SUFFERING REPS BAD
1NC SUFFERING REPS
Their demand for the ballot in response to descriptions of suffering is an attempt
to commodify the other --- their advocacy may sound empathetic but it fails as a
political strategy by comforting the Western observer and reinforcing the status
quo.
Bystrom, 12 - Kerry L. is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Research Program on Humanitarianism at the Human Rights
Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs, "Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (review)." Human Rights
Quarterly 34.4 (2012): 1214-1217. Project MUSE)//A-Berg
*gender modified
Over the past decade, a growing body of work has brought humanities perspectives to human rights scholarship and challenged still widely-held
assumptions that the task of advancing human rights is most fundamentally a matter of law and
politics. Texts such as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004), Anne Cubilié's
Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (2005), and Joseph R. Slaughter's Human Rights, Inc.: The World
Novel, Narrative Form and International Law (2007) have inaugurated a lively and expansive discussion about the work of culture and representation
in human rights activism, not to mention its centrality in shaping the larger social imaginary within which this activism takes place. Wendy S. Hesford's
provocative and important book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms adds further vitality to this discussion, as it
shifts attention from the narrative to the visual axis and mounts a compelling argument about the
significance of notions and
practices of visibility and spectatorship in contemporary human rights work. Hesford poses international
human rights as a regime constitutively bound up with practices of vision and discourses of sight; she notes that " [t]he history of human
rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain
bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and
means to look and to confer recognition."1 From this perspective, human rights activism—as it takes place across
the "truth-telling genres" she surveys, from photography to documentary film and theater, testimony, and ethnography— becomes a
"spectacular rhetoric" aimed at making formerly "invisible" subjects "visible" to the
Western and often specifically American audience of rights holders.2 Moments or "scenes" of
this activism participate in and extend what Hesford calls the larger "human rights spectacle," not a single
image or set of images but "the incorporation of subjects (individuals, communities, nations) through imaging
technologies and discourses of vision and violation into the normative frameworks of a human
[End Page 1214] rights internationalism based on United Nations (UN) documents and treaties."3 As Hesford deftly argues, being made
visible through this process of incorporation is not all it is cracked up to be, because the human rights spectacle relies on
structures of sight that may ultimately enable human rights abuses to continue (about which more
below). Yet, she also rightly points out, "the human rights spectacle is not fully allied with abusive power" and activists can mine its very paradoxes and
complications to open up new ways of seeing.4 How might the human rights spectacle perpetuate—or at the very least not fundamentally alter the
structure of—violation? The basic argument to this end is set forth in Chapter One, "Human Rights Visions and Recognitions," a theoretical chapter
that explains the
"ocular epistemology" or visibility-based system of knowledge through which
human rights developed and connects it with what is posed as the central problem of "recognition." Recognition, Hesford argues—and in
dialogue with a sometimes-dizzying array of thinkers from the fields of politics, philosophy, literary theory, and performance studies—has been
the paradigm through which human rights internationalism recruits and defines human
subjects. In the context of human rights, it is tied to spectacular scenes of trauma and suffering, where the
subject of human rights discourse becomes visible through her [their] representation as a feminized
victim with whom the spectator must sympathize or identify. The problem with this paradigm, Hesford
argues, is that it often re-affirms the self of the Western, neoliberal spectator rather than
enabling true (and materially based) response to the generally non-Western rights claimant. Hesford notes that
the rights claimant's coding as "victim" further means that she is [they are] incorporated into the
spectator's self—and into the framework of human rights—in a manner that constrains her [their]
agency and pegs her [them] to a relation of inferiority. Phrased more pointedly, recognition and the attendant
incorporation of previously "invisible" subjects by US audiences often perpetuates hierarchical
visions of human rights bound up with capitalism and concerned mainly with rescuing
traumatized women and children from the Global South. Such visions lionize Western activists and
activism as they re-victimize the "victims" of abuse and obscure the material contexts and
transnational interests that allow abuses to occur. By participating in this visual economy,
activist scenes, quite contrary to their intentions, can be complicit in reproducing the
status quo of global power and inequality in which violation is rooted. Lest this sound too abstract, Hesford
gives concrete examples in each of the chapters that follow, which present case studies of activism surrounding the War on Terror (Chapter Two:
"Staging Terror Spectacles"), rape warfare (Chapter Three: "Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle"), global sex work and trafficking in
women (Chapter Four: "Global Sex Work, Victim Identities and Cybersexualities") and infringements of children's rights (Chapter Five: "Spectacular
Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Politics of (In)visibility"). For instance, in "Staging Terror Spectacles," Hesford shows how the use of the Abu
Ghraib photographs in the 2004 International Center for Photography exhibition "Inconvenient [End Page 1215] Evidence," meant to criticize US
abuses of human rights in Iraq, intersects with the George W. Bush administration's narrative of the US as a traumatized nation that underwrote the
Iraq war.5 "Spectacular Childhoods"—one of the book's most compelling chapters—similarly shows how good intentions go awry through
a sensitive and nuanced reading of Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski's Academy Award-winning documentary about children from a red-light district in
Calcutta, Born Into Brothels (2004). While careful not to dismiss the positive achievements of the film, Hesford argues that its staging
of a
version of the recognition paradigm described above—one in which exploited and impoverished
children move beyond their trauma by learning to express themselves in art, and in this way
claim visibility in the international community—can reinforce counterproductive human rights
visions. The film "recreat[es] the spectacle of salvation" through Briski's actions as an activist art teacher in Calcutta and reinforces
"Western humanitarianism's investment in transnational sentimentality and capitalist
consumption."6 Not only may this perpetuate colonialist stereotypes of the unfit "third world" parent
and lead to regressive policies such as child removal, but it also ignores certain effective forms of local
activism and obscures many of the intersecting structural conditions that narrow life options for
the children featured in the film. Configuring the visibility of these children through the dominant forms of the human rights spectacle, then, according
to Hesford, may not be the most helpful way to resolve their problems. This is a strong (albeit justified) critique. As already mentioned, however,
Spectacular Rhetorics moves beyond critique to a positive agenda, which helps Hesford's book avoid the trap of a facile or overly zealous rejection of
human rights that can characterize certain strands of humanistic inquiry into the field. Throughout the book Hesford traces forms of advocacy that may
exploit or unsettle the dominant human rights spectacle and offer modes of responding to the erstwhile "victims" of human rights abuse that
reconfigure or work beyond the recognition paradigm. Key to this endeavor are activist scenes that—by doing more than "simply turn[ing] passive or
silent voices into compelling speech, or reproduc[ing] the traumatic real" and instead creating scenes that "reconfigur[e] witnessing in rhetorical and
ethical terms"—help spectators cultivate an active and complex practice of witnessing.7 This positive project is outlined theoretically in the Introduction
and Chapter One, and gains depth and clarity in the case studies. Of particular note is "Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle." Here,
Hesford examines a series of what she shows to be ethical and potentially useful representations of rape in the former Yugoslavia, including Midge
Mackenzie's documentary film The Sky: A Silent Witness (1995) and Melanie Friend's visual and acoustic exhibition Homes and Gardens (1996), as well
as Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic's documentary film Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women (1996). The first two pieces,
[End Page 1216] Hesford argues, "suspend the [human rights] spectacle" by boycotting the image of the rape victim—in the first case, by refusing to
show the visual image of a woman giving oral testimony about her rape and posing instead the image of water and the sky, and in the second by
juxtaposing another set of oral testimonies with ordinary or intimate images of domestic life in Yugoslavia before the war.8 Hesford shows how the
discordance created in these pieces between searing spoken testimony and non-spectacular visual images can help to draw attention to the dangers of
identification or recognition, and may prompt in the spectator an awareness of the "crisis of witnessing" that seeing or hearing testimony should
prompt—ultimately producing what Hesford, after Dominick LaCapra, calls "empathetic unsettlement."9 This is a move away from recognition through
identification to a more nuanced interaction that respects otherness even as it allows for connection. Calling the Ghosts goes even further towards
turning spectators into ethical witnesses, Hesford argues, as it foregrounds the status of rape "victims" as survivors and activists; self-consciously stages
the dilemmas of representation; troubles the notion that legal recognition is the end-point for the women in question; and calls for ongoing global
response. As Hesford puts it, "the differentiated politics of recognition and reflexive witnessing that Calling the Ghosts puts forth may provide a model
for the emergence of new transnational publics to offset the nationalist politics of recognition and the spectacular gaze of the international community
in the face of wars and other violent conflicts."10 Overall, Spectacular Rhetorics is a timely and resonant book that clearly demonstrates " the
rhetorical force that visual media exert in mediating the public's engagement with human rights
principles and inscribing human rights internationalism into the texts of global capitalism and
its nationalist and militarist correlates."11 Its casting of human rights advocacy as a "spectacular rhetoric" is a move that opens
exciting ground for future research. Further, the book is carefully organized such that each case study extends and enriches the theoretical questions
advanced in the opening chapters, raising new directions for critical inquiry and presenting both challenges and opportunities for current human rights
activists. Spectacular Rhetorics might make for demanding reading for non-humanities scholars, in part because of the tendency to re-route assertions
through citations from other scholars and in part because of its reliance on a dense theoretical vocabulary. But the book's potential difficulty also stems
from the fact that it makes critiques that can feel quite close to home and provides readers with a thick accretion of ideas that take time to work through
and grapple with—and these are surely aspects of scholarship that should be celebrated. Hesford's book deserves this time, thought, and celebration.
[End Page 1217]
This use of the other as a means for a ballot simply reduces populations to utility -- the impact is genocide.
Chow, ‘6 - Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, (Rey, “The Age of the World Target” p 40-42)//a-berg
Often under the modest and apparently
innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the
production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special "areas" became the
institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the
world as target.52 In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits "I
higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics,
political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war . To that extent, the
"scientific" and "objective"
disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a
strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis,
experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war‚—if, for instance, the
ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53‚—is it a surprise that it is doomed
to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures? Can "knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of
bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the
forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As
long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a
circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and
omnipresence of the sovereign "self"/"eye"‚— the "I"‚—that is the United States, the other will have no choice
but remain just that‚— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the
bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not
accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study
will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the
dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and
other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not
fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber‚—such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that
I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter‚—will never receive the attention that is due to them. "Knowledge,"
however
conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to
the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception,
haunted by "the absence of a definable object"‚—and by "the problem of the vanishing object."55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment
in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become
the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book
represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped area studies and freed it from its
own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative
and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said's attempt to link an incipient
neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to
area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and
its construction."57
The alternative is to vote neg --- your role as a judge is to interrogate how we
should deal with our privileged positions which allow us to speak in the first place.
Chow, ’93 - Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, (Rey, “Writing Diaspora” p 15-17 google books)//a-berg
While the struggle for hegemony remains necessary for many reasons-especially in cases where underprivileged groups
seek equality of privilege-I remain skeptical of the validity of hegemony over time, especially if it is a hegemony formed through intellectual power.
The question for me is not how intellectuals can obtain hegemony (a question that positions them in an
oppositional light against dominant power and neglects their share of that power through literacy, through the culture of words),
but how they can resist , as Michel Foucault said, “the forms of power that transform [them] into its
object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ ‘consciousness, and ‘discourse.’ “ Putting
it another way, how do intellectuals struggle against a hegemony which already includes them
and which can no longer be divided into the state and civil society in Gramsci’s terms, nor be clearly demarcated into national and transnational
spaces? Because “borders” have so clearly meandered Into so many intel lectual issues that the more stable and conventional relation be tween borders
and the field no longer holds, intervention cannot simply be thought of in terms of the creation of new ‘fields.” Instead, it is necessary to think primarily
in terms of borders—of borders, that Is, as parasites that never take over a field in Its en tirety but erode it slowly and tactically. The work of Michel de
Certeau Is helpful for a formulation of this para-sitical intervention. De Certeau distinguishes between “strategy” and another practice—”tactic”—in the
following terms. A strategy has the ability to “transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” (de Certeau, p. 36). The type of knowledge
derived from strategy is one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place” (de Certeau, p. 36). Strategy therefore
belongs to “an economy of the proper place” (de Certeau, p. 55) and to those who are committed to the building, growth, and fortification of a “field. A
text, for instance, would become in this economy “a cultural weapon, a private hunting pre serve.” or a means of social stratification” in the order of the
Great Wall of China (de Certeau, p. 171). A tactic, by contrast, is a cal culated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (de Certeau, p’ 37).
Betting on time instead of space, a tactic concerns an operational logic whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that
disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in
Western culture” (de Certeau, p. xi). Why are “tactics useful at this moment? As
discussions about multiculturalism,’
“interdisciplinary,” the third world intellectual,” and other companion issues develop in the
American academy and society today, and as rhetorical claims to political change and difference
are being put forth, many deep-rooted, politically reactionary forces return to haunt us.
Essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic
propriety, and the otherness’ ensuing from them; unattested claims of oppression and
victimization that are used merely to guilt-trip and to control; sexist and racist
reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made merely in the name of
righteousness—all these forces create new “solidarities whose ideological premises remain
unquestioned . These new solidarities are often informed by a strategic attitude which repeats what they seek to overthrow. The
weight of old ideologies being reinforced over and over again is immense, We need to remember
as intellectuals that the battles we fight are battles of words . Those who argue the
oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and are most certainly
not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival in metropolitan and
nonmetropolitan spaces alike. What academic intellectuals must confront is thus not their victimization by society at
large (or their victimization-in-solidarlty-with-the oppressed), but the power, wealth, and privilege
that Ironically accumulate from their “oppositional” viewpoint, and the widening gap
between the professed contents of their words and the upward mobility they gain from such
words. (When Foucault said intellectuals need to struggle against becoming the object and instrument of power, he spoke precisely to this kind of
situation.) The predicament we face in the West, where Intellectual freedom shares a history with economic enterprise, Is that
“If a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big business, . . . he will be wise to locate in a school
whose trustees are big businessmen. “ Why should we believe in those who continue to speak a language of alterity-as-lack while
their salaries and honoraria keep rising? How do we resist the turning-Into-propriety of oppositional
discourses, when the Intention of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the
proper? How do we prevent what begin as tactics—that which is ‘without any base where it could stockpile its winnings” (de Certeau. p. 37)—from
turning into a solidly fenced-off field, in the military no less than in the academic sense?
IMPACT WORK
2NC IMPACT DEBATE
This locks-in an investment in the oppression of the Other.
Chow 93 (Rey Chow, Professor of English 0061nd Comparative Literature, and Director of the Comparative Literature Program at the University
of California, Writing Diaspora: tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies, pp 12-15,
http://www.jonvonkowallis.com/readers/CHIN2400/475-493-Rey_Chow-Tactlcs_of_Intervention_in_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies.pdf)//Aberg
*gender modified
In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the Maoist is disillusioned to watch the China they sanctified crumble before their eyes. This Is the period in which
we hear disapproving criticisms of contemporary Chinese people for liking Western pop music and consumer culture, or for being overly interested in
sex. In a way that makes her indistinguishable from what at first seems a political enemy, the Orientalist, the Maoist now mourns the loss of her loved
object— Socialist China—by pointing angrily at living third world’ natives. For many who have built their careers on the vision of Socialist China, the
We see this in the way
terms such as “oppression” “victimization,” and “subalternity” are now being used. Contrary to
Or1enta11t disdain for contemporary native cultures of the non-West, the Maoist turns precisely the “disdained” other into
the object of his/her study and, in some cases, Identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralism, the Maoist
sometimes turns all people from non-Western cultures into a generalized “subaltern” that is
then used to flog an equally generalized “West. “‘ Because the representation of “the other” as such ignores (I.) the class and
grief is tremendous. in the ‘cultural studies’ of the American academy in the 1990s, the Maoist Is reproducing with prowess.
intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as elaborate as those In the West, and (2) the discursive power relations
structuring the Maoist’s mode of inquiry and valorization, It
produces a way of talking In which notions of lack,
subalternity, victimization, and so forth are drawn upon indiscriminately , often with the
intention of spotlighting the speaker’s own sense of alterity and political righteousness . A comfortably
wealthy white American Intellectual I know claimed that he was a “third world Intellectual,” citing as one of his credentials his marriage to a Western
European woman of part-Jewish heritage; a professor of English complained about being “victimized” by the structured time at an Ivy League
institution, meaning that she needed to be on time for classes; a graduate student of upper-class background from one of the world’s poorest countries
told his American friends that he was of poor peasant stock In order to authenticate his Identity as a radical “third world” representative; male and
female academics across the U.S. frequently say they were “raped” when they report experiences of professional frustration and conflict. Whether
sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization
all take the route of self-subalternizatlon, which has
Increasingly become the assured means to authority and power. What these Intellectuals are
doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional Import, and
thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand. The
oppressed, whose vo1es we seldom hear, are robbed twice—the first time of their economic chances, the second time of their
language, which is now no longer distinguishable from those of us who have had our
consciousnesses raised. In their analysis of the relation between violence and representation, Armstrong and Tennenhouse write:
“[The] idea of violence as representation is not an easy one for most academics to accept. It
Implies that whenever we speak for someone else we are inscribing her [them] with our
own (implicity masculine) idea of order .” At pre sent, this process of “inscribing” often means not only that
we represent” certain historic others because they are/were “oppressed”; It often means that there
Is interest In representation only when what is represented can in some way be seen as lacking.
Even though the Maoist is usually contemptuous of Freudian psychoanalysis because it Is “bourgeois,” her investment in oppression and victimization
fully partakes of the Freudian and Lacanian notions of “lack.” By attributing lack,” the Maoist Justifies the “ speaking
for someone else”
that Armstrong and Tennenhouse call violence as representation.” As in the case of Orientalism, which does not necessarily belong only
to those who are white, the Maoist does not have to be racially “white” either. The phrase “white guilt” refers to a type of discourse which continues to
position power and lack against each other, while the narrator of that discourse, like Jane Eyre, speaks with power but identifies with powerlessness.
This Is how even those who come from privilege more often than not speak from/of/as its lack.” What the Maoist demonstrates is a circuit of
productivity that draws its capital from others’ deprivation while refusing to acknowledge its own presence as endowed. With the material origins of her
own discourse always concealed, the Maoist thus speaks as if her charges were a form of immaculate conception. The
difficulty facing us, It
no longer simply the “first world” Orientalist who mourns the rusting away of his
treasures, but also students from privileged backgrounds Western and non-Western, who
conform behaviorally in every respect with the elitism of their social origins ( e.g., through powerful
matrimonial alliances, through pursuit of fame, or through a contemptuous arrogance toward fellow students) but who nonetheless
proclaim dedication to “vindicating the subalterns.” My point is not that they should be blamed
for the accident of their birth, nor that they can not marry rich, pursue fame, or even be arrogant. Rather, it is that they
choose to see in others’ powerlessness an idealized image of themselves and refuse to hear in
the dissonance between the content and manner of their speech their own complicity with
violence. Even though these descendents of the Maoist may be quick to point out the exploitativeness of Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘The East is a career,”
seems to me, Is
they remain blind to their own exploitativeness as they make ‘the East” their career. How do we Intervene in the productivity of this overdetermined
circuit?
2NC GIFT MODULE
This makes their aff a deception that prevents real progress.
Arrigo and Williams, 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of
Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department
of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The
(Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321343 GBN SK Article on Sage Publications, http://ccj.sagepub.com/content/16/3/321)
The impediments to establishing democratic justice in contemporary American society have caused a national paralysis; one that has recklessly
spawned an aporetic1 existence for minorities. The
entrenched ideological complexities afflicting under- and
nonrepresented groups (e.g., poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, crime) at the hands of political, legal, cultural,
and economic power elites have produced counterfeit, perhaps even fraudulent, efforts at
reform : Discrimination and inequality in opportunity prevail (e.g., Lynch & Patterson, 1996). The misguided and futile
initiatives of the state, in pursuit of transcending this public affairs crisis, have fostered a
reification , that is, a reinforcement of divisiveness. This time, however, minority groups compete with one another for
recognition, affirmation, and identity in the national collective psyche (Rosenfeld, 1993). What ensues by way of state effort, though,
is a contemporaneous sense of equality for all and a near imperceptible endorsement of
inequality; a silent conviction that the majority still retains power. The “gift” of equality, procured
through state legislative enactments as an emblem of democratic justice, embodies true (legitimated)
power that remains nervously secure in the hands of the majority. The ostensible empowerment
of minority groups is a facade; it is the ruse of the majority gift. What exists, in fact, is a simulacrum
(Baudrillard, 1981, 1983) of equality (and by extension, democratic justice): a pseudo-sign image (a hypertext or simulation) of real sociopolitical
progress. For the future relationship between equality and the social to more fully embrace minority sensibilities, calculated legal reform efforts in the
name of equality must be displaced and the rule and authority of the status quo must be decentered. Imaginable, calculable
equality is
self-limiting and self-referential. Ultimately, it is always (at least) one step removed from true equality and, therefore, true justice.
The ruse of the majority gift currently operates under the assumption of a presumed
empowerment , which it confers on minority populations. Yet, the presented power is itself circumscribed by the stifling horizons of
majority rule with their effects. Thus, the gift can only be construed as falsely eudemonic: An avaricious, although
insatiable, pursuit of narcissistic legitimacy supporting majority directives. The commission
(bestowal) of power to minority groups or citizens through prevailing state reformatory efforts underscores a polemic with implications for public
affairs and civic life. We contend that the avenir (i.e., the “to come”) of equality as an (in)calculable, (un)recognizable destination in search of
democratic justice is needed. However, we argue that this displacement of equality is unattainable if prevailing juridico-ethicopolitical conditions (and
societal consciousness pertaining to them) remain fixed, stagnant, and immutable. In this article, we will demonstrate how the gift
of the
majority is problematic, producing, as it must, a narcissistic hegemony, that is, a sustained
empowering of the privileged, a constant relegitimation of the powerful. Relying on Derrida’s
postmodern critique of Eurocentric logic and thought, we will show how complicated and fragmented the question of establishing democratic justice is
in Western cultures, especially in American society. We will argue that what
is needed is a relocation of the debate about
justice and difference from the circumscribed boundaries of legal redistributive discourse on equality
to the more encompassing context of alterity, undecidability, cultural plurality, and affirmative postmodern thought.
This simply reinforces oppression and turns the case.
Arrigo and Williams, 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of
Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department
of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The
(Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321343 GBN SK Article on Sage Publications, http://ccj.sagepub.com/content/16/3/321)
Reciprocation on your part is impossible. Even if one day you are able to return our monetary
favor twofold, we will always know that it was us who first hosted you; extended to and
entrusted in you an opportunity given your time of need. As the initiators of such a charity, we are
always in a position of power , and you are always indebted to us. This is where the notion of egoism or conceit
assumes a hegemonic role. By giving to you, a supposed act of generosity in the name of
furthering your cause, we have not empowered you. Rather, we have empower ed ourselves. We have less than
subtlely let you know that we have more than you. We have so much more, in fact, that we can afford to give you some. Our giving becomes,
not an act of beneficence, but a show of power, that is, narcissistic hegemony! Thus, we see that
the majority gift is a ruse: a simulacrum of movement toward aporetic equality and a simulation
of democratic justice. By relying on the legislature (representing the majority) when economic and social opportunities are availed to
minority or underrepresented collectives, the process takes on exactly the form of Derrida's gift. The majority controls the political,
economic, legal, and social arenas; that is, it is (and always has been) in control of such communities as the
employment sector and the educational system. The mandated opportunities that under- or nonrepresented citizens receive as a result of this falsely
eudemonic endeavor are gifts and, thus, ultimately constitute an effort to make minority populations feel better . There is a sense of
movement toward equality in the name of democratic justice, albeit falsely manufactured .18 In return for this effort,
the majority shows off its long-standing authority (this provides a stark realization to minority groups that power elites are the forces that critically
form society as a community), forever indebts under- and nonrepresented classes to the generosity of the majority (after all, minorities groups now
have, presumably, a real chance to attain happiness), and, in a more general sense, furthers the narcissism of the majority (its representatives have
displayed power and have been generous). Thus, the
ruse of the majority gift assumes the form and has the
hegemonical effect of empowering the empowered, relegitimating the privileged, and fueling the
voracious conceit of the advantaged.
2NC SFO MODULE
This act of “championing from afar” is cultural appropriation that only serves to
re-inscribe oppression.
Alcoff 91, Hunter College and CUNY philosophy professor, 1991 (Linda Martin, “The Problem of Speaking for Others” originally published in
Cultural Critique, No. 20, Winter, 1991-1992 , cut from www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html)
*gender modified
Looking merely at the content of a set of claims without looking at their effects cannot produce an adequate or even meaningful evaluation of it, and
this is partly because the notion of a content separate from effects does not hold up. The content of the claim, or its meaning, emerges in interaction
between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation. Given this, we
have to pay careful attention to the
discursive arrangement in order to understand the full meaning of any given discursive event. For example, in a
situation where a well-meaning First world person is speaking for a person or group in the Third
world, the very discursive arrangement may reinscribe the "hierarchy of civilizations" view
where the U. S. lands squarely at the top. This effect occurs because the speaker is positioned as authoritative
and empowered, as the knowledgeable subject, while the group in the Third World is reduced ,
merely because of the structure of the speaking practice, to an object and victim that must be championed
from afar. Though the speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged group, one of the effects of her
[their] discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist conceptions and perhaps also to further silence
the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard.18 This shows us why it is so important to reconceptualize
discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and so on.
Means they don’t solve and make it worse
Alcoff 91, Hunter College and CUNY philosophy professor, 1991 (Linda Martin, “The Problem of Speaking for Others” originally published in
Cultural Critique, No. 20, Winter, 1991-1992 , cut from www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html
*gender modified
The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two claims. First, there has been a
growing awareness that where
one speaks from affects both the meaning and truth of what one says, and
speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her
[their] social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims,
thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend her location. In other words, a
and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies and African American Studies departments were
founded on this very belief: that both the
study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to be done
principally by the oppressed themselves , and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic divergences in social
location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a
speaker's location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section. The second claim holds that not only is location
epistemically salient, but certain
privileged locations are discursively dangerous .5 In particular, the
practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has
actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group spoken for.
This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in question, but the effects
of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native authors because it is Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and whose books
will be bought by readers interested in Native women. Persons
from dominant groups who speak for others are
often treated as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands
of subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive
hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors who speak on behalf of the
oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those oppressed groups themselves.6
2NC COLONIALISM MODULE
This process of appropriation is the root cause of colonial violence.
Waldenfels 1995 – Bernhard, professor of philosophy at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, “Response to the Other,” in The
Psychology of Human Possibility and Constraint: Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, google books, 37-8)//A-Berg
It has often been claimed that Western
thought and practice have to be characterized as a process of
appropriation and domination of the world. Descartes thus proclaims at the beginning of modern times that human
beings should become “masters and owners of nature,” and this includes the mastering of others and of ourselves. In a similar way, according to Locke,
it is labor that gives a “right of property,” extending from one’s own person to the work of our hands and changing nature from a “common mother” into
a furnisher of “the almost worthless materials.”’ The
process of appropriation is based on what C. B. Macpherson has called
individualism.” This includes the atomization of the world into individuals, and from the
struggle of each of them for self-preservation arises a strong barrier between the spheres of
ownness and alienness. Now, appropriation is realized by different forms of centrism. First there is a kind of egocentrism that
reduces the alien to the own. The other appears as my double (alter ego), as a variation or
extension of the own. The well-known method of empathy presupposes that I have
something of my own that I can put into the other’s soul or mind. This sort of egocentrism, centered
on the ego and its own sphere, is completed by an egocentrism centered on the logos as a set of common
goals or rules reducing the alien to the common. The own and the alien are nothing more than parts of a whole or cases of a
“possessive
rule. Subjectivity is overcome by transsubectivity, which leaves no real place for intersubjectivity. Ethnocentrism, centered on the “we” of one’s own
group, tribe, nation or culture, can be taken as a collective form of egocentrism, but in its specific forms, especially in the form of Eurocentrism, it
should sooner be interpreted as a mixture of ego- and logocentrism. When we refer to Europe, we often do so in a certain way, for we do consider and
What does
not fit into the scheme of great Reason, true Faith, or real Progress becomes marginalized or, finally,
eliminated . Thus, the figures of the wild, the child, the fool, or the animal are heterogeneous figures, populating the borderlines of an allencompassing or all-regulating reason. The history of the Crusades, of colonialization, and mission could not have
been what it was, namely a mixture of ignorance, curiosity, arrogance, and good will, without such a fixed idea propagating
the appropriation of the world.
defend it not as one culture among others, which would be completely legitimate, but as the incarnation or vanguard of mankind.
2NC RESEARCH MODULE
To the aff the other is simply an object of research, distancing and excluding them
from an active role in empowerment
Pearce 08 - (Jenny, International Centre for Participation Studies/Department of Peace Studies at University of Bradford, “We Make Progress
Because We are Lost: Critical Reflections on Co Producing Knowledge as a Methodology for Researching Non governmental Public Action”
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/158531648/Microsoft-Word---NCRM-EPrints-Repository)
The idea of co-producing knowledge ‘with the researched’ emerges from a family of methodologies which attempt to
‘generate knowledge about a social system while at the same time, attempting to change it’ (Lewin, 1945,
quoted in Drummond and Themessl-Huber, 2007) ); which claim: ‘it is right and possible for poor and marginalized
people to conduct their own analysis and take action’ (Chambers,1997:107) or which have built on feminist theory to show
‘the highly problematic nature of the representation of research (Whose voices? Whose perspectives? Whose theories?) (Schrijvers, 1997:21); which is
experiential and where ‘the subjects of the research
contribute not only to the content of the research ie. the
activity that is being researched, but also to the creative thinking that generates, manages, and
draws conclusions from, the research’ (Heron,1981: 153) and which is based on a ‘participatory worldview’ rather than a positivist
distinction between science and everyday life, where ‘the validity of our encounter with experience rests on the high quality, critical, self-aware,
discriminating and informed judgments of the co-researchers ‘(Reason, 1994:11) These methodologies share a challenge to the premise of positivism
The methodologies posit that truth, as far as it is
possible to make claims to it, springs from the quality of the relationships built with the ‘researched’ i.e. from
deeper engagement with rather than distance from the ‘object’ of knowledge. They also challenge
methodologies which have sought to get closer to the lived reality of the researched, such as anthropological ‘participant observation’, but
which do not aim to give the ‘observed’ a role in the research process. Wright and Nelson argue that
participatory research is in fact the opposite of participatory observation: ‘ The principle of participatory research is that
people become agents rather than objects of research and the priorities of this approach are opposite to participant
that truth is only found through standing outside the object of knowledge.
observation. The first aim is for the research to increase participants’ understanding of their situation and their ability to use this information, in
conjunction with their local knowledge of the viability of different political strategies, to generate change for themselves. A very secondary aim is to
contribute to disciplinary knowledge with its double edge of both advancing our understanding of hierarchies and power, and of contributing to worldordering knowledge’ (Wright and Nelson, 1995:51)
LINK WORK
L: HUMAN RIGHTS
Their description of human rights abuses is an imperialistic attempt to create
Western sentimentalism --- this only ends up reproducing violence through
voyeurism.
Hua 12 – Julietta, San Francisco State University, “Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms by Wendy S. Hesford;
Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights by Dorothy L. Hodgson, Review by: Julietta Hua,” Signs, Vol. 38, No. 1, Autumn 2012, pp. 239-242,
JSTOR)//A-Berg
The idea of human rights continues to provide the anchor for an imagined future, to be achieved through
projects that strive for human betterment and greater social justice. Yet, as Dorothy L. Hodgson points out, the very potential of
human rights has simultaneously enabled it to serve as “a contemporary form of imperial
intervention —yet another effort by the Global North to impose its values and views on the
Global South” (1), a point Wendy S. Hesford echoes in her book. Indeed, particular figures have come to dominate in both the
representational practices of women’s-rights-as-human-rights campaigns as well as in much of the on-the-ground work
addressing violations. For example, the African woman victim of female genital modification (FGM), the veiled Muslim woman, the woman trafficked
into sex work, and the child victim (most often a girl) are
some of the hypervisible figures through which the idea of
has been shaped. Why have certain figures continued to be central in
representing the idea of human rights (violations), particularly for the more privileged, often
Western human rights subject or spectator? As Hodgson notes in her introduction, and as key chapters (by Pamela Scully,
women’s human rights
Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry, and Hodgson) in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights suggest, the seemingly singular focus of women’s
human rights projects on particular iconic figures is a symptom of the ways the terms of women’s human
rights (namely, “gender,” “culture,”
and “rights”) work to reaffirm “imperial intervention” even as they might also provide needed aid. It is from the perspective of
human rights as contradictory, paradoxical, and dynamic that both texts intervene. Both texts tackle the question “Why certain figures?” by arguing
that the figures in and of themselves (a priori) do not provide the reasons they have become iconic. Rather, it is the terms of the debate—the discursive
conditions through which the concept of human rights emerges—that account for why figures like the African FGM victim become the visual markers of
human rights. Hesford, for example, argues that the
rhetorical mechanisms through which human rights become
legible as such (namely, sentimentality, trauma, and spectacle) mean that some figures lend
themselves more easily to the terms of human rights. Similarly, Hodgson and the authors in her collection interrogate
the discursive power of gendered assumptions and ideologies (pt. 1) as well as the structural and
institutional mechanisms that route human rights through certain figures. As Levitt and Merry point out,
“human rights emerge over time from social movements that name and describe a violation, gather
information about the nature of the violation and its prevalence, develop media presentations
that generate public outrage, gather supporters, raise funds, build organizations, and
consequently are able to press the human rights system to include it as a violation” (84). It is the
processes through which certain figures become legible as victims and particular issues become recognizable as violations that interest Hesford and
many of the contributors to Hodgson’s collection. Rather than focus on the various institutional mechanisms through which legibility emerges (as
Levitt and Merry outline), Hesford links human rights to a
tradition that imagines humanity by “cultivating affective
cross-cultural and transnational identifications through the arts and humanities” (189), a line of thought
that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. Problematizing the “sentiment-based ethics and
compassionate ethos that sutures human rights to the suffering body” (189), Hesford argues that the
visuality of human rights, the spectacle, delineates what can become recognizable as a human
rights issue. The visual field of human rights not only brings human rights and its subjects into
view but also establishes normative frames that shape the processes of legal and cultural
recognition. Human rights, then, depend on a politics of recognizability and identification
(“rhetorical relations between texts and audiences,” both imagined and real; 199). Attentive to the uneven distribution of emotions, Hesford traces how
sentimentalism is visually staged to make recognizable certain figures of human rights. She
stagings demonstrate human rights’ selective and differential visibility,
where particular figures become hypervisible because they more easily rehearse the
rhetorical markers of human rights narratives, such as trauma, suffering, and
witnessing (chap. 2, “Staging Terror Spectacles”). The spectacle thus becomes both the site of human rights’
potential and its limit: its potential by enabling recognizability and therefore inclusion; its limit by reproducing violence
through the voyeurism that comes with publicizing violence, as is evident in representations
of rape during wartime (chap. 3, “Witnessing Rape Warfare”). Hesford grapples with the politics of identification, and in
further highlights how such
chapter 4 (“Global Sex Work”) she looks
at representations of trafficking in order to understand
“identification practices as material and rhetorical acts” (126). Questioning whether bringing women “before ‘our’ eyes
reiterates a cosmopolitanism that … positions poor women as objects of sight for the privileged gaze” (148), Hesford also asks how the rhetorical
strategies of human rights depend on the troubling dichotomies of spectator and witness,
viewer and speaker, that premise legibility on the truth-telling contract. While Lynn Stephen’s contribution to
Hodgson’s collection, “The Rights to Speak and Be Heard,” highlights the positive ways that testimonials enabled Oaxacan women to articulate a
gendering of human rights that they had not previously considered, Hesford complicates the centrality of the testimonial and the act of bearing witness
to human rights. She does this most explicitly in her fifth chapter (“Spectacular Childhoods”). Here Hesford
problematizes agency
as expressed through testimony and individual choice by examining how this definition
ties agency to a trajectory that moves progressively from victimization to naming and
identification to self-representation and expression. Such a trajectory frames human rights
narratives as coming-of-age stories that both infantilize and pathologize victims.
L: NUMBERS/BODY COUNT
Their use of a bodycount to get a ballot perpetuates suffering.
HOLT 2006 (Jim, frequent NYT contributor, “Math Murders,” New York Times, March 12,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wwln_lede.1.html?_r=0)
Counting the dead is a paradoxical business. Suppose I told you that around 150 million people have died over the last century in wars,
genocides, man-made famines and other atrocities. This number might evoke in you a certain horror. But it is, of course, only a wild guess.
Its very vagueness lends it an air of unreality. Yet what purpose would be served by making it
more precise? Where mass death is concerned, the moral significance of scale seems to be one of
those things that our brains aren't equipped to handle. A single life may have infinite value, but
the difference between a million deaths and a million and one strikes us as negligible. The moral
meaning of death counts is further obscured by their apparent lack of objectivity. Take the war in Iraq. How many Iraqi civilians have died as a
consequence of the American invasion? Supporters of the war say 30,000, a number that even President Bush finally brought himself to utter late last
year. Opponents of the war say more than 100,000. Surely there must be a fact of the matter. In practice, though, there are only competing
methodologies and assumptions, all of which yield different numbers. Even if we could put politics aside and agree on
one, it would be hard to say what it meant. Does it matter, for instance, that the higher estimate of 100,000 is the same order of magnitude as the
number of Iraqi Kurds that Saddam Hussein is reckoned to have killed in 1987 and 1988, in a genocidal campaign that, it has been claimed, justified his
forcible removal? ''It is painful to contemplate that despite our technologies of assurance and mathematics of certainty, such
a fundamental
index of reality as numbers of the dead is a nightmarish muddle,'' wrote Gil Elliot in his 1972 volume, ''The
Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.'' Figuring out the number of man-caused deaths is rarely as straightforward as counting skulls in a mass grave.
You can kill people with bombs, guns and machetes, but there are also more indirect ways: causing them to die of starvation, say, or of exposure or
disease. (The disease need not be indirect -- witness the radiation victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Of the nearly two million Cambodians killed by
the Khmer Rouge, for instance, perhaps half were executed outright. By contrast, in the ongoing civil war in the Congo -- the deadliest conflict since
World War II -- 2 percent of the estimated 3.9 million victims have died of direct violence; the rest perished when their subsistence-level lives were
disrupted by the war. Quantifying man-made death thus means, at the very least, having
an idea of the rate at which
people die naturally. And that entails recordkeeping. In 17th-century Europe, registers kept by church parishes -- dates of baptisms,
marriages and burials -- made it possible to gauge the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War, which was deadlier for civilians than for soldiers.
The last century, strange to say, has not always matched this level of demographic sophistication. Even
in the case of Nazi Germany,
Final Solution was so chaotic that the number of victims
can be known only to the nearest million. If our methodology of counting man-made deaths is crude, our
moral calculus for weighing the resulting numbers is even cruder. Quantification, it is often
thought, confers precision and objectivity. Yet it tells us very little about comparative evil. We
feel that Hitler was every bit as evil as Stalin, even though Stalin was far more successful in
murdering people (in part because he had a longer run). Mao may have been more successful still; in their recent
supposedly a model of efficiency, the implementation of the
book, ''Mao: The Unknown Story,'' Jung Chang and Jon Halliday estimate that the Chinese leader was responsible for ''well over 70 million deaths,''
which would come to nearly half of the total number of man-made deaths in the 20th century. In
relative terms, however, Mao is
easily eclipsed by Pol Pot, who directed the killing of more than a quarter of his fellow Cambodians. Raw death numbers
may not be a reliable index of evil, but they still have value as a guide to action. That, at least, is the
common-sense view. It is also part of the ethical theory known as utilitarianism, which holds that sacrificing x lives to save y
lives is always justified as long as y is greater than x. This utilitarian principle is often invoked, for example, in defense of President Truman's decision
to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed between 120,000 and 250,000 Japanese civilians, on the assumption that the death
toll would have been worse had the war been prolonged. Yet
some thinkers (like the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe) have
questioned whether, morally speaking, numbers really count. In a choice between saving 5 lives
and saving 10, they ask, why should we be dutybound to act in behalf of the greater number? Because,
you say, it would be worse for 10 people to die than for 5 people. They reply: Worse for whom?
Arithmetic misleads us into thinking that deaths aggregate the way numbers do. Yet in
reality there are only individuals suffering. In a dilemma where the deaths of one group of
people or another is unavoidable, why should someone have to die merely by reason of being in
the smaller group? This sort of skepticism about the significance of numbers has some perverse consequences. It implies that all atrocities
have an equal command on our moral attention, regardless of scale. Yet a refusal to aggregate deaths can also be ethically
salubrious. It helps us realize that the evil of each additional death is in no way diluted by the
number of deaths that may have preceded it. The ongoing bloodbath in Darfur has, all agree, claimed an
enormous number of victims. Saying just how many is a methodological nightmare; a ballpark figure is a quarter of a million, but
estimates range up to 400,000 and beyond. Quantitatively, the new deaths that each day brings are absorbed
into this vast, indeterminate number. Morally, they ought to be as urgent as those on the first
day of the slaughter. ''What is the moral context in which we should see those killed by violence? There exists a view that one violent death
has the same moral value as a thousand or a million deaths. . . . The killer cannot add to his sin by committing more than
one murder. However, every victim of murder would claim, if he could, that his death had a separate
moral value.'' Source: ''The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead,'' by Gil Elliot (1972)
ANSWERS TO
AT: WE DON’T DEFEND REPS
They are ethically obligated to defend their representations in political discussion
Williams, 3 (Michael, IR Prof @ University of Ottawa, “Words, Images, Enemies:
Securitization and International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 4, Dec.,
2003, pp. 511-53, Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The International Studies
Association, JSTOR)
Simply put, if security is nothing more than a specific form of social practice-a speech-act tied to
existential threat and a politics of emergency-then does this mean that anything can be treated as a
"security" issue and that, as a consequence, any form of violent, exclusionary, or irrationalist politics must be
viewed simply as another form of "speech-act" and treated "objectively"? Questions such as these have led
many to ask whether despite its avowedly "constructivist" view of security practices, securitization theory is implicitly committed
to a methodological objectivism that is politically irresponsible and lacking in any basis from
which to critically evaluate claims of threat, enmity, and emergency.29 A first response to this issue is to note
that the Copenhagen School has not shied away from confronting it. In numerous places the question of the ethics of securitization are discussed as
raising difficult issues. As Wever has argued in relation to theorizing the highly sensitive issue of identity, for example, Such an approach implies that
we have to take seriously concerns about identity, but have also to study the specific and often
problematic effects of their being framed as security issues. We have also to look at the
possibilities of handling some of these problems in nonsecurity terms, that is to take on the
problems but leave them unsecuritized. This latter approach recognizes that social processes are already under way whereby
societies have begun to thematize themselves as security agents that are under threat. This process of social construction can be studied, and the
security quality of the phenomenon understood, without thereby actually legitimizing it. (1995: 66; see also Waever, 1999). As sustained as these
considerations have been, it must be admitted that the answers are somewhat less searching than the questioning, and that this remains one of the
most underarticulated aspects of securitization theory (Wyn Jones, 1999: 111-12). I would like to suggest, however, that there are two important issues
at stake in these questions, each of which can be clarified through a greater recognition of the Schmittian elements of securitization theory. The first,
and simplest point is that in some ways the Copenhagen School treats securitization not as a normative question, 27 I owe this insight especially to
Didier Bigo. 28 Again, there are clear links here between securitization theory and classical Realism's stress on the "ethic of responsibility." 29 Voiced,
for example, in Erickson (1999). These issues are, of course, also central to debates concerning social constructivismm ore generally.S ee in particulart
he exchange between John Mearsheimer( 1994/95, 1995) and Alexander Wendt (1995). A broad overview can be found in Price and Reus-Smit (1998).
521 Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics but as an objective process and possibility. Very much like Schmitt, they view
securitization as a social possibility intrinsic to political life. In regard to his concept of the political, for example, Schmitt once argued, It is irrelevant
here whether one rejects, accepts, or perhaps finds it an atavistic remnant of barbaric times that nations continue to group themselves according to
friend and enemy, or whether it is perhaps strong pedagogic reasoning to imagine that enemies no longer exist at all. The concern here is neither with
abstractions nor normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of making such a distinction. One may or may not share these hopes
and pedagogic ideals. But, rationally speaking, it cannot be denied that nations continue to group themselves according to the friend-enemy antithesis,
that the distinction still remains actual today, and that this is an ever present possibility for every people existing in the political sphere (1996 [1932]:
28).30 In certain settings, the Copenhagen School seems very close to this position. Securitization must be understood as both an existing reality and a
continual possibility. Yet equally clearly there is a basic ambivalence in this position, for it raises the dilemma that securitization theory must remain at
best agnostic in the face of any securitization, even, for example, a fascist speech-act (such as that Schmitt has often been associated with) that
securitizes a specific ethnic or racial minority. To say that we must study the conditions under which such processes. I would like to suggest that it is in
response to these issues, and in regard to the realm of ethical practice, that the idea of security as a speech-actta kes on an importance well beyond its
Casting securitization as a speechact places that act within a framework of
communicative action and legitimation that links it to a discursive ethics that seeks to avoid the excesses of a
role as a tool of social explanation.
decisionist account of securitization. While the Copenhagen School has been insufficiently clear in developing these aspects of securitization theory,
they link clearly to some of the most interesting current analyses of the practical ethics of social-constructivism. As Thomas Risse (2000) has recently
argued, communicative
action is not simply a realm of instrumental rationality and rhetorical
manipulation. Communicative action involves a process of argument, the provision of reasons,
presentation of evidence, and commitment to convincing others of the validity of one's position.
Communicative action (speech-acts) are thus not just given social practices, they are implicated in a
process of justification. Moreover, as processes of dialogue, communicative action has a potentially
transformative capacity. As Risse puts it: Argumentative rationality appears to be crucially linked to the constitutive rather than the
regulative role of norms and identities by providing actors with a mode of interaction that enables them to mutually challenge and explore the validity
claims of those norms and identities. When actors engage in a truth-seeking discourse, they must be prepared to change their own views of the world,
their interests, and sometimes even their identities. (2000: 2)31 30 More broadly,i t can be argued that for Schmitti t was not only a possibilityb, ut a
choice, a decision, that he paradoxically saw as necessary if a vital human life was to be lived. For an analysis of Schmitt in relation to a vitalistic
romanticisma nd a virulenth ostilityt o liberalisms ee againW olin( 1992). Schmitt'sv italismm arkso ne of the clearest differences with the Copenhagen
School, as discussed below. 31 Risse's analysis here draws greatly on that of Habermas. For Habermas's own treatment of speech-act theory see
Habermas (1984). For Habermas's own views on Schmitt see Habermas (1990); a recent brief survey of the relationship between Habermas and
Schmitt in the context of International Relations is Wheeler (2000), and a more extended and varied collection is Wyn Jones (2001). As speech-acts,
securitizations are in principle forced to enter the realm of discursive legitimation. Speech-act theory entails the possibility of argument, of dialogue,
and thereby holds out the potential for the transformation of security perceptions both within and between states. The securitizing speech-act must be
accepted by the audience, and while the Copenhagen School is careful to note that "[a]ccept does not necessarily mean in civilized, dominance-free
discussion; it only means that an order always rests on coercion as well as on consent," it is nonetheless the case that "[s]ince securitization can never
only be imposed, there is some need to argue one's case"(Buzan et al., 1998: 23), and that "[s]uccessful securitization is not decided by the securitizer
but by the audience of the security speech-act: does the audience accept that something is an existential threat to a shared value? Thus security (as with
all politics) ultimately rests neither with the objects nor with the subjects but among the subjects"( 1998:31). It is via this commitment to
communicative action and discursive ethics, I would like to suggest, that the Copenhagen School seeks to avoid the radical realpolitik that might
otherwise seem necessarily to follow from the Schmittian elements of the theory of securitization. Schmitt appeals to the necessity and inescapability of
decision, enmity, and "the political." He appeals to the mobilizing power of myth in the production of friends and enemies, and asserts the need for a
single point of decision to the point of justifying dictatorship. He mythologizes war and enmity as the paramount moments of political life.32 By
contrast, the Copenhagen School treats securitization as a social process, and casts it as a phenomenon largely to be avoided. Securitization is the
Schmittian realm of the political, and for precisely this reason it is dangerous and-by and large-to be avoided.33 This element of the Copenhagen School
is clearly illustrated in the concepts of "desecuritization" and "asecurity" which form integral aspects of securitization theory. As a consequence of their
Schmittian understanding of security-and in contrast to many (indeed most) other forms of security studies-the Copenhagen School does not regard
security as an unambiguously positive value. In most cases, securitization is something to be avoided. While casting an issue as one of "security" may
help elevate its position on the political agenda, it also risks placing that issue within the logic of threat and decision, and potentially within the contrast
of friend and enemy.34 "Security,"accordingly, is something to be invoked with great care and, in general, minimized rather than expanded-a
movement that should be sought in the name of stability, tolerance, and political negotiation, not in opposition to it. "Desecuritization"
involves precisely this process; a moving of issues off the "security" agenda and back into the realm of public political
discourse and "normal" political dispute and accommodation. The transformation of many elements of European security as part of the end of the Cold
War stands as a key example (Waever, Buzan, Kelstrup, and Lemaitre, 1993). Similarly, the concept of "asecurity" designates a (probably optimal)
situation in which relations are so firmly "politicized" that there is little chance of them becoming re-securitized, a case that Waever argues is illustrated
by the Nordic countries whose relations with each other constitute an "asecurity community" rather than a "security community" in the more
conventional sense (Waver, 1998b). 32 See, for example, the direct discussion of-and partial contrast to-Schmitt's use of enmity in the construction of
sovereignty in Waver (1995: fn. 63); Schmitt also figures in the analysis of religion as a "referent object" pursued in Bagge Lausten and Waver
(2000:726, 733). 33 Here, too, the links to classical Realism are strong, for as William Scheuerman (1999) has brilliantly illustrated, this was precisely
the tack adopted by Hans Morgenthau in his extended critical engagement with Schmitt. 34 Recognizing this particular Schmittian legacy hopefully
also helps clarify the dispute between the Copenhagen School and those who think its scepticism toward the word and concept of "security" is politically
debilitating. 523 Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics As a contribution to political practice, the sociological analysis of
the Copenhagen School attempts to provide tools whereby these transformative processes can be fostered. By
exposing the limits
imposed by the securitization of specific issues, it provides resources for challenging these
limitations. In presenting security as a speech-act, the Copenhagen School is doing more than developing a
sociological thesis: it is presenting a political ethic. This does not mean that securitizations will always be forced to enter the realm of
discursive legitimation. Indeed, part of the power of securitization theory lies in its stress on how "security" issues are often or usually insulated from
this process of public debate: they operate in the realm of secrecy, of "national security," of decision. Equally, relations may be "sedimented" to such a
degree that discursive ethics and tactics of social negotiation are unlikely to succeed and need to be subordinated (at least in the short term) to more
traditional mechanisms of (relatively fixed) interest manipulation and material power balancing.35 These are key elements of any analysis of security
policy. But the limitations should also not be overstated. As
resistant as they may be, these security policies and relationships
are susceptible to being pulled back into the public realm and capable of transformation, particularly
when the social consensus underlying the capacity for decision is challenged, either by questioning
the policies, or by disputing the threat, or both.36
AT: KLIENMAN
Concludes neg --- here’s the paragraph after their card.
Kleinman and Kleinman 97 (Arthur, Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Joan, sinologist,
Research Associate, Medical Anthropology Program at Harvard, “The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering
in our times,” Social Suffering, pg. 18-18, google books)//a-berg
Yet, to do so, to develop valid appropriations, we must first make sure that the biases of commercial emphasis on profit-making, the
partisan agendas of political ideologies, and the narrow technical interests that serve primarily professional groups are understood and their influence
controlled. The
first action, then, is critical self-reflection on the purposes of policies and the
effects of programs. We take that to be a core component of programs of ethics in the professions. Perhaps a more difficult action is to lift the
veil on the taken-for-granted cultural processes within which those policies and programs, no matter how well intended, are inevitably, and usually
unintentionally, taken up and exploited. The idea that the first impulse of social and health-policy experts should be to historicize the issue before them
and to critique the cultural mechanisms of action at hand goes against the grain of current practice. Nonetheless, that is a chief implication of our
analysis. The
starting point of policymakers and program builders needs to be the understanding
that they can (and often unwillingly do) do harm . Because that potential for harm lies latent in
the institutional structures that have been authorized to respond to human problems, that work
behind even the best intentioned professionals, ‘experts must be held responsible to define
how those latent institutional effects can be controlled. Humanizing the level at which Interventions are organized
means focusing planning and evaluation on the interpersonal space of suffering, the local, ethnographic context of action. This requires not only
engagement with what is at stake for participants in those local worlds, but bringing those local participants (not merely national experts) into the
process of developing and assessing programs. Such policy-making from the ground up can only succeed, however, if these local worlds are more
effectively protected into national and international discourses on human problems. (This may represent the necessary complement to the globalization
of local images. Perhaps it should be called the global representation of local contexts.) To
do so requires a reformulation of the
indexes and instruments of policy. Those analytic tools need to authorize deeper depictions of the local (including how the &o bal—
e.g., displacement, markets, technology—enters into the local). And those methodologies of policy must engage the existential side of social life. How to
reframe the language of policies and programs so that large-scale social forces are made to relate to biography and local history will require
interdisciplinary engagements that bring alternative perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, and the health sciences to bear on human
problems. The goal is to reconstruct the object of inquiry and the purposes of practice. Ultimately,
we will have to engage the
more ominous aspects of globalization, such as the commercialization of suffering, the
commodification of experiences of atrocity and abuse, and the pornographic uses of
degradation .3’ Violence in the media, and its relation to violence in the streets and in homes, is already a subject that has attracted serious
attention from communities and from scholars.’7 Regarding the even more fundamental cultural question of how social experience is
being transformed in untoward ways, the first issue would seem to be to develop historical, ethno graphic, and narrative studies that provide
a more powerful understanding of the cultural processes through which the global regime of disordered capitalism alters the
connections between collective experience and subjectivity, so that moral sensibility, for example,
diminishes or becomes something frighteningly different: promiscuous, gratuitous, unhinged from
responsibility and ac tion.3’ There is a terrible legacy here that needs to be contemplated. The transformation of epochs is as much about
changes in social experience as shifts in social structures and cultural representations; indeed, the three sires of social transformation are inseparable.
Out of their triangulation, subjectivity too transmutes. The current transformation is no different yet perhaps we see more clearly the hazards of the
historical turn that we are now undertaking. Perhaps all along we have been wrong to consider existential conditions as an ultimate constraint limiting
the moral dangers of civilizational change.
AT: BUT IMPACTS
The ballot should prioritize good scholarship over theoretical policy impacts
Bilgin, 4 (Pinar, Assistant Prof of International Relations at Bilkent University, and Adam
David Morton, Senior Lecturer and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global
Justice of International Relations at Nottingham University, “From ‘Rogue’ to ‘Failed’ States?
The Fallacy of Short-termism” Politics: 2004 Vol 24(3), pg. 169–180, Wiley, pdf)
Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to point
to the fallacy of 'short-termism' in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by
Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as 'approaching security issues within the time frame of the next election,
not the next generation'. Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic thinking.
The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps towards
achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually become selfdefeating. The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies
in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in
Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the
United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has
eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused.
Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of state failure and the role Western states
have played in failing them through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators
may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic
approach to the problem of international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of
the medium-to-long-term implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst
also addressing the root causes of the problem of state 'failure'. Developing this line of
argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of 'state failure' in relation
to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative considerations. In
line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167–170), divergent issues might then come to the fore when
viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the
lenses of an incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become
apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the
breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are readily
identified (al-Qa'eda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, 'strong'/'weak' states) and
judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical
problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the
constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers
to bring conceptual baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information.
Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame, policy responses are subject
to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors assumed to be constant within an
incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect
on ongoing processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the
'war on terror' be waged for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more
concerned with the underlying forces that shape current trajectories. Shifting attention to a
third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame
an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a
conventional problem-solving mode 'wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof
grounds', towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To
conclude, in relation to 'failed states', the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very
structural conditions shaping the problems of 'failure' raised throughout the present discussion,
which will demand lasting and delicate attention from practitioners across the academy and
policymaking communities alike.
AT: NO LINK
This just proves that your epistemology is flawed.
Arrigo and Williams 2k (Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of
Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Christopher
R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, “The Philosophy of
the Gift and the Psychology of Advocacy: Critical Reflections on Forensic Mental Health Intervention,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law,
Vol. 13, No. 2, 2000, pgs. 215-242)
The psychological egoist questions the possibility of acting altruistically; that is, of acting purely with regard for the interests of another. That is to ask,
can our actions at times be motivated purely by a concern for the welfare of others without some manifestation of primary self-interest in our actions?
Though questions of self-interest factored significantly into the classical era of philosophical speculation, the establishment of egoism as psychologically
predetermined and, consequently, inescapable received its first detailed and philosophically animated treatment in the work of Thomas Hobbes.10
Hobbes’s theory rests on one core assumption: human beings, when acting voluntarily, will be
egoistically motivated . In other words, all human actions are rooted in self-interest, and the very possibility
of being motivated otherwise is forbidden by the structure of our fundamental psychological make-up. Hobbes’s conceptualizations on the self are
artfully depicted in passages from his work, On Human Nature (1650), in which he defines both “charity” and “pity.” These ideas are
particularly important for our purposes. Indeed, they anticipate future developments in the logic of the gift and
the motivational aspects of advocacy. With regard to the former, Hobbes deconstructs the prevalent
sentiment of neighborly love, finding “charity” to be a veiled form of egoism . As he describes it:
There can be no greater argument to a man, of his own power, than to find himself able not only to accomplish his own desires, but also to assist other
men in theirs: and this is that conception wherein consisteth charity.11 Actions
motivated by a concern for others are
those which Hobbes refers to as “charity.” To this, we might also add “altruism,” “assistance,”
“intervention,” and, to that effect, “advocacy.” For Hobbes, charity is nothing more than one taking
some delight in one’s own power . The charitable man is demonstrating to himself, and to the world, that he is more capable
than others. He can not only take care of himself, he has enough left over for others who are not so able as he. He is really just showing off his own
superiority.12 There is another important aspect of the charitable person, relevant more specifically to the psychological underpinnings of such
selfinterested displays of benevolence. This
is the notion of conscious selfinterest versus self-interest that
motivates from behind or, in Freud’s topology, underneath the level of conscious awareness.13 This point will become clearer when we
discuss self-interest in the context of a Lacanian psychoanalytic critique. For now, we note that even Hobbes recognized that persons
motivated by self-interest might not be consciously aware that their seemingly selfless acts
were, in fact, blemished by concerns for the self. What is more characteristic of such behavior in
terms of human psychology is that we consciously regard our actions as altruistic; an interpretation most
beneficial to our psychic life. In other words, we want to believe that our actions are unselfish and, consequently, we
interpret them in such a fashion. In fact, following psychological egoists, this interpretation obtains only superficially; that
is, we delude ourselves absent a careful investigation of the unconscious dynamics that
give rise to the logic of charitable, altruistic, intervening behavior.
AFF
SUFFERING REPS GOOD
Our reps cause an empathic shift---this is especially crucial in the context of policy
debates and advocacy simulations.
Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City. University of New York. He has taught at
Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER"
gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pdf
Perhaps, then, what distant consumers
express when they sit glued to the television watching a disaster replayed
over and over, when they buy t-shirts or snow globes, when they mail teddy bears to a memorial, or when they tour a disaster site, is a deep,
maybe subconscious, longing for those age-old forms of community and real human
compassion that emerge in a place when disaster has struck. It is a longing in some ways so
alien to the world we currently live in that it requires catastrophe to call it forth, even in our imaginations.
Nevertheless, the actions of unadulterated goodwill that become commonplace in harrowing conditions
represent the truly authentic form of humanity that all of us, to one degree or another, chase after in
contemporary consumer culture every day. And while it is certainly a bit foolhardy to seek authentic humanity
through disaster-related media and culture, the sheer strength of that desire has been evident in
the public’s response to all the disasters, crises and catastrophes to hit the United States in the past decade. The millions of
television viewers who cried on September 11, or during Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings, and the thousands upon thousands who
volunteered their time, labor, money, and even their blood, as well as the countless others who created art, contributed to memorials, or adorned their
cars or bodies with disaster-related paraphernalia— despite the fact that many knew no one who had been personally affected by any of these
disasters—all
attest to a desire for real human community and compassion that is woefully
unfulfilled by American life under normal conditions today. ¶ In the end, the consumption of
disaster doesn’t make us unable or unwilling to engage with disasters on a communal
level, or towards progressive political ends—it makes us feel as if we already have, simply by consuming. It is ultimately
less a form of political anesthesia than a simulation of politics, a Potemkin village of communal sentiment, that fills
our longing for a more just and humane world with disparate acts of cathartic consumption. Still, the positive political potential
underlying such consumption—the desire for real forms of connection and community—remains
the most redeeming feature of disaster consumerism. Though that desire is frequently warped when various media
lenses refract it, diffuse it, or reframe it to fit a political agenda, its overwhelming strength should nonetheless serve
notice that people want a different world than the one in which we currently live, with a
different way of understanding and responding to disasters. They want a world where risk is not leveraged for profit
or political gain, but sensibly planned for with the needs of all socio-economic groups in mind. They want a world where
preemptive strategies are used to anticipate the real threats posed by global climate change and
global inequality, rather than to invent fears of ethnic others and justify unnecessary wars. They
want a world where people can come together not simply as a market, but as a public, to exert
real agency over the policies made in the name of their safety and security. And, when disaster does strike, they
want a world where the goodwill and compassion shown by their neighbors, by strangers in their
communities, and even by distant spectators and consumers, will be matched by their own
government. Though this vision of the world is utopian, it is not unreasonable, and if contemporary American culture is ever to give us more
than just an illusion of safety, or empathy, or authenticity, then it is this vision that we must advocate on a daily basis, not only when disaster strikes.
SILENCE TURN
Some appropriations are good --- don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good --the alt risks silence, which is infinitely worse.
Kleinman and Kleinman 97 (Arthur, Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Joan, sinologist,
Research Associate, Medical Anthropology Program at Harvard, “The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering
in our times,” Social Suffering, pg. 16-18, google books)//a-berg
It is necessary to balance the account of the globalization of commercial and professional
images with a vastly different and even more dangerous cultural process of appropriation: the
totalitarian state's erasure of social experiences of suffering through the suppression of
images. Here the possibility of moral appeal through images of human misery is prevented,
and it is their absence that is the source of existential dismay. Such is the case with the massive starvation in China
from 1959 to 1961. This story was not reported at the time even though more than thirty million Chinese died in the aftermath of the ruinous policies of
the Great Leap Forward, the perverse effect of Mao's impossible dream of forcing immediate industrialization on peasants. Accounts of this, the world's
most devastating famine, were totally suppressed; no stories or pictures of the starving or the dead were published. An internal report on the famine
was made by an investigating team for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It was based on a detailed survey of an extremely poor
region of Anwei Province that was particularly brutally affected. The report includes this numbing statement by Wei Wu-ji, a local peasant leader from
Anwei: Originally there were 5,000 people in our commune, now only 3,200 remain. When the Japanese invaded we did not lose this many: we at least
could save ourselves by running away! This year there's no escape. We die shut up in our own houses. Of my 6 family members, 5 are already dead, and
I am left to starve, and I'll not be able to stave off death for long.(30) Wei Wu-ji continued: Wang Jia-feng from West Springs County reported that
cases of eating human meat were discovered. Zhang Sheng-jiu said, "Only an evil man could do such a thing!" Wang Jia-feng said, "In 1960, there were
20 in our household, ten of them died last year. My son told his mother 'I'll die of hunger in a few days.'" And indeed he did.(31) The report also
includes a graphic image by Li Qin-ming, from Wudian County, Shanwang Brigade: In 1959, we were prescheduled to deliver 58,000 jin of grain to the
State, but only 35,000 jin were harvested, hence we only turned over 33,000 jin, which left 2,000 jin for the commune. We really have nothing to eat.
The peasants eat hemp leaves, anything they can possibly eat. In my last report after I wrote, "We have nothing to eat," the Party told me they wanted to
remove my name from the Party Roster. Out of a population of 280, 170 died. In our family of five, four of us have died leaving only myself. Should I
say that I'm not broken hearted?(32) Chen Zhang-yu, from Guanyu County, offered the investigators this terrible image: Last spring the phenomenon
of cannibalism appeared. Since Comrade Chao Wu-chu could not come up with any good ways of prohibiting it, he put out the order to secretly
imprison those who seemed to be at death's door to combat the rumors. He secretly imprisoned 63 people from the entire country. Thirty-three died in
prison.(33) The official report is thorough and detailed. It is classified neibu, restricted use only. To distribute it is to reveal state secrets. Presented
publicly it would have been, especially if it had been published in the 1960s, a fundamental critique of the Great Leap, and a moral and political
delegitimation of the Chinese Communist Party's claim to have improved the life of poor peasants. Even today the authorities regard it as dangerous.
The official silence is another form of appropriation. It prevents public witnessing. It
forges a secret history, an act of political resistance through keeping alive the memory of things
denied.34 The totalitarian state rules by collective forgetting, by denying the collective experience of
suffering, and thus creates a culture of terror. The absent image is also a form of political
appropriation; public silence is perhaps more terrifying than being overwhelmed by public
images of atrocity. Taken together the two modes of appropriation delimit the extremes in this
cultural process.(35) Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does not mean that no
appropriations are valid. To conclude that would be to undermine any attempt to respond to
human misery. It would be much more destructive than the problem we have identified; it would paralyze
social action . We must draw upon the images of human suffering in order to identify
human needs and to craft humane responses.
AT: SFO
Speaking for the other is key to political activism
Alcoff 91, Hunter College and CUNY philosophy professor, 1991 (Linda Martin, “The Problem of Speaking for Others” originally published in
Cultural Critique, No. 20, Winter, 1991-1992 , cut from www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html)
*gender modified
The major problem with such a retreat is that it significantly undercuts the possibility of
political effectivity. There are numerous examples of the practice of speaking for others which have been politically
efficacious in advancing the needs of those spoken for, from Rigoberta Menchu to Edward Said and Steven Biko.
Menchu's efforts to speak for the 33 Indian communities facing genocide in Guatemala have helped to raise money for the revolution and bring
pressure against the Guatemalan and U.S. governments who have committed the massacres in collusion. The
point is not that for some
speakers the danger of speaking for others does not arise, but that in some cases certain political
effects can be garnered in no other way . Joyce Trebilcot's version of the retreat response, which I mentioned at the outset of
this essay, raises other issues. She agrees that an absolute prohibition of speaking for would undermine
political effectiveness , and therefore says that she will avoid speaking for others only within her lesbian feminist community. So it
might be argued that the retreat from speaking for others can be maintained without sacrificing political effectivity if it is restricted to particular
discursive spaces. Why might one advocate such a partial retreat? Given that interpretations and meanings are discursive constructions made by
embodied speakers, Trebilcot worries that attempting to persuade or speak for another will cut off that person's ability or willingness to engage in the
constructive act of developing meaning. Since no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account, and since the process of producing
meaning is necessarily collective, everyone's account within a specified community needs to be encouraged. I agree with a great deal of Trebilcot's
argument. I certainly agree that in
some instances speaking for others constitutes a violence and should be
stopped. But Trebilcot's position, as well as a more general retreat position, presumes an ontological configuration of the discursive context that
simply does not obtain. In particular, it assumes that one can retreat into one's discrete location and make claims entirely and singularly within that
location that do not range over others, and therefore that one can disentangle oneself from the implicating networks between one's discursive practices
and others' locations, situations, and practices. In other words, the claim that I can speak only for myself assumes the autonomous conception of
the self in Classical Liberal theory--that
I am unconnected to others in my authentic self or that I can achieve
an autonomy from others given certain conditions. But there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one's
words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to demarcate decisively a boundary between one's location and
a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of
current discourses and acts by omission to reenforce their dominance.
all others. Even
RANDOM.JPG
Science is imperialism
Hamm 5, - (Bernd, Professor of Sociology, Jean Monnet Professor of European Studies, UNESCO Chair in Europe in a Global Perspective at the
University of Trier, Germany, “Cynical Science: Science and Truth as Cultural Imperialism,” cut from Cultural Imperialism: Essays on the Political
Economy of Cultural Domination, google books)//A-Berg
This chapter argues that our Western
concepts of science and truth are used to legitimate interests aimed
at the suppression and exploitation of nature and humans. They are used to mask the destructive
character of Western political-economic interests. In doing this, science and truth have become ideologies. As
such, they tend to benefit the “Power Elites” (C.W. Mills 1956)’ of society and, of course, the scientific community, at the cost
of the population at large. The forced global imposition of this under standing of science and truth is part of
cultural imperialism. This thesis is formulated in negative terms. It criticizes Western science but will not propose alternatives. Theodor W.
Adorno, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School of sociology, has coined the term “negative dialectics” and argued that a critical
analysis of existing reality implicitly contains its antithesis. This is not the place to go deeper into the issue of other
knowledge systems (for a discussion of this see, e.g., Goonatilake ij8). My intention is not to follow up on Johan GaIning’s (1971) understanding of
scientific imperialism (as a subtype of cultural imperialism), which still holds the assumption that science is a
serious attempt to find out “the truth” (the imperialism in it being, rather, that valid objective
science exists but is misused in the interest of power), but rather to challenge this assumption. Science has
become in the course of history, or always was, so closely associated with, and subservient to the interests of, the power cadres that
the idealistic idea of science appears as a major instrument to safeguard access to and influence
on these cadres; in other words, it is a professional ideology The chapter will explore this thesis, first, by
recapitulating the Western definition of science and truth as objective and value-free. It then moves on to some
observations which do not comply with this self-image: the relation between science, money, and power; science and the problem of sustainable
development; the Americanization of science; and university reform as experienced In Germany as part of the Bologna Process.
These observations contrasted with the ideology will lead to a diagnosis of cynical science. Finally the globalization of such cynicism will be discussed.
The Ideology of Science and Truth “Knowledge”
may be defined as the way in which humans categorize,
encode process, and impute meaning to their experiences. This is as true of scientific as of non-scientific forms of
knowledge (Studley 1998:1). There are many different ways to acquire knowledge: through logical reasoning; sensual perception; intuition; authority
and conformism; or devotion and love. An
experience made according to certain rules commonly accepted in
the community of scientists is called “scientific.” Irrelevant as this code might be for the majority
of ordinary people, it has still succeeded in gaining strategic influence among cadres. Knowledge
is acquired and processed in the context of world views, of systems of knowledge, and of cultures which people share and regularly confirm to each
other. It is
built into existing frames of reference, evaluated, and selected; meaning is attached to it
and tied into the historical experience of a given society. It is neither autonomous nor objective
but rather bound into those social conditions under which people live and is influenced by the social position
of an individual in his or her society and the respective material living conditions. The sociology of knowledge (beginning with Karl
Mannheim, 1893-1947) has provided ample evidence for this (see, however, the critical review of Mannheim’s approach by Adorno 1955), and many
empirical studies have explored the images of society held by different social strata and professional groups. Such paradigms, which are relatively
resistant to change, also exist in science, as Thomas Kuhn (1962) has argued. In everyday life, we accept a statement as “true” if it is confirmed by the
rules of everyday experience, if it seems reasonable, if it is held true by people we love and respect, or ¡fit is confirmed by secondary information. A
statement is taken to be “scientifically true” if it has been published in a highly reputable volume and is taken for granted by respected scientists, or 1f It
has been tested according to the mies of scientific methodology. Karl Popper’s insistence that the truth of a statement can never be objectively
confirmed in scientific rigour and that the scientific method demands that well-established hypotheses be falsified, thus gradually narrowing the field of
potential truth, Is of only theoretical value (Popper 1960). It does not count very much In real practical research because new hypotheses are being
continuously generated and tested in the hope of verification, while sets of well-established hypotheses being falsified is the exception. In extrascientific everyday life, sensual experience, the opinion of a reference group, but mostly the mass media are relevant proofs of truth. In most of the
sciences the empirical proof of truth is made by statistical tests based on probability theory, while quoting from the Bible or from a classical author has
lost its persuasiveness. Mathematics is seen as an objective basis for rational argument. Empirical phenomena are supposed to be translated into the
language of numbers to become scientifically accessible by mathematical transformation. Truth can be calculated, according to common belief in the
scientific community The methods of scientific discovery are conventional; they rest on culturally specific consensus. However, we also have to assume
that there are different ways towards achieving knowledge, which might well lead to differ ent results. Scientific education and training transfer such
conventions. Therefore, it is important to understand who is entitled to determine the existence of such conventions, and on which criteria. Despite the
obvious need for such careful reflection, the current common practice is that European (and other) social scientists tend to accept those statistical and
methodological procedures which are the fashion of the day in the US as the standard for the relevance of our own work. The way into “refereed
journals” seems to be more often paved with sophisticated statistics than with theoretically relevant arguments. How often do we find heavy statistical
artillery used to shoot at theoretical mice! According to its self-image, science has to be independent and valuefree, leaving the scientist devoid of all
external restrictions.
There is only one goal, i.e., pure, purposeless knowledge. No political, economic, or
other non-scientific interest should intrude into and divert the scientific process. Only then is it
guaranteed that science will come continuously closer to the truth. Curiosity is not only part of the inner nature of humans but also serves the benefit of
humankind at large. The scientist has one and only one task: to engage in pure research and make his or her knowledge available to others. He or she
bears no responsibility beyond this. This is why the nationstate maintains universities and guarantees the freedom of research and teaching
(sometimes, like in Germany, even in the constitution). National
governments are well advised to invest in science because,
science will lead to wisdom and betterment, but also to competitive advantages, and thus to
innovation, growth, employment, and income. Globalization increases the validity and the relevance of this argument. It is
at least in the long run,
true, there are problems. Education, science, innovation, and growth are believed to be the means to solve them. According to this logic, many problems
have their cause in the fact that people are not scientifically educated, that they act in their traditional, “irrational” ways. Scientific
progress
is seen as the solution for all our problems: diseases will be eradicated or healed, environmental
damages prevented or repaired, poverty and hunger overcome, non-renewable resources
substituted, crime and drug abuse prevented, life-time extended and eternal youth achieved,
development enforced and material welfare secured for all. Scientific progress is the panacea for
all deficits. The idea of a reality that opens itself to scientifically objective insight— that problems are the simple
consequence of insufficient knowledge—is very tempting. First, it provides a welcome excuse because nobody is
responsible for the deficits in scientific knowledge. Secondly, it allows us to delegate the solution of our problems to others. The competence to
establish the objective truth has been attributed to science. The reputation of science depends largely on its ability to render this service to society Of
course, this image of science has always been put to doubt. There have always been, in all disciplines, individual voices calling for an ethical foundation
for science. Often these ethical scientists have been criticized by the mainstream, who argue that they oppose intellectual freedom and the freedom of
research and, hence, that they are against democratic thinking and might even advocate state-directed science. This
would, of course,
ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class—ironically making scientists with a strong
ethical foundation alleged proponents of political totalitarianism. To avoid overgeneralization, it needs to be noted
that “Western or “modem” science is by no means a homogeneous body There are “intellectual styles” (Gakung 1988: ) in different societies, and there
have always been dissenting voices among the disciplinary mainstreams, marginal epistemological positions with greater or smaller numbers of
proponents. The characteristics described above refer to the mainstream. Value freedom, purposelessness, and non-responsibility are seen as primary
virtues in those very institutions that serve the self-administration of science and receive gigantic sums of money for research funding. They still
provide the yardsticks for academic education and are being used to justify the privileges which scientists enjoy in our societies, especially in the rank of
professors. In an article on “Western Domination in Knowledge,”1 the Sri Lankan writer Nalin de Silva (2002) addressed this problem very directly,
arguing that: “Western science is supposed to be making attempts to understand the objective reality, and the truths or whatever that is taught by the
westerners is said to be objectively valid. The entire European modernism that began in the fifteenth century with Renaissance, is based on objectivity,
reality, and absolute truth.” Science, then, is the process of the gradual and methodologically standardized approximation of objective reality However,
to be in a position to assess the degree of approximation, we should already know the objective truth. This is, in other words, a classical circular
argument. Even if we assume, continues de Silva, that there is an objective reality that we can apprehend and can appropriate (“know”), even then the
process of appropriation is subjective, or relative. There is no way to appropriate an objective reality objectively, ne., equally valid for all at the same
time. Even the concept of objective reality is formulated subjectively (a very similar argument has been advanced by Feyerabend 1979).
Nanotech is neoliberal
Mehta, Michael 04-Dr. Encyclopedia of Globalization writer, environmental scientist who
specializes in science technology and social response, PHD in environmental Sociology
(“Nanotechnology”,
http://www.referenceworld.com/mosgroup/globalization/nanotechnology.html)//Modermatt
Since nanotechnology is such a powerful technology, it is critical to understand, and ideally
shape, the field before it becomes too difficult to manage. However, the social impacts of nanotechnology,
including its relationship to globalization, are poorly understood. Since few social scientists have begun to examine the possible
impacts of nanotechnology on society, their insights are often based on experience with earlier technologies like nuclear energy,
information technology, and biotechnology. The experience with earlier transformative technologies
suggests the need to devise better mechanisms for engaging the public in discussion, to develop
sounder regulation and more transparent approaches for handling scientific uncertainty, and to
nurture an appreciation for the impacts of technology on a global scale. One important impact
linked to globalization is that nanotechnology may reinforce, and magnify, existing disparities
between the rich and poor. Differential rates of diffusion of these technologies may create a “nano
divide.” Like the digital divide that has accompanied the introduction of new information and communication technologies, it is
likely that there will be nano have and nano have not countries. Some proponents of nanotechnology argue
that scientific advances in this field will bring the end of material scarcity, for example, by making raw materials such as wood and
oil obsolete, due to the ability to synthesize similar materials. But more critical thinkers suggest that
nanotechnology will accelerate the trend toward corporate concentration of power and
monopoly formation, because research on nanotechnology is too expensive and complex for
small organizations to conduct. Innovations derived from nanoscience will likely generate
intense international competition for patents and a drive to harmonize intellectual property
rights across countries. Nanotechnology is emerging into an already evolving global patent
landscape where multinational corporations are attempting to own downstream access rights to
enabling technologies, as occurred with some advances in biotechnology. For example, many of the
early genetically modified plants relied upon a gene transfer method that was licensed exclusively to CibaGeigy (now Syngenta). As a result, an important “tool kit” for research in the public sector came
under the control of a multinational corporation. Since research in nanoscience is expensive, global in scope, and
requires a high degree of cooperation between universities, governments, and industry, questions about the private-public
ownership of intellectual property need to be addressed. Also, these stronger alliances between universities, governments, and
industry threaten to redefine the priorities of university-based research, to weaken the regulatory role of the state, and to subsidize
industry-based initiatives like never before. Like biotechnology, nanotechnology will probably be controlled by a
small number of multinational corporations. On the one hand, large biotechnology and life science corporations will
likely lead the so-called wet nanotechnology revolution. Wet nanotechnology refers to the use of nanotechnology in biological
systems and involves developing customized pharmaceuticals, designer genes, and other nano-medical applications. On the other
hand, large electronics corporations will probably capitalize on dry nanotechnology; advances in dry nanotechnology use nano-based
coatings, polymers, powders and techniques to minimize friction, to produce “smart” materials and to reduce the size of electronic
components. With this concentration of control over nanotechnology, multinational corporations will continue to
play a strong role in shaping global rules for trade, monetary and fiscal policies, intellectual
property rights, and social policies. Nanotechnology may also stimulate a return of mercantilism (nano-mercantilism).
In contrast to liberal capitalism, mercantilism emphasizes economic self-sufficiency, a favorable balance of trade, captive markets
and colonial relations, and a stronger role for governments in shaping social policies that are in the interest of merchants and
producers. The development of universal assembler technology, which involves coordinating nano-sized
mechanical or biological devices to assemble objects from the bottom up, may
usher in a new kind of industrial
revolution where existing manufacturing processes will be replaced, the concept of human labor
reconsidered, and the current basis of the economy and global trade transformed. In Engines of
Creation (1987) Eric Drexler writes that a universal assembler could be a positioning device with different tools and tips that place,
mill, and add reactants, and allow for the assembly of nanoscale components into larger structures. Paradoxically, assembler era
nanotechnology may change our current understanding of globalization in significant ways. Countries with assembler technology
may be able to decouple themselves from certain kinds of international trade and commerce by “growing” their own products from
substrates like readily available carbon and silicon. Nanotechnology is stimulating significant advances in surveillance and
monitoring technology and may lead to what might be called nano-panopticism. By facilitating the miniaturization of remote camera
technology, nanotechnology makes it possible to place undetectable video cameras, microphones, and transmitters anywhere one
wishes. A comprehensive monitoring of individuals becomes possible, encompassing credit ratings, financial transactions, health
records, police files, consumption patterns, and so on. More importantly, increasingly sophisticated data-processing technology
enables the effective sorting of large amounts of information and provides the ability to track individuals as they navigate their way
through the Internet. Nanotechnology magnifies these effects by increasing the scope and scale of surveillance, and could allow
globally coordinated actors to monitor social behavior on a worldwide basis. Clearly, nanotechnology has profound
political impacts on globalization. It could privilege states of the developed world and their
national security interests. It looks likely to favor large multinational corporations. And it favors
agents of social control who value enhanced surveillance and monitoring capabilities. Since
nanotechnology has the potential to transform so much in the course of future globalization, it is
vital to consider both its benefits and its risks.
Neoliberal ideologies ensure nanotech puts the cart before the horse- leads to
focus on military application rather than problem solving
Hess 10 – Head of Science and Tech Studies at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute
(Environmental Reform Organizations and Undone Science in the United States:
Exploring the Environmental, Health, and Safety Implications of
Nanotechnology,http://www.davidjhess.org/NanoCivilSocietyHess.pdf)//Modermatt
One of the central problems in the political sociology of science, the problem of “undone science” (in this
case the problem of understanding the EHS implications of nanotechnology), also draws attention to the
political culture in which science is shaped and defined. In a neoliberal political culture that has
emphasized the value of developing new technologies for purposes of industrial competitiveness
and military prowess, and that has also deemphasized the need for environmental and other
regulations, the field of nanotechnology research has moved rapidly ahead toward applications
and commercial products. In contrast, research on possible EHS hazards, risks, and implications has tended to operate in a catch-up
mode. From the perspective of EROs, EHS research has been significantly underfunded, and regulatory policy needs to be more proactive and
precautionary until the EHS questions are more completely addressed
Threat construction is good --- psychological bias runs towards threat deflation
which internal link turns error replication and the cycle of violence
Schweller, 4 (Randall L., Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University,
“Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing,” International Security, Volume 29, Issue 2, pg. 159-201,
Project Muse)
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 overconfidence 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 naïveté associated with Munich and the
outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus,
the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] 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 overkill 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 thatnobody 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 [End
Page 199] 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 disagreement 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.
Only the plan’s technology solves
Soule, 95 (Professor of Environmental Studies Michael E., Professor and Chair of
Environmental Studies, UC-Santa Cruz, REINVITING NATURE? RESPONSES TO
POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION, Eds: Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease, p. 159-160)
Should We Actively Manage Wildlands and Wild Waters? The decision has already been made in most places. Some of the ecological myths
discussed here contain, either explicitly or implicitly, the idea that nature is self-regulating and capable of caring
for itself. This notion leads to the theory of management known as benign neglect – nature will do fine, thank
you, if human beings just leave it alone. Indeed, a century ago, a hands-off policy was the best
policy. Now it is not. Given nature's current fragmented and stressed condition, neglect will
result in an accelerating spiral of deterioration. Once people create large gaps in forests, isolate
and disturb habitats, pollute, overexploit, and introduce species from other continents, the viability of many
ecosystems and native species is compromised, resiliency dissipates, and diversity can collapse. When
artificial disturbance reaches a certain threshold, even small changes can produce large effects, and these will be compounded by climate change. For
example, a storm that would be considered normal and beneficial may, following widespread clearcutting, cause disastrous blow-downs, landslides, and
erosion. If global warming occurs, tropical storms are predicted to have greater force than now. Homeostasis,
balance, and Gaia are
dangerous models when applied at the wrong spatial and temporal scales. Even fifty years ago, neglect might
have been the best medicine, but that was a world with a lot more big, unhumanized, connected spaces, a world with one-third the number of people,
and a world largely unaffected by chain saws, bulldozers, pesticides, and exotic, weedy species. The
alternative to neglect is active
caring – in today`s parlance, an affirmative approach to wildlands: to maintain and restore them, to become
stewards, accepting all the domineering baggage that word carries. Until humans are able to control their numbers and their technologies,
management is the only viable alternative to massive attrition of living nature. But management
activities are variable in intensity, something that antimanagement purists ignore. In general, the greater the disturbance and the smaller the habitat
remnant, the more intense the management must be. So if we must manage, where do we look for ethical guidance?
Threat construction justifies endless warfare
Burke, 7 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales at
Sydney, Anthony, Johns Hopkins University Press, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and
Reason, Project Muse)
This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts
beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political
manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are
important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern
reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the
two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or
even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and
military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most
powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what
is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of
being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of
arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance
of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the
fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an
account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a
particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is
not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context
of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological
certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the
existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive
for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that
confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded
in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social
and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we
are witness to an epistemology of violence
(strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state). When we consider
their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination)
tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale
and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used
on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way
of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the
geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the
thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their
militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact
what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are
merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words
of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the
linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral
of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah
Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take
on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that
in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What
I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are
distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together,
continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic
roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of
predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them
into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more
totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between
The
epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims
positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use
force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the
ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique
quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of
insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are
known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential
predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of
epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action.
effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument
of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have
no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being;
epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose
obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet
in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was
quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate
the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he
remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that these dual
ontologies of war link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken
chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl
Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in
his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be
detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush
administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to
especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to
without interrogating more deeply how
dominant understandings of politics
and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made. The essay concludes by pondering a
normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and
instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out
every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be
disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However
they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our
found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up
the entire space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique
dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world
a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political.
Worst case thinking is counterproductive
Schneier, 10 (Bruce, internationally renowned security technologist and author, MA CS
American Univ, 3/13/10, http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/worstcase_thin.html)
There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it
involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It
substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters
powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable
to the effects of terrorism. Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several
reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By
speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen,
worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at
assessing outcomes. Second, it's based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a
proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible. Third, it can be
used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we don't build it, we will
run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we
don't, organs won’t arrive in time for transplant operations and people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons
he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death. Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that
we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is
hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and
annihilating the planet is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking. Fourth and finally, worst-
case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we
don't know -- and what we can imagine. Remember Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's quote? "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are
always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns;
that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." And
this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance
isn't a cause for doubt; when you can fill that
ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action. Even worse, it can lead to hasty and dangerous
acts. You can't wait for a smoking gun, so you act as if the gun is about to go off. Rather than
making us safer, worst-case thinking has the potential to cause dangerous escalation. The new
undercurrent in this is that our society no longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk
assessment is devalued. Probabilistic thinking is repudiated in favor of "possibilistic thinking":
Since we can't know what's likely to go wrong, let's speculate about what can possibly go wrong. Worst-case thinking leads to bad
decisions, bad systems design, and bad security. And we all have direct experience with its effects: airline security and the
TSA, which we make fun of when we're not appalled that they're harassing 93-year-old women or keeping first graders off airplanes. You can't be too
careful! Actually, you can. You can refuse to fly because of the possibility of plane crashes. You can lock your children in the house because of the
possibility of child predators. You can eschew all contact with people because of the possibility of hurt. Steven Hawking wants to avoid trying to
communicate with aliens because they might be hostile; does he want to turn off all the planet's television broadcasts because they're radiating into
space? It isn't hard to parody worst-case thinking, and at its extreme it's a psychological condition. Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University
of Kent, writes: "Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which the public, the government and
institutions should organize their life. It institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularizing the belief
that worst cases are normal, it incites people to feel defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats." Even worse, it plays directly into the
hands of terrorists, creating a population that is easily terrorized -- even by failed terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the
Times Square SUV bomber. When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst-case thinking
is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves. It isn't really a principle;
it's a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It
lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be cogent
arguments without understanding the whole issue.
Partial rejections don’t solve
Neocleous, 8 (Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy; Head of Department of
Politics & History Brunel Univ, “Critique of Security,” 185-6)
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 remoeves 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,"' 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."' 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 reaffirming 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.