be able to point to something called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and
future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use
Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest.
Vote neg on presumption –opportunity cost theory dictates that even if there’s a risk
of the affirmative advantages, they aren’t worth voting for
Greenwald, 14 – constitutional lawyer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Snowden story
for the Guardian; he also runs The Intercept (Glenn, The Intercept, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS
SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD” 11/19
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-masssurveillance/
There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of “public
advocates” at the FISA court to contest the claims of the government; the prohibition on the NSA
holding Americans’ phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking
specific records from the telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and
reducing the agency’s “contact chaining” analysis from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue
(as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill was a net-positive as a first step
toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with characteristic
insight, that the bill is so larded with ambiguities and fundamental inadequacies that it would forestall
better options and advocates for real reform should thus root for its defeat .
Impact – soft surveillance
Surveillance is rooted in fear of the other rooted in citizenship – ending federal
surveillance based on the domestic category reinforces social surveillance
Patel, 12 – Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Salford (Tina, Surveillance, Suspicion and Stigma:
Brown Bodies in a Terror-Panic Climate. Surveillance & Society 10(3/4): 215-234.
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
The surveillance of bodies is viewed in this paper to be the prolonged observation of person(s) who are
considered to be at risk of causing potential harm or threat. Surveillance can be carried out by ‘hard’
means, such as CCTV, biometric gathering, data mining and profiling systems, or by ‘soft’ means, for
instance the enhanced gaze of the public in everyday interactions. A variety of factors are used to inform
markers of risk, including biological and social variables, as well as wider political features of the given
context. With its selective nature, the surveillance of bodies is about pre-determining and reinforcing
ideas of ‘suspect bodies’—those persons who, for whatever reason, are marked out as a problem.
Ultimately they are of enemy status, a threat to the well-being and social order of society. A key
component of surveillance is suspicion. Norris and Armstrong (1999: 112) provide us with a list of seven
types of suspicion, which can be used to highlight the (legitimate and illegitimate) use of suspicion in
surveillance strategies. Writing in 1999 at ‘the brink of the millennium’, Norris and Armstrong (1999: 59)
argued that ‘we are approaching the maximum surveillance society’. I argue that in 2012 we are much
closer to this state of surveillance than one would expect within the short space of time between Norris
and Armstrong’s work and this paper. Not only are we the objects of an interconnected ‘surveillance
assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Haggerty and Ericson 2000), as used by official ‘big brother’
crime-prevention bodies, but we are also subjected to the everyday enhanced gaze of fellow citizens, i.e.
big brother’s army of little brothers , if to take from Norris, Moran and Armstrong’s discussion (1999:
100).
There are a variety of concerns regarding the selective nature and suspect marking powers of
surveillance. These concerns are rooted in claims made about the infringements on (discrimination and
privacy) rights. The promise of greater safety and security has been used to convincingly sell
surveillance. Fuelled by an overwhelming fear of crime (Norris, Moran and Armstrong 1998: 90) and
increasing ‘moral panics’ (Cohen 2002) about ‘Islamic terrorists’ (Jackson 2006), the allure of safety
promised by increased surveillance allows mainstream society to be distracted from the over-focus
nature of surveillance and ultimately how whilst enabling some, it also constrains others (Hier and
Greenberg 2007). Dubious yet widely believed claims made about the crime fighting benefits of
surveillance along with an equally dubious belief in ‘technological neutrality … – if people have nothing
to hide they have no need to fear’ lead to the general public’s dismissal of civil liberty concerns (Norris,
Moran and Armstrong 1998: 91).
Within the current terror-panic climate,1 it is argued that a ‘convenient opportunity’ for increased
surveillance emerged (Haggerty and Gazso 2005: 169), which resulted in the normalisation of a more
routine and intrusive surveillance system. This occurred despite an inability to actually assure our
security (Ball and Webster 2003). In using ‘colour-coded suspicion’ (Norris and Armstrong 1999: 123),
terror-related surveillance over-focuses on all those of middle Eastern appearance, or of South Asian or
Arabic heritage and of the Muslim faith, or, what I term in this paper ‘brown bodies’, who are marked
out as members of a ‘suspect community’—a label which is applied on a regular basis, despite the lack
of any actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing on their part. Terror-related labels, i.e. anti-Western, the
enemy within, illegal immigrant, sympathiser of terrorist activity, radicalised student etc., are presented
as truth within the white imagination. This has serious implications for the status of brown bodies in
society. Spalek, El Awa and McDonald (2009) argue that brown bodies experience enhanced,
discriminatory and unnecessary surveillance on all levels, and that the consequences lead to further
limited freedoms.2 This paper will begin by considering established knowledge on the surveillance of
bodies in relation to deviance, selectivity and control. In particular, there is an examination of hard and
soft surveillance, and the allocation of stigma on brown bodies within the current terror-panic climate.
Using the findings of a small qualitative study which examined racialised experiences of surveillance in
Manchester (England), this paper then reports on the perception, impact and challenges to these
surveillance methods.
Surveillance Within The Terror Panic Context
Surveillance controls and disciplines bodies (Gilliom 2001), and has often been presented as an effective
way to reduce crime—although actual firm evidence to confirm whether this is actually the case has yet
to be provided, as Skinns (1998) notes in his study of crime rates and CCTV use. Although we are all
under some form of surveillance, a select population are constructed as especially deviant and are
placed under enhanced surveillance. The problem with this lies in how categories of deviance are
constructed, and especially how notions of fear, panic and bias go on to determine who is labelled as
deviant, or as an undesirable body unwanted within a given space, or unwanted per se. Surveillance
therefore is much more than a tool to be used in the ‘fight against crime’. It is a means by which spaces
are ‘sanitised’—they are purified of perceived troublesome others (McCahill 2002). Existing work on
hard surveillance (usually CCTV surveillance) and control of spaces has focused on urban regeneration
projects, city centre locales and consumerism to argue that surveillance acts as a cleansing mechanism
privileging some, such as potential consumers,3 over others (see for instance Coleman and Sim 2000;
Norris and Armstrong 1999). This paper builds on this body of literature to argue that sanitisingsurveillance practices are used as a means to satisfy a racial/ethnic citizenship and social ordering
agenda . This involves marking out some groups are ‘dirty bodies’. Here, a set of particular markers are
used to identify dirty bodies, for example, skin tone and dress. Such markers are used to label bodies,
and therefore need to be fairly simplistic—as to be readily understood and easily applied by all those
undertaking surveillance, including members of the general public. In this sense, surveillance has a more
sinister side than the (crime control) one that is often presented to us.4 Its ‘social sorting’ function
‘produce[s] coded categories through which persons and groups of persons may be sorted…and
provided differential treatments’ (Lyon 2006: 404). Surveillance is therefore also about ‘social justice’
(Lyon 2003a: 1).
Soft surveillance exists because of firm categories of citizenship that reinforce group
divisions and xenophobia
Patel, 12 – Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Salford (Tina, Surveillance, Suspicion and Stigma:
Brown Bodies in a Terror-Panic Climate. Surveillance & Society 10(3/4): 215-234.
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
On another level, brown bodies are also subjected to everyday forms of ‘citizen surveillance practices’,
i.e. person-to-person gaze (stares) in public spaces undertaken by ‘ordinary’ citizens (Finn 2011: 413).
This gaze goes beyond the usual ‘hate stares’ (McVeigh 1998) often reserved for BMEs—which say,
‘you’re different’ and ‘you do not belong here’ (McVeigh 1998: 12). Rather, it is motivated by suspicion
and fear, so that brown bodies are labelled as deviant, and constructed as morally and legally
problematic, not only in their expected criminality, i.e. as a terrorist, but also in terms of their citizenship
as a whole. Citizen surveillance is something that is actively encouraged, as demonstrated with the
comments made by Michael Roach, former Assistant Director of the Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation, who, following the London bombings in 2005, asked the public to use their mobile phone
cameras to photograph figures of middle Eastern appearance, who were acting suspiciously (AAP 2005
and Lateline 2005 in Pugliese 2006: para. 14). The ‘success’ of citizen surveillance is rooted in the
‘permission to hate’ context (Perry 2001: 79) which presents citizen-to-citizen surveillance as one’s
national and civic duty, and in doing so actively reproduces and reinforces ethnic based social divisions
and structures of power (Finn 2011). Although always the subject of ‘colouring’ and boundaries, these
brown bodies have moved from being ‘a little bit foreign’ to being seen as the ‘anti-British’ threatening
other (i.e. terrorist). Brown bodies are therefore ‘casted out’ as they are subjected to stigmatisation,
surveillance and expulsion (Razack 2008: 5). This also keeps society as a whole in a ‘permanent state of
emergency’, marked by ‘practices of exceptionalism’ (Bigo 2009: 47). Such ‘colour-coded suspicion’
(Norris and Armstrong 1999: 123) is common. In the mainstream however, it is viewed as an acceptable
response to a specific risk—a fear about ‘new terrorism’. Even when faults are exposed, problematic
action is excused, as demonstrated in the shooting of 27 year old Jean Charles de Menezes in London’s
Stockwell Tube station on July 22nd 2005 (Justice4Jean 2011), and the Metropolitan Police force’s use of
the element of ‘error’ and the ‘what if’ rationale (Sir Ian Blair, quoted in NBC News 2005).10
AT: Threats real
It’s not objective – all truth claims are political, and theirs are supported by the
ideology of sovereignty
Shaw, 99 - Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria
(Karena, “Feminist Futures: Contesting the Political” 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 569, lexis)
Again, however, the key question is why we should read these struggles one way rather than another. It
is here that I think the most significant political stakes of contemporary theory reside. Crucially, this is
not a question that can be answered by piling up empirical evidence, given that empirical evidence is
always already framed by theoretical commitments. Nor is this to say that all readings are equally
plausible. The question of how to read contemporary events and processes is essentially a political
question. If we fail to open this question, a question that cannot be opened if we assume sovereignty,
we will continue to impose sovereignty whether or not it is the appropriate response to contemporary
circumstances. This, in turn, will leave us trapped within the mythology and logics of sovereignty,
potentially facilitating further violences in its name.
Their 1ac scenarios are ideologically constructed to fit the interests of the security
state – reject their claim to expertise
Rana 12- Ph.D. in political science at Harvard and a J.D. at Yale Law School
(Aziz Rana, July 2012, “Who Decides on Security?”, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1417)//Yak
Yet although these sociological views have become commonplace, the conclusions that Americans
should draw about security requirements are not nearly as clear cut as the conventional wisdom
assumes. In particular, a closer examination of contemporary arguments about endemic danger
suggests that such claims are not objective empirical judgments , but rather are socially complex and
politically infused interpretations. Indeed, the openness of existing circumstances to multiple
interpretations of threat implies that the presumptive need for secrecy and centralization is not
selfevident. And as underscored by high profile failures in expert assessment, claims to security
expertise are themselves riddled with ideological presuppositions and subjective biases. All this indicates
that the gulf between elite knowledge and lay incomprehension in matters of security may be far less
extensive than is ordinarily thought. It also means that the question of who decides—and with it the
issue of how democratic or insular our institutions should be—remains open as well.
Clearly, technological changes, from airpower to biological and chemical weapons, have shifted the
nature of America’s position in the world and its potential vulnerability. As has been widely remarked
for nearly a century, the oceans alone cannot guarantee our permanent safety. Yet in truth, they never
fully ensured domestic tranquility. The nineteenth century was one of near continuous violence,
especially with indigenous communities fighting to protect their territory from expansionist settlers.312
But even if technological shifts make doomsday scenarios more chilling than those faced by Hamilton,
Jefferson, or Taney, the mere existence of these scenarios tells us little about their likelihood or how
best to address them. Indeed, these latter security judgments are inevitably permeated with subjective
political assessments —assessments that carry with them preexisting ideological points of view —
such as regarding how much risk constitutional societies should accept or how interventionist states
should be in foreign policy.
AT: Pinker
State violence is increasing—Pinker doesn’t assume modern warfare.
Gray 15. (John, former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author.
“John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war,” The Guardian. 3/13/2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining)//CB
The picture of declining violence presented by this new orthodoxy is not all it seems to be. As some
critics, notably John Arquilla, have pointed out, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on declining fatalities
on the battlefield. If these deaths have been falling, one reason is the balance of terror: nuclear
weapons have so far prevented industrial-style warfare between great powers. Pinker dismisses the role
of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison
gas has not prevented war in the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. No
serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has been a major factor in preventing conflict
between great powers. Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million
of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of non‑ combatants, whereas around half of the
more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished
in the violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category.
If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars.
Neocolonial warfare in south-east Asia, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British
counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the
Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam war,
the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the invasion of
Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria, Russian cyber-attacks in the Baltic
states and the proxy war between the US and Russia that is being waged in Ukraine – these are only
some of the contexts in which great powers have been involved in continuous warfare against each
other while avoiding direct military conflict.
While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between
well-organised states that can at some point negotiate peace, it is now more often a many-sided conflict
in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power to end. The protagonists are armed irregulars,
some of them killing and being killed for the sake of an idea or faith, others from fear or a desire for
revenge and yet others from the world’s swelling armies of mercenaries, who fight for profit. For all of
them, attacks on civilian populations have become normal. The ferocious conflict in Syria, in which
methodical starvation and the systematic destruction of urban environments are deployed as strategies,
is an example of this type of warfare.
It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of
violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass
killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical
knowledge it has become clear that the “Holocaust-by-bullets” – the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in
the Soviet Union, during the second world war – was perpetrated on an even larger scale than
previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as
a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag
and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime
deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million.
Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably
broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear. Pinker
goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke,
and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may
be “apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history” (the italics are Pinker’s). However, there is
an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last
century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision.
Violence, mass incarceration, and torture are increasing.
Gray 15. (John, former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author.
“John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war,” The Guardian. 3/13/2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining)//CB
Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable.
Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. According to
many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia,
for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for
exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are
mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk
of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement,
sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been
constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture.
Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many
countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to
be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state.
It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced
more traditional types of warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism to include assassination by
unaccountable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by drones is part of this shift. A
metamorphosis in the nature is war is under way, which is global in reach. With the state of Iraq in ruins
as a result of US-led regime change, a third of the country is controlled by Isis, which is able to inflict
genocidal attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with near-impunity. In Nigeria,
the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practise a type of warfare featuring mass killing of civilians, razing of
towns and villages and sexual enslavement of women and children. In Europe, targeted killing of
journalists, artists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to
recognise any distinction between combatants and civilians. Whether they accept the fact or not,
advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference
between peace and war has been fatally blurred.
Deaths on the battlefield have fallen and may continue to fall. From one angle this can be seen as an
advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and intensity with
which violence is being employed, the Long Peace can be described as a condition of perpetual conflict.
Pinker’s method is flawed—his studies are based on anecdotes instead of statistical
analyses.
Taleb 12. (Nassim, essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness,
probability, and uncertainty. Former professor of Risk Engineering at NYU. “The ‘Long Peace’ is a Statistical Illusion.” 2012.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf)//CB
It turned out, the entire exchange with S. Pinker was a dialogue de sourds. In my correspondence and
exchange with him, I was under the impression that he (Pinker) simply misunderstood the difference
between inference from symmetric, thin-tailed random variables an one from asymmet- ric, fat-tailed
ones --the 4th Quadrant problem. I thought that I was making him aware of the effects from the
complications of the distribution. But it turned out things were worse, a lot worse than that.
Pinker doesn’t have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one
between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. Science is not about making claims about a
sample, but using a sample to make general claims and discuss properties that apply outside the sample.
Take M* the observed arithmetic mean from the realizations (a sample path) for some process, and M
the "true" mean. When someone says: "Crime rate in NYC dropped between 2000 and 2010", the claim
is about M* the observed mean, not M the true mean, hence the claim can be deemed merely
journalistic, not scientific, and journalists are there to report "facts" not theories. No scientific and
causal statement should be made from M* on "why violence has dropped" unless one establishes a link
to M the true mean. M* cannot be deemed "evidence" by itself. Working with M* cannot be called
"empiricism".
Alternatives
Generic
2nc – at: alternative fails
Our anti-statist vision may not abolish the state, but it energizes social movements
against state power. The plan’s reformist strategy props up the state and demobilizes
opposition by providing the illusion of protection
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
From vision to strategy
This institutional change programme is radical, going to the roots of the problem of surveillance. It is
hardly a practical proposition, though, to implement these solutions through a short, sharp campaign.
What use, then, is the programme?
First, it draws attention to the way that surveillance is deeply embedded in today's social institutions
and is becoming more and more pervasive. The real idealism is to imagine that the problem can be
solved by legislative and regulatory measures by the very institutions that are responsible for the
problem. The radical agenda should warn against investing too much energy or hope in reform
efforts , which may give only an illusion of protection.
Second, the programme provides an additional argument to challenge and replace hierarchical social
structures. Alone, the problem of surveillance is hardly serious enough to question the value of nuclear
power, corporate capitalism or the state. But surveillance is an important factor which should not be
neglected in a focus on environmental impacts, war or exploitation of workers.
Third, the programme highlights the range of triggers for surveillance: "national security," marketing,
protection against dangerous technologies, provision of welfare. There is no evil agency that is
responsible for all surveillance.
Undoubtedly, most surveillance is carried out with the very best of intentions: to protect the nation, to
provide better products to consumers, to economise on government expenditure. Surveillance is not a
product of evil schemers. The debate over surveillance concerns different conceptions of the good.
Fourth, a programme of radical solutions provides a direction for campaigns today. While it is impossible
to introduce collective provision or to abolish the state overnight, it is quite sensible to examine
campaigns to see whether they aid the capacity for community self-reliance and whether they weaken
rather than strengthen the power of the state.
The claim that the alternative is too radical is a power legitimating tactic that
reinforces state authority – this is also a link and wrecks the permutation
Shantz, 13 – professor of critical criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. (Jeff, “In
Defense of Radicalism”, Radical Criminology, Summer,
http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/article/view/34/html
Powerholders will always seek to discredit or delegitimize resistance to their privilege and deployment
of loaded (misconstructed and misconstrued by powerholders) terms like radicalism will be a tactic in
this. One can follow the reconstruction of the term "terror" to see an example of such processes. The
term 'terror' was initially used to designate state violence deployed against anyone deemed to be a
threat to instituted authority, to the state. (Badiou 2011, 17) Only later-as an outcome of hegemonic
struggle-did terror come (for state powerholders) to designate actions of civilians-even actions against
the state.
And it often works. Certainly, it has played a part in the dampening or softening of potentialities for
alternative globalization movements, as has been the case in previous periods of struggle. In this such
anti-radical activists inevitably bolster state capitalist power and authority and reinforce injustice.
Yet we need to be optimistic as well. The charge of radicalism from above (assertive on the surface) is
also a cry for help on behalf of power. It is a plea by power to the non-committal sectors, the soft
middle, to tilt away from the resisting sectors and side with power (states and capital) in re-asserting the
status quo (or extending relations and practices they find beneficial, a new status quo of privilege)-the
conditions of conquest and exploitation.
Radicalism (or extremism, or terrorism) is the charge used by power to quell unrest by drawing support
toward the ruling interests. In that sense it suggests a certain desperation on behalf of the powerfulone that should be seized upon, not played into or alleviated.
In periods of rising mass struggles, the issue of radicalism is inevitably posed. It is in these times that a
radical orientation breaks through the confines of hegemonic legitimation-posing new questions, better
answers, and real alternatives. To oppose radicalism is to oppose thought itself. To oppose radicalism is
to accept the terms set out by power, to limit oneself to that which power will allow.
Cosmopolitanism
2nc – at: cosmopolitanism bad
That’s not our cosmopolitianism – it describes existing cosmopolitanism that’s been
driven by state choices - they’ve read a disad to the perm not the alt
Beck and Sznaider 10 -- Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich and
School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel (Ulrich and Natan, “Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda”, January 2010, The British Journal of
Sociology) KW
Like the distinction between ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’, we have to distinguish between
cosmopolitanism as a set of normative principles and (really existing) cosmopolitanization. This
distinction turns on the rejection of the claim that cosmopolitanism is a conscious and voluntary choice,
and all too often the choice of an elite . The notion ‘cosmopolitanization’ is designed to draw attention
to the fact that the emerging cosmopolitan of reality is also, and even primarily, a function of coerced
choices or a side-effect of unconscious decisions. The choice to become or remain an ‘alien’ or a ‘nonnational’ is not as a general rule a voluntary one but a response to acute need, political repression or a
threat of starvation. A ‘banal’ cosmopolitanism in this sense unfolds beneath the surface or behind the
façades of persisting national spaces, jurisdiction and labelling, while national flags continue to be
hoisted and national attitudes, identities and consciousness remain dominant. Judged by the lofty
standards of ethical and academic morality, this latent character renders cosmopolitanism trivial,
unworthy of comment, even suspect.An ideal that formerly strutted the stage of world history as an
ornament of the elite cannot possibly slink into social and political reality by the backdoor.Thus, we
emphasize the centrality of emotional engagement and social integration and not only fragmentation as
part of the cosmopolitan world.And this emphasizes that the process of cosmopolitanization is bound up
with symbol and ritual, and not just with spoken ideas. And it is symbol and ritual that turns philosophy
into personal and social identity and consequently relevant for social analysis. The more such rituals
contribute to individuals’ personal sense of conviction, the larger the critical mass available to be
mobilized in cosmopolitan reform movements for instance, be they movements against global inequality
or human rights violations (see the contributions by Robert Fine (2006: 49–67) and Angela McRobbie
(2006: 69–86)). And the farther cosmopolitan rituals and symbols spread, the more chance there will be
of someday achieving a cosmopolitan political order. This is where normative and empirical
cosmopolitanism meet. At the same time, we must remember that a cosmopolitan morality is not the
only historically important form of today’s globalized world.Another one is nationalism.The nation-state
was originally formed out of local units to which people were fiercely attached. They considered these
local attachments ‘natural’ and the nation-state to be soulless and arti- ficial – Gesellschaft compared to
the local Gemeinschaft. But thanks to national rituals and symbols, that eventually changed completely.
Now today many people consider national identity to be natural and cosmopolitan or world identity to
be an artificial construct. They are right. It will be an artificial construct, if artificial means made by
humans. But they are wrong if they think artificial origins prevent something from eventually being
regarded as natural. It did not stop the nation-state. And there is no reason it has to stop cosmopolitan
morality. However, the challenge will be to see these moral orders not as contradictory but as living side
by side in the global world. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are not mutually exclusive, neither
methodologically nor normatively.
There can be no doubt that a cosmopolitanism that is passively and unwillingly suffered is a deformed
cosmopolitanism. The fact that really-existing cosmopolitanization is not achieved through struggle, that
it is not chosen, that it does not come into the world as progress with the reflected moral authority of
the Enlightenment, but as something deformed and profane, cloaked in the anonymity of side-effects –
this is an essential founding moment within cosmopolitan realism in the social sciences. Our main point
is here to make a distinction between the moral ideal of cosmopolitanism (as expressed in
Enlightenment philosophy) and the above mentioned cosmopolitan condition of real people. It’s also the
distinction between theory and praxis. This means, in our case, the distinction between a cosmopolitan
philosophy and a cosmopolitan sociology.
2nc – at: no blueprint
Using transnational civil actors to advance human rights discourse is the only way to
provide legitimacy to supranational institutions and creates concrete change- means
the alt is not abstract moralism
Cohen, 99- Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia
University
(Jean, September 1999, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos”,
International Sociology 14.3, 245-268)//Yak
Liberal cosmopolitans are quick to point out that civil as distinct from political society has taken the lead
in reviving human rights discourses including the crucial idea that everyone has the right to have rights
(legal protection and legal personhood) (Falk, 1992; Held, 1995). Claims for expanding rights
irrespective of citizenship status, for new sorts of rights and for new forms of protections for rights
emerge first from civil rather than from political actors (Alter, 1996). For civil society is a locus for the
spontaneous development of free association, civil publics and new powers. Civil actors establish
connections and relations that render economic and technological interdependencies 'social', as the
proliferation today on the transnational level of a wide and highly articulated range of associations, nongovernmental organizations, networks, interconnected publics and social movements witnesses. Thus a
context is being created in which people can act in concert as peers, exchange opinions and develop the
civic competence and trust needed for exercising influence on political entities, administrative bodies
and courts. The relations established by international civil society are what carry and give political
weight to the universalist dimension of human rights discourses.
The more important supranational organizational structures become, the more important the role of
international civil society is in monitoring, gaining access to and influencing them and keeping them
open to the concerns of relevant publics.
Thus supranational courts and the administrative/political bodies of regional federations do not function
in a vacuum, but they do lack the democratic legitimacy that courts and legislative bodies on the level of
the constitutional territorial state enjoy. The only meaningful way to rectify this legitimization deficit is
to construe such quasi-governmental institutions as the receptors of influence from civil society and to
institutionalize access to these along with forums for public debate. But this influence not only has to be
institutionalized, it must also be 'legitimate' in the sense of following certain standards. For this we must
recognize the increased importance of human rights discourses and supranational courts in such a
constellation. From the point of view of the liberal cosmopolitan, the most important development in
this regard is the emergence of supranational legal regimes that take cognizance of interdependency by
acknowledging new subjects of international law ranging all the way from individuals, indigenous
peoples, and oppressed groups to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These developments enable
cosmopolitans to parry the charges of foundationalism and abstract, empty moralistic universalism .
The referent of human rights is no longer a mere moral ought, a 'worldless' humanity stripped of all
bonds, relationships and context. Rather, human rights discourse now have a context (various
interdependences) and refer to real subjects. This implies that the appropriate symbolic referent of legal
personhood is not the territorial state but, rather and after all, a globally interrelated humanity whose
rights are articulated in international discourses and defended by a multiplicity of legal and political
instances (Cohen, 1996). The diversity of levels of governance articulating and backing up rights is the
key innovation here.
Indeed it is increasingly the case that the legitimacy of rights now lies at the level of the international
order. The transnational discourse of human rights articulated in international law and incorporated
increasingly in supranational (regional) covenants and national constitutions, backed up by
supranational courts, and monitored by a range of NGOs provides a normative framework that
constrains governmental actors, even if it remains the case that states are the entities that implement
civil and political rights and provide for social rights (Alter, 1996). In short, human rights discourses are
now a pervasive feature of global public culture. Their effectiveness goes well beyond moralistic
exhortation : they constitute an international symbolic order, a political-cultural framework, and an
institutional set of norms and rules for the global system that orients and constrains states.
The fact that these discourses refer to the rights of man rather than citizens should not be
misconstrued. It does not return us to natural law dogma, to empty abstractions, or to foundationalist
forms of justification. But it does leave us with a question: if the new international institutions render
discourses of human rights more effective, what serves to ground either the principle of universal
human rights or particular interpretations and institutionalizations of them?
2nc – at: state good
AT State Good
Even if the state is good, the alt does not mean the state would be destroyed.
Beck and Sznaider 10 -- Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich and
School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel (Ulrich and Natan, “Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda”, January 2010, The British Journal of
Sociology) KW
Critique of methodological nationalism
Methodological nationalism takes the following premises for granted: it equates societies with nationstate societies and sees states and their governments as the primary focus of social-scientific analysis. It
assumes that humanity is naturally divided into a limited number of nations, which organize themselves
internally as nation-states and externally set boundaries to distinguish themselves from other nationstates. And it goes further: this outer delimitation as well as the competition between nation-states,
represent the most fundamental category of political organization.
The premises of the social sciences assume the collapse of social boundaries with state boundaries,
believing that social action occurs primarily within and only secondarily across, these divisions:
[Like] stamp collecting... social scientists collected distinctive national social forms. Japanese industrial
relations, German national character, the American constitution, the British class system – not to
mention the more exotic institutions of tribal societies – were the currency of social research.
The core disciplines of the social sciences, whose intellectual traditions are reference points for each
other and for other fields, were therefore domesticated – in the sense of being preoccupied not with
Western and world civilization as wholes but with the ‘domestic’ forms of particular national societies
(Shaw 2000: 68).
The critique of methodological nationalism should not be confused with the thesis that the end of the
nation-state has arrived. One does not criticize methodological individualism by proclaiming the end of
the individual. Nation-states (as all the research shows – see also the different contributions in this
volume) will continue to thrive or will be transformed into transnational states. What, then, is the main
point of the critique of methodological nationalism? It adopts categories of practice as categories of
analysis. The decisive point is that national organization as a structuring principle of societal and political
action can no longer serve as the orienting reference point for the social scientific observer. One cannot
even understand the re-nationalization or re-ethnification trend in Western or Eastern Europe without a
cosmopolitan perspective. In this sense, the social sciences can only respond adequately to the
challenge of globalization if they manage to overcome methodological nationalism and to raise
empirically and theoretically fundamental questions within specialized fields of research, and thereby
elaborate the foundations of a newly formulated cosmopolitan social science.
As many authors – including the ones in this volume – criticize, in the growing discourse on
cosmopolitanism there is a danger of fusing the ideal with the real. What cosmopolitanism is cannot
ultimately be separated from what cosmopolitanism should be. But the same is true of nationalism. The
small, but important, difference is that in the case of nationalism the value judgment of the social
scientists goes unnoticed because methodological nationalism includes a naturalized conception of
nations as real communities. In the case of the cosmopolitan ‘Wertbeziehung’ (Max Weber, value
relation), by contrast, this silent commitment to a nation-state centred outlook of sociology appears
problematic.
In order to unpack the argument in the two cases it is necessary to distinguish between the actor
perspective and the observer perspective. From this it follows that a sharp distinction should be made
between methodological and normative nationalism. The former is linked to the social-scientific
observer perspective, whereas the latter refers to the negotiation perspectives of political actors. In a
normative sense, nationalism means that every nation has the right to self-determination within the
context of its cultural, political and even geographical boundaries and distinctiveness. Methodological
nationalism assumes this normative claim as a socio-ontological given and simultaneously links it to the
most important conflict and organization orientations of society and politics. These basic tenets have
become the main perceptual grid of the social sciences. Indeed, this social-scientific stance is part of the
nation-state’s own self-understanding. A national view on society and politics, law, justice, memory and
history governs the sociological imagination. To some extent, much of the social sciences has become a
prisoner of the nation-state.That this was not always the case is shown in Bryan Turner’s paper in this
issue (Turner 2006: 133–51).This does not mean, of course, that a cosmopolitan social science can and
should ignore different national traditions of law, history, politics and memory. These traditions exist
and become part of our cosmopolitan methodology. The comparative analyses of societies, international
relations, political theory, and a significant part of history and law all essentially function on the basis of
methodological nationalism. This is valid to the extent that the majority of positions in the
contemporary debates in social and political science over globalization can be systematically interpreted
as transdisciplinary reflexes linked to methodological nationalism.
These premises also structure empirical research, for example, in the choice of statistical indicators,
which are almost always exclusively national. A refutation of methodological nationalism from a strictly
empirical viewpoint is therefore difficult, indeed, almost impossible, because so many statistical
categories and research procedures are based on it. It is therefore of historical importance for the future
development of the social sciences that this methodological nationalism, as well as the related
categories of perception and disciplinary organization, be theoretically, empirically, and organizationally
re-assessed and reformed.
Viewing the world as nation states leads to states attempting complete control.
Beck and Sznaider 10 -- Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich and
School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel (Ulrich and Natan, “Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda”, January 2010, The British Journal of
Sociology) KW
The most inappropriate way to grasp the reality of the Global Age is to seek how to refit human society
back into the systems mould. Systems theory requires a firm position on what constitutes the system
and what its environment is. In order to preserve the nation-state society as the unit of analysis, Parsons
had to allocate other state societies, as well as the material world, to the category of environment. This
was artificial even in the 1950s. Nation-state societies exist within a field of other societies , in
persistent exchange and interaction. This has been part of the self-evident premises of the theory of
international politics, but it applies equally to those institutions which elude state control, including
money, information, science, transport, technology and law. The collapse of the Soviet system is only
the most blatant example of what happens if the control attempt is carried through regardless of the
risks involved. In other words, totalization discourse was a symptom of the overreach of the nationstate. (Albrow 1996: 111).
AT nation-state inevitable
Voice can be institutionalized on the supranational level even if nation-states still exist
Cohen, 99- Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia
University
(Jean, September 1999, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos”,
International Sociology 14.3, 245-268)//Yak
New meaning can certainly be given to the multiple levels of belonging, the various loci of identity (local,
national, regional, global), the differing forms of participation and the intersecting complexes of rights,
duties and loyalties that characterize multicultural polities existing in a global context. But we must
honestly acknowledge that the distribution of competencies in specifying rights is an issue that can only
be resolved politically. Hopefully this will be done democratically, informed as much as possible by
considerations of justice. We will avoid the Scylla of foundationalism and the Charybdis of democratic
despotism only if we acknowledge that substance and process, justice and democracy are in a recursive
relationship to each other. The assertion of basic rights in civil public spaces requires moral justification
through the giving of substantive reasons and free argumentation. An independent judiciary to protect
rights is crucial. But so are democratic political institutions that legislate and make policy in light of
publicly justifiable reasons (Gutman and Thompson, 1997). Democracy cannot guarantee justice, but
neither can moral justification appeal to some absolute truth that exists independently of consensus.
My abstract discussion of the logic of citizenship on a 'postmodern' paradigm has institutional
implications. I would like to suggest that instead of assuming that the future will entail either a new
system of sovereign federal mega-states, a return to liberally national nation-states, a world
government, or some sort of cosmopolitan world legal order, one must imagine a combination of the
elements of all of these. The idea of world government in which liberal and democratic considerations
would merge is both implausible and undesirable since it would threaten political diversity. As already
stated, quasi-governmental institutions must be open to the influence of civil society. Governmental
structures on the national, supra- and subnational levels must have 'receptors' for this influence. Indeed,
it is entirely possible that political parties might emerge on the supranational level to supplement
national parties and help to articulate and redesign political institutions in a democratic direction, as
Habermas hopes. Institutional redesign that makes federations more democratic and states more open
to norms articulated on higher levels and to the diversity emerging internally is also called for.
But it is not necessary to envisage federations replacing the territorial state. Instead we must be open to
a plurality of forums, and of modes of institutionalizing voice on the supranational level. Existing state
jurisdictions would certainly retain control in many areas and be the instances that implement many
rights and norms articulated on other political and legal levels (covenants, court decisions and so forth).
Democratic, constitutional nation-states could remain a level of political identification for the local
citizenry. But new identities and new forms of representation could follow new institutionalizations,
complicating the levels of belonging and allegiance in salutary ways. At the same time each state's
sovereignty could be tempered by the rules of the federation and other supranational bodies.
My theoretical point is that only if the various elements of the citizenship principle are disaggregated
and reinstitutionalized on independent levels of governance with different powers articulating and
backing them up will they be able to counter the flaws intrinsic to each of them and function
productively as mutual counter-powers. For example, the disaggregation of the rights of persons from
the rights of citizens has already diminished the opposition between citizen and alien, allowing for a
greater separation of the identity component and the rights component of the citizenship principle. It is
only a further development in this direction that would allow for the universalistic principles of justice
(equal concern and respect for every individual) and the principle of democracy (participatory parity in
public life) to be mutually reinforcing and to inform everyone's conception of the good.
AT: Can’t make a world State
We don’t need to make a world state – moral cosmopolitanism solves
Tan, asst philosophy prof, 4 (Kok-Chor, “Justice Without Borders: Cosmpolitanism,
Nationalism and Patriotism,” Cambridge University Press, p. 93-4)
Moral and institutional cosmopolitanism
It is often charged that cosmopolitanism is inherently anti-nationalistic because it calls for the creation
of a world state (or some similar global institutional form) and, consequently, the cultivation of world
citizenship. This is how one prominent critic of cosmopolitanism, Danielo Zolo, understands the
cosmopolitan position – consequently, Zolo goes on to reject the cosmopolitan ideal by showing that the
idea of a world state is a non-starter (Zolo 1997). Nationalism, in contrast, enjoins the right to national
self-determination, which may take the form of sovereign state-hood or, if not feasible, other forms of
autonomous political arrangements such as a multinational federalism (Tamir 1992, p. 9). In either case,
national self-determination calls for the establishment and strengthening of certain major public
institutions (e.g., in education, immigration/naturalization policies, etc.) at the national level, in order to
bring about (relatively) autonomous political institutions that “members might see as ‘their own,’” and a
public sphere in which the national culture may be expressed (Tamir 1992). Thus cosmopolitanism
understood as “world statism” is obviously in tension with nationalism. Each makes opposing
institutional demands – one aiming to concentrate and locate political sovereignty in a centralized world
body, the other to keep sovereignty decentralized and dispersed at the national level.
But few contemporary cosmopolitans, pace Zolo, actually support the idea of a world state and the
subsequent outright rejection of national self-determination. Adapting Charles Beitz’s terminology, I
shall call the above interpretation of cosmopolitanism institutional cosmopolitanism, and contrast it
with moral cosmopolitanism (Beitz 1999b, p. 287). Unlike institutional cosmopolitanism, which calls for
the establishment of a world state, moral cosmopolitanism makes no necessary institutional demands or
recommendations. Moral cosmopolitanism simply says that the individual is the ultimate unit of moral
worth and concern, and that how we ought to act or what kinds of institutions we ought to establish
“should be based on an impartial consideration of the claims of each person who would be affected” by
our choices (Beitz 1999b). In other words, moral cosmopolitanism is not concerned directly with the
question of how global institutions are to be ordered, but with the justificatory basis of these
institutions. And nothing in this interpretation of cosmopolitanism necessitates the idea of a world state.
On the contrary, a moral cosmopolitan can as well defend national self-determination if she believes the
ideal of equal and impartial concern for individuals is best realized by respecting their claims to national
sovereignty. So there is no necessary conflict between moral cosmopolitanism and the idea of national
self-determination.
It is plain that the cosmopolitan conception of distributive justice depends fundamentally on the
cosmopolitan moral view – that individuals are the ultimate units of moral worth and are entitled to
equal and impartial concern regardless of their nationality. But it is far from evidence that this idea of
justice must also depend on institutional cosmopolitanism (i.e., a world government). We can think of
different feasible global institutional arrangement for redistributing wealth and resources globally with
recourse to the punitive and administrative powers of a world state. Proposals like the Tobin Tax (that
would tax short-term capital flows and currency speculation), or Thomas Pogge’s global resource tax
(that would tax countries for extracting national resources) are global distributive schemes that are not
tied to the idea of a world state (Pogge 1994).
AT: Cosmopolitanism is Eurocentric
Critical cosmopolitanism recognizes multiple kinds of cosmopolitanism- avoids the
pitfalls of Enlightenment principles
Delanty, 6- Gerard Delanty is a British sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Social & Political
Thought at the University of Sussex (Gerard Delanty, 2006, “The cosmopolitan imagination: critical
cosmopolitanism and social theory”, http://www.oneworlduv.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/cosmopolitan_imagination.pdf)//Yak
Viewed from a different perspective – a broader vision of social theory as a critical reflection on
modernity – the decline of the cosmopolitan imagination associated with the Enlightenment and the rise
of the nation-state could be seen as the beginning of a different kind of cosmopolitanism, one less
premised on the assumptions of a world republic or on elites and also one less Eurocentric. In contrast
to the dominant Enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism as a transnational republican order, current
developments in social theory suggest a post-universalistic cosmopolitanism that takes as its point of
departure different kinds of modernity and processes of societal transformation that do not presuppose
the separation of the social from the political or postulate a single world culture. Current debates in
political theory draw attention to the revival of the Kantian ideal, which it is argued is relevant in the
present context of globalization, the alleged crisis of the nation-state and the need for global civil society
(Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1997). It is not the aim of the present paper to argue against such
normative positions, but to highlight a different and more sociological approach to cosmopolitanism
which is relevant to a critical social theory of late modernity. Viewed in such terms the emphasis shifts
to the very conceptualization of the social world as an open horizon in which new cultural models take
shape. In this approach, which I term critical cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitan imagination occurs
when and wherever new relations between self, other and world develop in moments of openness. It is
an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather
than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism and is also not reducible to the fact of pluralism.
The point of departure for this kind of critical cosmopolitan social theory is the recognition that the very
notion of cosmopolitanism compels the recognition of multiple kinds of cosmopolitanism, including
earlier kinds of cosmopolitanism, and which cannot be explained in terms of a single, western notion of
modernity or in terms of globalization. Cosmopolitanism refers to the multiplicity of ways in which the
social world is constructed in different modernities. Rather than see cosmopolitanism as a particular or
singular condition that either exists or does not, a state or goal to be realized, it should instead be seen
as a cultural medium of societal transformation that is based on the principle of world openness, which
is associated with the notion of global publics. Today global publics are playing a critical role in such
processes of transformation. In equating world openness rather than universalism as such with
cosmopolitanism the basis for a more hermeneutic and critical cosmopolitan sociology will hopefully be
established. In sum, then, the argument of this paper is that a sociologically driven critical
cosmopolitanism concerns the analysis of cultural modes of mediation by which the social world is
shaped and where the emphasis is on moments of world openness created out of the encounter of the
local with the global.
Cosmopolitanism requires looking at the world from multiple perspectives – not just
one.
Beck and Sznaider 10 -- Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich and
School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel (Ulrich and Natan, “Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda”, January 2010, The British Journal of
Sociology) KW
How and why is the twenty-first century very different from France in 1912 when Durkheim published
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life? One obvious difference is that Australian aboriginals have
access to Durkheim’s sociology of religion either through their interaction with contemporary
anthropologists, or through educational web-sites, or through participation in university discourses on
Durkheim’s sociological theory. Cosmopolitan understanding, despite the existence of digital divide, is
discursive, dialogic and reflexive.Whereas the Elementary Forms assumed hat the Aunta tribe was a
passive object of sociological inquiry, the contemporary world is connected together as a (more or less)
unified place in a (more or less) simultaneous time. Network society makes endless and instant dialogue.
(Turner 2004: 11)
The distinction between the actor perspective of society and politics and the observer perspective of the
social sciences only unfolds its disruptive potential when the expanded options opened up by
cosmopolitanization are viewed from both perspectives. It then becomes clear that cosmopolitanization,
in both the agent and the observer perspectives, must be developed as a new politics of perspectives (of
starting points, modes of access, standards, framings, foregrounds and backgrounds, etc.). (On the
‘politics of scale’ – i.e., the negotiation of hierarchy and legitimacy among different ‘scales’ of social
interaction – see Brenner 1999, 2000; Tsing 2000; Burawoy et al. 2000). It follows that social science can
conceptualize and thematize the relational patterns ‘transnational’,‘global–local’,‘global–
national’,‘national–global’ or ‘global–global’:
• with a local focus (e.g. transnational lifestyles of Turks in London; global co-operation and conflict
within the World Trade Organization, the American government or NGOs; conflicts between national
and Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences 397 British Journal of Sociology © London School
of Economics and Political Science 2010 communal governments over fertility policy; anti-poverty
initiatives in New Delhi; the impact of the BSE risk on an agricultural community in Scotland); or
• with a national focus (e.g. transnational forms of marriage and family in different countries; the modes
and frequency of transnational communication in the USA, Russia, China, North Korea and South Africa;
the nationalities and languages of schoolchildren in different countries, etc.); or
• with a transnational (or translocal) focus (e.g. German Turks who have developed a transnational
lifestyle moving between Berlin and Istanbul are being researched in both Berlin and Istanbul; this
involves an exchange of perspectives which sets the nation-state framings of Turkey and Germany into
systematic relations with each other (as regards values, administrative regulations, cultural stereotypes,
etc., which determine, facilitate or prevent transnationalization); the transnational dynamics of risk and
conflict of the BSE crisis and their cultural perception and evaluation in different European countries are
being investigated in a comparative study); or
• with a global focus (how far advanced is the internal and external cosmopolitanization of national
domains of experience in particular countries, what implications does this have, and what theoretical,
empirical and political conclusions can be drawn from it?).
Thus methodological cosmopolitanism is not mono- but multi-perspectival. More precisely, it can and
must observe and investigate the boundarytranscending and boundary-effacing multi-perspectivalism
of social and political agents through very different ‘lenses’.A single phenomenon, transnationality, for
example, can, perhaps even must, be analysed both locally and nationally and transnationally and translocally and globally.
Universalism and cosmopolitanism are distinct – their argument doesn’t apply
Beck and Sznaider 10 -- Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich and
School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel (Ulrich and Natan, “Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda”, January 2010, The British Journal of
Sociology) KW
What distinguishes the cosmopolitan outlook from a universalistic outlook? And what makes the
cosmopolitan outlook at the beginning of the twenty-first century ‘realistic’, in contrast with
cosmopolitan idealism? Here are just a few considerations by way of exploring these questions: Political
cosmopolitanism in sociological terms answers the question: how do societies deal with difference and
borders under conditions of global interdependence crises?
Different social modalities of dealing with difference have to be distinguished – universalism, relativism,
ethnicity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, etc. Universalistic practices, for example, but
also relativism, etc., involve conflicting impulses. Universalism obliges us to respect others as equals as a
matter of principle, yet for that very reason it does not involve any requirement that would arouse
curiosity or respect for what makes others different. On the contrary, the particularity of others is
sacrificed to an assumption of universal equality which denies its own context of emergence and
interests. Universalism thereby becomes two-faced: respect and hegemony, rationality and terror .
Similarly, the emphasis on context and on the relativity of standpoints springs from an impulse to
acknowledge the difference of others, but when it is absolutized in thought and practice it flips over into
an incommensurability of perspectives which amounts to pre-established ignorance.
Realistic cosmopolitanism – this is the inference – should be conceived, elaborated and practiced not in
an exclusive manner but in an inclusive relation to universalism, contextualism, nationalism,
transnationalism, etc. It is this particular combination of semantic elements which the cosmopolitan
outlook shares with the universalistic, relativistic and national outlooks and which at the same time
distinguishes it from these other approaches.
Realistic cosmopolitanism presupposes a universalistic minimum involving a number of substantive
norms which must be upheld at all costs. The principle that women and children should not be sold or
enslaved, the principle that people should be able speak freely about God or their government without
being tortured or their lives being threatened – these are so self-evident that no violation of them could
meet with cosmopolitan tolerance.We can speak of ‘cosmopolitan common sense’ when we have good
reasons to assume that a majority of human beings would be willing to defend these minimum universal
norms wherever they have the power, if called upon to do so.
On the other hand, realistic cosmopolitanism includes universal procedural norms, since they alone
make it possible to regulate how difference is dealt with across cultures.Accordingly, realistic
cosmopolitanism must also confront the painful questions and dilemmas, such as the universalist–
pluralist dilemma: is cosmopolitanism single or multiple?
AT: Causes globalization
Cosmopolitanism is distinct from globalization.
Beck and Sznaider 10 -- Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich and
School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel (Ulrich and Natan, “Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda”, January 2010, The British Journal of
Sociology) KW
Cosmopolitanism and globalization
But, one might object, isn’t ‘cosmopolitanization’ simply a new word for what used to be called
‘globalization’? The answer is ‘no’ : globalization is something taking place ‘out there’,
cosmopolitanization happens ‘from within’. Whereas globalization presupposes, cosmopolitanization
dissolves the ‘onion model’ of the world, where the local and the national form the core and inner layer
and the international and the global form the outer layers. Cosmopolitanization thus points to the
irreversible fact that people, from Moscow to Paris, from Rio to Tokyo, have long since been living in
really-existing relations of interdependence; they are as much responsible for the intensification of
these relations through their production and consumption as are the resulting global risks that impinge
on their everyday lives. The question, then, is: how should we operationalize this conception of the
world as a collection of different cultures and divergent modernities? Cosmopolitanization should be
chiefly conceived of as globalization from within, as internalized cosmopolitanism. This is how we can
suspend the assumption of the nation-state , and this is how we can make the empirical investigation
of local–global phenomena possible.We can frame our questions so as to illuminate the transnationality
that is arising inside nationstates. This is what a cosmopolitan sociology looks like.
Our version of cosmopolitanism isn’t about globalization – it’s about translating
cultural identity to be more open towards difference. We can reject nationalism
without facilitating greater globalization
Delanty, 6- Gerard Delanty is a British sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Social & Political
Thought at the University of Sussex (Gerard Delanty, 2006, “The cosmopolitan imagination: critical
cosmopolitanism and social theory”, http://www.oneworlduv.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/cosmopolitan_imagination.pdf)//Yak
The indicators of cosmopolitanism go beyond shifts in identity to wider discursive and cultural
transformation. In methodological terms, cosmopolitan indicators are necessarily ones concerning
socio-cultural mediation. If the cosmopolitan moment arises in the construction and emergence of new
identities or forms of self-understanding, cultural frames and cultural models, then mediation is the key
to it. This emphasis on mediation between, for example, competing conceptions of the social world
accords with the cosmopolitan idea in all its forms: the desire to go beyond ethnocentricity and
particularity. In this sense then critical cosmopolitanism is an open process by which the social world is
made intelligible; it should be seen as the expression of new ideas, opening spaces of discourse,
identifying possibilities for translation and the construction of the social world. Following Bryan Turner’s
analysis, it can be related to such virtues as irony (emotional distance from one’s own history and
culture), reflexivity (the recognition that all perspectives are culturally conditioned and contingent),
scepticism towards the grand narratives of modern ideologies, care for other cultures and an acceptance
of cultural hybridization, an ecumenical commitment to dialogue with other cultures, especially religious
ones, and nomadism, as a condition of never being fully at home in cultural categories or geo-political
boundaries (Turner 2001; Turner and Rojek 2001: 225). This is also reiterated in the arguments of other
social theorists, such as Calhoun (2003), Gilroy (2004) and Kurasawa (2004) that cosmopolitanism does
not entail the negation of solidarities, as liberal cosmopolitan theorists, such as Nussbaum (1996) argue,
but is more situated and, as Appiah (2005) argues, it is also ‘rooted’.
This notion of cosmopolitanism goes beyond conventional associations of cosmopolitanism with world
polity or with global flows. The article stresses the socially situated nature of cosmopolitan processes
while recognizing that these processes are world-constituting or constructivist ones. Such processes take
the form of translations between things that are different. The space of cosmopolitanism is the space of
such translations. While the capacity for translation has always existed, at least since the advent of
writing, it is only with modernity that translation or translatability, has itself become the dominant
cultural form for all societies. Translation once served the function of communication and was not the
basis of a given culture. It is only becoming fully apparent today what the logic of translation has
extended beyond the simple belief that everything can be translated to the recognition that every
culture can translate itself and others. The most general one is the translation of inside/outside as a
solution to the problem of inclusion and exclusion. Other dynamics of translation are those of the local
and global, self and other, particular and universal, past and present, core and periphery. It is the nature
of such translations that the very terms of the translation is altered in the process of translation and
something new is created. This is because every translation is at the same time an evaluation. Without
this dimension of self-transcendence, cosmopolitanism is a meaningless term. Conceived of in such
terms, cosmopolitanism entails the opening up of normative questions within the cultural imaginaries of
societies. The research object for critical cosmopolitan sociology concerns precisely this space, the
discursive space of translations.
Conclusion
Cosmopolitanism does not refer simply to a global space or to post-national phenomena that have come
into existence today as a result of globalization. The argument advanced in this paper is that it resides in
social mechanisms and dynamics that can exist in any society at any time in history where world
openness has a resonance. Clearly cosmopolitanism has become relevant today, due not least to the
impact of globalization. Cosmopolitanism concerns processes of self-transformation in which new
cultural forms take shape and where new spaces of discourse open up leading to a transformation in the
social world. The cosmopolitan imagination from the perspective of a critical social theory of modernity
tries to capture the transformative moment, interactive relations between societies and modernities,
the developmental and dialogic.
For these reasons, methodologically speaking, a critical cosmopolitan sociology proceeds on the
assumption that culture contains capacities for learning and that societies have developmental
possibilities. The article has highlighted translations as one of the central mechanisms of cosmopolitan
transformation and which occurs on macro-societal and on micro dimensions as well as being played on
in the continued transformation of modernities. Cosmopolitan sociology is a means of making sense of
social transformation and therefore entails an unavoidable degree of moral and political evaluation. To
this extent, cosmopolitanism is a connecting strand between sociology and political discourse in society
and in political theory. It has a critical role to play in opening up discursive spaces of world openness and
thus in resisting both globalization and nationalism.
AT: Mobility K
Mobility is not the critical element of cosmpolitanism- ignores notions of society that
are not territorially bounded and reduces cosmopolitanism to globalization
Delanty, 6- Gerard Delanty is a British sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Social & Political
Thought at the University of Sussex (Gerard Delanty, 2006, “The cosmopolitan imagination: critical
cosmopolitanism and social theory”, http://www.oneworlduv.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/cosmopolitan_imagination.pdf)//Yak
According to Urry (2000, 2002), who also aligns his position more explicitly with cosmopolitanism, the
key feature of the current situation is the fact of mobility. For Urry mobility is an ontological condition
and is expressed in processes as different as global complexity and reflexive modernity: people,
commodities, cultures, technologies are all mobile and their reality is one of mobility. Mobilities are not
just flows but networked relations and are globally organized in new kinds of spaces and temporal
processes. In his theory, which is a development of Castell’s and influenced by Bruno Latour, the idea of
society is redundant and with it all of classical sociology because it suggests an entity that is bounded,
territorial and constituted by the state. Global processes have undermined the nation-state creating an
entirely new context for social relations, which instead of being relations between people are relations
between mobile and immobile elements. This thesis lends itself to a cosmopolitan perspective since it
sees the social world in terms of open as opposed to closed processes. The difficulty with this argument
is two-fold. On the one side, the argument that society has become redundant makes unwarranted
assumptions about the concept of society in classical sociology as entirely defined by the categories of
the nation-state and thus neglects earlier and more cosmopolitan notions of society which cannot be
reduced to territorially bounded ideas. On the other side, it exaggerates the novelty of current
mobilities. Aside from neglecting earlier mobilities, such as Marx’s definition of capital, the main
drawback with this approach is that too much explanatory power is given to global mobilities and hyperchaotic phenomena. For instance, it is by no means evident that nation-states outside the relatively
small part of the world within the European Union are losing power. If anything they are gaining power,
as the examples of the USA and China suggest. Moreover, if the concept of society is jettisoned it will
have to be replaced by something similar. From the perspective of a cosmopolitan social theory, global
mobilities are of central importance, but the fact of mobility is not the key feature of the cosmopolitan
movement. Indeed, many kinds of mobilities are not cosmopolitan in the sense used here. They may be
open structures, as Urry argues, but the openness that he associated with cosmopolitanism is in fact
global fluidity, or ‘cosmopolitan global fluids’ (Urry 2002: 133). The problem here, again, is the reduction
of cosmopolitanism to globalization. In opposition to this emphasis on mobility as the chief
characteristic of cosmopolitanism, the argument in this paper is that cosmopolitanism cannot be
entirely separated from the normative vision of an alternative society and that this imaginary is also
present as a cultural model within the cultural traditions of societies.5 Identities and modes of cultural
belonging, while being influenced by global mobilities, are not reducible to mobility. The aspect of
globalization that is more pertinent is the abstract presence of the global public within the social world.
Security
1nc – reject security
Rejecting the aff interrupts the discourse of security and allows for rethinking political
possibility
Calkivik, 10 – Phd in Political Science from the University of Minnesota (Emine, “Dismantling Security”,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/99479/1/Calkivik_umn_0130E_11576.pdf)
Such an understanding of critical thought is premised on a historical consciousness that grasps the
present historically so as to break with the selfconception of the age. Untimely critique transforms into a
technique to blow up the present through fracturing its apparent seamlessness by insisting on
alternatives to its closed political and epistemological universe.349 Such a conception resonates with
the distinction that Žižek makes between a political subjectivity that is confined to choosing between
the existing alternatives—one that takes the limits of what is given as the limits to what is possible—and
a form of subjectivity that creates the very set of alternatives by “transcend[ing] the coordinates of a
given situation [and] ‘posit[ing] the presuppositions’ of one's activity” by redefining the very situation
within which one is active.”350
With its attempt to grasp the times in its singularity, critique is cast neither as a breaking free from the
weight of time (which would amount to ahistoricity) nor being weighed down by the times (as in the
case of teleology).351 It conceives the present as “historically contoured but not itself experienced as
history because not necessarily continuous with what has been.”352 It is an attitude that renders the
present as the site of “non-utopian possibility” since it is historically situated and constrained yet also a
possibility since it is not historically foreordained or determined.353 It entails contesting the
delimitations of choice and challenging the confinement of politics to existing possibilities.
Rather than positing history as existing objectively outside of narration, what Brown’s discussion
highlights is the intimate relation between the constitution of political subjectivity vis-à-vis the meaning
of history for the present. It alludes to “the power of historical discourse,” which Mowitt explains as a
power “to estrange us from that which is most familiar, namely, the fixity of the present” because “what
we believe to have happened to us bears concretely on what we are prepared to do with ourselves both
now and in the future.”354 Mark Neocleous concretizes the political stakes entailed in such encounters
with history—with the dead—from the perspective of three political traditions: a conservative one,
which aims to reconcile the dead with the living, a fascist one, which aims to resurrect the dead to
legitimate its fascist program, and a historical materialist one, which seeks redemption with the dead as
the source of hope and inspiration for the future.355
Brown’s discussion of critique and political time is significant for highlighting the immediately political
nature of critique in contrast to contemporary invocations that cast it as a self-indulgent practice, an
untimely luxury, a disinterested, distanced, academic endeavor. Her attempt to trace critique vis-à-vis its
relation to political time provides a counter-narrative to the conservative and moralizing assertions that
shun untimely critique of security as a luxurious interest that is committed to abstract ideals rather than
to the “reality” of politics—i.e., running after utopia rather than modeling “real world” solutions.
Dismantling security as untimely critique entails a similar claim to unsettle the accounts of “what the
times are” with a “bid to reset time.”356 It aspires to be untimely in the face of the demands on critical
thought to be on time; aims to challenge the moralizing move, the call to conscience that arrives in the
form of assertions that saying “no!” to security, that refusing to write it, would be untimely. Rather than
succumbing to the injunction that thought of political possibility is to be confined within the framework
of security, dismantling security aims to open up space for alternative forms, for a different language of
politics so as to “stop digging” the hole politics of security have dug us and start building a counterdiscourse.
2nc – reject security
Saying no to security requires rejecting the state as the site of politics – the alternative
can create a new emancipatory political language, but it requires giving in to insecurity
first
Neocleous, 8 - Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of
Security, p. 185)
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security
altogether – to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought
other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something
that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be
imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain ‘this is
an insecure world’ and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard
to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a
political way out of the impasse of security.
This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalises all else,
most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant
prioritising of a mythical security as a political end – as the political end – constitutes a rejection of
politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be
articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and
negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible – that they might
transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes
it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political
questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that we are
never quite told – never could be told – what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in
this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security
state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of
security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet
more ‘sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention
in yet more and more areas of our lives.
Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text
Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole
that’s left behind? But I’m inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The mistake has
been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of
security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of
these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up re - affirming the
state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed
hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us
beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into
the arms of the state. That’s the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more
adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a
negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the
positive in setting thought on new paths.
For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of
liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security’ (while
meekly hoping that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the
possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To
situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved
through the constant securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that ‘security’
helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting
of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a
different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and
politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the
word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising
that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not
the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus
giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties,
ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being human; it requires accepting that ‘securitizing’ an
issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it
requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.143
Anti-surveillance
1nc – anti-surveillance
The alternative is to vote for anti-surveillance - disruption tactics and surveilling the
powerful can cause widespread social change
Martin, 10 - Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication, University of
Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia (Brian, “Opposing Surveillance” IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
MAGAZINE | SUMMER, http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=lhapapers
Many individuals attempt to avoid or disrupt surveillance, for example by giving incorrect information
on forms, joining campaigns against identity cards, or damaging speed cameras. If actions are widely
taken up, they can have a major impact and can stimulate development of new methods of
resistance . Using and promoting encryption is an example. If everyone puts some encrypted files on
their computer and sends occasional encrypted emails, even if they have nothing to hide, this makes it
harder for snoops to determine who is worth watching. This is especially important in repressive
regimes, where use of encryption might be seen as implying subversive activities. Struggles to enable
access to encryption technology are a vital part of resistance [27].
Gary Marx [18] has distinguished 11 different types of individual resistance to surveillance, for example
avoiding detection, blocking intrusive measures, refusing to provide information, and encouraging
surveillance agents not to enforce regulations. He gives examples of each type of resistance and argues
that there will be an ongoing struggle between controllers and resisters, with total control being
unrealizable.
Methods of intimidation are often linked to cover-up. Beginning in the 1970s, CovertAction Information
Bulletin challenged secret agencies by exposing the identities of undercover CIA agents; in response, the
U.S. Congress in 1982 passed a law against this. This law later led to a giant scandal when government
officials revealed the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame in reprisal against her husband Joseph Wilson
for questioning false claims used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq [31]. This case suggests that datagathering can sometimes be turned against powerful groups. Normally, the groups that instigate and
run surveillance systems, such as politicians, employers, top bureaucrats, and spy agencies, are not
equally subject to the techniques they use against others. For example, employers may monitor workers
but workers are seldom able to monitor employers to the same extent. Collecting data about the rich
and powerful, putting them on a par with others, challenges and deters intimidation . In other words, if
the rich and powerful want surveillance, then make sure the searchlight is turned on them as well as
others.
2nc – antisurveillance solves
The alternative is more realistic than the plan – we have comparative evidence
between the alt and circumvention and governmentality
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
Surveillance, a serious and growing issue, is basically a problem of unequal power. The usual reform
solutions, such as codes of professional ethics, laws and regulations, give only an illusion of protection.
Another approach is to promote grassroots challenges to surveillance either through disruption or by
replacing social institutions that create a demand for surveillance. A long-term programme for
institutional change helps in choosing directions for antisurveillance campaigns.
Today, information about citizens is collected by dozens of corporations and government bureaucracies,
including police, taxation departments, marketing firms and banks. Cameras and listening devices are
commonplace. Technologies to automatically recognise people's faces or hands are being refined.
So central is surveillance that countries such as Sweden, Germany and the United States have been
called "surveillance societies." Yet few people are enthusiastic about the increased capacity of large
organisations to collect information about themselves. Opinion surveys regularly show that most people
attach great value to their own privacy -- though not always to other people's privacy. However, concern
about invasions of privacy has not led to a mass movement against surveillance. Privacy campaigner
Simon Davies notes that activist privacy groups are folding up or losing energy, though citizen action is
desperately needed.
So far, the main responses to the threat of surveillance -- codes of professional ethics, laws and
regulations -- have given only an illusion of protection. These responses may be adequate in some
circumstances, but they don't address the driving forces behind surveillance: power, profit and control.
Codes of ethics seem to have made little impact, while laws and regulations are regularly flouted or
made obsolete by technological change.
There is another approach, which has received relatively little attention: to challenge and replace the
social structures that promote surveillance. My aim in this chapter is to outline a radical
antisurveillance agenda . It is an exercise in thinking about massive changes in the organisation of
society and especially in the distribution of power. Of course, this can be considered "unrealistic" in the
sense that such changes will be opposed by powerful groups and thus be difficult to achieve. But
envisioning alternatives has the advantage of indicating directions for today's campaigns that will
make some contribution to long-term change. What is actually unrealistic is to imagine that the problem
of surveillance can be addressed by band-aid methods .
Antisurveillance movements need to be aligned against the existence of the state
itself – even if the alternative can’t accomplish abolition, aligning goals is vital to the
success of restraining the state
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
Here I outline some radical approaches to eliminating surveillance by eliminating the institutional
capacity or need for it in the first place. By necessity, this is an extremely brief overview, but it should
illustrate the general approach.
Many of the proposals here, such as "abolish nuclear weapons" or "abolish the state," are easy to say
but very difficult to accomplish. After all, it's a challenging, long-term process to succeed in abolishing
nuclear weapons, not to mention abolishing the state. It is not my intention to present strategies for
achieving these goals; in most cases, there are well-established perspectives or movements for doing so.
Rather, my intention is to point out institutional sources of surveillance so that campaigns against
surveillance can be chosen and implemented in ways that weaken rather than strengthen them.
To put this another way: abolishing nuclear weapons or the state is not a prerequisite for eliminating
surveillance. Rather, campaigns against nuclear weapons or the state should be developed so that they
are compatible with struggles against surveillance, and campaigns against surveillance should be
developed so that they are compatible with struggles with the ultimate aim of abolishing nuclear
weapons, abolishing the state or eliminating other roots of surveillance. In short, a programme for
institutional change provides a direction for antisurveillance campaigns today.
Small scale, everyday resistance is the most accessible way to resist the surveillance
state- widespread recognition creates a significant movement
Gilliom, 5- John Gilliom is professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio University
(John Gilliom, Summer 2005, “Resisting Surveillance”, Social Text, JSTOR)//Yak
From what Moonstar and other women told us, getting a family of four through the month on the
state’s allowance of, at that time, a little over four hundred dollars was next to impossible.2 Making
things worse was the fact that state regulations at the time either forbade any extra income or made the
reporting and surveillance system about allowable income prohibitively risky and cumbersome. So when
the mothers did what they had to do—find extra cash and keep it secret—they placed themselves at
odds with the law and at odds with one of the most advanced financial surveillance systems of its time.
The mothers’ defiance of the rules and besting of the system through petty fraud, subterfuge, and other
tactics manifests a pattern of “everyday resistance” to the surveillance regime .3 As James Scott
explains in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, everyday resistance
encompasses “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false
compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth.”4 He continues, “When
a peasant hides part of his crop to avoid paying taxes, he is both filling his stomach and depriving the
state of gain. . . . When such acts are rare and isolated, they are of little interest; but when they become
a consistent pattern (even though uncoordinated, let alone organized) we are dealing with resistance.
The intrinsic nature and, in one sense, the ‘beauty’ of much peasant resistance is that it often confers
immediate and concrete advantages, while at the same time denying resources to the appropriating
classes, and that it requires little or no manifest organization.”5
Here we hit on a new way of thinking about age-old practices of noncompliance, masking,
misrepresentation, and other ways to beat the system. In situations where these activities work to defy
the goals of the surveillance program by evading detection and engaging in forbidden or regulated
behaviors, they have to be understood as a form of antisurveillance politics . Moving beyond the
welfare context, we emphasize that these are not necessarily laudable politics, for many nasty things are
done in hiding. Nor is it to argue that any instance of noncompliance is necessarily a significant political
phenomenon. Rather, it is to argue that in a society in which surveillance increasingly becomes the
defining face of government and corporate influence and domination, resisting surveillance programs
becomes one key way for citizens to express and act on their disagreement with the norms and rules of
the state. And when that resistance becomes sufficiently widespread to be recognized as a pattern in
the lives of large numbers of people, it becomes hard not to recognize it as a significant movement on
the political landscape.
Welfare mothers lack the political influence to raise their allowance through legislative change—but
they have the personal resources to do it on their own. Middle-class families cannot rewrite the laws of
Medicare eligibility, but they can learn to shift assets to achieve what are effectively the same ends. All
around us, the demands of various systems of regulation and enforcement create webs of control and
power. These systems seek to monitor, channel, identify, sanction, and reward according to established
norms and goals. When we see that individuals are able to assert their autonomy and opposition
through these millions of small skirmishes, we must conclude that a massive, underground,
uncoordinated, antisurveillance movement is underway.
Protests from below contain the most dynamic politics to break down the surveillance
state- small scale actions can compound to create lasting change
Gilliom, 5- John Gilliom is professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio University
(John Gilliom, Summer 2005, “Resisting Surveillance”, Social Text, JSTOR)//Yak
The Politics of Everyday Resistance
But just how widespread are the patterns of everyday resistance to surveillance programs? When
employee drug-testing programs came online in the mid-1980s, small companies emerged selling “clean
urine” through magazines and newspapers. When police began using radar to catch speeders, drivers
began installing radar detectors. When the Internal Revenue Service develops profiles used to identify
those who will be audited, tax advisers, newspapers, and Web sites broadcast the parameters of those
profiles in a very public manner. Herds of tax attorneys and preparers assist middle-class and wealthy
families as well as businesses in shirking, as much as possible, the obligations of taxation and besting the
surveillance systems designed to implement those obligations. Thus, in these ongoing battles to prepare
and divide the pie of national finance, the welfare mothers do nothing different from what many typical
families would do, and they do it from a position of greater need and risk and with less advice and
support.
When viewed from this perspective, there are millions upon millions of people throughout the
industrialized world engaged in widespread and diverse types of opposition and resistance to
surveillance regimes. Depending on class, context, and circumstance, some get more formal, public, and
organized while others must necessarily remain personal, private, and solitary. Some types of
resistance—like the upper-middle-class tax shirker—are tolerated, even smiled on, by political leaders.
Others, like the poor women here, are vilified and hunted. In all these different contexts and manners,
the politics of surveillance are played out daily. It is here, ra ther than in the official arenas of the
courts, legislatures, and blue-ribbon commissions , that the most important and dynamic politics of
surveillance may be taking place.
Even if they win state-based approaches are better, they are not accessible by those
who need it the most
Gilliom, 5- John Gilliom is professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio University
(John Gilliom, Summer 2005, “Resisting Surveillance”, Social Text, JSTOR)//Yak
There is another important sense in which the ongoing pattern of income enhancement works as an
important front and form of political resistance—this has to do with the relationship of the surveilled
subject to the surveillance state. In that the welfare administration demands that a client open her life
to them in the form of income verification, computer matches, and other tactics in what can only be
called a full-scale surveillance assault, her secret actions are an act of resistance to the very structure of
the surveillance society. The welfare system works as hard as it can to force that secret out of her. It will
solicit “rat calls” in an attempt to get neighbors and relatives to expose the situation. It will use
computer matching searches to check bank accounts, social security payments, and other searchable
databases disclosing records.
This is, in short, a power struggle over the compulsory visibility of the welfare poor. The surveillance
mechanisms of the state are mechanisms of domination that seek to force the poor into the open,
prevent them from augmenting their meager allowance with entrepreneurial pursuits, and, as a result,
disempower them by closing off more and more of the secret places in which to hide, at least
temporarily, from the power of the state. To the extent that the poor can maintain those spaces,
augment their income, and assert the needs and values of their own identities, they have won a
temporary but not so small victory in the broader struggle.
These are all important political effects. But taking stock of the promising dimensions of a politics of
everyday resistance does not imply that more formal and public politics would not be a more
preferential and heartening course (and one that might even be more effective at achieving some of
these ends). It is also not meant to imply that there are no costs. There are, of course, potential costs,
risks, and drawbacks in all political choices. Many of the actions taken by these women are crimes, and
they may be caught and punished. More broadly, politicians may use evidence of “welfare fraud” to
reduce support and advance even more draconian measures of surveillance. All of this may happen. But
the tactical comparisons of such cost-benefit analyses overstate the extent to which relatively powerless
people can pick and choose from a menu of political options. For these poor women, the pressure is on
and the resources are slim. Most of their choices are shaped by social, legal, economic, and political
contexts over which they have little control —these contexts, after all, are far more affected by the
interests and desires of the powerful than they are by those of the sorts of people who turn to the
“weapons of the weak.”
2nc – anti-surveillance- encryption now
The squo is generating stronger encryption pressure because of the perception of NSA
overreach
Greenwald, 14 – constitutional lawyer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Snowden story
for the Guardian; he also runs The Intercept (Glenn, The Intercept, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS
SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD” 11/19
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-masssurveillance/
In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been
significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the premise of the question,
which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start
that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass
surveillance, at least not fundamentally. Those limitations are going to come from—are now coming
from —very different places:
1) Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy. The FBI and other U.S.
government agencies, as well as the U.K. Government, are apoplectic over new products from Google
and Apple that are embedded with strong encryption, precisely because they know that such
protections, while far from perfect, are serious impediments to their power of mass surveillance. To
make this observation does not mean, as some deeply confused people try to suggest, that one believes
that Silicon Valley companies care in the slightest about people’s privacy rights and civil liberties.
As much of the Snowden reporting has proven, these companies don’t care about any of that. Just as
the telecoms have been for years, U.S. tech companies were more than happy to eagerly cooperate with
the NSA in violating their users’ privacy en masse when they could do so in the dark. But it’s precisely
because they can’t do it in the dark any more that things are changing, and significantly. That’s not
because these tech companies suddenly discovered their belief in the value of privacy. They haven’t,
and it doesn’t take any special insight or brave radicalism to recognize that. That’s obvious.
Instead, these changes are taking place because these companies are petrified that the perception of
their collaboration with the NSA will harm their future profits, by making them vulnerable to appeals
from competing German, Korean, and Brazilian social media companies that people shouldn’t use
Facebook or Google because they will hand over that data to the NSA. That—fear of damage to future
business prospects—is what is motivating these companies to at least try to convince users of their
commitment to privacy. And the more users refuse to use the services of Silicon Valley companies that
compromise their privacy—and, conversely, resolve to use only truly pro-privacy companies instead—
the stronger that pressure will become.
Encryption solves better than legislative protection
Greenwald, 14 – constitutional lawyer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Snowden story
for the Guardian; he also runs The Intercept (Glenn, The Intercept, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS
SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD” 11/19
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-masssurveillance/
Increased individual encryption use is a serious impediment to NSA mass surveillance: far stronger than
any laws the U.S. Congress might pass. Aside from the genuine difficulty the agency has in cracking wellused encryption products, increased usage presents its own serious problem. Right now, the NSA—
based on the warped mindset that anyone who wants to hide what they’re saying from the NSA is
probably a Bad Person—views “encryption usage” as one of its key factors in determining who is likely a
terrorist. But that only works if 10,000 people around the world use encryption. Once that number
increases to 1 million, and then to 10 million, and then to default usage, the NSA will no longer be able
to use encryption usage as a sign of Bad People. Rather than being a red flag, encryption will simply be a
brick wall: one that individuals have placed between the snooping governments and their online
activities. That is a huge change, and it is coming.
Sousveillance solves - movements
Sousveillance constrains the state and bolsters social movements – it holds the
greatest promise for radical social change
Bradshaw, 13 - Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Central Michigan University
(Elizabeth, “This is What a Police State Looks Like: Sousveillance, Direct Action and the Anti-corporate
Globalization Movement”, 6/26/13, Springer Link) KW
Within the literature on surveillance, resistance is often mentioned but seldom explored from the
perspective of those who are surveilled, and even less attention is given to the ways in which
surveillance itself can be used as a means of resistance. Stressing the importance of researching
struggles, consciousness and subjectivities of surveillance, Gilliom (2001) documents the ways in which
welfare recipients are engaged in a pattern of everyday resistance to surveillance regimes through such
means as foot dragging, false compliance, and petty fraud. More commonly, resistance to surveillance in
the public and media has been framed in terms of rights to privacy, which fails to adequately capture
the range and complexities of surveillance experience (Gilliom 2006: 122). As Gilliom (2006: 126) states
A tour of the field suggests that we have been particularly good at studying the watchers- the police, the
CCTV operators, etc.- but not so good at the necessarily messier, less institutionalized, and exploratory
but absolutely crucial job of studying the watched- the real people and real bodies who are the subjects
of these systems.
Without developing a body of research that makes sense of how differently situated people respond to
varied surveillance settings, it is impossible to fundamentally define what surveillance is (Gilliom 2006:
126).
One of the few scholars to tackle resistance to surveillance head on, Gary T. Marx (2003) identifies
eleven means by which people confront, evade and neutralize surveillance in their daily lives. Marx
(2003: 84) describes ‘‘counter-surveillance moves’’ as turning the tables on those who are doing the
surveilling. The greater availability of technologies for surveillance has also played a role in facilitating
counter-surveillance, even leading some to call this the ‘‘democratization of surveillance’’. However,
Marx (2003) cautions that the greater availability of the means of surveillance does not equate to
democratization due to the inequality of resources between agents of surveillance and their resisters.
Nonetheless, the ease of access of low-cost surveillance equipment such as digital video cameras and
cell phones supply the means for counter-surveillance activities.
Counter-surveillance techniques can also document abuses by surveillance agents and have the
potential to lead to changes. As Marx (2003: 384) explains, ‘‘If counter-measures uncover questionable
practices, which are then publicized, it may lead, also, to their moderation or cessation.’’ The strategic
and tactical communications of global justice protestors provide the networks and infrastructure to
monitor police abuses of power during the protest through the use of common surveillance
technologies such as cell phones and video cameras and then publicize sensational images of the
repression via the internet. McGrath (2004: 198) concurs, stating that ‘‘Counter surveillance involves
using surveillance equipment in a way that reverses the usual vectors of power. As such, its most basic
manifestation may be the video cameras carried at most political demonstrations, on the look-out to
record any police brutality.’’ Although protesters have been quite successful in documenting and
publicizing police repression of protesters with the use of collaborative video projects, such countersurveillance techniques have yet to tame the excessive use of force by the police at mass actions.
Sousveillance: Watching from Below
Resituating Bentham’s panopticon, Mann, Nolan and Wellman (2003) propose that surveillance
technologies be freely distributed to promote the observation of people in positions of authority.
Labeling this inverse panopticon ‘‘sousveillance’’ [from the French words for ‘‘sous’’ (below) and
‘‘veiller’’ (to watch)], Mann et al. (2003: 332–333) describe it as a type of critical reflectionism which
challenges bureaucratic structures by mirroring their practices back at them. ‘‘Reflectionism becomes
sousveillance when it is applied to individuals using tools to observe the organizational observer.
Sousveillance focuses on enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their
surveillance and to neutralize surveillance’’ (Mann et al. 2003: 333).
The sousveillance of police by citizens is one attempt to mirror, critique and question the primacy of
state surveillance. ‘‘During mass actions, hundreds of media activists thus take to the streets to record
video footage, snap digital photos, and conduct interviews’’ (Juris 2005: 201). Documenting police
repression of protestors during demonstrations, photography abounds during the course of mass
actions. As one media activist astutely noted ‘‘Everyone is watching everyone else’’ (Juris 2005: 201).
Quite in-line with the anticorporate globalization movements’ goals of autonomy and decentralization,
the authors explicitly recognize sousveillance as a form of direct action with historical roots in
democratic social movements past, stating that
Acts of sousveillance redirect an establishment’s mechanisms and technologies of surveillance back on
the establishment. There is an explicit ‘‘in your face’’ attitude in the inversion of surveillance techniques
that draws from the women’s rights movement, aspects of the civil rights movement, and radical
environmentalism. Thus sousveillance is situated in the larger context of democratic social
responsibility. (Mann et al. 2003: 347)
One of the few studies to comprehensively rely on the concept of sousveillance is Vian Bakir (2010)
Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication which uses numerous comparative case
studies in Iraq, the US and the UK within the first decade of the new century to examine how web-based
participatory media (especially blogs and social media sites) challenged political communication. Relying
on Mann’s concepts of hierarchical surveillance (politically motivated watching of the institutional
watchers) and personal sousveillance (human-centered life sharing that is apolitical), Bakir’s analysis
incorporates perspectives from politics, media studies and cultural studies to explore ‘‘…the emergence
of Web 2.0 (a revolutionary way of remixing, repurposing and managing information) and its impact on
strategic political communication (the careful planning of communication tools to meet very specific
political objectives)’’ (2010: 1).
On the whole, Bakir’s research demonstrates how sousveillance allows for people to feel empowered
both by sharing their lives with others while also taking action against the surveillant state.
Just as the Panopticon operates through potential or implied surveillance, so sousveillance might also
operate through the credible threat of its existence . As the ubiquity and awareness of sousveillance
widens, it is this that may most empower citizens - by making the state and indeed, all strategic political
communicators, realize their actions may, themselves, be monitored and exposed at any time. The
permanent potential for sousveillance from so many…raises the likelihood that power abuses will be
captured on record which can then be used to hold powerabusers and manipulators to account… (2010:
157)
However, in contrast to Mann’s original conception of hierarchical sousveillance which is a conscious act
of resistance to surveillance, most of the acts considered by Bakir do not appear to be motivated by
hierarchical sousveillance (2010: 160). In this regard, Bakir fails to fully articulate the use of
sousveillance for the explicitly political means of challenging state and corporate authorities.
With the exception of a few notable scholars such as Bakir (2010), comparably limited research has been
done on resistance to authoritarian surveillance practices. While Marx’s (2003) techniques for
neutralizing surveillance contribute a framework for understanding the typology of resistance, it does
not offer a detailed analysis of resistance techniques in various social settings. Despite the conceptual
foundation for exploring resistance to surveillance that sousveillance provides, surveillance scholars
have been reluctant to utilize the concept. In stark contrast to the all-knowing eye of Big Brother,
sousveillance turns the hegemonic surveillance apparatus on its head by empowering ordinary citizens
to question surveillance practices and expropriate them for their own use.
As a form of direct action, sousveillance is yet another means for anarchists, global justice activists and
other protesters to confront authority and domination. Using strategic communications such as
independent media centers to circulate footage of police repression and tactical communications such
as cell phones and the internet to sousveill the activities of police, activists are not only registering their
dissent but are more importantly altering these authoritarian practices through direct action.
Sousveillance allows social movements to network and speak truth to power against
state and corporate violence
Verde Garrido, 15 – Berlin Forum on Global Politics (BFoGP), Germany (Miguelángel, “Contesting a
Biopolitics of Information and Communications: The Importance of Truth and Sousveillance After
Snowden” Surveillance & Society, 13(2): 153-167. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org) ICT =
Information and Communications Technology
The previous section explained that global mass surveillance is a state and/or corporate deployment of a
biopolitical technology of power that regulates the biosociological processes of information and
communication. It also explained that the contestation of state and corporate control over the regime of
truth is even more important when we consider that their policies and practices extend not only to ICT
infrastructure, networks, and content, but also to entire citizenries and global consumer markets. The
notion of parrhesia, Foucault clarifies, involves courageously speaking the whole truth without reserves,
despite the fact that it may place the speaker at risk of violence at the hands of the authority that is
contested (Foucault 2011: 6; 9; 11). The biopolitics of information and communications of states and
corporations employ cutting-edge scientific and technological developments. These mechanisms of
control are deployed so ICT data traces can be thoroughly monitored and examined in order to govern
populations more efficiently in accordance to electoral calculations, market imperatives, and security
concerns. In contemporary surveillance societies, parrhesiastic action has important sociopolitical
implications because it contests the regime of truth that attempts to ensure the political, economic, and
social regulation and compliance of civil society inasmuch as citizens and consumers.1 Recent Snowden
revelations evidence that GCHQ deploys covert tools over the internet to spread false information,
manipulate the results of online polls, divert traffic to or away from websites and videos that are of their
interest, and even permanently disable internet users’ accounts by infiltrating their computers (The
Intercept 14th July 2014). This is particularly worrying because “most conceptions of democracy”,
explain Bauman et al., “rest on some sense that people are able to think and make judgments for
themselves” (Bauman et al. 2014: 137). Fortunately, the escalating development of ICT and their
inventive use by civil society has also led to the emergence of numerous modalities of resistance that
can contest the mechanisms of control of contemporary biopolitics of information and communication.
Civil societies continue to develop their political agency and are learning to strengthen a nascent digital
agency, both of which enable them to contest state and corporate regimes of truth as parrhesiastes
that search for the resemantization of their social, economic, and political processes.
In consequence, there are various important individual and collaborative actions of parrhesia in
contemporary society that did not exist only a few decades ago. In general terms, we find alternative
media organizations and citizen journalism that employ internet websites and blogs as well as social
media networks to post and distribute their reporting. More specifically, there are whistleblowing
organizations such as WikiLeaks have that globalized, online and offline, the revelations substantiated by
carefully vetted materials sent anonymously to them by individuals and/or groups concerned by state
and corporate wrongdoings and abuses. Quite recently, hacktivists and hacktivism collectives as well as
collaborative networks that crowdsource open data analysis—which journalist Barrett Brown calls
‘pursuances’ (Brown 2012)—have shed light upon the strategies by which the state-corporate nexus
deploys espionage and persona management (i.e., using online identities for purposes of astroturfing or
disinformation) to infiltrate or hinder the activities of non-profit organizations and sociopolitical activism
groups (Masnick 25th November 2013). Lastly, there are numerous national and international non-profit
(NPO) and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) committed to establishing radical transparency of the
state, corporations, and the media. These organizations investigate, report, and publicize their findings
on a broad scope of topics, that cover state and corporate corruption, free and fair elections,
environmental impact, consumer rights, freedom of information and of the press, corporate lobbying,
and digital rights— but to name a few.
Parrhesiastic contestation of the regime of truth is also embedded within the social, economic, and
political processes of contemporary surveillance society. Because of its commitment to detaching the
truth from the economic and political hegemonies that control it, we cannot consider an ICT-enabled
parrhesiastic action to embody the very biopolitics of information and communications it contests.
However, the commitment of parrhesia to transparency appears to require that it share the interest of
surveillance in monitoring and collecting data on certain individuals and populations. In order to clarify
whether this is the case, it is fundamental to consider whether what appears as surveillance is not in fact
something altogether different.
Murakami Wood has questioned whether we should not begin to talk about “multiple and multiplying
‘veillances’”, rather than simply ‘surveillance’, in order to understand the reception, reaction, and
resistance to global surveillance (Murakami Wood 2013: 324). Steve Mann conceptualizes and theorizes
from the intersection of Surveillance Studies and his technical trailblazing in the development of
wearable computing, especially those devices that involve computational photography. From the
standpoint of this technico-conceptual crossroad, Mann posits an understanding of surveillance that,
although “commonly used to refer literally to visual signals”, also covers “other sensory signals and
observational data in general” (Mann and Ali 2013: 243). Surveillance, for Mann, frequently exhibits the
following traits: it is usually deployed from a fixed viewpoint, commonly architecture-centered, and
attached to property; it establishes an “oversight” perspective, which watches from above; and, it is
commonly initiated by property owners and/or its custodians, such as governments (Mann 2004: 626627). Contemporary developments in wearable computing and ICT, such as “social networking,
distributed cloud-based computing, self-sensing, body-worn vision systems, wearable cameras, and egocentric vision” (Mann 2014: 605), lead Mann to propose an alternative or counterpart to surveillance,
which he terms sousveillance. Sousveillance, for Mann, exhibits the following traits: it is usually
deployed from a mobile viewpoint, commonly human-centered, and worn by a person; it establishes an
“undersight” perspective, which watches from below; and, it is commonly less hierarchical and more
rhizomic than its counterpart, surveillance (Mann 2004: 626-627). In this sense, sousveillance seems to
explain parrhesia more correctly and more in detail than surveillance does. To be clear, it is not
necessary to consider every instance of parrhesia an instance of sousveillance and vice-versa, but we
can argue that they may coincide quite often. Mann and Ferenbok intuit the potential for parrhesia of
sousveillance when they argue that in contemporary society “people can and will not only look back, but
in doing so [can and will] potentially drive social and political change ” (Mann and Ferenbok 2013: 24).
Sousveillance is key to create dissent and effective politics
Bakir 10 (Vian, May 2010, “Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication :
Iraq, USA, UK,” Continuum International Publishing, pp. 156-7)//ES
Undoubtedly, the urge and practice of dissent has always been with us, and people exploit the
participatory media technologies at hand to mark and spread their dissent. However, the rise of webbased participatory media and sousveillance cultures have made it easier for many more to record and
spread this dissent globally, unimpeded by traditional media’s commercial distribution restrictions such
as pre- defined circulation runs or paid-for airtime, or the need for expert Developments and
Implications 157 knowledge in media production. Mann has long maintained that the ‘informal nature of
sousveillance, with its tendency to distribute recordings widely, will often expose inappropriate use to
scrutiny, whereas the secret nature of surveillance will tend to prevent misuse from coming to light
[Mann, 1995]’ (Mann, 2005, p. 641). Indeed, by the end of 2006, the internet was awash with
sousveillant civilian footage – for instance of police abuse in Malaysia, union-busting in Zimbabwe, and
women posting photos of men who had harassed them (Hoffman, 2006b). 8 By 2009, G20 protesters in
London openly collected sousveillant footage of the police presence to deter police officers from
excessive use of force and to provide evidence for legal action against the police where excessive force
was used. Meanwhile, pilot tests by police in 2006–2007 of ‘body worn video devices’ – typically small
cameras attached to the head – were pronounced a success by the Home Office in that they led to a
drop in complaints against the police, vindicating the police’s own versions of events (Rohrer, 2009). Just
as the Panopticon operates through potential or implied surveillance, so sousveillance might also
operate through the credible threat of its existence. As the ubiquity and awareness of sousveillance
widens, it is this that may most empower citizens – by making the state and indeed, all strategic political
communicators, realize that their actions may, themselves, be monitored and exposed at any time. The
permanent potential for sousveillance from so many (as opposed to more formalized exposés at the
hands of investigative reporters, a small media elite) raises the likelihood that power abuses will be
captured on record which can then be used to hold power-abusers and manipulators to account,
providing of course, that there is a functioning legal system and/or public sphere (with mechanisms in
place to translate popular demands and moral outrage into real-world change). Some of the key
features of sousveillant cultures as realized in webbased participatory media and revealed in the case
studies examined in this book are issues of anonymity; the blurring of boundaries between personal and
hierarchical sousveillance and its implications for resistance and social change; and the interplay
between semipermanence and instantaneity. These are discussed below.
Sousveillance is revolutionary – it can expose abuse and drive revolutions against
power relations
Mann, 13 - professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with crossappointments to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Faculty of Forestry, at the University of Toronto,
(Steve, New Media and the Power Politics of Sousveillance in a Surveillance- Dominated World.
Surveillance & Society 11(1/2): 18-34. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
But we do not live in virtual prisons, at least not ones without some form of agency. And new media, in
particular personalized broadcasting, and more specifically networked, wearable computers capable of
broadcasting and sharing virally what we see have significant implications for the power dynamics
within society. Imagine that prisoners in Foucault’s panopticon could look back—imagine they could see
their guards and be able to record their interactions. In the Matrix movie, where human-beings are
reduced to a shared delusional state and serve as batteries to their mechanical overlords, copperheads
cannot look back! In Orwell’s 1984, people can’t see who is behind the telescreen. But the power of
mobilized media that is always on, always able to broadcast, always able to access a network of
followers or friends or circles, changes these broader notions of surveillance and oppression. We are
entering an age where people can and will not only look back, but in doing so potentially drive social
and political change . No one can tell you what the matrix is, but once you’ve seen it, you are
immediately embroiled in the power politics of Sousveillance.
Thus wearing a camera does not necessarily mean we're ‘shooting back’ against surveillance. We might
actually be in favour of both forms of veillance, especially in times of danger or high risk. This is where
blogging, Eye Glass (EyeTap), Google Glass (‘Project Glass’ 2012), practical philosophy and socially
responsible design intersect. What was once a fringe of inventors and early adopters is now increasingly,
with projects like Digital Eye Glass (EyeTap) and Project Glass, part of the everyday. With mobile and
pervasive computing quickly becoming part of our reality, the possibility for sousveillance—that is
undersight of political and corporate entities, the ‘watchers’—becomes increasingly possible. It is this
change, the shift towards mainstream that makes it particularly apropos to rethink the politics of
sousveillance. The politics of sousveillance are themselves divisible into those that deal with the
channels, media and technology of sousveillance that intern influence power and its efficacy. The
efficacy and power of sousveillance is in part influenced by the design of media technologies that
channel the message. This relationship between mediated and distributed undersight, technology,
communication and the privileging of some political agendas over others happens at the system design
stage.
Sousveillance changes the relationships between the asymmetric paradigm for social control that
Foucault discussed as the formational characteristics of modern societies—what he termed the panoptic
gaze (Foucault 1995). Adding sousveillance to the mix makes the shaping of society more of a continual
dialogue between prisoners and guards, politicians and citizens, bureaucrats and people (figure 2).
Sousveillance differs critically from surveillance in the relationship of power between the observing gaze
and its subject (see figure 3). This relationship implies that there is power in the act of looking back, but
it also makes clear that looking back is ‘uphill’, and that even if an individual cannot ‘see’ his guard the
looking back provides a kind of back channel, a social check-and-balance to potentially serve as a
mechanism for helping to regulate the scope and socio-political boundaries of institutional surveillance
practices. Where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance,
but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance. Sousveillance
represents a ‘gazing’ from below. The viewer is by definition at a lower power potential than the subject
of the gaze.
Just as the efficacy of surveillance relies on ‘la potence’ (potency, e.g. ‘the gallows’), the efficacy of
sousveillance requires a different kind of ‘potency’ or reciprocal concept, i.e. another force to make the
undersight an effective social mechanism for political action and change. We name this force ‘swollag’
(‘gallows’ spelled backwards). This other equalizing force, swollag, although it can be political or
economic, is considered here as a socio-technical assemblage of new media and social networks. The
coalescing of power through new media and its distribution through social networking represents the
mechanism for potentially effective undersight. In this power triangle, if the viewer’s incline is small,
then the efficacy (‘swollag’) required for effective undersight is relatively little. However, if the
inclination is steep, the swollag required for effective change through sousveillance is much greater. The
practice of viewing from below when coupled with political action becomes a balancing force that
helps—in democratic societies—move the overall ‘state’ towards a kind of veillance (monitoring)
equilibrium, what we refer to as equiveillance. Sousveillance may lead to revolutions and uprisings ,
and could be for example argued to have arisen in the modern state at the very onset of the French
Revolution. The storming of the Bastille was itself the flashpoint where distributed power from below
was brought to bear on the existing social structure of order and control—the prison (which at the time
only housed seven prisoners and had 144 guards). However, it is really since the proliferation of video
recording and transmitting, and ubiquitous computing that a major swell in the practices of and
effectiveness of sousviellance have become noticeable—and worthy of further study and analysis.
Sousveillance solves – democratization
Sousveillance holds authority accountable and democratizes power
Fernback, 13- Jan Fernback, associate professor, received her doctorate from the University of
Colorado, and her MA from Temple University. Professor Fernback consults on various web-related
projects and has published studies and commentary on cybercommunity and new technology. (Jan,
“Sousveillance: Communities of resistance to the surveillance environment”, Telematics and Informatics
Volume 30, Issue 1, February 2013, Science Direct)//Yak
Foucault claimed that, ‘‘where
there is power, there is resistance,’’ (1978, p. 95). Resistance to surveillance
environments assumes a sinister motivation for watching, or at least a breach of privacy as typified by
panoptic or synoptic monitoring. For Koskela (2004) breaches of individual privacy need not cause people to
feel shame; rather, resistance is empowering, immodest, and subverting of Foucault’s discipline. Webcams or
other types of technologically-enabled exhibitionistic acts can confront surveillance regimes in a type of
‘‘surveillance turned into spectacle’’ (Koskela, 2004, p. 208). When embodied as a means of publicizing
institutional power structures, the cultural and political implications of resistance can be seen as
empowering for citizens .
While the notion of resistance broadly encompasses multiple dimensions (Sanchez, 2009; Martin et al., 2009; Marx, 2003), this paper locates
resistance primarily within the concept of sousveillance, or ‘‘watching from below,’’ a term popularized by
University of Toronto computer engineering professor Steve Mann (2004). Sousveillance is a form of inverse surveillance in
which citizens monitor the surveillors as a means to challenge the surveillance state. Wearable cameras and
wearable computers allow the wearer to observe, record, and disseminate events. Examples include citizen video posted
online, watchdog web sites or blogs, recording telephone conversations, or the monitoring of
bureaucratic authorities (corporations, military, government). Sousveillance embraces the idea of
transparency as an antidote to concentrated power in the hands of surveillors; it empowers individuals
to be cast as active producers of ‘‘observed’’ discourses, images, and data rather than as mere victims of
panoptic or synoptic surveillance. According to Mann et al. (2003), sousveillance ‘‘focuses on enhancing the ability of
people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance’’ (p. 333). The
overt visibility of some forms of sousveillance dilute the power and dominance of surveillance by exposing it,
forcing the watchers to confront and possibly question their own surveillance activities (Mann et al., 2003).
Citizens cannot access surveillance videos, yet citizens can post sousveillance videos. Fundamentally, sousveillance is about exerting
control of constant oversight as a potential force for democratization .
In the interest of imagining an ‘‘informed knowledge society’’ responsive to the ideals of individual empowerment, social responsibility and
equality, social networking communities are forming to interrogate networked surveillance. As Mann et al. (2003) argue, individuals
and
small groups are using sousveillance techniques to empower themselves against large, bureaucratic,
and institutionalized forms of surveillance . Sousveillance is used by Facebook members to expose the
data gathered by Facebook to the larger networked population and sometimes to authorities such as
law enforcement. With the introduction of Facebook’s News Feed feature, deemed ‘‘too stalkeresque’’ by users, a resistance effort
formed in the Facebook group ‘‘Students Against Facebook News Feed,’’ with membership exceeding 700,000 (Cohen, 2008). In another study
about sousveillance efforts within this group, Sanchez (2009, p. 287) writes, ‘‘Where
Facebook had become authoritarian and
hegemonic, the retaliation was democratic and multilateral.’’ Other groups, such as the Facebook, Respect My Privacy
group, the FB: Privacy and Prevention group or the Facebook smartm0b group are examples of sousveillance collectives that use the techniques
of transparent resistance to expose the surveillance environment and to openly critique it. Under such a scheme, the
Facebook
network is able to use the techniques of synoptic surveillance and sousveillance as a means of
resistance against panoptic surveillance. To examine sousveillance within Facebook as a response to the perceived surveillance
environment, this paper examines writings within several Facebook sousveillance/countersurveillance groups. Major themes are identified and
analyzed using a critical orientation that examines structures of socio-cultural dominance that have been institutionally legitimized in a
Foucauldian sense. The aim of this analysis is to discover the critical nature of resistance to the surveillance environment through an
exploration of the values, assumptions, and institutional practices that underlie both the mechanisms of surveillance within Facebook and the
discourses of resistance.
Potential for sousveillance growing now – it’s key to break down power asymmetries
Weiss 9 (Jen, “Critical Issues in Crime and Society : Schools under Surveillance : Cultures
of Control in Public Education,” Chapter: “Scan This”, pp. 224-5)//ES
To conclude this chapter I want to address one final response to Baldwin’s increasing security
presence—the formation of an after-school poetry and hip-hop club by a small group of Baldwin
students in the weeks after the walkout. The decision to convene a poetry and hip-hop club was as
much a response to the school’s newfound policies as was the protest described earlier in this chapter.
In my view, the club proved a much more radicalizing choice. As poet and essayist Adrienne Rich points
out, poetry, in its “rejection of conventional expectations,” is “inherently subversive to dominant and
oppressive structures” (2001, 116). I discuss the relationship between writing and resistance at length
elsewhere (see Weiss et al., 2008); here I will address one aspect of writing that can be seen as
resistance—that of writing as “sousveillance.” “Sousveillance” denotes “surveying from below” or the
act of “countersurveillance” and offers a way for us to think about how students and teachers in schools
like Baldwin can resist their school’s unjust policies by recording and mediating them. Scholar William G.
Staples notes: A citizen’s ability to evade this surveillance is diminishing. To venture into a shopping
mall, bank, subway, sometimes even a bathroom is to perform before an unknown audience. Even if this
kind of surveillance is relatively “seamless” as I have argued, it may function to undermine our
willingness to participate in civic life and to speak our minds as clearly, openly, and imaginatively as we
can. (1997, 133) While we can see the effects of surveillance on our civic life, Staples asserts that the
forces of active resistance, protest, sabotage, noncooperation, and liberty are also present. “If we
accept the premise that much of the exercise of this kind of power takes place in the form of ‘local’
micropractices that are present in our everyday lives, then the sites of opposition are right before us.
They are in our own homes, workplaces, schools, and communities” (ibid., 135). In this chapter I have
sought to identify a host of micropractices present in student’s everyday lives, however overlooked they
may be. The basic premise of “sousveillance” research is “to challenge and problematize both
surveillance and acquiescence to it [and] to resituate these technologies of control on individuals,
offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority” (Mann et al. 2003, 332). One of
the best known examples of “sousveillance” is the videotaping by George Holliday, an average citizen of
Los Angeles, of the Rodney King beating and his turning over of that tape to local media outlets. Studies
that focus on sousveillance point to the common feeling among surveillance scholars that as surveillance
technologies proliferate so too do technologies that can disrupt surveillance techniques and expose
power asymmetries (Monahan 2006; Kemple and Huey 2005).
Sousveillance is key to combat authoritarian organizations and democratizing power
Huey, Walby, and Doyle 6 - Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Western Ontario;
Associate Professor and Chancellor's Research Chair, University of Winnipeg, Department of Criminal
Justice; Associate Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University (Laura,
Kevin, and Aaron, “Cop watching in the downtown eastside”, in T. Monahan (Ed.), “Surveillance and
security: Technological politics and power in everyday life”, 2006) KW
Steve Mann coined the term sousveillance to describe such activities. As Mann (n.d.) explains:
Sousviellance (roughly French for undersight) is the opposite of surveillance (roughly French for
oversight). But by “sousveillance”, I’m not suggesting that the cameras be mounted on the floor looking
up, rather than being on the ceiling looking down like they are no. Rather, I am suggesting that the
cameras be mounted on people in low places, rather than upon buildings and establishments in high
places. Thus the “under” (sight) means from down under in the hierarchy.
Mann further distinguishes between the two forms of sousveillance: in-band, which arises from within
an organization, and out-of-band, which is external to the organization and frequently arises from the
perceived failure of surveillance mechanisms within institutions. It is not coincidental that “citizens
videotaping police brutality and sending copies to news media” is used as an example of the latter form
(Mann n.d.).
Sousveillance is a form of reflectionism, a term referring to the use of technology to mirror and confront
bureaucracies and the authoritative organizations such a police agencies. Relctionism employs the tactic
of appropriating tools of authoritative organiztions and resituating those tools in a disorienting manner
toward undercutting the privilege of the organization, in essence leveling (or attempting to level) the
surveillance hierarchy (Mann, Nollman, and Wellman 2003: 333). Mann and colleagues (2003) write,
“Reflectionism seeks to increase the equality between surveiller and the person being surveilled
(surveillee) including enabling the surveillee to surveil the surveiller.”
Mann’s writings on sousveillance must be situated in the postpanoptic paradigm now coming into effect
within the surveillance literature (cf. Boyne 2000). For decades the panopticon metaphor dominated
scholarly and lay discussions of surveillance. In the inspection house, as Jeremy Bentham originally
called it, jail cells on the six stories would be positioned around a central observation deck within which
guards would be watching (or not) from behind blinded windows. The purpose was to render power
“visible and unverifiable” so that inmates would not know if they were being monitored and would
constantly modify their behavior in accord with institutional standards. Whereas violent forms of social
control were bloody and had uncertain normalization effects on those being punished, the panopticon
made discipline certain without blood (Lyon 1991: 600). The panoptic for Foucault (1977: 201) has the
effect of inducing “in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power” so t make the actual exercise of power unnecessary. The process of watching
takes place within enclosed spaces, where subject populations are forced under the gaze. Foucault’s
appropriation of the panopticon metaphor, however, has not gone uncontested. David Lyon (1991: 608)
critiques Foucault’s usage of the panopticon in several ways. First, Discipline and Punish focuses on
rational means and says little about resistance. Second, Foucault is guilty of “totalizing the partial,”
applying the panoptic metaphor to situations where it does not empirically correspond. Finally, the
observer in the inspection house is always the watcher, never the watched (cf. Goodlad 2003). Many
surveillance theorists have attempted to extend their analyses past the limitations if the panopticon
(Mathiesen 1997; Bauman 1998; Deleue 1992; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Haggerty and Ericson 2000;
Hier 2004; Walby 2005). Mann’s work must be include in this cohort of writers raising questions about
the plethora of their relationships between watchers and watched.
For Mann and other proponents, sousveillance is not simply a phenomenon to be described and
analyzed but rather a process for rendering institutions democratically accountable and thus something
to be promoted within the public sphere. This reading of Mann’s purpose is clear: he sees sousveillance
as a potential antidote not only to the problem of terrorism but moreover to the antidemocratic
underpinnings that he suggests give rise to terrorism and totalitarianism: “Secrecy, not privacy, may be
the true cause of terrorism” (n.d.). In his writings, surveillance (oversight) is depicted as employed
exclusively by powerful institutions. The only effective remedy against the potential for institutions to
abuse secrecy and thus potentially citizens is through sousveillance (undersight). Without effective
undersight, surveillance-based states can become “unstable and tend toward totalitarianism” (Mann
n.d.). Thus countersurveillance through the camera is viewed not only as a good thing but as necessary
for democracy.
Sousveillance solves – authoritarianism
Sousveillance works – confronting surveillance by surveilling the surveillers
Mann et al. 03 - Prof. in Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto (Steve,
“Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance
Environments”, Surveillance and Society, http://www.surveillance-andsociety.org/articles1(3)/sousveillance.pdf)//A-Sharma
Digital technology can build on personal computing to make individuals feel more selfempowered at home, in the community, at school and at
work. Mobile, personal, and wearable computing devices allow people to take the personal computing revolution with them. Sousveilling
individuals now can invert an organization's gaze and watch the watchers by collecting data on them.
The development of wearable computing fits well with contemporary social transformations. While
surveillance is a manifestation of the industrial and post-industrial eras of large hierarchical
organizations that have efficiently employed technologies in neo-panopticons of social control, there is
now a turn from such organizations to “networked societies” (Wellman 1999, 2001; Castells 2000). Rather than
being embedded in single communities or work groups, individuals switch among multiple, partial
communities, and work teams. They move about, both socially and physically. Where centralized mainframe
computers served the needs of large hierarchical organizations, personal computers better fit the needs of people in networked organizations
and communities who move with some autonomy among geographically and socially dispersed work teams, friends and activities. Yet personal
computers are still rooted to desktops at the office and tabletops at home. They are still wired into computer networks. W earable,
wireless computers better fit the needs of people to be physically mobile as they move between
interactions with workmates and community members. As the developed world transforms from small-group to person-toperson interactions, they are a powerful tool for personal empowerment. We describe here an attempt to use
newly invented forms of wearable computing (Mann 1997, Mann 2001a) to empower individuals in at least
some aspects of their encounters with organizations. These inventions call into question Aldous Huxley's assertion that
"technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man" (Huxley 1958:43). We examine how using wearable
computing devices can promote personal empowerment in human technology/human interactions (Mann
1997; Fogg 1997). Two key issues are the extent to which organizational surveillance can be challenged, and the ways in which organizations
respond to such challenges. We describe and analyze here a set of performances that follow Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodolgical approach
to breaching norms (1967).
We gain insight into these norms by: (a) deliberately not acquiescing in
surveillance, and (b) performing visible and explicit sousveillance. By breaking organizational policies,
these performances expose hitherto discreet, implicit, and unquestioned acts of organizational
surveillance. More active forms of sousveillance confront surveillance by using wearable computing
to surveil the surveillers reflectively, bringing into question the very act of surveillance itself. Because of
the mobility of the modern individual, this act is best accomplished by mobile, wearable computers. In the mobile
society of the early twenty-first century, Western societies move among milieus. Their personal environments travel with them
in the unstable environment of ostensibly neutral public spaces such as streets, sidewalks, shopping
malls, etc. (Lefebvre 1991; Wellman 2001). In such milieus, individuals are largely responsible for their own security and integrity. Wearable
computing devices afford possibilities for mobile individuals to take their own sousveillance with them. Given this frequent sociophysical
mobility, it makes
sense to invent forms of wearable computing to situate research devices on the bodies of
the surveilled (customer, taxicab passenger, citizen, etc.). The act of holding a mirror up to society, or the social
environment, allows for a transformation of surveillance techniques into sousveillance techniques in
order to watch the watchers. The goal of the performances reported here is less to understand the
nature of surveillance than to engage in dialogues with front-line officials and customer service
personnel at the point-of-contact in semi-public and commercial locations. With Gary Marx, we are interested in
how “the relationship between the data collector and the subject may condition evaluations, as may the place” (1998: 176). We
attempt,
as a systems analyst might, to engage our points of contact (managers, clerks, security workers, etc.) without claiming to
understand complicated internal hierarchical considerations or politics within large bureaucratic,
sometimes multinational, organizations. Instead, the performers instigate situations in order to: (a) gauge
the degree to which customer service personnel will try to suppress photography in locations where it is
forbidden; (b) (break unstated rules of asymmetric surveillance using new wearable computing
inventions (Mann and Niedzviecki 2001). The collecting of digital images, via photographs or videos, is usually prohibited by store personnel
because of stated policy, explicit norms, or unconscious norms that are only realized when they are breached. The surveilled become
sousveillers who engage social controllers (customs officials, shopkeepers, customer service personnel,
security guards, etc.) by using devices that mirror those used by these social controllers. Uncertainty surrounds
these performances; no one is ever sure of the outcome of the interaction between device, wearer, and participants. Design factors can
influence performances: the wearing of technology can be seen by participants as either empowering or threatening, depending on the type of
technology, location, and how it is presented and represented. For example, people who use familiar mobile devices, such as laptop computers
and personal digital assistants, are perceived as more socially desirable than those with less familiar devices, such as wearable computers and
hands-free mobile phones (Dryer, et al. 1999).
Sousveillance allows constant oversight of state practices Fernback, 13 – PhD in Media Studies and Communication (Jan, “Sousveillance: Communities of
resistance to the surveillance environment”, Telematics and Informatics, February 2013, Volume 30,
Issue 1, pgs. 11-21,http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585312000275#)//gg
Foucault claimed that, ‘‘where there is power, there is resistance,’’ (1978, p. 95). Resistance to
surveillance environments assumes a sinister motivation for watching, or at least a breach of privacy
as typified by panoptic or synoptic monitoring. For Koskela (2004) breaches of individual privacy need
not cause people to feel shame; rather, resistance is empowering, immodest, and subverting of
Foucault’s discipline. Webcams or other types of technologically-enabled exhibitionistic acts can
confront surveillance regimes in a type of ‘‘surveillance turned into spectacle’’ (Koskela, 2004, p. 208).
When embodied as a means of publicizing institutional power structures, the cultural and political
implications of resistance can be seen as empowering for citizens.
While the notion of resistance broadly encompasses multiple dimensions (Sanchez, 2009; Martin et al.,
2009; Marx, 2003), this paper locates resistance primarily within the concept of sousveillance, or
‘‘watching from below,’’ a term popularized by University of Toronto computer engineering professor
Steve Mann (2004). Sousveillance is a form of inverse surveillance in which citizens monitor the
surveillors as a means to challenge the surveillance state. Wearable cameras and wearable computers
allow the wearer to observe, record, and disseminate events. Examples include citizen video posted
online, watchdog web sites or blogs, recording telephone conversations, or the monitoring of
bureaucratic authorities (corporations, military, government). Sousveillance embraces the idea of
transparency as an antidote to concentrated power in the hands of surveillors; it empowers individuals
to be cast as active producers of ‘‘observed’’ discourses, images, and data rather than as mere victims of
panoptic or synoptic surveillance. According to Mann et al. (2003), sousveillance ‘‘focuses on enhancing
the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance’’
(p. 333). The overt visibility of some forms of sousveillance dilute the power and dominance of
surveillance by exposing it, forcing the watchers to confront and possibly question their own
surveillance activities (Mann et al., 2003). Citizens cannot access surveillance videos, yet citizens can
post sousveillance videos. Fundamentally, sousveillance is about exerting control of constant oversight
as a potential force for democratization.
In the interest of imagining an ‘‘informed knowledge society’’ responsive to the ideals of individual
empowerment, social responsibility and equality, social networking communities are forming to
interrogate networked surveillance. As Mann et al. (2003) argue, individuals and small groups are using
sousveillance techniques to empower themselves against large, bureaucratic, and institutionalized forms
of surveillance. Sousveillance is used by Facebook members to expose the data gathered by Facebook to
the larger networked population and sometimes to authorities such as law enforcement. With the
introduction of Facebook’s News Feed feature, deemed ‘‘too stalkeresque’’ by users, a resistance effort
formed in the Facebook group ‘‘Students Against Facebook News Feed,’’ with membership exceeding
700,000 (Cohen, 2008). In another study about sousveillance efforts within this group, Sanchez (2009, p.
287) writes, ‘‘Where Facebook had become authoritarian and hegemonic, the retaliation was
democratic and multilateral.’’ Other groups, such as the Facebook, Respect My Privacy group, the FB:
Privacy and Prevention group or the Facebook smartm0b group are examples of sousveillance
collectives that use the techniques of transparent resistance to expose the surveillance environment
and to openly critique it. Under such a scheme, the Facebook network is able to use the techniques of
synoptic surveillance and sousveillance as a means of resistance against panoptic surveillance. To
examine sousveillance within Facebook as a response to the perceived surveillance environment, this
paper examines writings within several Facebook sousveillance/countersurveillance groups. Major
themes are identified and analyzed using a critical orientation that examines structures of socio-cultural
dominance that have been institutionally legitimized in a Foucauldian sense. The aim of this analysis is
to discover the critical nature of resistance to the surveillance environment through an exploration of
the values, assumptions, and institutional practices that underlie both the mechanisms of surveillance
within Facebook and the discourses of resistance.
Sousveillance is a form of reflectionism that balances the power between the
surveiller and the surveillee – undermines the state’s panoptic power
Hawk et all, 8- Byron Hawk is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina
(Byrn Hawk, David M Rieder, Ollie Oviedo, January 2008, Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools,
ProQuest ebrary)//Yak
Sousveillance: Surveilling the Surveillers
Surveillance is everywhere, but often little observed. Organizations have tried to make technology
mundane and invisible through its disappearance into the fabric of buildings, objects, and bodies. The
creation of pervasive ubiquitous technologies—such as smart floors, toilets, elevators, highway cameras,
and light switches—means that intelligence gathering devices for ubiquitous surveillance are also
becoming invisible (Mann and Niedzviecki; Marx “The Engineering of Social Control”; Lefebvre).For
example, closedcircuit television networks (CCTV) surveill neighborhoods in the name of public safety.
This proliferation of small technologies and data conduits has brought new opportunities for
observation and data collection, making public surveillance of private space increasingly ubiquitous. All
such activity has been surveillance: organizations observing people.
One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and our acquiescence to it is to resituate these
technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in
authority. We call this inverse panopticon “ sousveillance,” from the French words sous (below) and
veiller (to watch).With many people in the developed world carrying camera-equipped mobile phones,
ordinary people now have ample means for portable, low-cost, easy to use sousveillance. Web sites such
as YouTube (www.youtube.com) for videos and Flickr (www.flickr.com) for photographs, make it almost
as easy for people to share sousveillance with others, one-to-one, as it is to broadcast to the public.
Sousveillance can be a form of tactical media activism. As such, it can be seen as a proven mode of
resistance. For example, police agent provocateurs were quickly revealed on YouTube when they
infiltrated a demonstration in Montebello, Quebec against the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the
United States (August 2007).When the head of the Quebec police publicly stated that there was no
police presence, a sousveillance video showed him to be wrong. When he revised his statement to say
that the police provocateurs were peaceful observers, the same video showed them to be masked,
wearing police boots, and holding a rock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow).
There are many similar examples, such as the widely-viewed YouTube showing of UCLA police attacking
a student in the university library (Fall 2006:http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=AyvrqcxNIFs).Other
projects include the “Yes Men”(http://theyes men.org),RTMARC (http://rtmark.com),Next5Minutes.org
(http://www.next5minutes .org);in the Critical Art Ensemble’s court battles; and on various Nettime.org
lists (Lovink and Schneider).
The sousveillance performances presented in this chapter are very much forms of activism. However,
instead of mobile camera phones, the performances use specially created tools of inquiry specific to the
form of intervention anticipated. As part of this tradition of challenging institutional control over public
life, sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism”(Mann,“‘Reflectionism’ and ‘Diffusionism’”), a philosophy
and a procedure of using technology to mirror and confront social ecologies dominated by bureaucratic
organizations by holding up a mirror and asking: “Do you like what you see?” It represents a
methodology for exploring surveillance—in all its forms—and the dynamic relation between technology
and its cultural ecology. Accordingly, reflectionism is a technique for inquiry-in-performance that is
directed toward uncovering the panopticon, undercutting its primacy and privilege, and relocating the
relationship of the surveillance society within a more traditional “commons” notion of observability
(Ostrom).
Reflectionism is especially related to “détournement”: the tactic of appropriating tools of social
controllers and resituating these tools in a disorienting manner (Rogers; Ward). It extends the concept
of détournement by using the tools against the organization, holding a mirror up to the establishment,
and creating a symmetrical self-bureaucratization of the wearer (Mann,“‘Reflectionism’ and
‘Diffusionism’”). In this manner, reflectionism is related to the “Theater of the Absurd”(Bair),and the
Situationist movement in art. Reflectionism becomes sousveillance when it is applied to individuals
wearing digital tools to observe the organizational observer. Sousveillance focuses on enhancing the
ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance,
creating a new ecological balance. As a method to map and protect personal space, it resonates with
Gary Marx’s proposal to resist surveillance through noncompliance and interference “moves” that block,
distort, mask, refuse, and counter-surveil the collection of information (“A Tack in the Shoe”).
Probably the best-known recent example of sousveillance is when Los Angeles resident George Holliday
videotaped police officers beating Rodney King after he had been stopped for a traffic violation. The
ensuing uproar led to the trial of the officers and serious discussion of curtailing police brutality
(Cannon). Taping and broadcasting the police assault on Rodney King was serendipitous and fortuitous
sousveillance. Yet planned acts of sousveillance can occur, although they are rarer than organizational
surveillance. Examples include customers photographing shopkeepers; taxi passengers photographing
cab drivers; citizens photographing police officers who come to their doors; civilians photographing
government officials; and individuals beaming satellite shots of occupying troops onto the Internet. In
many cases, these acts of sousveillance violate prohibitions stating that ordinary people should not use
recording devices to record official acts. For example, many countries, including the United States, have
prohibitions against photographing military bases. More often these prohibitions are unstated. For
example, although many large stores do not want photographs taken on their premises, it is rare to see
a sign prohibiting such photography.
Sousveillance replaces the Panoptic eye with a community based model of
empowerment against authoritarian state tactics
Bollier 08 - Author, journalist and expert on the commons; Amherst College (David, “Using
Sousveillance to Defend the Commons”, News and Perspectives on the commons,
http://bollier.org/blog/using-sousveillance-defend-commons)//A-Sharma
The familiar storyline of science fiction is the evil dystopia – the totalitarian society of the future in which large, faceless
government agencies and corporations use sophisticated technologies to pry into every corner of our
lives. The goal is to neutralize dissent and shield the exercise of power from accountability. However necessary at times, surveillance is a
crude display of power, a unilateral override of the “consent of the governed." Now a countervailing storyline is starting to get
some traction in real life: the increasing citizen use of technology to “watch from below.” The practice
has been called “sousveillance,” a word that comes the French word “sous” (from below) with the word
“viller” (to watch). Instead of Big Brother using a panopticon of surveillance to exercise total, unquestioned control, the commoners are
using cheap, portable technologies to monitor and publicize the behavior of Power. The commons is sprouting its own eyes –
and its own means of self-defense, political organizing and reclamation of democracy. The concept of
sousveillance has been around since at least 1998, when Steve Mann, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering
at the University of Toronto, Canada, coined the term. The term has gained greater currency over the past ten years
as the cell-phone camera, digital tape recorder, handheld video camera and many other mobile devices
have become ubiquitous. The spread of cheap communications technologies is changing the power
equation between the surveillers and ordinary citizens. Sousveillance is commonly directed against
police as a way to document their (anticipated) abuses. The classic example is the amateur video footage of
LA policemen brutalizing Rodney King in 1991. Now that lightweight cameras are everywhere and footage can easily be posted on
YouTube and other websites, sousveillance videos have documented police abuse in Malaysia, gay-bashing in Latvia and union-busting in
Zimbabwe, as has taken note of “FitWatch” – “the tactic of filming the Met Police Forward Intelligence Teams and sharing photos, badge
numbers and names.” In the United States and Canada, there is a network of volunteer organizations called Copwatch that monitor the police
and host a user-generated database of police misbehavior.
Sousveillance is not just about watching the police. The Web
site HollaBackNYC.com invites women to post photos of any man who tries to harass them. In Sierra Leone and
Ghana, people used mobile phones to monitor for irregularities and intimidation during elections in 2007.
Politicians are increasingly monitored by citizen-videos, a practice that allows citizens to bypass the mainstream press and present their own
unvarnished accounts of campaign activities. The most famous example may be the videotape of George Allen, the GOP candidate for Senate in
2004, who had the bad judgment to utter an ethnic slur, maccaca. The sousveillance video arguably tipped the election in favor of Allen’s
opponent, James Webb. The British newspaper, The Guardian, once enlisted its readers to help take photos of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair at
a time when the Labour Party was trying to insulate him from press coverage. The fascinating thing about sousveillance is how people with
power – whether policemen, politicians or corporate officials – get supremely agitated at the idea that anyone would try to photograph, tape or
videotape them. They find sousveillance quite threatening. For good reason: their behaviors can now be held to public account.
The very possibility that official behaviors might be documented and publicized is unsettling to those who have previously enjoyed an
unchallenged right of top-down surveillance against us. A British website, Ideal Government,, recognizes the need for police to protect ordinary
citizens from crime and anti-social behavior, but goes on to say: Wouldn’t
it be better if….the police accepted or were
taught that transparency is mutual; that they should be prepared to accept it if they are conducting
themselves correctly; that the police vs. demonstrators encounter was less us v them against a Kafkaesque legal background that noone understands and more a case of both police and demonstrators conforming to laws that all understand and generally respect. The
equalization of power relationships is not the only good thing to flow from sousveillance. It
also opens up the possibility of a
more community-based management and sanctioning of free-riders, which are familiar aspects of the
classic commons paradigm. (See an excellent paper on sousveillance by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, all professors at
the University of Toronto.) An excellent Wikipedia entry notes that an equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance may have positive
effects. “Equiveillance theory”
argues that sousveillance may reduce or eliminate the need for
surveillance: In this sense it is possible to replace the Panoptic God’s eye view of surveillance with a more
community-building ubiquitous personal experience capture. Crimes, for example, might then be solved
by way of collaboration among the citizenry rather than through the watching over the citizenry from
above. But it is not so black-and-white as this dichotomy. Rather, there is a simple shift in the equiveillant point, as, for example, more
camera phones enter widespread use, we might be able, as a society, to be more self-reliant, on our own communities to keep an electronic
neighborhood watch. This variation of sousveillance (“personal
sousveillance”) has been referred to as “coveillance” by
Mann, Nolan and Wellman.I must admit my discomfort at the possibility that all public acts might be subject to recording, whether
from the top or down, not to mention private acts. This is not necessarily an advance for humanity. Raw evidence is not necessarily reliable
evidence, and one cannot discount the risk of hoaxes. But as
a way to hold Power accountable at a time when Power
has aggressively fortified itself against accountability through new concentrations of wealth, legal
manipulations, advanced technologies and political alliances, sousveillance does serve as a provisional,
imperfect antidote. It is customary for innovations that emerge from the commons to be regarded as aberrant epiphenomena before
they are finally named and publicly recognized by mainstream authorities (the surveillers), at which point the practices are in fact even more
pervasive than suspected. For me, this about sums up the status of sousveillance. It is more widespread than we may imagine. Although I
harbor some misgivings,
it is liberating to realize that the simple act of transparency – a tactic pioneered by the
Freedom of Information Act and open-meetings laws of the 1970s — can be so transformative. Except
that now, we don’t need no stinkin’ lawyers or press agents. Sousveillance is decentralized, self-enacting
and remarkably powerful.
Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism” – using technology to mirror and confront
bureaucratic organizations
Mann et al. 03- Prof. in Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto (Steve,
“Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance
Environments”, Surveillance and Society, http://www.surveillance-andsociety.org/articles1(3)/sousveillance.pdf)//A-Sharma
These disparate observers are reacting to the pervasiveness of surveillance in contemporary western society (Stanley and Steinhardt 2003).
Such surveillance is everywhere
but often little observed. Organizations have tried to make technology
mundane and invisible through its disappearance into the fabric of buildings, objects and bodies. The
creation of pervasive ubiquitous technologies—such as smart floors, toilets, elevators, and light
switches—means that intelligence gathering devices for ubiquitous surveillance are also becoming
invisible (Mann and Niedzviecki 2001; Marx 1995; Lefebvre 1991). This re-placement of technologies and data conduits
has brought new opportunities for observation, data collection, and sur/sousveillance, making public surveillance
of private space increasingly ubiquitous. All such activity has been surveillance: organizations observing people.
One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these
technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in
authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and
“veiller” to watch. Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism,” a term invented by Mann (1998) for a
philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations.
Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: “Do you like what you see?” If you do not, then
you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered.
Thus, reflectionism is a technique for inquiry-in-performance that is directed: a) toward uncovering the
panopticon and undercutting its primacy and privilege; b) relocating the relationship of the surveillance
society within a more traditional commons notion of observability. Reflectionism is especially related to
"detournement": the tactic of appropriating tools of social controllers and resituating these tools in a
disorienting manner (Rogers 1994). It extends the concept of detournement by using the tools against the organization, holding a mirror
up to the establishment, and creating a symmetrical self-bureaucratization of the wearer (Mann 1998). In this manner,
reflectionism is related to the Theater of the Absurd (Bair 1978), and the Situationist movement in art. Reflectionism becomes sousveillance
when it is applied to individuals using tools to observe the organizational observer. Sousveillance
focuses on enhancing the ability
of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance. As a form of
personal space protection, it resonates with Gary Marx’s (2003) proposal to resist surveillance through noncompliance and interference ‘moves’ that block, distort, mask, refuse, and counter-surveil the collection
of information. Reflectionism differs from those solutions that seek to regulate surveillance in order to protect privacy (Rhodes, et al.
1999). Reflectionism contends that such regulation is as much pacifier as solution because in a regulatory
regime, surveillance information is largely exchanged and controlled by external agents over which
individuals have little power. For example, a recent regulatory proposal from the American Civil Liberties Association suggests:
surveillance cameras … must be subject to force-of-law rules covering important details like when they will be used, how long images will be
stored, and when and with whom they will be shared” (Stanley and Steinhardt 2003: 2). By contrast, reflectionism
seeks to increase
the equality between surveiller and the person being surveilled (surveillee), including enabling the
surveillee to surveil the surveiller. Probably the best-known recent example of sousveillance is when Los
Angeles resident George Holliday videotaped police officers beating Rodney King after he had been
stopped for a traffic violation. The ensuing uproar led to the trial of the officers (although not their conviction) and serious
discussion of curtailing police brutality (Cannon 1999). Taping and broadcasting the police assault on Rodney King was
serendipitous and fortuitous sousveillance. Yet planned acts of sousveillance can occur, although they are
rarer than organizational surveillance. Examples include: customers photographing shopkeepers; taxi
passengers photographing cab drivers; citizens photographing police officers who come to their doors;
civilians photographing government officials; residents beaming satellite shots of occupying troops onto
the Internet. In many cases, these acts of sousveillance violate stated or prohibitions stating that ordinary people should not use recording
devices to record official acts. At times, these prohibitions are stated. For example, many countries prohibit photographing military bases. More
often, these prohibitions are unstated. For example, although many large stores do not want photographs taken on their premises, we have
never seen a sign prohibiting such photography.
Affirmative
Framework
Framework – internet surveillance debates good
Internet surveillance research is vital to the future of communication, war, peace,
wealth, and poverty
Lyon, 15 - director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Surveillance Research Chair, Professor Sociology
and Law at Queen’s University (David, The Snowden Stakes: Challenges for Understanding Surveillance
Today. Surveillance & Society 13(2): 139-152. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
Any field of study, including that of surveillance, is obliged to review from time-to-time the main
forcefields that shape the object of analysis. Today the internet is bound up with surveillance at many
levels and thus deserves special attention. This section argues that the research direction for
Surveillance Studies should be strongly inflected by issues of information and the internet. The kinds of
surveillance that have developed over several decades are heavily dependent on the digital—and,
increasingly, on what is now labelled Big Data—but also extend beyond it. As Greenwald indicates, the
Snowden revelations raise as a key issue the future of the internet. While it is true that modern societies
have been ‘information societies’—and thus ‘surveillance societies’—from their inception (Lyon 2005),
today information and its central conduits have become an unprecedented arena of political struggle,
centred on surveillance. This suggests that both analytically, in terms of research directions, and
politically, in terms of practice and policy, the internet and surveillance are bound in a mutuallyinforming relation.
The use of internet for surveillance is not new but its scope has never been greater. For many, such as
Greenwald and Snowden himself, this is a great betrayal of the initial wave of optimism about its
democratic potential with which the internet was born. The hoped-for human benefit pre-dated the
commercialization of the internet but versions of it were also woven-into many corporate aspirations in
Silicon Valley and elsewhere from the 1990s onwards. Some popular and prescient writers such as Ithiel
de Sola Pool (1983) foresaw the development of what we now call the internet, arguing that it was a key
carrier of technological freedom. He insisted that free speech would become a vital issue. How
regulation and access were organized would determine whether or not the new communications would
enhance democracy as the political platform and the printing press had done before.
What happened to those utopian dreams of the ‘information revolution’ pundits of the 1980s? After all,
they had correctly noted the emancipatory and democratizing possibilities offered by the new
technologies. But Ithiel de Sola Pool and others of his ilk perhaps paid insufficient attention to the
already-existing political economy informing information technologies—not to mention the over-arching
cultural belief in the power of Technology. Together, they led to a failure to note that the new
technologies might be deemed efficacious despite evidence to the contrary, and to see the flaws in the
analysis that sees knowledge as a new and independent factor of production. Following Karl Polanyi
(1944, 2001), one might think of informational knowledge as in fact a ‘fictitious commodity’ that has
been cut off from its social origins in creative labour as an ‘independent’ form in expert systems or
virtual services (Hayles 1999), integrated into an economic system of general commodification where
profit is the bottom line, and is allocated through the market, where reciprocity or social justice have
little or no say (Jessop 2007; also Schiller 1988). The commodification of the internet in 1995 was a
critical moment in the more general development of information as a fictitious commodity.
However, De Sola Pool’s thirty-year-old comments on freedom of speech came home dramatically as
documents were released by Snowden. By this time matters had become polarized. Right on the heels of
the news about the NSA’s access to Verizon telephone subscriber data came the disclosures about the
PRISM program that directly implicated major internet companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google
and Facebook. Urgent exchanges occurred, some of which involved some puzzlement on the part of the
companies: yes, they had parted with some data but the revelations seemed to suggest that far greater
quantities were involved than they had themselves authorized. As it transpired, beyond the
FISAauthorized access to data held by internet companies, the NSA had also found ways to intercept
upstream in the data flow, using systems such as Muscular, developed by the NSA along with Five Eyes
partner the UK GCHQ (Gellman and Soltani 2013).
As Steven Levy noted in a Wired article (Levy 2014), the Snowden ‘revelations’ exposed a “…seemingly
irresolvable conflict. While Silicon Valley must be transparent in many regards, spy agencies operate
under a cloak of obfuscation.”
Snowden’s findings shone a spotlight on an issue of which internet companies had been all too aware
for some years. Companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Twitter had struggled to hold off government
attempts, through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, to oblige them to hand over
customer data. To their credit, the companies seemed to have tried to ward off such efforts9 but the
combination of government power and the fact that the companies also have government contracts
compromised the struggle somewhat. PRISM focused the fight, but the secrecy surrounding the NSA has
made it very difficult to know exactly what is happening. They are fighting in a fog. This also presents
problems for those trying to research corporate-government surveillance relations.
The details of the ongoing controversies and battles may be found on various sites10 but the theme that
unites them is surveillance and the future of the internet. This has several implications for analysis and
action.
One important outcome is that those studying surveillance have come to realize that those researching
communications have much to offer. From Oscar Gandy’s or Joseph Turow’s pioneering work in
consumer surveillance to Mark Andrejevic’s or Alice Marwick’s explorations of online surveillance
(Gandy 1993, 2012; Turow 2012; Andrejevic 2007, 2013; Marwick 2013), not to mention ongoing work
on communications surveillance itself, the connections are clear. Those whose surveillance background
is in criminology or public policy in particular may need to strengthen their analyses by examining more
closely how the internet intersects with their understanding of surveillance. Equally, those grappling
with questions about internet surveillance would do well to look at the literatures of surveillance—and
of privacy—more broadly conceived (e.g. Raab and Goold 2011).
A second area is to explore further the analytical possibilities for considering information as a fictitious
commodity. One could argue, for example, with the strong push towards so-called Big Data, that the
severing of connections between information and its social roots is now even more pronounced. In N.
Katherine Hayles’ analysis, information “loses its body” dating from the time of the 1950s Macey
Conferences on communication theory onward. But I would argue that now so-called personal data
progressively loses its ‘person’ (Lyon 2014a). When data gathered for commercial (marketing)
purposes—which already stretch the links between data and individuals—are then resignified for
security goals, quite new social and legal problems appear (Amoore 2014). All too often, inappropriate
talk of ‘raw data’ gives the impression that they are harmless technical means of connecting the dots
through algorithms. The practices and politics of algorithms are profound but scarcely explored (but see
e.g. Kitchin 2014; Morozov 2013).
A third area of concern has to do with the politics of the internet in the era of ‘mass’ surveillance. In an
obvious sense, this has been a key aspect of the Snowden controversies from the outset. Governments,
including the US Administration, have been obliged to respond to the continuing debates over state
power and its entwinement with commercial networks, especially internet companies (see e.g. Clarke
et al. 2014). But the politics of internet surveillance is also a strong current running through the internet
companies themselves—they have had to distance themselves from the NSA while at the same time
acknowledging that they do cooperate extensively with government. Alongside these areas of
turbulence is the active resistance of numerous NGOs who are engaged with both the civil liberties and
privacy dimensions of mass surveillance and, again, the future of the internet itself. The new coalitions
that have formed since Snowden, between EPIC, EFF and ACLU in the US, for instance, or under the
banner of OpenMedia in Canada, are making waves in fresh ways and building creatively towards
consensus on each new Snowden revelation. Could this be the more concerted response to surveillance
that Colin Bennett concluded was still lacking when he published his 2008 book, The Privacy Advocates?
The future of the internet still hangs in the balance as the revelations about mass surveillance continue.
As Ron Deibert indicates in Black Code (2013), broad issues of enclosure, secrecy and the arms race are
all implicated here. And as Jonathan Zittrain (2009) reminds us, from a different standpoint, the internet
has never had a golden age. The problems as well as the potential were built-in from the outset. Analysis
of the spread of surveillance has never been more significant , from the threats to individual people to
the consequences for war and peace, wealth and poverty, on a global level.
Framework – surveillance debates good
Debates with clash about surveillance are good—evaluating the range of opinions in
surveillance literature inform us of our civil liberties as citizens
Lyon et al 12. (David, director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Surveillance Research Chair, Professor Sociology and
Law at Queen’s University. Kevin Haggerty, PhD, prof of Sociology at Alberta University specializing in surveillance studies.
Kirstie Ball, PhD, professor of Organization concentrating in surveillance studies research at the Open University. Routledge
Handbook of Surveillance Studies. Google Books. 2012.)//CB
Given that many surveillance studies scholars are alarmed by some of the more disquieting instances of
surveillance, a major question concerns how citizens should respond to these developments, either
individually or collectively. In surveillance studies this issue of praxis often revolves around debates
about the continued relevance of official privacy regimes or data protection provisions . Although
there is a wide spectrum of opinions on this topic, one can crudely break these down into those who
have some faith in the existing privacy structures versus those who are suspicious or critical.
In legal terms, privacy—along with that of “data protection” in Europe especially—often seems the
obvious category to wield in wars against rampant data-gathering (Reagan 1995; Bennett 1992).
Advocates for a privacy approach tend to acknowledge that these regimes are limited by virtue of
underfunding, scant powers of investigation and enforcement, broad exemption and outdated
assumptions about the nature of privacy. At the same time, they stress that privacy discourses and
structures remain the most promising avenue for restricting surveillance and point to instances where
such measures have helped thwart egregious privacy violations (Bennett 2011, 2008).
At the other end of the continuum are those who tend to accentuate the limitations of privacy as both a
concept and a regime. For them, proof of the failure of privacy structures is glaringly apparent in how a
surveillance society has sprung up around us, notwithstanding a large and vibrant privacy bureaucracy.
In essence, the unrelenting growth of intensive surveillance measures is presented as conclusive
evidence that the privacy infrastructure has proven itself to be incapable of thwarting the expansion of
surveillance. Scholars in this tradition tend to focus their research more on the mundane daily practices
that individuals use to try and secure a private realm, such as closing blinds, shredding documents,
purchasing anti-surveillance devices, or learning how to “hide in the light” (Gilliom 2001; Nippert-Eng
2010; Whitson and Haggerty 2008; Marx 2003).
Any resistance to surveillance ultimately depends upon an informed, motivated and engaged
citizenry. This points to the fact that perhaps one of the greatest surprises in the field of surveillance
studies has been the comparatively muted public response to developments in surveillance that seem to
be self-evident threats to personal liberties. One wants to be careful here not to discount the vital
efforts by anti-surveillance activists and concerned citizens, and some of the important anti-surveillance
victories that they have won. At the same time, it is clear that by and large the public has
enthusiastically or resignedly accepted such technologies, accepting claims that they are viable ways to
secure profit, increase security, or simply as fun devices to play with (Ellerbrok, forthcoming). This
muted public response, combined with a new willingness by individuals to hand over information on
assorted social media applications, has challenged many assumptions that scholars have about citizen
engagement and the politics of influence.
Public discussion on surveillance a pre-requisite to governmental transparency—spills
up to policy solutions.
Kean and Hamilton 13. (Thomas, former Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States. Lee, member of the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council. “It's time to debate NSA program,” Politico. 7/23/13.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/its-time-to-debate-nsa-programs-94634.html)//CB
Every day, it seems, brings disturbing new revelations about the National Security Agency’s program to
collect phone and email metadata, raising serious questions for our country. Reports indicate that the
NSA is gathering metadata on millions of people in the United States and around the world, targeting
diplomatic missions of both friends and foes.
The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent
made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading
statements from senior administration officials.
When the Congress and the courts work in secret; when massive amounts of data are collected from
Americans and enterprises; when government’s power of intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens,
augmented by the awesome power of advanced technologies, is hugely expanded without public debate
or discussion over seven years, then our sense of constitutional process and accountability is deeply
offended.
Officials insist that the right balance has been struck between security and privacy. But how would we
know, when all the decisions have been made in secret, with almost no oversight?
Much of this surveillance activity raises sharp questions: Is it necessary to collect and preserve this vast
amount of data rather than pursue targeted individuals? Is the government using the least intrusive
means to protect us? What are the rules for using metadata collected ostensibly for counterterrorism
purposes in other contexts? Could more information about the program’s reach have been made
available earlier? These and other vital questions must be debated in the open.
A fundamental duty of our government is to keep the country safe. Spying and surveillance are
instruments of national power that have an important place in U.S. national security, as the threat of
terrorism is real and lethal. It is not the surveillance program per se that is concerning; we agree that
authorized and monitored surveillance is necessary. It is the sheer magnitude of the program and the
lack of debate that worry us.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, security officials were galvanized by the fear of
another mass casualty attack. The pendulum swung in the direction of security over privacy, giving rise
to the NSA surveillance program. The terror threat has evolved over the years. We need to examine
these programs and determine whether their scope is necessary today.
When the government is exercising powers that may impinge on our rights, even when justified as
measures essential for national security, we must be alert. Government, once granted authority, rarely
relinquishes it and often expands it. Even if its actions are well intentioned, we must consider the
precedent of expansive government power to be used 10, 20 or 50 years hence, when the justification
may be less compelling than safeguarding lives.
The administration says the program is tightly controlled, but unilateral executive branch action and
assurances are not sufficient; we need constitutional checks and balances. The extremely low rate of
denial of warrant requests and the fact that in the hearings only the government’s side is presented are
troubling. The public would benefit from a better, more detailed understanding of the judiciary process.
The Congress, the courts and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which the 9/11 Commission
recommended, each have critically important roles to play. This board is essential to balancing the
impact of the government’s security measures in the aftermath of Sept. 11 with our civil liberties. It has
taken a decade to get the board up and running. Now that the Senate has confirmed a chairman, it is
time for the board to get to work in a transparent manner on this surveillance program.
We are stronger as a nation when we understand what the government is doing. This does not mean
sharing sensitive intelligence with the public. A public debate poses challenges when it involves
classified information that dribbles out, obfuscated by misinformation. But there is certainly far more
we can discuss openly.
President Barack Obama has rightly called for a national discussion, which his administration and
Congress should convene. It is unfortunate that this conversation begins only when an unauthorized
leaker divulges secrets he has agreed, under penalty of law, to keep. But the issues are now before the
public. It is time to trust the American people’s judgment about where to strike the balance between
what is, after all, their security and their freedom.
There’s a lack of awareness and journalism on surveillance policy in the status quo—
debate is a key forum for topic education.
Naughton 13. (John, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. “Edward Snowden:
public indifference is the real enemy in the NSA affair,” The Guardian. 10/19/2013.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/public-indifference-nsa-snowden-affair)//CB
One of the most disturbing aspects of the public response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the
scale of governmental surveillance is how little public disquiet there appears to be about it. A recent
YouGov poll, for example, asked respondents whether the British security services have too many or too
few powers to carry out surveillance on ordinary people. Forty-two per cent said that they thought the
balance was "about right" and a further 22% thought that the security services did not have enough
powers. In another question, respondents were asked whether they thought Snowden's revelations
were a good or a bad thing; 43% thought they were bad and only 35% thought they were good.
Writing in these pages a few weeks ago, Henry Porter expressed his own frustration at this public
complacency. "Today, apparently," he wrote, "we are at ease with a system of near total intrusion that
would have horrified every adult Briton 25 years ago. Back then, western spies acknowledged the
importance of freedom by honouring the survivors of those networks; now, they spy on their own
people. We have changed, that is obvious, and, to be honest, I wonder whether I, and others who care
about privacy and freedom, have been left behind by societies that accept surveillance as a part of the
sophisticated world we live in."
I share Henry's bafflement. At one point I thought that the level of public complacency about the
revelations was a reflection simply of ignorance. After all, most people who use the internet and mobile
phones have no idea about how any of this stuff works and so may be naive about the implications of
state agencies being able to scoop up everybody's email metadata, call logs, click streams, friendship
networks and so on.
But what is, in a way, more alarming is how relaxed many of my professional peers seem to be about it.
Many of them are people who do understand how the stuff works. To them, Snowden's revelations
probably just confirm what they had kind of suspected all along. And yet the discovery that in less than
three decades our societies have achieved Orwellian levels of surveillance provokes, at most, a wry smile
or a resigned shrug. And it is this level of passive acceptance that I find really scary.
What's even more alarming is that the one group of professionals who really ought to be alert to the
danger are journalists. After all, these are the people who define news as "something that someone
powerful does not want published", who pride themselves on "holding government to account" or
sometimes, when they've had a few drinks, on "speaking truth to power". And yet, in their reactions to
the rolling scoops published by the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Der Spiegel,
many of them seem to have succumbed either to a weird kind of spiteful envy, or to a desire to act as
the unpaid stenographers to the security services and their political masters.
Framework – internet surveillance debate good
Debate is key to generate policy solutions and assert our agency in the face of
imminent big data domination.
Tufekci 2014. – fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University
(Zeynep, “Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics.” First Monday 19 (7).
Accessed 22nd June 2015. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097)//RZ
On the surface, this century has ushered in new digital technologies that brought about new
opportunities for participation and collective action by citizens. Social movements around the world,
ranging from the Arab uprisings to the Occupy movement in the United States (Gitlin, 2012), have made
use of these new technologies to organize dissent against existing local, national and global power [11].
Such effects are real and surely they are part of the story of the rise of the Internet. However, history of
most technologies shows that those with power find ways to harness the power of new technologies
and turn it into a means to further their own power (Spar, 2001). From the telegraph to the radio, the
initial period of disruption was followed by a period of consolidation in which challengers were
incorporated into transformed power structures, and disruption gave rise to entrenchment. There are
reasons to think that the Internet’s trajectory may have some differences though there is little reason
to think that it will escape all historical norms. The dynamics outlined in this paper for computational
politics require access to expensive proprietary databases, often controlled by private platforms, and
the equipment and expertise required to effectively use this data. At a minimum, this environment
favors incumbents who already have troves of data, and favors entrenched and moneyed candidates
within parties, as well as the data–rich among existing parties. The trends are clear. The selling of
politicians — as if they were “products” — will become more expansive and improved, if more
expensive. In this light, it is not a complete coincidence that the “chief data scientist” for the Obama
2012 campaign was previously employed by a supermarket to “maximize the efficiency of sales
promotions.” And while the data advantage is held, for the moment, by the Democratic party in the
United States, it will likely available to the highest bidder in future campaigns. A recent peek into
public’s unease with algorithmic manipulation was afforded by the massive negative reaction to a study
conducted by Facebook and Cornell which experimentally manipulated the emotional tenor of the
hundreds of thousands of people’s newsfeed in an effort to see if emotional contagion could occur
online (Kramer, et al., 2014). The authors stated their results “indicate that emotions expressed by
others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive–scale
contagion via social networks.” While both the level of stimulus and the corresponding effect size were
on the small side, the broad and negative reaction suggests that algorithmic manipulation generates
discomfort exactly because it is opaque, powerful and possibly non–consensual (study authors pointed
to the Facebook’s terms–of–service as indication of consent) in an environment of information
asymmetry. The methods of computational politics will, and already are, also used in other spheres such
as marketing, corporate campaigns, lobbying and more. The six dynamics outlined in this paper —
availability of big data, shift to individual targeting, the potential and opacity of modeling, the rise of
behavioral science in the service of persuasion, dynamic experimentation, and the growth of new power
brokers on the Internet who control the data and algorithms — will affect many aspects of life in this
century . More direct research, as well as critical and conceptual analysis, is crucial to increase both
our understanding and awareness of this information environment, as well as to consider policy
implications and responses . Similar to campaign finance laws, it may be that data use in elections
needs regulatory oversight thanks to its effects on campaigning, governance and privacy. Starting an
empirically informed, critical discussion of data politics now may be the first important step in
asserting our agency with respect to big data that is generated by us and about us, but is increasingly
being used at us.
Cede the political
2ac – cede the political
The alt fails without pragmatic re-imagination. It’s too depoliticized and cedes power
to the conservative right. Instead, we should use the master’s tools to break down the
master’s house.
Kreiss and Tufekci 13 - Professor in the School of Media and Journalism and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the
Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina AND Assistant Professor University of North Carolina
(Daniel and Zeynep, “Occupying the Political: Occupy Wall Street, Collective Action, and the Rediscovery of Pragmatic Politics”,
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologie, 2013, Sage publications)
It is the turn from pragmatic politics and institutional engagement that distinguished Occupy from the
Tea Party, the most recent manifestation of a five decade old populist conservative movement. Similar
to other manifestations of conservative mobilization (McGirr, 2001; Teles, 2008) the Tea Party adopted a
dual orientation toward both symbolic and institutional power . The most recent example is the Tea
Party’s populist mobilization around the 2010 midterm elections, which reshaped the internal workings
of the Republican Party and redoubled its institutional ability to block much of the president’s agenda—
including what now passes as progressive reform. In conjunction with party elites and conservative
media outlets, in 2010 the Tea Party movement drove turnout in the Republican primaries and the
midterm elections (Williamson, Skocpol, & Coggin, 2011). After the elections, the Tea Party and its
legislative allies created a 62-member caucus in the House and enlisted four members of the Senate to
create a voting block that repeatedly eschewed legislative compromise. Even more, Tea Party activists
not only drove turnout in the midterm elections, the presence of activists in districts helped hold
members to account for the movement’s policy goals (Bailey, Mummolo, & Noel, 2011). In the process,
the Tea Party caucus wielded all of the institutional tools at its disposal for the purposes of thwarting
the president’s, and often the Republican House leadership’s, agenda. In this, the Tea Party resembles
other movements that have taken advantage of political opportunities to open the space for new
configurations of institutional politics (Amenta, 2008; McAdam & Tarrow, 2010). The contemporary
conservative movement is, in large part, a story of the successful navigation of the twin faces of
redemptive and pragmatic politics. Activists who participated in the redemptive mobilization around
Barry Goldwater’s candidacy worked to reshape the Republican Party in the years after his defeat
(Perlstein, 2001). All of which enabled movement conservatives to seize the political opportunity that
Reagan’s candidacy offered. If Goldwater began to unravel the American consensus ideologically, it was
Reagan who drew on the movement to wield the levers of institutional power that had effects that ran
much deeper than cultural stylings. Reagan dismantled unions, cut taxes on the wealthy, and gutted
social service programs. It was Reagan’s electoral victory that forged a radical reimagining of the
American state and its obligations to its citizens, and created the institutional forms to hold it in place,
from regulatory changes to the reshaping of the judiciary. Conclusion The Occupy movement may now
be melting into a sedimentary network (Chadwick, 2007) of activists that will hang together through
new media technologies and reconstitute itself around symbolic events in the coming years ― as it did
in protest events at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. This symbolic power will
likely prove fleeting given the deinstitutionalized nature of redemptive politics. Deinstitutionalization
can certainly be a strength in some contexts, such as the overthrowing of a dictator or the rapid creation
and publicizing of a national political movement. But, in the routine workings of pragmatic politics, these
organizational qualities are a distinct disadvantage, as secular liberals discovered in their recent defeat
in the Egyptian elections. After the initial flare of the movement’s mediated publicity, the political
context in the United States has changed to one that requires political organization able to engage and
challenge institutional politics to advance an agenda forward. If Occupy is deeply divided about its
engagement with pragmatic, institutional politics and fails to build meaningful ties to unions and civil
society and advocacy organizations during the president’s second term it will be a wasted opportunity.
Occupy’s redemptive energy, for instance, would be well directed towards the organization of a
progressive, “Occupy Congress” voting block inside Congress that can hold Democrats to account for its
aims. In effect, this strategy would call for using the master’s pragmatic tools to occupy the master’s
institutional house . This strategy does not exclude the potential for transforming these institutional
tools through a focus on process—neither does it disallow the regenerative politics which broader
room for self-expression can facilitate. It does, however, call for rethinking the balance between process
and durable goals, and between personal and institutional transformation—which in turn can transform
the conditions through which individuals ultimately flourish. Nor is this a call for abandoning redemptive
politics which can again be mobilized when the institutional levers of power become, as they will
inevitably, calcified.
1ar – cede the political
Their alternative is emblematic of the utter failure of the radical left to do anything
meaningful – vote aff to recapture the political
Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’
network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
(Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State”
Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
1. In the early days of the crisis there was widespread anticipation of change. From the collapse of large
banks and public anger at acquisitive capitalists, to the collapse in faith in neoliberal 2 ideologues and
political elites, this was a watershed moment for the radical Left. However, given its failure to provide a
coherent response to the crisis, many radicals have begun to explore what it means to be of the ‘radical
Left’ today (Chandler, 2009a; Smith, 2008; Cox, 2009; Harvey, 2009; Castree, 2009; contributors to Pugh,
2009). Importantly, we are still therefore at a time of opportunity for the Left.
2. The crisis has highlighted the salience of the state, representational and party politics. It has done so
because while of course the ‘masses’ have not emerged as a political force, making strong demands of
the state, the state nevertheless became, by default, the main institution that the general population
left to resolve the crisis.
3. Seizing this opportunity, governments (in Britain, the USA, and across much of the West) have used
trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to continue to intervene in the interests of capital and the neoliberal model. Across Europe, as elsewhere, the Right and neo-liberals get this point, using the economic
power of government in recent months to support their causes.
4. Some (clearly not all) on the radical Left have therefore misread the public mood when it comes to
the role of the nation state. Despite predictions and aspirations from those civil society organisations
that want to withdraw and deterritorialise from the state, most other people, if reluctantly, have moved
in the opposite direction.
5. Some radicals had reduced radical politics to living more ethical lifestyles. Their aim is to produce
ethical individuals, to raise awareness, not a collective and instrumental political project for the state.
This is not providing an effective challenge to the Right and neo-liberals, who as just noted post-crisis
are capturing the powerful institutions of politics .
6. Articulate and intelligent, the ‘philosophical militant’ has done much to shift and change our
understanding of the world in recent decades. However, the crisis shows that there is a difference
between doing philosophy and doing politics. Philosophy does not provide the detailed, tangible,
instrumental mechanisms needed today. Some radicals have therefore attached too much importance
to their philosophical interventions and critique, making them political acts, in and of themselves.
I do not claim to be able to make intricate connections between these various points in this brief, largely
rhetorical paper. They are simply a list to provide food for thought to those engaged with that disparate
label that we call ‘the radical Left’. And for those who have perhaps, like me, been shocked at our
impotence.
Most People Looked to the State, Not Away From It
As noted, my first point is directed toward those who seek to avoid the salience of the state,
representational, and party politics post-crisis. Before the crisis Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000)
produced what was widely heralded at radical conferences as the Communist Manifesto for the twentyfirst century. Sadly for many, the crisis proved it to be incorrect. For while Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 48)
were seeking ‘lines of flight’ from territorial government, through the deterritorialised multitude, post
crisis most people have, by default, allowed a strong state to address the specificities of the crisis like
trade and financial regulation, credit rating, fiscal stimuli, forms of nationalisation, closing down tax
havens, and penalising acquisitive capitalists, as just some of many examples. The multitude is not
therefore a significant brake on state power. Far from it. It would seem that state power has increased,
to intervene in the fine details of unregulated capitalism. In 2009, the organisers of the World Social
Forum, one leading civil society organisation, were forced to admit that civil society organisations are
‘not yet strong enough to overcome the problems caused by capitalism’ (Osava, 2009).
AT: individual action good
A retreat to individual ethical acts ends political change – the neg’s alt and framework
arguments affirm status quo injustice
Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’
network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
(Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State”
Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
In this polemical piece I have just been talking about how, following an ethos of radicalism as
withdrawal from the state, some from the radical Left were incapable of being able to respond to the
new stakes of radical politics. In particular, they were not found at the state, where the passive public
turned to resolve the crisis. I will now go on to examine how in recent years significant parts of the
radical Left have also tended to prioritise raising awareness of our ethical responsibilities, over capturing
state power. I am going to say that it is important to create this awareness. However, in an effort to
draw attention to the stakes of politics as we find them now, post-2008, I will also point out that we
should not place too much faith in this approach alone.
Against the backdrop of what I have just been saying, it is important to remember that while much
attention is focused upon President Obama, in many other parts of the world the Right and
fundamentalism are gaining strength through capturing state power. The perception that the USA has
changed is accompanied by a sense of relief among many radicals. However, the European Elections of
2009, the largest trans-national vote in history, heralded a continent-wide shift to the Right (and far
Right) in many places—in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portgual, Slovenia, Spain,
Romania, as just some examples (Wall Street Journal, 2009). Despite Obama’s election and a near
depression, neo-liberalism continues to be implemented through a world spanning apparatus of
governmental and intergovernmental organisations, think tanks and trans-national corporations
(Massey, 2009; Castree, 2009). The power of the Right in countries like Iran, while checked, remains
unchallenged by the Left. Albertazzi et al. (2009) draw attention to how a disconnected Left is leaving
power in the hands of the Right in many other countries nationally, like Italy for example. Reflecting
upon contemporary radical politics, the British Labour politician Clare Short (2009, p. 67) concludes:
In the fog of the future, I see a rise of fascistic movements . . . I am afraid it will all get nastier before we
see a rise in generous, radical politics, but I suspect that history is about to speed up in front of our eyes
and all who oppose the radicalisation of fear, ethnic hatred, racialism and division have to be ready to
create a new movement that contains the solutions to the monumental historical problems we currently
face.
So, the stakes of politics are clear. The Right is on the rise. Neo-liberal ideology is still dominant. How is
the Left responding to these stakes? I have already discussed how some from the radical Left are placing
too much faith in civil society organisations that seek to withdraw from the state. I will now turn to how
others have too much faith in the power of raising awareness of our ethical responsibilities.
Post-crisis, the increasing popularity of David Chandler’s (2004, 2007, 2009a, 2009b) work reflects the
sense that radicals too often celebrate the ethical individual as a radical force, at the expense of wider
representational programmes for change. His central argument is that this leaves radicals impotent.
Chandler (2009a, p. 78–79) says that many radicals
argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the
2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty
History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I
disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualised and personal ones— there is no attempt
to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and
bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of awareness, rather than attempts
to engage politically with society.
In one way, Chandler’s reflective insight here is not particularly unique. Many others also seem to think
that radicals today are too isolated and disengaged (Martin, 2009).5 Neither is it particularly original to
say that there is too much emphasis upon creativity and spontaneity (what Richard Sennett, 2004, calls
‘social jazz’), and not enough upon representational politics. Indeed, go to many radical blogs and you
find radicals themselves constantly complaining about how it has become too easy to sign up to ethical
web petitions, email complaints, join a variety of ethical causes, without actually developing the political
programmes themselves that matter. So it is not Chandler’s point about radicals being disengaged from
instrumental politics that concerns me here. It is his related point—that there has been a flight into
ethics, away from political accountability and responsibility that I find intriguing. Personal statements of
ethical awareness have become particularly important within radical politics today. It is therefore
interesting to note, as I will now discuss, that we have been here before.
In his earlier writings Karl Marx (1982) criticised the German Idealists for retreating into ethics, instead
of seizing the institutions of power that mattered for themselves. Unwilling to express their selfinterests politically through capturing power, the Idealists would rather make statements about their
ethical awareness. Such idealism, along with an unwillingness to be held accountable for political power,
often goes hand in hand. For Marx, it is necessary to feel the weight, but also the responsibility of
power.
Chandler argues that, just as when the early Marx critiqued German Idealism, we should now be
drawing attention to the pitfalls of the flights to ethics today. He says:
In the case of the German bourgeoisie, Marx concludes that it is their weakness and fragmentation,
squeezed between the remnants of the ancien re´gime and the developing industrial proletariat, which
explains their ideological flight into values. Rather than take on political responsibility for overthrowing
the old order, the German bourgeoisie denied their specific interests and idealised progress in the
otherworldly terms of abstract philosophy, recoiling from the consequences of their liberal aspirations in
practice. (Chandler, 2007, p. 717)
Today we are witnessing a renewed interest in ethics (Laı¨di, 1998; Badiou, 2002). Fragmented, many
radicals retreat into abstract ethical slogans like ‘another world is possible’, ‘global human rights’, or
‘making poverty history’. As discussed above, we are also of course seeing the return of Kant’s
cosmopolitanism. While I think we should not attack the ethical turn for its values, as many of these
around environmental issues and human rights are admirable, it is equally important to say that the turn
to ethics seems to reflect a certain lack of willingness to seize power and be held accountable to it. For
the flight to ethics, as it often plays out in radical politics today, seems to be accompanied by scepticism
toward representational politics.
Continuing with this theme for a moment, Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek (2008) also sheds some more light upon why
ethics (when compared to representational politics) has become so important to the Left in recent
years. He says that many of us (he is of course writing for the Left) feel that we are unable to make a real
difference through representational politics on a larger scale, when it comes to the big political
problems of life. Z ˇ izˇek (2008, p. 453) talks of this feeling that ‘we cannot ever predict the
consequences of our acts’; that nothing we do will ‘guarantee that the overall outcome of our
interactions will be satisfactory’. And he is right to make this point. Today, our geographical
imaginations are dominated by a broader sense of chaos and Global Complexity (Urry, 2003; Stengers,
2005).
These ways of thinking, deep in the psyche of many radicals on the Left may be one other reason why so
many have retreated into ethics. When we do not really believe that we can change the world through
developing fine detailed instruments, capturing the state, or predictive models, we are naturally more
hesitant. It is better to try and raise ethical awareness instead. Whereas in the past power was
something to be won and treasured, something radicals could use to implement a collective ideology,
today, with the risk posed by representation in fragmented societies, top-down power often becomes a
hazard, even an embarrassment, for many on the Left (Laı¨di, 1998). This is, as I have already discussed,
where the Right and neo-liberal ideologues are seizing the opportunity of the moment.
Putting what I have just said another way, there is a need to be clear, perhaps more so in these
interdisciplinary times—ethics and politics (particularly representational politics) are different. Of course
they are related. You cannot do politics without an ethical perspective. But my point here is that the
Right and neo-liberal ideologues will not simply go away if the Left adopt or raise awareness of
alternative ethical lifestyles. The Right are willing to capture state power, particularly at this time when
the state is increasingly powerful. When we compare the concerted political programme of neoliberalism, first developed by Reagan, Thatcher, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, multi-national banks,
and the G20, as just some of many examples, ethical individuals across the world offer some counterresistance. But the 2008 crisis, and the response of protests like the Alternative G20, demonstrated how
weak ethical resistance is in the face of the institutions of the neo-liberal economy.
Pretending that philosophy is politics consigns the left to total irrelevance
Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’
network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
(Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State”
Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
It is interesting how this journey came about. It does not need to be rehearsed here, for the readers of
this specialist journal, that modern radical philosophers like Foucault, Bergson, Sartre, Lacan, LeviStrauss, and Derrida fervently opposed the external concepts of Plato or Kant, instead preferring more
earthly explanations. Just as abstract concepts were not separated or suspended from ordinary
existence by such thinkers, and these radical philosophers no longer competed with kings or sages to
represent the Ideal society, so for many radicals philosophy has come to be inscribed within ordinary life
(Butler, 2005). In turn, acts of deconstruction and exposing governmentality, psycho- and schizoanalysis, have been invested with a great deal of political significance. As Badiou (2005) points out, the
practice of such philosophical militants has come to be seen as political intervention in ‘our everyday
lives’ (Foucault, 1983, p. xiv). In making such philosophical interventions, consciously or not, this is how
many radical intellectuals pre-crisis shifted our understanding of how radical politics should be done.
Rather than providing the details of the Ideal city, setting up a vision and grand narrative, there is
instead emphasis upon exposing the relations of power that produce truth and knowledge, and our
sense of who we are (from the science to the arts and humanities).
Such interventions are part of a broader trend, increasing the significance of the philosophical militant.
To take one example of this, walk into many PhD discussions today and we find the academic telling his
or her student to discover themselves through focusing upon their ‘positionality’, to be reflective about
the ‘spectator-individual’ relationship they are studying, or to consider the regimes of power that are
disciplining them and the subjects they are studying. However, despite the sophisticated philosophies
that have been developed in these areas, we are often only left with philosophical interventions, new
understandings of how desire and power work in a given context, for example. We pick up the student’s
PhD, look for their ‘activism’, often only to find that it is often dominated by their philosophical and
ethical reflections. At its worse this can turn into narcissism . It can become a form of ‘me-search’
rather than ‘research’.
This illustrates the broader trend discussed in the last section of my paper (and by Marx, 1982; and
Chandler, 2009a). This is that many radicals do not so much want to struggle for positions over power
(such as the nation state), giving the details of a new vision of society, as they want to develop new
sources of knowledge about how that power becomes manifest—and put critique and self-reflection
‘out there’ for debate. For sure, the gaining of new philosophical consciousness, perhaps through
experimental and creative practices, opens up new spaces for debate that could possibly lead into a
radical politics. But a space for debate and the raising of awareness is not the same as providing a
political solution.
A further example illustrates my point. The radical philosopher Isabelle Stengers has been increasingly
influential in recent years. In her ‘cosmopolitical proposal’ Stengers (2005, p. 994) however illustrates
the movement away from political solutions, when she says:
How can we present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke
thought, a proposal that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to ‘slow down’
reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and
situations mobilizing us?
This is, once again, radical politics as a philosophical intervention—an attempt to intervene in ordinary
life, to shift our awareness. As Stenger’s says, it does not offer a model for how society should be. To
repeat something I said earlier, I am absolutely not saying that this means we should turn our back upon
the philosophical militant as a force for radical change. What I am saying is that the 2008 crisis brings
home the fact that understanding something differently (including yourself), shifting awareness of
problems and situations, is not the same as producing political instruments for change.
To take another example of this, the World Social Forum (WSF) is certainly an important opposition to
neo-liberalism, much celebrated by certain parts of the radical Left. Of course it does important political
work in many areas (Marcuse, 2005; Ko¨hler, 2005). But here I am concerned with how the WSF also
tends to illustrate the ascendancy of radical philosophy as radical politics. This perhaps reflects its status
as a forum. As such, the WSF is more about doing the vital job of changing people’s perspective of the
world, about making us stop and think about neo-liberalism, Rwanda, and the USA in different ways,
through introducing new critical theory and ontology into our vocabularies. It is a place where different
people can share experiences, transforming their understanding of the world.
Launched in 2001, at Porto Allegre in Brazil, the WSF has become an annual event. In 2005, 155,000
people attended, and 19 key participants issued the Porto Allegre Manifesto. This said: many
progressive people ask themselves: what can we do about what is happening in the world? What can we
do in the face of events such as the Rwanda massacre, the hole in the ozone layer, or American
interventionism? The answer may seem disappointing: nothing. Because this ensemble of facts that is
called ‘the world’ is a construction aimed at the spectator-individual and not to the person in situation.
In other words, such a world does not exist outside the discursive presuppositions that constitute it.
Hence, we cannot accept such a world without accepting at the same time its presuppositions, without
occupying the place of the receiver or spectator-individual. (Manifesto of the Malgre´ Tout Collective,
1995)
The well-known tension within the forum is whether it should seek to influence state policy, or simply
be a forum for analysing the ‘ensemble of facts’. Indeed, the Malgre´ Tout, which in September 1995
included radicals such as Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Michael Lo¨wy, and Miguel Benasayag, think that
the Left has been ‘corroded by a complete devotion to influencing government policy’ (Manifesto of the
Malgre´ Tout Collective, 1995). This set the wrong tone. For 13 years later the actions of the state, not
theWSF, have receivedmore attention from most people. In continuing to make this point, it is perhaps
helpful to be reminded that Gilles Deleuze also seemed to believe that the stakes of philosophy and
politics are different (Reid, unpublished). Philosophy seeks to understand the world. Politics reveals the
stakes that people have in a given situation. Pre-crisis, many from the World Social Forum, for example,
politicised Deleuze’s ontology of deterritorialisation to justify a certain rejection of the state. There is of
course nothing wrong with this per se. Philosophy should be politicised. But Deleuze was clear that we
should take the stakes of politics on their own terms when doing so. By saying this I therefore link back
to the first point of my essay. Following an ethos of radicalism as withdrawal from the state for a
number of decades, many tried to influence the radical Left to move in a particular direction. Tragically,
it has therefore not connected with how the stakes of radical politics have changed. Hutton (2009, p.
297) is correct to say that ‘there is a new recognition that states, government and public really matter’.
However, since Hutton made this statement I do not think the public matter because the masses are
making political demands from the state. This is not how the stakes of radical politics have changed. But
precisely because the state is doing incredibly radical things, drawing upon resources of the public, and
the public are letting them get away with it. While I am often sympathetic to it as a tool, philosophical
critique will only get the Left so far here.
Liberalism
2ac – liberalism impact defense
Liberal universalism doesn’t explain global violence - their impact is ahistorical
Teschke, 11 - Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex,
Brighton, UK (Benno, “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt’s international political and legal
theory” International Theory (2011), 3:2, 179–227, doi:10.1017/S175297191100011X
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis
stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a structural and continuous relation between
liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the
liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity
was accompanied by the intensification and de-formalization of war in the international construction of
liberal constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing
individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt’s
‘spaceless universalism’. In this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to
verify Schmitt’s long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and depoliticizations’ (Schmitt 1993).
But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of a succession of
confrontations between the carriernations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer
margins seems unable to comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then
and now. For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their
conflicts with the Anglo- American liberal-capitalist heartland were grounded in an antagonism between
liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter
to the historical evidence. For this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already
substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing
the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry
(Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal capitalist development,
due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye
and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the
construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply
influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely
political– existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th century
conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal
modernity and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these confrontations were
interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity.
Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal
humanity against non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that
the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian clientregimes (Mubarak’s Egypt, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pahlavi’s Iran, Fahd’s Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi’s preintervention Libya, to name but a few), which were and are actively managed and supported by the
West as antiliberal Schmittian states of emergency, with concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human
Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical stability and economic access?
Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the idea that Western intervention
has to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere
seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested statebuilding projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal
colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their
imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical
vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/ enemy
groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories of
analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power and the
eventual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led wars
for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the
production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in
some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Libya).
Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal
and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them
once they step out of line. These are conflicts within a world, which seem to push the term liberalism
beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless universalism’ sits
uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’, which has to
manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is this persistence of a
worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American
supremacy possible in the first place.
1ar – liberalism impact defense
Liberalism is the best overall political system and constrains fundamentalist violence –
their totalizing critique ignores the possibility of reform within liberalism.
Bowie and Simon, 8 - *professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Until his retirement in 2009
he was Elmer L Andersen Chair of Corporate Responsibility and served in the departments of strategic
management and of philosophy AND ** (Norman and Robert, The Individual and the Political Order: An
Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy, p. 199-202)
Implicit in much of the work of Young is a concern that Native Americans, African Americans, and
women have been marginalized in modern liberal democratic societies and that impartiality is in some
way the cause of the marginalization. Even if the marginalization claim is partially true, we doubt that
the liberal emphasis on impartiality leads to viewing all problems from one perspective, that of the
dominant. Impartiality properly applied requires each of us to consider the viewpoint of others and to
give no special weight to our own. Moreover, impartiality need not lead to simplistic and highly abstract
rules. Liberal impartiality, as Brian Barry has argued, is a second-order notion requiring that the major
rules governing the political order be reasonable for all to accept, but it does not require that the rules
themselves be simple or few in number.24 On our view, especially complex political issues sometimes
may need to be resolved by suitably constrained democratic procedures that allow for the play of a
variety of perspectives in mutual dialogue.
So where does that leave us? We think that the feminists are right to point out the failures of liberal
theory in the real world. Despite the claims of impartiality, great injustice still exists in the world, and it
is statistically correct to say that injustice falls disproportionately on certain groups. However, liberals
need not be convinced that this failure results from any errors of logic in the rights-based theory of the
democratic state. Where violations of human rights or justice occur, liberals should remain committed
to corrective action. Feminist theories have sensitized much of our society to potential blind spots, but
they have not shown that rights-based theories of the democratic state are fundamentally flawed.
Indeed, if Benhabib is right, and we think she is, feminism itself needs a rights-based ethical theory.25
Many "postliberal" thinkers tend to condemn or reject liberal attempts to ground political argument on
impartial, neutral, or relatively objective grounds because they believe that such notions presuppose a
"god's-eye view" or a neutral perspective of impartiality and objectivity that humans cannot attain. Of
course, we agree that the language of neutrality, impartiality, and objectivity can be misused as a cover
for self-seeking, especially (but not only) by those in power. And of course we realize that political claims
regarding the attributes of the just state arc- not scientific claims.
However, there is widespread agreement that the function of the state is to preserve order, limit
conflict, and assist its citizens as they seek fulfillment in their lives and that the state should do so justly.
We believe that the liberal democratic state is best able to achieve those goals.
In the absence of a liberal state, here is what worries us. Unless there are acceptable points of view from
which reason can proceed, impartial ground rules acceptable to all parties, it is hard to see how people
on any side of a dispute can persuade those who disagree with them. What worries liberals is that if
there are no preconditions on discussion and no human rights that are specifiable in advance, then
there is the danger that individuals will be unjustly treated. The rights theorist believes that some things
should be off the table, such as racism, if justice is to prevail. And a democracy should be constrained by
rights. Otherwise a religious fundamentalist majority could elect to become a theocracy that would run
roughshod over individual rights . The early twenty-first century provides vivid pictures of what
happens in a fundamentalist theocracy, like that of the Taliban .
Accordingly, although liberal theory is far from perfect, and forceful objections have been brought
against many of its key assumptions, such objections, we have argued, are far from decisive. The liberal
democratic state, we have argued, provides protections for the individual that can be abandoned only at
our great peril.
2ac – law good
Legal change is a struggle, not an end-point – and risks of cooption, rollback and
masking exist only because progressive social movements turned away from statebased legal strategies. The neg has a goal – not a strategy – and consigning that goal
to the level of the performative or imaginary breeds self-mystification and passivity
when society ceases to change
Lobel, 7 - Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego (Orly, “THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL
ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS“ HARVARD LAW REVIEW
[Vol. 120:937, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf)
Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform.
Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to legal reform models and
as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited
improvement in existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be
explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common
pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing,
for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of
counterhegemonic activities translate into a more complete transformation. This celebration of multiple
micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate approach — an idea that the multiplication of practices
will evolve into something substantial. In fact, the myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of
change being produced , while the broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform
produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few instances of meaningful reordering of
social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution. Scholars write about decoding what is
really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the actual
conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through
mere reframing. At the same time, the elephant in the room — the rising level of economic inequality —
is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural and inevitable .225 This is precisely the
problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers’ self-mystification, through which marginalized
groups come to see systemic losses as the product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on
minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their willed reality.
The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the
distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism — the
law and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the
celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere of action — all produce a fantasy that change can be
brought about through small-scale, decentralized transformation . The emphasis is local, but the
locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is national and global. In the context
of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies
from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works
on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each
individual story could translate into a “time of the nation” body of knowledge and motivation.227 In
contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger,
translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots
groups, few new local-statenational federations have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and
1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are
in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent
intermediate public sphere, which has been termed “the missing middle” by Professor Theda
Skocpol.229 New social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing
significant institutional change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure
is due in part to the ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current
activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader
substantive debate?
It is important for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal
consciousness, to recognize that not all extralegal associational life is transformative. We must
differentiate, for example, between inward-looking groups, which tend to be self- regarding and
depoliticized, and social movements that participate in political activities, engage the public debate, and
aim to challenge and reform existing realities.231 We must differentiate between professional
associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments of the
community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a
smaller scale than earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within
critical discourse there is a need to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should
question the narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action
as directly translating into change. Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is
questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a social
agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are situated in opposition
to any form of institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are fighting against
and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the narrow space that
is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted, and
contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.
V. RESTORING CRITICAL OPTIMISM IN THE LEGAL FIELD
“La critique est aisée; l’art difficile.”
A critique of cooptation often takes an uneasy path. Critique has always been and remains not simply an
intellectual exercise but a political and moral act. The question we must constantly pose is how critical
accounts of social reform models contribute to our ability to produce scholarship and action that will be
constructive. To critique the ability of law to produce social change is inevitably to raise the question of
alternatives . In and of itself, the exploration of the limits of law and the search for new possibilities is
an insightful field of inquiry. However, the contemporary message that emerges from critical legal
consciousness analysis has often resulted in the distortion of the critical arguments themselves. This
distortion denies the potential of legal change in order to illuminate what has yet to be achieved or
even imagined . Most importantly, cooptation analysis is not unique to legal reform but can be
extended to any process of social action and engagement. When claims of legal cooptation are
compared to possible alternative forms of activism, the false necessity embedded in the contemporary
story emerges — a story that privileges informal extralegal forms as transformative while assuming that
a conservative tilt exists in formal legal paths.
In the triangular conundrum of “law and social change,” law is regularly the first to be questioned,
deconstructed, and then critically dismissed. The other two components of the equation — social and
change — are often presumed to be immutable and unambiguous. Understanding the limits of legal
change reveals the dangers of absolute reliance on one system and the need, in any effort for social
reform, to contextualize the discourse, to avoid evasive, open-ended slogans, and to develop greater
sensitivity to indirect effects and multiple courses of action. Despite its weaknesses, however, law is an
optimistic discipline. It operates both in the present and in the future. Order without law is often the
privilege of the strong. Marginalized groups have used legal reform precisely because they lacked
power. Despite limitations, these groups have often successfully secured their interests through
legislative and judicial victories. Rather than experiencing a disabling disenchantment with the legal
system, we can learn from both the successes and failures of past models, with the aim of constantly
redefining the boundaries of legal reform and making visible law’s broad reach.
1ar – law good
Legal reform can force compliance without producing new states of emergency –
debates over the law are key
Sanders 8 - Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of Toronto (Rebecca, “Norms of Exception?
Intelligence Agencies, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law”, 6/6/08, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers2008/Sanders.pdf)//DBI
There is no doubt that law is part of and shaped by power. But there is a reason the Bush administration
is disdainful of law. There is a potential for an anti-imperialist egalitarianism within international law
that should be pursued, not rejected. Law can be a weapon of the weak (Bartholomew, 2006, p. 178).
While recognizing the unilateral violence of “empire’s law” that is “derivative of its own will as the global
sovereign” (p. 162) we should also remain committed to Dworkin’s “law’s empire”, where human rights
and international law regimes forge a democratic cosmopolitan order (p. 164). The aspirational view of
law, devoted to a substantive rule of law as opposed to lawless legal black holes and procedural
positivistic legality or rule by law, suggests there are “moral resources” in the law available to deal with
crises without producing exceptions (Dyzenhaus, 2007). Finally, it should be noted that unlike domestic
law, the absence of a unified international sovereign negates the possibility of pure sovereign
suspension. Breaches of international law are just that - they break rather than remake the law.
This is not to say the law alone provides some sort of antidote to the abuses of the powerful. In this
sense international human rights campaigners would do well to examine the debates over the role of
law in achieving minority rights in the domestic context. For instance Stuart Scheingold (2004) has
argued that the “myth of rights” should be supplanted with a “politics of rights” in which “rights are
treated as contingent resources which impact on public policy indirectly-in the measure, that is, that
they can aid the altering balance of the political forces” (p. 148). In this view, law is a resource in a
larger political struggle that takes place not only in the courts, but through various channels of social
action. In acknowledging the role of power relations in shaping law, the excluded should not be obliged
to renounce the possibility of rights. Instead, oppressed people can contribute to the generation of
new norms that reflect their experience. As Matsuda (1987) asks “How could anyone believe both of
the following statements? (1) I have a right to participate equally in society with any other person. (2)
Rights are whatever people in power say they are...the experience of the bottom is that one can believe
in both of those statements simultaneously, and that it may well be necessary to do so” (p. 138). Rather
than painting a black and white portrait, the ambiguities and contingencies inherent in the relationship
between law and power demand examination and engagement in their historically specific
configurations.
We must do everything we can to combat the surveillance state – including collective
movement and pragmatic reform – weak law is better than none at all and lays the
foundation for improvement.
Lyon 94 – Director of Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University
(David, “the electronic eye : the rise of surveillance society”, p. 223-224)//RZ
To eschew fatalism or paranoia is one thing. To face the future with realism and hope is another. I have
tried to sketch a vision that catches some elements of hope, and to couple that to the realism of
sociological analysis. But even this is of little use without the identification of some agency or agencies,
capable of transforming present situations into something different and desirable. Surveillance, as
explored in this book, is neither overwhelmingly negative in its effects nor incorrigibly evil in its
character. But it is undergoing certain rapid changes at present, so that it is hard to get a handle on what
exactly is happening. The first agency then, would actually be responsible social analysis. In
understanding better the meaning of electronic languages and of the relation between consumption,
social order, and surveillance, common obstacles to appropriate political action would be removed. The
more this could be considered within the educative processes of contemporary society, the better. Our
worst fears of surveillance will be realized much more easily in contexts where such complacent
assumptions reign as that computerized efficiency equals progress or that privacy laws protect citizens.
Thus educative initiatives should be welcomed. In the USA, for instance, university and college computer
science accreditation requires the inclusion of 'social and ethical implications of computing'. 9 In Britain,
the Open University's 'Introduction to Information Technology' includes similar questions. Such public
awareness of surveillance issues could further be raised through professional groups and organizations,
especially those directly concerned with computing, information management, and so on. Recall the
importance of 'mobilization' responses mentioned in Chapter Eight, and the dramatic results of the
computer networking of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility group in blocking
development of the Lotus Household Marketplace software in 1991. Their attempts to argue for limits
to consumer surveillance expansion fits in exactly with my criteria of participation, personhood and
purposes. Resisting the growth of electronic surveillance per se would be a futile gesture . Attempting
to channel it in ethically and politically appropriate directions is sociologically much more a propos .
More broadly, other kinds of movements may also contribute to the containment of surveillance. If we
are right to think of 'surveillance as a site of struggle in its own right', 10 then there is every reason to
expect various kinds of groups and movements to contest this territory, no doubt in the name of
privacy. Consumer groups and organizations represent one important sector which, as we have seen,
has already flexed its muscles. In Britain banking practices and consumer blacklisting have come in for
criticism, and in the USA more ad hoc groups have mobilized to resist unwanted direct marketing. Of
course, creating policies and laws equal to the realities of today's surveillance society is another task
for which agencies exist. Without relaxing my indictment of privacy laws for being cynical, sieve-like and
subject-unfriendly, it may still be said that such laws are a necessary minimum. Weak law is better than
none at all. Precedents for some protection are set that way, and the foundation for improvements
laid . In a situation where surveillance becomes increasingly global, it is interesting that legal limits
similarly start to have international implications. The European Convention on Data Protection, for
instance, may well have beneficial effects on citizens well beyond Europe, as well as within it. As Europe
requires trading partners to comply with the convention, the USA and Canada may well be obliged to
extend legislation to the currently untouched field of consumer surveillance. Needless to say, the
political problem involves not only identifying agencies that might spur transformative activity, but also
searching for appropriate ways of doing so. It is clear, for instance, that some kinds of regulation of
surveillance practices could wind up with as much invasive bureaucratic machinery as the practices they
intend to reduce. It is equally clear that if surveillance is not to be viewed in a paranoid fashion, then
space must be made not only for viewing it as a 'necessary evil' but as a 'greater good'. The case of caller
ID telephone services is a case in point. Technical means are available for maintaining such services for
women or minority groups in danger while denying them to direct marketers. The question of which
purposes would be served is critical here.
2ac – permutation
Surveillance restrictions generate new modes of political engagement that limit
further state power
Marquez 12 - Victoria University of Wellington, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science &
International Relations, Lecturer in Political Theory (Xavier, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of
Surveillance”, Polity, January 2012, http://www.palgravejournals.com/polity/journal/v44/n1/full/pol201120a.html)//DBI
A solution to these problems would at least involve the expansion of spaces of appearance (even if they
can never be untainted by surveillance) and the reduction of the reach of spaces of surveillance, and in
particular of those disciplinary spaces that reduce the “disclosiveness” of human action and make it the
slave of production processes. Arendt’s apparently “utopian” proposal for a council system in lieu of
representative democracy can be understood as an attempt to describe the way a society would look if
its spaces of appearance were greatly expanded, even though she never fully or properly articulated the
connection between these potential new spaces of appearance with the myriad other spaces that would
still remain in society.77 Yet it is important to stress again that the point is not that spaces of
surveillance could or should be eliminated wholesale; any moderately complex society, and indeed any
society that aspires to a certain level of material security, will certainly contain a very large number of
spaces of surveillance.78 But the number of activities that take place in spaces of surveillance can be
decreased while increasing the number of activities that take place in spaces of appearance (however
imperfect), and groups excluded from public spaces can be brought into such spaces. Moreover, spaces
of appearance can be generated within spaces that remain shot through with surveillance; witness, for
example, the ways in which “social media” technologies enabled many activists in the Middle East both
to enter the public space (and mobilize collective action through their stories of resistance to
oppression) while at the same time enabling governments to monitor their activities: as in Eastern
Europe in the 1980s, the activist’s courage to appear tended to subvert or undermine the apparatus of
surveillance without completely rendering it ineffective.79
Indeed, spaces of appearance have repeatedly emerged within disciplinary organizations as a result of
what Foucault calls resistance. As Arendt notes, during the twentieth century, labor movements time
and again attempted to create spaces of appearance and to engage in political action where, in our
terms, only spaces of surveillance had existed. According to Arendt, such political action by the working
class eventually provided workers with an unprecedented amount of economic security and political
power (now under threat in various ways, to be sure). But the significance of the working-class action lay
not in its economic success (which, arguably, simply integrated the working class into the apparatuses of
the state, with all its spaces of surveillance), but in its ability to force open the public realm to “a
whole new segment of the population” that “appeared in public” for the first time .80 These
movements of resistance to disciplinary power (both in labor movements and more recently in Egypt
and Syria) illustrate the Arendtian notion of action. Human beings generate counter- power by means
of their joint action , disrupt the instrumentalization imposed on them by disciplinary organization, and
create, at least momentarily, spaces of appearance where people’s individual stories can be articulated.
Perhaps Foucault’s notion of resistance could be enriched through the Arendtian notion of a space of
appearance. Foucault values the rejection of imposed identities, but when discussing the possibility of
such rejection, he seems to consider only the evasion of visibility. He does not consider the
establishment of new spaces of appearance where the disclosure of individual identity and the
generation of power go hand in hand. Arendt, in contrast, proposes changing the way in which visibility
operates. Her goal is to make visibility function less as a lever of control and more as an opportunity to
express individuality, less as an experience that separates people and more as one that enables
collective action, less as a weapon with which to impose norms and more as a springboard from which
to launch new experiments in collective self-regulation—“new modes and orders,” in the Machiavellian
phrase that Arendt was fond of quoting.81 The creation of spaces of appearances may well involve
providing opportunities for individuals to escape visibility , but it is not reducible to such an escape.
Late in life, Foucault also came to the conclusion that we need to expand the spaces where self-creation
is possible.82 He tended to understand these spaces as places where one can “make” the self as one
might make a thing. Although his “aesthetic of existence” is not devoid of a collective dimension,83 it
misses Arendt’s important points about how the human condition of plurality prevents us from
“making” ourselves as we make other things. At best, we can disclose ourselves as individuals (in
spaces of appearance) or as types or roles (in spaces of surveillance) , or as a mixture of both (in most
spaces).
Finally, it may be possible to harness the power of surveillance to control those “commanding heights”
of public space in modern democracies. As Green has argued, because the structural features of modern
states have restricted access to enduring and significant public spaces to a small elite, the actors in
these spaces should be prevented as far as possible from fully controlling the conditions of their
visibility. One might, for example, increase the number of opportunities where relatively spontaneous
and sometimes hostile challenges of the visible leader can occur—perhaps through the use of press
conferences and parliamentary “question time.”84 When political leaders cannot control the conditions
of their visibility, they are both more subject to the surveillance of the public (which compensates, to
some extent, for its normal lack of power), and more likely to engage in genuine action, which is
unpredictable and incalculable and capable of generating new modes and orders . A space of
surveillance can thus work in tandem with the maintenance of a genuine space of appearance.
1ar – pragmatism
Vote for the permutation - evaluate the round through a lens of pragmatism, which is
self-correcting. Their critique is totalizing and meaningless absent contextualization to
the specific scenario of the 1AC.
Hickman 7 – Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Larry A., Pragmatism
as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey, p.34-37)//RZ
One of the striking things about James's proposal is that it did not anticipate or privilege any special
result. It was offered as a method only—a ticket to ride to wherever the method went. Once the
Pragmatic method was applied, James thought, it was sure to undercut some of the old philosophical
antagonisms. In language that went even beyond the call of Jonathan Edwards for a return to "naked
ideas" unencumbered by the dead weight of parasitic abstractions, James demanded that every word
pay its own way—that it earn its living within the stream of experience. And he insisted that every
theory be regarded as an instrument, as a tool for the remodeling of experience. In other words, the
Pragmatic method would be flexible enough to allow for a wide range of viewpoints and activities, depending on individual temperament and context. But it would not accept just any applicant. Though
they might live for a time on credit, ideas submitted to this test would eventually have to either pay
their own bills or declare bankruptcy. It is worth noting at this point that there is a significant difference
between James's proposal for a working method that privileges no particular result, and the proposal
issued by Lyotard and other post-modernists that no particular narrative or standpoint can or should be
privileged. James's proposal possesses the virtues of what has been termed "the scientific method"' of
inquiry (on which it is based): when it is properly applied, it does present a privileged method with
respect to knowledge-getting, since it is experimental and therefore produces practical effects that are
objective. It is self-correcting. Lyotard's postmodernist proposal, on the other hand, appears to be selfdefeating: it must privilege its own announced narrative, namely, that no narrative is privileged. It is also
important to keep in mind that Lyotard's book does in fact appear to privilege the domain of knowledgegetting. Its subtitle is "A Report on Knowledge." Underscoring his claim that the Pragmatic method
privileges no special result, James borrowed a metaphor from the Italian Pragmatist Giovanni Papini.
The Pragmatic method would be like a corridor in a hotel, he said. Many rooms would open onto it, and
inside those rooms there would be a wide variety of activities. Religionists as well as atheists would be
found there and scientists as well as philosophers. Despite their differences, the occupants of the rooms
would have one important thing in common: they would have to pass through the corridor—they would
have to employ the Pragmatic method—to get in or out of their respective rooms." What James was
suggesting, therefore, was that cultural, intellectual , and political differences , can in many cases be
negotiated under the umbrella of the Pragmatic method. If his view is correct, we would therefore
expect to find in it a tool for fostering global citizenship and its corollary, the formation of global publics.
But what, more specifically, is the Pragmatic method? Given that it privileges no particular result, what
is it about that corridor that allows religionists and atheists to pass, as well as scientists and
philosophers, but (presumably) not democrats and dictators, secularists and theocrats, and humanists
and fundamentalists? This is a question that Pragmatism must answer if it is to pay its own way as a set
of tools for fostering global citizenship. The question is complicated by the fact that now, almost one
hundred years after James's Lowell Lectures, and after a period during which it had precious few friends,
Pragmatism appears to have be-come quite fashionable. Despite its current popularity (or perhaps
because of it), however, the central tenets of Pragmatism have not yet been appropriated in some of
the most important arenas of human life. Stripped to its most muscular form, Pragmatism is a precise
theory of meaning, truth, and inquiry, or perhaps better put, it is a closely related family of precise
theories of meaning, truth, and inquiry. Here is Peirce in 1878: "Consider what effects, that might
conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our
conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."9 Here is James, twenty years
later, in 1898: "The effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to
some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point
lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active."i°
And here is Dewey in 1938, sixty years after Peirce's statement: "The proper interpretation of
'pragmatic,' [involves] namely the function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity of
propositions, provided these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve the
specific problem evoking the operations" (LW 12.4). Put succinctly, the Pragmatic theory of meaning
insists that we treat the whole meaning of a concept not just in terms of its use in a language game,
as Wittgenstein urged us to do, but in terms that are overtly experimental and behavioral and in ways
that transcend particular language games: the meaning of a concept is the difference it will make
within and for our future experience. Another way of putting this is that the Pragmatic method is
experimental at its core. Here is Peirce in 1906. "All Pragmatists will further agree that their method of
ascertaining the meanings of words and concepts is no other than that experimental method by which
all the successful sciences . . . have reached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper to them
today." Applying Peirce's Pragmatic maxim, it seemed to James natural enough to conclude that since
the word "truth" is not otiose, then it, too, must have a meaning.12 Absorbing the best elements of
both correspondence and coherence theories of truth (as well as rejecting their less defensible
elements) and then adding a temporal dimension, James claimed that "true ideas are those that we can
assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot."" Some who have
read this remark have concluded that James equated truth with personal satisfaction, but Dewey
understood the matter differently. James's real doctrine, he wrote, was, "A belief is true when it satisfies
both personal needs and the requirements of objective things" (MW 4.112.). In his most precise
statement of the matter, Dewey defined truth as warranted assertibility." In a word, the Pragmatic
theory of truth involves a robust form of experimentalism: it requires that we regard our ideas as true
when they have both an objective basis (i.e., their warrant can be demonstrated before a candid
world) and the capacity to resolve some type of objective difficulty (i.e., they are assertible under
relevant conditions). Pragmatism treats inquiry as a natural activity, that is, as intimately related to
organic nature as the beating of a heart and the perches and flight of a bird. At the conscious level,
inquiry takes its start in situations that are doubtful, from which it seeks to shape well defined problems.
It then uses tools of all sorts, abstract as well as concrete , to form hypotheses which it tests in the very
existential arena from which the motivating difficulty arose. In sum, the Pragmatic account of inquiry is
invariably situated with respect to specific circumstances . It arises from felt needs, employs both
abstract and concrete tools, tests proposals in the laboratory of experience, and terminates in the
resolution of the difficulties which occasion that particular sequence of inquiry. In Dewey’s book, logic is
the theory of inquiry.
AT: Surveillance state inevitable
The critique is overly pessimistic – that discourages the imagination of effective
solutions.
Lyon 94 – Director of Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University
(David, “the electronic eye : the rise of surveillance society”, p. 223-224)//RZ
The dystopic paradigms deriving from Orwell and Bentham are indeed illuminating. They serve the
purposes of alerting us to significant social trends or tendencies in the present that have already been
discussed imaginatively in the past. They assist our identification of undesirable trends. Although the
more dramatic 'thought control' is what we often associate with Orwell, in many ways his vision was far
more mundane, and alarmingly contemporary. As Stanley Cohen observes, the control of proles, the
mass of the population, depended on nothing more sophisticated than classification, segregation and
behaviour modification. 17 Crime control in the later twentieth century, with all the humane talk of
decarceration, seems to have some surprising affinities with Orwell; surveillance, anticipation,
prevention are its watchwords. One might add that consumer surveillance operates by a smiliar logic as
well, though seduction and channelling of choices might here be better terms than 'prevention'. 18 This
kind of exposition ties Orwell even more closely to Bentham, for whom the instrumental channelling of
behaviour was paramount. A technique was sought in the Panopticon that would ensure the automatic
functioning of the system, so that organizational certainty could be obtained at the price of uncertainty
in the people it contained. Though Bentham conceived of his 'moral architecture' as a place for the
'fabrication of virtue', in fact the Panopticon served to redefined virtue itself. This production of virtue is
essentially cynical - Bentham unwittingly used 'fabrication' in an ambiguous way. Psychological
conditioning of the most deplorable kind here supplants genuine responsibility. 19 There are some
differences between Orwell's vision and that of Foucault's Bentham, however. Whereas Orwell's could
be viewed as a 'possible but preventable' future, as it is in, say, Rule's hands, Foucault's Panopticon
often appears as imminent and inevitable. Whereas the contemporary interpreters of Orwell's dystopia
may under certain circumstances galvanize action and resistance - 'Big Brother is watching you' must be
the best known anti-surveillance slogan - Foucault's dystopia seems rather to instil paranoia and
paralysis. Whereas Nineteen EightyFour still clings to some shadowy hopes of democracy and decency,
Discipline and Punish dissolves them in discourses of ubiquitous power. The differences should not
however be exaggerated . Even Orwell's dystopia finally leaves us with almost unrelieved pessimism .
True, conflict, struggle, and resistance are present, but in the end only at an elite level. The proles - 85%
of the population - are a pretty docile, determinable and one-dimensional lot. Does not even Orwell
underestimate their knowledgeability, their capacity for making a difference? As Raymond Willams
notes, 'by viewing the struggle as one between only a few people over the heads of an apathetic mass,
Orwell created the conditions for defeat and despair' . 20 But even if Orwell had a more positive
message , the problem is that after Foucault it is hard to go back to Orwell. For Foucault has shown
how the 'autonomous individuals' or Orwell's elite are indeed the product of post-Enlightenment
Western thought. The quest for 'privacy' bound up with that approach is thus equally suspect as a
means of countersurveillance. Even if we grant that Orwell's desire for dignity and decency barked up
the right tree, it is not clear how they would be preserved. Foucault's approach, for all its luminary
quality, also seems unsatisfactory, because it is unclear exactly what is wrong with the Panopticon or
what strategy might be appropriate to question or resist it. Herein lies the challenge for surveillance
theory . I propose that such theory often depends for its criterion of judgement, its normative basis,
upon dystopian visions . These have the virtue of directing our attention to the negative, constraining,
and unjust aspects of surveillance, and of helping us to identify which kinds of trends are especially
dangerous from this point of view. But their disadvantage is that they may thus exaggerate the
negative by seeing only one side of surveillance, promote pessimism about whether such negative
traits can be countered, and fail to offer any indication as to what the content of an alternative might
be.
The critique is unreflective and overly fatalistic – contemporary surveillance’s
potential for harm is distinct from its realization –multiple factors check.
Marx 3 – Professor Emeritus of Sociology M.I.T. (Gary, “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting
the New Surveillance”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2003, pp. 369—390)
The identification of factors encouraging the spread of surveillance and the ready availability of
newsworthy horror stories of privacy invasions such as the selling of information from AIDS tests or
cameras hidden in dressing rooms (e.g., Smith, 1990) too often lead to an unreflective “the sky is
falling” view of contemporary surveillance , whether explicit or implicit. The potential of a technology
for harm needs to be kept distinct from its realization. Just because something negative could happen,
does not mean that it must happen. In short, little consideration is given to how the dystopia will
actually be produced or to factors working against it , such as practicality, cost, laws and fears of
lawsuits, organizational policies, morality, doubts about effectiveness or the ability to control the
technology, and concern with public opinion. Control systems are not usually as effective and efficient
as their advocates claim and they often have a variety of unintended consequences (Marx, 1995; Sieber,
1981; Tenner, 1996). There is frequently a gap between visible conforming behavior and less visible
attitudes, emotions, and fantasies. Moreover, new technologies rarely enter passive environments of
total inequality. Instead, they become enmeshed in complex, pre-existing systems. They are as likely to
be altered as to alter. Professional associations, oversight organizations, and political and social
movements are also factors.
Technological innovation in surveillance will never result in a totalitarianism state –
they ignore the potential of human ingenuity for resistance.
Marx 3 – Professor Emeritus of Sociology M.I.T. (Gary, “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting
the New Surveillance”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2003, pp. 369—390)
As the examples of neutralization suggest, the human spirit valiantly expresses itself in the face of the
machine . It frequently proves richer than the possibilities anticipated and built into the latter.
However, victory may be short lived. While the present analysis is static, in reality the processes are fluid
and dynamic. That is, just as new means of information collection can lead to innovations in resistance,
those in the surveillance business respond to neutralization efforts with their own innovations that are
then responded to in a reoccurring pattern. This is not to deny the greater power of employers,
manufacturers, merchants, landlords, professionals, parents, and state agents, such as welfare workers,
teachers, police, and prison guards, over those subordinate to them. Issues of power and control are
central to the kinds of surveillance that become social issues. Yet power is rarely a zero-sum game .
Beyond varying degrees of normative constraint on power holders, power is not unlimited because it is
often rooted in interdependency and occurs on a broad and decentralized scale. In informationalconflict 388 Marx settings in democratic societies, the advantage of technological and other strategic
surveillance advances are often short-lived and contain ironic vulnerabilities. Neutralization is a
dynamic adversarial social dance involving strategic moves and counter-moves. It has the quality of an
endless chess game. This emergent phenomenon is well worth studying as a conflict interaction process.
Note the escalation and “the see-saw principle” of military technology in which new developments are
balanced by counter-developments. Consider for example the appearance of the “unshredder,” a
computerized document reconstruction process that appeared in response to the initial strip-cut type of
shredder. This cat-and-mouse reciprocity raises questions such as: How are neutralization and counterneutralization techniques discovered, chosen, combined, and diffused? Useful in studying this would be
the “how to do it” literature made possible by a free market and free press (with an enormous boost
from the Internet) and communications of the surveillance industry. What are the major “career paths”
and “life cycles” of techniques of surveillance and neutralization? Does the lag time vary by the
properties of the technique and characteristics of the players, by resource and skill factors, or by the
perceived importance of success and cost of failure? Final Comments In summary, I have noted factors
encouraging compliance with and subverting the vast expansion in the collection of personal
information. I have identified 11 behavioral techniques of neutralization intended to subvert the
collection of personal information and some issues for research. In spite of doomsday scenarios about
the death of privacy , in societies with liberal democratic economic and political systems, the initial
advantages offered by technological developments may be weakened by their own ironic
vulnerabilities and, in Poe’s (1843/1967, p. 153) term, “human ingenuity.” This is certainly not to argue
for complacency because power imbalances (both legitimate and illegitimate) are central to a majority
of surveillance situations. It is, however, to ask that our vigilance be informed by careful empirical
research and analysis.
Giroux
2ac – Giroux dissent alternative
The permutation is the best option. The aff may not be the end all be all, but rolling
back the surveillance state through reform is also worth fighting for.
Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian
Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truthout.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]
If the first task of resistance is to make dominant power clear by addressing critically and meaningfully the abuses perpetrated by the corporate surveillance state
and how such transgressions affect the daily lives of people in different ways, the second step is to move from understanding and critique to the hard work of
building popular movements that integrate rather than get stuck and fixated in single-issue politics. The
left has been fragmented for too
long, and the time has come to build national and international movements capable of dismantling the political, economic and cultural architecture put in place
by the new authoritarianism and its post-Orwellian surveillance industries. This is not a call to reject identity and special-issue politics
as much as it is a call to build broad-based alliances and movements, especially among workers, labor unions,
educators, youth groups, artists, intellectuals, students, the unemployed and others relegated, marginalized and harassed by the political
and financial elite. At best, such groups should form a vigorous and broad-based third party for the defense of
public goods and the establishment of a radical democracy. This is not a call for a party based on traditional hierarchical structures
but a party consisting of a set of alliances among different groups that would democratically decide its tactics and strategies. Modern history is replete with such
struggles, and the arch of that history has to be carried forward before it is too late. In a time of tyranny, thoughtful and organized resistance is not a choice; it is a
necessity. In
the struggle to dismantle the authoritarian state, reform is only partially acceptable. Surely, as Fred
Branfman argues, rolling back the surveillance state can take the form of fighting : to end bulk collection of
information; demand Congressional oversight ; indict executive-branch officials when they commit
perjury; give Congress the capacity to genuinely oversee executive agency; provide strong whistleblower protection; and restructure the present system of classification.84 These are important reforms
worth fighting for , but they do not go far enough. What is needed is a radical restructuring of our understanding of democracy and
what it means to bring it into being. The words of Zygmunt Bauman are useful in understanding what is at stake in such a struggle. He writes: "Democracy
expresses itself in continuous and relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside
the political system ; essential, as a force of dissent and change. One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant
complaints that it is not democratic enough."85 What cannot be emphasized enough is that only through collective struggles can change take place against modernday authoritarianism. If the first order of authoritarianism is unchecked secrecy, the first moment of resistance to such an order is widespread critical awareness of
state and corporate power and its threat to democracy, coupled with a desire for radical change rather than reformist corrections. Democracy involves a sharing of
political existence, an embrace of the commons and the demand for a future that cannot arrive quickly enough. In short, politics needs a jump start, because
democracy is much too important to be left to the whims, secrecy and power of those who have turned the principles of self-government against themselves.
Restraints on the executive democratizes information and creates a strong public
check against surveillance state encroachment
Balkin 8 – professor of law at Yale (Jack M., Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, “The
Constitution in the National Surveillance State” , 1/1/08,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1224&context=fss_papers)
If some form of the National Surveillance State is inevitable , how do we continue to protect individual
rights and constitutional government? Today’s challenge is similar to that faced during the first half of the twentieth century, when government transitioned into the Welfare State and
the National Security State. Americans had to figure out how to tame these new forms of governance within constitutional boundaries. It is no accident that this period spawned both the New
Deal—with its vast increase in government power—and the Civil Rights Revolution. The more power the state amasses, the more Americans need constitutional guarantees to keep
governments honest and devoted to the public good.
We might begin by distinguishing between an authoritarian information
state and a democratic information state .68 Authoritarian information states are information gluttons
and information misers. Like gluttons they grab as much information as possible because this helps maximize
their power. Authoritarian states are information misers because they try to keep the information they collect—and their own
operations—secret from the public. They try to treat everything that might embarrass them or
undermine their authority as state secrets, and they multiply secret rules and regulations, which lets them claim to obey the law without having to
account for what they do. In this way they avoid accountability for violating people’s rights and for their own policy
failures. Thus, information gluttony and information miserliness are two sides of the same coin: both secure governments’ power by using information to control their populations, to
prevent inquiry into their own operations, to limit avenues of political accountability, and to facilitate self-serving propaganda.69 By contrast, democratic
information states are information gourmets and information philanthropists. Like gourmets they collect and
collate only the information they need to ensure efficient government and national security. They do not
keep tabs on citizens without justifiable reasons; they create a regular system of checks and procedures to avoid
abuse. They stop collecting information when it is no longer needed and they discard information at regular intervals to protect privacy. When it is
impossible or impractical to destroy information—for example, because it is stored redundantly in many different locations—democratic information states
strictly regulate its subsequent use. If the information state is unable to forget, it is imperative that it be able to forgive. Democratic information states
are also information philanthropists because they willingly distribute much valuable information they create
to the public, in the form of education, scientific research, and agricultural and medical information. They
allow the public access to information about their laws and their decision-making processes so that the public can
hold government officials accountable if they act illegally or arbitrarily or are corrupt or inefficient. They avoid secret laws and secret proceedings except
where absolutely necessary. Democratic states recognize that access and disclosure help prevent governments from manipulating their citizens. They protect individual privacy because
surveillance encourages abuses of power and inhibits freedom and democratic participation. Thus being an information gourmet and an information philanthropist are also connected: both
You might
think the Fourth Amendment70 would be the most important constitutional provision for controlling
and preventing abuses of power in the National Surveillance State. But courts have largely debilitated
the Fourth Amendment to meet the demands of the Regulatory and Welfare States, the National
Security State, and the War on Drugs.71 Much government collection and use of personal data now falls
outside the Fourth Amendment’s protection—at least as the courts currently construe it. The Supreme
Court has held that there is no expectation of privacy in business records and information that people
give to third parties like banks and other businesses;72 in the digital age this accounts for a vast amount
of personal information. Most e-mail messages are copied onto privately held servers, making their
protection limited if not nonexistent.73 Courts have also held that the Fourth Amendment poses few
limits on foreign intelligence surveillance, which is largely regulated by FISA;74 as a result, the executive
branch has increasingly justified domestic surveillance by asserting that it is a permissible byproduct of
foreign intelligence gathering.75 Currently, governments are free to place cameras in public places like streets and parks because there is no expectation of privacy
help keep governments open and responsible to citizens; both further individual autonomy and democracy by respecting privacy and promoting access to knowledge.
there.76 Governments can also collect information that people leave out in the open, like their presence on a public street; or abandon, like fingerprints, hair, or skin cells.77 Moreover,
because the Fourth Amendment focuses on searches and seizures, it places few limits on collation and analysis, including data mining.78 The Fourth Amendment does not require governments
to discard any information they have already lawfully collected. Digital files, once assembled, can be copied and augmented with new information indefinitely for later analysis and pattern
matching. Finally, whatever constitutional limits might restrain government do not apply to private parties, who can freely collect, collate, and sell personal information back to the
government free of Fourth Amendment restrictions, effectively allowing an end-run around the Constitution. We should try to change some of the weaknesses in current Fourth Amendment
doctrine. But legislative, administrative, and technological solutions may be far more important means of guaranteeing constitutional freedoms in the National Surveillance State. These laws
and technologies will probably do far more to enforce the constitutional values underlying the Fourth Amendment and the Due Process Clause. Congress must pass new superstatutes to
regulate the collection, collation, purchase, and analysis of data. These new superstatutes would have three basic features. First, they would restrict the kinds of data governments may collect,
collate, and use against people. They would strengthen the very limited protections of e-mail and digital business records, and rein in how the government purchases and uses data collected
by private parties. They would institutionalize government “amnesia” by requiring that some kinds of data be regularly destroyed after a certain amount of time unless there were good
reasons for retaining the data. Second, the new superstatutes would create a code of proper conduct for private companies that collect, analyze, and sell personal information. Third, the new
superstatutes would create a series of oversight mechanisms for executive bureaucracies that collect, purchase, process, and use information.
Oversight of executive
branch officials may be the single most important goal in securing freedom in the National
Surveillance State . Without appropriate checks and oversight mechanisms, executive officials will too
easily slide into the bad tendencies that characterize authoritarian information states. They will increase
secrecy, avoid accountability, cover up mistakes, and confuse their interest with the public interest.
Resilience (Evans and Reid)
2ac – resilience
Their alternative is anti-political and is just another form of reinforcing the resilient
subject – seeking change through traditional politics is a better way of overcoming
resilience. We can accept vulnerability AND act to prevent threats we can change
Juntunena and Hyvönen, 14 - *School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland AND
**Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland (Tapio
Juntunen & Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen (2014) Resilience, security and the politics of processes, Resilience:
International Policies, Practices and Discourses, 2:3, 195-209, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2014.948323
Arendt’s emphasis on the public and collective nature of political action also sets our approach
somewhat apart from the tentative suggestions made by Evans and Reid on the topic of going beyond
the resilient subject. Their approach builds on the idea of the ‘poetic subject’, capable of ‘thinking the
atmospheric-aesthetic-affective register differently’.68 As with Chandler above, we tend to agree with
the general lines of their argument, such as the call for ‘reintroducing political meaning back into the
world’.69 However, when it comes to Evans and Reid’s notion of the poetic subject, the above
reservations apply here as well. Furthermore, our worry is that the Nietzschean–Foucauldian ‘art of the
self’ promoted by them is not adequate to the task of rescuing politics proper from the perils of
resilience.70 We fail to see how the politics of the ‘art of the self’ manages to overcome an
individualistic bias in order to take the necessary step towards changing the structures and political
institutions of the world. While it is important to resist resilience on the same ground where it makes its
principal interventions – on the construction of the individual subject – it is even more crucial to act
against the undoing of political structures and institutions – the processualisation of everything – by
resilience policies. It is in the safeguarding of these shared structures of meaning that the Arendtian
approach can make its foremost contribution.
This brings us to the assessment made by Evans and Reid according to which resilience can be seen as an
anti-politics of nihilism, a political will to nothingness. To us, this seems to hit the mark. From an
Arendtian perspective, this is because practices of resilience intensify the process whereby public spaces
and the shared world of meaningful structures disappear. Arendt argued that ours is the ‘objective
situation of nihilism where nothingness and nobodyness threaten to destroy the world’.71 However, the
problem of resilience is thus not so much that it ‘cheats us of the notion of learning to die’,72 as it is that
resilience is the latest phase in the long process steadily depriving us of the possibility of a second birth,
the birth of the public self. This loss is not unrelated to our conceptions of life, death and immortality,
however. Resilience-centred liberalism is able to go on ‘living without death’ because the societal life
process has taken the part of the individual, whose lifespan is limited. In our society, the only thing that
can be ‘potentially immortal, as immortal as the body politic in antiquity and as individual life during the
Middle Ages, [is] life itself, that is, the possibly everlasting life process of the species mankind’.73
However, for Arendt, ‘learning how to die’ is not the solution. Neither care for life (or ‘making life
live’74) nor coming to terms with death is in itself political. What matters is the establishment of a
public space where neither of these concerns constitutes the focal point of attention. In Heidegger’s and
Arendt’s footsteps, we argue that death is always mine individually. In other words, there is no political
potential in coming to terms with death. While fostering the life process surrenders politics to
necessitarian-processual attitudes, the care for death is a question of the existential (Arendt says
metaphysical), rather than the political, since it is essentially a question of the self and not of the
world.75
Nihilism, then, derives from a deterioration of a meaningful common world and politics. As Arendt put it
in a powerful passage:
The answer to the question of the meaning of politics is so simple and so conclusive that one might think
all other answers are utterly beside the point. The answer is: The meaning of politics is freedom [ . . . ]
Today this answer is in fact neither self-evident nor immediately plausible [ . . . ] Our question is thus far
more radical, more aggressive, and more desperate: Does politics still have any meaning at all?76
While such questions as free will and choice are no doubt important for human liberty, Arendt is
steadfast in holding that the experience of freedom proper is only possible among equals in a public
space. As she puts it in another succinct statement about the theme: ‘the raison d’eˆtre of politics is
freedom, and its field of experience is action’.77 Without the human artifice and human institutions –
public space in particular – any meaningful action is not possible. As Chandler has also pointed out, the
exercise of freedom is only possible if we can ‘conceive of ourselves as acting meaningfully in the world
– i.e. in relation to temporal and spatial structures’.78 As we already pointed out above, the public
world, like every relationally constituted in-between, has the double function of bringing people
together and separating them simultaneously; it gathers us together, and ‘prevents our falling over each
other’.79 Consequently, as Margaret Canovan explains, without the world human beings cannot be
plural individuals but merely interchangeable members of a species.80 Since the world is seen as a
product of meaningful human interaction, it is also possible to change it. By acting together as a
collective, human beings can change the structures of this world and start new endeavours within it.81
This Arendt-inspired conceptualisation is in stark contradiction to the image of human capabilities
painted by the resilience-based security discourses, one of the key tenets of which is the belief that,
amidst the demand to cultivate individual adaptive capacities and social cohesion, we cannot change the
world in any meaningful sense. No radical departures from the societal life process are possible. Yet, if
we consider humans as acting, instead of behaving beings, it is exactly the disruptions of processes that
matter. Each political act, as Arendt explains,
. . . bursts into the context of predictable processes as something unexpected, unpredictable, and
ultimately causally inexplicable – just like a miracle. In other words every new beginning is by nature a
miracle when seen and experienced from the standpoint of the processes it necessarily interrupts.82
Conclusion
In this article, we have traced the emergence of the resilience discourse from ecology and complexity
thinking to politics, and the area of security policy and governance in particular. We have noted that the
modes of thinking derived from these sciences, when brought to the realm of politics, have detrimental
consequences for the basic activities of politics as acting and for the exercise of public freedom. In
ecology, resilience is understood as a capacity of a system to absorb disruptions, and it not only
maintains its functions but also renews and reorganises as a result. In this kind of thinking, the
processual nature of living systems becomes an all-embracing fact of life. We then moved to the analysis
of the consequences of this kind of thinking for the concepts of security, public freedom and political
action itself, emphasising the problematic nature of reactivity and vulnerability implied in resilience
thinking.
Towards the end of the article, we provided preliminary thoughts on the possibility of surpassing this
predicament. We argued that what is needed is not another philosophical idea, or even a return to a
previously articulated idea. As Chandler notes, we need to develop a ‘ practical political approach’ .83
Resilience invites us to accept that we are fundamentally vulnerable and that the world is a complex
bundle of emergent and overlapping socio-ecological processes to which we can only respond by
societal adaptation and assimilation, not through political structures in a traditional manner. We see this
as an indication of actively promoted, self-imposed powerlessness. This is detrimental for a plurality of
reasons, beginning with the fact that it prevents us from effectively tackling the political issues behind
the insecurities we face. Our wager is that what is needed in today’s global and seemingly complex
world is keeping open the agonistic spaces of political contestation, of public spaces where problems,
challenges and threats to the common world can be addressed.
Building resilience enables politics – refusing it generates greater anxiety
Kolers 15 - professor of philosophy at University of Louisville (Avery, “Review of Brad Evans and Julian Reid,
Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously.” 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/9999493/Review_of_Brad_Evans_and_Julian_Reid_Resilient_Life_The_Art_of_Living_Dangerously)
//CB
Evans and Reid’s answer is that the politics of resilience foregrounds our continuous vulnerability, which
has deeper, more corrosive consequences (170). What exactly are we afraid of? Death? Extinction?
These are inevitable. If climate change doesn’t get us, eventually something will (151-2). So the anxious
pursuit of resilience is self-deceptive. What liberal resilience wants to save us for is worse than what it
purports to save us from.
The authors instead insist “that there is more to life than this ongoing survival” (167); we can “live
through the source of our endangerment” (169). This attitude frees us for creativity, for life as poetry or
work of art. “The political task of our times, remains learning to … thrive beyond the catastrophe of our
times … and welcome with confidence a more poetic subjectivity” (203).
This is insightful and even inspiring, though underdeveloped. What does it mean to say that life is art or
poetry? The authors promise all good things (174), but provide no rules of the craft. Is life as poetry
really incompatible with resilience or liberalism? The authors claim that the resilience industry stokes
our anxiety such that “the prevailing mode of contemporary affect is a state of normalized anxiety” (92)
which dulls our creativity and renders us docile workers and consumers. But they do not offer any
evidence for this causal claim , or even for believing that this “mode of affect” is indeed “prevailing.” To
the contrary, it seems to me that resilience’ is principally the concern of academics and policy-wonks.
Most people just don’t think about it, and hence, are not anxious. Moreover, resilience — whether as
fact or as discourse — can enable creativity, politics, and activism . Insofar as I have confidence in my
children’s resilience, I eschew ‘helicopter parenting’ in hopes that they will grow to be resourceful and
courageous. More broadly, insofar as California’s infrastructure is resilient to earthquakes, Californians
are free to not think about it. They can live creatively while others, whose infrastructure is more
precarious, are busy rebuilding and burying the dead .
Ultimately, Resilient Life provides a powerful challenge to the discourse of resilience. The book does
repay sympathetic engagement, but the reader must indulge an excess of jargon and point-scoring. The
authors promise future work developing their Nietzschean conception of life as poetry; it will be
welcome, but I hope it will be more generous and less narcissistic .
No epistemic basis for the K and the alternative won’t have political salience
Kolers 15 - professor of philosophy at University of Louisville (Avery, “Review of Brad Evans and Julian Reid,
Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously.” 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/9999493/Review_of_Brad_Evans_and_Julian_Reid_Resilient_Life_The_Art_of_Living_Dangerously)
//CB
Their critique has two connected, but distinct, core elements. The first is a challenge not to the concept
itself but to its function in ‘neoliberal’ regimes. What could explain the sudden popularity of ‘resilience’
? What makes it so useful not only for scholars but for governments, security firms, and so on? The
merits of the concept as such cannot answer this question; that requires a political analysis of its uptake.
The second element is a challenge to the concept itself, i.e., to the attitude toward life and politics that
it engenders. Evans and Reid claim that ‘resilience’ closes us down as political and creative subjects.
Each of these challenges deserves careful attention. Unfortunately, the authors’ style is the enemy of
the substance. They obfuscate causal claims by both using the passive voice to ascribe actions to no one
in particular, and also imputing agency to constructs like ‘neoliberalism’, ‘the species’, even ‘Life’. They
thereby treat complex, multifaceted phenomena as unitary agents working in concert. Nor do the
authors give evidence for causal claims or empirical assertions; though to be sure, their subject is not
the world itself but the contemporary ‘imaginary’ , so perhaps the scholarly and literary works they cite
count as evidence. And in place of arguments they tend to deploy praise and blame, dividing the
academic world into teams of “intellectuals worthy of the term” (xiv) who see clearly what “the Left
today is forced to think against” (107), vs. “those who only reason to teach mediocrity on account of
their intellectual limitations” (xvi) . The risk is that those who most need to engage with the authors’
genuinely valuable critical analysis will understandably roll their eyes and ignore this book .
Their alternative is rhetorical conjecture not strong enough to overcome their criticism
Mitchell, 14 – Department of Politics at the University of York (Audra, Review of Resilient Life, Antipode,
https://radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/book-review_mitchell-on-evans-and-reid.pdf.
More broadly, Resilient Life makes a substantial contribution to the radical social sciences and
humanities. In particular, it does an excellent job of demonstrating how contributions from the Left, in
an effort to respond ethically to disaster, often collapse into a mood of mourning and become
(unintentional) accomplices of liberal rule. But does Resilient Life itself escape this trap itself?
In order to avoid fuelling nihilism, a project of this kind needs to confront its readers face-on with the
enormities that poison the backgrounds of their lives, which the book does quite effectively. However, it
also needs to bring its readers through the ‘wall of fear’ and activate within them a genuine sense of
the possibility of radical change. In other words, it needs to give concrete indications of how humans
might ‘live dangerously’ in the second sense of the term: that is, in defiance of resilience, and in the
embrace of becoming-other. This does not necessarily require prescriptions for action, but it should
entail a strong sense of what alternatives might look or feel like. As it stands, the invocations of
affirmative sensibilities come across as largely rhetorical , and do not seem strong enough to counter
the weight of the analysis that precedes them. Here, the authors could have drawn more on the work of
authors such as William Connolly (2011), who gives a much more detailed (if still abstract) account of
the micro-politics of responsiveness, attachment, and becoming that might help humans to overcome
ressentiment. In the latter sections of the book, Evans and Reid make appeals to imagination, the artful
cultivation of the self, an ethos of ‘welcoming’ catastrophe, and a poetic sensibility; but what might it be
like to exist in this way? Are there any examples actually existing in the world that we might draw from?
And what might it feel like to ‘live dangerously’ in this second, more affirmative sense?
Cosmopolitanism
2ac – cedes the political
Cosmopolitanism cedes the political to the Right – creates a more virulent state
Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’
network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
(Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State”
Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
Given this dominant imaginary, for some radicals on the Left it made sense to turn to a more mobile and
trans-national civil society, rather than the state for radical politics (Appadurai, 1996; Routledge, 2003).
Within some academic disciplines there was a certain ‘distaste for [the] state’ (Low, 2003, p. 628). For
society did not seem to operate anymore according to the rules of those older, modern, disciplinary
categories, which concerned those radicals from the previous generation, like Foucault or Laclau and
Mouffe. So new forms of analysis and radical politics were developed by new radicals, responding to the
arrival of a new era (Featherstone, 2003; Anand et al., 2004). Hardt and Negri (2000), for example,
talked up the idea that the new phase of capitalism operated far beyond the nation state, directly
organising brain and body, through the complex interactions of globalised systems of trade and global
media. Hardt and Negri therefore sought to work with the stakes of radical politics, as they saw them at
the time, pre-crisis radicalising the post-modern categories4 of a global networked society itself, to
create a borderless, less oppressive world. When these new radicals developed their manifesto, it
seemed an almost natural conclusion to seek to get rid of outdated modes of representational politics,
instead radicalising the deterritorialised potential of the multitude into new trans-national forms of biopower, by intensifying this new phase of capitalism. This seemed logical, when all the analysis pointed to
the way that globalised capitalism was going precrisis— states were holding back the revolutionary
potential of the multitude.
As well as those radicals who advocate a global civil society ‘from below’, like Hardt and Negri and Mary
Kaldor, there are of course those who advocate global civil society ‘from above’, in the form of some
sort of global governance, such as the United Nations. Developing theories of globalisation in a
particular way, many have argued for a move away ‘from the national to the cosmopolitan public
sphere’, claiming that we are witnessing ‘the formation of a global polity’ (Ko¨hler, 1998, p. 231). The
reality is of course that this ‘global polity’ is dominated by quasi-governmental organisations and elites
that claim to speak on behalf of civil society, often without being elected by it. Nevertheless, as David
Harvey (2000, p. 529) has written: ‘Cosmopolitanism is back.’ This revival has been led by authors such
as David Held, Daniele Archibugi, Richard Falk, and Martin Ko¨hler (see Archibugi et al., 1998, for some
examples). As David Chandler (2004, p. 320) said pre-crisis, such authors tend to look upon
representational politics as a ‘mechanism of domination’. The belief is that trends in globalisation have
shifted the way in which government is being and should be done.
Yet as Will Hutton (2009, p. 214) said post-crisis, on 5 December 2008:
to those who say that globalisation really constrains states, I say well look at the bail out of the last six or
eight weeks. Look at the way in which when push came to shove, it was nation states that had to write
taxpayers’ money to support Western banks, and suddenly we were all reminded that these nation
states that allegedly had little or no power were, when the system broke, the only thing that you had.
It would have been unthinkable a few years ago that the government of the USA would own 60% of
General Motors. It would have been unthinkable that British citizens would, without any major protests,
allow 8% of national income to be invested in failing private banks, making the state the major
shareholder in some of the world’s largest companies, like the Royal Bank of Scotland (84% in this case).
From the USA to India, as recent elections reveal and trends in the global economy suggest, the new era
is going to be one that extends the powers of government. Elected governments have expressed their
power in an unparalleled way since 2007. Those who command the representational politics of the state
command an incredibly powerful force. Radicals will need to work with the new tide of history, and the
new opportunities it presents.
As Saskia Sassen (2009) says, in her contribution to a recent analysis of radical politics today,
the radical Left now needs to re-engage with the state . A point that wraps up this section of my
essay is that in that same book Chantal Mouffe (2009) looks back over the past decade or so,
noticing two dominant trends in radical politics. The first is ‘critique as withdrawal’ from the
state; the second is ‘critique as engagement’ with it. She says that many radicals believe withdrawal
is more valuable. This was (and probably still is) the dominant trend within contemporary
radical politics. And it is this trend that we need to reverse. As I will now discuss, the new stakes
also demand that the radical Left re-engage in representational politics more seriously, if the
Right is not to continue its rise to power.
2ac – cosmopolitanism bad
A cosmopolitan ethic is driven by Western paternalism that assumes the third world
is unfit to help themselves and establishes Western superiority
Dhawan 13- Professor for Political Theory at the University of Innsbruck (Nikita Dhawan, Fall/ Winter
2013, “Human Rights between Past and Future”, Qui Parle, Vol. 22, No. 1pp. 139-166, JSTOR)//Yak
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck points out that, because we live in an increasingly interdependent
world, we face common threats to our ecologies, finances, and security, so that any violation of rights in
one part of the world is felt everywhere. This “globalization of risk” unites us in our equal vulnerability,
providing the basis for the “cosmopolitan moment” of a world risk society.9 In response to the question
“How can the relationship between global risk and the creation of a global public be understood?,” Beck
discusses a “globalization of compassion” (W, 114), as seen in global media events such as the Haitian
earthquake and the tsunamis, spectacularly demonstrated by the unprecedented readiness of citizens in
faraway countries to donate to relief efforts. World risk society’s shocking threats open up questions of
social accountability and responsibility that cannot be adequately addressed either in terms of national
politics or the available forms of international cooperation. Public debate enables a range of voices to be
heard and the public to participate in decisions that would otherwise evade their involvement. For Beck,
international civil society actors are thus given new opportunities to intercede in the fields of human
rights and global justice and in the search for a new grand narrative of radical- democratic globalization.
Beck endorses a “cosmopolitan realpolitik” (W, 368), viewing global institutions such as the United
Nations and the International Criminal Court, as well as global NGOs and transnational social
movements such as the World Social Forum, as legitimate vanguards of global governance. International
NGOs like Amnesty International and Greenpeace enjoy a high level of legitimacy in the public sphere
and are increasingly entrusted with the task of globally monitoring issues of human rights and ecology.
Although Nussbaum and Beck enthusiastically endorse cosmopolitanism as a “solution” for past
injustices and a “promise” of better times to come, I want to emphasize the complicities between liberal
cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity and the global structures of domination they claim to resist.
Pheng Cheah argues that such a critique of cosmopolitanism’s elitist detachment is motivated by a vision
of cosmopolitanism as an “intellectual ethos” espoused by a “select clerisy” lacking feasible political
structures for the universal institutionalization of its ideals.10 But I object to the project of
cosmopolitanism, because it fails to seriously address the historical processes through which certain
individuals are placed in a situation from which they can aspire to global solidarity and universal
benevolence— in other words, it lacks a concept of cosmopolitanism as the self- indulgence of the
altruistic and the magnanimous.
Nussbaum, to her credit, is trying to explore ways of improving people’s lives. But that itself is the
problem. Her attempt to act in the interests of distant others, to look beyond her position and make
everyone have as good a life as “ours,” disregards the connection between the well- off “here” and the
impoverished “elsewhere.” As Spivak has argued, Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism appears profoundly
provincial, in its too- hasty assumption, as “given,” that a “first- world” metropolitan academic and a
“third world” sexed subaltern subject would share fundamental aims and interests.11 Nussbaum firmly
believes in a critical Socratic pedagogy12 that would circumvent Eurocentrism through cultivating
sensitivity to other cultures and perspectives, even as she asserts that she “would rather risk charges of
imperialism than refuse to take a moral stand on urgent issues facing women” (WCD, 2).
In contrast to Nussbaum’s faith in cosmopolitanism’s self-correctional reflexivity, Spivak diagnoses in the
cosmopolitan call to align ourselves with our fellow citizens a shift from “the white man’s burden” to the
“the burden of the fittest.”13 This revision of social Darwinism defines the “unfit” as unable either to
help or to govern themselves. The distance between those who “dispense” justice, aid, rights, and
solidarity and those who are simply coded as “victims of wrongs” and thus as “receivers” remains a
signature of historical violence (OA, 266n14). When progressive activists and intellectuals intervene
“benevolently” in the struggles of subaltern groups for greater recognition and rights, they reinforce the
very power relations that they seek to demolish.
Conversely, Beck proposes that our common vulnerability in the face of risk brings us together. But as
we all know, though we might be facing the same storm, we are not all in the same boat, and that
makes all the difference. For Beck, the tsunamis resulted in the “globalization of compassion”; but, as an
instructive contrast, I would like to consider a moment in Spivak’s narrative of a major cyclone in
Bangladesh in 1991 and the subsequent intervention by Médecins sans frontières. The MSF workers,
none of whom spoke the local language, were obliged to work through interpreters. When Spivak later
arrived at one of the villages where she had worked actively in the past, some of the villagers ran up to
her, saying, “We don’t want to be saved, we want to die, they are treating us like animals.”14 In a
situation like this, and without any common language, can we even think of solidarity? For these
reasons, the Sri Lankan feminist Malathi De Alwis15 has asked if we are truly capable of empathizing
with the pain of others, and even if we should be allowed to witness their pain if this witnessing only
serves to affirm our humanity and our capacity to care. Correspondingly, of course, we need to find
“authentic victims” who truly deserve our benevolence. What do we do with our “will to empower” the
“disenfranchised and the vulnerable,” and how do we deal with those who refuse to be interpellated as
appropriate objects of our solidarity?
Cosmopolitanism has an authoritarian underside that reinforces state power
Pallitto and Heyman 8 – Political Science, Seton Hall University; Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, The University of Texas at El Paso (Robert and Josiah, “Theorizing Cross-Border Mobility:
Surveillance, Security and Identity”, 2008, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/viewFile/3426/3389) KW
One such analysis involves the concept of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism covers various
phenomena within which political and cultural imaginations become relatively unbounded, losing their
localized prejudices and sentiments, and thus cosmopolitanism is, predictably, often celebrated as a
triumph of technology, or of social-cultural development (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). However, its
benefits are unequally distributed, and they come at a cost . The mobility freedom enjoyed by some
depends on an “authoritarian underside” that denies movement to others (Sparke, 2006: 173, 174).
Mobility freedom can be seen as a right or as a privilege, but either way it usually comes with greater
speed of movement and lower designation of risk; that is, high rights and high speed are mutually
reinforcing, and they are associated with lower risk. Those designated as “higher-risk,” on the other
hand, will experience risk in a double sense: they are seen to pose a higher risk of harm to others, and at
the same time they themselves are more at risk for state scrutiny, detention and even mistreatment.
Ulrich Beck (1992,1999) sees risks as products of modern and post-modern technological, social, and
economic processes, creating new, shared domains of political collectivity that cut across traditionally
bounded polities. Risk calculations made on a global scale can drive political decisionmaking, with the
resulting calculations shaping the space for action in a postmodern context. This may be plausible for
some issues (such as global warming), but as our analysis of securitization of movement after 9/11
shows, world risk may also result in greater differentiation of treatment and potentially segmentation of
subjectivities. When applied to social groups, risk calculation is problematic because of its stratifying
effect that entrenches the unequal position of those at the losing end of the rights/risk/speed calculus.
2ac – state good
Transforming state institutions from within is a better political strategy – giving up on
the state fully cedes it to corporate control and subjects the subaltern to the violence
of the market
Dhawan, 13- NIKITA DHAWAN is a junior professor of political science for gender/postcolonial studies
at Goethe University in Frankfurt. (Nikita Dhawan, Winter 2013, “Coercive Cosmopolitanism and
Impossible Solidarities”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, JSTOR)
The other significant challenge lies in negotiating the Enlightenment legacies of cosmopolitanism,
democracy, justice, and rights without reproducing the constitutive violence that marked the emergence
of these normative ideals. Spivak proposes that the aporetic, simultaneously imperial and counterimperial, nature of the Enlightenment makes the exploration of possible ways to mobilize antipaternalistic forms of Enlightenment more necessary than nativist denunciations of the legacies of
Enlightenment or ethnocentric searches for “pure” non-Western knowledge systems. Despite their
white, bourgeois, masculinist bias, Enlightenment ideals are eminently indispensable, and we “cannot
not want them,” even as we must doggedly critique their coercive mobilization in service [End Page 156]
of the continued justification of imperialism. Spivak proposes an “affirmative sabotage” of those
Enlightenment principles “with which we are in sympathy, enough to subvert!”32 One etymology of
“sabotage” traces the word back to sabot (wooden shoe): workers in fifteenth-century Holland would
throw their clogs into the gears of textile looms, breaking their cogs lest the automated machines render
the human workers obsolete. The saboteur aims to subvert through obstruction and disruption, through
intentionally withdrawing efficiency. Spivak supplements the term with the adjective “affirmative,”
devising a strategy in which the instruments of colonialism are turned around into tools for
transgression, poison turned into medicine . She explains: “The invention of the telephone by a
European upper class male in no way preempts its being put to the use of an anti-imperialist
revolution.”33 Thus decolonization is not about forsaking the “master’s tools” but about enabling
subaltern access to these tools .34 The problem is that native elites have monopolized the “master’s
tools” and use them not to dismantle the master’s house but to cement their own hegemony.
Transnational elites have an interest in preventing subaltern agency and manipulating the tools to serve
their purposes.
The project of desubalternization poses some interesting questions, which it leaves necessarily
unanswered. How can we listen to and learn from those who have been exiled from intellectual labor,
from those who do not know the larger script? How can we resolve the paradox in which the intellectual
must learn to be transformed through an ethical encounter with the subaltern, even as he or she must
create conditions conducive to subaltern agency, activate habits of democracy, and insert subalterns
into hegemony, which in turn reinforce the agency of the vanguard? Finally, we must ask: What is the
role of “wrongs” in the constitution of our ethical agency? Spivak stresses that wrongs is not the only
antonym of rights; rather, responsibility is another possible antonym that has not yet been derived from
rights. Differentiating between “rights-based” and “responsibility-based” subordinate cultures (oa , 37)
impels us to rethink the meaning of responsibility, not as the duty of the “fitter self” for the other but as
responsibility to the other (ph , 180; oa , 28). Spivak moves beyond the traditional [End Page 157]
aporias of ethics and politics: here ethics is imagined not as a self-driven political calculus of doing the
right thing but rather as openness toward the imagined agency of the other; and political work is
marked by uncertainty, the ethical interrupting the political even as they become more and more
entangled. Spivak describes critical practice through the example of brushing your teeth: although you
know that you will die, you still brush your teeth as an act of defiance of mortality.35 Revisiting Lenin’s
suggestion in “What Is to Be Done?,” Spivak recommends that vanguardism be supplanted by the slow,
patient work of “building up of a will to social justice for all” in place of the promotion of self-interest
and consciousness raising. Changing the intellectual’s habits of mind while training the subaltern to
undertake “intellectual performance” involves much more than producing “educated electorates.” In
contrast to Rousseau’s dictum “Men must be forced to be free,” Spivak outlines the impossible, albeit
necessary, task of uncoercive rearrangement of desires.
The task of undoing subalternity demands the Gramscian/Spivakian intellectual to be a “permanent
persuader” even as the question of how uncoercive persuasion should function poses itself more and
more forcefully. In contrast to Nussbaum’s project of educating “intelligent world citizens” (np , 100), I
find more compelling Spivak’s idea of preparing subalterns to enter the circuit of hegemony so that they
are capable of governing. The challenge is to transform the subaltern from an object of benevolence
into an agent of democracy. Instead of ensuring the survival of the suffering classes, thus reducing the
deprived to their basic needs (themselves coded as transparent to our reading practices), decolonization
engages with the imaginations and desires of both the dispensers and the receivers of justice. Against
theories that presume sovereign subjects, who know what they need and how to get it, Spivak unpacks
the discontinuity of interest and desire, namely, how subjects perceive unpleasure as pleasure to
protect themselves. Rather than teach self-help or seek to ensure immediate material comfort, Spivak
attempts to act as a conduit between class-privileged and subaltern subjects and to construct a
necessary but impossible collectivity: her aim is the “uncoercive undermining of the class habit [End
Page 158] of obedience” (“ss ,” 562), to elicit consent rather than compliance (“ss ,” 558).
The “epistemic discontinuity” between the advocates of global justice and human rights and those they
protect is a constant reminder of the subaltern as a “space of difference.” The subaltern has been torn
away from the public sphere, and this tear must be invisibly sutured through epistemic transformation,
as a supplement to infrastructural support (oa , 34–35). This demands a “wider egoity” of the
postcolonial feminist: we are forced to think beyond ourselves. We have to resist becoming “selfselected moral entrepreneurs who distribute philanthrophy without democracy” (“ss ,” 482). Spivak
reminds us that colonialism was carried out by ethical subjects like us with good intentions. Directly
scapegoating colonialism masks our complicity in global injustice.36
Spivak examines a case of sati in 1987 in India, in which the mother of the eighteen-year-old Rup
Kanwar, who had been married for only eight months, smiled at her daughter’s suicide and said that she
was proud. She points out that feminist activists in India could not come to terms with this smile. To
remove this smile involves engaging in a painstaking and patient work of epistemic change, which any
“mere” criminalization of gender violence will not achieve.37 Instead of seeing ourselves the altruistic
solvers of the world’s problems, as those who have the responsibility as well as the capacity to
implement global democracy, peace, and justice, we have to learn to see ourselves as part of the
problem. This entails “a productive acknowledgement of complicity” wherein we need to interrogate
the processes that convert us into dispensers of justice and rights. Self-doubt and modesty are
important aspects of ethico-political practice, but not in the Christian sense of “selflessness.” Instead,
we must question the invincibility of our convictions (“we ,” 532). As Spivak warns: “History is larger
than personal goodwill. In this business of solidarity with the poorest of the poor in the global south
personal goodwill is not enough. That’s a Christian thing to think that you can undo thousands of years
of oppression by just being nice” (“mg ,” 27). In addition to the necessary collective efforts to reform
laws and relations of production and to improve access to education and health care (cpr , 383), [End
Page 159] we must undo the rupture between the privileged classes and the gendered subaltern, and
this will not be done through top-down solidarity politics. Spivak cautions that without persistent efforts
to establish ethical singularity with subalterns (cpr , 384) first-world activism (US-based anti-sweatshop
consumer boycott campaigns, for example) can take the form of the highly damaging “moral
imperialism” of “solidarity tourists” (cpr , 415). Instead, the “uncoercive rearrangement of desires”
through an interruptive, supplementary education, the remapping of subject formation through
“epistemic change” at both ends of postcoloniality, is the heart of the project of decolonization. This
entails a recoding of our reading practices of interpreting and acting in the world. We, transnational
elites, urgently need to rethink and reimagine our understanding of politics by examining how, despite
our best efforts, subaltern groups remain the objects of benevolence and not the agents of
transformation.
The relationship of democratization and decolonization to the indigenous subalterns remains a tenuous
one. Even as subaltern groups weather the impact of neocolonial globalization, they remain marginal to
both nation-states and to civil society. Resistance, for subaltern groups, lies not in anti-statism or
postnationalism, but instead in their insertion into the existing framework of the nation-state .38
Despite the nation-state’s crisis of legitimacy, it is dangerous to disregard the immense political
implications of state-phobic positions , which are immensely popular in radical discourses in the West
(“cn ,” 106). Postcolonial states are still the most important mediators between the injunctions of global
capital and disenfranchised groups. We cannot understand the state narrowly as a repressive apparatus;
instead, we must envisage a different state capable of articulating the will of excluded subaltern
populations (“cn ,” 106). To a large extent, the dictates of neoliberal political economy, which posits a
false opposition between the ills of state planning and the virtues of free markets, drive this attack on
the state. What this operation conveniently conceals is that neoliberalism itself requires the state as its
precondition (“cn ,” 114). Thus we should not frame the discussion as for or against the state, but
instead focus on how the interests of disenfranchised groups can be articulated in the struggle for
hegemony, through [End Page 160] the institutionalization of the redistributive functions of the state
(“cn ,” 114). We should direct our efforts toward enabling subaltern groups to make claims on the state
within the formal grammar of rights and citizenship to activate a “democracy from below.”
Security
2ac threats real
Some threats are objective – defer to expert judgments, the alternative isn’t credible
Cole, 12 – professor of law at Georgetown (David, “Confronting the Wizard of Oz: National Security,
Expertise, and Secrecy”, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1617, http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub
Rana notes that in the early days of the republic, every able-bodied man had to serve in the militia,
whereas today only a small (and largely disadvantaged) portion of society serves in the military.11 But
serving in the militia and making decisions about national security are two different matters. The early
days of the Republic were at least as dominated by “elites” as today. Rana points to no evidence that
decisions about foreign affairs were any more democratic then than now. And, of course, the nation as a
whole was far less democratic, as the majority of its inhabitants could not vote at all.12 Rather than
moving away from a golden age of democratic decision-making, it seems more likely that we have
simply replaced one group of elites (the aristocracy) with another (the experts).
Second, to the extent that there has been an epistemological shift with respect to national security, it
seems likely that it is at least in some measure a response to objective conditions, not just an ideological
development. If so, it’s not clear that we can solve the problem merely by “thinking differently” about
national security. The world has, in fact, become more interconnected and dangerous than it was when
the Constitution was drafted. At our founding, the oceans were a significant buffer against attacks,
weapons were primitive, and travel over long distances was extremely arduous and costly. The attacks
of September 11, 2001, or anything like them, would have been inconceivable in the eighteenth or
nineteenth centuries. Small groups of non-state actors can now inflict the kinds of attacks that once
were the exclusive province of states. But because such actors do not have the governance
responsibilities that states have, they are less susceptible to deterrence. The Internet makes information
about dangerous weapons and civil vulnerabilities far more readily available, airplane travel dramatically
increases the potential range of a hostile actor, and it is not impossible that terrorists could obtain and
use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.13 The knowledge necessary to monitor nuclear weapons,
respond to cyber warfare, develop technological defenses to technological threats, and gather
intelligence is increasingly specialized. The problem is not just how we think about security threats; it is
also at least in part objectively based.
Third, deference to expertise is not always an error; sometimes it is a rational response to complexity.
Expertise is generally developed by devoting substantial time and attention to a particular set of
problems. We cannot possibly be experts in everything that concerns us. So I defer to my son on the
remote control, to my wife on directions (and so much else), to the plumber on my leaky faucet, to the
electrician when the wiring starts to fail, to my doctor on my back problems, and to my mutual fund
manager on investments. I could develop more expertise in some of these areas, but that would mean
less time teaching, raising a family, writing, swimming, and listening to music. The same is true, in
greater or lesser degrees, for all of us. And it is true at the level of the national community, not only for
national security, but for all sorts of matters. We defer to the Environmental Protection Agency on
environmental matters, to the Federal Reserve Board on monetary policy, to the Department of
Agriculture on how best to support farming, and to the Federal Aviation Administration and the
Transportation Security Administration on how best to make air travel safe. Specialization is not
something unique to national security. It is a rational response to an increasingly complex world in
which we cannot possibly spend the time necessary to gain mastery over all that affects our daily lives.
If our increasing deference to experts on national security issues is in part the result of objective
circumstances, in part a rational response to complexity, and not necessarily less “elitist” than earlier
times, then it is not enough to “think differently” about the issue. We may indeed need to question the
extent to which we rely on experts, but surely there is a role for expertise when it comes to assessing
threats to critical infrastructure, devising ways to counter those threats, and deploying technology to
secure us from technology’s threats. As challenging as it may be to adjust our epistemological
framework, it seems likely that even if we were able to sheer away all the unjustified deference to
“expertise,” we would still need to rely in substantial measure on experts.
The issue, in other words, is not whether to rely on experts, but how to do so in a way that nonetheless
retains some measure of self-government. The need for specialists need not preclude democratic
decision-making. Consider, for example, the model of adjudication. Trials involving products liability,
antitrust, patents, and a wide range of other issues typically rely heavily on experts.14 But critically, the
decision is not left to the experts. The decision rests with the jury or judge, neither of whom purports to
be an expert. Experts testify, but do so in a way that allows for adversarial testing and requires them to
explain their conclusions to laypersons, who render judgment informed, but not determined, by the
expert testimony.
The US is more likely to underestimate threats
Schweller, 4 – professor of political science at Ohio State (Randall, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical
Realist Theory of Underbalancing” International Security, JSTOR)
Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject. Indeed,
Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of
wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been made with equal
veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library shelves are
filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of domestic
politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there
have been few studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain
why states have with some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival.
There may be some cognitive or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a
commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people are, |in some way, "out to get
you" or are planning to do one harm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the opposite
psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet, we do not
have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that describes this
pathology (hubris and over- confidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I
have described).
That noted, international relations theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of
states' underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used,
however, in a disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the
naivete associated with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and
inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and un- appeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the
analogy either mistakenly causes leaders to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is
deliberately used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public.
A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on underreactions to threats, however, is the
tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to
provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help resolve or manage urgent security
problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field
of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security that have
had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the dangers of
underreacting to or underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear revolution was not about over- kill
but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic
consequences of miscalculation, accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were
more concerned about overreacting to threats than underresponding to them. At a time when all of
humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing
the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from
ambiguous actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was
that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process
and bring on a war that nobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and
thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94
Now that the Cold War is over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I
have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a prudent
and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with
recent realist studies on imperial under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed
Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the
national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power
(i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did not take
advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the institutional state
strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument
with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high,
and they are unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided society.
The arguments presented here also suggest that elite fragmentation and dis- agreement within a
competitive political process, which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist policies, are
more likely to produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent
states.96 This is because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any,
compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic environment is always somewhat
uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to
generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This dynamic captures the
underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In
addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that regularly
intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.
Countersurveillance
2ac – Antisurveillance fails
Antisurveillance fails because it doesn’t offer an actual alternative to the state
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
Instead of disrupting the surveillance that is carried out by powerful organisations, another approach is
to undertake "countersurveillance": surveillance of powerful organisations. Today, large organisations
and powerful individuals have as much privacy as money will buy, and most surveillance is carried out
against the weak, disorganised and defenceless. The builders of weapons of mass destruction use every
available means to ensure secrecy while spying on their enemies (foreign powers and peace
movements). Can this pattern be challenged and reversed by promoting surveillance of the rich,
powerful and dangerous?
The challenge is enormous, but some courageous individuals and groups have made efforts in this
direction. A few investigators have probed the corridors of power.[10] Their exposés are incredibly
threatening to organisational elites simply because they reveal what is actually happening on the inside.
Such information undoubtedly contributes to better strategies by social movements. Many more
exposés are needed. Even more daring is spying on spies and publicising the results, such as the efforts
of the magazine Counterspy to expose CIA agents. This was so threatening to the spy agency that special
legislation was passed to stop such revelations.
Much more could be said of the potential for disrupting surveillance. The techniques to do this deserve
much more study and experimentation. It does seem, though, that they offer at most one part of a
solution: they interfere with surveillance but do not offer an alternative to the systems that generate
and thrive on it. Furthermore, as the experience of Earth First! has shown, disruption sometimes triggers
increased surveillance and repression. To achieve a society with less surveillance, disruption is far from
an ideal approach.
1ar – Antisurveillance fails
Anti-surveillance fails – state surveillance is too strong, the alt is a palliative
Green 99 – London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK (Stephen, “A PLAGUE ON THE
PANOPTICON: Surveillance and power in the global information economy, Information, Communication
& Society, 2:1, 26-44”, 1999, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/136911899359745)//AS
The question, however, is how far this cyberspace utopianism actually impacts on social and political
realities. Surveillance may ‘flow’ out of these communities, it might express grief and injustice, but the
danger is that it doesn’t do anything. The surveillance target is ‘neoliberalism’, but the resources
available are painfully limited, in comparison to what are perceived to be the ‘enemy’ assets of
electronic listening-devices, infrared heat-sensors, aerial surveillance and well-established DEA/CIA
ground-operatives (<http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/~zapatistas/infowar/>). Not only this but the entire
battalion of ‘neoliberal’ forces from Wall Street to the Congress have been allied against what is
perceived to be threatening ‘instability’. Linking networks may indeed spread information, but the
challenge which confronts these self-consciously counter-hegemonic groups is converting information
into productive political action and change. It is possible. Amnesty International, for instance, actively
employs e-mail technology to connect local human rights monitors with a large and diverse audience
(<http://www.amnesty. org>). This enables rapid protest after an arrest and has been found to be
instrumental in the early release of political prisoners. Yet there are limits: the vast majority of
‘backstreet’, non-media-friendly protest groups do not receive attention, be it in virtual or in the more
material forms of reality.
Disruption tactics fail – too small scale and vulnerable to federal infiltration
Martin, 98 – Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Brian,
“Antisurveillance” Information Liberation, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il04.html
Corrupting databases and other ways of disrupting surveillance challenge the encroachments of the
surveillance society, but they have a number of limitations. Introducing errors into databases sounds
effective, but databases are full of errors already. How much difference would more errors make? The
impact would need to be financially significant (even more wrong names on mailing lists!) or politically
potent (names of powerful people on embarrassing lists).
More importantly, disrupting surveillance in this fashion is, by necessity, mostly an individual activity. It
provides a poor basis for mobilising a social movement; instead, it tends to breed secrecy and
vanguards. Such secret activities are ideal for the duels of spy versus counterspy. When it comes to
spying and infiltration, social movements are likely to come off second best to state agencies.
This was certainly the case with Earth First!, which was infiltrated by the FBI. Some Earth First!ers have
renounced sabotage and secret tactics and, as a result, been able to forge links with workers in a way
impossible using individualist, secretive methods.
Bottom up reform fails – the state can track movements
de Ville, 13- Geraud de Ville is a PhD researcher on on indigenous issues, ICTs and development at The
Open University
(Geraud, 9/29/13, “Megaphone for social movements: campaigning in the surveillance state”,
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2013/nov/29/surveillanceonline-campaigning-tips)//Yak
From the Arab revolutions to indigenous-led campaigns and, more recently, the spontaneous social
movements that burst in Turkey and Brazil over the last three years, the internet seems to have turned
into a megaphone for social movements.
The networked nature of web 2.0 applications, in particular social media, and the explosion of users
worldwide provide citizens and activists with unprecedented tools to communicate their ideas, mobilise
supporters and take action outside established hierarchical power structures. Platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become privileged fields of action for professional campaigners as
well as grassroots movements.
With their built-in feature allowing many-to-many communication, social media have revolutionised the
way information is produced and shared: everyone is encouraged to participate, share opinions, pictures
and videos on issues they care about or witness and instantly upload them from their smartphone on
the Internet. Institutions and individuals that represent public authority are now under constant citizen
scrutiny.
They know that any abuse, any mistake can spark online retaliation and take proportions that may be
hard to control. Many activists and academics see in digital networks a new source of power that will
eventually force the ruling elite around the world to become more transparent, more accountable and
protect human rights and democracy.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a technological fix to a complex problem and, the solution itself
has quite a few downsides. Indeed, while digital technologies have helped the success of social and
revolutionary movements, they also tremendously enhance the effectiveness of state surveillance.
Due to the supervision they exert on the physical infrastructure, governments are tempted to use digital
networks to control populations by monitoring communications, blocking access of certain users or even
tracking and imprisoning dissidents, e.g. in China and Iran.
Recent revelations by the Guardian on the surveillance system set up by the US National Security Agency
(NSA) and its British counterpart: the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have shown
that this is not an exclusive feature of authoritarian or non-democratic regimes.
2ac – sousveillance
Sousveillance is a flawed theory – farmer's dilemma and lack of trust
Danaher 14 - John Danaher holds a PhD from University College Cork (Ireland) and is currently a
lecturer in law at NUI Galway (Ireland). His research interests are eclectic, ranging broadly from
philosophy of religion to legal theory, with particular interests in human enhancement and neuroethics.
(John, "What's the case for sousveillance?", IEET, Feb 10, 2014,
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/danaher20140210)//A-Sharma
Mann and Ali are clear that "authority" here is understood in terms of ability and legitimacy. In other words, a person possesses authority over
another if they have the ability and the legitimacy to impose their will on that other. This is the first slip-up in the argument for me.
They
explicitly say that legitimacy is understood in a "normative sense", but I don't see why they say that. Indeed, many
of the most problematic cases of surveillance — ones that sousveillance may be able to counteract —
arise precisely because the person doing watching can illegitimately impose their will on another.
Furthermore, depending on how you define legitimacy, this definition of "authority" risks foreclosing much of the
ethical debate about surveillance and sousveillance. If legitimacy entails the moral right to enforce your
will, it's difficult to see how or why the use of surveillance equipment would be of major ethical concern.
I would suggest, then, that we drop "legitimacy" from the definition of authority. This raises the next issue. It
seems obvious that in making a case for sousveillance you must, implicitly or explicitly, believe that there is something morally problematic or
sub-optimal about a world in which surveillance dominates. But what is that something? Well, first of all, let's consider the advantages of
surveillance. Clearly, surveillance has advantages from the perspective of authority. It can be used to police and enforce behavioural norms (e.g.
street cameras and laws against vandalism) or to prevent the breach of such norms. Consequently, to the extent that these norms are morally
valid, surveillance is of benefit to us all. The obvious disadvantages of surveillance are when it goes too far, and personal rights such as the right
to privacy are traded-off against the good of enforcement, or when the norms being enforced are not morally valid. Another, perhaps more
subtle, problem with a surveillance culture is best-expressed using republican conceptions of liberty and non-domination. One thing that
constant surveillance seems to carry with it is the implicit threat that if you do something to displease the de facto authority figure, you risk
punishment or sanction. You live in the permanent shadow of a threat. This will force you to engage in ingratiating, self-censoring and extracautious acts. The position strikes me as being similar to that of the happy slave in neo-republican political theory. The happy slave is happy
only to the extent that he or she doesn't step out of line. That's not real freedom (according to the republican theory). Those us living under the
domination of surveilling authorities might have a similarly restricted type of freedom. This problem of surveillance and domination needs
further exploration, but it seems important to me. Indeed, I think it can be used to great effect when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses
of Mann's case for sousveillance. Let's turn to that case next. 2. Trust, Exchange and the Case for Sousveillance The main
argument that
Ali and Mann make for sousveillance is based on the value of efficient economic exchange. As any classical
economist will tell you, free and fully-informed exchanges between rational agents should increase societal well-being. The idea being that such
a system of exchange ensures that resources are distributed to their highest expected value uses. Now, there
are many problems
with this model, particularly in terms of the idealistic assumptions one needs to make in order for the
conclusion to hold. Nevertheless, Mann and Ali's arguments are based on the notion that sousveillance gets us closer to those idealistic
assumptions. Central to this argument is an analysis of the conditions for efficient economic exchange. It has
long been clear that social cooperation can be mutually advantageous. It has also long been clear that
such cooperation carries risks. Hume's story of the two corn farmers illustrates the point rather nicely.
Imagine that there are two farmers, A and B, both with crops of corn. These crops will ripen at different times.
Each farmer will need the help of the other to ensure that they can harvest their crops, and put them in
storage in good time. Without such help, a portion of the crops will start rotting in the field. In this case, cooperation would be mutually
beneficial. The problem is that a purely rationalistic analysis suggests that they won't help each other: if farmer
A helps B before his crops ripen, then farmer B will have no real incentive to help farmer A later on. Reasoning backwards, A will expect B to
betray him and so won't bother helping B. This is sometimes referred to as the Farmers' Dilemma. There are various solutions
to this dilemma. A legal system that enforces promises is one: if the breach of promise carries with it a risk of legal sanction, then more people
might be inclined to keep their promises. So too is trust: simply voluntarily committing yourself to help another, in spite of the risk. Some
people argue that trust is a social emotion that evolved so that we could solve the problem of social cooperation. And some people argue that
trust of this sort is incredibly virtuous. Something that society should be keen to promote and protect. Indeed, trust plays a considerable role in
many important social exchanges. People can feel offended if you don't trust them, and may back out of an exchange if you seem to lack trust.
Think, for example, of how betrayed you might feel if you caught your partner snooping through your text messages just to make sure you were
being faithful. Ali and Mann argue that sousveillance can facilitate beneficial social exchanges. They say it does so by making the parties to an
exchange less vulnerable to exploitation. The mechanism for this is not stated, but I assume the authors are imagining something like the
following: There is a system in place that will enforce promises if they are breached (this system could be a formal legal system or an informal
social one). This system relies on proof of claim before enforcement. Those who use sousveillance will record every detail of every negotiated
promise. In this way, they will always be able to prove a claim should they need to rely on the social system of enforcement. Consequently,
every exchange with a sousveiller will carry an implicit threat of enforcement. If both parties are sousveillers (as they should be according to Ali
and Mann), they can keep each other honest, and thereby clear the path to beneficial exchange. In this sense, sousveillance is a trustsubstitute: it overrides the vulnerabilities inherent in exchange without forcing us to voluntarily assume the risk of exploitation. To lay this out
more formally: (1) If mutually advantageous social exchanges carried less risk of exploitation, people will be more likely to undertake them. (2)
Sousveillance helps to reduce the risk of exploitation inherent in mutually advantageous social exchanges. (3) Therefore, sousveillance increases
the likelihood of people undertaking mutually advantageous social exchanges. We've already considered the case for premise (2) in the
preceding paragraph. I want to dwell on premise (1). It seems to me that this
is potentially vulnerable to a counterargument.
The counterargument brings us back to the virtue of trust. Although some exchanges could be facilitated by sousveillance, it
could also be the case that people insist on the voluntary assumption of risk as a gesture of good faith
prior to entering into an exchange. We could imagine, for example, one of the CEOs of two major corporations,
negotiating a merger deal, asking the other to "switch off" his sousveillance equipment before they
agree on the final terms of the deal. After all, if this merger is going to work, they need to trust each
other, and they can't do that if they are constantly monitoring and recording one another's words. This
might, of course, be terribly naive, and agreeing to this gesture of good faith may be costly, but humans are sometimes irrational
and one could imagine this kind of insistence taking place. What matters is whether the number of
valuable exchanges in which people insist upon trust, will be larger than the number of valuable
exchanges facilitated by sousveillance. In their discussion, Ali and Mann break the possible exchanges down into three
categories: (i) those that are unaffected by the presence of sousveillance; (ii) those that are facilitated by sousveillance; and (iii) those that are
discouraged or prevented by sousveillance. As long as categories (i) and (ii) are larger and more valuable than category (iii), a case for
sousveillance can be made. So which is it? Ali and Mann try to argue that the number of exchanges in category (iii) will be minimal. They do so
on the grounds of desensitisation. As sousveillance becomes more widespread, people will adjust their expectations to accommodate it. They
will be less "creeped out" or offended by its use. Arguably, this has already happened with surveillance technologies. Whenever I get the train, I
see little signs reminding me that my every movement is being recorded by CCTV. It doesn't bother me. I've become so used to it. Why
wouldn't the same thing happen with sousveillance? I think there are some problems with this argument. While it is
true that we could become desensitised to sousveillance if it achieved sufficient social penetration, that
seems to assume what needs to be proved, namely: that sousveillance will achieve sufficient social
penetration. Elsewhere in their article, Ali and Mann defend this on the grounds of economic inevitability: sousveillance will be so
economically beneficial that it will become widespread. But, again, that seems to assume what needs to be proved: that sousveillance really is
If the economic benefit of technology depends on whether it facilitates voluntary
exchange between parties, and if a sufficient number of parties are offended by the use of sousveillance
technologies, then they won't be economically beneficial. People won't consent to their use. This is markedly
different from the surveillance case. Since surveillance technologies are imposed from the top-down — by de facto
authorities — they don't require the immediate consent of those being watched. Economic exchanges
arguably do. Admittedly, this is a technical objection, based more on how Ali and Mann make their argument, than on what I think the
economically beneficial.
reality is going to be. The fact is that the marketplace is currently characterised by inequalities of bargaining power between parties to
economic exchange. It is perfectly possible that those inequalities create conditions in which veillance technologies will get a foothold. This may
clear the path to widespread sousveillance
1ar – sousveillance fails
Sousveillance can't solve – gives rise to liberty-undermining surveillance and is
counterproductive in nature
Danaher 14 - John Danaher holds a PhD from University College Cork (Ireland) and is currently a
lecturer in law at NUI Galway (Ireland). His research interests are eclectic, ranging broadly from
philosophy of religion to legal theory, with particular interests in human enhancement and neuroethics.
(John, "What's the case for sousveillance?", IEET, Feb 10, 2014,
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/danaher20140210)//A-Sharma
Here's my problem with all of this: Although I have no doubt that constant monitoring of activities with veillance technologies — both
pre and post-transaction — could reduce (some) information asymmetries, I find it hard to see how this wouldn't simply give
rise tosur-veillance of a highly coercive and insidious nature, rather than sousveillance of a positive and
autonomy-enhancing nature. As you'll recall from part one, surveillance is when de facto authorities impose surveillance on ordinary
people; sousveillance is when everybody uses veillance technologies. Whenever there are inequalities of power, there is a
potential de facto authority. If those authorities can insist upon monitoring our activities, it seems to me like we have the conditions
for liberty-undermining surveillance. I suspect this is what would happen in the case of things like insurance contracts. Consider, in the first
instance, the signalling powers of sousveillance technologies could indeed be quite autonomy-enhancing. The early-adopters could credibly
signal that they are low-risk customers, and reap all the benefits of reduced costs of insurance premiums. But this
could easily set-up a
slippery slope to the compulsory use of such technologies. After all, given the benefits, why wouldn't the
insurance company insist upon monitoring every customer's waking move before agreeing to give them
insurance. And since the exchange between insurance providers and customers is characterised by
inequalities of bargaining power (e.g. we are often legally obliged to buy insurance), it is hard to see why this wouldn't
amount to a kind of coercive surveillance. You would be dominated by the company: subtly encouraged to bring your behaviour
in-line with their preferences, whatever those preferences happen to be. And since similar inequalities of bargaining power are present in other
markets, I think this is a general problem for the economic case for sousveillance. (There are possibly
counterarguments to this domination-style argument. I'd be interested in hearing about them in the comments section) 3. Conclusion So that
brings us to the end of this aspect of my series on Mann's arguments for sousveillance. The next post on the topic will be more concerned with
the general concept of sousveillance and different types of veillance society. Consequently, it's worth briefly recapping the arguments discussed
so far. As we have seen, Ali and Mann's
primary case in favour of sousveillance is based on its potential economic
advantages. They present this argument in three different ways. The first being a general argument about trust and the risks of economic
exchange; the second being about information asymmetries; and the third being about opportunism. They then add to this economic case the
claim that sousveillance will help to reduce feelings of terror/helplessness in the face of bureaucratic decision-making. In
each case, I've
suggested that Ali and Mann may have overstated the arguments for sousveillance. Although there may
be some benefits, it's possible that several of the examples discussed by Ali and Mann would give rise to
liberty-undermining surveillance, rather than autonomy-enhancing sousveillance. This is due to their
underappreciation of inequalities of bargaining power in economic exchanges. Furthermore, although
sousveillance may encourage some kinds of good behaviour, its widespread use may be
counterproductive. This is because many people might perceive it as an affront to their autonomy, or a
sign of a lack of trust.
Sousveillance fails – "surveillers" will have access to more data and lead to a loss of
freedom
Pesce 14 - Specialties: Columnist for The Register, Producer & Host, This Week in Startups Australia;
Inventor of VRML, the standard for 3D on the Internet and a core component of MPEG-4. Author of 6
books, including "VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace", "The Playful World", and, most recently,
"The Next Billion Seconds". Founder & CEO of MooresCloud, an IoT startup. Well-known speaker,
consultant in areas intersecting technology and culture. Well-respected educator, and panelist / judge
on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "The New Inventors" from 2005 – 2011 (Mark Pesce, 4-172014, "Finding freedom in a 'sousveillance' society," ABC News, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-0417/pesce-finding-freedom-in-a-sousveillance-society/5395592)//A-Sharma
In a world where everything is recorded by everyone, what is left of our freedom when the state collects this information? Mark Pesce writes.
Cameras have become a commonplace phenomenon at protests of all sizes. No longer just the lenses of the mainstream media, high-definition
cameras are now carried by every smartphone-toting individual (that is, nearly all of us) all the time. We can upload video of our protest to
YouTube, and even stream it in real-time to everyone else on the internet. A few years ago I viewed the Oakland, California police department
as they violently broke up the Occupy Oakland demonstrations via a stream from a smartphone rapidly burning through its batteries. More
recently, you could see protests in Cairo or Istanbul from the point of view of the protesters, as the police came for them. All of this has
happened entirely organically. No one orchestrated the transformation of political protest into pervasively broadcast events. Put enough
smartphones into enough hands and it just happens. Surrounded in a halo of coverage, protests inevitably draw the attention of the forces of
law and order. Police have cameras too, and after the protest has ended they go back to the tape, map faces to names, and issue arrest
warrants. Each side in the conflict attempts to use the camera to undermine the natural advantages of the opposition. Protesters have shouted
'The whole world is watching!' into live cameras since the 1968 riots in Chicago; police wait until the mob disperses before going after its visibly
identified leaders. Protesters now wear balaclavas to disguise their identities; police use artificial intelligence and pattern recognition to peer
beneath the Guy Fawkes mask. From the empty (yet vaguely menacing) glare of CCTV cameras, to the seemingly innocent but far more
pervasive 'sousveillance' (literally, 'to watch from below') of more than ten million smartphone-toting Australians, the public sphere places us
under constant observation. We've
gone from Big Brother to a planet of 'Little Bothers', everyone watching
everyone watching everyone watching everyone. Not a sparrow falls from the sky without its descent being captured and
commented upon. Sousveillance sounds friendly, as though all these watching eyes, so similar to our own,
and on our same level, could never mean us harm. Individually they might not, but collected together,
these moments of innocence can be assembled into a mosaic of meaning, and - in the right hands power. Last week, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced the immediate availability of an app that twists sousveillance
inside-out. The Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository, or LEEDIR, allows citizens to contribute their own media to the LEEDIR
collection - in effect, handing the images and video collected by their smartphones directly to the LAPD. This
could be immensely
useful when the 'Big One' hits Los Angeles (presuming the mobile networks are still operational after a
massive earthquake - a big ask), as LEEDIR could help emergency planners get a sense of the scope of
the damage and the areas in need of greatest assistance. That's the good side of the tech - the side the
police are happy to talk about. On the other hand, LEEDIR turns everyone into a police spy. While the
LAPD never acknowledges this capacity, they have already used LEEDIR to request photos and videos of
a wild party in a Los Angeles neighbourhood. The line between crowd-sourced emergency assistance
and instruments of state surveillance collapses in LEEDIR. Under the cover of the best of intentions, LEEDIR encourages
people to dob one another in. Already well on its way toward LEEDIR-ship, the Federal Government, as recently reported by Fairfax,
now scours social media for content it considers "offensive" - particularly in the debate over
immigration policy - and has intimidated its foes into removing offending posts. If social media posts critical of
government policies merit responses more appropriate to a standover man, then surely any comments made in public (social media
being the latest incarnation of the public sphere) by any citizen must be equally worthy both of detection and of
swift, sure correction. If I had the ear of those in power, I might recommend requiring the telcos to
install an app on the smartphones they sell us, one that records everything we say for later analysis. It
should also note the people we associate with, where, and for how long. That data would be used to calculate a 'loyalty
rating', one that would be displayed on the lock screen of our smartphones, so we need only peek at our
mobiles to monitor the official assessment of our current behaviour. As the days passed, and we learned the
boundaries of safe activity, we would begin to self-censor appropriately. The problem would soon take care of itself. And what of freedom?
We've suddenly realized freedom has a quantum-like slipperiness - it exists only when not being
observed. The act of capturing something takes away its freedom. Now that we live entirely in a world of recorded
activities, where everything visible about us is being noted somewhere, what remains of our freedoms? Freedom exists - if at all - in what we do
not say, at least not publicly. Freedom is hidden, but not invisible. Freedom
is the private place, where the cameras have
been taped over, where the mobile broadband has been blocked, where the devices have been turned
off. Freedom is low voices conspiring in near darkness. Only there can we reveal who we are, without fear. This is who we
are now.
Psychoanalysis
AT: Framework
Their attachment to theory is both useless and devolves into dogma
Bird 6, works at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, (John, ON THE POVERTY OF THEORY,
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs/journal/v11/n3/pdf/2100097a.pdf)//kap
We could now think about theory and the attachment to theory as a form of psychic retreat, especially
where this attachment avoids contact with reality and gives us a feeling of being locked in, such that
theory becomes an end-in-itself. This allows the free flow of phantasy and omnipotence in which the
community of theorists avidly colludes. Theory allows protection – from external and internal anxieties,
‘‘[but] at the expense of [the] development and evolution of meaning’’ (Armstrong, 1998, p 7). Thus,
Lacan and Zizek have the answer for everything – even the answer to which is the real Freud – and the
community of Lacanians and Zizekians colludes with this and excludes those who are not in the
community.
If theory is a form of psychic retreat then what are the anxieties that this retreat is addressing? With
reference to depressive affects, the helplessness and despair of the theorist in the face of terrible social
and political events – 9/11, global warming, famine, the Asian Tsunami, 7/7 in London – make theory an
attractive retreat, an alternative to engagement with the realities of despair. With reference to
paranoid-schizoid anxieties, the persecution of the theorist when faced with the call to certainty and a
return to fundamental truths may lead to a paranoid attachment to theory through retreat from both a
real and a phantasied persecution. These forms of retreat may be exacerbated in three ways: first,
through the paranoid style in much contemporary political and social action and thought, a paranoid
style exacerbated by the fear engendered by the war on terror; second, through the peculiar and
particular conditions of the social production of knowledge in the academy (Sibley, 2004), with its
attachment to systems of quality control and assessment, of tenure and promotion, of user engagement
and so on; and third, through what seem to be the structural conditions of post-modernity, in which the
fragmentation of the self and of identity become, as it were, normal conditions. The structural
insecurities of flexible labour markets, and the constant pressure to change and cultivate identities, feed
into forms of defensive attachment to theory (Bauman, 2005).
False self-relationships to theories
The idea that theory may be a form of psychic retreat implies that we often use theory for defensive
purposes, both as individuals and as members of social organizations. As Belger suggests (2002), we can
approach the difficulties and dangers of theory in another, but related way, that is, with reference to
Winnicott’s idea of the False Self:
…this False Self functions as the reactive protector of the true core of the individual in an environmental
context in which impingements [infantile and contemporary] and neglect, rather than attunements,
have dominated the developmental field... The False Self is reactive instead of proactive. (Belger, 2002,
p 51)
In the context of theory – in this case, the role of theory in the training of analysts – Belger postulates
false self-relationships to theory which ‘‘foreclose potential space and inhibit the healthy development
of the therapist-as-subject’’ (Belger, 2002, p 51). As such, there is ‘‘an elaboration of the intellectual at
the expense of the real’’ (p 55). These defensive, false self-relationships to theory are further analysed
by Ogden:
The illusion of knowing is achieved through the creation of a wide range of substitute formations that fill
the ‘‘potential space’’ in which desire and fear, appetite and fullness, love and hate might otherwise
come into beingy . In the absence of the capacity to generate potential space, one relies on defensive
substitutes for the experience of being alive... (Ogden, 1989, cited in Belger, 2002, p 55).
Theory becomes defensive and delusional and provides us with a phantasy of being all-knowing and
omnipotent. For Belger and Ogden, the problem becomes one of releasing omnipotent control in much
the same way that the infant may find it difficult to release its control in its relationships with carers. As
Belger suggests, following Wheelis (1958), theory becomes a way in which we foreclose creativity, such
that it is not experience which dictates what might be called truth, but dogma. As we will see later, this
release of control and this withdrawal from theoretical dogma is part of the development of what could
be called a healthy relationship to theory.
2ac – theory wrong
Psychoanalysis can’t describe IR, but the neg’s insistence that it does stems from their
own anxiety of political impotency and a desire for control – that turns the K.
Rosen-Carole 10 – Visiting Professor in the Philosophy Department at Bard College (Adam, “Menu
Cards in Time of famine: on Psychoanalysis and Politics”, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2010 Volume
LXXIX, No. 1)//RZ
The second approach to the problem has to do with psychoanalytic contributions to political theory that
avoid Freud’s methodological individualism, but nevertheless run into the same problem. An expanding
trend in social criticism involves a tendency to discuss the death or aggressive drives, fantasy
formations, traumas, projective identifications, defensive repudiations, and other such “psychic
phenomena” of collective subjects as if such subjects were ontologically discrete and determinate .
Take the following passage from Žižek (1993) as symptomatic of the trend I have in mind:
In Eastern Europe, the West seeks for its own lost origins, its own lost original experience of “democratic
invention.” In other words, Eastern Europe functions for the West as its Ego-Ideal (Ich-Ideal): the point
from which [the] West sees itself in a likable, idealized form, as worthy of love. The real object of
fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naive gaze by means of which Eastern
Europe stares back at the West, fascinated by its democracy. [p. 201, italics in original]
Also, we might think here of the innumerable discussions of “America’s death drive” as propelling the
recent invasions in the Middle East, or of the ways in which the motivation for the Persian Gulf Wars of
the 1990s was a collective attempt “to kick the Vietnam War Syndrome”— that is, to solidify a national
sense of power and prominence in the recognitive regard of the international community—or of the
psychoanalytic speculations concerning the psychodynamics of various nations involved in the Cold War
(here, of course, I have in mind Segal’s [1997] work), or of the collective racist fantasies and paranoiac
traits that organize various nation-states’s domestic and foreign policies.7 Here are some further
examples from Žižek, who, as a result of his popularity, might be said to function as a barometer of
incipient trends:
• What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always
impute to the “other” [ethnic group, race, nation, etc.] an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our
enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. [1993,
pp. 202-203]
• Beneath the derision for the new Eastern European postCommunist states, it is easy to discern the
contours of the wounded narcissism of the European “great nations.” [2004, p. 27, italics added]
• There is in fact something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle Eastern conflict—everyone recognizes
the way to get rid of the obstacle, yet nonetheless, no one wants to remove it, as if there is some kind of
pathological libidinal profit gained by persisting in the deadlock. [2004, p. 39, italics added]
• If there was ever a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it
is the Jewish attachment to their land and Jerusalem . . . . When the Jews lost their land and elevated it
into the mythical lost object, “Jerusalem” became much more than a piece of land . . . . It becomes the
stand-in for . . . all that we miss in our earthly lives. [2004, p. 41]
Rather than explore collective subjects through analyses of their individual members, this type of
psychoanalytically inclined engagement with politics treats a collective subject (a nation, a region, an
ethnic group, etc.) as if it were simply amenable to explanation , and perhaps even to intervention , in
a manner identical to an individual psyche in a therapeutic context .
But if the transpositions of psychoanalytic concepts into political theory are epistemically questionable ,
as I believe they are,8 the question is: why are they so prevalent? Perhaps the psychoanalytic
interpretation of collective subjects (nations, regions, etc.), or even the psychoanalytic interpretation of
powerful political figures, registers a certain anxiety regarding political impotence and provokes a
fantasy that, to an extent, pacifies and modifies—defends against—that anxiety. Perhaps such
engagements, which are increasingly prevalent in these days of excruciating political alienation, operate
within a fantasmatic frame wherein the anxiety of political exclusion and “castration”—that is, anxieties
pertaining to a sense of oneself as politically inefficacious, a non-agent in most relevant senses—is both
registered and mitigated by the fantasmatic satisfaction of imagining oneself interpretively
intervening in the lives of political figures or collective political subjects with the efficacy of a clinically
successful psychoanalytic interpretation.
To risk a hypothesis: as alienation from political efficacy increases and becomes more palpable, as our
sense of ourselves as political agents diminishes, fantasies of interpretive intervention abound. Within
such fantasy frames, one approaches a powerful political figure (or collective subject) as if s/he were “on
the couch,” open and amenable to one’s interpretation.9 One approaches such a powerful political
figure or ethnic group or nation as if s/he (or it) desired one’s interpretations and acknowledged her/his
suffering, at least implicitly, by her/his very involvement in the scene of analysis.
Or if such fantasies also provide for the satisfaction of sadistic desires provoked by political frustration
and “castration” (a sense of oneself as politically voiceless, moot, uninvolved, irrelevant), as they very
well might, then one’s place within the fantasy might be that of the all-powerful analyst, the sujet
supposé savoir, the analyst presumptively in control of her-/himself and her/his emotions, etc. Here the
analyst becomes the one who directs and organizes the analytic encounter, who commands
psychoanalytic knowledge, who knows the analysand inside and out, to whom the analysand must
speak, upon whom the analysand depends, who is in a position of having something to offer, whose
advice—even if not directly heeded—cannot but make some sort of impact, and in the face of whom the
analysand is quite vulnerable, who is thus powerful, in control . . . perhaps the very figure whom the
psychoanalytically inclined interpreter fears. 9
Minimally, what I want to underscore here is that (1) a sense of political alienation may be registered
and fantasmatically mitigated by treating political subjects, individual or collective, as if they were “on
the couch”; and (2) expectations concerning the expository and therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalytic
interpretations of political subjects may be conditioned by such a fantasy.
Sweeping psychoanalytic generalizations lack predictive force and preclude effective
politics – defer to specifics
Robinson 5 (Andrew, political theorist University of Nottingham, “The Political Theory of Constitutive
Lack: A Critique”, Theory & Event Vol. 8, Issue 1. Date: 2005, project muse)
More precisely, I would maintain that "constitutive lack" is an instance of a Barthesian myth. It is, after
all, the function of myth to do exactly what this concept does: to assert the empty facticity of a
particular ideological schema while rejecting any need to argue for its assumptions. 'Myth does not deny
things; on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them
innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it is a clarity which is not that of an
explanation but that of a statement of fact'37. This is precisely the status of "constitutive lack": a
supposed fact which is supposed to operate above and beyond explanation, on an ontological level
instantly accessible to those with the courage to accept it. Myths operate to construct euphoric
enjoyment for those who use them, but their operation is in conflict with the social context with which
they interact. This is because their operation is connotative: they are "received" rather than "read"38,
and open only to a "readerly" and not a "writerly" interpretation. A myth is a second-order signification
attached to an already-constructed denotative sign, and the ideological message projected into this
sign is constructed outside the context of the signified. A myth is therefore, in Alfred Korzybski's sense,
intensional: its meaning derives from a prior linguistic schema, not from interaction with the world in its
complexity39. Furthermore, myths have a repressive social function, carrying in Barthes's words an
'order not to think'40. They are necessarily projected onto or imposed on actual people and events,
under the cover of this order. The "triumph of literature" in the Dominici trial41 consists precisely in this
projection of an externally-constructed mythical schema as a way of avoiding engagement with
something one does not understand. Lacanian theory, like Barthesian myths, involves a prior idea of a
structural matrix which is not open to change in the light of the instances to which it is applied. Zizek's
writes of a 'pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the construction of reality'42, while
Laclau suggests there is a formal structure of any chain of equivalences which necessitates the logic of
hegemony43. Specific analyses are referred back to this underlying structure as its necessary
expressions, without apparently being able to alter it; for instance, 'those who triggered the process of
democratization in eastern Europe... are not those who today enjoy its fruits, not because of a simple
usurpation... but because of a deeper structural logic'44. In most instances, the mythical operation of
the idea of "constitutive lack" is implicit, revealed only by a rhetoric of denunciation. For instance,
Mouffe accuses liberalism of an 'incapacity... to grasp... the irreducible character of antagonism'45,
while Zizek claims that a 'dimension' is 'lost' in Butler's work because of her failure to conceive of
"trouble" as constitutive of "gender"46. This language of "denial" which is invoked to silence critics is a
clear example of Barthes's "order not to think": one is not to think about the idea of "constitutive lack",
one is simply to "accept" it, under pain of invalidation. If someone else disagrees, s/he can simply be
told that there is something crucial missing from her/his theory. Indeed, critics are as likely to be
accused of being "dangerous" as to be accused of being wrong. One of the functions of myth is to cut
out what Trevor Pateman terms the "middle level" of analytical concepts, establishing a short-circuit
between high-level generalizations and ultra-specific (pseudo-)concrete instances . In Barthes's classic
case of an image of a black soldier saluting the French flag, this individual action is implicitly connected
to highly abstract concepts such as nationalism, without the mediation of the particularities of his
situation. (These particularities , if revealed, could undermine the myth . Perhaps he enlisted for
financial reasons, or due to threats of violence). Thus, while myths provide an analysis of sorts, their
basic operation is anti-analytical: the analytical schema is fixed in advance, and the relationship between
this schema and the instances it organizes is hierarchically ordered to the exclusive advantage of the
former. This is precisely what happens in Lacanian analyses of specific political and cultural phenomena.
Zizek specifically advocates 'sweeping generalisations' and short-cuts between specific instances and
high-level abstractions, evading the "middle level". 'The correct dialectical procedure... can be best
described as a direct jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of particularity '.
He wants a 'direct jump from the singular to the universal', without reference to particular contexts47.
He also has a concept of a 'notion' which has a reality above and beyond any referent, so that, if reality
does not fit it, 'so much the worse for reality'48. The failure to see what is really going on means that
one sees more, not less, because libidinal perception is not impeded by annoying facts49. Zizek insists
on the necessity of the gesture of externally projecting a conception of an essence onto phenomena50,
even affirming its necessity in the same case (anti-Semitism) in which Reich denounces its absurdity51.
This amounts to an endorsement of myths in the Barthesian sense, as well as demonstrating the
"dialectical" genius of the likes of Kelvin McKenzie. Lacanian analysis consists mainly of an exercise in
projection. As a result, Lacanian "explanations" often look more propagandistic or pedagogical than
explanatory. A particular case is dealt with only in order to, and to the extent that it can, confirm the
already-formulated structural theory. Judith Butler criticizes Zizek's method on the grounds that 'theory
is applied to its examples', as if 'already true, prior to its exemplification'. 'The theory is articulated on its
self-sufficiency, and then shifts register only for the pedagogical purpose of illustrating an already
accomplished truth'. It is therefore 'a theoretical fetish that disavows the conditions of its own
emergence'52. She alleges that Lacanian psychoanalysis 'becomes a theological project' and also 'a way
to avoid the rather messy psychic and social entanglement' involved in studying specific cases53.
Similarly, Dominick LaCapra objects to the idea of constitutive lack because specific 'losses cannot be
adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalised discourse of absence ...
Conversely, absence at a "foundational" level cannot simply be derived from particular historical
losses'54. Attacking 'the long story of conflating absence with loss that becomes constitutive instead of
historical'55, he accuses several theorists of eliding the difference between absence and loss, with
'confusing and dubious results', including a 'tendency to avoid addressing historical problems, including
losses, in sufficiently specific terms', and a tendency to 'enshroud, perhaps even to etherealise, them in
a generalised discourse of absence'56. Daniel Bensaid draws out the political consequences of the
projection of absolutes into politics . 'The fetishism of the absolute event involves... a suppression of
historical intelligibility, necessary to its depoliticization'. The space from which politics is evacuated
'becomes... a suitable place for abstractions, delusions and hypostases'. Instead of actual social forces,
there are 'shadows and spectres '57. The operation of the logic of projection is predictable. According
to Lacanians, there is a basic structure (sometimes called a 'ground' or 'matrix') from which all social
phenomena arise, and this structure, which remains unchanged in all eventualities, is the referencepoint from which particular cases are viewed. The "fit" between theory and evidence is constructed
monologically by the reduction of the latter to the former, or by selectivity in inclusion and reading of
examples. At its simplest, the Lacanian myth functions by a short-circuit between a particular instance
and statements containing words such as "all", "always", "never", "necessity" and so on. A contingent
example or a generic reference to "experience" is used, misleadingly, to found a claim with supposed
universal validity. For instance, Stavrakakis uses the fact that existing belief-systems are based on
exclusions as a basis to claim that all belief-systems are necessarily based on exclusions58, and claims
that particular traumas express an 'ultimate impossibility'59. Similarly, Laclau and Mouffe use the fact
that a particular antagonism can disrupt a particular fixed identity to claim that the social as such is
penetrated and constituted by antagonism as such60. Phenomena are often analysed as outgrowths of
something exterior to the situation in question. For instance, Zizek's concept of the "social symptom"
depends on a reduction of the acts of one particular series of people (the "socially excluded",
"fundamentalists", Serbian paramilitaries, etc.) to a psychological function in the psyche of a different
group (westerners). The "real" is a supposedly self-identical principle which is used to reduce any and all
qualitative differences between situations to a relation of formal equivalence. This shows how mythical
characteristics can be projected from the outside, although it also raises different problems: the underconceptualization of the relationship between individual psyches and collective phenomena in Lacanian
theory, and a related tendency for psychological concepts to acquire an ersatz agency similar to that of a
Marxian fetish. "The Real" or "antagonism" occurs in phrases which have it doing or causing something.
As Barthes shows, myth offers the psychological benefits of empiricism without the epistemological
costs. Tautology, for instance, is 'a minor ethical salvation, the satisfaction of having militated in favour
of a truth... without having to assume the risks which any somewhat positive search for truth inevitably
involves'61. It dispenses with the need to have ideas, while treating this release as a stern morality.
Tautology is a rationality which simultaneously denies itself, in which 'the accidental failure of language
is magically identified with what one decides is a natural resistance of the object'62. This passage could
almost have been written with the "Lacanian Real" in mind. The characteristic of the Real is precisely
that one can invoke it without defining it (since it is "beyond symbolization"), and that the accidental
failure of language, or indeed a contingent failure in social praxis, is identified with an ontological
resistance to symbolization projected into Being itself . For instance, Zizek's classification of the Nation
as a Thing rests on the claim that 'the only way we can determine it is by... empty tautology', and that it
is a 'semantic void'63. Similarly, he claims that 'the tautological gesture of the Master-Signifier', an
empty performative which retroactively turns presuppositions into conclusions, is necessary, and also
that tautology is the only way historical change can occur64. He even declares constitutive lack (in this
case, termed the "death drive") to be a tautology65. Lacanian references to "the Real" or "antagonism"
as the cause of a contingent failure are reminiscent of Robert Teflon's definition of God: 'an explanation
which means "I have no explanation"'66. An "ethics of the Real" is a minor ethical salvation which says
very little in positive terms, but which can pose in macho terms as a "hard" acceptance of terrifying
realities. It authorizes truth-claims - in Laclau's language, a 'reality' which is 'before our eyes67', or in
Newman's, a 'harsh reality' hidden beneath a protective veil68 - without the attendant risks. Some
Lacanian theorists also show indications of a commitment based on the particular kind of "euphoric"
enjoyment Barthes associates with myths. Laclau in particular emphasizes his belief in the 'exhilarating'
significance of the present69, hinting that he is committed to euphoric investments generated through
the repetition of the same .
It’s junk science that doesn’t even work clinically
Ellis 2, PhD in psychology, has written books on the harmfulness of psychoanalysis, (Albert, revised in
2002, Chapter 5: Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice: Is Psychoanalysis Harmful from the book
Psychiatric Opinion, http://studysites.sagepub.com/personalitytheoriesstudy/05/resources2.htm)//kap
Many articles and books have been written which purport to show that psychoanalysis is an ineffective
form of psychotherapy. Behavior therapists, existentialists, physical scientists, ra-tional philosophers, Marxists, and many other kinds
of thinkers have held that psychoanalytic therapy rests on unverified assumptions and that it is largely a
waste of time. Relatively few critics, however, have objectively pointed out some of the actual harm that may
occur if an individual enters classical psychoanalysis or even undergoes intensive psychoanalytic
psychotherapy. To give and to document all the main reasons why virtually any form of truly psychoanalytic therapy is frequently
injurious to clients would take a sizable book; and someday I may write it. For the present,
let me briefly and inadequately
outline some ways in which analysis does more harm than good. SIDETRACKING Probably the greatest harm
that psychoanalysis does is its tendency to sidetrack clients from what they had better do to improve
and to give them a “good” excuse not to work hard at helping themselves. What disturbed people preferably should
do is fairly simple (although it is not at all easy); namely, to understand precisely what are the self-defeating irrational ideas they firmly believe
and to vigorously contradict them, both verbally and actively. Thus one of the main senseless notions they usually hold is, “Unless I am
remarkably competent and popular, and unless I am superior to others, I am rather worthless as an individual.” They
can strongly
contradict this philosophy by asking themselves, ‘Why am I no good just because many of my performances are poor? Where is the
evidence that I cannot accept myself if others do not like me? How is my self-acceptance really dependent on external criteria?” And they
can actively work against their self-defeating attitudes by performing, even when they may not do very
well; by risking social disapproval when they want to achieve a desired goal; and by experimenting with
potentially enjoyable pursuits in spite of the possibilities of failure and rejection. Psychoanalysis
sidetracks health-seeking individuals verbally by encouraging them to concentrate on innumerable
irrelevant events and ideas: such as what happened during their early years, how they came to have an Oedipus complex, the
pernicious influence of their unloving parents, what are the meanings of their dreams, how all-important are their relations with the analyst,
how much they now unconsciously hate their mates, etc. These may all be interesting pieces of information about clients. But they not only do
not reveal, they often seriously obscure, their basic irrational philosophies that originally caused, and that still instigate, their dysfunctional
feelings and behaviors. Being mainly diagnostic and psychodynamic, analysis is practically allergic to philosophy, and therefore often never gets
around to the basic ideological assumptions and value systems with which humans largely create their symptoms. To make matters much
worse, psychoanalysis
is essentially a talky, passive, insight-seeking process which encourages clients
mainly to lie on their spine or sit on their behinds in order to get better. Sensible unorthodox analysts frequently
supplement this passive procedure by giving advice, directing the clients to do something, helping them change their environment, etc.; but
they do so against psychoanalytic theory, which stoutly insists that they do otherwise. Meanwhile, the poor analysands, who probably
have remained disturbed for most of their lives largely because they will not get off their asses and take risk after risk, are firmly encouraged, by
the analytic procedure and by the non-directive behavior of the analyst, to continue their avoidant behavior. They now, moreover, have
the
excuse that they are “actively” trying to help themselves by being analyzed; but this, of course, is a delusion
if anything like classical pro-cedures are being followed; and they consequently tend to become more passive, and possibly
even more disturbed, than before. DEPENDENCY Most clients are overly dependent individuals who are afraid to think and act for themselves
and to risk being criticized for making mistakes. Psychoanalysis is usually a process that greatly fosters dependency .
The sessions are often several times a week; they continue for a period of years; the analyst frequently forbids the clients to make any major
changes in their life during treatment a positive transference between the analyst and analysand is usually encouraged; the
clients are
constantly brainwashed into accepting analytic interpretations, even when they seem to have a farfetched relationship to the facts of their lives; and in analytic group therapy, a family-like setting is often deliberately fostered
and maintained. While many forms of therapy also abet the client’s being dependent on the therapist, classical analysis is surely one of the
worst, and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy one of the second-worst modes, in this respect. Several activity-directed forms of
therapy, on the other hand — such as assertiveness-training therapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, and structured therapy — urge clients,
as soon as feasible, into independent action and teach them how to t hink clearly for themselves. EMPHASIS ON FEELINGS Because it heavily
emphasizes free association, dream analysis, and the involvement of the client and therapist in transference and counter-transference
relations, psychoanalysis
inevitably puts a premium on the expression of feelings rather than the changing
of these feelings and the self-defeating philosophies behind them. A good deal of the improvement in analytic therapy
seems to come from clients’ feeling better, as a result of catharsis and abreaction, and because they believe that the analyst really understands
and likes them. This
tendency of clients to “feel better,” however, frequently sabotages their potentiality to
“get better.” Thus, the analysand who is terribly depressed about his being refused a job and who gets
these feelings off his chest in an individual or a group session will often come away relieved, and feel that at least his analyst (or the
group) heard him out, that someone really cares for him, and that maybe he’s not such a worthless slob after all. Unfortunately, in getting
himself to “feel good,” he forgets to inquire about the self-defeating beliefs he told himself that maintain his depression: namely, “If this
employer who interviewed me today doesn’t like me, probably no employer will; and if I can’t get a very good job like this one, that proves that
I’m incompetent and that I don’t really deserve anything good in life.” The
expressive, cathartic-abreactive method that is
such a common part of analysis doesn’t encourage this client to stop and think about his philosophic
premises; instead, it enables him to “feel good” — at least momentarily — in spite of the fact that he
strongly retains these same premises, and in spite of the fact that he will almost certainly depress
himself, because of his holding them, again and again. In the expression of hostility that psychoanalysis encourages, the
situation is even worse. Starting with the assumption that it is bad for the client to feel hostile and to hold in her hostile feelings — which is a
fairly sensible assumption, since there is empirical evidence to support it — psychoanalysts usually derive from this view another, and rather
false, assumption: that the expression of hostile feelings will release and cure basic hostility. Nothing of the sort is probably true; in fact, just
the opposite frequently happens. The individual who, in analytic sessions, is encouraged to express her hatred for her mother, husband, or boss
may well end up by becoming still more hostile, acting in an overtly nasty fashion to this other person, engendering return hostility, and then
becoming still more irate. Expression of hostility, moreover, is one of the best psychological cop-outs. By convincing
herself that other people are awful and that they deserve to be hated, the client can easily ignore her own maladaptive behavior and selfloathing and can nicely avoid doing anything to look into her own heart and to change her irrational thinking and her dysfunctional feelings and
acts. One of the main functions of an effective therapist, moreover, is to help the client minimize or eliminate her hostility (while keeping her
dislike of unfortunate events and nasty people, so that she can do something to solve her problems connected with them). Psychoanalysis,
because it falsely believes that present hostility stems from past occurrences (rather than largely from the individual’s philosophic attitude
toward and consequent interpretations about those occurrences), has almost no method of getting at the main sources of hatred and
eradicating them. By failing to show the client how to change her anger-creating views and by encouraging her to become more hostile in many
instances, it tends to harm probably the majority of analytic clients (or should we say victims?). BOLSTERS CONFORMISM The main reasons why
many human beings feel sufficiently disturbed to come for therapy are their misleading beliefs that they need the love and approval of others,
that they can’t possibly be happy at all when they are alone, and that unless they are successful they are no damned good. Because
psychoanalysis is essentially non-philosophic, and because it does not show clients how to distinguish
clearly between their wanting and their needing to be approved and successful, most analysands wind up, at best,
by becoming better adapted to the popularity-and achievement-demanding culture in which they live rather than becoming persons in their
own right who give themselves permission to think and to enjoy themselves in unconforming ways. Psychoanalysis basically teaches the client,
“Since your parents were overly-critical and therefore made you hate yourself, and since you are able to see that I, your analyst, uncritically
accepts you in spite of your poor behavior, you can now accept yourself.” And also: “Since you have been achieving on a low level because you
were afraid to compete with your father or your brother, and I have helped you gain insight into this reason for your doing poorly, you can now
compete successfully with practically anyone, and make the million dollars you always wanted to make.” What psychoanalysis
fails to
teach the individual is: “You can always unqualifiedly accept yourself even if I, your analyst, do not particularly like you, because your
value to yourself rests on your existence, on your being, and not on how much anyone approves you.” And: “There are several reasons why
succeeding at vocational or avocational activities is usually advantageous; but you don’t have to be outstanding, ultrasuccessful, or noble in
order to accept yourself.” Because analysis is largely concerned with historical events in people’s lives rather than their
ideological reactions to these events; because it encourages passivity and dependency; because it over-emphasizes the personal relationship
between the analyst and analysand — for these and other reasons it often encourages clients to be more successful conformers rather than
ever-growing, courageously experimenting, relatively culture-free persons. The analyst himself, rigidly-bound as he often is by the orthodox
rules of the therapeutic game he is playing, and self-condemned by following these rules to be a non-assertive, undaring individual himself,
tends to set a bad example for the client and to encourage her or him to be a reactor rather than an actor in the drama that we call life.
STRENGTHENS IRRATIONALITY Clients’ basic problems often stem from assuming irrational premises and making illogical deductions from these
premises. If they are to be helped with their basic disturbance, they had better learn to question their assumptions and think more logically and
discriminate more clearly about the various things that happen to them and the attitudes they take toward these happenings. In particular,
they’d better realize that their preferences or desires are not truly needs or demands and that just because it would be better if something
occurred, this is no reason why it absolutelyshould, ought, or must occur. Instead of helping clients with this kind of realistic and logical
analysis, psychoanalysis provides them with many unverified premises and irrationalities of its own. It usually
insists that they must be disturbed because of past events in their lives, that they need to be loved and have to be-come angry when thwarted,
that they must have years of intensive analysis in order to change significantly, that they must get into and finally work through an intense
transference relationship with their analyst, etc. All these assumptions — as is the case with most psychoanalytic hypotheses — are either
dubious or false; and analysands are given additional irrationalities to cope with over and above their handicapping crooked thinking with
which they come to therapy. In innumerable instances, they become so obsessed with their analytic nonsense that psychoanalysis becomes
their religious creed and their be-all and end-all for existing; and though it may somewhat divert them from the nonsense with which they first
came to therapy, it does not really eliminate it but at best covers it up with this new psychoanalytic mode of ‘positive thinking.” Rather
than becoming less suggestible and more of a critical thinker through analysis, they frequently become
worse in these respects. ABSORBS AND SABOTAGES HEALTH POTENTIALS When clients come for psychoanalysis, they are usually
reasonably young and have considerable potential for achieving mental health, even though they are now disturbed. Psychoanalysis,
particularly in its classical modes, is such a long-winded, time-consuming, expensive process that it often takes many of the best years of clients’
lives and prevents them from using these years productively. To make matters much worse, analytic therapy leads in most instances to such
abysmally poor results that analysands are often highly discouraged, are convinced that practically all the time and money they spent for
analysis is wasted, that there is no possibility of their ever changing and that they’d better avoid all other types of psychotherapy for the rest of
their lives and adjust themselves, as best they may, to living with their disturbances. An untold number of ex-analysands have become utterly
disillusioned with all psychological treatment be-cause they wrongly believe that psychoanalysis is psychotherapy, and that if they received
such poor results from being analyzed nothing else could possible work for them. If the facts in this regard could ever be known, it is likely to be
found that analysis harms more people in this way than in any of the other many ways in which it is deleterious. The number of people in the
United States alone who feel that they cannot afford any more therapy because they fruitlessly spent many thousands of dollars in
psychoanalysis is probably considerable. WRONG THERAPEUTIC GOALS The two main functions of psychotherapy, when it is sanely done, are:
(1) to show clients how they can significantly change their disordered thinking, emoting, and behaving and (2) to help them, once they are no
longer severely disturbed, to lead a more creative, fulfilling, growing existence. Instead of these two goals, psychoanalysis largely follows a third
one: to help people understand or gain insight into themselves and particularly to understand the history of their disturbances. Humans — in
contradistinction to the analytic assumptions — do not usually modify their basic thoughts and behaviors by insight into their past, by relating
to a therapist, or even by un-derstanding their present irrational assumptions and conflicting value systems. They change mainly by work and
efort. They consequently had better be helped to use their insights — which usually means, to concretely understand what they are believing
and assuming right now, in the present, and to actively challenge and question these self-defeating beliefs and assumptions until they finally
change them. They also had better be helped to act, to experiment, to accept discomforts, and to force themselves to do many things of which
they are irrationally afraid, so that their actions effectively depropagandize them to give up their dysfunctional beliefs. Psychoanalytic
therapy, instead of devoting much time to encouraging and teaching clients to dispute and act against their self-defeating thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, takes them up the garden path into all kinds of irrelevant (though sometimes accurate) in-sights, which
gives them a lovely excuse to cop Out from doing the work, the practice, the effort, the self-deprivation by which alone they are likely truly to
change their basic self-sabotaging philosophies of life. Even if it were a good method of psychological analysis (which it actually is not), it is an
execrable method of synthesis. It does not notably help people make themselves whole again; and it particularly does not show them how to
live more fulfillingly when they have, to some degree, stopped needlessly upsetting themselves. Because it implicitly and explicitly encourages
people to remain pretty much the way they are, though perhaps to get a better understanding of themselves (and often to construct better
defenses so that they can live more efficiently with their irrational assumptions about themselves and others), it frequently does more harm, by
stopping them from really making a concerted attack on their fundamental disturbances, than the good that well might come to them if they
received a non-analytic form of psychotherapy or even if they resolutely tried to help themselves by reading, talking to others, and by doing
some hard thinking. CONCLUSION Psychoanalysis
in general and classical analysis in particular are mistaken in
their assumptions about why human beings become emotionally disturbed and what can and should be
done to help them become less anxious and hostile. Consequently, analytic therapy largely wastes
considerable time teaching clients often-mistaken theories about themselves and others. Although these
theories are frequently highly interesting and diverting, they at best may help the client to feel better rather than to get better. The one thing
that analysis usually insures is that analysands will not understand the philosophic core of their disturbance-creating tendencies and
consequently will not work and practice, in both a verbal-theoretical and active-motor way, to change their basic assumptions about
themselves and the world and thereby ameliorate their symptoms and make themselves less disturbable. Although ostensibly an intensive and
ultra-depth-centered form of psychotherapy, analysis is actually an exceptionally superficial, palliative form of treatment.
Because it deludes clients that they are truly getting better by following its rules and because it dissuades them from doing the difficult
reorganizing of their underlying philosophical assumptions,
psychoanalysis
usually (though, of course, not always)
does more
harm than good and is contraindicated in the majority of instances in which it is actually used.
1ar – theory wrong
No predictive value – the fact it can’t be consistently replicated robs it of explanatory
potential
Sadovnikov 7 – professor of philosophy at York University (Slava, “Escape from Reason: Labels as
Arguments and Theories”, Dialogue, September 2007,
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0012217300002249 //DBI
The way McLaughlin shows the rosy prospects of psychoanalytical social theory boils down to this: there
are people who labour at it. He reports on Neil Smelser’s lifelong elaborations of psychoanalytical
sociology, which prescribed the use of Freudian theories. Then he presents a “powerful”
psychoanalytical theory of creativity of Michael Farrell, commenting on how the theorist “usefully
utilizes psychoanalytic insights,” though McLaughlin does not specify them. He correctly expects that I
might not view his examples as scientific. Their problems begin well before that. First, due to their
informative emptiness, or tautological character, all they amount to is rewordings of everyday
assumptions . Second, due to their vagueness these accounts are compatible with any outcomes; in
other words, they lack explanatory and predictive power . The proposed ideas are too inarticulate to
subject to intersubjective criticism , and to call them empirical or scientific theories would be, no
matter how comforting, a gross misuse of words.
On the constructive side, a psychoanalytic theorist may be challenged to unambiguously formulate her
suppositions and specify conditions of their disproof, to leave out what we already well know and
smooth out internal inconsistencies, and revise the theories in view of easily available counter-examples
and competing accounts. Only after having done this can one present candidate theories to public
criticism and thus make them part of science, and fruitfully discuss their further refinements. Another
suggestion is not to label them “powerful theories,” “classics,” or anything else before their real scrutiny
begins.
That criticism and disagreement are indispensable for science is not a “Popperian orthodoxy,” although
Popper does champion this idea; it is the pivot of the tradition (which we owe to the Greeks) which
identifies rationalism with criticism. 4 McLaughlin ostensibly bows to the critical tradition but does not
put it to use. Instead of critical evaluation of the theories in question he writes of “compelling case,”
“powerful analytic model,” and “useful conceptual tool.”
On the methodological side of the issue, we should inquire into the mode of thinking common to Fromm
and all adherents of confirmationism. The trick consists in mere replacement of familiar words with new,
more peculiar ones; customary expressions are substituted by “instrumental intimacy,” “collaborative
circles,” and “idealization of a self-object.” Since the new, funnier, and pseudo-theoretical tag does the
job of naming just as well, it “shows how” things work. The new labels in the cases criticized here do not
add anything to our knowledge; nor do they explain. We have seen Fromm routinely abuse this
technique. The vacuity of Fromm’s explanations by character type was the central point in my analysis of
Escape, yet McLaughlin conveniently ignores it and, like Fromm, uses the method of labelling as
somehow supporting his cause.
The widely popular practice of mistaking new labels for explanations has been exposed by many
methodologists in the history of philosophy, but probably the most famous example of such critique
comes from Molière. In the now often-quoted passage, his character delivers a vacuous explanation of
opium’s property to induce sleep by renaming the property with an offhand Latinism, “virtus dormitiva.”
The satire acutely points not only at the impostor doctor’s hiding his lack of knowledge behind foreign
words, but also at the emptiness of his alleged explanation. (Pseudo-theoretical literature is boring
precisely because of its “dormitive virtue,” its shuffling of labels without rewarding inquiring minds.)
Let me review notable criticisms of this approach in the twentieth century by Hempel, Homans, and
Weber leaving aside their forerunners. This problem was discussed in the famous debate between
William Dray and Carl Hempel. Dray argues, contra the nomological account of explanation, that
historians and social scientists often try to answer the question, “What is this phenomenon?” by giving
an “explanation-by-concept” (Dray 1959, p. 403). A series of events may be better understood if we call
it “a social revolution”; or the appropriate tag may be found in the expressions “reform,”
“collaboration,” “class struggle,” “progress,” etc.; or, to take Fromm’s suggestions, we may call familiar
motives and actions “sadomasochistic,” and any political choice save the Marxist “escape from
freedom.”
Hempel agrees with Dray that such concepts may be explanatory, but they are so only if the chosen
labels or classificatory tags refer to some uniformities, or are based on nomic analogies. In other words,
our new label has explanatory force if it states or implies some established regularity (Hempel 1970, pp.
453-57). For example, you travel to a foreign country and, strolling along the street, see a boisterous
crowd. Your guide may explain the crowd with one of several terms: that it is the local soccer team’s
fans celebrating its victory, or it is a local religious festival, or a teachers’ strike, etc. The labels applied
here—celebration, festival, strike— have explanatory value, because we know that things they refer to
usually manifest themselves in noisy or unruly mass gatherings.
If, on the other hand, by way of explaining the boisterous crowd the guide had invoked some hidden
social or psychological forces, or used expressions such as embodiment, mode of production, decentring, simulacra, otherness, etc., its causes would remain obscure . If she had referred to
psychoanalytic “character types ” (say, Fromm’s authoritarian, anal, or necrophiliac types), the
explanation would not make much sense either . Nothing prevents us nevertheless from
unconditionally attaching all these labels to any event. The mistake McLaughlin and confirmationists
persistently make is in thinking that labelling social phenomena alone does theoretical and explanatory
work.5 George Homans observed the prevalence of this trick some decades ago:
Much modern sociological theory seems to us to possess every virtue except that of explaining
anything. . . . The theorist shoves various aspects of behavior into his pigeonholes, cries “Ah-ha!” and
leaves it at that . Like magicians in all times and places, the theorist thinks he controls phenomena if
he is able to give them names, particularly names of his own invention . (1974, pp. 10-11)
Psychoanalysis is not inductive or empirical – it’s more religious than scientific.
Holowchak 12 – professor philosophy Rider University (M. Andrew, “When Freud (Almost) Met
Chaplin: The Science behind Freud's Especially Simple, Transparent Case", Perspectives on Science, MIT
Press Journals, Spring 2012, Vol. 20, No. 1, Pages 44-74, Project Muse)//RZ
Elsewhere, I have addressed (Holowchak, forthcoming) the difficulties of certainty in analytic therapy, both from the perspective of individual constructions a therapist makes to assure him that each construction is correct and that
his overall etiological assessment is correct. I noted that Freud made special use of a jigsaw-puzzle analogy and disclosed three needed conditions for assuring correctness of any construction and correctness of etiological
assessment: the intelligibility, fittingness, and correspondence conditions. A construction must be intelligible (i.e., meaningful), all of the elements of a construction must ªt together tightly like puzzle pieces, and the construction
must match the (screen) memory of the patient. The puzzle analogy, I argued, seems prima facie plausible, but on close analysis it is casuistical, because jigsaw puzzles are unlike constructions in key respects. The conclusion at
which I arrived—a conclusion I believe Freud himself embraced in mature writings on clinical theory and one which does not show psychoanalytic therapy to be nothing but bosh—is that there can be no such thing as certainty in
analytic therapy. Yet here I wish to say more. The fittingness condition, I suspect, cannot be met with any degree of reliability. If all three conditions are jointly sufficient for the correctness of any construction or end-of-the-day
analytic assessment, as I believe they are, then certainty is out of the question. Overall,
too much turns on coherence and the problem of patients
being led by suggestion in a manner that matches the theoretical orientation of a therapist—for Freud, that being
Oedipus-rooted—is magnified. In short,
Freud’s clinical therapy seems more top-down than bottom-up. Theory drives its
data . Still, Freud consistently maintained in publications and letters that system-building in the manner of a philosophical or religious Weltanschauung was not his aim. For instance, in a letter to Putnam (8 July 1915), Freud
intimates that he qua scientist is uninterested in any sort of methodological synthesis of psychoanalytic material. “For the time being, psycho-analysis is compatible with various Weltanschauungen,” he begins humbly and
concessively. “But has it yet spoken its last word? For my part I have never been concerned with any comprehensive synthesis, but invariably with certainty alone. And it is worth sacrificing everything to the latter” (Freud et al.
One can only wonder whether Freud is being deceitful or deceptive. Overall, Freud’s forays into
group-psychology issues, early human history, and metapsychological speculation betray a
preoccupation with system-building. In integrating biology into psychoanalysis through
metapsychological analysis, Freud was system-building—i.e., essaying to give psychoanalysis extraordinary
explanatory power and scope in the manner of Newtonian dynamics. There is one element of system-building,
characteristic of philosophical systems more than religions, that is an integral part of science— consistency — a needed
1961).24
ingredient of a scientific theory and scientific explanation. Unlike philosophical systems, presumably built top-down, Freudian psychoanalysis is said to be data-driven and bottom-up.
Following his commitment to Positivism and his inference of the sexual etiology of hysteria from 18 observed cases in “Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896, S.E., III: 198, 220), Freudian psychotherapy is
seemingly based on eliminative induction of the Baconian/Millian sort, which strives both to seek confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis and rule out others through disclosure of
disconfirmatory evidence—i.e., evidence inconsistent with competing hypotheses. John Greenwood challenges Freud’s presumed eliminative
inductivism. He suggests that “[Freud] treated consistency with the empirical data as providing sufficient
confirmation of psychoanalytic theory and ignored those alternative causal hypotheses that the
canons of eliminative induction mandate.” Greenwood, adding spice to Popper’s condemnation, says that Freud behaved like a “Popperian
‘naïve’ inductivist,” in that he seldom took seriously and often ignored alternative explanations. Thus, the question for Greenwood is not whether Freudian psychoanalysis, narrowly construed as a method for
treating patients, works—he thinks it is unquestionably effective if only because of the placebo effect—but whether Freudian psychoanalysis as a method for treating patients works because of Freudian theory (1996, pp. 607–8).
Greenwood leaves good reason to be doubtful. Greenwood’s concern is Freud’s clinical work, but if psychoanalysis has a broader
application, as I have argued it does, then Greenwood’s suspicions are more fully confirmed. For instance, of his notion
of the killing of the primal father and general account of human prehistory, called a “Just So Story” by an unkind critic, Freud writes, “[B]ut I think it is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and
Freud must be talking about the scientific
status of the killing-of-the-primal-father hypothesis, yet he clearly is not using eliminative induction here.
Moreover, saying something is “creditable” is not to offer sufficient confirmation of its truth. Freud is
appealing to coherence here and nothing more . Freud is system-building. Seeing psychoanalysis rooted in
clinical data, Freud must be arguing for veridicality by appealing to coherence through consistency with
those data. Yet we have already seen that the data are likely to be highly unreliable , so coherence with them amounts to foofaraw.
With what are we left? The Freudian psychoanalytic theoretical system seems to be standing alone and it is, according
to Freud’s account of Weltanschauungen, as much of a house of cards as he says is any philosophical or
religious system, which can do nothing empirically to rule out or, at least, make implausible other possible
explanations—an important part of eliminative inductivism.
understanding into more and more new regions” (1921, S.E., XVIII: 122). Execrating the sort of explanations given by Weltanschauungen,
It ignores larger social forces
LaBier 10, PhD in psychology, psychoanalytic therapist, and Director of the Center for Progressive
Development in Washington, D.C., (Douglas, 10/28/10, Why Psychotherapists Fail To Help People Today,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/201010/why-psychotherapists-fail-helppeople-today)//kap
Many people who enter psychotherapy today aren't helped at all. Some end up more troubled than
when they began treatment . And ironically, some therapists are examples of the kinds of problems they're trying to treat. In this
post I explain why that is and how to become a more informed consumer when considering psychotherapy. The
popularity of the TV show "In Treatment (link is external)" is one indicator that there's a large, market for psychotherapy, today. Despite the
decline of the more orthodox psychoanalytic treatment - the kind that Daphne Merkin described in a recent New York Times article (link is
external)about her years in treatment - people continue to seek competent professional help for dealing with and resolving the enormous
emotional challenges and conflicts that impact so many lives in current times. Beyond healing, they want to grow their capacity for healthy
relationships and successful lives. Many skilled and competent therapists are out there. (I use term "therapist" to describe psychologists,
psychiatrists and clinical social workers - professionally trained and licensed practitioners.) Moreover, research shows that psychotherapy can
be very effective. Either alone, or sometimes in combination with the judicious use of medication. Yet
so often practitioners don't
help people very much. Some struggle for years in therapy with one practitioner after another, and never seem to make any progress.
Others resolve some conflicts, but then are hit with others that hadn't been addressed. I see three reasons for this situation.
One is rooted in the kind of people therapists tend to be today. Their personal values, social attitudes
and how they relate to conventional norms and behavior contrast in several ways with those of the
"pioneers" from Freud's era. That contrast impedes effective help . Then there are the kinds of problems
that people experience. They've evolved over the decades, but especially since 9-11 and the near-depression that began
in the fall of 2008. But many therapists aren't in synch with the impact of that shift. They fail to understand
how 21st Century conditions impact emotional lives and conflicts . Many are clueless about how life in today's world
interweaves with the dysfunctions or family conflicts that patients bring with them into their adult lives. The third reason is the
therapists' vision of the goals of treatment; what a healthy outcome or resolution of conflicts should
look like, and how to get there. Many remain stuck within an older model - helping patients better
manage, cope with or adjust to change and traumas; build resilience and restore equilibrium. But that's
no longer possible: Our new environment is one of "non-equilibrium" and unpredictability . That creates
new emotional and life challenges across the board -- for intimate relationships, careers and for engaging with a changing society - the "remix"
that America is now becoming. The Psychotherapist - Past and Present The
early analysts were pioneers, adventurous
explores of uncharted terrain. They were trying to uncover how human personality and unconscious passions evolve within people
to create symptoms and dysfunctions. They courageously risked their careers when they called attention to the impact of repressed sexuality.
Aside from the accuracy of early theories about the causes of emotional disturbance, the practitioners' aim was to reduce suffering. They
wanted to help people develop more love, reason and independence - albeit within the context of the norms of their era that they, themselves,
accepted. Moreover, most were well-read in literature, history and culture, more so than today's practitioners. That gave them a
broad outlook and perspective on life. For example, Freud's writings are filled with references from Shakespeare, Goethe and other great works
of literature, drama and mythology. He drew on their themes, plots and character portrayals to help illuminate and understand the motives and
moral dilemmas underlying his patients' emotional problems. Most
contemporaries and followers of Freud possessed a
radical spirit. They wanted to uncover the truth beneath patient's symptoms; see beneath the surface. They shared the view that
successful treatment was based on a love of the truth; that is, emotional reality. And that it must preclude any kind of sham, deception or
illusion. Of course, Freud and his contemporaries interpreted their patients' problems in many ways that were flawed. They made assumptions
about psychological health that were part of the prevailing values and norms of post-Victorian, early-20th Century society - a largely patriarchal
culture. For example, most assumed that a normal, successful life derived from being well-adjusted to those norms. Nevertheless,
their
spirit of truth-seeking, rooted in broad understanding of human culture, literature and history, has
become lost . Today's practitioners tend to be technicians, looking for the right technique that will
treat the patient's symptoms. Many tend to be cautious, often disengaged and detached people in their
manner and interactions with patients. They are largely ignorant of philosophical, religious , cultural
and socio-economic forces that shape people's psychological development , especially those in nonWestern societies. And yet, all of those forces in all parts of the globe profoundly impact how and why we learn to think and behave as
we do. Much current world conflict reflects those differences that define what we think in "normal" or "disturbed." Many therapists
today simply assume that adjusting to prevailing values and norms reflects psychological health. Now that's
desirable for those whose conflicts have disabled them from minimally successful functioning. But it misses the mark for those whose conflicts
are linked with their successful adaptation to begin with. The therapist then fails to explore their patients' definition of "success" - how it's
shaped their career and life goals, their conflicts and disappointments. Some therapists will spend inordinate time ferreting out tiny truths
about the patient's family and childhood, without figuring out which have relevance to the person's conflicts today, and which don't. They
may ignore the impact of trade-offs and compromises patients made as they created their sexual and
intimate relationship patterns Overall, today's practitioners tend to share in, rather than critique and examine, the social norms,
values and anxieties of today's world. Too often, they uncritically accept good functioning per se, and conventional
values like power-seeking, as psychologically healthy. This blinds them from recognizing that "normal" adjustment can mask
repressed feelings of self-betrayal, self-criticism, and the desire to be freer, more alive. All of those longings can conflict with or oppose
parental expectations or the pressures from social class membership. Emotional Conflicts In Today's World
People's problems have
evolved . Up through World War II and into the 1950s-early 60s symptoms that were more typical of Freud's time -- hysteria or specific
phobias, for example - diminished. People wanted help for fitting in with the apparent paths to success and happiness and for dealing with
conflicts that interfered with or limited it. Therapy often addressed things like guilt, inhibition, the need for approval, and dealing with the
conflicts generated by defined, rigid roles for men and women. Desires or
longings that deviated too much from the
prevailing norms were troublesome and created conflicts, often unconscious. The popular TV show "Mad Men
(link is external)" is a good portrayal of conflicts of that era, especially issues of identity, longing for an authentic self and gender roles. At the
same time, the men enjoyed the surface appearance of power and control. And women chafed against the limits imposed by gender roles, as
the women's movement began to arise. The period of social upheaval of the late 60s and 70s created more openly conscious conflict and
struggle for many people. The theme, here, was seeking more freedom from oppressive relationships and social constraints. Some
therapists were able to address these issues in helpful ways. But others were bound by their own uncritical embrace of
the very norms their patients wanted help to free themselves from. Partly because of that disconnect, many
psychotherapy patients were attracted to the vision of personal development offered by the rising "new
age" movement, although its gurus generally lacked any depth of understanding about emotional conflicts or psychological development.
Then, from the 1980s to about 2000 more men and women sought help to create more personally fulfilling, engaged relationships, and more
personal meaning from their work. The costs and limits of success (link is external) became visible in patients who wanted help to create
greater work-life "balance" while preserving their relationships and their upward climb in their careers. Dealing with the emotional fallout of
the dot-com bubble burst added another dimension to these stresses. During this period of greater fulfillment-seeking, more people turned to
spiritual development as a companion to or substitute for traditional therapy, especially via older traditions like Buddhism and other Eastern
practices. And now, in the current era, emotional
conflicts spring more from the psychological impact of our
nonlinear, unpredictable, highly interconnected world. For example, financial and career uncertainties. Changing practices
in romantic/sexual relationships. Facing one's responsibilities to fellow inhabitants of the planet, and for sustaining the planet for future
generations. The psychological impact of these issues interacts with the legacy of family conflicts and their dysfunctions that people carry with
them into the adult world. It's a new universe of potential pain and confusion that people are now struggling with.
Freud was a fraud and the study of psychoanalysis is a political joust for power among
aspiring philosophers
Dufresne 15, social and cultural theorist best-known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history
of psychoanalysis, Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the
author of multiple books about Freud and psychoanalysis, (Todd, January 2015, 235. DR. TODD
DUFRESNE ON FREUD’S LOOMING SHADOW OF DECEPTION, http://www.skeptiko.com/235-todddufresne-freud-deception/)//kap
Can you take us through the evolution of this Freud scholarship? What’s
emerged in the last 20 or 30 years in terms of
who Freud really was? What’s the story behind these murmurs we hear in the background that maybe
Freud wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. Dr. Todd Dufresne: That’s a good question. I’ll back up just for one second and say
this first to get into that: for myself, because I was interested in deconstruction, what happened to me is when I looked at Freud I realized that
the work of deconstruction and psychoanalysis was not actually very good. So ironically I ended up being somebody that was interested in
deconstruction but became a specialist in Freud. My first self-authored book, Tales From the Freudian Crypt, that you mentioned ends
essentially before I started doing my own thing with a critique of Derrida on deconstruction. What I was left with was realizing the limitations of
deconstruction and stuck with an area of study that I in fact never had any intention of being a specialist in, which is Freudian psychoanalysis.
I’m very unusual, I suppose, because I came to psychoanalysis not because I was in analysis or I particularly liked it. Just purely because I was
curious about it. To follow up on the rest of your question, the evolution of Freud scholarship, one of the things that really struck me pretty
quickly was I got lucky in some ways. I was a TA for a guy named Paul Rosen, who’s a major Freud scholar and he was the main Freud scholar at
York University. He’s one of the main biographers of Freud in the world. He has since passed away. I happened to be set up with him to be his
TA, which made sense given my interests. What I quickly realized is that in
the field of psychoanalysis there are certain texts
and certain thinkers that are verboten. They’re not allowed, right? And certain kinds of thinkers that are not
looked upon very well. Rosen was one of these people. My great luck is that I worked with a guy that was already kind of a heretic in
psychoanalysis. I was immediately struck by how politicized the field was and how if you simply read
somebody like Rosen’s work or many other scholars who have been on a list of heretics, you realize that
there’s lots of great work out there that many people simply won’t read because it is somehow it’s
been blacklisted one way or another. What I had to realize is that I had to find my own way. And that the field of criticism in the
last 30-40 years was made possible by people like Paul Rosen, Henri Ellenberger, a great historian, as well. At the other end of that you’ll find
Frank Coffey, a great philosopher who has since passed away as well and in the ‘90s somebody like Frederick Crews, who is an English professor
from Berkeley, since retired. These people had to have a certain amount of courage to go against everyday convictions about Freud and
psychoanalysis because, like I said, certain criticisms of Freud and certain viewpoints of Freud were just not indulged at all. So for me, I didn’t
have to be brave in some ways. The
field was already opened up by these people who suffered the consequences
of their heresy, I suppose. Rosen, who started off as a darling of the psychoanalytic field and became a heretic, he really suffered
personally at the hands of institutional psychoanalysis. He would have wanted to be accepted in some way, I think. For me, of course, I had no
illusions. I never cared to be accepted by them and I also had no problem reading works that people wouldn’t read. Alex Tsakiris: Before we talk
past that too much, give people a sense for this criticism. There are layers of criticism and the way you’re saying it I think people might get the
impression that there’s a little tussle over how this should be interpreted or that should be interpreted when in fact the real historical touchpoints that we have paint just a horrible picture of Freud—of someone who’s really a complete fraud. Who manufactures evidence in order to
support his theories, that copies without attribution other people’s work or at least he promotes himself as being this original great genius
when he’s really stood on the shoulders of all these other people. I mean, the history of it beyond just critiquing theory is just stunning for
people who haven’t fully encountered it. The other side of that that I really want you to get into to support that is how we know this
information was really held under lock and key and protected under the tightest controls for so long. Then it’s gradually pried loose. So give
people a sense for that. Dr. Todd Dufresne: There’s so much to say I hardly know where to begin. In some ways, from my perspective, what
really happened was Ernest Jones came out with this three-volume biography in 1953, 1955, 1957, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Then he
died. Basically you have everything after the Jones biography, which is an official biography of psychoanalysis, as kind of a response to this
official biography. What happens is that people start becoming more and more critical of psychoanalysis. For me, Rosen is one of the first
figures in this regard and it’s around 1967 when he publishes a book called, Brother Animal, in which he reveals that one of Freud’s earlier
followers committed suicide. I guess the radical side of this is that Freud
was very unmoved by this follower’s plight. He
was a sycophant like half the people surrounding Freud, and Freud rebuffed him in various ways and the
guy committed suicide. Okay, that’s horrible but not entirely surprising in some ways. But deeper and more radical than that, Rosen
exposed that during two periods in the 1920s Freud analyzed his own daughter, Anna, and that’s what really got him
into trouble. That’s kind of the beginning of this movement to reassess the fundamental myths of
psychoanalysis or the things we didn’t know were myths but certainly we now know are myths. I call it
really the beginning of critical Freud studies. I take it to be a post-Jones movement, roughly from the mid-‘60s through to the
late 1990s and maybe going on today, as well. I see it as like the whole purpose of scholarship and Freud studies is to move to critical Freud
studies. Now how did it happen? It’s really amazing. One of the untold stories of psychoanalytic studies or Freud studies, as it’s usually called, is
that one of the reasons there’s so much misinformation is that the vast majority of books published and that appear under the library heading
of BF173 to BF175 roughly—go to any library and you’ll find all the Freud books there. Most of this work is vanity publishing. So much
of
the field is run by psychoanalysts who have positions of authority. They start their own book
publishers. They start their own journals. Pretty soon they have an authority in the marketplace of
ideas so it’s very, very hard to actually find in the thousands of books published on Freud anything
that actually tells the truth. It’s a hard thing for somebody to free themselves from many, many misconceptions about Freud. You
mentioned a couple of them. Freud manufactured evidence. One of the things that’s not well-appreciated is how Freud went
out of his way to manipulate the reception of his own work, right? He wrote his own histories, first of all. Many
times he revised his own histories and sometimes there are discrepancies with his own histories. He was always trying to spin
his history in advance because Freud always perceived himself as an historically important person, so he
proceeded accordingly. He destroyed some of his correspondence. He would destroy some of his process notes that he used to create
his famous case studies, of which there really is only four that he wrote, all of which are failures, by the way. He destroyed the notes
and these were important cases. You’d think you’d keep them but he destroyed them. He tried to get his famous letters with
Wilhelm Fliess destroyed but Marie Bonaparte preserved them against his wishes. So Freud was always interested in
manipulating the reception of his work and he was largely successful in many ways. People have generally
believed what he said.
Freud fabricated evidence-- but his “cult” following refuses to accept his invalidity
Dufresne 15, social and cultural theorist best-known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history
of psychoanalysis, Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the
author of multiple books about Freud and psychoanalysis, (Todd, January 2015, 235. DR. TODD
DUFRESNE ON FREUD’S LOOMING SHADOW OF DECEPTION, http://www.skeptiko.com/235-todddufresne-freud-deception/)//kap
Alex Tsakiris: Can we stop right there? One of the things I always like to do when we get into these discussions with people and I have just a
very superficial understanding of this stuff—you could
get into it in much greater detail. I always stop at this point
and say, “What would that look like in modern academic standards?” Just what we already know there.
What would that look like if any intellectual, academic figure of our time was known to have done those
things? I can’t imagine but that they would be completely ostracized as just the beginning of it. They’d
be a complete joke. Dr. Todd Dufresne: The problem is, Alex, that’s there’s hardly any modern equivalent to Freud .
What Freud got away with for so long, which is essentially passing off incomplete results or fraudulent
results as the truth—I can give you some examples as we get into it later. He did all of the things you said he did. He
manufactured evidence and even the evidence that he had, he may have felt legitimately and honestly is
so shot-through with epistemological problems because there’s the contamination of results by the
expectations he had on the patients. We know this is called “suggestion,” right? And undue influence. One of the
things that’s interesting about Freud is that he was a scientist and as a scientist he had followers. These
followers routinely referred to his major works like The Interpretation of Dreams as their “bibles.” So
we’re already in Freud’s life in the presence of a kind of cult or church or something that’s not scientific.
This guy was a trained neurologist, right? He asked some legitimate questions. He explored these questions but at some point
ambition took over and he fudged the results in many ways like you’re saying. What should happen with Freud is
the minute people see that he fudged the results in a number of ways that are absolutely clear—there’s
no question—well, anybody that has any fair-mindedness would say that everything that follows from
these results is therefore questionable. But that’s not what happens with Freud, and that’s because we’re in the
presence of a belief system, like a religion, so people don’t want to question it. Anything like this
today, you’d lose tenure. You’d lose your job. When this happens people fall into disgrace. But Freud
has never really seriously fallen into disgrace.
One of the things that’s happened which is amazing to me because I’m
somebody who works in the humanities is that part of the blame belongs to people in the humanities and social sciences that don’t really care
about science, or in some ways truth, not to be too general about it. They don’t care that maybe he fudged the results; they’re just interested in
this as a hermeneutic system, a way of interpreting the world. So
this is the place we get, where people are really nonskeptical about Freud and they don’t want to hear it, you know? They do not want to hear it. And that’s
my colleagues, I’m afraid.
Pinker
2ac – violence down / at: global civil war
Violence decreasing globally
Mack and Pinker 14 - director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University AND
** Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of Our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (Andrew and Steven, J “The World Is Not Falling Apart” Slate, 12/22,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal
_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)//CB
The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world
seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton
likes to say, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” We will see that the trend lines are more
encouraging than a news junkie would guess.
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem
callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a
quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal
value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the
hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most
likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.
Homicide. Worldwide, about five to 10 times as many people die in police-blotter homicides as die in
wars. And in most of the world, the rate of homicide has been sinking. The Great American Crime
Decline of the 1990s, which flattened out at the start of the new century, resumed in 2006, and, defying
the conventional wisdom that hard times lead to violence, proceeded right through the recession of
2008 and up to the present.
England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries have also seen their homicide rates fall in the
past decade. Among the 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have seen a decline in the past 15 years.
Though numbers for the entire world exist only for this millennium and include heroic guesstimates for
countries that are data deserts, the trend appears to be downward, from 7.1 homicides per 100,000
people in 2003 to 6.2 in 2012.
The global average, to be sure, conceals many regions with horrific rates of killing, particularly in Latin
America and sub-Saharan Africa. But even in those hot zones, it’s easy for the headlines to mislead. The
gory drug-fueled killings in parts of Mexico, for example, can create an impression that the country has
spiraled into Hobbesian lawlessness. But the trend line belies the impression in two ways.
One is that the 21st-century spike has not undone a massive reduction in homicide that Mexico has
enjoyed since 1940, comparable to the reductions that Europe and the United States underwent in
earlier centuries. The other is that what goes up often comes down. The rate of Mexican homicide has
declined in each of the past two years (including an almost 90 percent drop in Juárez from 2010 to
2012), and many other notoriously dangerous regions have experienced significant turnarounds,
including Bogotá, Colombia (a fivefold decline in two decades), Medellín, Colombia (down 85 percent in
two decades), São Paolo (down 70 percent in a decade), the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (an almost twothirds reduction in four years), Russia (down 46 percent in six years), and South Africa (a halving from
1995 to 2011). Many criminologists believe that a reduction of global violence by 50 percent in the next
three decades is a feasible target for the next round of Millennium Development Goals.
Violence Against Women. The intense media coverage of famous athletes who have assaulted their
wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, have suggested to many pundits that
we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. But the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’
victimization surveys (which circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police) show the
opposite: Rates of rape or sexual assault and of violence against intimate partners have been sinking for
decades, and are now a quarter or less of their peaks in the past. Far too many of these horrendous
crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about
violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought about measurable progress—and that
continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still.
Few other countries have comparable data, but there is reason to believe that similar trends would be
found elsewhere. Most measures of personal violence are correlated over time, so the global decline of
homicide suggests that nonlethal violence against women may be falling on a parallel trajectory, though
highly unevenly across regions. In 1993 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence Against Women, and polling data show widespread support for women’s rights,
even in countries with the most benighted practices. Many countries have implemented laws and public
awareness campaigns to reduce rape, forced marriage, genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic
violence, and wartime atrocities. Though some of these measures are toothless, and the effectiveness of
others has yet to be established, there are grounds for optimism over the long term. Global shaming
campaigns, even when they start out as purely aspirational, have led in the past to dramatic reductions
of practices such as slavery, dueling, whaling, foot binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare,
apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.
Violence Against Children. A similar story can be told about children. The incessant media reports of
school shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual and physical abuse
make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous times. But the data say otherwise: Kids are
undoubtedly safer than they were in the past. In a review of the literature on violence against children in
the United States published earlier this year, the sociologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues reported,
“Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases
between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual
victimization.”
Similar trends are seen in other industrialized countries, and international declarations have made the
reduction of violence against children a global concern.
Democratization. In 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented that “liberal democracy on the American
model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of
government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there … but which has simply no
relevance to the future.” Moynihan was a social scientist, and his pessimism was backed by the numbers
of his day: A growing majority of countries were led by communist, fascist, military, or strongman
dictators. But the pessimism turned out to be premature, belied by a wave of democratization that
began not long after the ink had dried on his eulogy. The pessimists of today who insist that the future
belongs to the authoritarian capitalism of Russia and China show no such numeracy. Data from the
Polity IV Project on the degree of democracy and autocracy among the world’s countries show that the
democracy craze has decelerated of late but shows no signs of going into reverse.
Democracy has proved to be more robust than its eulogizers realize. A majority of the world’s countries
today are democratic, and not just the wealthy monocultures of Europe, North America, and East Asia.
Governments that are more democratic than not (scoring 6 or higher on the Polity IV Project’s scale
from minus 10 to 10) are entrenched (albeit with nerve-wracking ups and downs) in most of Latin
America, in floridly multiethnic India, in Islamic Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and in 14 countries in
sub-Saharan Africa. Even the autocracies of Russia and China, which show few signs of liberalizing
anytime soon, are incomparably less repressive than the regimes of Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao.
Genocide and Other Mass Killings of Civilians. The recent atrocities against non-Islamic minorities at the
hands of ISIS, together with the ongoing killing of civilians in Syria, Iraq, and central Africa, have fed a
narrative in which the world has learned nothing from the Holocaust and genocides continue unabated.
But even the most horrific events of the present must be put into historical perspective, if only to
identify and eliminate the forces that lead to mass killing. Though the meaning of the word genocide is
too fuzzy to support objective analysis, all genocides fall into the more inclusive category of “one-sided
violence” or “mass killing of noncombatant civilians,” and several historians and social scientists have
estimated their trajectory over time. The numbers are imprecise and often contested, but the overall
trends are clear and consistent across datasets.
By any standard, the world is nowhere near as genocidal as it was during its peak in the 1940s, when
Nazi, Soviet, and Japanese mass murders, together with the targeting of civilians by all sides in World
War II, resulted in a civilian death rate in the vicinity of 350 per 100,000 per year. Stalin and Mao kept
the global rate between 75 and 150 through the early 1960s, and it has been falling ever since, though
punctuated by spikes of dying in Biafra (1966–1970, 200,000 deaths), Sudan (1983–2002, 1 million),
Afghanistan (1978–2002, 1 million), Indonesia (1965–1966, 500,000), Angola (1975–2002, 1 million),
Rwanda (1994, 500,000), and Bosnia (1992–1995, 200,000). (All of these estimates are from the Center
for Systemic Peace.) These numbers must be kept in mind when we read of the current horrors in Iraq
(2003–2014, 150,000 deaths) and Syria (2011–2014, 150,000) and interpret them as signs of a dark new
era. Nor, tragically, are the beheadings and crucifixions of the Islamic State historically unusual. Many
postwar genocides were accompanied by splurges of ghastly torture and mutilation. The main difference
is that they were not broadcasted on social media.
The trend lines for genocide and other civilian killings, fortunately, point sharply downward. After a
steady rise during the Cold War until 1992, the proportion of states perpetrating or enabling mass
killings of civilians has plummeted, though with a small recent bounce we will examine shortly.
The number of civilians killed in these massacres has also dropped. Reliable data, collected by the
Uppsala Conflict Data Program, or UCDP, exist only for the past 25 years, and this period is so dominated
by the Rwandan genocide that an ordinary graph looks like a tall spike poking through a wrinkled carpet.
But when we squish the graph by using a logarithmic scale, we see that by 2013 the rate of civilian killing
had fallen by an order of magnitude since the mid-1990s, and by two orders of magnitude since
Rwanda.
Though comparisons to the cruder data of previous decades are iffy, the numbers we have suggest that
the rate of killing civilians has dropped by about three orders of magnitude since the decade after World
War II, and by four orders of magnitude since the war itself. In other words, the world’s civilians are
several thousand times less likely to be targeted today than they were 70 years ago.
War. Researchers who track war and peace distinguish “armed conflicts,” which kill as few as 25 soldiers
and civilians caught in the line of fire in a year, from “wars,” which kill more than a thousand. They also
distinguish “interstate” conflicts, which pit the armed forces of two or more states against each other,
from “intrastate” or “civil” conflicts, which pit a state against an insurgency or separatist force,
sometimes with the armed intervention of an external state. (Conflicts in which the armed forces of a
state are not directly involved, such as the one-sided violence perpetrated by a militia against
noncombatants, and intercommunal violence between militias, are counted separately.)
In a historically unprecedented development, the number of interstate wars has plummeted since 1945,
and the most destructive kind of war, in which great powers or developed states fight each other, has
vanished altogether. (The last one was the Korean War). Today the world rarely sees a major naval
battle, or masses of tanks and heavy artillery shelling each other across a battlefield. The green curve in
the graph below (from the UCDP) shows how major wars have sputtered out in the postwar period.
The end of the Cold War also saw a steep reduction in the number of armed conflicts of all kinds,
including civil wars . The blue curve in the graph shows that recent events have not reversed this trend.
In 2013 there were 33 state-based armed conflicts in the world, a number that falls right within the
range of fluctuations of the last dozen years (between 31 and 38) and well below the high of 52 shortly
after the end of the Cold War. The UCDP has also noted that 2013 saw the signing of six peace
agreements, two more than in the previous year.
1ar – data outweighs
The world’s improving by all metrics – prefer evidence to clown conjecture
Mack and Pinker 14 - director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University AND
** Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of Our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (Andrew and Steven, J “The World Is Not Falling Apart” Slate, 12/22,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal
_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)//CB
The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide,
rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way
to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete.
The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison
with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.
We have been told of impending doom before: a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a line of dominoes
in Southeast Asia, revanchism in a reunified Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage
superpredators, a coming anarchy that would fracture the major nation-states, and weekly 9/11-scale
attacks that would pose an existential threat to civilization.
Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater
majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?
Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration.
Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how
representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait.
Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem:
generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about
the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what
emotions to feel.
There is a better way to understand the world. Commentators can brush up their history—not by
rummaging through Bartlett’s for a quote from Clausewitz, but by recounting the events of the recent
past that put the events of the present in an intelligible context. And they could consult the analyses of
quantitative datasets on violence that are now just a few clicks away.
An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits. It would calibrate our
national and international responses to the magnitude of the dangers that face us. It would limit the
influence of terrorists, school shooters, decapitation cinematographers, and other violence impresarios.
It might even dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world.
1ar – at: uptick in civil war
The uptick in civil war is still substantially below historical baselines and those
conflicts will burn out
Mack and Pinker 14 - director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University AND
** Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of Our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (Andrew and Steven, J “The World Is Not Falling Apart” Slate, 12/22,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal
_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)//CB
But the red curve in the graph shows a recent development that is less benign: The number of wars
jumped from four in 2010—the lowest total since the end of World War II—to seven in 2013. These
wars were fought in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, South
Sudan, and Syria. Conflict data for 2014 will not be available until next year, but we already know that
four new wars broke out in the past 12 months, for a total of 11. The jump from 2010 to 2014, the
steepest since the end of the Cold War, has brought us to the highest number of wars since 2000. The
worldwide rate of battle deaths (available through 2013) has also risen since its low point in 2005,
mostly because of the deaths in the Syrian civil war.
Though the recent increase in civil wars and battle deaths is real and worrisome, it must be kept in
perspective. It has undone the progress of the last dozen years, but the rates of violence are still well
below those of the 1990s, and nowhere near the levels of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s.
The 2010–2014 upsurge is circumscribed in a second way. In seven of the 11 wars that flared during this
period, radical Islamist groups were one of the warring parties: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel/Gaza, Iraq,
Nigeria, Syria, and Yemen. (Indeed, absent the Islamist conflicts, there would have been no increase in
wars in the last few years, with just two in 2013 and three in 2014.) This reflects a broader trend. In
January 2014 the Pew Research Center reported that the number of countries experiencing high or very
high levels of “religious hostilities” increased by more than 40 percent (from 14 to 20) between 2011
and 2012. In all but two of these countries (those listed above together with Bangladesh, Egypt, India,
Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, and Thailand) the
hostilities were associated with extremist Islamist groups. These groups tend to gain the most traction in
countries with exclusionary, inept, or repressive governments or in zones with no effective government
at all, including long-anarchic frontier regions and the parts of Syria and Iraq that have been rendered
anarchic in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring.
Because the radical Islamist groups have maximalist goals and reject compromise, the major
mechanisms that drove the decline in the number of wars in the preceding decades—negotiated
settlements and peacekeeping and peacebuilding programs—are unlikely to succeed in ending these
conflicts. Also intensifying the violence is their international scope. External fighters and weapons drive
up death tolls and prolong fighting. For these reasons we do not expect the recent upsurge to be quickly
reversed.
At the same time, there are reasons to believe that it will not extend into the indefinite future, let alone
escalate into global warfare. Let’s examine the three most prominent trouble spots.
Iraq/Syria. The Islamic State will not expand into a pan-Islamic caliphate, and it is unlikely to persist over
the long term. For one thing, its ideology and politics are loathed throughout most of the Islamic world;
even al-Qaida has excommunicated the movement for being too extreme. The extremists thus lack the
mass popular support that is necessary for fighting the kind of “people’s war” that proved successful in
places like China and Vietnam.
The Islamic State, moreover, lacks the conventional military capabilities needed to overthrow a heavily
defended Baghdad. It has minimal armor, long-range artillery, sophisticated rocketry, and air power, and
only a rudimentary air defense system. The Islamists’ remarkable sweep through northern Iraq in the
summer of 2014 occurred mainly because hapless Iraqi soldiers, abandoned by officers with no loyalty
to the Shiite regime, chose not to fight.
The Islamic State is now overextended and will become more vulnerable as it seeks to become a normal
state. Although wealthy by terror group standards, its income—estimated at $2 million a day—is grossly
inadequate to the task of governing as a state. It is already under the same U.N. sanction regime as alQaida, and it is isolated from the region’s main centers of trade, manufacture, and commerce. As ISIS is
decreasingly able to extract, refine, and sell oil, its major source of revenue is shrinking. It has no access
to the sea, it has no major-power supporters, and its neighbors are mostly enemies. Last but not least,
the United States and its allies, together with the Iraqi army, are planning a spring counteroffensive
against ISIS that will be far more punishing than anything attempted thus far.
Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s reabsorption of Crimea into Russia, and his thinly disguised support for
Ukrainian secessionist movements, are deeply troubling developments, not just because the resulting
fighting has claimed more than 4,000 lives, but also because they challenge the grandfathering of
national borders and the near-taboo on conquest that have helped keep the peace since 1945.
Yet comparisons to the world of a century ago—when romantic militarism was widespread,
international institutions virtually nonexistent, and leaders naive about the costs of escalating greatpower war—are almost certainly overdrawn. So far Russia has sent “little green men” rather than tank
divisions across the border, and even the most hawkish of American hawks has not proposed pushing it
back with military force. Meanwhile Putin’s adventurism has been hugely costly for Russia. The tough EU
sanctions, along with plunging oil prices, will push Russia into a recession in 2015. The ruble is
plummeting in value, food prices have risen sharply, and Russian banks are finding it increasingly
difficult to borrow foreign capital. All this suggests that the tensions in Ukraine are far more likely to end
in an uneasy stalemate like those in Georgia and Moldova, which have endured the loss of pro-Russian
breakaway statelets, than a repeat of World War I.
AT: Body counts are a bad metric
Body counts are the most moral way to assess impacts – it prevents devaluing distant
impacts and centers the debate on problem solving
Mack and Pinker 14 - director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University AND
** Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of Our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (Andrew and Steven, J “The World Is Not Falling Apart” Slate, 12/22,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal
_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)//CB
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem
callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a
quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal
value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the
hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most
likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.
AT: Taleb
Your author needs to rethink his criticism—Pinker is laying down the smack.
Pinker 12. (Steven, Steven, Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of
Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. “Fooled by Belligerence: Comments on Nassim Taleb’s ‘The Long Peace is a Statistical
Illusion.’” Nov 11 2012. http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf)//CB
Taleb shows no signs of having read Better Angels with the slightest attention to its content. Instead he
has merged it in his mind with claims by various fools and knaves whom he believes he has bettered in
the past. The confusion begins with his remarkable claim that the thesis in Better Angels is “identical” to
Ben Bernanke’s theory of a moderation in the stock market. Identical! This alone should warn readers
that for all of Taleb’s prescience about the financial crisis, accurate attribution and careful analysis of
other people’s ideas are not his strong suits.
Taleb’s article implies that Better Angels consists of 700 pages of fancy statistical extrapolations which
lead to the conclusion that violent catastrophes have become impossible. He mistakenly refers to this as
“The Long Peace.” In fact “The Long Peace” (the term is John Gaddis’s) refers specifically to the welldocumented post-1945 decline of wars among great powers and developed states. And the chapter with
that title is one of six that describe historical reductions in rates of violence. Another chapter discusses
the more tentative but still appreciable declines in civil war and terrorism since the end of the Cold War.
The remaining four pertain to other kinds of violence: tribal raiding and feuding, violent personal crime,
barbaric practices such as slavery and torture-executions, and violence on smaller scales such as
lynching, rape, spousal abuse, spanking, hate crimes, and cruelty to animals. The book makes it clear
that these developments obey very different statistical processes than those governing wars and
terrorist attacks; not even Taleb, presumably, would expect a sudden, massive, unpredictable jump in
human sacrifice, slave auctions, sodomy laws, or debtor’s prisons. So even if, as Taleb seems to believe,
the danger from major war has not declined, we would have plenty of other declines of violence to
explain. It’s an open question whether there are any common denominators behind these various
declines. Better Angels considers some possibilities, while making it clear that these declines do not
constitute a single phenomenon.
The book’s structure was lost on Taleb, who blends the different chapters and then criticizes his own
confusion. He claims that the book “conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with
simple weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear weapons),” that it uses
“statistics of one to make inferences about the other,” that it “does not realize the core difference
between scalable/nonscalable,” that it implies that a drop in crime has implications for “casualties from
violent conflict,” that it “fails to deal with the notion of temporal homogeneity,” and that it “assumes
that the statistics of the 14th century can apply to the 21st.” Every one of these attributions is wrong.
The book spends many pages arguing the exact opposite.
Poverty/Economic Inequality Decreasing
Income inequality has never been lower—increased trade.
Cowen 14. (Tyler, professor of Economics at George Mason University. “Income Inequality Is Not Rising Globally. It's
Falling,” NYT. JULY 19, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-is-not-rising-globally-its-falling.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1)//CB
Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that
inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most
individual nations, yet income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20
years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been noted often enough.
The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and
Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may
sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and
some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history.
Of course, no one should use this observation as an excuse to stop helping the less fortunate. But it can
help us see that higher income inequality is not always the most relevant problem, even for strict
egalitarians. Policies on immigration and free trade, for example, sometimes increase inequality within a
nation, yet can make the world a better place and often decrease inequality on the planet as a whole.
International trade has drastically reduced poverty within developing nations, as evidenced by the
export-led growth of China and other countries. Yet contrary to what many economists had promised,
there is now good evidence that the rise of Chinese exports has held down the wages of some parts of
the American middle class. This was demonstrated in a recent paper by the economists David H. Autor
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial
Studies in Madrid, and Gordon H. Hanson of the University of California, San Diego.
At the same time, Chinese economic growth has probably raised incomes of the top 1 percent in the
United States, through exports that have increased the value of companies whose shares are often held
by wealthy Americans. So while Chinese growth has added to income inequality in the United States, it
has also increased prosperity and income equality globally.
The evidence also suggests that immigration of low-skilled workers to the United States has a modestly
negative effect on the wages of American workers without a high school diploma, as shown, for
instance, in research by George Borjas, a Harvard economics professor. Yet that same immigration
greatly benefits those who move to wealthy countries like the United States. (It probably also helps top
American earners, who can hire household and child-care workers at cheaper prices.) Again, income
inequality within the nation may rise but global inequality probably declines, especially if the new
arrivals send money back home.
From a narrowly nationalist point of view, these developments may not be auspicious for the United
States. But that narrow viewpoint is the main problem. We have evolved a political debate where
essentially nationalistic concerns have been hiding behind the gentler cloak of egalitarianism. To clear
up this confusion, one recommendation would be to preface all discussions of inequality with a
reminder that global inequality has been falling and that, in this regard, the world is headed in a
fundamentally better direction.
The message from groups like Occupy Wall Street has been that inequality is up and that capitalism is
failing us. A more correct and nuanced message is this: Although significant economic problems remain,
we have been living in equalizing times for the world — a change that has been largely for the good.
That may not make for convincing sloganeering, but it’s the truth.
A common view is that high and rising inequality within nations brings political trouble, maybe through
violence or even revolution. So one might argue that a nationalistic perspective is important. But it’s
hardly obvious that such predictions of political turmoil are true, especially for aging societies like the
United States that are showing falling rates of crime.
Furthermore, public policy can adjust to accommodate some egalitarian concerns. We can improve our
educational system, for example.
Still, to the extent that political worry about rising domestic inequality is justified, it suggests yet another
reframing. If our domestic politics can’t handle changes in income distribution, maybe the problem isn’t
that capitalism is fundamentally flawed but rather that our political institutions are inflexible. Our
politics need not collapse under the pressure of a world that, over all, is becoming wealthier and fairer.
Global poverty is at an all-time low—globalization.
Tupy 15. (Marian, senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
Internally quoting
the World Bank’s Branko Milanovic and Geoffrey Gertz of the Brookings Institution. “Stop obsessing about inequality. It’s
actually decreasing around the world,” The Washington Post. 1/8/2015.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/08/stop-obsessing-about-inequality-its-actually-decreasingaround-the-world/)//CB
In America, the income gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has grown. But if we look not at
America, but the world, inequality is shrinking. We are witnessing, in the words of the World Bank’s
Branko Milanovic, “the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial
Revolution.”
For most of human history, incomes were more equal, but terribly low. Two thousand years ago, GDP
per person in the most advanced parts of the world hovered around $3.50 per day. That was the global
average 1,800 years later.
But by the early 19th century, a pronounced income gap emerged between the West and the rest. Take
the United States. In 1820, the U.S. was 1.9 times richer than the global average. The income gap grew
to 4.1 in 1960 and reached its maximum level of 4.8 in 1999. By 2010, it had shrunk by 19 percent to 3.9.
That narrowing is not a function of declining Western incomes. During the Great Recession, for example,
U.S. GDP per capita decreased by 4.8 percent between 2007 and 2009. It rebounded by 5.7 percent over
the next 4 years and stands at an all-time high today. Rather, the narrowing of the income gap is a result
of growing incomes in the rest of the world.
Consider the spectacular rise of Asia. In 1960, the U.S. was 11 times richer than Asia. Today, America is
only 4.8 times richer than Asia.
To understand why, let’s look at China.
Between 1958 and 1961, Mao Zedong attempted to transform China’s largely agricultural economy into
an industrial one through the “Great Leap Forward.” His stated goal was to overtake UK’s industrial
production in 15 years. Industrialization, which included building of factories at home as well as largescale purchases of machinery abroad, was to be paid for by food produced on collective farms.
But the collectivization of agriculture resulted in famine that killed between 18 and 45 million people.
Industrial initiatives, such as Mao’s attempt to massively increase production of steel, were equally
disastrous. People burned their houses to stoke the fires of the steel mills and melted cooking wares to
fulfil the steel production quotas. The result was destruction, rather than creation of wealth.
Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, partially privatized the farmland and allowed farmers to sell their
produce. Trade liberalization ensured that Chinese industrial output would no longer be dictated by
production quotas, but by the demands of the international economy. But Following liberalization in
1978, China’s GDP per capita has increased 12.5 fold, rising from $545 in 1980 to $6,807 in 2013. Over
the same time period, the Chinese poverty rate fell from 84 percent to 10 percent.
What is true of China is also true in much of the developing world. As Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey
Gertz of the Brookings Institution wrote in 2011, “poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in
history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”
Developing countries have made strides in other areas too. Take life expectancy. Between 1960 and
2010, global life expectancy increased from 53 years to 70. In the U.S. over the same period it rose from
70 to 78. Similar stories can be told about child and maternal mortality, treatment of communicable
diseases, and the spread of technology.
Many Americans point to globalization as a bogeyman, robbing our country of good jobs and resources.
But really, the phenomenon has ushered a period of unprecedented prosperity in many poor countries.
Even as we struggle with economic problems at home let us remember the global – and largely positive
– perspective on the state of the world.
Warming Decreasing
Climate change is improving—emissions falling worldwide.
Magill 15. (Bobby, Senior Science Writer at Climate Central, focusing on energy and climate change. Internally quotes IEA
Chief Economist and incoming IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “Energy Bombshell: CO2 Emissions Stabilized in 2014,” Climate
Central. March 13th, 2015. http://www.climatecentral.org/news/co2-emissions-stabilized-in-2014-18777)//CB
Solar, wind and other renewables are making such a big difference in greenhouse gas emissions
worldwide that global emissions from the energy sector flatlined during a time of economic growth for
the first time in 40 years.
The International Energy Agency announced Friday that energy-related CO2 emissions last year were
unchanged from the year before, totaling 32.3 billion metric tons of CO2 in both 2013 and 2014. It
shows that efforts to reduce emissions to combat climate change may be more effective than previously
thought.
Energy-related CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources have gone flat worldwide,
according to the International Energy Agency. Credit: Ian Britton/flickr
“This is both a very welcome surprise and a significant one,” IEA Chief Economist and incoming IEA
Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “It provides much-needed momentum to negotiators
preparing to forge a global climate deal in Paris in December. For the first time, greenhouse gas
emissions are decoupling from economic growth.”
Following an announcement earlier this week that China’s CO2 emissions fell 2 percent in 2014, the IEA
is crediting 2014’s progress to China using more solar, wind and hydropower while burning less coal.
Western Europe’s focus on sustainable growth, energy efficiency and renewables has shown that
emissions from energy consumption can fall even as economies grow globally, according to the IEA.
Global CO2 emissions stalled or fell in the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009, each time correlating with a
faltering global economy. In 2014, the economy grew 3 percent worldwide.
In the U.S., energy-related CO2 emissions fell during seven of the past 23 years, most notably during the
recession of 2009, U.S. Energy Information Administration data show. Emissions in 2013 — the most
recent year for which U.S. data is available — were higher than they were in the previous year, but 10
percent lower than they were in 2005.
Global political will for curbing emissions is increasing.
Davenport 14. (Coral, energy and environment reporter for NYT. Internally quoting Durwood Zaelke, president of the
Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. “U.S. Moves to Reduce Global Warming Emissions,” NYT. SEPT. 16,
2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/us/hfc-emissions-cut-under-agreement.html)//CB
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a series of moves aimed at cutting
emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, powerful greenhouse gases that contribute to climate
change.
The White House has secured voluntary agreements from some of the nation’s largest companies to
scale down or phase out their use of HFCs, which are factory-made gases used in air conditioning and
refrigeration. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Red Bull, Kroger, Honeywell and DuPont, the company that invented
fluorinated refrigerants, have agreed to cut their use and replace them with climate-friendly
alternatives.
Over all, the administration estimated that the agreements announced on Tuesday would reduce
cumulative global consumption of HFCs by the equivalent of 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide
through 2025. That is about 1.5 percent of the world’s 2010 greenhouse gas emissions, or the same as
taking 15 million cars off the road for 10 years.
A repair technician in New Jersey removed an air-conditioning unit that uses HCFC-22, which is banned
for use in new units, to install a new one that uses a different coolant, R-410A.Chilling
The announcement came a week before President Obama is expected to join over 100 other world
leaders at a United Nations climate change summit in New York, which will begin 15 months of
negotiations as leaders work toward a global climate change agreement in Paris next year.
The primary focus of that deal will be to push for enactment of new laws around the world aimed at
cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the abundant planet-warming gas caused by burning fossil fuels
such as oil and coal. Negotiators anticipate it will take a grueling battle to achieve such an agreement,
which would require the world’s largest economies — including the United States, China and India — to
greatly cut their use of burning coal and oil.
But climate policy advocates say small steps aimed at reducing other greenhouse gases will also help.
While HFCs are less abundant in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, they have 10,000 times the
planet-warming potency. But carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, while HFCs
disintegrate after about 15 years.
“Every drumbeat in this symphony helps. It drives it along. This is part of that drumbeat,” said Durwood
Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a research organization.
“The benefits from cutting non-CO2 come much faster,” he added. “CO2 is like a supertanker – you can
stop it, but it keeps drifting for a long time. Cutting HFCs are like stopping a steamboat. You stop it and
that’s that.”
Warming is slowing—renewable energy and reduced consumption.
Cohen 15. (Steven, executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a professor in the Practice of Public
Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “Renewable Energy Growth Mitigates Climate Change
While Boosting Economy, IEA Reports,” EcoWatch. March 23, 2015. http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/23/renewables-mitigateclimate-change/)//CB
The International Energy Agency (IEA) announced this month that 2014 carbon dioxide emissions from
the energy sector leveled off—the first time in 40 years this has happened without being linked to an
economic downturn.
According to the IEA:
“Global emissions of carbon dioxide stood at 32.3 billion tonnes in 2014, unchanged from the preceding
year. The preliminary IEA data suggest that efforts to mitigate climate change may be having a more
pronounced effect on emissions than had previously been thought.
The IEA attributes the halt in emissions growth to changing patterns of energy consumption in China and
OECD countries. In China, 2014 saw greater generation of electricity from renewable sources, such as
hydropower, solar and wind, and less burning of coal. In OECD economies, recent efforts to promote
more sustainable growth—including greater energy efficiency and more renewable energy—are
producing the desired effect of decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions.”
In OECD economies, recent efforts to promote more sustainable growth—including greater energy
efficiency and more renewable energy—are producing the desired effect of decoupling economic
growth from greenhouse gas emissions.
While this halt in global emissions may not survive this year’s cut in oil prices, it’s still a promising sign
that the increased adoption of renewable energy technology, increased use of energy efficiency
measures and the transition to a renewable economy, is well underway.
In Europe, three countries have already met their renewable energy targets five years ahead of
schedule. According to United Press International, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Sweden have all surpassed the
required goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020, mandated by the EU for each member country,
with several other European countries, such as Italy, Romania and Lithuania, not far behind.
China’s commitment to reducing air pollution has likely had a huge effect on the leveling off of global
carbon emissions, as its dependence on coal dropped for the first time in a decade and its clean energy
consumption increased. Bloomberg Business reported that:
“China led in renewables last year with investments of $89.5 billion, accounting for almost one out of
every three dollars spent on clean energy in the world, according to BNEF figures released in January.”
The U.S also reached new renewable energy milestones, with solar accounting for one-third of new
generating capacity last year, more than any other energy source besides natural gas. The Washington
Post also reported that electricity generated from renewable energy in 2014 outgrew that of fossil fuels,
with wind power growing faster than all other sources and solar power more than doubling.
Biodiversity Increasing
Huge increase in funding and political will for biodiversity programs will improve
global biodiversity.
UN 14. (United Nations. “UN convention agrees to double biodiversity funding, accelerate preservation measures,” UN
News Centre. 17 October 2014. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=49104#.VZ15UEvrsds)//CB
17 October 2014 – A United Nations conference in Republic of Korea wrapped up today with
governments agreeing to double biodiversity-related international financial aid to developing countries,
including small islands and transition economics, by 2015 and through the next five years.
The decision was made at the 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD COP-12) in Pyeongchang.
Delegations attending the meeting, which opened 6 October in Republic of Korea’s key mountain and
forest region, agreed on the so-called “Pyeongchang Road Map,” and “Gangwon Declaration”, both of
which outline conservation initiatives and global sustainable development goals and initiatives.
“Parties have listened to the evidence, and have responded by committing,” said UN AssistantSecretary-General and Executive Secretary of the CBD, Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias.
The funding decision was originally made at the last CBD meeting in Hyderabad, India, in 2012, but there
had been disagreement on how to implement it.
This time, the participants decided to use average annual biodiversity funding for the years 2006-2010
as a baseline. The targets, in particular, are the least developed countries and the small island
developing States, as well as countries with economies in transition.
Key decisions taken in Pyongchang, including those on resource mobilization, capacity building, scientific
and technical cooperation linking biodiversity and poverty eradication, and on monitoring of the
Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, form the Roadmap and will, according to the CBD, strengthen capacity
and increase support for countries and stakeholders to implement their national biodiversity strategies
and action plans.
The decisions were bolstered by the call in the Gangwon Declaration, the result of two days of
ministerial-level talks, to link the implementation of the post-2015 development agenda to other
relevant processes such as the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) process and the
national biodiversity strategies and action plans.
Governments also agreed to increase domestic financing for biodiversity and boost funding from other
resources.
“Their commitments show the world that biodiversity is a solution to the challenges of sustainable
development and will be a central part of any discussions for the post-2015 development agenda and its
sustainable development goals,” Mr. Dias noted in reference to the agenda succeeding the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs).
Deforestation Decreasing
Deforestation is decreasing—new tech, more legal restrictions, and increased
awareness.
Howard 14. (Brian Clark, writer, editor and producer for National Geographic’s award-winning website. Internally quotes
Toby McGrath, a senior scientist at Earth Innovation Institute. “Brazil Leads World in Reducing Carbon Emissions by Slashing
Deforestation,” National Geographic. JUNE 05, 2014. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140605-brazildeforestation-carbon-emissions-environment/)//CB
Brazil's success in slowing rain forest destruction has resulted in enormous reductions in carbon
emissions and shows that it's possible to zealously promote sustainability while still growing the
economy, suggests a new study out Thursday.
A second study out this week also underscores Brazil's success and shows that deforestation has also
slowed in several other tropical countries.
Since 2004, farmers and ranchers in Brazil have saved over 33,000 square miles (86,000 square
kilometers) of rain forest from clear-cutting, the rough equivalent of 14.3 million soccer fields, a team of
scientists and economists from the U.S. and South America report in Science. At the same time,
production of beef and soy from Brazil's Amazon region rose.
The country has reduced deforestation by 70 percent and kept 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of
the atmosphere, because forests use carbon as they grow and release it when they are removed, often
through burning. That makes Brazil's the biggest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of any country
in the world; the cut is more than three times bigger than the effect of taking all the cars in the U.S. off
the road for a year.
"Brazil is known as a leading favorite to win the World Cup, but they also lead the world in mitigating
climate change," the Science study's lead author, Daniel Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute in San
Francisco, said in a statement.
Brazil's success in saving about 80 percent of the original Amazon serves as a model for other countries
around the world and represents a "completely different trajectory for forest areas over the last few
centuries," says Toby McGrath, a senior scientist at the institute and another of the study's co-authors.
(See "Photos: The Last of the Amazon.")
"For the first time in history, we are stopping the process of forest loss on a frontier before it gets
seriously depleted, while continuing to develop economies that still have substantial forest cover," says
McGrath.
Globally, deforestation is responsible for about 10 percent of all climate emissions, says a study released
Wednesday by the Union of Concerned Scientists. That's down from 17 percent of emissions in the
1990s, thanks to falling rates of deforestation.
"Brazil is most notably lauded for their deforestation reductions, but the report found numerous
example of successfully saving forests in unexpected locations," study author Doug Boucher, director of
the Union of Concerned Scientists' Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative, said in a statement. Mexico, El
Salvador, and six countries in Central Africa, in particular, have shown decreased rates of deforestation.
Measure of Success
For the Science study, scientists and economists analyzed how Brazil was able to reverse decades of high
rates of deforestation in the Amazon, starting in 2005, when then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
announced the ambitious goal of slashing the rate by 80 percent over the previous year. After that,
things turned around due to a number of factors coming together, says McGrath.
One important element was the advancement of remote sensing technology. Although Brazil first
passed a forest code requiring landowners in the Amazon to protect at least 50 percent of native forest
in 1965, enforcement was spotty. "Officials didn't have good information on where deforestation was
occurring and who was on the ground," says McGrath.
Over the past few years, satellites have given officials a more precise picture of the forest, often in real
time.
Another boost to deforestation efforts: The forest code was updated in 2012 and now requires
landowners to preserve 80 percent of the Amazon's virgin forest, as well as protect watersheds. Those
that have violated the rules have increasingly received fines and even jail time in extreme cases.
Nonprofit groups, meanwhile, have helped publicize data on rule breakers and have built support for
enforcing the law. Campaigns by Greenpeace, Conservation International, and others put pressure on
companies that buy products from the Amazon, especially beef and soy, shaming those that have been
found to contribute to deforestation. Market agreements signed by companies took that a step further,
prohibiting practices that lead to deforestation.
"In Brazil, there was rising awareness of the value of nature and how essential it is to our society," says
Fabio Rubio Scarano, the vice president of Conservation International's Americas Division, who is based
in Rio de Janeiro.
Malnutrition Decreasing
Malnutrition is dramatically decreasing—increased economic growth.
The Nation 6/6/2015 (The Nation, major Sri Lankan newspaper. Internally quoting FAO Director General, José Graziano
da Silva. “Global hunger declining gradually.” http://nation.lk/online/2015/06/06/global-hunger-declining-gradually/)//CB
Global hunger has continued to decline gradually to an estimated 795 million undernourished people, or
a reduction of 167 million hungry people over the last ten years according to the latest edition of the
annual UN hunger report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 (SOFI) published by the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural
Development (IFAD) and the World Food Program (WFP). This decline has been most pronounced in
developing countries, despite significant population growth.
The year 2015 is a milestone, marking the end of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) monitoring
period. For the developing regions as a whole, the target to reduce the proportion of the world’s hungry
by 50 percent by 2015 was missed by a small margin.
“The near-achievement of the MDG hunger targets shows us that we can indeed eliminate the scourge
of hunger in our lifetime. We must be the Zero Hunger generation. That goal should be mainstreamed
into all policy interventions and at the heart of the new sustainable development agenda to be
established this year,” said FAO Director General, José Graziano da Silva.
During the past quarter century, of all regions in the world, the Asia and the Pacific region has achieved
the fastest rate of economic growth, leading to a dramatic reduction in extreme poverty below US$
1.25/person/day and meeting, in early 2010, the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the
proportion of people living in extreme poverty by half. The region also achieved the largest reduction in
the number of undernourished people in the world, and the region as a whole achieved the MDG 1c
target of reducing the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by half by 2015.
While Sri Lanka has made progress, it has, however, yet to achieve the MDG 1c target. The proportion of
undernourished in Sri Lanka stands at 22.0% in 2014-16, down from 30.6% in 1990-92. “The report is
proof that we can win the fight against hunger and should be inspiring to move forward. We are
motivated to see the credible findings of the report on the decline of hunger levels in Sri Lanka and also
globally,” said Ismail Omer, Representative, WFP Sri Lanka, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World
report shows that hunger has been decreasing in Sri Lanka, but there is more to be done to address
hunger—including malnutrition—so as to ensure food and nutrition security are sustained for the most
vulnerable.”
The challenge of ensuring food security can only be met if all stakeholders work together, with a multisectoral outlook. Economic growth is a key success factor for reducing undernourishment, but it has to
be inclusive and provide opportunities for improving the livelihoods of the poor.
World hunger is steeply declining—more government goals.
Binnie 14. (Isla, Reuters correspondent in Rome. “World Hunger Decreasing, But 1 In 9 People Still Undernourished,”
HuffPo. 09/16/2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/16/world-hunger-decreasing-_n_5829026.html)//CB
ROME, Sept 16 (Reuters) - The number of hungry people in the world has fallen sharply over the past
decade but 805 million, or one in nine of the global population, still do not have enough to eat, three
U.N. food and agriculture agencies said on Tuesday.
The number of chronically undernourished people dropped by more than 100 million, equivalent to a
country the size of the Philippines, according to a report by the United Nations food agency (FAO),
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and World Food Program (WFP).
Government drives to improve nutrition have helped the developing world move towards a U.N. goal of
halving the number of people suffering from hunger between 1990 and 2015, said the report entitled
"The State of Food Insecurity in the World".
Mass Incarceration Decreasing
Mass incarceration and crime are trending downwards.
Lane 14. (Charles, Post editorial writer, specializing in economic policy, federal fiscal issues and business, and a contributor
to the PostPartisan blog. “America gets out of jail,” Washington Post. February 21, 2014.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/02/21/america-gets-out-of-jail/)//CB
The strangest thing about Holder’s protest, and others like it, is that it came at a time when U.S. prison
populations are shrinking, and have been for several years. In fact, the inmate population of state and
federal prisons decreased by 1.7 percent in 2012, to an estimated 1,571,013 from 1,598,783 in 2011,
according to Justice Department statistics. This was the third straight annual decrease.
What’s more, the downward trend is almost certain to continue . The rate of new prison admissions
has been declining for the last nine years, and now stands at roughly the level of two decades ago,
according to data compiled by Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University psychiatrist who studies criminal
justice issues.
The root cause of these welcome trends is another welcome trend: the plunging crime rate of the last
two decades. Less crime leads to declining incarceration in two ways. First, and most obvious, there are
fewer law-breakers to lock up. Second, safer streets reduce the public’s demand for tough “law and
order” policies – like the stiff mandatory minimum sentences that helped drive the U.S. rate of
incarceration up in the 80s and 90s.
Yes, declining incarceration also reflects sentencing reforms and other policy changes at the state and
local level. But those changes would not be occurring unless lower crime had eased fears about public
safety to the point where it was politically possible to discuss them in the first place.
According to data from the General Social Survey compiled by Professor Mark Ramirez of Arizona State
University, the percentage of Americans who believe criminals are not punished “harshly enough”
declined from 85 percent in 1994 to 62 percent by 2012.
As Holder noted, the federal prison population continues to grow. Yet even federal incarceration may be
leveling off; the inmate population grew by 0.7 percent during 2012, compared to an average annual
increase of 3.2 percent over the past 10 years. Notably, drug trafficking offenses, which account for half
of the 219,000 current federal inmate population, represent a declining percentage of new admissions,
according to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report. The big drivers of additional federal
incarceration in the last decade were immigration and weapons offenses.
Contrary to much propaganda about a relentless “drug war,” a 2012 Urban Institute study found that
the feds shifted enforcement resources from drug trafficking to weapons and immigration offenses
between 1998 and 2010, resulting in a prison population that was still growing, but not as much as it
would have been if federal law enforcement priorities and practices had remained as drug-focused they
were in 1998.