***Oceans Neg
*Case*
Self-Criticism Bad
We agree that confession in the abstract are problematic – however coupling them with political strategies
prevents cooption and dismantles privilege.
Smith 13 (Andrea, intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist, Founder of INCITE - A National Activist Organization of
radical feminists of color, "The Problem with “Privilege”," http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-withprivilege-by-andrea-smith/)Si
In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the years, I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which
participants were asked to reflect on their gender/race/sexuality/class/etc. privilege. These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: “I
am so and so,
and I have x privilege.” It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions were. It was not as if other participants did not know the
confessor in question had her/his proclaimed privilege. It did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political projects
to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project
themselves. The benefits of these confessions seemed to be ephemeral. For the instant the confession took place, those who do not have that privilege in daily life
would have a temporary position of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and forgiveness. The sayer of the confession could
then be granted temporary forgiveness for her/his abuses of power and relief from white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt. Because of the
perceived benefits of this ritual, there was generally little critique of the fact that in the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of
domination it was supposed to resist. One of the reasons there was little critique of this practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to
be the “most oppressed.” Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently,
people aspired to be oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression
from which they suffered. “I may be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me to be oppressed
when we played together.” Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible.
These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building. And despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed
to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as
the occasion for self-reflexivity.
These rituals around self-reflexivity
in the academy and in activist circles
are not without merit . They
are informed by key insights into how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute who we are as
subjects. Political projects of transformation necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as
well . However, for this process to work, individual transformation must occur concurrently with social and political
transformation . That is, the undoing
themselves into a new subject position,
of
privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their privileges
or trying to think
but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that
enable these privileges . The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a
problem of individual prejudice. Rather, the
purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of
oppression. However, the response to structural racism became an individual one – individual confession at the expense of collective action. Thus the question
becomes, how would one collectivize individual transformation? Many organizing projects attempt and have attempted to do precisely this, such Sisters in Action for
Power, Sista II Sista, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse, among many others. Rather than focus simply on one’s individual
privilege, they address privilege on an organizational level. For instance, they might assess – is everyone who is invited to speak a college graduate? Are certain peoples
always in the limelight? Based on this assessment, they develop structures to address how privilege is exercised collectively. For instance, anytime a person with a college
degree is invited to speak, they bring with them a co-speaker who does not have that education level. They might develop mentoring and skills-sharing programs within
the group. To quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn, “ You
don’t think your way into a different way of acting; you act your
way into a different way of thinking .” Essentially, the current social structure conditions us to exercise what privileges we may have. If we want
to undermine those privileges, we must change the structures within which we live so that we become different
peoples in the process .
Critical Interrogation Bad
Discursive archeology re-entrenches domination- empirics prove
Hernando ‘13 [Dr. Almudena Hernando Gonzalo, Associate Professor at the Department of Prehistory of the Complutense
University of Madrid, her work focuses on archeological theory, “Change, individuality and reason, or how Archaeology has
legitimized a patriarchal modernity,”
http://www.academia.edu/3984983/Change_individuality_and_reason_or_how_archaeology_has_legitimized_a_patriarch
al_modernity._In_A._GonzalezRuibal_ed._Reclaiming_Archaeology._Beyond_the_tropes_of_Modernity._Routledge_London_pp._155-67._2013]
In terms of legitimation procedures, archaeology as a discourse was actually not much different from myth. Mythological
discourses project the group’s social order onto sacred levels of agency, and then turn this relation of analogy on its head, interpreting that the group’s survival as
the¶ elect ¶ , the¶ chosen ones¶ , is precisely confirmed and ¶ guaranteed by its resemblance to that supernatural sphere. In similar fashion modern
archaeology - influenced by positivist and evolutionist paradigms - constructs the past through a projection of those elements of present
day society it aims at legitimating: ignoring all other factors, the past is selectively scanned for evidence of change, power,
individuality, rationality or technology, and the obvious conclusion is then triumphantly established: our (western) culture has
developed all those characteristics far beyond and in advance of all others, which means it stands a far greater chance of
succeeding(surviving). This discursive operation was typical of historicist and processual archaeology: it was taken for granted that no other logic but our own could
preside any viable human interaction with the world. Consequently, the worldviews of present-days scholars were straightforwardly and unquestioningly projected onto
other times and cultures, churning out veritable exercises in ethnocentric evolutionism that demoted all human groups in previous ages (and by the same token, also
those societies with a similar level of technology in present times) to the status of mere precedents or harbingers of all that our own advanced, fully mature culture has
achieved (Trigger 1984; McNiven and Russell 2005; Hernando 2006). Although postprocessual archaeology rejected the ethnocentric bias, along with positivism and
evolutionism. the
deep structures underpinning the discourse of archaeology remained, however, unchanged in most cases: as a
discourse, it was now legitimating postmodernism’s ontology of the present, which was based on the transcendental
subject. Particular subjects and their differences became the aspect of the past to be scanned for (Hodder 2003: cap. 9), and individuality as a mode of personhood was
hypostatized into universality (Knapp and Meskell 1997; Knapp and VanDommelen 2008; Machin 2009). Unsatisfied with the modernist subject presented by archaeology,
some researchers shifted their attention to issues such as ‘things’ (Olsen2010), but many archaeologists (including historicist, processual and post-processual) kept
producing the same kind of narratives centred on change, conflict, power, individuality, personal subjectivity, technology or rationality.
Factors such as stability, recurrence, relational identity, bonding and emotion were deemed of secondary relevance or not
relevant at all. Thus even when the present-day bearers of these values were taken into account (such as women and indigenous peoples), and indeed postprocessual archaeologists were the first to pay attention to them, they were frequently pictured through the same modernist lens emphasizing
power, change and individuality (Montón-Subías and Sánchez-Romero, 2008; McNiven and Russell 2005; Atalay 2006;C. Gnecco and A. Haber, both in this
volume).
The aff’s critical interrogation method fails - we’ll re-embrace old methods
Calvert-Minor ’10 [Chris, PhD, Associate Professor of Philosophy¶ Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies¶ University
of Wisconsin-Whitewater, “Archeology and Humanism: An Incongruent Foucault,” June,
http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_7/calvert-minor_june2010.pdf]
To engage in the act of trying to imagine an unperceived object is ¶ already a failed attempt, for one cannot subtract oneself as a perceiver from the ¶ act. Foucault
theorizes that the epistemological position of the archaeologist is ¶ externally neutral to the discourses under study and that the
fruit of his labor is ¶ a pure description of the discursive rules of formation immanent to the texts. ¶ Foucault is asking us to believe that we can
accurately describe the conceptual ¶ framework of foreign concepts without the importation of our own concepts. ¶ In the spirit
of Berkeley, we should certainly ask: can the archaeologist subtract ¶ herself from her methodology to the extent that Foucault requires? The ¶ answer is ‘no’
because we have no recourse to archaeological theorizing ¶ without our own concepts; to avoid using our own concepts in
any analysis ¶ makes as little sense as trying to imagine an unperceived object. And this is a ¶ familiar point in post-positivist philosophy,
stating that all observation, theory formation, and interpretation do not occur in vacuums, but are thoroughly ¶ constituted by
our cognitive capacities and conceptual systems.20 In brief, the¶ normativity of our own concepts seeps into all “descriptive” projects – and this ¶ means
that no project is purely descriptive. Foucault inadvertently assents to ¶ projects of theorizing that are fundamentally inconceivable. His error is the ¶ failure to theorize
himself as the archaeologist adequately in his own poststructuralist methodology. ¶ Foucault’s mistake presents a substantial problem for him. Discussing ¶ the transition
between the Classical and Modern epistemes, Foucault makes the ¶ comment, “When discourse ceased to exist and function within representation ¶ as the first means of
ordering it, Classical thought ceased at the same time to ¶ be directly accessible to us.”21 This is a crucial statement Foucault needs to ¶ make to demarcate the Modern
from the Classical episteme, but it derails his ¶ archaeology. Classical thought is not directly accessible to us in the sense that ¶ it is set within an epistemological
infrastructure that is foreign to us. We, as ¶ Modern archaeologists standing outside that infrastructure, neither use nor ¶ “think” the same kinds of concepts as those
Classical texts we are studying.22¶ Therefore, we must use our own epistemological orderings and concepts to ¶ understand those foreign discursive practices because
there is no other ¶ recourse; the Modern archaeologist is wholly constituted as a knowing subject ¶ by the epistemological framework of the Modern episteme. Thus, to
reiterate, ¶ the discourses we analyze must be constituted by our Modern epistemic rules ¶ of formation. If this is what we must do, it is then strange that Foucault speaks
¶ of distinct foreign epistemes with altogether different rules of formation. This ¶ situation makes it hard even to refer meaningfully to this kind of utterly foreign ¶
episteme. As others have argued, if we conceive of “foreign” epistemes at all ¶ (or conceptual schemes as Donald Davidson writes), they cannot be absolutely ¶ foreign
because we have to locate them on a common coordinate axis in ¶ relation to our own episteme in order for us even to understand them.23 The ¶ presumptive nature of
rationality means that we must interpret other people¶ and other discourses as conceptually and rationally like ourselves; otherwise the ¶ other is not considered foreign
or irrational, but simply unintelligible. There ¶ would be a failure to understand the other, and worse, a failure to imagine what ¶ it would take to understand. Needless to
say, this contradicts Foucault’s ¶ archaeological presuppositions because he clearly believes that he can ¶ understand and classify the Classical episteme without importing
his own ¶ concepts and rationality. ¶ Foucault’s interpretive problem grows into two related difficulties. ¶ First, when the archaeologist is theorized adequately into her
own ¶ methodology, the archaeologist can no longer adopt a purely post-structuralist ¶ position on pains of inconsistency. Rather, she must admit to a level of ¶
humanismm. Since the
archaeologist identifies demarcations between ¶ epistemes and interprets epistemic discourses according to her taxonomic ¶ concepts, the
methodology she engages revolves around her consciousness, ¶ even as she maps discursive structures. This does not preclude
archaeological ¶ analysis in toto, but it does mean that one must be attuned to and account for ¶ how one shapes the employed
methodology. As it stands, however, Foucault’s ¶ post-structuralism is self-defeating if its humanisticm element goes ¶ unincorporated. ¶ The second difficulty is
closely related to the first regarding the truth ¶ and meaningfulness of archaeological analysis. For Foucault’s stated method ¶ to work, the archaeologist
must perform a double phenomenological ¶ bracketing of truth and meaning, both in her own episteme and the episteme ¶ she is describing,
so that she can study the epistemological conditions for truth ¶ and meaning in different epistemes without the interference of contaminating
¶ conceptions.24 Archaeological findings, then, have a paradoxical status. The ¶ archaeologist reveals these discoveries under the assumptions that
they ¶ accurately describe some characteristic about an episteme and that these ¶ discoveries are intelligible to us, whereas according to the constraints of double ¶
bracketing, these reports can neither be accurate nor intelligible since truth and ¶ meaning play no regulative role. One may retort that archaeological findings ¶ are
always relayed through the conditions of truth and meaning immanent to ¶ the episteme under study. Unfortunately, this response succumbs to the first ¶ difficulty noted
above where we cannot help but impute our notions of truth ¶ and meaning into the conceptual project of delineating the epistemic ¶ conditions for truth and meaning in
the other episteme. ¶ All of this suggests that Foucault is caught in the analytic of finitude he ¶ believes he safely avoids. Foucault reduces the human subject to an
epistemic ¶ node constituted by practices of truth and meaning made possible by the ¶ episteme; the episteme wholly constitutes the knowing, intelligible subject. ¶ This
explains for Foucault how the subject is not of her own making. She is an ¶ empirically finite subject derived from social, economic, historical, and ¶ epistemic
constitutional practices. At the same time, however, she is still the ¶ archaeologist who conceptualizes the analysis and theorizes the contours and ¶ limitations of the
episteme, thereby assuming the role of the transcendental ¶ observer who is able to bifurcate herself from the interpretive process. This ¶ situation echoes the
transcendental-empirical doublet that tenuously ¶ acknowledges that we are entirely empirical while also the infinite knowers who ¶ methodologically constitute the field
of experience and analysis. Thus, by ¶ Foucault’s own conclusions, his archaeological
project is unstable and in need ¶ of revision.
Other Fixation Turn
The affirmative's engagement with otherness occurs as a result of a process of fixation - the Western academic subject
maintains a libidinal investment in Otherness in order to sustain its privileged position.
BETANCOURT-SERRANO – 04
[Alex, Associate Professor of Political Theory at Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras,
http://www.lacan.com/gesture.htm]
This kind of liberal approach to disadvantaged members of society is the most progressive discourse that we get nowadays
in mainstream academia. When postcolonial theorists and historians acknowledge that in order for the voice of the other to
be heard it has to pass through the hegemonic discourse, this liberal discourse is the path that claims of justice and
recognition have to take. The problem is that although the expectation is that subaltern claims will point to the injustice of
the system and that 'subaltern history' will give them recognition, there is here a deeper fantastic logic (in the sense of
fantasy) operating here. A logic that the postcolonial position, which is presumably the most progressive when it comes to
the subjugation of the 'Other', misses. This fantasy binds, whether they intended it or not, the postcolonial project to
political liberalism. Let me resort to Freud to clarify my argument. I think we can all agree with Freud that as humans we are
all self-interpreting subjects, or at least have the capacity for it. But more importantly we are also historical subjects. This is
not to say of course that the approaches discussed here denied this, on the contrary they assume it wholeheartedly. Nor do
they deny that as historical subjects, we can look at ourselves and our place in history and interpret what is the significance
of our place and how we got there. Now, among many possible interpretations and self-understandings we must
acknowledge that the experience of the historically marginalized and politically excluded is a painful one. Such an
experience may be a traumatic historical experience. Moreover, in terms of one's subjective and historical positioning in
front of the place one is sited by a hegemonic narrative and the way one may see oneself can produce certain kinds of
attachments that impede seeing oneself in a historico-political alternative position. That is to say, a painful historical
experience and the possible attachments that such an experience may produce with its corollary socio-economic position
can produce a fundamental fantasy that ties one to an oppressive structure. Wendy Brown has called this logic "wounded
attachments".11 What I want to point out is that in relation to the current historico-political understandings and
approaches to the injustices committed against the 'Other', is that these approaches actually rely on the aforementioned
fantasy. Such fantastic structure helps to both: sustain the liberal position with its theoretical and political framework, and
secondly, such a stance ensures the reliability of the status quo. This (possibly unconscious) reliability gives the feeling that
things will be OK, and the 'other' will remain 'other' as long as nothing changes in any fundamental way. A Freudian
understanding of that fantastic tie, which creates a defensive structure in front of emancipation, not only sheds light
theoretically about the dependency on that structure, but more importantly, the psychoanalytic notion of 'working through'
can help to break one's entanglements with oppressive and unjust structures of power, and our ideological dependency to
existing social 'reality'. A personal anecdote might be of help to clarify my argument.
This turns the case – fixated desire for the Other keeps the Other in bondage - the affirmative's subject-position of
authority is confirmed by repression and prohibition.
Bhabha 94
[Homi K. Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University, Location of Culture, pg 74]
The place of the Other must not be imaged, as Fanon sometimes suggests, as a fixed phenomenological point opposed to
the self, that represents a culturally alien consciousness. The Other must be seen as the necessary negation of primordial
identity- cultural of physic- that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the cultural to be signified as a
linguistic, symbolic, historic reality. If, as I have suggested, the subject of desire is never simply a Myself, then the Other is
never simply an IT-Self, a front of identity, truth or misrecognition. As a principle of identification, the Other bestows a
degree of objectivity, but its representation – be it the social process of the Law or the psychic process of the Oedipus- is
always ambivalent, disclosing a lack. For instance, the common, conversational distinction between the letter and spirit of
the Law displays the otherness of Law itself; the ambiguous grey area between Justice and juridical procedure is, quite
literally, a conflict of judgment. In the language of psychoanalysis, the Law of the Father or the paternal metaphor cannot
be taken at its word. It is a process of substitution and exchange that inscribes a normative, normalizing place for the
subject; but that metaphotic access to identity is exactly the place of prohibition and repression, a conflict of authority.
Identification, as it is spoken in the desire of the Other, is always a question of interpretation, for it is the elusive assignation
of myself with a one-self, the elision of person and place.
*Framework*
1NC
A – Interpretation
Topical affirmatives must affirm the resolution through instrumental defense of action by the United
States Federal Government.
B – Definitions
Should denotes an expectation of enacting a plan
American Heritage Dictionary 2000 (Dictionary.com)
should. The will to do something or have something take place: I shall go out if I feel like it.
Federal government is the central government in Washington DC
Encarta Online 2005,
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_1741500781_6/United_States_(Government).html#howtocite
United States (Government), the combination of federal, state, and local laws, bodies, and agencies that is responsible for
carrying out the operations of the United States. The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington
DC.
Resolved implies a policy
Louisiana House 3-8-2005, http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm
Resolution A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations, stating policies, and making decisions where some other form is
not required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the term "resolved". Not subject to a time limit for introduction
nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House Rules 8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4)
.
C – Vote neg
1 – Predictability - The resolution proposes the question the negative is prepared to answer. Even if it
is good to talk about their 1AC, they must prove we could have logically anticipated it. This question
comes prior to the merits of the aff because it implicates our ability to debate.
Ruth Lessl Shively, Assoc Prof Polisci at Texas A&M, 2000 Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 181-2
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to—they must reject and limit—some ideas
and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of
rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is
necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the
end of contest—that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or
contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities
but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting
condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It
seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a
basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray
1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and
terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least,
we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it . For instance, one cannot have an argument
about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target
audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy
if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about
what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the
terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a
demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what
that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or
harmony.
Debate over a clear and specific controversial point of government action creates argumentative stasis – that’s a
prerequisite to the negative’s ability to engage in the conversation — that’s critical to deliberation
Steinberg 8, lecturer of communication studies – University of Miami, and Freeley, Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights
law, ‘8
(David L. and Austin J., Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making p. 45)
Debate is a means of settling differences , so there must be a
debate.
If everyone is in agreement
on a tact or value or policy, there
difference of opinion or a
conflict of interest
before there can be a
is no need for debate : the matter can be settled by
unanimous consent . Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four,"
because there is simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of
ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate . In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions
without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered . For example, general argument may occur about the
broad topic of illegal immigration . How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and
immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do
they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal
immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our
country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk
due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and
philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should
we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!,
or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be
addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be
emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and
identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy . To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated
clearly . Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions , frustration, and emotional distress, as
evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer
of 2007 . Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised
youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject
areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might
arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups
of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations , anger, disillusionment, and
emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions , they could easily agree about the sorry state of
education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow . But if a precise
question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up
simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form
of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the
federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher
program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They
provide specific policies to
be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates
effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision
to be made,
the basis for argument should be clearly
defined . If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an
interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the
pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation . If we take this statement
to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or
physical force for a specific purpose. Although we
now have a general subject , we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad , too loosely
worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website
development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords,
bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of
our support in a certain crisis?" The
basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition
such as "Resolved: That the United States
should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution.
This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation
of the controversy by advocates, or
that good
debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy ; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very
engaging . The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of
difference , which will be outlined in the following discussion.
2 - government knowledge – learning about the nuts and bolts of policy are necessary to create political change
Zwarensteyn 12, Ellen, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of
Masters of Science, “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning,” August,
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=theses
The first trend to emerge concerns how debate
fosters in-depth political knowledge. Immediately, every resolution calls for analysis of
United States federal government action. Given that each debater may debate in over a hundred different unique rounds, there is a competitive
incentive thoroughly research as many credible, viable, and in-depth strategies as possible. Moreover, the requirement to
debate both affirmative and negative sides of the topic injects a creative necessity to defend viable arguments from a multitude of
perspectives. As a result, the depth of knowledge spans questions not only of what, if anything, should be done in response to a policy question,
but also questions of who, when, where, and why. This opens the door to evaluating intricacies of government branch,
committee, agency, and even specific persons who may yield different cost-benefit outcomes to conducting policy action. Consider the following
responses: I think debate helped me understand how Congress works and policies actually happen which is different than what government classes teach you. Process
counterplans are huge - reading and understanding how delegation works means you understand that it is not just congress passes a bill and the president signs. You
understand that policies can happen in different methods. Executive orders, congress, and courts counterplans have all
helped me understand that policies don’t just happen the way we learn in government. There are huge chunks of
processes that you don't learn about in government that you do learn about in debate. Similarly, Debate has certainly aided [my
political knowledge]. The nature of policy-making requires you to be knowledgeable of the political process because process does effect
the outcome. Solvency questions, agent counterplans, and politics are tied to process questions. When addressing the overall higher level of
awareness of agency interaction and ability to identify pros and cons of various committee, agency, or branch activity, most respondents traced this knowledge to the
politics research spanning from their affirmative cases, solvency debates, counterplan ideas, and political disadvantages. One of the recurring topics concerns
congressional vs. executive vs. court action and how all of that works. To be good at debate you really do need to have a good grasp of that. There is really something to
be said for high school debate - because without debate I wouldn’t have gone to the library to read a book about how the Supreme Court works, read it, and be interested
in it. Maybe I would’ve been a lawyer anyway and I would’ve learned some of that but I can’t imagine at 16 or 17 I would’ve had that desire and have gone to the law
library at a local campus to track down a law review that might be important for a case. That aspect of debate in unparalleled - the competitive drive pushes you to find
new materials. Similarly, I think [my political
knowledge] comes from the politics research that we have to do. You read a lot of names
name-dropped in articles. You know who has influence in different parts of congress. You know how different leaders would feel
about different policies and how much clout they have. This comes from links and internal links. Overall, competitive debaters must
have a depth of political knowledge on hand to respond to and formulate numerous arguments. It appears debaters then
internalize both the information itself and the motivation to learn more . This aids the PEP value of intellectual pluralism as
debaters seek not only an oversimplified ‘both’ sides of an issue, but multiple angles of many arguments. Debaters uniquely approach arguments from
a multitude of perspectives – often challenging traditional conventions of argument. With knowledge of multiple perspectives, debaters often
acknowledge their relative dismay with television news and traditional outlets of news media as superficial outlets for
information.
A focus on policy is necessary to learn the pragmatic details of powerful institutions – acting without
this knowledge is doomed to fail in the face of policy pros who know what they’re talking about
McClean, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Molloy College in New York, ‘1 (David E., “The Cultural Left and the Limits of
Social
Hope”,
Conference
of
the
Society
for
the
Advancement
of
American
Philosophy,
http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/)
Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may reasonably be described as a very long and eccentric footnote to Nietzsche (I have once been
accused, by a Foucaltian true believer, of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks). Foucault, who has provided the Left of the late 1960s through the present with
such notions as "governmentality," "Limit," "archeology," "discourse" "power" and "ethics," creating or redefining their meanings, has made it
overabundantly clear that all of our moralities and practices are the successors of previous ones which derive from certain configurations of savoir and connaisance arising
I have not yet found in anything Foucault wrote or said how such
observations may be translated into a political movement or hammered into a political document or theory (let alone public
policies) that can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary aesthetic experimentalism. In fact, Foucault would have shuddered if
from or created by, respectively, the discourses of the various scientific schools. But
any one ever did, since he thought that anything as grand as a movement went far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly rehabilitate Habermas, for
at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the
abstractions of various Marxian-Freudian social critiques. Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is
long overdue, leftist critics
continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and
a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts
to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed,
national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who
actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my
own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multisyllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions
about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described,
if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children
safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or
she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to
philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and
adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical
hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing
a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness
America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left
is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture
critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything
like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this
country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents
to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and
political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the
Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain.
country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the
American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single
yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able
to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to
the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We
who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our
ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past
high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our
flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to
Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as
but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and
doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity
as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This
means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian
social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and
bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives,
and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world
before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy
pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they
proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture
critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
Specifically, debates about the policy implications of climate change and environmental policy are
necessary to confront social injustices that prioritize rich, Western countries over disadvantaged ones
–turns the case
Barker et al in 8 <Barker, Terry; Scrieciu, Serban; Taylor, David. “Climate Change, Social Justice and Development”
Development, suppl. Climate Justice and Development 51.3 (Sep 2008): 317-324. Proquest>
Moral philosophers have long debated the relative weighting to be given to the well-being of social groups living at
different times. The Stern Review commissioned a review of the ethics of climate change from Broome (2006), who had written earlier on the issue (1992). He
argues that economics is not ethics-free, that basing economics on the ethics of individuals assumed to be entirely selfinterested can go badly wrong, and that 'willingness to pay' is invalid as a means of valuation (Broome, forthcoming). This directly
contradicts the analysis of Pearce et al. (1996: 196-197), when they contrast prescriptive with descriptive valuations of human life. In considering the ethics of climate
change, Broome positions justice centre stage, arguing that those who cause climate change should desist from doing so because it is unjust, and if they think that they
cannot desist, then they should compensate those who suffer.¶ Justice has
always attracted as much serious attention as utility in the
theory of ethics. Rawls (1971) deserves serious attention in the debate on climate-change analysis, although he does not discuss such change in itself. Let us adapt
his theory to this issue. Consider two population groups: a well-off urban majority, burning fossil fuels, and a subsistence rural
minority, in danger of losing access to food and water if the climate changes. Assume that the rural minority do not share
in average global growth; they can be said, in Rawls' words, to be the 'least advantaged group'. In his concept of a better
society, the standard of living of the most advantaged would be justified only if their privileges maximized the welfare
of the least advantaged group , for example through the general economic effect of incentives. Let us assume that society is not
influenced by such a Rawlsian concept of justice - perhaps it is dominated by neo-classical economists. We are then left with a triple injustice in the scenario described:¶
The rural minority have not been responsible for the greenhouse gas concentrations causing climate change, and nor
have they benefited from the comfort and power provided by the fossil energy services.¶ The rural minority will suffer the
most from climate change because of droughts and floods, and cannot buy their way out of the problem.¶ When
traditional approaches to climate policy ignore the distributional aspect of the harm caused, global consumption affected
by the harm (including mortality) is discounted by an average figure dominated by the well-off majority's income growth, so the
minority's future subsistence income counts for less in the traditional cost-benefit analysis informing global climatechange policy.¶ Since global inequalities over the last century have been increasing (Maddison, 2001) and a subsistence minority of
countries (and social groups within countries) may continue into the far future, these assumptions may be more realistic than those of the traditional model. Rawlsian
ethics would focus social policy on preventing the climate change and caring for the subsistence minority in this scenario,
instead of the traditional policies, which would have almost the opposite effect.¶ The limits to utilitarianism¶ Broome (2006) also
considers expected-utility theory alongside justice as a guide to social policy. Importantly, he distinguishes 'value' from 'utility' and allows for intrinsic value in human life
and in nature. He considers the debased version of utilitarianism applied to climate change, arguing first, that lives should not be valued by the method of willingness-topay, which makes the value of people's lives depend on how much they can afford to spend on prolonging it, and second, that future lives should not be discounted in
value relative to present lives of similar quality. 5¶ The argument that because people in the future are expected to be better off in real money terms, so that we can then
ascribe to their lives or their health a discounted monetary value, runs into serious logical and moral problems, which are not solved by recourse to the term 'statistical
lives'. Those who rely on the market to provide an estimate of the social discount rate are assuming that the relevant preferences are fixed, but their procedure is not
empirically valid and short-circuits the political process, in which for example elected politicians try to lead and change preferences. They are also assuming that the
preferences take a particular form, in which no ethical preferences are allowed, although in fact people might prefer that natural resources be preserved as a matter of
principle, even though they attach no utility to these resources in themselves. Finally, they are assuming that natural and man-made assets can be substituted for each
other, that is, that they all have monetary values and can therefore be exchanged. Irreversible changes, for example a warming of the oceans leading to loss of coral reefs
for the indefinite future, mean that such monetary exchanges are impossible.¶ There are ethical, aesthetic and other values, and it seems that all forms of life should not
be simply converted into money, with the exchangeability that money permits (Ackerman and Heinzerling, 2004; Gowdy, 2005). The use of the discount rate to account
for time preference and risk should be re-thought to allow for subjective time preference and a risk analysis independent of the return (Price, 2005). The distribution of
rights consistent with sustainable development should be considered (Padilla, 2004). The anti-utilitarian moral philosopher Bernard Williams has criticized the
reductionism of 'utilitarian thought' and 'the device of regarding all interests, ideas, aspirations and desires as on the same level, and all representable as preferences of
different degrees of intensity, perhaps, but otherwise to be treated alike' (Williams, 1985: 86). He does not believe that someone's immediate gratification is to be given
the same weight as that same person's life plan and hopes for his children, although traditional economists, with a reverence for market-driven consumerism, may see
Williams' attitude as typical paternalism.¶ Policy implications¶ Social
choice regarding climate policy involves social groups, that is,
'stakeholders', such as government, industry, NGOs, civil society and political parties, in a process of consensus (Ostrom,
1990). But it also requires information and the force of law (Heinzerling and Ackerman, 2007). A real choice requires the equal and simultaneous
presentation of feasible alternatives. When a policy is the subject of political debate and possible implementation by
government, policy advisors consider the benefit that such implementation would produce in each of various mutually
exclusive possible futures that might follow it, the good being considered for each group affected over space and time.¶
The process of developing such information for the global community for climate change has been impressive but erratic and controversial. The approach to establishing
at least the information base to develop international climate policy is embodied by the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the IPCC.
These bodies have arisen out of the international political process, and in their nature they are in keeping with the need for decentralized and varied political structures.
This process has brought questions of equity to the fore as witnessed by the crisis in the IPCC's adoption of the Second Assessment Report in 1995, which brought out the
neo-classical economists' insistence on valuing human life on an insurance basis. The use of values of 'statistical lives' came into conflict with a perception that human life
at present and in the future should be valued equally, irrespective of income or circumstance, for the purpose of agreeing international policy. The governments of the
developing countries arguing their case for equality prevailed over the expert economists advising them. It is perfectly feasible that a consensus approach in international
negotiation can help to establish social values in difficult and controversial areas, such as abatement of climate change, where the interests of future generations are to be
taken into account. For example, the IPCC's summaries for policymakers are agreed by all governments explicitly at international meetings. Nevertheless, a
consensus
approach needs to be reached not only through negotiations at the government level but also through an iterative
process of discussions and feedbacks between civil society representatives and policymakers to ensure that the concerns
of the wider society regarding the climate problem are adequately factored in. The increasing importance of 'side events' at UNFCCC
meetings represents progress in this direction.¶ Social justice, ethics and care for current and future generations represent
fundamental values that need to be fully accounted for when dealing with the climate change problem and formulating
mitigation and adaptation policies and measures. Addressing the climate change challenge , not only efficiently in an
economic sense but also in an environmentally effective and socially equitable manner, may provide a crucial impetus
for solving deep development inequities and imbalances . New economic thinking, allowing for induced technological change and
observed market conditions (under-utilized resources, lack of information, barriers to action and institutional inertia), holds out the prospect of replacing
growth strategies at odds with finite world resources with negotiated international actions recognizing the need for
justice in social development and human well-being.
3 – Switch Side Debate - Switch side policy debates empirically promotes critical thinking and greater knowledge on social
issues
Keller, et. al, 01 – Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago
(Thomas E., James K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago, professor of Social
Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, “Student debates in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and
knowledge through active learning,” Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001, EBSCOhost)
Discussion ¶ The results of the surveys suggest that debates
have value as an active learning strategy to enhance student learning. On survey
questions and in written comments, students expressed satisfaction with the debates. The majority of students were pleased with the debates as a class
assignment. Most indicated that participation in the debates raised the level of their policy skills and knowledge. In addition, the educational
value of debates was rated as higher than more traditional assignments. It should be noted, however, that a desire to report favorably on class experiences may have
influenced reported satisfaction with the debates (i.e., acquiescence bias). ¶ Student comments supported the view that
debates promote critical thinking
by encouraging serious consideration of both sides of a policy issue. Comments also indicated that the active learning approach had generated
more classroom interest and energy than usual. On the other hand, some comments noted how the debates might have detracted from a positive learning experience. ¶
All four hypotheses regarding changes in student-rated knowledge were supported by the analysis. Students
reported statistically significant increases
in knowledge on topics covered during the course--a result which is reassuring for the instructors. Gains in self-reported knowledge from simply
observing debates were equivalent to gains based on traditional forms of instruction. Observing a debate appears comparable to acquiring information through a class
lecture or discussion. By contrast, debate
participation generated significantly greater increases in self-reported knowledge than
were obtained by observing debates or by learning through traditional forms of instruction. This result, which is consistent with the
principles of experiential learning, suggests the educational advantage of using debates to engage students in learning. ¶ The findings are
noteworthy considering the use of conservative nonparametric statistics on a small sample. However, the results should be interpreted somewhat cautiously due to
certain study limitations. First, the dependent variable was self-reported and highly subjective in nature. The study did not contain objective measures of knowledge, and
the findings pertain only to students' self-perceptions of their knowledge regarding particular topics. Second, although attrition from pretest to posttest was not
associated with the pretest measures, differential attrition related to unmeasured factors, including objective knowledge of the topics, is a potential source of bias. Third,
the assumption of independence among cases may be questionable given that students worked closely as members of debate teams. Finally, other plausible explanations
for the general increase in knowledge over time, besides taking the class, cannot be ruled out. Nevertheless, the differential improvement in self-rated knowledge in favor
of debaters would still be a credible finding, and this was a main objective of the analysis. ¶ Conclusion ¶ The purposes of this article were to examine the potential of
student debates for fostering the development of policy practice knowledge and skills, to demonstrate that debates can be effectively incorporated as an in-class
assignment in a policy course, and to report findings on the educational value and level of student satisfaction with debates. Based on a review of the literature, the
authors' experience conducting debates in a course, and the subsequent evaluation of those debates, the authors believe the development of policy practice skills and the
acquisition of substantive knowledge can be advanced through structured student debates in policy-oriented courses. The authors think debates
on important
policy questions have numerous benefits: prompting students to deal with values and assumptions, encouraging them to
investigate and analyze competing alternatives, compelling them to advocate a particular position, and motivating them to
articulate a point of view in a persuasive manner. We think engaging in these analytic and persuasive activities promotes
greater knowledge by stimulating active participation in the learning process. ¶ However, the use of debates in a classroom setting is not
without certain drawbacks. Schroeder and Ebert (1983) noted several limitations which were also encountered in this experience. First, staging debates presents logistical
challenges for the instructor. These administrative concerns include creating teams, selecting topics, determining the debate format, and scheduling. Second, the amount
of time devoted to the specific topic of a debate can detract from covering a wider scope of course material. Third, although debating encourages the examination of
issues from two opposing positions, many policy dilemmas can be approached from several angles. A structured debate does not necessarily foster a multidimensional
examination of policy options. Fourth, as in most group projects, some debate team members may have contributed more to the effort than others. Finally, the
competitive aspects of debating may polarize the issue. ¶ For those interested in using debates as an instructional technique, the importance of thorough advance
planning with respect to the mechanics of conducting the debates must be stressed. Flexibility to make adjustments during the process is equally important. Special
attention should be given to debriefing sessions after debates to discuss perceptions of the debate experience, areas of common agreement, and possibilities for policy
compromise and consensus. The integration of opposing views into a coherent and purposeful course of action is a central feature of the theoretical framework presented
earlier, and students expressed a need for more resolution and closure. For example, one student suggested, "I think it would be more effective to do an active
brainstorming/planning session for identifying solutions/alternatives following the debates." ¶ The final word on debates should come from students themselves. In the
debriefing session immediately following
a debate, one student stated, "I thought the debate was good because it forced me to
articulate the position, and that is something we will need to do to be advocates." Another student described how her opinion of debating
changed, "When I first heard about this assignment, I really questioned its value. I thought it would be a waste of class time. But I learned so much about family
preservation services. I learned more than I ever would have any other way."
External contestation of our personal convictions is critical to ethical decision making – our blindspots about the limits of
our knowledge must be tested in order for debate to produce ethical subjects – the aff results in dogmatism
Button, 2011 (Oct 5, Mark E., associate professor of political science at the University of Utah, “Accounting for Blind Spots: From
Oedipus to Democratic Epistemology,” p.3-5)
A moral blind spot refers to the ineluctable limitations and partialities that are folded into our moral knowledge or beliefs, and
therewith, the judgments and actions that human beings make on the basis of that knowledge or belief. A moral blind spot
designates the boundaries of moral identity and the limits of human knowing and judging, a limit (of practical reason and moral
sentiment) that can be intuited or postulated by moral and political theory, but one whose full dimensions—its span and depth—are
not available to our selfconscious perception or articulation, except perhaps a posteriori, Oedipuslike. The problem to which a moral blind
spot refers overlaps with but is not identical to substantive moral or political ignorance. Substantive ignorance is a matter
about which moral agents are, by and large, capable of self-conscious discernment and critical awareness; we can know and
readily admit to the fact that there are numerous branches of knowledge about which we know that we do not presently
know, or about which we know that we lack epistemic or practical competence relative to others. Unless we are acting in bad faith or vainly putting on airs from any one
of a number of ulterior motives, a certain robust sense of epistemic–cognitive limitation is within most people’s self-conscious reach.
By contrast, a blind spot is a feature of our moral perception, of ourselves and others, about which we are largely unaware. The
social environments and the moral and linguistic traditions in accordance with which we judge and make meaning of the
world; the economic, social, and racial or gendered privileges about which individuals are not always consciously aware;
the self- and group biases that personal introspection do not fully disclose; the partialities, commitments, and
attachments that define the contours of our everyday lives as culturally situated moral subjects with an identity: all of
these, and more, are the sources of our potential moral blind spots. Since we have diverse motives (both conscious and unconscious) for affirming
and extending the elements of this list, individuals and groups also have strong incentives to keep blind spots in place and to avoid or
resist a moral and political consideration of their operation and effects on others. The solidity of identity is served by the
construction of cultural difference,5 but this sense of solidity is also protected (and partially grounded) in accordance with that
which the subject does not (or will not) “see” or feel. As the above list already indicates, to speak of moral blind spots is to address a
basic sociocultural and linguistic condition of human being, but it is also a tragic condition of human existence. Blind spots define us
both individually and socially and thus have a powerful influence on judgment and agency, but they also mark our
(unselfconscious) moral limitations, for they exist at the periphery of our perception of what objects and relations have
moral value for us by virtue of the kind of social and linguistic beings that we are and thus mark the limits of our moral
sympathies. Consider the following example drawn from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. An economically impoverished person, according to Smith, “feels
that [his poverty] places him out of the sight of mankind,” or if other members of society “take any notice of him, they have scarce any fellow-felling with the misery and
distress which he suffers.”6 And, Smith continues, as “obscurity covers us from the daylight of honor and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily
damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature.” In this example, Smith illuminates a blind spot in the dominant pattern of
moral beliefs and affective sentiments among the members of a modern commercial middle class. As Smith explores the full consequences of a distribution of moral
sentiments that follows from a condition in which “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers of wealth and greatness,” he highlights the most visible
hidden ethical costs (the corruption of moral sympathies for shared humanity) that attend these
particular blind spots in perception and moral valuation.7 In accordance with this way of thinking about them, moral blind spots are socially and
advancements (economic growth), and the largely
culturally variable; different subjects or questions will cross into the domain of ethical and political consideration at different stages in the life of a political society or social
group, and, largely as
a consequence of this broader sociocultural variation, moral blind spots are also subject to modification in
the temporal span of an individual subject or group. Significantly, moral blind spots are historically contingent, and while they
are recalcitrant, they are not incorrigible (a point to which I will return). The central point to make in regard to the first-order level of experience with moral
identity and agency is that blind spots attend and facilitate judgment and action in the way that all forms of partiality and moral
identity do by filtering the phenomenal world so as to navigate within its complexities. Yet the constitutive occlusions
embedded within moral perception also shape judgment and action in ways that can subvert both individual and
collective well-being.
Surely one of the most illuminating instances of this problematic condition is provided by the example of Oedipus. In turning to Sophocles’
Oedipus Tyrannus, we can also introduce the significance that second-order moral blindness has for the life of an individual and a political society.
2NC Ext – State Key/Good
Even if engaging in the state isn’t perfect it is necessary – withdrawing from institutions allows right wing hawks to take
over – the only way to prevent social injustices is by engaging with the institutions that cause or control them in the first
place
Mouffe 2009 (Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the
State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)
is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for the development of a non-state public
see forms of traditional representative
politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid
of them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there
sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics. They
must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier,
sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the
evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form
of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This
was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not
representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because
the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be
conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are nonrepresentative, are needed. They
advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of
radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often characterised by a
feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem . Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the
way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand
mood, a sense and a
the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined
in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have
contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that,
by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of
capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the
creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they
deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to
institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’,
‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being
challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the
plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on).
Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have
influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever
present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in
a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension
when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at
work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the
work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists
manage to use the
demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the
post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to
refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the antihierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the
disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of
the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism
to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what
Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands
which challenge the hegemonic
order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their
subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can
understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy . We did
not witness a revolution , in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It
is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical
politics is not about withdrawing
completely from
existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage
with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them . This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do
not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the
door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples
of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the
state . The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between
the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the
state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room
for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If
my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged
the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that
heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As
far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic
struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A
successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through
which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to
being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms .
A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can
never be merely oppositiona l or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may
reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages
between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that
will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather
than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why
they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the
determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a
natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided
by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic
practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called
an ‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different
groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come
together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In
these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general
terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question – the
specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of
political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create
the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as
engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a
range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions,
for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often
institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics.
Policy simulation key to creativity and decisionmaking—the detachment and disembodiment the aff criticizes are
necessary skills to create meaningful change outside of the debate space
Eijkman 12 <The role of simulations in the authentic learning for national security policy development: Implications for Practice / Dr. Henk Simon Eijkman. [electronic
resource] http://nsc.anu.edu.au/test/documents/Sims_in_authentic_learning_report.pdf. Dr Henk Eijkman is currently an independent consultant as well as visiting fellow
at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy and is Visiting Professor of Academic Development, Annasaheb Dange College of
Engineering and Technology in India. As a sociologist he developed an active interest in tertiary learning and teaching with a focus on socially inclusive innovation and
culture change. He has taught at various institutions in the social sciences and his work as an adult learning specialist has taken him to South Africa, Malaysia, Palestine,
and India. He publishes widely in international journals, serves on Conference Committees and editorial boards of edited books and international journal
Policy simulations stimulate Creativity Participation
in policy games
has proved
to be a highly effective way of developing new
combinations of experience and creativity, which is precisely what innovation requires (Geurts et al. 2007: 548). Gaming, whether
in analog or digital mode, has the power to stimulate creativity, and is one of the most engaging and liberating ways for making group work productive, challenging
and enjoyable. Geurts et al. (2007) cite one instance where, in a National Health Care policy change environment, ‘the many parties involved accepted the
invitation to participate in what was a revolutionary and politically very sensitive experiment precisely because it was a
game’ (Geurts et al. 2007: 547). Data from other policy simulations also indicate the uncovering of issues of which participants
were not aware, the emergence of new ideas not anticipated, and a perception that policy simulations are also an enjoyable way to
formulate strategy (Geurts et al. 2007). Gaming puts the players in an ‘experiential learning’ situation, where they discover a concrete,
realistic and complex initial situation, and the gaming process of going through multiple learning cycles helps them work through the situation as it unfolds. Policy
gaming stimulates ‘learning how to learn’, as in a game, and learning by doing alternates with reflection and discussion.
The progression through learning cycles can also be much faster than in real-life (Geurts et al. 2007: 548). The bottom line is that
problem solving in policy development processes requires creative experimentation. This cannot be primarily taught via ‘camp-fire’ story telling learning mode but
demands hands-on ‘veld learning’ that allow for safe creative and productive experimentation. This
(De Geus, 1997; Ringland, 2006). In simulations
is exactly what good policy simulations provide
participants cannot view issues solely from either their own perspective or that of one
dominant stakeholder (Geurts et al. 2007). Policy simulations enable the seeking of Consensus Games are popular because historically people seek and enjoy the
tension of competition, positive rivalry and the procedural justice of impartiality in safe and regulated environments. As in games, simulations temporarily
remove the participants from their daily routines, political pressures, and the restrictions of real-life protocols. In consensus
building, participants engage in extensive debate and need to act on a shared set of meanings and beliefs to guide the policy process in the
desired direction
State is inevitable and best agent of change – engagement is key
Rorty 98 - (Richard, Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford, Achieving Our Country)
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the
government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of
selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are
now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are
likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that “the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism,” but it remains the entity which makes decisions about social
benefits, and thus about social justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx’s philosophy of history,
for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking
advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to
Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract
abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people
outside the academy – and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control
of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will
require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard’s account of America as Disneyland – as a country of simulacra—and and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real
country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would
undergo is the shedding of its semi-conscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This
and
do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list – endlessly reprinted and
debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals’ toilets – might revitalize leftist
politics.
Alternatives fail and recreate violent exclusion
Englhart 03 - Neil A., Assistant Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, (“In Defense of State Building: States, Rights, and Justice,” Dissent, Fall,
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite, p. 18)
State failure has become an increasingly important policy concern since 9/11. Strengthening or reconstructing failed states has even become an explicit goal of
American foreign policy. Yet many Americans across the political spectrum regard states with deep suspicion and abiding hostility, as instruments of oppression. In
truth, states are more likely to protect human rights than any other form of political organization. Acknowledging that potential is today
a moral and political imperative. The evil that states do is well known. There are abundant examples: from the brutality of the Thirty Years War to the
Stalinist purges, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and the Rwandan genocide. Because its repressive capacities are so clear, political theorists seek to protect us from
the state (Locke), to divide and limit its power (Madison), to liberate us from it (Marx), or to dissolve it entirely (Foucault). Yet Hobbes’s picture of life
without the state— poor, nasty, brutish, and short—still resonates. States can only be called oppressive if there is an alternative
available, a more promising political order. States dominate our minds as much as they dominate the globe. The conceptual hegemony of the state is so
great that there has been little serious thinking about alternative arrangements. Anarchist visions may sound liberating, but only because they
assume that life under anarchy would be much like it is now—only better. In fact, anarchists depend on the very order they seek to abolish, assuming
that people will be treated as free and equal, able to make uncoerced choices outside the protection of the state. Their utopian visions set the parameters of
critiques of the state, but they seldom recognize that the necessary substructure of their utopia doesn’t exist “nowhere”— it exists only
where states have established law and order. In real life, the alternatives to the state are more violent, more coercive social and
political orders dominated by warlords and gangs. Not quite the Hobbesian war of all against all, they are rather wars of group against
group, dividing society and destroying the possibility of a peaceful public sphere, of civil society, rights, and social justice. The
corollary to the oppressiveness of non-state politics is that, contrary to our commonsense understanding, states are relatively liberating and
egalitarian. Compared to actually existing alternatives, states have more potential for protecting human rights, human security, and
international peace than any other political order . That’s why state building is so important.
--Turns the Case
Confronting social apathy about global warming is necessary to create policy change – global warming
is the root cause of the tsunamis the aff problematizes
Meares in 9 <Richard. “Global warming may bring tsunami and quakes: scientists” September 16, 2009.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/16/us-climate-geology-idUSTRE58F62I20090916>
Quakes, volcanic eruptions, giant landslides and tsunamis may become more frequent as global warming changes the
earth's crust, scientists said on Wednesday.¶ Climate-linked geological changes may also trigger "methane burps," the
release of a potent greenhouse gas, currently stored in solid form under melting permafrost and the seabed, in quantities
greater than all the carbon dioxide (CO2) in our air today.¶ "Climate change doesn't just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth's crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system,"
Professor Bill McGuire of University College London told Reuters, at the first major conference of scientists researching the changing climate's effects on geological hazards.¶ "In the political community people are
almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change."¶ The vulcanologists, seismologists, glaciologists, climatologists and landslide experts at the meeting have
looked to the past to try to predict future changes, particularly to climate upheaval at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago.¶ "When the ice is lost, the earth's crust bounces back up
again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis ," said McGuire, who organized the three-day
conference.¶ David Pyle of Oxford University said small changes in the mass of the earth's surface seems to affect volcanic activity in general, not just in places where ice receded after a cold spell. Weather patterns also seem to affect volcanic activity - not just the other
way round, he told the conference.¶ LONDON'S ASIAN SUNSET¶ Behind him was a slide of a dazzlingly bright orange painting, "London sunset after Krakatau, 1883" - referring to a huge Asian volcanic eruption whose effects were seen and felt around the world. ¶
Volcanoes can spew vast amounts of ash, sulphur, carbon dioxide and water into the upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and sometimes cooling the earth for a couple of years. But too many eruptions, too close together, may have the opposite effect and quicken global
warming, said U.S. vulcanologist Peter Ward.¶ "Prior to man, the most abrupt climate change was initiated by volcanoes, but now man has taken over. Understanding why and how volcanoes did it will help man figure out what to do," he said. ¶ Speakers were careful to
point out that many findings still amounted only to hypotheses, but said evidence appeared to be mounting that the world could be in for shocks on a vast scale.¶ Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California warned of the vast power of recently discovered
"Our experiments
show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar
magnitude," said Song.¶ "Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are
"glacial earthquakes" -- in which glacial ice mass crashes downwards like an enormous landslide. ¶ In the West Antarctic, ice piled more than one mile above sea level is being undermined in places by water seeping in underneath.¶
particularly at risk."¶ He said ice sheets appeared to be disintegrating much more rapidly than thought and said glacial
earthquake tsunamis were "low-probability but high-risk."¶ McGuire said the possible geological hazards were alarming enough, but just one small part of a scary picture if man-made CO2 emissions
were not stabilized within around the next five years.¶ "Added to all the rest of the mayhem and chaos, these things would just be the icing on the
cake," he said. "Things would be so bad that the odd tsunami or eruption won't make much difference."
2NC Ext – Stasis Good
Resolutional debate around a clear and specific controversial point of government action is key to creating
argumentative stasis – that’s key to equitable debate where each team can come to the table prepared
Zwarensteyn 12, Ellen, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of
Masters of Science, “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning,” August,
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=theses
Galloway (2007) also advances an argument concerning the privileging of the resolution as a basis for debating. Galloway (2007) cites three pedagogical advantages to seeing
the resolution and the first affirmative constructive as an invitation to dialogue. “First,
all teams have equal access to the resolution. Second, teams
spend the entire year preparing approaches for and against the resolution. Finally, the resolution represents a community
consensus of worthwhile and equitably debatable topics rooted in a collective history and experience of debate” (p. 13). An
important starting point for conversation, the resolution helps frame political conversations humanely . It preserves basic
means for equality of access to base research and argumentation. Having a year-long stable resolution invites depth of
argument and continuously rewards adaptive research once various topics have surfaced through practice or at debate
tournaments.
The aff assumes that limits are some infinite capacity to do whatever you want- this radical liberalism
turns into the domination of the weak by the strong and is the same logic as Bush exceptionalism and
Tea Partiers- freedom should be bounded by the limits of responsibility within a community- your
responsibility in this case is to answer the question of the resolution affirmatively so that we can have
a productive discussion
Anthony Burke- School of Politics and International Relations, The University of New South Wales- 2005, Freedom’s Freedom:
American Enlightenment and Permanent War, Social Identities Vol. 11, No. 4, July 2005, pp. 315/343,
http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/256400_915549761_727339818.pdf
Freedom can no longer be thought of as a thing, a possession, an infinite capacity to will, make, use, decide. It must be a
freedom that is aware of ethical, social, and physical limits , because without them it is not freedom but domination. These
limits cannot, as in the classical social contract theory, be supplied by the new physical and ontological power of the state , as an exchange of freedom for security—that gesture is precisely what
simultaneously subordinated men to the state and generated reason of state’s belief in its unbounded freedom to act. We thus need to preserve and radicalise Kant’s insight that Right is ‘the
restriction of each individual’s freedom so that it harmonises with the freedom of everyone else’ (Kant, 1988, p. 73), while expanding its community of ‘hospitality’ and detaching it from nationalist
ontology and sovereign authority.12 To
get beyond its atomistic liberal formulation, Kant’s principle of balance and limitation here must
be extended to the operation of institutions, technologies and social formations. In the spirit of Levinas and Arendt—but perhaps also beyond them—I would argue that
the limits to freedom must come from nature, the world, the Other; from the infinite plurality of human society and aspiration within the natural structures that contain them and interact with
their social and technological processes so unpredictably . If
freedom is to exist, if it is to have any kind of positive value, and if it is to be a measure
of being, it must be rethought as relationship and responsibility. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Experience of Freedom:
Freedom cannot be presented as the autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself and its decisions, evolving freely and in
permanent independence from every obstacle. What would such an independence mean, if not the impossibility of entering
into the slightest relation—and therefore of exercising the slightest freedom? (Nancy, 1993, p. 66) In short, freedom arises
only in relationships of interconnection, mutual dependence and responsibility, not in separation, control or mastery. Freedom, at its most naked
and unborn, is a wish sent into a space of existence; a simplistic, childlike hunger growing in a space of complexity and life. It is this ‘space’ that is most important. Who lives there? What do we all
want, in our tension and complexity? How do we adjudicate, mediate, and meet our diverse and so often conflicting claims? How is justice also to live there, in tension, in dialogue, in partnership
with freedom? Here we encounter some difficult dilemmas. Firstly, how do we promote human emancipation, and sustainable relationships with others and the environment, when human and/or
natural claims and aspirations clash?13 Should freedom be plural and differentiated at the same time as it is universal? How is conflict to be mediated and resolved to work for freedom, a plural
freedom, without being thought as a ‘contradiction’ that can be ‘dialectically’ resolved into a higher end or suffocating uni ty that contains the seeds of new conflict? Secondly, how can we think a
limited freedom to act when modern action is, as Arendt (1998, p. 230) argued, perpetually dangerous and unpredictable yet remains one of the ‘most decisive human experiences’ without which
freedom cannot be possible? In short, we must ask who and what lives and hopes in the space of freedom, how we interact, and how our actions affect how we might interact. Who lives there are
other people, other animals, other forms of matter and life: the societies and ecosystems that sustain and limit us. Complexity and contingency, plural and contested meanings, inhabit and fissure
this space, and freedom must learn to accept the uncertainty that comes with it. Arendt argues that modernity reduced action to ‘making’ in order to reduce its uncertainty and ‘save human affairs
from their frailty’, yet cautioned that ‘action has no end’. We are not able to ‘undo or even control reliably any of the process we start through action’—uncertainty is its product. She suggests that
the traditional attempt to evade this ‘burden of irreversibility and unpredictability’ by identifying sovereignty with freedo m is no answer, because ‘the result would not so much be sovereign
domination of oneself as arbitrary domination of all others’. The result would be both unjust and meaningless: ‘no man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth’.
Conversely, any ‘aspiration toward omnipotence always implies—apart from utopian hubris—the destruction of plurality’ (Arendt, 1998, pp. 230/34, 202). In a profound meditation on power in The
Human Condition, Arendt argues that plurality*/‘the living together of people’*/is the very condition of freedom, of ‘human power’. Plurality is its condition and ‘its only limitation’ (Arendt, 1998,
p. 201). Such a recognition of plurality*/a plurality which I would expand from Arendt’s more limited definition to take in different people, genders, races, religions, nations, sexualities and
cultures*/points us towards profound ways of thinking freedom ethically. A plurality that must be further radicalised, in ways that Arendt could not quite conceive, beyond the human so that it
takes in animals, plants, ecosystems, so that our terrible ability to act into nature, to turn humans into nature, product and resource simultaneously, is matched by responsibility for that action and
It is in this sense that the Bush Administration’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, its
doctrine of preventive force and fundamentalist belief in the transformative power of war, and its stunning disregard for
the daily suffering of millions, are so paradigmatic of an irresponsible exercise of freedom thrown in the very face of
creative efforts to recognise and limit the destructive character of modern action and global processes. It is not as if we do not
possibility (Arendt, 1998, pp. 200/50; Wadiwel, 2002).
possess the resources and ability to develop such understandings of responsible freedom and contingent action—in the spheres of the global environment, political economy
and security, among others, existing discussions and efforts to organise show valuable evidence of the sensibility I am arguing for here. They need to be cultivated, refined
and, most importantly, mobilised at the highest and most potentially destructive levels of politics and organisational power.
Policy debate is good for education, the development of empathy, and producing real world engagement from
participants. Clear rules, a stable topic, and institutional role playing and simulation are integral to the
process. The things you criticize about debate make it a unique exercise in active learning.
Lantis 8 (Jeffrey S. Lantis is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Chair of the
International Relations Program at The College of Wooster, “The State of the Active Teaching and Learning Literature”,
http://www.isacompss.com/info/samples/thestateoftheactiveteachingandlearningliterature_sample.pdf)
Simulations, games, and role-play represent a third important set of active teaching and learning approaches. Educational objectives
include deepening conceptual understandings of a particular phenomenon, sets of interactions, or socio-political processes by using
student interaction to bring abstract concepts to life . They provide students with a real or imaginary environment within
which to act out a given situation (Crookall 1995; Kaarbo and Lantis 1997; Kaufman 1998; Jefferson 1999; Flynn 2000; Newmann and Twigg 2000; Thomas
2002; Shellman and Turan 2003; Hobbs and Moreno 2004; Wheeler 2006; Kanner 2007; Raymond and Sorensen 2008). The aim is to enable students to
actively experience, rather than read or hear about, the “constraints and motivations for action (or inaction) experienced by
real players” (Smith and Boyer 1996:691), or to think about what they might do in a particular situation that the instructor has dramatized for
them. As Sutcliffe (2002:3) emphasizes, “Remote theoretical concepts can be given life by placing them in a situation with which students are familiar.” Such
exercises capitalize on the strengths of active learning techniques: creating memorable experiential learning events that tap into
multiple senses and emotions by utilizing visual and verbal stimuli. Early examples of simulations scholarship include works by Harold Guetzkow and colleagues, who
created the Inter-Nation Simulation (INS) in the 1950s. This work sparked wider interest in political simulations as teaching and research tools. By the
1980s, scholars had accumulated a number of sophisticated simulations of international politics, with names like “Crisis,” “Grand
Strategy,” “ICONS,” and “SALT III.” More recent literature on simulations stresses opportunities to reflect dynamics faced in the real
world by individual decision makers, by small groups like the US National Security Council, or even global summits organized around international
issues, and provides for a focus on contemporary global problems (Lantis et al. 2000; Boyer 2000). Some of the most popular simulations involve
modeling international organizations, in particular United Nations and European Union simulations (Van Dyke et al. 2000; McIntosh 2001; Dunn 2002; Zeff 2003;
Switky 2004; Chasek 2005). Simulations may be employed in one class meeting, through one week, or even over an entire semester. Alternatively, they may be
designed to take place outside of the classroom in local, national, or international competitions. The scholarship on the use of games in
international studies sets these approaches apart slightly from simulations. For example, Van Ments (1989:14) argues that
games are structured
systems of competitive play with specific defined endpoints or solutions that incorporate the material to be learnt. They
are similar to simulations, but
contain specific structures or rules that dictate what it means to “win” the simulated
interactions. Games place the participants in positions to make choices that 10 affect outcomes, but do not require that they take on
the persona of a real world actor. Examples range from interactive prisoner dilemma exercises to the use of board games in international studies classes (Hart and
Simon 1988; Marks 1998; Brauer and Delemeester 2001; Ender 2004; Asal 2005; Ehrhardt 2008) A final subset of this type of approach is the role-play. Like
simulations, roleplay places students within a structured environment and asks them to take on a specific role . Role-plays differ
from simulations in that rather than having their actions prescribed by a set of well-defined preferences or objectives, role-plays provide more leeway for
students to think about how they might act when placed in the position of their slightly less well-defined persona (Sutcliffe 2002).
Role-play allows students to create their own interpretation of the roles because of role-play’s less “goal oriented” focus. The primary aim of the role-play
is to dramatize for the students the relative positions of the actors involved and/or the challenges facing them (Andrianoff and Levine
2002). This dramatization can be very simple (such as roleplaying a two-person conversation) or complex (such as role-playing numerous actors interconnected within
a network). The reality of the scenario and its proximity to a student’s personal experience is also flexible. While few examples of effective
roleplay that are clearly distinguished from simulations or games have been published, some recent work has laid out some very useful role-play
exercises with clear procedures for use in the international studies classroom (Syler et al. 1997; Alden 1999; Johnston 2003; Krain and Shadle
2006; Williams 2006; Belloni 2008). Taken as a whole, the applications and procedures for simulations, games, and role-play are well detailed in the active teaching
and learning literature. Experts recommend a set of core considerations that should be taken into account when designing effective
simulations (Winham 1991; Smith and Boyer 1996; Lantis 1998; Shaw 2004; 2006; Asal and Blake 2006; Ellington et al. 2006). These include building the
simulation design around specific educational objectives, carefully selecting the situation or topic to be addressed, establishing the
needed roles to be played by both students and instructor, providing clear rules, specific instructions and background
material, and having debriefing and assessment plans in place in advance. There are also an increasing number of simulation designs published
and disseminated in the discipline, whose procedures can be adopted (or adapted for use) depending upon an instructor’s educational objectives (Beriker and
Druckman 1996; Lantis 1996; 1998; Lowry 1999; Boyer 2000; Kille 2002; Shaw 2004; Switky and Aviles 2007; Tessman 2007; Kelle 2008). Finally, there is growing
attention in this literature to assessment. Scholars have found that
these methods are particularly effective in bridging the gap between
academic knowledge and everyday life. Such exercises also lead to enhanced student interest in the topic, the
development of empathy, and acquisition and retention of knowledge.
2NC Ext – Switch Side Debate
The 1AC acts as a monologue rather than a dialogue. This ignores that the aff is constructed in
expectation of a negative response and that its role is not to establish a foundational truth, but
instigate an agonistic search for the truth
Galloway, 2007 (Ryan, professor of communication at Samford University, “Dinner and Conversation at the Argumentative
Table: Reconceptualizing Debate as an Argumentative Dialogue,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007), p.3-4)
Conceiving debate as a dialogue exposes a means of bridging the divide between the policy community and the kritik community.
Here I will distinguish between formal argument and dialogue. While formal argument centers on the demands of informal and formal logic as a mechanism of mediation,
dialogue tends to focus on the relational aspects of an interaction. As such, it emphasizes the give-and-take process of
negotiation. Consequently, dialogue emphasizes outcomes related to agreement or consensus rather than propositional
correctness (Mendelson & Lindeman, 2000). As dialogue, the affirmative case constitutes a discursive act that anticipates a
discursive response. The consequent interplay does not seek to establish a propositional truth, but seeks to initiate an indepth dialogue between the debate participants. Such an approach would have little use for rigid rules of logic or argument, such as stock issues or fallacy
theory, except to the point where the participants agreed that these were functional approaches. Instead, a dialogic approach encourages evaluations
of affirmative cases relative to their performative benefits, or whether or not the case is a valuable speech act. The move away from formal
logic structure toward a dialogical conversation model allows for a broader perspective regarding the ontological status of
debate. At the same time, a dialogical approach challenges the ways that many teams argue speech act and performance
theory in debates. Because there are a range of ways that performative oriented teams argue their cases, there is little consensus regarding the status of topicality.
While some take topicality as a central challenge to creating performance-based debates, many argue that topicality is wholly irrelevant to the debate, contending that
the requirement that a critical affirmative be topical silences creativity and oppositional approaches. However, if
we move beyond viewing debate as an
ontologically independent monologue—but as an invitation to dialogue, our attention must move from the ontology of
the affirmative case to a consideration of the case in light of exigent opposition (Farrell, 1985). Thus, the initial speech act of
the affirmative team sets the stage for an emergent response. While most responses deal directly with the affirmative
case, Farrell notes that they may also deal with metacommunication regarding the process of negotiation. In this way, we may
conceptualize the affirmative’s goal in creating a “germ of a response” (Bakhtin, 1990) whose completeness bears on the
possibility of all subsequent utterances. Conceived as a dialogue, the affirmative speech act anticipates the negative
response. A failure to adequately encourage, or anticipate a response deprives the negative speech act and the emergent
dialogue of the capacity for a complete inquiry. Such violations short circuit the dialogue and undermine the potential for
an emerging dialogue to gain significance (either within the debate community or as translated to forums outside of the activity).
Here, the dialogical model performs as a fairness model, contending that the affirmative speech act, be it policy oriented,
critical, or performative in nature, must adhere to normative restrictions to achieve its maximum competitive and
ontological potential.
Switch side debate is good – encouraging students to take both sides of a debate prevents
dogmatism
Koehle 10
Joe Koehle, Phd candidate in communications at Kansas, former West Georgia debater
http://mccfblog.org/actr/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Koehle_Paper_ACTR-editedPDF.pdf.
Much like criticism of the sophists has persisted throughout time; criticism of switch side debate has been a constant feature since the advent of
tournament-style debating. Harrigan documents how numerous these criticisms have been in the last century, explaining that Page 15 Koehle 15 complaints about the
mode of debate are as old as the activity itself (9). The
most famous controversy over modern switch side debate occurred in 1954, when the U.S.
military academies and the Nebraska teachers‟ colleges decided to boycott the resolution: “Resolved: That the United States should extend
diplomatic relations to the communist government of China.” The schools that boycotted the topic argued that it was ethically and educationally indefensible to defend a
recognition of communists, and even went so far as to argue that “a pro-recognition stand by men wearing the country‟s uniforms would lead to misunderstanding on the
part of our friends and to distortion by our enemies” (English et al. 221). Switch side debate was on the defensive, and debate coaches of the time were engaged in
virulent debate over the how to debate. The controversy made the national news when the journalist Edward Murrow became involved and opined on the issue in front of
millions of TV viewers. English et al. even go so far as to credit the
“debate about debate” with helping accelerate the implosion of the
famous red- baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy (222). The debate about debate fell back out of the national spotlight after the high-profile incident over
the China resolution, but it never ended in the debate community itself. The tenor of the debate reached a fever pitch when outright
accusations of modern
sophistry (the bad kind) were published in the Spring 1983 edition of the National Forensic Journal, when Bernard K. Duffy wrote, “The Ethics of Argumentation
in Intercollegiate Debate: A Conservative Appraisal.” Echoing the old Platonic argument against sophistic practice, Duffy argued that switch side debate
has ignored ethical considerations in the pursuit of teaching cheap techniques for victory (66). The 1990‟s saw a divergence of criticisms into two different
camps. The first camp was comprised of traditional critics who argued that debate instruction and practice promoted form over substance. For example, a coach from
Boston College lamented that absent a change, “Debate instructors and their students will become the sophists of our age, susceptible to the traditional indictments
elucidated by Isocrates and others” (Herbeck). Dale Bertelstein published a response to the previously cited article by Muir about switch side debate that launched into an
extended discussion of debate and sophistry. This article continued the practice of coaches and communications scholars developing and applying the Platonic critique of
the sophists to contemporary debate practices. Alongside this traditional criticism a newer set of critiques of switch side debate emerged. Armed
with the language of Foucauldian criticism, Critical Legal Studies, and critiques of normativity and statism, many people who were uncomfortable with the debate tradition
of arguing in favor of government action began to question the reason why one should ever be obliged to advocate government action. They began to
argue that
switch side debate was a mode of debate that unnecessarily constrained people to the hegemony of debating the given
topic. These newer criticisms of switch side debate gained even more traction after the year 2000, with several skilled teams using these arguments to avoid having to
debate one side of the topic. William Spanos, a professor of English at SUNY Binghamton decided to link the ethos of switch side debate to that of neo-conservatism after
observing a debate tournament, saying that “the arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush…learned their „disinterested‟ argumentative skills in
the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed.” (Spanos 467)
Contemporary policy debate is now under attack from all sides, caught in its own dissoi logoi. Given the variety of assaults upon switch side
debate by both sides of the political spectrum, how can switch side debate be justified? Supporters of switch side debate have made many arguments
justifying the value of the practice that are not related to any defense of sophist Page 17 Koehle 17 techniques. I will only briefly describe them so as to not muddle the
issue, but they are worthy of at least a cursory mention. The first defense is the most pragmatic reason of all: Mandating
people debate both sides of a
topic is most fair to participants because it helps mitigate the potential for a topic that is biased towards one side. More theoretical justifications are given,
however. Supporters of switch side debate have argued that encouraging students to play the devil‟s advocate creates a sense of selfreflexivity that is crucial to promoting tolerance and preventing dogmatism (Muir 287). Others have attempted to justify switch side debate
in educational terms and advocacy terms, explaining that it is a path to diversifying a student‟s knowledge by encouraging them to seek out paths they may have avoided
otherwise, which in turn creates better public advocates (Dybvig and Iversen). In fact, contemporary
policy debate and its reliance upon switching
sides creates an oasis of argumentation free from the demands of advocacy, allowing students to test out ideas and become more wellrounded advocates as they leave the classroom and enter the polis (Coverstone). Finally, debate empowers individuals to become critical thinkers
capable of making sound decisions (Mitchell, “Pedagogical Possibilities”, 41).
We should play Devil’s advocate—failure to present an alternative, worst-case look at their ideas only silences dissent,
makes them hard to implement, and allows flaws to slip through
CHANDRA 2008 (Sarvajeet, Managing Partner in Master Sun Consulting, MBA in Marketing Communications from MICA, Ahmedabad. He is a mechanical engineer
from MS University, “Role of Strategy Execution Team - Be a Devil's Advocate, Bad News Messenger,” Dec 17, http://ezinearticles.com/?Role-of-Strategy-Execution-Team--Be-a-Devils-Advocate,-Bad-News-Messenger&id=1797944)
Become a Devil's Advocate to a Specific Strategy and look at the What Will Go Wrong We are all over-confident and overoptimistic beings. While that has spurred us on as a civilization, this over-confidence gets translated into strategic choices or strategic plans that we
make. Most of us tend to believe in the veracity of our ideas, tenacity of our plans and our destiny to win (regardless of market condition and
competitive activity) It is the job of the execution team therefore to assume the role of a Devil's advocate. It is the job of the execution team to do so, since they have to
drive the execution. They have to question the unrealistically precise estimates of time, resources and targets. They
have to imagine a worst case scenario
Someone has to be given the role of challenging the false consensus
or group-think that may have cause the dissenters to stay quiet. The execution team has to confront and ensure that worst case
scenarios is put on the table. This will help the strategy become more 'implementable', give the strategic plan more
flexibility and force the strategists to become more realistic. However for this to happen the management must encourage the culture of challenge
(most strategists do not come up with very gloomy worst case scenarios).
and recognize the role of the strategy execution team as a ' Devil's Advocate'
--Turns the Case
Switch-side debate inculcates skills that empirically improve climate policy outcomes
Mitchell 10 Gordon R. Mitchell is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where he
also directs the William Pitt Debating Union. Robert Asen’s patient and thoughtful feedback sharpened this manuscript, which was also improved by contributions from
members of the Schenley Park Debate Authors Working Group (DAWG), a consortium of public argument scholars at the University of Pittsburgh that strives to generate
rigorous scholarship addressing the role of argumentation and debate in society. SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING MEETS DEMAND-DRIVEN RHETORIC OF SCIENCE. MITCHELL,
GORDON R.1 Rhetoric & Public Affairs; Spring2010, Vol. 13 Issue 1, p95-120, 26p
The watchwords for the intelligence community’s debating initiative— collaboration, critical thinking, collective awareness—resonate with key terms anchoring the study
of deliberative democracy. In a major new text, John Gastil defines deliberation as a process whereby people “carefully examine a problem and arrive at a well-reasoned
solution aft er a period of inclusive, respectful consideration of diverse points of view.”40 Gastil and his colleagues in organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and
the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation are pursuing a research program that foregrounds the democratic telos of deliberative processes. Work in this area
features a blend of concrete interventions and studies of citizen empowerment.41 Notably, a key theme in much of this literature
concerns the
relationship between deliberation and debate, with the latter term often loaded with pejorative baggage and working as a
negative foil to highlight the positive qualities of deliberation.42 “Most political discussions, however, are debates. Stories in the media turn politics into a never-ending
series of contests. People get swept into taking sides; their energy goes into figuring out who or what they’re for or against,” says Kettering president David Mathews and
coauthor Noelle McAfee. “Deliberation is different. It is neither a partisan argument where opposing sides try to win nor a casual conversation conducted with polite
civility. Public deliberation is a means by which citizens make tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country. It is a way of
reasoning and talking together.”43 Mathews and McAfee’s distrust of the debate process is almost paradigmatic amongst theorists and practitioners
of Kettering-style deliberative democracy. One conceptual mechanism for reinforcing this debate-deliberation opposition is characterization of debate as a process
inimical to deliberative aims, with debaters adopting dogmatic and fixed positions that frustrate the deliberative objective of “choice work.” In this register, Emily
Robertson observes, “unlike deliberators, debaters are typically not open to the possibility of being shown wrong. . . . Debaters are not trying to find the best solution by
keeping an open mind about the opponent’s point of view.”44 Similarly, founding documents from the University of Houston–Downtown’s Center for Public Deliberation
state, “Public deliberation is about choice work, which is different from a dialogue or a debate. In dialogue, people oft en look to relate to each other, to understand each
other, and to talk about more informal issues. In debate, there are generally two positions and people are generally looking to ‘win’ their side.”45 Debate, cast here as the
theoretical scapegoat, provides a convenient, low-water benchmark for explaining how other forms of deliberative interaction better promote cooperative “choice work.”
The Kettering-inspired framework receives support from perversions of the debate process such as vapid presidential debates
and verbal pyrotechnics found on Crossfire-style television shows.46 In contrast, the intelligence community’s debating initiative
stands as a nettlesome anomaly for these theoretical frameworks, with debate serving, rather than frustrating, the ends of deliberation. The presence of such an
anomaly would seem to point to the wisdom of fashioning a theoretical orientation that frames the debate-deliberation connection in contingent, rather than static terms,
with the relationship between the categories shift ing along with the various contexts in which they manifest in practice.47 Such an approach gestures toward the
importance of rhetorically informed critical work on multiple levels. First, the contingency of situated practice invites analysis geared to assess, in particular cases, the
extent to which debate practices enable and/ or constrain deliberative objectives. Regarding the intelligence community’s debating initiative, such an analytical
perspective highlights, for example, the tight connection between the deliberative goals established by intelligence officials and the cultural technology manifest in the
bridge project’s online debating applications such as Hot Grinds. An additional dimension of nuance emerging from this avenue of analysis pertains to the precise nature
of the deliberative goals set by bridge. Program descriptions notably eschew Kettering-style references to democratic citizen empowerment, yet feature deliberation
prominently as a key ingredient of strong intelligence tradecraft . Th is caveat is especially salient to consider when it comes to the second category of rhetorically
informed critical work invited by the contingent aspect of specific debate initiatives. To grasp this layer it is useful to appreciate how the name of the bridge project
constitutes an invitation for those outside the intelligence community to participate in the analytic outreach eff ort. According to Doney, bridge “provides an environment
for Analytic Outreach—a place where IC analysts can reach out to expertise elsewhere in federal, state, and local government, in academia, and industry. New
communities of interest can form quickly in bridge through the ‘web of trust’ access control model—access to minds outside the intelligence community creates an
analytic force multiplier.”48 This presents a moment of choice for academic scholars in a position to respond to Doney’s invitation; it is an opportunity to convert scholarly
expertise into an “analytic force multiplier.” In reflexively pondering this invitation, it may be valuable for scholars to read Greene and Hicks’s proposition that switch-
side debating should be viewed as a cultural technology in light of Langdon Winner’s maxim that “technological artifacts have politics.”49 In the
case of bridge, politics are informed by the history of intelligence community policies and practices. Commenter Th omas Lord puts this point in high relief in a post off
ered in response to a news story on the topic: “[W]hy should this thing (‘bridge’) be? . . . [Th e intelligence community] on the one hand sometimes provides useful
information to the military or to the civilian branches and on the other hand it is a dangerous, out of control, relic that by all external appearances is not the slightest bit
reformed, other than superficially, from such excesses as became exposed in the cointelpro and mkultra hearings of the 1970s.”50 A debate scholar need not agree with
Lord’s full-throated criticism of the intelligence community (he goes on to observe that it bears an alarming resemblance to organized crime) to understand that
participation in the community’s Analytic Outreach program may serve the ends of deliberation, but not necessarily democracy, or even a defensible politics. Demanddriven rhetoric of science necessarily raises questions about what’s driving the demand, questions that scholars with relevant expertise would do well to ponder carefully
before embracing invitations to contribute their argumentative expertise to deliberative projects. By the same token, it would be prudent to bear in mind that the
technological determinism about switch-side debate endorsed by Greene and Hicks may tend to flatten reflexive assessments regarding the wisdom of supporting a given
debate initiative—as the next section illustrates, manifest differences among initiatives warrant context-sensitive judgments regarding the normative political dimensions
featured in each case. Public Debates in the EPA Policy Process Th e preceding analysis of U.S. intelligence community debating initiatives highlighted how analysts are
challenged to navigate discursively the heteroglossia of vast amounts of diff erent kinds of data flowing through intelligence streams. Public
policy planners are
tested in like manner when they attempt to stitch together institutional arguments from various and sundry inputs ranging from
expert testimony, to historical precedent, to public comment. Just as intelligence managers find that algorithmic, formal methods of analysis often
don’t work when it comes to the task of interpreting and synthesizing copious amounts of disparate data, public-policy planners
encounter similar challenges. In fact, the argumentative turn in public-policy planning elaborates an approach to public-policy
analysis that foregrounds deliberative interchange and critical thinking as alternatives to “decisionism,” the formulaic application of “objective”
decision algorithms to the public policy process. Stating the matter plainly, Majone suggests, “whether in written or oral form, argument is central in all stages of
the policy process.” Accordingly, he notes, “we miss a great deal if we try to understand policy-making solely in terms of power,
influence, and bargaining, to the exclusion of debate and argument.”51 One can see similar rationales driving Goodwin and Davis’s EPA debating project, where
debaters are invited to conduct on-site public debates covering resolutions craft ed to reflect key points of stasis in the EPA decision-making process. For example, in
the 2008 Water Wars debates held at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., resolutions were craft ed to focus attention on the topic of water pollution, with one
resolution focusing on downstream states’ authority to control upstream states’ discharges and sources of pollutants, and a second resolution exploring the policy merits
of bottled water and toilet paper taxes as revenue sources to fund water infrastructure projects. In the first debate on interstate river pollution, the team of Seth
Gannon and Seungwon Chung from Wake Forest University argued in favor of downstream state control, with the Michigan State University team of Carly
Wunderlich and Garrett Abelkop providing opposition. In the second debate on taxation policy, Kevin Kallmyer and Matthew Struth from University of Mary
Washington defended taxes on bottled water and toilet paper, while their opponents from Howard University, Dominique Scott and Jarred
McKee, argued against this proposal. Reflecting on the project, Goodwin noted how the intercollegiate Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of
Science 107 debaters’ ability to act as “honest brokers” in the policy arguments contributed positively to internal EPA
deliberation on both issues.52 Davis observed that since the invited debaters “didn’t have a dog in the fight,” they were able to give voice to previously buried
arguments that some EPA subject matter experts felt reticent to elucidate because of their institutional affiliations.53 Such findings are consistent with the
views of policy analysts advocating the argumentative turn in policy planning. As Majone claims, “Dialectical confrontation
between generalists and experts often succeeds in bringing out unstated assumptions, conflicting interpretations of the facts, and
the risks posed by new projects.”54 Frank Fischer goes even further in this context, explicitly appropriating rhetorical scholar Charles Willard’s concept of
argumentative “epistemics” to flesh out his vision for policy studies: Uncovering the epistemic dynamics of public controversies would allow for a more enlightened
understanding of what is at stake in a particular dispute, making possible a sophisticated evaluation of the various viewpoints and merits of diff erent policy options. In so
doing, the diff ering, oft en tacitly held contextual perspectives and values could be juxtaposed; the viewpoints and demands of experts, special interest groups, and the
wider public could be directly compared; and the dynamics among the participants could be scrutizined. This
would by no means sideline or even
exclude scientific assessment; it would only situate it within the framework of a more comprehensive evaluation. 55 As Davis
notes, institutional constraints present within the EPA communicative milieu can complicate eff orts to provide a full airing of all relevant arguments pertaining to a given
regulatory issue. Thus, intercollegiate
debaters can play key roles in retrieving and amplifying positions that might otherwise
remain sedimented in the policy process. Th e dynamics entailed in this symbiotic relationship are underscored by deliberative planner John Forester, who
observes, “If planners and public administrators are to make democratic political debate and argument possible, they will need strategically located allies to avoid being
fully thwarted by the characteristic self-protecting behaviors of the planning organizations and bureaucracies within which they work.”56 Here, an institution’s need for
“strategically located allies” to support deliberative practice constitutes the demand for rhetorically informed expertise, setting up what can be considered a demanddriven rhetoric of science. As
an instance of rhetoric of science scholarship, this type of “switch-side public 108 Rhetoric & Public Affairs
debate” diff ers both from insular contest tournament debating, where the main focus is on the pedagogical benefit for student participants, and first-generation
rhetoric of science scholarship, where critics concentrated on unmasking the rhetoricity of scientific artifacts circulating in what
many perceived to be purely technical spheres of knowledge production.58 As a form of demand-driven rhetoric of science, switch-side
debating connects directly with the communication field’s performative tradition of argumentative engagement in public
controversy—a different route of theoretical grounding than rhetorical criticism’s tendency to locate its foundations in the English field’s
tradition of literary criticism and textual analysis.59 Given this genealogy, it is not surprising to learn how Davis’s response to the EPA’s institutional need for
rhetorical expertise took the form of a public debate proposal, shaped by Davis’s dual background as a practitioner and historian of intercollegiate debate. Davis competed
as an undergraduate policy debater for Howard University in the 1970s, and then went on to enjoy substantial success as coach of the Howard team in the new
millennium. In an essay reviewing the broad sweep of debating history, Davis notes, “Academic debate began at least 2,400 years ago when the scholar Protagoras of
Abdera (481–411 bc), known as the father of debate, conducted debates among his students in Athens.”60 As John Poulakos points out, “older” Sophists such as
Protagoras taught
Greek students the value of dissoi logoi, or pulling apart complex questions by debating two sides of an
issue.61 Th e few surviving fragments of Protagoras’s work suggest that his notion of dissoi logoi stood for the principle that “two accounts [logoi] are present about
every ‘thing,’ opposed to each other,” and further, that humans could “measure” the relative soundness of knowledge claims by engaging in give-and-take where parties
would make the “weaker argument stronger” to activate the generative aspect of rhetorical practice, a key element of the Sophistical tradition.62 Following in
Protagoras’s wake, Isocrates would complement this centrifugal push with the pull of synerchesthe, a centripetal exercise of “coming together” deliberatively to listen,
respond, and form common social bonds.63 Isocrates incorporated Protagorean dissoi logoi into synerchesthe, a broader concept that he used flexibly to express
interlocking senses of (1) inquiry, as in groups convening to search for answers to common questions through discussion;64 (2) deliberation, with interlocutors gathering
in a political setting to deliberate about proposed courses of action;65 and (3) alliance formation, a form of collective action typical at festivals,66 or in the exchange of
pledges that deepen social ties.67 Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 109 Returning once again to the Kettering-informed sharp distinction
between debate and deliberation, one
sees in Isocratic synerchesthe, as well as in the EPA debating initiative, a fusion of debate with deliberative
functions. Echoing a theme raised in this essay’s earlier discussion of intelligence tradecraft , such a fusion troubles categorical attempts to classify debate and
deliberation as fundamentally opposed activities. Th e significance of such a finding is amplified by the frequency of attempts in the deliberative democracy literature to
insist on the theoretical bifurcation of debate and deliberation as an article of theoretical faith. Tandem
analysis of the EPA and intelligence community
debating initiatives also brings to light dimensions of contrast at the third level of Isocratic synerchesthe, alliance formation. Th e intelligence community’s
Analytic Outreach initiative invites largely one-way communication flowing from outside experts into the black box of classified intelligence analysis. On the contrary, the
EPA debating program gestures toward a more expansive project of deliberative alliance building. In this vein, Howard University’s participation in the 2008
EPA Water Wars debates can be seen as the harbinger of a trend by historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) to catalyze their debate programs in a strategy that
evinces Davis’s dual-focus vision. On the one hand, Davis aims to recuperate Wiley College’s tradition of competitive excellence in intercollegiate debate, depicted so
powerfully in the feature film The Great Debaters, by starting a wave of new debate programs housed in hbcus across the nation.68 On the other hand, Davis sees
potential for these new programs to complement their competitive debate programming with participation in the EPA’s public debating initiative. Th is dual-focus vision
recalls Douglas Ehninger’s and Wayne Brockriede’s vision of “total” debate programs that blend switch-side intercollegiate tournament debating with forms of public
debate designed to contribute to wider communities beyond the tournament setting.69 Whereas the political telos animating Davis’s dual-focus vision certainly embraces
background assumptions that Greene and Hicks would find disconcerting—notions of liberal political agency, the idea of debate using “words as weapons”70—there is
little doubt that the project of pursuing environmental protection by tapping the creative energy of hbcu-leveraged dissoi logoi diff ers significantly from the intelligence
community’s eff ort to improve its tradecraft through online digital debate programming. Such diff erence is especially evident in light of the EPA’s commitment to extend
debates to public realms, with the attendant possible benefits unpacked by Jane Munksgaard and Damien Pfister: 110 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Having
a public
debater argue against their convictions, or confess their indecision on a subject and subsequent embrace of argument as a way to seek clarity, could
shake up the prevailing view of debate as a war of words. Public uptake of the possibility of switch-sides debate may help
lessen the polarization of issues inherent in prevailing debate formats because students are no longer seen as wedded to their arguments. This could
transform public debate from a tussle between advocates, with each public debater trying to convince the audience in a Manichean struggle about the truth of
their side, to a more inviting exchange focused on the content of the other’s argumentation and the process of deliberative exchange.71
Reflection on the EPA debating initiative reveals a striking convergence among (1) the expressed need for dissoi logoi by
government agency officials wrestling with the challenges of inverted rhetorical situations, (2) theoretical claims by scholars regarding the centrality of
argumentation in the public policy process, and (3) the practical wherewithal of intercollegiate debaters to tailor public switch-side
debating performances in specific ways requested by agency collaborators. These points of convergence both underscore previously articulated
theoretical assertions regarding the relationship of debate to deliberation, as well as deepen understanding of the political role of deliberation in institutional decision
making. But they also suggest how decisions by rhetorical scholars about whether to contribute switch-side debating acumen to meet demand-driven rhetoric of
science initiatives ought to involve careful reflection. Such an approach mirrors the way policy
planning in the “argumentative turn” is designed to
respond to the weaknesses of formal, decisionistic paradigms of policy planning with situated, contingent judgments
informed by reflective deliberation. Conclusion Dilip Gaonkar’s criticism of first-generation rhetoric of science scholarship rests on a key claim regarding
what he sees as the inherent “thinness” of the ancient Greek rhetorical lexicon.72 That lexicon, by virtue of the fact that it was invented primarily to teach rhetorical
performance, is ill equipped in his view to support the kind of nuanced discriminations required for eff ective interpretation and critique of rhetorical texts. Although
Gaonkar isolates rhetoric of science as a main target of this critique, his choice of subject matter Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 111
positions him to toggle back and forth between specific engagement with rhetoric of science scholarship and discussion of broader themes touching on the
metatheoretical controversy over rhetoric’s proper scope as a field of inquiry (the so-called big vs. little rhetoric dispute).73 Gaonkar’s familiar refrain in both contexts is a
warning about the dangers of “universalizing” or “globalizing” rhetorical inquiry, especially in attempts that “stretch” the classical Greek rhetorical vocabulary into a
hermeneutic metadiscourse, one pressed into service as a master key for interpretation of any and all types of communicative artifacts. In other words, Gaonkar warns
against the dangers of rhetoricians pursuing what might be called supply-side epistemology, rhetoric’s project of pushing for greater disciplinary relevance by attempting
to extend its reach into far-flung areas of inquiry such as the hard sciences. Yet this essay highlights how rhetorical scholarship’s relevance can be credibly established by
outsiders, who seek access to the creative energy flowing from the classical Greek rhetorical lexicon in its native mode, that is, as a tool of invention designed to spur and
hone rhetorical performance. Analysis
of the intelligence community and EPA debating initiatives shows how this is the case, with
government agencies calling for assistance to animate rhetorical processes such as dissoi logoi (debating different sides) and synerchesthe
(the performative task of coming together deliberately for the purpose of joint inquiry, collective choice-making, and renewal of
communicative bonds).74 Th is demand-driven epistemology is diff erent in kind from the globalization project so roundly criticized by Gaonkar. Rather than rhetoric
venturing out from its own academic home to proselytize about its epistemological universality for all knowers, instead here we have actors not formally trained in the
rhetorical tradition articulating how their own deliberative objectives call for incorporation of rhetorical practice and even recruitment of “strategically located allies”75 to
assist in the process. Since the productivist content in the classical Greek vocabulary serves as a critical resource for joint collaboration in this regard, demand-driven
rhetoric of science turns Gaonkar’s original critique on its head. In fairness to Gaonkar, it should be stipulated that his 1993 intervention
challenged the way rhetoric of science had been done to date, not the universe of ways rhetoric of science might be done in the future. And to his partial credit, Gaonkar
did acknowledge the promise of a performance-oriented rhetoric of science, especially one informed by classical thinkers other than Aristotle.76 In his Ph.D. dissertation
on “Aspects of Sophistic Pedagogy,” Gaonkar documents how the ancient
sophists were “the greatest champions” 112 Rhetoric & Public Affairs of
“socially useful” science,77 and also how the sophists essentially practiced the art of rhetoric in a translational, performative register: Th e sophists could not
blithely go about their business of making science useful, while science itself stood still due to lack of communal support and recognition. Besides, sophistic pedagogy was
becoming increasingly dependent on the findings of contemporary speculation in philosophy and science. Take for instance, the eminently practical art of rhetoric. As
taught by the best of the sophists, it was not simply a handbook of recipes which anyone could mechanically employ to his advantage. On the contrary, the strength
and vitality of sophistic rhetoric came from their ability to incorporate the relevant information obtained from the ongoing research in other fields.78 Of course, deep trans-historical diff erences make uncritical appropriation of classical Greek rhetoric for contemporary use a
fool’s errand. But to gauge from Robert Hariman’s recent reflections on the enduring salience of Isocrates, “timely, suitable, and eloquent appropriations” can
help us postmoderns “forge a new political language” suitable for addressing the complex raft of intertwined problems facing
global society. Such retrospection is long overdue, says Hariman, as “the history, literature, philosophy, oratory, art, and political thought of Greece and Rome have never
been more accessible or less appreciated.”79 Th is essay has explored ways that some of the most venerable elements of the ancient Greek rhetorical tradition—those
dealing with debate and deliberation—can
be retrieved and adapted to answer calls in the contemporary milieu for cultural technologies
capable of dealing with one of our time’s most daunting challenges. This challenge involves finding meaning in inverted
rhetorical situations characterized by an endemic surplus of heterogeneous content.
The aff’s cry to help the most disadvantaged populations by natural disasters is best combated with policy solutions to
climate change. Their Lehmen evidence is about how many Sri Lankans that depended on fishing for their lifestyles were
the most disproportionately affected – policy solutions to warming is key
Byravan and Rajan ’10 Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, “The Ethical Implications of Sea-Level Rise Due to Climate Change,” Ethics & International
Affairs 24, No. 3, 9/20/2010, only accessible on some exclusive database
As scientific evidence for the adverse effects of human-induced climate change grows stronger, it
is becoming increasingly clear that these questions are of urgent practical interest and require concerted
international political action. In the course of this century and the next, the earth’s climate will almost surely get
warmer as a direct result of the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere from the burning of
fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. This warming will very likely result in heat waves, heavy
precipitation in some areas, extreme droughts in others, increased hurricane intensity, and sea-level rise of about
one meter—although recent findings suggest this rise could quite plausibly be greater than that by century’s end.1 Forecasts of how many people will be
displaced by 2050 by climate change vary widely, from about 25 million to 1 billion. The difficulty in accurate forecasting lies not only in the
uncertainty regarding future climate change impacts and adaptation measures but also in estimating the outcome of the several complex factors driving migration.2 No other form
of environmentally induced human migration will likely be as permanent as that caused by climate-induced SLR; and there are special
reasons why its victims deserve unique moral consideration. SLR will affect coastal populations in a variety of ways, including
inundation, flood and storm damage, erosion, saltwater intrusion, and wetland loss. Together, these
will greatly reduce available land for cultivation, water resources, and fodder, causing severe
hardship in terms of livelihood and habitat loss. Worst of all, SLR and the associated changes in the coastal zone will add burdens to many who are
already poor and vulnerable. The physical changes associated with SLR may themselves take place in abrupt, nonlinear ways as
thresholds are crossed. In turn, the least resilient communities— that is, those dependent on subsistence fishing—
will be the first to experience ‘‘tipping points’’ in their life systems, so that the only option available to them would be to abandon their homes and search for better
level continues to rise, coastal inundation, saltwater intrusion, and storm
surges will become more intense and people will find it increasingly difficult to stay in their homes
and will look for ways to migrate inland. As ever larger numbers pass thresholds in their ability to cope, more societal tipping points
will be crossed, resulting in the sudden mass movements of entire villages, towns, and cities in
coastal regions.3 On small islands and in countries with heavily populated delta regions, the very existence of the nation-state
may become jeopardized, so that the extremely vulnerable will no longer have state protection they can rely on. The extent of vulnerability to sea-level rise in any given
prospects elsewhere. As the average sea
country will depend on more than just its terrain and climatic conditions: the fraction of the population living in low-lying regions, the area and proportion of the country inundated, its wealth and
economic conditions, and its prevailing political institutions and infrastructure will all be of relevance. Thus, in a large country, such as the United States or China, coastal communities would be
able to move inland, given adequate preparation and government response. In the case of small islands in the South Pacific, however, such an option does not exist, since it is expected that most
or even the entire land area will sink or become uninhabitable. In such cases as Bangladesh,
Egypt, Guyana, and Vietnam, where nearly half
or more of the populations live in low-lying deltaic regions that support a major fraction of their
economies, SLR will threaten the very functioning of the state. Moreover, it is increasingly clear that for tens to hundreds of millions
of people living in low-lying areas and on small islands, no physical defense is realistically possible or can be fully protective. A recent report by the Dutch Delta Committee proposes annual
investments of about 1.5 billion Euros for the rest of the century just to protect the Netherlands’ 200-mile coastline, and indicates that 20–50 percent of coastal land worldwide cannot be
protected, especially under conditions where SLR takes place rapidly—as a result, say, of a collapse of major ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica.4 Even
if greenhouse
gases are removed from the atmosphere through some future technology, we are already committed to a certain
degree of warming and sea-level rise because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. In addition, most
residents of small island nations and other low-lying coastal regions around the world will not be
able to avail themselves of the sorts of conventional adaptation remedies that are conceivable for
the victims of drought, reduced crop yields, desertification, and so on. Apart from exceptional cases where adequate
engineering solutions can be developed to prevent inundation, coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion, and other challenges associated with rising seas, people living in these
vulnerable regions will be forced to flee, generally with no possibility of return to their original homes. Indeed, migration and permanent
resettlement will be the only possible ‘‘adaptation’’ strategy available to millions. Existing international law provides no solution for these
individuals, for whom, we will argue, the only just remedy is in the form of special rights of free global movement and resettlement in regions and countries on higher ground in
advance of disaster. What Needs to Be Done The issue of climate change and migration has received considerable scholarly attention, primarily in terms of its political and legal implications, but
there has been little focus on the ethical aspects.5 In an earlier paper we suggested that the responsibility of absorbing ‘‘climate exiles’’ should be shared among host countries in a manner that is
proportional to a host’s cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases.6 Here, we try to develop the ethical basis for the international community, first, to recognize that displaced persons, and in
particular those whose nation states will have become physically nonexistent or will face an unendurable burden, should have a special right to free movement to other countries; and, second, to
formulate institutional means for providing them political, social, and economic rights. We define the victims’ unbearable burden in the following terms: they will face a breakdown or total
forfeiture of prevailing physical, economic, and social support systems; and they will have no effective state to endow them with rights and alleviate their pain. It is not our intention to provide a
particular formula for how individual countries should be made responsible for the victims’ habitation and citizenship, but to suggest instead that once the basic principle of shared responsibility
based on each country’s contribution to climate change is accepted, there could be several ways to determine precisely how the costs of policy implementation should be distributed, how rights
could be exercised by the climate exiles and migrants, and what other institutional and political mechanisms should be established to avert a massive refugee crisis. The fairest solution, we
therefore propose, is for the international community to grant, in the first instance, the individual right to migrate to safe countries for those who will be displaced forcibly by SLR. We then
recommend that an international treaty begin to address this issue so that climate migrants and future exiles will be able to find homes well in advance of the actual emergency.7 Indeed, unlike in
the case of natural disasters, such as the Asian tsunami of December 2004, the world is already sufficiently forewarned about the need to prepare for the effects of SLR and has ample time and
opportunity to make reasoned judgments about how best to respond.8 We contend that the alternative—
to ignore potential victims until after they
become ‘‘environmental refugees’’— is morally indefensible
as well as impractical. For one thing, the victims in the case of SLR cannot even be
classified as ‘‘refugees’’ since there are no legal instruments that give them this option. Notably, the Refugee Convention, designed to protect those forced to flee their homes as a result of war or
persecution, in force since 1954, recognizes as a refugee someone who is ‘‘unable [or] unwilling to avail himself of the protection’’ of his country of nationality and is outside that country ‘‘owing
to well-grounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion’’—a definition that does not extend to those
adversely affected by environmental disasters, including climatic change. In this paper and elsewhere we therefore reserve the terms ‘‘climate migrants’’ and ‘‘climate exiles’’ to refer to the
victims of SLR attributed to climate change. The former includes all those who are displaced because of the effects of climate change, while the latter refers to a special category of climate
migrants who will have lost their ability to remain well-functioning members of political societies in their countries, often through no fault of their own. Further, while most climate migrants will
be internally displaced people, or have the opportunity of returning to their countries or regions of origin if adequate adaptation measures were taken, climate exiles will be forced to become
permanently stateless in the absence of other remedies. Duties to Climate Exiles Our fundamental argument is that humanity
carries a special obligation to
whose homes, means of livelihood, and membership in states will be lost specifically
as a result of sea-level rise caused by climate change. We draw upon the principle of intergenerational equity, wherein each generation is collectively responsible for
present and future generations of people
protecting and using natural resources in a sustainable manner so that future generations are not unduly harmed by their present misuse. The recognition of this duty implies, as Joerg Tremmel
suggests, that ‘‘in
spite of the difficulties such as opportunity costs, restricted human ability and foresight, modern collective agents (present governments
and leading industrial companies) have to take their responsibility for future generations seriously.’’9 This responsibility is carried over to representative
agents in the future who share the legacy of causing harm with their forebears but who now have the ability to recognize the suffering that ensues as a result of historical (if not continuing)
actions and can therefore make amends to the sufferers who live in their midst. As we discuss later, this is not always equivalent to an argument for making reparations for past injury.
A2 Competition Bad
Competition in debate is good—it encourages education, strong community, and increases quality of work
GILLESPIE AND GORDON 2006 (William and Elizabeth, Kennesaw State University, “Competition, Role-Playing, and Political Science Education,” Sep 1,
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/5/1/0/0/pages151007/p151007-1.php)
But, for the most part, coaches report that the
competitive element enhances learning in several ways. First, many coaches perceive that
competition motivates their students to put in the time and do their best work. Some indicate that no other means of motivation
is as effective. Engaging in competition allows students to measure their progress. It also provides a goal, raises the stakes
of the activity, and provides more rewards. Second, as one coach said, “the activity faithfully recreates many of the dynamics of the
adversarial model, and my students report learning a lot.” For the goal of substantive learning about how American law functions,
especially in litigation, competition is an essential element. Mock trial allows students to experience some of the processes, constraints, and emotions
associated with competition in a courtroom. Third, the stress of competition itself helps students gain flexibility and adaptability. Many
coaches mention the ability to “think on one’s feet” as a skill that students acquire in the fluid environment of a mock trial
competition. “Competition enhances the learning experience. The students seem to absorb lessons more quickly and
thoroughly under fire,” writes one coach. Another writes: “They also learn to adjust and adapt quickly to the different evaluators. That
is something they don't get from their regular classes.” Fourth, some coaches explain that competing against other schools allows
their students to learn by seeing different approaches to the same case. Representative comments along these lines include: “Students get to
see what other teams do and learn from those experiences.” “[Competition] exposes the students to different techniques and approaches that the other teams use.”
Fifth, many coaches explain that the competition enhances
camaraderie and teamwork among their students. One coach explains that
competition “gives a sense of duty to fulfill an obligation to their fellow teammates.” “Students learn teamwork in an
interactive and dynamic setting,” reports another.
A2 Personal Agency Key
Our model of debate doesn’t trade-off with personal conviction or require you detach yourself from your agency
Hodson ‘9 (Derek Hodson, Professor of Education – Ontario Institute for Studies @ University of Toronto, ‘9
(Derek, “Towards an Action-oriented Science Curriculum,” Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education, Vol. 1, No. 1)
**note: SSI = socioscientific issues
Politicization of science education can be achieved by giving students the opportunity to confront real world issues that
have a scientific, technological or environmental dimension. By grounding content in socially and personally relevant
contexts , an issues-based approach can provide the motivation that is absent from current abstract, de-contextualized
approaches and can form a base from which students can construct understanding that is personally relevant , meaningful
and important. It can provide increased opportunities for active learning, inquiry-based learning, collaborative learning and direct experience of the
situatedness and multidimensionality of scientific and technological practice. In the Western contemporary world, technology is all
pervasive; its social and environmental impact is clear; its disconcerting social implications and disturbing moral-ethical dilemmas are made
apparent almost every day in popular newspapers, TV news bulletins and Internet postings. In many ways, it is much easier to recognize how technology is
determined by the sociocultural context in which it is located than to see how science is driven by such factors. It is much easier to see the environmental impact of
technology than to see the ways in which science impacts on society and environment. For these kinds of reasons, it makes
good sense to use problems
and issues in technology and engineering as the major vehicles for contextualizing the science curriculum . This is
categorically not an argument against teaching science; rather, it is an argument for teaching the science that informs an understanding
of everyday technological problems and may assist students in reaching tentative solutions about where they stand on key SSI.
A2 Kappeler
Kappeler is wrong – roleplaying is key to democracy and engagement
Rawls 99 (John, Professor Emeritus – Harvard University, The Law of Peoples, p. 54-7)
Developing the Law of Peoples within a liberal conception of justice, we work out the ideals and principles of the foreign policy of a reasonably just liberal people. I distinguish between the public
reason of liberal peoples and the public reason of the Society of Peoples. The first is the public reason of equal citizens of domestic society debating the constitutional essentials and matters of
basic justice concerning their own government; the second is the public reason of free and equal liberal peoples debating their mutual relations as peoples. The Law of Peoples with its political
concepts and principles, ideals and criteria, is the content of this latter public reason. Although these two public reasons do not have the same content, the role of public reason among free and
equal peoples is analogous to its role in a constitutional democratic regime among free and equal citizens. Political liberalism proposes that, in a constitutional democratic regime, comprehensive
doctrines of truth or of right are to be replaced in public reason by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. Here note the parallel: public reason is invoked by
members of the Society of Peoples, and its principles are addressed to peoples as peoples. They are not expressed in terms of comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right, which may hold sway in
ideal of public reason. In domestic
realized, or satisfied, whenever judges, legislators, chief executives, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow
the idea of public reason and explain to other citizens their reasons for supporting fundamental political questions in terms of the political conception of justice that
this or that society, but in terms that can be shared by different peoples. 6.2. Ideal of Public Reason. Distinct from the idea of public reason is the
society this ideal is
they regard as the most reasonable. In this way they fulfill what I shall call their duty of civility to one another and to other citizens. Hence whether judges, legislators, and chief executives act
from and follow public reason is continually shown in their speech and conduct. How is the ideal of public reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative
government, citizens vote for representatives-chief executives, legislators, and the like-not for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote directly on referenda questions,
citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask
disposition of
citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and
social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility
and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is
which are not usually fundamental questions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally,
themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact.7l When firm and widespread, the
an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech.
Also that turns the case – key to social change
Milbrath ’96 (Lester W., Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology – SUNY Buffalo, Building Sustainable Societies, Ed. Pirages, p. 289)
In some respects personal change cannot be separated from societal change. Societal transformation will not be successful without change at the personal level; such
change is a necessary but not sufficient step on the route to sustainability. People hoping to live sustainably must adopt new beliefs, new values, new lifestyles, and new
worldview. But lasting
personal change is unlikely without simultaneous transformation of the socioeconomic/political system in which
to change, but that resolve is likely to weaken as they perform day-today within a system
reinforcing different beliefs and values. Change agents typically are met with denial and great resistance. Reluctance to challenge mainstream
society is the major reason most efforts emphasizing education to bring about change are ineffective. If societal transformation must be speedy, and most
of us believe it must, pleading with individuals to change is not likely to be effective.
people function. Persons may solemnly resolve
A2 Hicks and Greene
Hicks and Greene are wrong—switch-side debate is good and any alternative links worse to their criticism of debate
STANNARD 2006 (Matt, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Wyoming, Spring 2006 Faculty Senate Speaker Series Speech, April 18,
http://theunderview.blogspot.com/2006/04/deliberation-democracy-and-debate.html)
If it is indeed true that debate inevitably produces other-oriented deliberative discourse at the expense of students' confidence in their first-order convictions, this would
indeed be a trade-off worth criticizing. In all fairness, Hicks and Greene do not overclaim their critique, and they take care to acknowledge the important ethical and
cognitive virtues of deliberative debating. When represented as anything other than a political-ethical concern, however, Hicks
and Greene's critique has
several problems: First, as my colleague J.P. Lacy recently pointed out, it seems a tremendous causal (or even rhetorical) stretch to go from
"debating both sides of an issue creates civic responsibility essential to liberal democracy" to "this civic responsibility
upholds the worst forms of American exceptionalism." Second, Hicks and Greene do not make any comparison of the
potentially bad power of debate to any alternative. Their implied alternative, however, is a form of forensic speech that
privileges personal conviction. The idea that students should be able to preserve their personal convictions at all costs
seems far more immediately tyrannical, far more immediately damaging to either liberal or participatory democracy, than
the ritualized requirements that students occasionally take the opposite side of what they believe. Third, as I have suggested and will
continue to suggest, while a debate project requiring participants to understand and often "speak for" opposing points of view may carry a great deal of liberal baggage, it
is at its core a project more ethically deliberative than institutionally liberal. Where
Hicks and Greene see debate producing "the liberal citizensubject," I see debate at least having the potential to produce "the deliberative human being." The fact that some academic
debaters are recruited by the CSIS and the CIA does not undermine this thesis. Absent healthy debate programs, these
think-tanks and government agencies would still recruit what they saw as the best and brightest students. And absent a
debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal rhetoric, those students would have
little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas. Moreover, if we allow ourselves to believe that it is
"culturally imperialist" to help other peoples build institutions of debate and deliberation, we not only ignore living political
struggles that occur in every culture, but we fall victim to a dangerous ethnocentrism in holding that "they do not value
deliberation like we do." If the argument is that our participation in fostering debate communities abroad greases the
wheels of globalization, the correct response, in debate terminology, is that such globalization is non-unique, inevitable, and
there is only a risk that collaborating across cultures in public debate and deliberation will foster resistance to domination—
just as debate accomplishes wherever it goes. Indeed, Andy Wallace, in a recent article, suggests that Islamic fundamentalism is a byproduct of the
colonization of the lifeworld of the Middle East; if this is true, then one solution would be to foster cross-cultural deliberation among people on both sides of the cultural
divide willing to question their own preconceptions of the social good. Hicks
and Greene might be correct insofar as elites in various cultures
can either forbid or reappropriate deliberation, but for those outside of that institutional power, democratic discussion
would have a positively subversive effect.
*PICs*
“Natural Disaster” PIC
1NC
We advocate the 1AC without its construction of the concept of a “natural disaster”
The construction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a “natural disaster” ignores that it was a social
construct – it is not “natural” that certain populations we’re disproportionately affected based on
class or race – their advocacy is in itself an act of distancing that fails to account for how we create the
conditions for the “disaster” to occur in the first place – turns the thesis of the aff
Clark in 7 <Clark N, 2007 “Living through the tsunami: vulnerability and generosity on a volatile earth”
Geoforum 38: 1127–1139>
The late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of geographical¶ perspectives on hazards that viewed vulnerability as having¶ at least as much to do with the conditions of
everyday¶ social life as with the specific physical events that triggered¶ crisis situations. Drawing on Marxist political economy¶ and other radical traditions, these new
approaches demonstrated¶ how specific
patterns of socio-economic marginalization¶ and powerlessness leave some people living
and¶ working in conditions of vulnerability to hazard which the¶ relatively privileged have a much greater chance of
avoiding.¶ Surveying the Weld at the end of the 1980s, Emel and¶ Peet (1989, p. 68) could assert that: ‘the geography of social¶ Relations determines
the occurrence and extent of natural¶ disasters’.¶ A decade and half later, this notion of a physical trigger¶ activating a set of pre-existing social
vulnerabilities has¶ become well entrenched amongst critical geographers. The¶ tragedy in the Indian Ocean, closely followed by Hurricane¶
Katrina afforded Neil Smith the opportunity to reiterate its¶ premises (2005, unpag):¶ It is generally accepted among environmental
geographers¶ that there is no such thing as a natural disaster .¶ In every phase and aspect of a disaster – causes, vulnerability,¶
preparedness, results and response, and¶ reconstruction – the contours of disaster and the¶ difference between who
lives and who dies is to a¶ greater or lesser extent a social calculus.¶ In an editorial in Society and Space, Jim Glassman followed¶ a similar line
of reasoning, providing the details as¶ they applied to the tsunami’s victims in the Indonesian province¶ of Aceh (2005, pp. 165–166):¶ many of
the population have lived in conditions of¶ poverty or near-poverty throughout the years of economic¶ boom. Those who
lived in small coastal fishing¶ villages eking out a living from the sea were among¶ these, and their susceptibilities to an
event like the¶ tsunami are part and parcel of this poverty.¶ Having observed the burden of suffering falling most heavily¶ on ‘the poorest fishing
communities in the most ramshackle¶ of seaside dwellings’, Philo (2005, pp. 443–444).¶ couched it more questioningly. ‘ Why’, he asked, ‘is it these¶
people, the planet’s most vulnerable due to lacking¶ resources available to others, who are so often the ones ‘in¶ the
way?’¶
No-one here, we should note, is denying the magnitude¶ of the geological trigger event. But it is clear that critical or¶ radical geographers still feel obliged to
push for the full recognition¶ of the social preconditions of disaster. While such¶ assertions are clearly in keeping with the cognitive and analytical¶ styles characteristic of
the modern social sciences,¶ they also manifest the moral-political imperative that has¶ long animated critical inquiry: that which we might call, in¶ the simplest terms, a
desire for justice. Benjamin Wisner¶ expresses it succinctly: ‘The
people in the way whenever a¶ real disaster happens, the poor, the weak,
the hungry,¶ deserve better’ (cited in Philo, 2005, p. 444
2NC Ext
This turns the aff – the conception of a natural disaster not only ignores our own agency in the violent
it creates but also displaces it from similar imperial disasters that are ignored – understanding all
disasters as man-made is crucial to confronting the injustice the aff seeks to prevent
Clark in 7 <Clark N, 2007 “Living through the tsunami: vulnerability and generosity on a volatile earth”
Geoforum 38: 1127–1139>
But what
happens when generosity takes on the guise of¶ excessiveness, rather than insufficiency? And what if it can¶ be
seen to be reaching out across continents and oceans, in¶ advance of any intellectual directives or critical admonitions?¶ As
we saw earlier, the recurring motif in reports on¶ post-tsunami donorship is one of plenitude, in respect to¶ local and international gifting alike.
Earlier accounts of¶ abundant hand-outs of food, superfluous distributions of¶ used clothing and unrestrained monetary
donations have¶ since been appended by accounts of an oversupply of¶ replacement fishing boats, of the doubling up of
inoculations¶ against infectious disease, and even of an overzealous¶ gathering of information and testimonials from traumatised¶ survivors (Tarrant, 2005; Batha, 2005;
Waldman,¶ 2005).¶ What should we make of this? Left-liberal
commentators¶ seem to have moved quickly to revisit the moral
geography¶ of carelessness and culpability in order to contain the¶ evidence of exorbitant generosity, as speedily as they¶
moved to subvert the ‘act of God’ storyline. As soon as the¶ extent of public donation and state pledges became apparent,¶ critics raised the
question of why this disaster had¶ attracted so much attention, where no-less deserving causes¶ had been left wanting .
‘I am bewildered by the world reaction¶ to the tsunami tragedy’, wrote Jones (2005, unpag) in¶ an article entitled ‘A man-made tsunami’ in the UK
Guardian¶ a fortnight after the tragedy. ‘Nobody is making this¶ sort of fuss about all the people killed in Iraq and yet it’s
a¶ human catastrophe of comparable dimensions’. As Pilger¶ (2005, unpag) put it, in the same week: ‘The victims of a¶ great natural
disaster are worthy (though for how long is¶ uncertain) while the victims of man-made imperial disasters¶ are unworthy
and very often unmentionable’ ‘ The other¶ tsunami is worldwide’, he continued ‘causing 24,000 deaths¶ every day from
poverty and debt and division’. ¶ Later, as the massive relief and recovery effort was subjected¶ to assessment and scrutiny, left-liberal criticism¶ became
more pointed. As Mari Marcel Thekaekara put it¶ bluntly in a report in the New Internationalist: ‘The Tsunami¶ tossed up unnecessary, conspicuous,
vulgar spending’¶ (2005, p. 21). International NGOs, in particular, have come¶ under assault for their insensitivity to local
traditions and¶ political complexities, for their lack of accountability and¶ consultation with local representatives and for
their¶ aggressively self-promotional behaviour, while intervening¶ state actors – both local and international – have been¶ charged
with capitalizing on crisis conditions to pursue¶ unjust political and socio-economic agendas or to extend¶ military
presence in the region (Jeganathan, 2005; Korf,¶ 2005, 2006; Glassman, 2005; Nanthikesan, 2005). With¶ some exceptions (Nah and Bunnell, 2005; Greenhough¶ et al.,
2005) most commentators have been reluctant to¶ entertain any hope that responses to the tsunami may have¶ opened up new possibilities or even had unforeseeable
consequences,¶ preferring to focus attention on the ways that¶ the aid effort has reinforced existing structures of inequality¶ and injustice. To return to Neil Smith’s
account (2005,¶ unpag).¶ In communities surrounding the Indian Ocean, ravaged¶ by the tsunami of December 2004, the class and¶ ethnic Wssures of the old societies are
re-etched deeper¶ and wider by the patterns of response and reconstruction.¶ There,
“reconstruction” forcibly prevents local¶ fishermen from
re-establishing their livelihoods, planning¶ instead to secure the oceanfront for wealthy¶ tourists. Locals increasingly call
the reconstruction¶ effort the “second tsunami”.¶ In this way, critical accounts of post-tsunami donation and¶ aid tend to be continuous with the
critique of the structural¶ determinants of vulnerability. Patterns and levels of generosity¶ are, unsurprisingly, attributed to the social
location of¶ actors, with the inference that they are distorted in some¶ sense by slanted or occluded visions of global
affairs. The¶ implication is that potential donors or care-givers should¶ have been better able to assess the situation, and weigh
it¶ against commensurate demands for assistance and attention.¶ Along with reference to ‘common denominators’ or a¶ ‘social calculus’ of
vulnerability, the repeated invoking of¶ an ‘other tsunami’ is suggestive that left-liberal intellectuals¶ see the need for a kind of moral accounting at every stage¶ of
response to disaster. It infers that disasters
unfold within¶ an ‘economy’: a system that provides common ground for¶ evaluating
need and suffering; one that precedes, endures¶ and postdates the particular crisis in question.¶ It is unlikely that there
are thinkers who take vulnerability¶ seriously who would deny its uneven social and geopolitical¶ distribution. And it is
just as unlikely that those who¶ take the ‘event’ of generosity to heart would wish to elevate¶ any aspect of giving or
caring to a position above criticism.¶ Who, after all, would not wish to learn from the preconditions¶ and aftermath of this tragedy, so as improve their¶
efforts to assist, now and in the face of disasters to come?¶ But that does not mean we should be comfortable with¶ every aspect of the critical responses we have
witnessed, nor¶ assume that they hold a monopoly on radical engagement¶ with destruction and suffering. As I argue in the rest of this¶ paper, there is a need for a
supplement, for another kind of¶ story. One that adds and amends but also disturbs the¶ default assumptions of critical engagement.
A2 Perm
The 1ac deployment of the term ALREADY had an effect – it framed the rest of the debate – any link is
not solved by the permutation
.
Jackson 05 Richard Jackson, Lecturer in Politics @ University of Manchester, 2k5 “Language Power and Politics: Critical
Discourse Analysis and the War on Terrorism,” 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, Spring,
http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/jackson1.htm
There are both ontological and normative reasons why a critical analysis of the discourse of the ‘war on terrorism’ is urgently called
for. Ontologically, as a number of important works have reminded us,[5] political reality is a social construct, manufactured through
discursive practices and shared systems of meaning. Language does not simply reflect reality, it actually co-constitutes it. As a
consequence, a fully informed understanding of the current global ‘war on terrorism’ is unattainable in the absence of a critical deconstruction of the official language of
counter-terrorism. From a normative viewpoint, the
enactment of any large-scale project of political violence—such as war or counter-terrorism—
requires a significant degree of political and social consensus and consensus is not possible without language. The process of
inducing consent—of normalising the practice of counter-terrorist war—requires more than just propaganda or so-called ‘public diplomacy’; it
actually requires the construction of a whole new language, or a kind of public narrative, that manufactures approval while
simultaneously suppressing individual doubts and wider political protest. To put it another way, power is a social phenomenon
and constantly needs to be legitimated; language is the medium of legitimation.[6] Thus, the deployment of language by
politicians is an exercise of power and without rigorous public interrogation and critical examination, unchecked power
inevitably becomes abusive. This is never truer than during times of national crisis when the authorities assume enhanced powers to deal with perceived
threats. Academics that live within a relatively open society have a normative responsibility to act as constructive critics and to
challenge the lies and obfuscations of government; this is critical for the strengthening of civil society.[7] Alarmingly, the abuse of state power under
the banner of the ‘war on terrorism’ is already well advanced—from the unconstitutional powers to try ‘enemy combatants’ in secret trials to the manipulation of
intelligence information about Iraq and the unconstitutional violation of civil liberties in America, Britain and elsewhere. The
systematic and institutionalised
abuse of Iraqi prisoners first exposed in April 2004 is a direct consequence of the language used by senior administration officials:
conceiving of terrorist suspects as ‘evil’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘faceless enemies of freedom’ (and with hoods on they really are faceless) creates an
atmosphere where abuses become normalised and tolerated. There is therefore, an ethical duty to cross examine and
scrutinise the language of political leaders, to challenge what they say, rather than just passively and uncritically absorb it or
reproduce it in academic discourse.
our language shapes our reality as soon as we use it
Arieli 84 Prof History Hebrew Univ [Yehoshua, "History as Reality," Images and Reality in International Politics, p. 58-59 ]
All expressions and dimensions of human life are permeated and shaped by representations (Vorstellungen,) ideas, conceptions
beliefs purposes and ages that transform the basic and recurrent biological and psychological needs and behavior patterns
into a world dominated by meanings and mental constructs, images and symbols. They are constituent parts of human
reality. We can neither conceive nor understand the individual and society unless we relate to mental constructs and
images inherent in their make-up. The units comprising social reality are conscious agents, a myriad of wills, minds, mentalities and behavior patterns held
together by semiconscious and conscious relations that contain structures of meanings and images of a meta- natural world. The way to understand this
world is by understanding its language and forms of communication; by analyzing the intentions, motives, conceptions and
purposes embodied in actions, Institutions and patterns of behavior, as well as the nature and the logic of the relations
between individuals and groups; by taking account of material, social and mental resources organized for the satisfaction of
needs and the employment of power While images and representations of nature cannot influence or change nature unless an action taken is based on a
correct understanding of its structure, images about nature or the human world can change human reality irrespective of their truth
value, as soon as they are translated into actions and patterns of behavior and gain power over the minds of men [people]
Severance Bad
Severance destroys accountability
Harris, Grainger and Mullany ‘6[Sandra (Professor Emeritus at Nottingham Trent University); Karen (Lecturer in
Communications at Sheffield Hallam College); Louise (Professor Linguistics at University of Nottingham); “The pragmatics of
political apologies”; Discourse Society 17 //nick]
In reply to an audience member who responded to this statement by Patricia Hewitt by shouting ‘You haven’t’, and the prolonged applause for another woman who
argued that Mr Blair’s conference ‘apology’ really meant ‘That is saying I’m able to apologize but I’m not actually apologising’, Ms Hewitt made the following statement to the Question Time
audience: I certainly want to say that all of us, from the Prime Minister down, all of us who were involved in making an incredibly difficult decision are very sorry and do apologize for the fact that that information was
wrong – but I don’t think we were wrong to go in. It was primarily these words which sparked off the very considerable public debate and controversy which followed. Major newspapers headlined
Ms Hewitt’s ‘apology’ the next day; a member of the Government appeared on the Radio 4 early morning Today programme; clips from Question Time appeared on the
news the next evening; BBC News invited its listeners worldwide to respond by expressing their views as to whether ‘Patricia Hewitt was right to apologise’ online; Michael
Howard (the then Leader of the Opposition) further demanded an apology from the Prime Minister in Parliament the following week in Prime Minister’s Question Time
(13 October 2004). At a time when it had become increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and the
Prime Minister’s
decision to go to war in Iraq was being undermined by arguments not so much concerning the validity of intelligence
reports but as to how they were interpreted and used by the Government, it is interesting that the controversy should centre not
only on the increasing demand for a political apology but on the substance and nature of that apology. If we look at what Ms Hewitt actually said, she
uses both of the explicit Ifid words, i.e. ‘sorry’ (intensified) and ‘apologise’. She emphasizes by way of explanation that the decision to go to war was an ‘incredibly difficult’
one and that ‘the [intelligence] information was wrong’. Moreover, she also in her statement assumes some kind of collective responsibility; her ‘apology’ is on behalf not
only of the Prime Minister but of ‘all of us’ who were involved. Thus, on the surface, this looks very like an apology, and, indeed, it was widely reported in the media as the
‘first direct apology to be made by a senior member of the Government’. It is interesting to note how The Daily Telegraph (9/10/04: 10), for example, defines such a
speech act. ‘Miss Hewitt issued her direct apology, using the word “sorry”’, contrasting this usage with Mr Blair and other ministers, who have ‘studiously avoided using
the word “sorry” in this context’. Downing Street, on the other hand, claimed that Ms Hewitt was not saying anything that Mr Blair had not said already, i.e. ‘All she was
doing was echoing precisely what the Prime Minster had said, which is, of course, that we regret the fact that some information was wrong’ (cited in The Daily Telegraph,
9/10/04). In a sense, Downing Street is right. In terms of the taxonomy of the strategies which constitute an apology as an identifiable speech act, Ms Hewitt has used
both the explicit Ifid words, but her collective responsibility is a spurious one, since it relates to an ‘offence’ committed (implicitly) by the intelligence services (producing
wrong information) rather than the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister. Hence, the Ifid ‘sorry’ becomes necessarily ‘sorry’ as regret, as the Downing Street statement
which followed Hewitt’s ‘apology’ makes explicit. Because
‘sorry’ as regret carries no acceptance of responsibility or accountability, the
‘offence’ becomes an implicit part of the explanation, even a justification for an ‘incredibly difficult decision’. Reparation, forbearance,
absolution are not appropriate in such circumstances. Moreover, Ms Hewitt concludes her ‘apology’ with a statement (‘but I don’t think we were wrong to go in’) which
contradicts the demand made by the questioner, i.e. that the Prime Minister should apologize for taking the British nation to war in Iraq. However, though nearly all forms
of media who report the Question Time encounter refer to Hewitt’s statement as an ‘apology’, thus at least implicitly categorizing it as such, most of them do call into
question in various ways its nature and substance. The many viewers who responded to BBC News are even more critical and also, perhaps surprisingly, more discerning,
despite the fact that the invitation was headlined: ‘Ms Hewitt is the first senior member of the government to make a direct apology for the intelligence failings’ and the
question worded as ‘Was Patricia Hewitt right to apologise? Does the apology draw a line under the debate over WMD?’, all of which accept as a presupposition that an
apology has been made. The most frequent question raised by both the press and viewers has to do with accountability, i.e. that a ‘proper’ apology involves the
acceptance of personal responsibility for the ‘offence’ by the apologizer. Hence, Patricia Hewitt’s apology is faulty both because she’s apologizing for something for which
she bears no responsibility (‘What does Patricia Hewitt have to do with the security services?’, as one viewer asks) and for the ‘wrong’ offence, i.e. that it was the Prime
Minister’s misrepresentation of the intelligence reports, not the intelligence reports in themselves, which was wrong (‘I asked him [the Prime Minister] very specifically
about the way in which he misrepresented the intelligence that he received to the country. Why can he not bring himself to say sorry for that?’ – Michael Howard in the
House of Commons, 13 October 2004). Both the press and large numbers of viewers, like Michael Howard, question the acceptability of Hewitt’s remarks on these
grounds. Perhaps partly because Hewitt’s ‘apology’ comes to exemplify what is seen as the failure of a number of leading politicians to accept accountability, viewers, like
the press, also question the ultimate significance of political apologies which appear to be unconnected with meaningful action, both in terms of rectifying the damage
caused by the ‘offence’ (‘An apology won’t bring back the lives of the servicemen lost, nor the civilians, nor rectify the damage, nor pay back the £5bn cost, nor call off the
insurgents and terrorists, nor free Ken Bigley’ – BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04) and as an indication of the (lack of) seriousness of the politician’s sense of remorse
(‘The only apology that I would accept is the apology of resignation’ – BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04). Examining the controversy which followed Ms Hewitt’s
Question Time statement has highlighted the complexity of political apologies in relationship to the interpersonal types usually explored in the apology literature – or at
least has demonstrated that different types of complexity are involved. First of all, it is clear that the use of one of the two explicit Ifids (‘sorry’ and ‘apologize’) appear to
be crucial according to the judgements/evaluations of both the press and viewers in order to categorize what a politician says as an apology. The widespread
categorization of Patricia Hewitt’s statement by the press as ‘the first direct apology by a senior minister’ appears to relate to her use of these Ifids. Tony Blair’s
conference statement, on the other hand (‘I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam’)
is ambiguous in its use of ‘can’ as to whether that speech act is actually being performed, and the clear emphasis is, in any case, on his refusal to apologize for the act cited
in the latter half of the sentence. Indirection in a political apology is likely to be perceived negatively as evasion and shiftiness. Second, there are clearly disputes over who
should apologize; hence, the reaction of much of the press and many viewers who write in online that Patricia Hewitt is not the appropriate person to apologize for
something for which she had minimal or no responsibility. There is also the question of the ‘offence’ itself, which in the Question Time challenge by the studio audience is
related to the decision to go to war in Iraq, but in the apology becomes that the information provided by the intelligence services was wrong. And, perhaps most
significant, to whom is the apology being made? Who are the victim/s? Unlike Mr Blair’s apology for the ‘injustice’ to those wrongly convicted for the IRA pub bombings,
where the victims are named, there are no victims indicated in Ms Hewitt’s apology. The implication in the studio audience challenge is that it is the British people to
whom an apology for the decision to go to war in Iraq should be addressed, for having been misled, but the implications are probably even wider than that. (If there is an
implicit meaning in the apology statement itself, it is that the Government itself has been ‘victimized’ by having been provided with faulty intelligence, especially since Ms
Hewitt clearly states that the act of going to war itself was ‘not wrong’.) In addition, Ms Hewitt’s statement is made in the immediate context in answer to a question
raised by a member of the studio audience, but the reaction of that audience certainly demonstrates that they regard the ‘apology’ as directed at the entire audience
rather than at the specific individual. Ms Hewitt knew that her statement was also being heard by the unseen wider audience who are watching the programme and must
have anticipated that it would be taken up by the press, repeated and published for a wider public yet. Who the ‘victim/s’ are and the nature of the ‘offence’ are clearly
disputed territory which the ‘apology’ does little to clarify. Clearly, the political stakes for the Prime Minister are incredibly high, and whatever his current beliefs about
Iraq or the demands of a substantial number of the British public for an apology for taking the country to war on the basis of faulty (or misrepresented) intelligence, Tony
Blair is unlikely ever to issue a political apology which would satisfy the basic conditions of those demands according to viewer judgements (an Ifid token + an expression
which indicates acceptance of responsibility and/or blame for wrongdoing) – or to resign (absolution).1 Conclusions We would agree with Luke (1997) that ‘the
apology has become a form of political speech with increasing significance and power’ (p. 344), and across the political spectrum on
a global scale has, arguably, become one of the most prominent of ‘public’ speech acts. Even though it may not as yet be ‘the age of the apology’, the
relative lack of interest in the political apology as a generic type of discourse by sociolinguistics and pragmatics is both surprising and unwarranted, since they
demonstrate some revealing differences as well as significant areas of overlap with the type of interpersonal and individual apologies which have been the primary focus
of the now considerable amount of apology research. For example, much of the existing literature on apologies, following Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), adopts a faceneeds perspective, seeing the apology as basically a negative politeness strategy which is aimed mainly at the redress of Face Threatening Acts (see Brown and Levinson,
1978, 1987; Goffman, 1971; Holmes, 1995, 1998). It is certainly the case that many types of political apologies do represent a potentially serious loss of face for politicians,
which may be why they are frequently so eager to apologize for things for which they cannot be held accountable. But to approach political apologies by means of faceoriented definitions is often not particularly helpful and highlights some of the important differences with the interpersonal data on which such definitions are most often
based. Holmes (1998), for instance, defines apologies as follows: An apology is a speech act addressed to B’s face-needs and intended to remedy an offense for which A
takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between A and B (where A is the apologizer, and B is the person offended). (p. 204) Clearly, this is a definition which
assumes that it is two individuals who are involved in the process of apologizing and that addressing the face-needs of the ‘person offended’ is the primary motive for the
speech act, with the restoring of equilibrium its main goal. Such definitions do not take us very far in understanding the significance and issues raised by political
apologies. Given the magnitude of some of the ‘offences’ we have considered, describing what the apology addresses as the ‘face-needs’ of ‘the person offended’ seems
neither accurate nor enlightening. To claim that it is the face-needs of Samantha Roberts which are in some way damaged or that she is ‘the person offended’ seems
somehow to trivialize events which are of a very serious nature. Nor would these terms be very helpful in describing the motives held by the various persons and groups
who call on the British Prime Minister to apologize for taking the country to war in Iraq – or for allegedly misrepresenting the intelligence reports to members of
Parliament. Moreover, the process of restoring ‘equilibrium’ is again likely to be a much more complex process – if it can be achieved at all – than is the case when
apologies are negotiated between individuals acting in a private capacity. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how Robinson’s (2004) notion of a ‘preferred’ response (one which
offers absolution to the apologizer rather than merely accepting the apology) could possibly be applicable in the case of most political apologies. Even in the instance of
fairly low level ‘offences’ such as the British diplomat who described Nottingham as a more dangerous place than Saudi Arabia, city officials agreed to accept the apology
rather than to offer absolution to the ‘offender’. However, Holmes’ emphasis on the apologizer’s accepting responsibility for the offence and Robinson’s argument that
‘Apologizing is an essential component of the maintenance of social harmony because it communicates awareness and acceptance of moral responsibility for offensive
behavior’ (2004: 292) both foreground the essential sense of morality which generates the need for such apologies and which goes well beyond face-needs. What
Samantha Roberts demands is an apology from the Minister for Defence which explicitly accepts his own moral responsibility for the actions which led to her husband’s
death. From both the press and viewers, Ms Hewitt’s political apology produces responses which are concerned essentially with morality, i.e. what is right or wrong, what the politician/s should or should not do; and these responses most often centre on the question of accepting personal
responsibility. Eelen (2001: 249) argues in conjunction with new directions in politeness theory that ‘morality is no longer regarded as a fixed higher-order set of rules that
determine the individual’s behaviour, but as something that people do to – or with – each other’. This seems to us an arguable point but one which is overstated. Though
what constitutes an acceptable political apology may not be based on ‘a fixed higher-order set of rules’, there does seem to exist a cultural consensus that is morally
grounded and goes beyond the merely individual response, i.e. it is right for a politician to offer an apology in which s/he explicitly accepts responsibility for his/her own
acts and wrong to attempt to evade that responsibility. This is not to deny that the political apology is a contested concept or that it not only arises out of discourse
struggle but generates further struggle and controversy. It is that very discourse struggle which is, indeed, part of their interest for linguists and which is reflected in the
substantial amount of media coverage and public debate that political apologies often provoke. However, once again, we would argue that apologies, nearly always
regarded in apology research as a ‘quintessential’ politeness strategy, are more than ‘an argumentative social tool with which the individual can accomplish things’ (Eelen,
2001: 249) and also that political apologies are perceived as more than a politeness strategy. It is interesting that the British data on political apologies which we have
examined contains no references at all to the question of (im)politeness, though that too frequently evokes impassioned public debate. Like Eelen, Mills (2003) also
regards apologies as a contested concept and stresses the importance of ‘evaluation’. ‘Apologies are often composed of elements which cannot be recognised easily by
either interactants or analysts as unequivocal apologies’ (p. 111). Hence, ‘apologies cannot be considered to be a formal linguistic entity (p. 222) but rather ‘a judgement
made about someone’s linguistic performance’ (p. 112). This, again, is probably true in a general sense, and as we maintained earlier, apologies are unlikely ever to be
defined precisely as a fixed set of semantic components. However, once again, though the evaluative component is highly significant, the responses (from both media and
public) to the political apologies in our data are more than merely individuals making disparate judgements about ‘someone’s linguistic performance’. They do instead, we
would argue, reflect a set of cultural expectations as to what constitutes a valid apology as a formal speech act, and, as such, contain also a quite considerable degree of
predictability. Indeed, it is in large measure the fact that listeners and viewers do have
a sense of what constitutes an ‘unequivocal apology’
that perpetuates the discours e struggle. In contrast to many apologies between individuals, which may take a wide variety of forms and often contain a
high degree of implicitness, it seems to be crucial if political apologies are to be regarded as valid by those to whom they are addressed that
they are not implicit or ambiguous, i.e. that they contain an explicit Ifid (‘sorry’ and/or ‘apologize’) and that there is an (explicit) acceptance of personal
responsibility for a stated act which has been committed by the apologizer. The widely expressed cynicism with regard to political apologies which are made by
major politicians long after the events concerned have occurred and for which they cannot be accountable reflects these cultural expectations, along with the clear sense
that apologies are morally grounded.
Rhetorical accountability is key to value to life and education.
Blitefield ‘6 [Jerry (Professor at the University of Massachusetts and Dartmouth); Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.4; Book
Reviews //nick]
Wayne
Booth , who passed away in October 2005, has long been rhetoric's most ardent ambassador, having pressed his claim for rhetoric's value in the halls of literature,
science, and philosophy. With his last book and self-described "manifesto" The Rhetoric of RHETORIC,
back-chatter of
academe
and straight to
Booth takes his message beyond
the intramural
the public at large. His case: "that the quality of our lives, moment by moment, depends upon the
quality of our rhetoric " (171), and that the discursive, ethical, and epistemic impoverishment of contemporary democratic politics and
culture results from practicing bad rhetoric, what he calls rhetrickery—"dangerously, often deliberately, deceptive [rhetoric]: just plain cheating that
deserves to be exposed . . . the art of producing misunderstanding" (x). As a mend, Booth posits that by reviving rhetorical education across the
board, by attuning the general population upward toward heightened rhetorical awareness, rhetorical hucksters and cardsharps—from shady
politicians and corporations to the shading press—would find no truck among the people. Or at least a lot less.
“Aid” PIC
1NC
Therefore, [name] and I advocate a critical exploration of the Earth’s oceans without the use of the
word “aid”
“Development cooperation” is a preferable term to “aid” – it better reflects collaboration and current
international trends
Glennie ‘11
Jonathan Glennie, 27 July 2011, “Development co-operation: aid by any other name”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/globaldevelopment/poverty-matters/2011/jul/27/aid-and-development-coordination
It's official. Rich
countries no longer give "aid", they engage in "development co-operation". The word "aid" has been all but
erased from the declaration set to come out of the fourth high level forum on aid effectiveness, taking place in Busan, South Korea, later this year. In its
place is a concept that emphasises not charity or rich donor-poor recipient relationships, but working together for a
common good.
I have done my own little nerdish word-cloud of the draft outcome document, and the results are instructive.
In the Paris declaration, written in 2005, the word "aid" is used 57 times, while "co-operation" only gets two mentions. In Accra,
the follow-up to Paris in 2008, there is a slight movement towards co-operation, partly as a consequence of south-south co-operation becoming recognised in
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) donor circles. Aid is still the predominant term, used 48 times, but co-operation makes 12 appearances.
in the draft Busan declaration, circulated earlier this month, "aid" is all but banished as the term to describe money transfers from
it is used only six times in the whole document, while co-operation is
used 41 times, reversing the previous language trends.
The reasons for this shift are clear. As developing country voices, including the powerful emerging donors, are increasingly heard in
international relations, and particularly in the corridors of the OECD, so the term "aid" feels ever more old-fashioned. In this context the decision by
But
rich to poor countries. Not counting jargon (such as "aid-for-trade")
Britain's Department for International Development a few years ago to brand itself as UKaid appears even more regressive than it did originally.
Emerging donors prefer concepts that emphasise collaboration, and the development professionals within the DAC donors are leading
the way in language modification to fit in with a new reality. At a recent debate hosted by the Overseas Development Institute, Brian Atwood, the
chairman of the OECD's development assistance committee (DAC) and the man ultimately responsible for making a success of the Busan meeting, expressed his dislike of
the term "aid".
it is a move in the right direction. Apart from a more equal relationship between
countries, it also implies development relationships that go beyond aid, ie the transfer of cash.
So is this linguistic shift a good thing? On the one hand,
Power-over ideologies destroy genuine democratic cooperation, is the root cause of antagonism and
divisiveness and ensures peace will always remain a pipe dream – turns the aff
Chew 98 (Lian, Phyllis, Sr. Lecturer @ School of Arts, Nanyang Technological Univ, “The Challenge of Unity: Women, Peace
and Power”,http://action.web.ca/home/cpcc/attach/Women%20Peace%20and%20Power.htm)
The dominance of the masculine principle has also resulted in the
possession of power as a much sought-after value. This can be
seen in the fact that nations, religions and classes have often thought that it was good to have power over others by
thinking of themselves as superior in some way. Indeed, it is because of the high value given to power that the sexes have not been treated as
equal. It is argued that as long as power remains a predominant value, there can be no hope for world peace. For society to become
more balanced, relationships based on power and domination, which are the main causes of antagonism and divisiveness, have
to be abandoned in favor of more cooperation and equality. Authoritarian modes of behavior have to be
discarded and dictatorial methods of government replaced with true democracy and meaningful, free participation of all citizens.
2NC Ext
The term “aid” jeopardizes public engagement and NGO missions
Darnton ‘11
Andrew Darnton, independent researcher, and lead author of Finding Frames, 28 March 2011, “Aid: why are we still stuck in 1985?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/mar/28/aid-public-perceptions
It is our contention that it is time to have another go at breaking that legacy, once and for all. We have marshalled a body of theoretical and empirical evidence around
values and frames, which we use as lenses through which to see the problem of public engagement. Through these lenses
we also point to solutions, for ways
out of this stalemate in public engagement.
We do not dictate the solutions though, as it is critical that the development sector comes together to work them out for themselves, in collaboration. Whatever the new
the frames we find will need to enable NGOs to keep
raising the revenue they need now, but without jeopardising public engagement over the longer term.
frames for global development are, they will need to work for all organisations. Most obviously,
Happily, we think there are solutions out there: at community level, in faith groups, in academic thought, and in development as it is taking place in the global south (not
least through south-south partnerships).
All this amounts to a big change in how NGOs pursue their missions to end global poverty – from how they draft their business plans, to
how they fundraise, campaign, or work with their volunteers. Most strikingly, it suggests they should frame their messages differently; seen
from this perspective, "charity" "aid" and "development" are all problematic terms.
A2 Perm
The 1ac deployment of the term ALREADY had an effect – it framed the rest of the debate – any link is
not solved by the permutation
.
Jackson 05 Richard Jackson, Lecturer in Politics @ University of Manchester, 2k5 “Language Power and Politics: Critical
Discourse Analysis and the War on Terrorism,” 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, Spring,
http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/jackson1.htm
There are both ontological and normative reasons why a critical analysis of the discourse of the ‘war on terrorism’ is urgently called
for. Ontologically, as a number of important works have reminded us,[5] political reality is a social construct, manufactured through
discursive practices and shared systems of meaning. Language does not simply reflect reality, it actually co-constitutes it. As a
consequence, a fully informed understanding of the current global ‘war on terrorism’ is unattainable in the absence of a critical deconstruction of the official language of
counter-terrorism. From a normative viewpoint, the
enactment of any large-scale project of political violence—such as war or counter-terrorism—
requires a significant degree of political and social consensus and consensus is not possible without language. The process of
inducing consent—of normalising the practice of counter-terrorist war—requires more than just propaganda or so-called ‘public diplomacy’; it
actually requires the construction of a whole new language, or a kind of public narrative, that manufactures approval while
simultaneously suppressing individual doubts and wider political protest. To put it another way, power is a social phenomenon
and constantly needs to be legitimated; language is the medium of legitimation.[6] Thus, the deployment of language by
politicians is an exercise of power and without rigorous public interrogation and critical examination, unchecked power
inevitably becomes abusive. This is never truer than during times of national crisis when the authorities assume enhanced powers to deal with perceived
threats. Academics that live within a relatively open society have a normative responsibility to act as constructive critics and to
challenge the lies and obfuscations of government; this is critical for the strengthening of civil society.[7] Alarmingly, the abuse of state power under
the banner of the ‘war on terrorism’ is already well advanced—from the unconstitutional powers to try ‘enemy combatants’ in secret trials to the manipulation of
intelligence information about Iraq and the unconstitutional violation of civil liberties in America, Britain and elsewhere. The
systematic and institutionalised
abuse of Iraqi prisoners first exposed in April 2004 is a direct consequence of the language used by senior administration officials:
conceiving of terrorist suspects as ‘evil’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘faceless enemies of freedom’ (and with hoods on they really are faceless) creates an
atmosphere where abuses become normalised and tolerated. There is therefore, an ethical duty to cross examine and
scrutinise the language of political leaders, to challenge what they say, rather than just passively and uncritically absorb it or
reproduce it in academic discourse.
our language shapes our reality as soon as we use it
Arieli 84 Prof History Hebrew Univ [Yehoshua, "History as Reality," Images and Reality in International Politics, p. 58-59 ]
All expressions and dimensions of human life are permeated and shaped by representations (Vorstellungen,) ideas, conceptions
beliefs purposes and ages that transform the basic and recurrent biological and psychological needs and behavior patterns
into a world dominated by meanings and mental constructs, images and symbols. They are constituent parts of human
reality. We can neither conceive nor understand the individual and society unless we relate to mental constructs and
images inherent in their make-up. The units comprising social reality are conscious agents, a myriad of wills, minds, mentalities and behavior patterns held
together by semiconscious and conscious relations that contain structures of meanings and images of a meta- natural world. The way to understand this
world is by understanding its language and forms of communication; by analyzing the intentions, motives, conceptions and
purposes embodied in actions, Institutions and patterns of behavior, as well as the nature and the logic of the relations
between individuals and groups; by taking account of material, social and mental resources organized for the satisfaction of
needs and the employment of power While images and representations of nature cannot influence or change nature unless an action taken is based on a
correct understanding of its structure, images about nature or the human world can change human reality irrespective of their truth
value, as soon as they are translated into actions and patterns of behavior and gain power over the minds of men [people]
Severance Bad
Severance destroys accountability
Harris, Grainger and Mullany ‘6[Sandra (Professor Emeritus at Nottingham Trent University); Karen (Lecturer in
Communications at Sheffield Hallam College); Louise (Professor Linguistics at University of Nottingham); “The pragmatics of
political apologies”; Discourse Society 17 //nick]
In reply to an audience member who responded to this statement by Patricia Hewitt by shouting ‘You haven’t’, and the prolonged applause for another woman who
argued that Mr Blair’s conference ‘apology’ really meant ‘That is saying I’m able to apologize but I’m not actually apologising’, Ms Hewitt made the following statement to the Question Time
audience: I certainly want to say that all of us, from the Prime Minister down, all of us who were involved in making an incredibly difficult decision are very sorry and do apologize for the fact that that information was
wrong – but I don’t think we were wrong to go in. It was primarily these words which sparked off the very considerable public debate and controversy which followed. Major newspapers headlined
Ms Hewitt’s ‘apology’ the next day; a member of the Government appeared on the Radio 4 early morning Today programme; clips from Question Time appeared on the
news the next evening; BBC News invited its listeners worldwide to respond by expressing their views as to whether ‘Patricia Hewitt was right to apologise’ online; Michael
Howard (the then Leader of the Opposition) further demanded an apology from the Prime Minister in Parliament the following week in Prime Minister’s Question Time
(13 October 2004). At a time when it had become increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and the
Prime Minister’s
decision to go to war in Iraq was being undermined by arguments not so much concerning the validity of intelligence
reports but as to how they were interpreted and used by the Government, it is interesting that the controversy should centre not
only on the increasing demand for a political apology but on the substance and nature of that apology. If we look at what Ms Hewitt actually said, she
uses both of the explicit Ifid words, i.e. ‘sorry’ (intensified) and ‘apologise’. She emphasizes by way of explanation that the decision to go to war was an ‘incredibly difficult’
one and that ‘the [intelligence] information was wrong’. Moreover, she also in her statement assumes some kind of collective responsibility; her ‘apology’ is on behalf not
only of the Prime Minister but of ‘all of us’ who were involved. Thus, on the surface, this looks very like an apology, and, indeed, it was widely reported in the media as the
‘first direct apology to be made by a senior member of the Government’. It is interesting to note how The Daily Telegraph (9/10/04: 10), for example, defines such a
speech act. ‘Miss Hewitt issued her direct apology, using the word “sorry”’, contrasting this usage with Mr Blair and other ministers, who have ‘studiously avoided using
the word “sorry” in this context’. Downing Street, on the other hand, claimed that Ms Hewitt was not saying anything that Mr Blair had not said already, i.e. ‘All she was
doing was echoing precisely what the Prime Minster had said, which is, of course, that we regret the fact that some information was wrong’ (cited in The Daily Telegraph,
9/10/04). In a sense, Downing Street is right. In terms of the taxonomy of the strategies which constitute an apology as an identifiable speech act, Ms Hewitt has used
both the explicit Ifid words, but her collective responsibility is a spurious one, since it relates to an ‘offence’ committed (implicitly) by the intelligence services (producing
wrong information) rather than the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister. Hence, the Ifid ‘sorry’ becomes necessarily ‘sorry’ as regret, as the Downing Street statement
which followed Hewitt’s ‘apology’ makes explicit. Because
‘sorry’ as regret carries no acceptance of responsibility or accountability, the
‘offence’ becomes an implicit part of the explanation, even a justification for an ‘incredibly difficult decision’. Reparation, forbearance,
absolution are not appropriate in such circumstances. Moreover, Ms Hewitt concludes her ‘apology’ with a statement (‘but I don’t think we were wrong to go in’) which
contradicts the demand made by the questioner, i.e. that the Prime Minister should apologize for taking the British nation to war in Iraq. However, though nearly all forms
of media who report the Question Time encounter refer to Hewitt’s statement as an ‘apology’, thus at least implicitly categorizing it as such, most of them do call into
question in various ways its nature and substance. The many viewers who responded to BBC News are even more critical and also, perhaps surprisingly, more discerning,
despite the fact that the invitation was headlined: ‘Ms Hewitt is the first senior member of the government to make a direct apology for the intelligence failings’ and the
question worded as ‘Was Patricia Hewitt right to apologise? Does the apology draw a line under the debate over WMD?’, all of which accept as a presupposition that an
apology has been made. The most frequent question raised by both the press and viewers has to do with accountability, i.e. that a ‘proper’ apology involves the
acceptance of personal responsibility for the ‘offence’ by the apologizer. Hence, Patricia Hewitt’s apology is faulty both because she’s apologizing for something for which
she bears no responsibility (‘What does Patricia Hewitt have to do with the security services?’, as one viewer asks) and for the ‘wrong’ offence, i.e. that it was the Prime
Minister’s misrepresentation of the intelligence reports, not the intelligence reports in themselves, which was wrong (‘I asked him [the Prime Minister] very specifically
about the way in which he misrepresented the intelligence that he received to the country. Why can he not bring himself to say sorry for that?’ – Michael Howard in the
House of Commons, 13 October 2004). Both the press and large numbers of viewers, like Michael Howard, question the acceptability of Hewitt’s remarks on these
grounds. Perhaps partly because Hewitt’s ‘apology’ comes to exemplify what is seen as the failure of a number of leading politicians to accept accountability, viewers, like
the press, also question the ultimate significance of political apologies which appear to be unconnected with meaningful action, both in terms of rectifying the damage
caused by the ‘offence’ (‘An apology won’t bring back the lives of the servicemen lost, nor the civilians, nor rectify the damage, nor pay back the £5bn cost, nor call off the
insurgents and terrorists, nor free Ken Bigley’ – BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04) and as an indication of the (lack of) seriousness of the politician’s sense of remorse
(‘The only apology that I would accept is the apology of resignation’ – BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04). Examining the controversy which followed Ms Hewitt’s
Question Time statement has highlighted the complexity of political apologies in relationship to the interpersonal types usually explored in the apology literature – or at
least has demonstrated that different types of complexity are involved. First of all, it is clear that the use of one of the two explicit Ifids (‘sorry’ and ‘apologize’) appear to
be crucial according to the judgements/evaluations of both the press and viewers in order to categorize what a politician says as an apology. The widespread
categorization of Patricia Hewitt’s statement by the press as ‘the first direct apology by a senior minister’ appears to relate to her use of these Ifids. Tony Blair’s
conference statement, on the other hand (‘I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam’)
is ambiguous in its use of ‘can’ as to whether that speech act is actually being performed, and the clear emphasis is, in any case, on his refusal to apologize for the act cited
in the latter half of the sentence. Indirection in a political apology is likely to be perceived negatively as evasion and shiftiness. Second, there are clearly disputes over who
should apologize; hence, the reaction of much of the press and many viewers who write in online that Patricia Hewitt is not the appropriate person to apologize for
something for which she had minimal or no responsibility. There is also the question of the ‘offence’ itself, which in the Question Time challenge by the studio audience is
related to the decision to go to war in Iraq, but in the apology becomes that the information provided by the intelligence services was wrong. And, perhaps most
significant, to whom is the apology being made? Who are the victim/s? Unlike Mr Blair’s apology for the ‘injustice’ to those wrongly convicted for the IRA pub bombings,
where the victims are named, there are no victims indicated in Ms Hewitt’s apology. The implication in the studio audience challenge is that it is the British people to
whom an apology for the decision to go to war in Iraq should be addressed, for having been misled, but the implications are probably even wider than that. (If there is an
implicit meaning in the apology statement itself, it is that the Government itself has been ‘victimized’ by having been provided with faulty intelligence, especially since Ms
Hewitt clearly states that the act of going to war itself was ‘not wrong’.) In addition, Ms Hewitt’s statement is made in the immediate context in answer to a question
raised by a member of the studio audience, but the reaction of that audience certainly demonstrates that they regard the ‘apology’ as directed at the entire audience
rather than at the specific individual. Ms Hewitt knew that her statement was also being heard by the unseen wider audience who are watching the programme and must
have anticipated that it would be taken up by the press, repeated and published for a wider public yet. Who the ‘victim/s’ are and the nature of the ‘offence’ are clearly
disputed territory which the ‘apology’ does little to clarify. Clearly, the political stakes for the Prime Minister are incredibly high, and whatever his current beliefs about
Iraq or the demands of a substantial number of the British public for an apology for taking the country to war on the basis of faulty (or misrepresented) intelligence, Tony
Blair is unlikely ever to issue a political apology which would satisfy the basic conditions of those demands according to viewer judgements (an Ifid token + an expression
which indicates acceptance of responsibility and/or blame for wrongdoing) – or to resign (absolution).1 Conclusions We would agree with Luke (1997) that ‘the
apology has become a form of political speech with increasing significance and power’ (p. 344), and across the political spectrum on
a global scale has, arguably, become one of the most prominent of ‘public’ speech acts. Even though it may not as yet be ‘the age of the apology’, the
relative lack of interest in the political apology as a generic type of discourse by sociolinguistics and pragmatics is both surprising and unwarranted, since they
demonstrate some revealing differences as well as significant areas of overlap with the type of interpersonal and individual apologies which have been the primary focus
of the now considerable amount of apology research. For example, much of the existing literature on apologies, following Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), adopts a faceneeds perspective, seeing the apology as basically a negative politeness strategy which is aimed mainly at the redress of Face Threatening Acts (see Brown and Levinson,
1978, 1987; Goffman, 1971; Holmes, 1995, 1998). It is certainly the case that many types of political apologies do represent a potentially serious loss of face for politicians,
which may be why they are frequently so eager to apologize for things for which they cannot be held accountable. But to approach political apologies by means of faceoriented definitions is often not particularly helpful and highlights some of the important differences with the interpersonal data on which such definitions are most often
based. Holmes (1998), for instance, defines apologies as follows: An apology is a speech act addressed to B’s face-needs and intended to remedy an offense for which A
takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between A and B (where A is the apologizer, and B is the person offended). (p. 204) Clearly, this is a definition which
assumes that it is two individuals who are involved in the process of apologizing and that addressing the face-needs of the ‘person offended’ is the primary motive for the
speech act, with the restoring of equilibrium its main goal. Such definitions do not take us very far in understanding the significance and issues raised by political
apologies. Given the magnitude of some of the ‘offences’ we have considered, describing what the apology addresses as the ‘face-needs’ of ‘the person offended’ seems
neither accurate nor enlightening. To claim that it is the face-needs of Samantha Roberts which are in some way damaged or that she is ‘the person offended’ seems
somehow to trivialize events which are of a very serious nature. Nor would these terms be very helpful in describing the motives held by the various persons and groups
who call on the British Prime Minister to apologize for taking the country to war in Iraq – or for allegedly misrepresenting the intelligence reports to members of
Parliament. Moreover, the process of restoring ‘equilibrium’ is again likely to be a much more complex process – if it can be achieved at all – than is the case when
apologies are negotiated between individuals acting in a private capacity. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how Robinson’s (2004) notion of a ‘preferred’ response (one which
offers absolution to the apologizer rather than merely accepting the apology) could possibly be applicable in the case of most political apologies. Even in the instance of
fairly low level ‘offences’ such as the British diplomat who described Nottingham as a more dangerous place than Saudi Arabia, city officials agreed to accept the apology
rather than to offer absolution to the ‘offender’. However, Holmes’ emphasis on the apologizer’s accepting responsibility for the offence and Robinson’s argument that
‘Apologizing is an essential component of the maintenance of social harmony because it communicates awareness and acceptance of moral responsibility for offensive
behavior’ (2004: 292) both foreground the essential sense of morality which generates the need for such apologies and which goes well beyond face-needs. What
Samantha Roberts demands is an apology from the Minister for Defence which explicitly accepts his own moral responsibility for the actions which led to her husband’s
death. From both the press and viewers, Ms Hewitt’s political apology produces responses which are concerned essentially with morality, i.e. what is right or wrong, what the politician/s should or should not do; and these responses most often centre on the question of accepting personal
responsibility. Eelen (2001: 249) argues in conjunction with new directions in politeness theory that ‘morality is no longer regarded as a fixed higher-order set of rules that
determine the individual’s behaviour, but as something that people do to – or with – each other’. This seems to us an arguable point but one which is overstated. Though
what constitutes an acceptable political apology may not be based on ‘a fixed higher-order set of rules’, there does seem to exist a cultural consensus that is morally
grounded and goes beyond the merely individual response, i.e. it is right for a politician to offer an apology in which s/he explicitly accepts responsibility for his/her own
acts and wrong to attempt to evade that responsibility. This is not to deny that the political apology is a contested concept or that it not only arises out of discourse
struggle but generates further struggle and controversy. It is that very discourse struggle which is, indeed, part of their interest for linguists and which is reflected in the
substantial amount of media coverage and public debate that political apologies often provoke. However, once again, we would argue that apologies, nearly always
regarded in apology research as a ‘quintessential’ politeness strategy, are more than ‘an argumentative social tool with which the individual can accomplish things’ (Eelen,
2001: 249) and also that political apologies are perceived as more than a politeness strategy. It is interesting that the British data on political apologies which we have
examined contains no references at all to the question of (im)politeness, though that too frequently evokes impassioned public debate. Like Eelen, Mills (2003) also
regards apologies as a contested concept and stresses the importance of ‘evaluation’. ‘Apologies are often composed of elements which cannot be recognised easily by
either interactants or analysts as unequivocal apologies’ (p. 111). Hence, ‘apologies cannot be considered to be a formal linguistic entity (p. 222) but rather ‘a judgement
made about someone’s linguistic performance’ (p. 112). This, again, is probably true in a general sense, and as we maintained earlier, apologies are unlikely ever to be
defined precisely as a fixed set of semantic components. However, once again, though the evaluative component is highly significant, the responses (from both media and
public) to the political apologies in our data are more than merely individuals making disparate judgements about ‘someone’s linguistic performance’. They do instead, we
would argue, reflect a set of cultural expectations as to what constitutes a valid apology as a formal speech act, and, as such, contain also a quite considerable degree of
predictability. Indeed, it is in large measure the fact that listeners and viewers do have
a sense of what constitutes an ‘unequivocal apology’
that perpetuates the discours e struggle. In contrast to many apologies between individuals, which may take a wide variety of forms and often contain a
high degree of implicitness, it seems to be crucial if political apologies are to be regarded as valid by those to whom they are addressed that
they are not implicit or ambiguous, i.e. that they contain an explicit Ifid (‘sorry’ and/or ‘apologize’) and that there is an (explicit) acceptance of personal
responsibility for a stated act which has been committed by the apologizer. The widely expressed cynicism with regard to political apologies which are made by
major politicians long after the events concerned have occurred and for which they cannot be accountable reflects these cultural expectations, along with the clear sense
that apologies are morally grounded.
Rhetorical accountability is key to value to life and education.
Blitefield ‘6 [Jerry (Professor at the University of Massachusetts and Dartmouth); Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.4; Book
Reviews //nick]
Wayne
Booth , who passed away in October 2005, has long been rhetoric's most ardent ambassador, having pressed his claim for rhetoric's value in the halls of literature,
science, and philosophy. With his last book and self-described "manifesto" The Rhetoric of RHETORIC,
back-chatter of
academe
and straight to
Booth takes his message beyond
the intramural
the public at large. His case: "that the quality of our lives, moment by moment, depends upon the
quality of our rhetoric " (171), and that the discursive, ethical, and epistemic impoverishment of contemporary democratic politics and
culture results from practicing bad rhetoric, what he calls rhetrickery—"dangerously, often deliberately, deceptive [rhetoric]: just plain cheating that
deserves to be exposed . . . the art of producing misunderstanding" (x). As a mend, Booth posits that by reviving rhetorical education across the
board, by attuning the general population upward toward heightened rhetorical awareness, rhetorical hucksters and cardsharps—from shady
politicians and corporations to the shading press—would find no truck among the people. Or at least a lot less.
Quotes PIC
1NC
The affirmatives use of quotation around a word they want to call attention is called a scare quotation
- this causes personal distance from politics and it justifies the use of the word
Trask 1997 http://wwwxogs.susx.ac.uk/doc/punctuatiori/node31 .html, Larry
The use of quotation marks can be extended to cases which are not exactly direct quotations. Here is an example: Linguists sometimes employ a technique they call "inverted reconstruction".
The phrase in quote marks is not a quotation from anyone in particular, but merely a term which is used by some people < in this case, linguists. What the writer is doing here is
distancing himself from the term in quotes. That is, he's saying "Look that's what they call it. I'm not responsible for this term."
In this case, there is no suggestion that the writer disapproves of the phrase in quotes, but very often there is a suggestion of disapproval: The Institute for Personal Knowledge is now offering
a course in "self-awareness exercises". Once again, the writer's quotes mean "this is their term, not mine", but this time there is definitely a hint
of a sneer: the writer is implying that although the Institute may call their course "self-awareness exercises", what they're really
offering to do is to take your money in exchange for a lot of hot air. Quotation marks used in this way are informally called scare
quotes. Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase from which you, the writer, wish to distance yourself because you consider that word or
phrase to be odd or inappropriate for some reason. Possibly you regard it as too colloquial for formal writing: possibly you think it's unfamiliar or mysterious; possibly
you consider it to be inaccurate or misleading: possibly you believe it's just plain wrong. Quite often scare quotes are used to express irony or
sarcasm: The Serbs are closing in on the "safe haven" of Gora^@de. The point here is that the town has been officially declared a safe haven by the UN, whereas in fact, as the quote marks
make clear, it is anything but safe. Here's another example: Sharon Stone made dozens of "adult films" before getting her Hollywood break. The phrase 'adult films' is the industry's conventional
label for pornographic films, and here the writer is showing that she recognizes this phrase as nothing more than a dishonest euphemism. It is important to realize this
distancing effect of scare quotes. Quotation marks are not properly used merely in order to draw attention to words, and all those pubs which declare We Sell "Traditional Pub
Food" are unwittingly suggesting to a literate reader that they are in fact serving up microwaved sludge. Some writers perhaps take the use of scare quotes a little too far: I have just been "ripped
off" by my insurance company. Here the writer is doing something rather odd: she is using the phrase 'ripped off', but at the same time she is showing her distaste for this phrase by wrapping it in
quotes. Perhaps she regards it as too slangy, or as too American. Using scare quotes like this is the orthographic equivalent of holding the phrase
at arm's length with one hand and pinching your nose with the other. I can't really approve of scare quotes used in this way. If you think a
word is appropriate, then use it. without any quotes: if you think it's not appropriate, then don't use it. unless you
specifically want to be ironic. Simultaneously using a word and showing that you don't approve of it will only make you
sound like an antiquated fuddy-duddy.
2NC Ext
The use of scare quotes undermines the credibility of the claims - people start to adopt a nihilistic view
of the problem
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy ’03 (26 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 17 "LAW AND TRUTH: PANEL I: LAW & TRUTH:
PRE-MODERNISM, MODERNISM, AND
POST-MODERNISM: Truth, Truths, "Truth," and "Truths" in the Law")
Moreover, not every sentence, not even every declarative sentence, manages to express something true or false; some, for instance, are too indeterminate in meaning to have a truth-value. The
effect of scare quotes is to turn an expression meaning "X" into an expression meaning "so-called 'X'." So scare-quotes
"truth," as distinct from truth, is what is taken to be truth: and scare-quotes "truths," as distinct from truths, are claims,
propositions, or beliefs, which are taken to be truths-many of which are not really truths at all. We humans, after all, are thoroughly
fallible creatures. Even with the best will in the world, finding out the truth can be hard work: and we are often willing, even eager, to take
pains to avoid discovering, or to cover up. unpalatable truths. The rhetoric of truth, moreover, can be used in nefarious ways. Hence an important source of
the idea that truth is merely a rhetorical or political concept: the seductive, but crashingly invalid, argument I call the "Passes-for Fallacy." *6 What passes for truth, the argument goes, is often no
such thing, but only what the powerful have managed to get accepted as such; therefore the concept of truth is nothing but ideological humbug. Stated plainly, this is not only obviously invalid,
but also in obvious danger of undermining itself. If. however, you don't distinguish truth from scare-quotes "truth," or truths from scare-quotes "truths," it can seem irresistible. Nowadays, it
seems, the Passes-for Fallacy is ubiquitous. Perhaps it is rooted in the philosophies of Marx and Freud, in the idea of false consciousness and the "hermeneutics of suspicion."*7 It is enabled by
regimes of propaganda and, in our times, by the overwhelming flood of information, and misinformation, which promotes first credulity and then, as people realize they have been fooled, cynicism.
For when it becomes notorious that what are presented as truths are not really truths at all--that Pravda is full of lies and
propaganda, that the scientific [*19] breakthrough or miracle drug prematurely trumpeted in the press was no such thing-people
become increasingly distrustful of truth-claims, increasingly reluctant to speak of truth without the precaution of
neutralizing quotation marks: until eventually, they lose confidence in the very idea of truth, and formerly precautionary
scare-quotes cease to warn and begin to scoff: "Truth?' Yeah, right!"
Scare quotes rhetoric promotes inaccurate and poor journalism this undermines the
affirmatives ability create change –
Jacobs 4 (Alan, Wheaton College Professor of English, http://www.batesline.com/archives/000481
.html)
Scare quotes have two functions, the first of which is quite straightforward: They allow their users very easily to express incredulity about, and
often contempt for, the views of their political opponents. But they also allow those users to avoid the hard work of thinking up
their own descriptions of events or people or ideas. And they're parasitic: Thev suck all their nourishment from
the host words, contributing nothing of their own. Fisk's sneer quotes—he's not as scary as he'd like to be— allow him to
express his revulsion at the very notion of describing what's happening in Iraq as "liberation," but relieve him of the obligation to say just what
he thinks is happening in that city. Is it (as many left-wing critics have said) a new form of colonization? Ah, but that is a claim too easily refuted,
unless one wishes to stretch the term beyond all historical recognition. Is it occupation? But if so, we would need to have a conversation about
the purposes of occupation, some of which can be better than others. This is all too complicated; it's so much simpler to wheel out the trusty old
inverted commas. (I have a suspicion also that many journalists, even those most addicted to the scare quote,
would say that it's their job merely to report, to describe-leave it to the editorialists and news analysts to offer
positive explanations. But it is surely a curious understanding of reporting that allows the journalist merely, and
just typographically, to cast doubt on the claims of others, without offering any reasons for that doubt or any
alternatives to those claims.)
A2 Perm
The 1ac deployment of the term ALREADY had an effect – it framed the rest of the
debate – any link is not solved by the permutation
.
Jackson 05 Richard Jackson, Lecturer in Politics @ University of Manchester, 2k5 “Language Power and
Politics: Critical Discourse Analysis and the War on Terrorism,” 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of North American Studies, Spring, http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/jackson1.htm
There are both ontological and normative reasons why a critical analysis of the discourse of the ‘war on
terrorism’ is urgently called for. Ontologically, as a number of important works have reminded us,[5] political reality is a
social construct, manufactured through discursive practices and shared systems of meaning. Language
does not simply reflect reality, it actually co-constitutes it. As a consequence, a fully informed understanding of the current
global ‘war on terrorism’ is unattainable in the absence of a critical deconstruction of the official language of counter-terrorism. From a
normative viewpoint, the
enactment of any large-scale project of political violence—such as war or counter-terrorism—
requires a significant degree of political and social consensus and consensus is not possible without
language. The process of inducing consent—of normalising the practice of counter-terrorist war—requires more than
just propaganda or so-called ‘public diplomacy’; it actually requires the construction of a whole new
language, or a kind of public narrative, that manufactures approval while simultaneously suppressing individual
doubts and wider political protest. To put it another way, power is a social phenomenon and constantly needs
to be legitimated; language is the medium of legitimation.[6] Thus, the deployment of language by
politicians is an exercise of power and without rigorous public interrogation and critical examination,
unchecked power inevitably becomes abusive. This is never truer than during times of national crisis when the authorities
assume enhanced powers to deal with perceived threats. Academics that live within a relatively open society have a
normative responsibility to act as constructive critics and to challenge the lies and obfuscations of
government; this is critical for the strengthening of civil society.[7] Alarmingly, the abuse of state power under the banner of the ‘war on
terrorism’ is already well advanced—from the unconstitutional powers to try ‘enemy combatants’ in secret trials to the manipulation of
intelligence information about Iraq and the unconstitutional violation of civil liberties in America, Britain and elsewhere. The
systematic
and institutionalised abuse of Iraqi prisoners first exposed in April 2004 is a direct consequence of the language
used by senior administration officials: conceiving of terrorist suspects as ‘evil’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘faceless
enemies of freedom’ (and with hoods on they really are faceless) creates an atmosphere where abuses become
normalised and tolerated. There is therefore, an ethical duty to cross examine and scrutinise the
language of political leaders, to challenge what they say, rather than just passively and uncritically
absorb it or reproduce it in academic discourse.
our language shapes our reality as soon as we use it
Arieli 84 Prof History Hebrew Univ [Yehoshua, "History as Reality," Images and Reality in International
Politics, p. 58-59 ]
All expressions and dimensions of human life are permeated and shaped by representations (Vorstellungen,)
ideas, conceptions beliefs purposes and ages that transform the basic and recurrent biological and
psychological needs and behavior patterns into a world dominated by meanings and mental constructs,
images and symbols. They are constituent parts of human reality. We can neither conceive nor
understand the individual and society unless we relate to mental constructs and images inherent in their
make-up. The units comprising social reality are conscious agents, a myriad of wills, minds, mentalities and behavior patterns held together
by semiconscious and conscious relations that contain structures of meanings and images of a meta- natural world. The way to
understand this world is by understanding its language and forms of communication; by analyzing the
intentions, motives, conceptions and purposes embodied in actions, Institutions and patterns of
behavior, as well as the nature and the logic of the relations between individuals and groups; by taking
account of material, social and mental resources organized for the satisfaction of needs and the
employment of power While images and representations of nature cannot influence or change nature unless an action taken is based
on a correct understanding of its structure, images about nature or the human world can change human reality
irrespective of their truth value, as soon as they are translated into actions and patterns of behavior and
gain power over the minds of men [people]
Severance Bad
Severance destroys accountability
Harris, Grainger and Mullany ‘6[Sandra (Professor Emeritus at Nottingham Trent University);
Karen (Lecturer in Communications at Sheffield Hallam College); Louise (Professor Linguistics at
University of Nottingham); “The pragmatics of political apologies”; Discourse Society 17 //nick]
In reply to an audience member who responded to this statement by Patricia Hewitt by shouting ‘You haven’t’, and the prolonged applause for
another woman who argued that Mr Blair’s conference ‘apology’ really meant ‘That is saying I’m able to apologize but I’m not actually
apologising’, Ms Hewitt made the following statement to the Question Time audience: I certainly want to say that all of us, from the Prime Minister down, all of us
who were involved in making an incredibly difficult decision are very sorry and do apologize for the fact that that information was wrong – but I don’t think we were wrong to go in. It was primarily these words
which sparked off the very considerable public debate and controversy which followed. Major newspapers headlined Ms Hewitt’s ‘apology’ the
next day; a member of the Government appeared on the Radio 4 early morning Today programme; clips from Question Time appeared on the
news the next evening; BBC News invited its listeners worldwide to respond by expressing their views as to whether ‘Patricia Hewitt was right
to apologise’ online; Michael Howard (the then Leader of the Opposition) further demanded an apology from the Prime Minister in Parliament
the following week in Prime Minister’s Question Time (13 October 2004). At a time when it had become increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein
had no weapons of mass destruction and the
Prime Minister’s decision to go to war in Iraq was being
undermined by arguments not so much concerning the validity of intelligence reports but as to how
they were interpreted and used by the Government, it is interesting that the controversy should centre not only
on the increasing demand for a political apology but on the substance and nature of that apology. If we look at what Ms Hewitt
actually said, she uses both of the explicit Ifid words, i.e. ‘sorry’ (intensified) and ‘apologise’. She emphasizes by way of explanation that the
decision to go to war was an ‘incredibly difficult’ one and that ‘the [intelligence] information was wrong’. Moreover, she also in her statement
assumes some kind of collective responsibility; her ‘apology’ is on behalf not only of the Prime Minister but of ‘all of us’ who were involved.
Thus, on the surface, this looks very like an apology, and, indeed, it was widely reported in the media as the ‘first direct apology to be made by
a senior member of the Government’. It is interesting to note how The Daily Telegraph (9/10/04: 10), for example, defines such a speech act.
‘Miss Hewitt issued her direct apology, using the word “sorry”’, contrasting this usage with Mr Blair and other ministers, who have ‘studiously
avoided using the word “sorry” in this context’. Downing Street, on the other hand, claimed that Ms Hewitt was not saying anything that Mr
Blair had not said already, i.e. ‘All she was doing was echoing precisely what the Prime Minster had said, which is, of course, that we regret the
fact that some information was wrong’ (cited in The Daily Telegraph, 9/10/04). In a sense, Downing Street is right. In terms of the taxonomy of
the strategies which constitute an apology as an identifiable speech act, Ms Hewitt has used both the explicit Ifid words, but her collective
responsibility is a spurious one, since it relates to an ‘offence’ committed (implicitly) by the intelligence services (producing wrong information)
rather than the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister. Hence, the Ifid ‘sorry’ becomes necessarily ‘sorry’ as regret, as the Downing Street
statement which followed Hewitt’s ‘apology’ makes explicit. Because
‘sorry’ as regret carries no acceptance of
responsibility or accountability, the ‘offence’ becomes an implicit part of the explanation, even a
justification for an ‘incredibly difficult decision’. Reparation, forbearance, absolution are not appropriate in such circumstances.
Moreover, Ms Hewitt concludes her ‘apology’ with a statement (‘but I don’t think we were wrong to go in’) which contradicts the demand
made by the questioner, i.e. that the Prime Minister should apologize for taking the British nation to war in Iraq. However, though nearly all
forms of media who report the Question Time encounter refer to Hewitt’s statement as an ‘apology’, thus at least implicitly categorizing it as
such, most of them do call into question in various ways its nature and substance. The many viewers who responded to BBC News are even
more critical and also, perhaps surprisingly, more discerning, despite the fact that the invitation was headlined: ‘Ms Hewitt is the first senior
member of the government to make a direct apology for the intelligence failings’ and the question worded as ‘Was Patricia Hewitt right to
apologise? Does the apology draw a line under the debate over WMD?’, all of which accept as a presupposition that an apology has been made.
The most frequent question raised by both the press and viewers has to do with accountability, i.e. that a ‘proper’ apology involves the
acceptance of personal responsibility for the ‘offence’ by the apologizer. Hence, Patricia Hewitt’s apology is faulty both because she’s
apologizing for something for which she bears no responsibility (‘What does Patricia Hewitt have to do with the security services?’, as one
viewer asks) and for the ‘wrong’ offence, i.e. that it was the Prime Minister’s misrepresentation of the intelligence reports, not the intelligence
reports in themselves, which was wrong (‘I asked him [the Prime Minister] very specifically about the way in which he misrepresented the
intelligence that he received to the country. Why can he not bring himself to say sorry for that?’ – Michael Howard in the House of Commons,
13 October 2004). Both the press and large numbers of viewers, like Michael Howard, question the acceptability of Hewitt’s remarks on these
grounds. Perhaps partly because Hewitt’s ‘apology’ comes to exemplify what is seen as the failure of a number of leading politicians to accept
accountability, viewers, like the press, also question the ultimate significance of political apologies which appear to be unconnected with
meaningful action, both in terms of rectifying the damage caused by the ‘offence’ (‘An apology won’t bring back the lives of the servicemen
lost, nor the civilians, nor rectify the damage, nor pay back the £5bn cost, nor call off the insurgents and terrorists, nor free Ken Bigley’ – BBC
News, World Edition 09/10/04) and as an indication of the (lack of) seriousness of the politician’s sense of remorse (‘The only apology that I
would accept is the apology of resignation’ – BBC News, World Edition 09/10/04). Examining the controversy which followed Ms Hewitt’s
Question Time statement has highlighted the complexity of political apologies in relationship to the interpersonal types usually explored in the
apology literature – or at least has demonstrated that different types of complexity are involved. First of all, it is clear that the use of one of the
two explicit Ifids (‘sorry’ and ‘apologize’) appear to be crucial according to the judgements/evaluations of both the press and viewers in order to
categorize what a politician says as an apology. The widespread categorization of Patricia Hewitt’s statement by the press as ‘the first direct
apology by a senior minister’ appears to relate to her use of these Ifids. Tony Blair’s conference statement, on the other hand (‘I can apologize
for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam’) is ambiguous in its use of ‘can’
as to whether that speech act is actually being performed, and the clear emphasis is, in any case, on his refusal to apologize for the act cited in
the latter half of the sentence. Indirection in a political apology is likely to be perceived negatively as evasion and shiftiness. Second, there are
clearly disputes over who should apologize; hence, the reaction of much of the press and many viewers who write in online that Patricia Hewitt
is not the appropriate person to apologize for something for which she had minimal or no responsibility. There is also the question of the
‘offence’ itself, which in the Question Time challenge by the studio audience is related to the decision to go to war in Iraq, but in the apology
becomes that the information provided by the intelligence services was wrong. And, perhaps most significant, to whom is the apology being
made? Who are the victim/s? Unlike Mr Blair’s apology for the ‘injustice’ to those wrongly convicted for the IRA pub bombings, where the
victims are named, there are no victims indicated in Ms Hewitt’s apology. The implication in the studio audience challenge is that it is the British
people to whom an apology for the decision to go to war in Iraq should be addressed, for having been misled, but the implications are probably
even wider than that. (If there is an implicit meaning in the apology statement itself, it is that the Government itself has been ‘victimized’ by
having been provided with faulty intelligence, especially since Ms Hewitt clearly states that the act of going to war itself was ‘not wrong’.) In
addition, Ms Hewitt’s statement is made in the immediate context in answer to a question raised by a member of the studio audience, but the
reaction of that audience certainly demonstrates that they regard the ‘apology’ as directed at the entire audience rather than at the specific
individual. Ms Hewitt knew that her statement was also being heard by the unseen wider audience who are watching the programme and must
have anticipated that it would be taken up by the press, repeated and published for a wider public yet. Who the ‘victim/s’ are and the nature of
the ‘offence’ are clearly disputed territory which the ‘apology’ does little to clarify. Clearly, the political stakes for the Prime Minister are
incredibly high, and whatever his current beliefs about Iraq or the demands of a substantial number of the British public for an apology for
taking the country to war on the basis of faulty (or misrepresented) intelligence, Tony Blair is unlikely ever to issue a political apology which
would satisfy the basic conditions of those demands according to viewer judgements (an Ifid token + an expression which indicates acceptance
of responsibility and/or blame for wrongdoing) – or to resign (absolution).1 Conclusions We would agree with Luke (1997) that ‘the
apology has become a form of political speech with increasing significance and power’ (p. 344), and
across the political spectrum on a global scale has, arguably, become one of the most prominent of ‘public’ speech acts. Even
though it may not as yet be ‘the age of the apology’, the relative lack of interest in the political apology as a generic type of discourse by
sociolinguistics and pragmatics is both surprising and unwarranted, since they demonstrate some revealing differences as well as significant
areas of overlap with the type of interpersonal and individual apologies which have been the primary focus of the now considerable amount of
apology research. For example, much of the existing literature on apologies, following Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), adopts a face-needs
perspective, seeing the apology as basically a negative politeness strategy which is aimed mainly at the redress of Face Threatening Acts (see
Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Goffman, 1971; Holmes, 1995, 1998). It is certainly the case that many types of political apologies do
represent a potentially serious loss of face for politicians, which may be why they are frequently so eager to apologize for things for which they
cannot be held accountable. But to approach political apologies by means of face-oriented definitions is often not particularly helpful and
highlights some of the important differences with the interpersonal data on which such definitions are most often based. Holmes (1998), for
instance, defines apologies as follows: An apology is a speech act addressed to B’s face-needs and intended to remedy an offense for which A
takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between A and B (where A is the apologizer, and B is the person offended). (p. 204) Clearly,
this is a definition which assumes that it is two individuals who are involved in the process of apologizing and that addressing the face-needs of
the ‘person offended’ is the primary motive for the speech act, with the restoring of equilibrium its main goal. Such definitions do not take us
very far in understanding the significance and issues raised by political apologies. Given the magnitude of some of the ‘offences’ we have
considered, describing what the apology addresses as the ‘face-needs’ of ‘the person offended’ seems neither accurate nor enlightening. To
claim that it is the face-needs of Samantha Roberts which are in some way damaged or that she is ‘the person offended’ seems somehow to
trivialize events which are of a very serious nature. Nor would these terms be very helpful in describing the motives held by the various persons
and groups who call on the British Prime Minister to apologize for taking the country to war in Iraq – or for allegedly misrepresenting the
intelligence reports to members of Parliament. Moreover, the process of restoring ‘equilibrium’ is again likely to be a much more complex
process – if it can be achieved at all – than is the case when apologies are negotiated between individuals acting in a private capacity. Indeed,
it’s hard to imagine how Robinson’s (2004) notion of a ‘preferred’ response (one which offers absolution to the apologizer rather than merely
accepting the apology) could possibly be applicable in the case of most political apologies. Even in the instance of fairly low level ‘offences’
such as the British diplomat who described Nottingham as a more dangerous place than Saudi Arabia, city officials agreed to accept the apology
rather than to offer absolution to the ‘offender’. However, Holmes’ emphasis on the apologizer’s accepting responsibility for the offence and
Robinson’s argument that ‘Apologizing is an essential component of the maintenance of social harmony because it communicates awareness
and acceptance of moral responsibility for offensive behavior’ (2004: 292) both foreground the essential sense of morality which generates the
need for such apologies and which goes well beyond face-needs. What Samantha Roberts demands is an apology from the Minister for
Defence which explicitly accepts his own moral responsibility for the actions which led to her husband’s death. From both the press and
viewers, Ms Hewitt’s political apology produces responses which are concerned essentially with morality, i.e. what is right or wrong, what the politician/s should or should not do; and these responses most often centre on the question of accepting personal
responsibility. Eelen (2001: 249) argues in conjunction with new directions in politeness theory that ‘morality is no longer regarded as a fixed higherorder set of rules that determine the individual’s behaviour, but as something that people do to – or with – each other’. This seems to us an
arguable point but one which is overstated. Though what constitutes an acceptable political apology may not be based on ‘a fixed higher-order
set of rules’, there does seem to exist a cultural consensus that is morally grounded and goes beyond the merely individual response, i.e. it is
right for a politician to offer an apology in which s/he explicitly accepts responsibility for his/her own acts and wrong to attempt to evade that
responsibility. This is not to deny that the political apology is a contested concept or that it not only arises out of discourse struggle but
generates further struggle and controversy. It is that very discourse struggle which is, indeed, part of their interest for linguists and which is
reflected in the substantial amount of media coverage and public debate that political apologies often provoke. However, once again, we would
argue that apologies, nearly always regarded in apology research as a ‘quintessential’ politeness strategy, are more than ‘an argumentative
social tool with which the individual can accomplish things’ (Eelen, 2001: 249) and also that political apologies are perceived as more than a
politeness strategy. It is interesting that the British data on political apologies which we have examined contains no references at all to the
question of (im)politeness, though that too frequently evokes impassioned public debate. Like Eelen, Mills (2003) also regards apologies as a
contested concept and stresses the importance of ‘evaluation’. ‘Apologies are often composed of elements which cannot be recognised easily
by either interactants or analysts as unequivocal apologies’ (p. 111). Hence, ‘apologies cannot be considered to be a formal linguistic entity (p.
222) but rather ‘a judgement made about someone’s linguistic performance’ (p. 112). This, again, is probably true in a general sense, and as we
maintained earlier, apologies are unlikely ever to be defined precisely as a fixed set of semantic components. However, once again, though the
evaluative component is highly significant, the responses (from both media and public) to the political apologies in our data are more than
merely individuals making disparate judgements about ‘someone’s linguistic performance’. They do instead, we would argue, reflect a set of
cultural expectations as to what constitutes a valid apology as a formal speech act, and, as such, contain also a quite considerable degree of
predictability. Indeed, it is in large measure the fact that listeners and viewers do have
a sense of what constitutes an
‘unequivocal apology’ that perpetuates the discours e struggle. In contrast to many apologies between individuals,
which may take a wide variety of forms and often contain a high degree of implicitness, it seems to be crucial if political
apologies are to be regarded as valid by those to whom they are addressed that they are not implicit or ambiguous, i.e. that they
contain an explicit Ifid (‘sorry’ and/or ‘apologize’) and that there is an (explicit) acceptance of personal responsibility for a
stated act which has been committed by the apologizer. The widely expressed cynicism with regard to political apologies which are made by
major politicians long after the events concerned have occurred and for which they cannot be accountable reflects these cultural expectations,
along with the clear sense that apologies are morally grounded.
Rhetorical accountability is key to value to life and education.
Blitefield ‘6 [Jerry (Professor at the University of Massachusetts and Dartmouth); Rhetoric & Public
Affairs 9.4; Book Reviews //nick]
Wayne
Booth , who passed away in October 2005, has long been rhetoric's most ardent ambassador, having pressed his claim for rhetoric's
value in the halls of literature, science, and philosophy. With his last book and self-described "manifesto" The Rhetoric of RHETORIC,
Booth takes his message beyond
the intramural back-chatter of
academe
and straight to
the public at large. His case:
"that the quality of our lives, moment by moment, depends upon the quality of our rhetoric " (171), and that
the discursive, ethical, and epistemic impoverishment of contemporary democratic politics and culture results
from practicing bad rhetoric, what he calls rhetrickery—"dangerously, often deliberately, deceptive [rhetoric]: just plain cheating
that deserves to be exposed . . . the art of producing misunderstanding" (x). As a mend, Booth posits that by reviving
rhetorical education across the board, by attuning the general population upward toward heightened rhetorical
awareness, rhetorical hucksters and cardsharps—from shady politicians and corporations to the shading press—would find no truck among
the people. Or at least a lot less.
*Generic Ks*
Anthro
Link – Liberation
Their focus on liberation requires re-affirmation of a distinction between “human” and “animal” – reentrenches specieism
Kim, UC Irvine political science professor, 2009
(Claire, “Slaying the Beast: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Species”, http://aapf.org/wpcontent/uploads/2009/05/kalfou.pdf)
KIM ‘9 - UC Irvine political science professor (Claire, “Slaying the Beast: Reflections on Race, Culture,
and Species”, http://aapf.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/kalfou.pdf)
Dyson gives a perfunctory nod to the animal question and then turns to focus on the issue of true moral significance and urgency:
racism. It is as if defending the humanity of Black people requires reaffirming the animality of animals,
their categorical subordination . Similarly, feminist Sandra Kobin asks why Vick was treated more
harshly than professional athletes who beat their wives and girlfriends , writing: “Beat a woman? Play on; Beat a dog? You’re gone”
(Kobin 2007). Kobin does not critique dog fighting for its promotion of masculinist violence or show any appreciation of the fact that women and animals are both victims of male
Instead, she bristles at the idea that dogs might be valued more than women and insists that women are
the victims that really matter. What is troubling about the racial persecution narrative advanced by Vick’s
defenders is not that it is wrong per se but that it subsumes, deflects, and ultimately denies the
other moral question being raised, the animal question. Its response to the interdependency of Blackness
and animalness in the white imagination is not to deconstruct both notions but rather to vigorously affirm
that Blacks are human and therefore deserving of better treatment than animals. It is a narrative that
embraces an ideology of human supremacy in the name of fighting white supremacy and
sees no contradiction in this position. It is as if Dyson and Kobin are saying that people of color and women
have the most at stake in reinscribing the impassable line between humans and animals, whereas these
groups may in fact have the most at stake in its erasure. Most humans are unaccustomed to thinking about how their politics reinscribe notions of
human superiority over all other species, but the notion of species-free space is as improbable as that of race-free space.
Categories of difference saturate our thinking, our discourse, our experience, and our actions.
violence.
Link – Seperation/Luke
Identifying an environment separate from nature reduces it to an object to be
managed and manipulated for the good of human populations as interpreted through
technicist discourse
Luke 95 ‘On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism’ Cultural
Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II p.57-81 (Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445
Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
The separation
of organisms from their environments is the primary epistemological divide
cutting through reality in the rhetorics of ecology. This discursive turn goes back to Haeckel's initial 1866
identification of ecology as the science that investigates all of the relations of an organism to its organic and inorganic environments.
Nonetheless, there are differences among ecologists over what these "environments" might be.
Because the expanse of the organic and inorganic environment is so broad, it often is defined in terms delimiting what it is by looking at
what it is not. In other words, it
is the organism, or biotic community, or local ecosystem that ecologists place
at the center of their systems of study, while the environment is reduced to everything
outside of the subject of analysis . With these maneuvers , environments are often transformed
rhetorically into silences, backgrounds, or settings . In this manner, they also are studied and
understood not directly as such, but more indirectly in terms of the objective relations and effects they
register upon the subjects of study they surround. Even so, this inversion of one thing, like an
organism or society, into everything, or the environment, might disclose the nature of the environment only in
relation to this one thing. After all, environmental analysis must reduce "everything" to
measures of "anything" available for measurement (like temperature levels, gas
concentrations, molecular dispersions, resource variations, or growth rates) to track variations in
"something" (like an organism's, a biome's, or a river's responses to these factors). But is it "the environment" that is being
understood here, or is its identity being evaded in reducing it to a subset of practicable measurements? Does this vision of
"environment" really capture the actual quality or true quantity of all human beings'
interrelations with all of the terrains, waters, climates, soils, architectures, technologies,
societies, economies, cultures, or states surrounding them? In its most expansive applications, then, the
environment becomes a strong but sloppy force: it is anything out there, everything around us, something affecting
us, nothing within us, but also a thing upon which we act. Despite its formal definitions, however, the environment is
not, in fact, everything. Many environmental discourses look instead at particular sites or at peculiar forces. The discursive variations and
conceptual confrontations of the "environment" really begin to explode when different
voices accentuate this or that set of things in forming their environmental analysis. On the one
side, they may privilege forces in the ecosphere, or, on the other side, they might stress concerns from the technosphere. But in either
case, each rhetoric which operates as an
agency protecting "the environment" struggles to site
"the environmental" as a somewhere affected by or coming from everything. Perhaps the early
origins of "the environment" as a conceptits historical emergence and original applications-might prove more helpful. In its
original sense, which is borrowed by English from Old French, an environment is an action resulting from, or the
state of being produced by a verb: "to environ." And environing as a verb is, in fact, a type of strategic action. To
environ is to encircle, encompass, envelop, or enclose. It is the physical activity of
surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something. Its uses even suggest stationing guards around, thronging with hostile
intent, or standing watch over some person or place. To environ a site or a subject is to beset, beleaguer, or besiege that place or person.
An environment, as either the means of such activity or the product of these actions, now might be read in a more
suggestive manner. It is the encirclement, circumscription, or beleaguerment of places and persons in a strategic disciplinary
policing of space. An environmental act, in turn, is already a disciplining move, aimed at constructing
some expanse of space-a locale, a biome, a planet as biospherical space, or, on the other hand, some city, any
region, the global economy in technospherical territory-in a discursive envelope. Within these enclosures,
environmental expertise can arm environmentalists who stand watch over these
surroundings, guarding the rings that include or exclude forces, agents, and ideas. If one thinks
about it, this original use
of "the environment" is an accurate account of what is, in fact, happening
in many environmental practices today. Environmentalized places become sites of
supervision, where environmentalists see from above and from without through the enveloping designs of administratively
delimited systems. Encircled by enclosures of alarm , environments can be disassembled, recombined, and
subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management.
Enveloped in these interpretive frames,
environments can be redirected to fulfill the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives, and administrative writs.
Environing, then, engenders "environmentality," which embeds instrumental rationalities in
the policing of ecological spaces.
Turns the Case
A new moral system can only be articulated once we have moved past the unquestioned exploitation
and ignorance of non-human life.
Best, 06 (2006, Steven, PhD, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso, cofounder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), “Rethinking Revolution: Animal Liberation,
Human Liberation, and the Future of the Left,” The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol.
2, No. 3 (June 2006),
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol2/vol2_no3_Best_rethinking_revolution_PRINT
ABLE.htm)
The next great step in moral evolution is to abolish the last acceptable form of slavery that subjugates
the vast majority of species on this planet to the violent whim of one. Moral advance today involves sending
human supremacy to the same refuse bin that society earlier discarded much male supremacy and
white supremacy . Animal liberation requires that people transcend the complacent boundaries of humanism in order to make a
qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity.
Animal
liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process whereby human beings gradually
realize that arguments justifying hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are arbitrary,
baseless, and fallacious. Moral progress occurs in the process of demystifying and deconstructing all
myths ―from ancient patriarchy and the divine right of kings to Social Darwinism and speciesism―
that attempt to legitimate the domination of one group over another . Moral progress advances through the
dynamic of replacing hierarchical visions with egalitarian visions and developing a broader and more inclusive ethical community. Having
recognized the illogical and unjustifiable rationales used to oppress blacks, women, and other
disadvantaged groups, society is beginning to grasp that speciesism is another unsubstantiated form
of oppression and discrimination . The gross inconsistency of Leftists who champion democracy and rights while supporting a
system that enslaves billions of other sentient and intelligent life forms is on par with the hypocrisy of American colonists protesting British
tyranny while enslaving millions of blacks. The
commonalities of oppression help us to narrativize the history of
human moral consciousness, and to map the emergence of moral progress in our culture. This trajectory can
be traced through the gradual universalization of rights. By grasping the similarities of experience and oppression, we
gain insight into the nature of power, we discern the expansive boundaries of the moral community,
and we acquire a new vision of progress and civilization, one based upon ecological and non-speciesist
principles and universal justice.
Speciesism makes possible “systematic beastilization” which justifies non-criminal putting to death of
the other—root cause of all oppression
Rossini, postdoctoral Fellow ASCA, 2006
(Manuela, “To the Dogs: Companion speciesism and the new feminist materialism”, text and image
Volume 3, September, http://intertheory.org/rossini)
What is equally sobering, however, is the fact that the most radical metaposthumanists (and the humanities more broadly) do not quite
manage to make an epistemological break with liberal humanism, insofar as their writing is also marked by an unquestioned “speciesism”; i.e.,
in the definition of ethicist Peter Singer who popularised the term three decades ago in his book Animal Liberation, “a prejudice or attitude of
bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” Both postcolonial, feminist and
queer theories and discussion of subjectivity, identity, and difference as well as the claims on the right to freedom by new social movements
have recourse to an Enlightenment concept of the subject whose conditio sine qua non is the absolute control of that subject over the life of
nonhuman others/objects. The
rhetorical strategy of radically separating non-white, non-male and non-heterosexual human
beings from animals in order to have the subject status of these members of the human species recognised
was and is successful and also legitimate – given that the racist, sexist and homophobic discourse of animality or an
animalistic „nature“ has hitherto served to exclude most individuals of those groups of people from
many privileges – but the speciesist logic of the dominance of human animals over nonhuman animals has
remained in place. If we fight racism and (hetero)sexism because we declare discrimination on the basis of
specific and identifiable characteristics – such as “black“, “woman” or “lesbian“ to be wrong and unjust, then
we should also vehemently oppose the exploitation, imprisoning, killing and eating of nonhuman
animals on the basis of their species identity. Moreover, if our research and teaching as cultural critics endeavours to do justice
to the diversity of human experience and life styles and feel responsible towards marginalised others, should we then not seriously think about
Cary Wolfe’s question „how must our work itself change when the other to which it tries to do justice is no longer human?“
Wolfe is not
making a claim for animal rights here – at least not primarily. This is also why his book puns on “rites/rights“: Animal Rites is the intervention of
the anti-speciesist cultural critic who scrutinizes the rituals that human beings form around the figures of animals, including the literary and
cinematic enactments of cannibalism, monstrosity and normativity. Wolfe subsumes all of these stagings under the heading the discourse of
species, with “discourse“ understood in the sense of Michel Foucault as not only a rhetoric but above all as the condition for the production and
ordering of meaning and knowledge in institutions like medicine, the law, the church, the family or universities. In addition, Wolfe
wants
to sharpen our awareness that a speciesist metaphysics has also a deadly impact on human animals,
especially because speciesism is grounded in the juridical state apparatus: “the full transcendence of the
‘human‘ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal‘ and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic
economy in which we engage in what Derrida [calls] a ‚non-criminal putting to death‘ of other humans as
well by marking them as animal.“ The dog lies buried in the singular: “The animal – what a word!”, Derrida exclaims: “[t]he
animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and authority to give to another
living creature [à l'autre vivant].” In order to problematise this naming, Derrida has created the neologism l'animot: I would like to have the
plural of animals heard in the singular. […] We have to envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within
the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity. […] The suffix mot in l’animot should bring us back to the word […]. It
opens onto the referential experience of the thing as such, as what it is in its being, and therefore to the reference point by means of which one
has always sought to draw the limit, the unique and indivisible limit held to separate man from animal. As I propose in what follows, this clearly
defined caesura of the „anthropological machine”, which according to Giorgio Agamben was already set in motion by the old Greeks and the
messianic thinkers and then accelerated by scientific taxonomies and the birth of anthropology, can be bridged with the help of a zoontological
approach and companion speciesism. Posthumanist zoontologies The desperate cry of the historical person Joseph Carey Merrick (in the movie
The Elephant Man of 1980), “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I...am...a man!” – for recognition of his human identity through which he
claims his right to social integration and personal integrity, is very understandable and hurts. But his words nevertheless reflect the poverty of
the humanist stance, insofar as traditional humanism can only secure the “proper” essence of humanitas via a rigid separation from animalitas.
If one
reads the reports by the victims and witnesses of the tortures in the military prison of Abu Ghraib,
it seems to me that it is precisely the continued insistence and reinforcement of the animal-human
boundary that legitimises the committed atrocities: Some of the things they did was make me sit down like a
dog, … and … bark like a dog and they were laughing at me … One of the police was telling me to crawl … A few days before [this], … the
guy who wears glasses, he put red woman's underwear over my head … pissing on me and laughing on me … he put a part of his stick … inside
my ass … she was playing with my dick … And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances. … [Another prisoner] was forced to
insert a finger into his anus and lick it. He was also forced to lick and chew a shoe. … He was then told to insert his finger in his nose during
questioning … his other arm in the air. The Arab interpreter told him he looked like an elephant. [They were] given badges
with the letter ‘C’ on it. The US soldiers reduce their prisoners to their corporeal being, to animal being, and then make fun of this “bare life“
Instead of accepting their own vulnerability and mortality that they share with their victims as well as
with other living beings, the torturers use the “systematic bestialization“ of the prisoners to strengthen
their own sense of freedom and autonomy and to concomitantly withdraw the right to protection
guaranteed by the humanitarian rights of the Geneva Conventions; after all, as barking dogs, crawling
insects and ‘elephant men’, these ‘creatures’ cannot respond to the name, the word, the interpellation
“human.“ The implicit and explicit analogies between racism, sexism, homophobia that accompany the above
description of the torture methods, confirm that the power of the “discourse of species” to affect human
others depends on the prior acceptance of the institution “speciesism;” i.e. on taking for granted that the
inflicting of pain and the killing of nonhuman animals by human animals does not constitute a criminal
act but, on the contrary, is legal. This is why Derrida speaks of the “carnophallogocentrism“ of Western metaphysics. And here Wolfe’s
argument comes full circle: [Since] the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some
humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever
species – or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. . . we need to understand that the ethical and philosophical
urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to
do with whether you like animals. We all, human and nonhuman alike, have a stake in the discourse and
institution of speciesism; it is by no means limited to its overwhelmingly direct and disproportionate
effects on animals.
We have a better methodology for understanding the historical causes of discrimination
(Sam, “AMERICAN ABATTOIRS”, 12-20, http://samheydt.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/224/, DOA: 8-1811, ldg)
Patriarchy, slavery and the social matrix of speciesism emerged in tandem to one another from the same
region that fathered agriculture in the Middle East during the Chalcolithic Age. Sumer , now modern Iraq, was the first
civilization to engage in core agricultural practices such as organized irrigation and specialized labor with slaves and
animals. They raised cattle, sheep and pigs, used ox for draught their beast of burden and equids for
transport (Sayce 99). The knowledge to store food as standing reserve meant migration was no longer
necessary to survive. The population density bred social hierarchies supported at its base by slaves
(Kramer 47). In Sumer, there were only two social strata’s to belong to: lu the free man and arad the slave (Kramer 47). Technologies
such as branding irons, chains and cages that were developed to dominate animals paved way for the
domination over humans too. The “human rule over the lower creatures provided the mental analogue
in which many political and social arrangements are based” (Patterson 280). Caged and castrated, slaves were
treated no different from chattel. Thousands of years later, the tools developed in the Middle East for
domestication were used by the Europeans during colonization to shackle slaves. “When the European settlers
arrived in Tasmania in 1772, the indigenous people seem not to have noticed them…By 1830 their numbers had been reduced from around five
hundred to seventy-two. In their intervening years they had been used for slave labour and sexual pleasure, tortured and mutilated. They had
been hunted like vermin and their skins had been sold for a government bounty. When the males were killed, female survivors were turned
loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were usually castrated. Children were clubbed to
death.” (Gray 91). This horrific account illustrates how the indigenous people of Tasmania were enslaved , skinned and slaughtered by the
Europeans. Meanwhile across the globe, the
trans-Atlantic slave trade was at its peak in the 18th century. Africans
were taken from their native land, branded , bred , and sold as property. Linguistically these acts of
violence and exploitation are tied to animals- branded, skinned, slaughtered, sold . Be that as it may,
“as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other” (Pythagoras in Patterson 210). Racism, colonialism,
anti-Semitism and sexism all stem from the same systems of domination that initially subjugated animals . Until
we cease to exploit living beings as resources, the threat of man being stripped of his humanity looms. Although we cringe at the inhumane
actions of our ancestors, the scale and efficiency of murder and oppression has only advanced, while the notion of ‘human’ remains
increasingly obscured.
Cap
Link – General
The focus on _____________ becomes an alibi for acquiescence of class struggles – they obscure the
logic of capital and ensure repetition of oppression
Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'Ud, The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production": In the
Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left," College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 3, The Politics of Teaching Literature 2
(Oct., 1994),pp. 92-114)
Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of "production" as the determining force in organizing human
societies and their institutions, and its insistence on "consumption" and "distribution" as the driving force of the
social.5 The argument of the post-al left (briefly) is that "labor," in advanced industrial "democracies," is superseded by
"information," and consequently "knowledge" (not class struggle over the rate of surplus labor) has become the driving
force of history. The task of the post-al left is to deconstruct the "metaphysics of labor" and consequently to announce the end of
socialism and with it the "outdatedness" of the praxis of abolishing private property (that is, congealed alienated labor) in the post-al moment.
Instead of abolishing private property, an enlightened radical democracy which is to supplant socialism (as Laclau, Mouffe, Aronowitz, Butler,
and others have advised) should make property holders of each citizen. The post-al left rejects the global objective conditions of production for
the local subjective circumstances of consumption, and its master trope is what R-4 [France] so clearly foregrounds: the (shopping) "mall"?the
ultimate site of consumption "with all latest high-tech textwares" deployed to pleasure the "body." In fact, the post-al left has "invented" a
whole new interdiscipline called "cultural studies" that provides the new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics from
"production" to "consumption." (On the political economy of "invention" in ludic theory, see Transformation 2 on "The Invention of the
Queer.") To prove its "progressiveness," the post-al left devotes most of its energies (see the writings of John Fiske, Constance Penley, Michael
Berube, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Ross, Susan Willis, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson), to demonstrate how "consumption" is in fact an act of
production and resistance to capitalism and a practice in which a Utopian vision for a society of equality is performed! The shift
from
"production" to "consumption" manifests itself in post-al left theories through the focus on "superstructural" cultural
analysis and the preoccupation not with the "political economy" ("base") but with "representation"? for instance, of race,
sexuality, environment, ethnicity, nationality, and identity. This is, for example, one reason for [Hill's] ridiculing the "base" and
"superstructure" analytical model of classical Marxism (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) with an anecdote (the
privileged mode of "argument" for the post-al left) that the base is really not all that "basic." To adhere to the base/superstructure model for
[him] is to be thrown into an "epistemological gulag." For
the post-al left a good society is, therefore, one in which, as
antagonism is bracketed and the "surplus value" is distributed more evenly among men
and women, whites and persons of color, the lesbian and the straight. It is not a society in which "surplus value"?the
[France] puts it, class
exploitative appropriation of the other's labor-is itself eliminated by revolutionary praxis. The post-al left's good society is not one in which
private ownership is obsolete and the social division of labor (class) is abolished. Rather it
is a society in which the fruit of
exploitation of the proletariat (surplus labor) is more evenly distributed and a near-equality of consumption is established.
This distributionist/consumptionist theory that underwrites the economic interests of the (upper)middle classes is the foundation for all the
texts in this exchange and their pedagogies. A good pedagogy in these texts therefore is one in which power is distributed evenly in the
classroom: a pedagogy that constructs a classroom of consensus not antagonism (thus opposition to "politicizing the classroom" in OR-1
[Hogan]) and in which knowledge (concept) is turned through the process that OR-3 [McCormick] calls "translation"?into "consumable"
EXPERIENCES. The more "intense" the experience, as the anecdotes of [McCormick] show, the more successful the pedagogy. In short, it
is a
pedagogy that removes the student from his/her position in the social relations of
production and places her/him in the personal relation of consumption : specifically,
EXPERIENCE of/as the consumption of pleasure. The post-al logic obscures the laws of motion of capital by very specific assumptions
and moves-many of which are rehearsed in the texts here. I will discuss some of these, mention others in passing, and hint at several more. (I
have provided a full account of all these moves in my "Post-ality" in Transformation 1.) I begin by outlining the post-al assumptions that
"democracy" is a never-ending, open "dialogue" and "conversation" among multicultural citizens; that the source of social inequities is
"power"; that a post-class hegemonic "coalition," as OR-5 [Williams] calls it-and not class struggle-is the dynamics of social change; that truth
(as R-l [Hill] writes) is an "epistemological gulag"? a construct of power and thus any form of "ideology critique" that raises questions of
"falsehood" and "truth" ("false consciousness") does so through a violent exclusion of the "other" truths by, in [Williams'] words, "staking sole
legitimate claim" to the truth in question. Given the injunction of the post-al logic against binaries (truth/falsehood), the project of
"epistemology" is displaced in the ludic academy by "rhetoric." The question, consequently, becomes not so much what is the "truth" of a
practice but whether it "works." (Rhetoric has always served as an alibi for pragmatism.) Therefore, [France] is not interested in whether my
practices are truthful but in what effects they might have: if College Literature publishes my texts would such an act (regardless of the "truth" of
my texts) end up "cutting our funding?" [he] asks. A post-al leftist like [France], in short, "resists" the state only in so far as the state does not
cut [his] "funding." Similarly, it is enough for a cynical pragmatist like [Williams] to conclude that my argument "has little prospect of effectual
force" in order to disregard its truthfulness. The
post-al dismantling of "epistemology" and the erasure of the
question of "truth," it must be pointed out, is undertaken to protect the economic interests of the ruling class.
If the "truth question" is made to seem outdated and an example of an orthodox binarism ([Hill]), any
conclusions about the truth of ruling class practices are excluded from the scene of social contestation
as a violent logocentric (positivistic) totalization that disregards the "difference" of the ruling class. This is why a
defender of the ruling class such as [Hill] sees an ideology critique aimed at unveiling false consciousness and the production of class
consciousness as a form of "epistemological spanking." It is this structure of assumptions that enables [France] to answer my question, "What is
wrong with being dogmatic?" not in terms of its truth but by reference to its pragmatics (rhetoric): what is "wrong" with dogmatism, [he] says,
is that it is violent rhetoric ("textual Chernobyl") and thus Stalinist. If I ask what is wrong with Stalinism, again (in terms of the logic of [his] text)
I will not get a political or philosophical argument but a tropological description.6 The post-al left is a New Age Left: the "new new left"
privileged by [Hill] and [Williams]- the laid-back, "sensitive," listening, and dialogic
left of coalitions, voluntary work, and
neighborhood activism (more on these later). It is, as I will show, anti-intellectual and populist; its theory is "bite size" (mystifying, of course,
who determines the "size" of the "bite"), and its model of social change is anti-conceptual "spontaneity": May 68, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
and, in [Hill's] text, Chiapas. In the classroom, the New Age post-al pedagogy inhibits any critique of the truth of students' statements and
instead offers, as [McCormick] makes clear, a "counseling," through anecdotes, concerning feelings. The
rejection of "truth" (as
"epistemological gulag"?[Hill]), is accompanied by the rejection of what the post-al left calls "economism." Furthermore, the
post-al logic relativizes subjectivities, critiques functionalist explanation, opposes "determinism," and instead of closural
readings, offers supplementary ones. It also celebrates eclecticism; puts great emphasis on the social as discourse and on discourse
as always inexhaustible by any single interpretation? discourse (the social) always "outruns" and "exceeds" its explanation. Post-al logic is, in
fact, opposed to any form of "explanation" and in favor of mimetic description: it regards "explanation" to be the intrusion of a violent outside
and "description" to be a respectful, caring attention to the immanent laws of signification (inside). This notion of description which has by now
become a new dogma in ludic feminist theory under the concept of "mimesis" (D. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation)?regards politics to be
always immanent to practices: thus the banalities about not politicizing the classroom in [Hogan's] "anarchist" response to my text7 and the
repeated opposition to binaries in all nine texts. The
opposition to binaries is, in fact, an ideological alibi for erasing
class struggle, as is quite clear in [France's] rejection of the model of a society "divided by two antagonistic classes" (see my Theory and
its Other).
Class should be the starting point of this debate – the plan becomes a peace meal that destroys
attempts to overcome universal capitalist oppression
GIMENEZ (Prof. Sociology at UC Boulder) 2001
[Martha, “Marxism and Class; Gender and Race”, Race, Gender and Class, Vol. 8, p. online:
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html)
There are many competing theories of race, gender, class, American society, political economy, power, etc. but no specific theory is invoked to
define how the terms race, gender and class are used, or to identify how they are related to the rest of the social system. To some extent, race,
gender and class and their intersections and interlockings have become a mantra to be invoked in any and all theoretical contexts, for a tacit
agreement about their ubiquitousness and meaning seems to have developed among RGC studies advocates, so that all that remains to be
dome is empirically to document their intersections everywhere, for everything that happens is, by definition, raced, classed, and gendered.
This pragmatic acceptance
of race, gender and class, as givens, results in the downplaying of theory, and the
resort to experience as the source of knowledge. The emphasis on experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as
a corrective to theories that, presumably, reflect only the experience of the powerful. RGC seems to offer a subjectivist understanding of theory
as simply a reflection of the experience and consciousness of the individual theorist, rather than as a body of propositions which is collectively
and systematically produced under historically specific conditions of possibility which grant them historical validity for as long as those
conditions prevail. Instead, knowledge and theory are pragmatically conceived as the products or reflection of experience and, as such,
unavoidably partial, so that greater accuracy and relative completeness can be approximated only through gathering the experiential accounts
of all groups. Such is the importance given to the role of experience in the production of knowledge that in the eight page introduction to the
first section of an RGC anthology, the word experience is repeated thirty six times (Andersen and Collins, 1995: 1-9). I
agree with the
importance of learning from the experience of all groups, especially those who have been silenced by
oppression and exclusion and by the effects of ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To
learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -- real or illusory -- of
(our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994: 111), because "social existence determines consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given that our
existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has
to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience
in itself, however, is suspect
because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing
and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which
individuals may know little or nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick,
"Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow, Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC
and feminist research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973: 37- 49). Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC
perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist
theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the
would require, however, a) a rethinking and modification of
the postulated relationships between race, class and gender, and b) a reconsideration of the notion that,
because everyone is located at the intersection of these structures, all social relations and interactions
are "raced," "classed," and "gendered." In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class are presented as
equivalent systems of oppression with extremely negative consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization
constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor. This
of the connections between these systems require "a working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997:74). Whether or not it is possible to
view class as just another system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within the traditional
sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population aggregates ranked on the
basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference between gradational and
relational concepts of class, see Ossowski, 1963). Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being more fundamental than
gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place individuals within an aggregate or strata arbitrarily
defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be
is qualitatively different from gender and race
and cannot be considered just another system of oppression. As Eagleton points out, whereas racism and sexism are
identified). From the standpoint of Marxist theory, however, class
unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even though socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage
was instrumental in ushering a new era in historical development, one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism
and put forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Today, however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and
deepens the rule of capital over the entire globe. The working class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against
capital and, consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996: 57). While
racism and sexism have no redeeming
feature, class relations are, dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a
site where the potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class is the fundamental agent of
change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The working class is of course composed of women and
men who belong to different races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and racial/ethnic struggles
have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist
countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members of the
working class, people who need to work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class
exploitation matter. But this vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not subsumed but are nevertheless
related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC remains a
neutral concept, open to any and all theoretical meanings, just one oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary
potential. Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for
my argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very assumptions of RGC studies
and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all
interactions are raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves, so that while one person might
think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class," highlight the basic issue that Collins
accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power relations underlie all processes of social
interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not to obfuscate the fact that some
power relations are more important and consequential than others. For example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman
in her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In
my view, the flattening or erasure of the qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the
recognition that it is important to deal with "basic relations of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class
relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the RGC
perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating some other "basic"
structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations
between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations," (Wright,
1978) -- are of paramount importance, for most people's economic survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert
power over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used is through their choosing the identity they impute
their workers. Whatever
identity workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and
"read" their "doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both, rather than as "classed," thus
downplaying their class location and the class nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is
fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying
basic and "nameless" power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in
"intersectionality" is class power.
Link – Race Focus
Racism was create to protect the labor production of chattel slavery – it was
manufactured by elites as a means of protecting their interests – anti-racism strategies
are co-opted and divide resistance – universal consciousness is key
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at
Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has worked on criminal
justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served as director of the Racial
Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry
Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)
The concept of race is a relatively recent development. Only in the past few centuries, owing largely
to European imperialism, have the world’s people been classified along racial lines. Here, in America, the idea of
race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery- as well as the extermination of American Indians – with the ideals of freedom preached
by whites in the new colonies. In
the early colonial period, when settlements remained relatively small, indentured servitude was
blacks struggled to survive against a
common enemy, what historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes as “the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized
the dominant means of securing cheap labor. Under this system, whites and
terror against black and white bondsmen.” Initially, blacks brought to this country were not all enslaved; many were treated as indentured
servants. As
plantation farming expanded, particularly tobacco and cotton farming, demand increased greatly for both
labor and land. The demand for land was met by invading and conquering larger and large swaths of territory. American Indians became a
growing impediment to white European “progress,” and during this period, the images of American Indians promoted in books, newspapers,
and magazines became increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty and Eric Swank have observed, eliminating “savages” is less of a moral
problem than eliminating human beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race- uncivilized savages- thus
providing a justification for the extermination of the native peoples. The growing
demand for labor on plantations was met
through slavery. American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves, largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight
back. The fear of raids by Indian tribes left plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free labor. European immigrants were also
deemed poor candidates for slavery, not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement would, quite
naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation owners thus view Africans, who were relatively powerless, as
the ideal slaves. The systemic enslavement of Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage, emerged with all deliberate speedquickened by events such as Bacon’s
Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to
united slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter
elite. Although slaves clearly occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and suffered the most
under the plantation, the condition of indentured whites was barely better, and the majority of free whites lived in extreme
poverty. As explained by historian Edmund Morgan, in colonies like Virginia, the planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a
vastly superior position to workers of all colors. Southern colonies did not hesitate to invent ways to extend the terms of
servitude, and the planter class accumulated uncultivated lands to restrict the options of free workers. The simmering resentment
against the planter class created conditions that were ripe for revolt. Varying accounts of Bacon’s rebellion abound, but
the basic facts are these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to acquire more property for himself and
others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia support for his scheme, Bacon
retaliated, leading to an attack on the elite, their homes, and their property. He openly
condemned the rich for their
oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond laborers, as well as slaves, who demanded
an end to their servitude. The attempted revolution was ended by force and false promises of amnesty . A
number of the people who participated in the revolt were hanged. The events in Jamestown were alarming to the
planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers and slave. Word of
Bacon’s rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to
protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining
dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. Instead of
importing English-speaking slaves from the West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language and culture, many more
slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier to control and far less likely to form alliances with poor whites.
Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient to
protect their interests, the planter class took an additional
precautionary step, a step that would later come to be known as a “racial bribe.” Deliberately and strategically,
the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between
them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police
slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition
with slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black
slaves and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a racebased system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not
slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the logic of their
situation and sought ways to expand their racially privileged position. By the mid-1770s, the system of
bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status
of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence
and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as
whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery was born.
Their account of race erases connection to economics – this masks class based
violence and allows it to continue
Young 6
(Robert, Prof. Critical Studies at Oxford, “Putting Materialism Back Into Race Theory”, Red Critique,
Spring)
I foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts of race,
which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance, humanism and poststructuralism represent two
dominant views on race in the contemporary academy. Even though they articulate very different theoretical positions,
they produce similar ideological effects: the suppression of economics. They collude in redirecting attention
away from the logic of capitalist exploitation and point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or
difference (poststructuralism). In developing my project, I critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary instances of humanist
and poststructuralist accounts of race, especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and, in doing so, I foreground the
historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this link that forms the core of what I am calling a
transformative theory of race. The transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of democratic
multiculturalism, ultimately, requires the transformation of capitalism.
Capitalism racializes subjects to entrench competition and destroy class consciousness
– it produces white supremacy to paper over class contradictions
SAN JUAN 3
[E., Fulbright Lecturer @ Univ. of Leuven, Belgium, “Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A ReArticulation”, p. online: http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html)
It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical circumstances change gradually or are
transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist
practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class
exploitation cannot
replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the
racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and reinforce alienation,
mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are
dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. 30. We
might take a passage from Marx as a source of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory
of racism which is not empiricist but dialectical in aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of
historically informed and configured determinations. This passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx
explains why the Irish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat: . . . Every industrial and commercial center in
England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates
the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation
and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over
himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the
'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the
English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by
the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the
impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class
is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993). Here Marx
sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of
racism in modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers is dictated by the
distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and
unskilled labor is contextualized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers,
which can be manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white
workers, with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or
compensation. Like religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the real
contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class reinforces and
maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its ideological/political
hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide. 31. Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles
articulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes
but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983). The concept
of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle
of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical
attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global
division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account
the extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade
Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter,
about ten million persons and growing). National
oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class
exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the
racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class,
as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism
arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world
economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire
meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and
reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to
reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial"
solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political
relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups
fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the
production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic
groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political
functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men
allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly
marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been
subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and
economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence
race relations and race conflict are necessarily
structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the
structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized
scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically
changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.
Turns the Case/Root Cause
History has been one of class struggles – confronting capitalism is a necessary prerequisite to breaking
down the hierarchies of oppression the aff talks about – their method prevents a transition to a
society beyond oppression
TUMINO 1
(Stephen, Prof. English @ Pitt, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever”,
Red Critique)
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated
understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for
praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been
able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide
lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity.
But first I must clarify what I
mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself
contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria)
existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I
regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism
within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on
freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know
what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but
inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This
systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or
nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental
contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities
primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because
such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept
economic inequality as an integral part of human societies . They accept a sunny capitalism—a
capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been
the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism,"
or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson,
Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to
stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This
humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism,
feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the
fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That
is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that
shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of
labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory
theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat
the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social
theory.
Even if we don’t win the racial bribe still functions today – economic conditions are right for a rising
up of the poor against the rich, but law-and-order politics have painted poor blacks as a degenerate
culture to be fought and controlled – the alt is key, otherwise the aff just gets coopted
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle Alexander is an asociate professor of law at
Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has worked on criminal
justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served as director of the Racial
Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry
Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)
Competing images of the poor as “deserving” and “undeserving” became central components of the
debate. Ultimately, the racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives, who
succeeded in using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class
voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans. As explained by Thomas
and Mary Edsall in their insightful book Chain Reaction, a disproportionate share of the costs of integration and racial
equality had been borne by lower- and lower-middle-class whites, who were suddenly forced to compete on
equal terms with blacks for jobs and status and who lived in neighborhood adjoining black ghettos. Their children-not the children of
wealthy whites-attended schools most likely to fall under busing orders. The affluent white liberals who were pressing the legal claims of blacks
and other minorities “were often sheltered, in their private lives, and largely immune to the costs of implementing minority claims.” This
reality made
it possible for conservatives to characterize the “liberal Democratic establishment” as
being out of touch with ordinary working people- thus resolving one of the central problems facing
conservatives: how to persuade poor and working-class voters to join in alliance with corporate
interests and the conservative elite.
SFO/Chow K
1NC
The affirmative takes the position of the Maoist—their veneration of the oppressed
constructs an ideal subaltern with whom they can engage in parasitic solidarity—this is
virulent form of colonialism which turns the academy into a site for the consumption of
Otherness for personal gain.
Rey Chow, Comparative Literature—Brown University, 1993
Writing Diaspora, p. 10-13
The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kind of
representational agency, call the Maoist. Arif Dirlik, who has written extensively on the history of political movements in
twentieth-century China, sums up the interpretation of Mao Zedong commonly found in Western Marxist analyses in terms of a "Third Worldist
fantasy"‚—"a fantasy of Mao as a Chinese reincarnation of Marx who fulfilled the Marxist promise that had been betrayed in the West."16
The Maoist was the phoenix which arose from the ashes of the great disillusionment
with Western culture in the 1960s and which found hope in the Chinese Communist
Revolution." In the 1970s, when it became possible for Westerners to visit China as
guided and pampered guests of the Beijing establishment, Maoists came back with
reports of Chinese society's absolute, positive difference from Western society and of the
Cultural Revolution as "the most important and innovative example of Mao's concern with the pursuit of egalitarian, populist, and
communitarian ideals in the course of economic modernization" (Harding, p. 939). At that time, even poverty in China was regarded as
"spiritually ennobling, since it meant that [the] Chinese were not possessed by the wasteful and acquisitive consumerism of the United States"
(Harding, p. 941). Although
the excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an
oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the Maoist is very much alive among
us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East Asian fields. Typically, the
Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with
capitalism‚—a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one
that is supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the
way desire works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an
identification with and valorization of that which she is not/does not have. Since what is
valorized is often the other's deprivation‚—"having" poverty or "having" nothing‚—the
Maoist's strategy becomes in the main a rhetorical renunciation of the material power
that enables her rhetoric. In terms of intellectual lineage, one of the Maoist's most impor- tant ancestors is Charlotte Brontes
Jane Eyre. Like Jane, the Maoist's means to moral power is a specific representational posi tion‚—the position of powerlessness. In their reading
of Jane Eyre,Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse argue that the novel exemplifies the paradigm of violence that expresses its
dominance through a representation of the self as powerless: Until the very end of the novel, Jane is always excluded from every available form
of social power. Her survival seems to depend on renouncing what power might come to her as teacher, mistress, cousin, heiress, or
missionary's wife. She repeatedly flees from such forms of inclusion in the field of power, as if her status as an exem- plary subject, like her
authority as narrator, depends entirely on her claim to a kind of truth which can only be made from a position of powerlessness. By creating
such an unlovely heroine and subjecting her to one form of harassment after another, Bronte demonstrates the power of words alone. This
reading of Jane Eyre highlights her not simply as the female underdog who is often identified by feminist and Marxist critics, but as the
Lying
at the core of Anglo-American liberalism, this moral rectitude would accompany many
territorial and economic conquests overseas with a firm sense of social mission. When Jane
intellectual who acquires power through a moral rectitude that was to become the flip side of Western imperialism's ruthlessness.
Eyre went to the colonies in the nineteenth century, she turned into the Christian missionary. It is this understanding‚—that Bronte's depiction
of a socially marginalized English woman is, in terms of ideological production, fully complicit with England's empire-building ambition rather
than opposed to it‚—that prompted Gayatri Spivak to read Jane Eyre as a text in the service of imperialism. Referring to Bronte's treatment of
the "madwoman" Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole character, Spivak charges Jane Eyre for, precisely, its humanism, in which the
"native subject" is not created as an animal but as "the object of what might be termed the terrorism of the categorical imperative." This kind
of creation is imperialism's use/travesty of the Kantian metaphysical demand to "make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as
an end in himself. "19 In the twentieth century, as Europe's former colonies became independent, Jane Eyre became the Maoist. Michel de
Certeau describes the affinity between her two major reincarnations, one religious and the other political, this way:
The place that
was formerly occupied by the Church or Churches vis-a-vis the established powers
remains recognizable, over the past two centuries, in the functioning of the opposition
known as leftist. . . .There is vis-a-vis the established order, a relationship between the
Churches that defended an other world and the parties of the left which, since the
nineteenth century, have promoted a different future. In both' cases, similar functional
characteristics can be discerned. The Maoist retains many of Jane's awesome features, chief of
which are a protestant passion to turn powerlessness into "truth" and an idealist intolerance of those
who may think differently from her. Whereas the great Orientalist blames the living "third
world" natives for the loss of the ancient non-Western civilization, his loved object, the
Maoist applauds the same natives for personifying and fulfilling her ideals. For the
Maoist in the 1970s, the mainland Chinese were, in spite of their "backwardness," a
puritanical alternative to the West in human form‚—a dream come true. In the 1980s and
1990s, however, the Maoist is disillusioned to watch the China they sanctified crumble before their eyes.
This is the period in which we hear disapproving criticisms of contemporary Chinese people for liking
Western pop music and consumer culture, or for being overly interested in sex. In a way that makes
her indistinguishable from what at first seems a political enemy, the Orientalist, the
Maoist now mourns the loss of her loved object‚— Socialist China‚—by pointing angrily
at living "third world" natives. For many who have built their careers on the vision of Socialist
China, the grief is tremendous. In the "cultural studies" of the American academy in the
1990s, the Maoist is reproducing with prowess. We see this in the way terms such as
"oppression," "victimization," and "subalternity" are now being used. Contrary to
Orientalist disdain for contemporary native cultures of the non-West, the Maoist turns
precisely the "disdained" other into the object of his/her study and, in some cases,
identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralism, the Maoist sometimes turns all
people from non-Western cultures into a generalized "subaltern" that is then used to
flog an equally generalized "West."21 Because the representation of "the other" as such
ignores (1) the class and intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are
usually as elaborate as those in the West, and (2) the discursive power relations
structuring the Maoist's mode of inquiry and valorization, it produces a way of talking in
which notions of lack, subalternity, victimization, and so forth are drawn upon
indiscriminately, often with the intention of spotlighting the speaker's own sense of alterity and
political righteousnes s. 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-subalternization, which has increasingly
become the assured means to authority and power. What these intellectuals are doing is
robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus
depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand. The
oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed twice‚—the first time of their economic
chances, the second time of their language, which is now no longer distinguishable from
those of us who have had our consciousnesses "raised."
Their attempt to raise the question of who is able to speak on the part of the oppressed only
reduces the oppressed to tools in the quest for rhetorical victory—reinscribes the privilege
which enables them to speak in the first place.
Rey Chow, Comparative Literature—Brown University, 1993
Writing Diaspora, p.145-146
But while it effectively raises our consciousness in regard to the privileged positions enjoyed by those
who are economically successful, the question "Who speaks?" tends to remain useless in its
capacity to change existing economic power relations. This is be-cause the posing of the
question itself is already a form of privilege, mostly affordable for those who can stand
apart and view the world with altruistic concern. The question that this question cannot
ask, since it is the condition of its own possibility, is the more fundamental inequality
between theory‚—the most sophisticated speaking instance, one might say‚—and the oppressed.
Like anthropologists, medical doctors, zoological researchers, and their like, theorists
need "objects" to advance their careers. The current trend is for theorists in the
humanities to discover objects of oppression for the construction of a guilt-tripping
discourse along the lines of "Who speaks?" and thus win for themselves a kind of and/or
rhetorical victory. Strictly speaking, we are not only living in the age of "traveling theories" and
"traveling theorists," as the topic of a recent issue of a journal indicates,2 but also of portable
oppressions and portable oppressed objects. Our technology, including the technology that is
the academic conference, the visual and aural aids with which we present our "objects," the field trips
we take for interviewing and archeological purposes of every kind, is what makes portability, a
result of mechanization whose effects far exceed the personal mobility of speaking
humans, an inherent part of "voices," even though this portability is often ignored in our
theorizing. The problem -with the question "Who speaks?", then, is that it is still trying
to understand the world in the form of a coherent narrative grammar, with an
identifiable (anthropomorphic) subject for every sentence. The emphasis of the question is
always on "who." From that it follows that "Who speaks?" is a rhetorical question, with
predetermined answers which however cannot change the structure of privilege against
which it is aimed. Obviously, it is those who have power who speak‚—this is the answer
this question is meant to provoke.
This oppressive solidarity locks in cycles of exclusionary violence—making their impacts
inevitable. You should reject the affirmative because of their failure to question the
indebtedness of their intellectual project to institutions mired in the very privilege they
sanctimoniously criticize—your first obligation as an intellectual is to interrogate your own
privilege and struggle against becoming the object and instrument of power.
Rey Chow, Comparative Literature—Brown University, 1993
Writing Diaspora, p. 16-17
Why are "tactics" useful at this moment? As discussions about "multiculturalism,"
"interdisciplinarity," "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-solidarity-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."2* 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?
Link – Criticizing the West
Their criticism of the west is ethnocentric—ensures otherness is only portrayed as
indistinguishable, agencyless mass which merely has instrumental value in their self-serving
intellectual America bashing.
Rey Chow, Comparative Literature—Brown University, 1993
Writing Diaspora, p. 19-20
To give one example, the sanctification of victimization in the American academy and its
concomitant rebuke of "theory" as intellectualist and elitist parallel, in an uncanny
fashion, the treatment of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, when labels of
"feudalist," "reactionary," "Confucianist," and the like led to murder and execution in the
name of salvaging the oppressed classes. This alleged separation of intellectuals from life
continues today, not so much in China, where intellectuals are poorly paid, as in places
where part of the power enjoyed by intellectuals comes precisely from "bashing"
themselves from an anti-intellectual position of "solidarity with the masses." Terry
Eagleton's recent diatribe against "American" intellectuals‚—even though his own publications are
bestsellers in the American intellectual market‚—is a good ex- ample of this kind of Cultural
Revolution thinking inside capitalist society. Eagleton's attitude is consistent with the typical
European intellectual disdain toward "America" and with British intellectual disdain toward "French
thought." This is how he uses the Tiananmen incident to target his own enemies:Viewed from
eight thousand miles off, [the new historicist] enthusiasm for Foucault has a good deal to
do with a peculiarly American left defeatism, guilt-stricken relativism and ignorance of
socialism‚—a syndrome which is understandable in Berkeley but, as I write, unintelligible
in Beijing. The unconscious ethnocentrism of much of the U.S. appropriation of such
theory is very striking, at least to an outsider. What seems on the surface like a glamorous theory of
the Renaissance keeps turning out to be about the dilemmas of ageing 1960s radicals in the epoch of
Danforth Quayle. I write this article while the Chinese students and workers are still massing outside the
Great Hall of the People; and I find it rather hard to understand why the neo-Stalinist bureaucrats have
not, so far anyway, moved among the people distributing copies of Derrida, Foucault and Ernesto Laclau.
For the Chinese students and workers to learn that their actions are aimed at a "social
totality" which is, theoretically speaking, non-existent would surely disperse them more
rapidly than water cannons or bullets.32 The claim to being an "outsider" is a striking
one, bringing to mind not only Jane Eyre's self-marginalization but also nineteenthcentury Britain's "splendid isolation." Needless to say, it remains the case that the
"people" of the "third world" are invoked only in the form of an indistinguishable mass,
while "first world" intellectuals continue to have names.
Link – SFO General
Speaking for others directly constitutes the subjectivity of the ‘other’ as an object to dehumanize. This
representation is necessarily violent and should not be accepted
Fiona A Campbell, ‘97
[Open Lecture, Certificate IV in Community Services, Melton Campus, Victoria Univ. of Technology, Nov.
4, http://members.tripod.com/FionaCampbell/speech_acts_on_problematising_empowerment.htm,
DREG/JT]
It is not only at the level of attitudes, that our understandings are affected., but constructions and
representations of race, ‘disability’, sex and age. The question of language is critical and should not just
be seem as merely playing lip service’ to ‘political correctness’ (as problematical that term is). It is
extraordinary how often that the media, politicians, academic texts, ourselves - portray subordinated
peoples as the passive Other - separate and apart: “The disabled, a gang of disruptive youths, the
unemployed etc.”. Think about it: in describing Others as nouns (this is not a grammar lecture!), your
representation is not just a ‘label’, in your speech you are constituting the subjectivity of the whole
person. ‘Thingism’, (you won’t find this word in the Dictionary because I made it up), disempowers,
makes people faceless, dehumanises and creates comfort zones of distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ .
The art of speaking should not merely be reduced to the level of the pursuit of ’rightness’, a kind of
‘morality’ of speech. Rather, each of us is called to constantly reflect and be mindful of the potential
violence of our speech and representation. Sticks and stones may break my bones and contrary to the
saying, names do have the capacity to injure and demean me. Need you think I am coming on too
strong, I am supported by Morrison when she says “oppressive language … does more than represent
violence; it is violence” (Morrison, in Butler 1997: 6 - emphasis added).
Link – Asking for Ballot
The role of the speaker must be questioned—strategies, motivations and locations of utterances
affects the message—their advocacy of the 1ac representations fall within the hermeneutics of
domination inhernet in debate as a competitive activity- their message gets coopted by the ballot.
Ann Marie Baldonado, Postcolonial Studies at Emory University, ‘96
[“Representation,” Fall, http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Representation.html, Accessed June 10,
2006, JT/DREG]
If there is always an element of interpretation involved in representation, we must then note who may
be doing the interpreting. Ella Shohat claims that we should constantly question representations:
Each filmic or academic utterance must be analyzed not only in terms of who represents but also in
terms of who is being represented for what purpose, at which historical moment, for which location,
using which strategies, and in what tone of address. ("The Struggle over Representation: Casting,
Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification," Late Imperial Culture, 173)
This questioning is particularly important when the representation of the subaltern is involved. The
problem does not rest solely with the fact that often marginalized groups do not hold the 'power over
representation' (Shohat 170); it rests also in the fact that representations of these groups are both
flawed and few in numbers. Shohat asserts that dominant groups need not preoccupy themselves too
much with being adequately represented. There are so many different representations of dominant
groups that negative images are seen as only part of the "natural diversity" of people. However,
"representation of an underrepresented group is necessarily within the hermeneutics of domination,
overcharged with allegorical significance." (170) The mass media tends to take representations of the
subaltern as allegorical, meaning that since representations of the marginalized are few, the few
available are thought to be representative of all marginalized peoples. The few images are thought to be
typical, sometimes not only of members of a particular minority group, but of all minorities in general. It
is assumed that subalterns can stand in for other subalterns. A prime example of this is the fact that
actors of particular ethnic backgrounds were often casted as any ethnic "other". (Some examples
include Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here (1943), Ricardo Mantalban in Sayonara (1957), and
Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik ). This collapsing of the image of the subaltern reflects not
only ignorance but a lack of respect for the diversity within marginalized communities.
Turns the Case
Social location constructs discursive meaning. Speaking for others is a wreckless act of privilege that
reinforces domination at the intersection of knowledge and power
Linda Martín Alcoff, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, ’96
[“The Problem of Speaking For Others,” http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html, Accessed June 10, 2006, published in
Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised & reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, 1996; and in
Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds, 1994; also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections, 1995, JT]
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 thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend
her location. In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an
epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims, and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize 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
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 re-enforcing the oppression of the
the next section. 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
Cultural appropriation robs people of their identity and culture. Enacting policies under this
framework will inevitably lead to oppression and dehumanization. This only breeds resentment and
divisions, which should be rejected
Kwame Dawes, ’97
[Borrowed Power, pp.117-118, ES/JT]
For we concede, as well we must, that there are very few existing cultures that can be described as completely void of influence
from other cultures. This may be, for many, a lamentable fact of imperialism and colonialism, but for me it is a compelling fact
of industrialization and the instinct to explore and learn about other people. I suspect that this is a fact of the human condition.
We are social creatures who have consistently shown a propensity to adapt our values, our sense of beauty and art, and our
concepts of identity and place according to the cultures and civilizations that we encounter. This kind of interaction and
sharing of culture--whether it be exploitive or that of mutual respect and sharing--is something that is
arguably inherent in human behavior. To deny this, therefore, is to deny a fundamental human trait. Thus, any
attempt to formulate policy that seeks to uphold a concept of culture as a homogeneous entity that is
static and not subject to change through interaction and dialogue is bound to lead to the adoption of
totalitarian and inhuman practices. More importantly, it entails the denial of the commonality of human experience.
Interaction is inevitable; influences must occur. What need not be inevitable are exploitation and the
movement toward a denial of one's own identity. As well, the kind of hierarchical structures that
establish "superior" cultures as the ultimate goal of "inferior" cultures though the processes of so-called
influence and change must be completely rejected as manifestations of genocidal tendencies. Cultural
appropriation, understood in its most negative of manifestations, amounts to robbery. Coping with robbery and
thievery is something that all societies have somehow had to do, and the principles inherent in such coping mechanisms could
be applied to cultural appropriation. We abhor robbery. We resent when our things are taken from us without our
permission and flaunted by the thief as trophies and as things that belong to that person. We resent it
because in the process our achievements are denied and our enemy has managed to ride toward
success on our backs. We also resent it when we give people permission to do something on our behalf
and they completely misrepresent us. They make a mockery of our message and shamefully betray the
trust that we had in them. Our instinct is to cry and retrieve what was taken from us--the actual item that we gave in
good faith to the bad messenger--and to reassert who we are and what is ours so that generation can see the truth and
appreciate it. If we do not do this, our children's inheritance, that which was given to us, will no longer be there for them, and
they will be very poor indeed.¶ It is time to ensure that such exploitation be arrested. More crucially, it is time
to ensure that when our gift of culture is being displayed by those with whom we have been willing to
share it, that it is presented in a manner that indicates that the artist feels accountable not only to one's
financiers, but to us, the part-suppliers of this person's content.
Alt Solves
EVEN IF SPEAKING FOR OURSELVES DOESN’T SOLVE 100%, ANY SUBVERSION OF SPEAKING FOR
OTHERS HAS SOME LIBERATORY EFFECT
Linda Martín Alcoff, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, ’96
[“The Problem of Speaking For Others,” http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html, Accessed June 10, 2006, published in
Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised & reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, 1996; and in
Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds, 1994; also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections, 1995, JT]
Spivak's arguments show that a simple solution can not be found in for the oppressed or less privileged
being able to speak for themselves, since their speech will not necessarily be either liberatory or
reflective of their "true interests", if such exist. I agree with her on this point but I would emphasize also
that ignoring the subaltern's or oppressed person's speech is, as she herself notes, "to continue the
imperialist project."15 Even if the oppressed person's speech is not liberatory in its content, it remains
the case that the very act of speaking itself constitutes a subject that challenges and subverts the
opposition between the knowing agent and the object of knowledge, an opposition which has served as
a key player in the reproduction of imperialist modes of discourse. Thus, the problem with speaking for
others exists in the very structure of discursive practice, irrespective of its content, and subverting the
hierarchical rituals of speaking will always have some liberatory effects.
OUR CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONS CAN BE AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR SUBVERTING HEGEMONIC
AND COLONIALIST DOMINATION
Ann Marie Baldonado, Postcolonial Studies at Emory University, ‘96
[“Representation,” Fall, http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Representation.html, Accessed June 10,
2006, JT]
Despite the fact that Spivak's formulation is quite accurate, there must still be an effort to try and
challenge status quo representation and the ideological work it does. The work of various 'Third world'
and minority writers, artists, and filmmakers attest to the possibilities of counter-hegemonic, anticolonial subversion.
It is obvious that representations are much more than plain 'likenesses'. They are in a sense ideological
tools that can serve to reinforce systems of inequality and subordination; they can help sustain
colonialist or neocolonialist projects. A great amount of effort is needed to dislodge dominant modes of
representation. Efforts will continue to be made to challenge the hegemonic force of representation,
and of course, this force is not completely pervasive, and subversions are often possible. 'Self represent
tation' may not be a complete possibility, yet is still an important goal.
A2 Speaking About =/= Speaking For
THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SPEAKING FOR AND SPEAKING ABOUT OTHERS. BOTH
PARTICIPATE IN CONSTRUCTING SUBJECT-POSITIONS OF AUTHORITY AND ADVOCACY
Linda Martín Alcoff, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, ’96
***GENDERED LANGUAGE
[“The Problem of Speaking For Others,” http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html, Accessed June 10, 2006, published in
Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised & reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, 1996; and in
Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds, 1994; also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections, 1995, JT]
In the examples used above, there may appear to be a conflation between the issue of speaking for others
and the issue of speaking about others. This conflation was intentional on my part, because it is difficult to distinguish
speaking about from speaking for in all cases. There is an ambiguity in the two phrases: when one is speaking for
another one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them. In fact, it may be
impossible to speak for another without simultaneously conferring information about them. Similarly,
when one is speaking about another, or simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it,
one may also be speaking in place of them, i.e. speaking for them. One may be speaking about another
as an advocate or a messenger if the person cannot speak for herself. Thus I would maintain that if
the practice of speaking for others is problematic, so too must be the practice of speaking about
others.8 This is partly the case because of what has been called the "crisis of representation." For in both the
practice of speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about others, I am engaging in the act of
representing the other's needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are, based on my own situated
interpretation. In post-structuralist terms, I am participating in the construction of their subject-positions
rather than simply discovering their true selves.
A2 Permutation
THE PERMUTATION LINKS MORE—IT GOES BEYOND THE INITIAL REPRESENTATION AND CONSTRUCTS
A RE-PRESENTATION BASED ON SELECTIVE INCLUSION. THEIR REFORMULATED ADVOCACY IS NOT A
BENEVOLENT INCLUSION, BUT COOPTATION. A PERSISTENT KRITIK IS KEY TO AVOID THE NECESSARY
EXCLUSION OF THE 1AC
Ann Marie Baldonado, Postcolonial Studies at Emory University, ‘96
[“Representation,” Fall, http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Representation.html, Accessed June 10,
2006, JT/DREG]
Representations, then can never really be 'natural' depictions of the orient. Instead, they are
constructed images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content.
In a similar way, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between Vertretung and Darstellung.
The former she defines as "stepping in someone's place. . .to tread in someone's shoes." Representation
in this sense is "political representation," or a speaking for the needs and desires of somebody or
something. Darstellung is representation as re-presentation, "placing there." Representing is thus "proxy
and portrait," according to Spivak. The complicity between "speaking for" and "portraying" must be kept
in mind ("Practical Politics of the Open End," The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.)
Elsewhere, Spivak addresses the problem of "speaking in the name of": "It is not a solution, the idea of
the disenfranchised speaking for themselves, or the radical critics speaking for them; this question of
representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem." Spivak recommends "persistent
critique" to guard against "constructing the Other simply as an object of knowledge, leaving out the real
Others because of the ones who are getting access into public places due to these waves of benevolence
and so on" ("Questions of Multi-Culturalism" The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues).
THE PERMUTATION DOESN’T RESOLVE THE ISSUE OF APPROPRIATION. THIS IS A POLITICAL ACT THAT
COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF OPENING UP SPACE FOR THE VOICES OF THE SUBALTERN… THE IMPACT IS
OUR BERUBE EVIDENCE… IT ALSO PROVES THE ALTERNATIVE IS MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE
Fiona A Campbell, ‘97
[Open Lecture, Certificate IV in Community Services, Melton Campus, Victoria Univ. of Technology, Nov.
4, http://members.tripod.com/FionaCampbell/speech_acts_on_problematising_empowerment.htm,
DREG/JT]
Mindful of the pitfalls and ‘dangers’ of speech acts, what can we do and how can we resist speech
appropriation? As a safeguard we need to “ … to look at where the incitement to speak originates … as
well as to whom the disclosure is directed” (Alcoff & Gray 1993: 284), before agreeing/deciding to
speak; We need to recognise that not all situations are discursively empowering (Alcoff 1991: 7) – some
territory is indeed dangerous! In other words, we need to check out who is doing the ‘asking’ and who is
listening/reading e.g. audience demographics.
As a discerning individual, you should fastidiously examine your own ‘motivation’ to speak out. To ask
whether your impulse to speak is coming from a place of solidarity and rage or if this impulse is bound
up with deeper questions of your ‘ego’, zeal and desire to ‘save’. Such ‘Messiah complexes’ are not
uncommon among community and justice advocates and Spivak notes this concern when she says: “…
there is an impulse among literary critics and other kinds of intellectuals to save the masses, speak for
the masses, describe the masses” (Spivak 1990a: 56), at the expense of providing spaces for the ‘voice’
of subordinated peoples. These semantic moves, must not be taken lightly as the “ … appropriation and
use of space are political acts” (Pratibha Parma, in hooks 1990: 152).
A2 Reductionist
OUR CRITICISM IS NOT REDUCTIONIST OR ESSENTIALIST. WE RECOGNIZE LOCATION AS FLUID, BUT IT
ALSO HELPS SHAPE MEANING. THEIR CLAIM FALSELY ASSUMES LOCATION AS A TOTALIZING
INFLUENCE
Linda Martín Alcoff, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, ’96
[“The Problem of Speaking For Others,” http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html, Accessed June 10, 2006, published in
Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised & reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, 1996; and in
Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds, 1994; also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections, 1995, DREG/JT]
First I want to consider the argument that the very formulation of the problem with speaking for others
involves a retrograde, metaphysically insupportable essentialism that assumes one can read off the
truth and meaning of what one says straight from the discursive context. Let's call this response the
"Charge of Reductionism", because it argues that a sort of reductionist theory of justification (or
evaluation) is entailed by premises (1) and (2). Such a reductionist theory might, for example, reduce
evaluation to a political assessment of the speaker's location where that location is seen as an
insurmountable essence that fixes one, as if one's feet are superglued to a spot on the sidewalk.
For instance, after I vehemently defended Barbara Christian's article, "The Race for Theory," a male
friend who had a different evaluation of the piece couldn't help raising the possibility of whether a sort
of apologetics structured my response, motivated by a desire to valorize African American writing
against all odds. His question in effect raised the issue of the reductionist/essentialist theory of
justification I just described.
I, too, would reject reductionist theories of justification and essentialist accounts of what it means to
have a location. To say that location bears on meaning and truth is not the same as saying that
location determines meaning and truth. And location is not a fixed essence absolutely authorizing one's
speech in the way that God's favor absolutely authorized the speech of Moses. Location and
positionality should not be conceived as one-dimensional or static, but as multiple and with varying
degrees of mobility.13 What it means, then, to speak from or within a group and/or a location is
immensely complex. To the extent that location is not a fixed essence, and to the extent that there is an
uneasy, underdetermined, and contested relationship between location on the one hand and meaning
and truth on the other, we cannot reduce evaluation of meaning and truth to a simple identification of
the speaker's location. Neither Premise (1) nor Premise (2) entail reductionism or essentialism. They
argue for the relevance of location, not its singular power of determination, and they are non-committal
on how to construe the metaphysics of location.