{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Psychoanalysis Answers – HJPV
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Tips
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Just Some Notes
If you’re going to go for arguments about why psychoanalysis is ridiculous, which I
suggest you do, make sure the evidence applies. Most of the psychoanalysis critiques
that were released have nothing to do with Lacan, except the best “psychoanalysis
false” cards are from Robinson and he exclusively criticizes Lacan and some Zizek. So
just read the cards and make sure they’re responsive to the critique you have to
answer.
Psychoanalysis might seem a bit hard to understand, but if you actually read the cards
I think you’ll find some versions of the critique are easier to grasp. For example, the
Naturalism K and the Techno-Control K pretty much just say “tech bad, managerialism
bad”. The Horrorism K and the Individualism K are more difficult to understand, but if
you spend a few minutes just reading all of the 1NC cards, you will understand the
argument. My point is, if you don’t know what “constitutive Lack” is, don’t worry.
Good luck,
Quay
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
General
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Psycho Wrong
Their focus on the psyche as a starting point for their analysis ignores behaviors of
large groups which disproves their impacts, cedes the political, and means the alt can’t
solve
Volkan 03 – Vamik D. Volkan is the Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (“Psychoanalysis in International Relations and
International Relations in Psychoanalysis”, http://www.vamikvolkan.com/Psychoanalysis-and-International-Relations-and-International-Relations-inPsychoanalysis.php)
Other difficulties that complicate
collaboration between psychoanalysts and practitioners and scholars of
politics and international relations come from psychoanalysis itself. I sensed these difficulties myself as I became more and more involved in
collaborative work with scholars and practitioners of other disciplines. I noted that the difficulties within psychoanalytic discipline that hindered collaboration
between psychoanalysis and diplomacy could be divided into various inter-related categories. As expected, at first it was difficult for me to realize these obstacles
and define them. But slowly I was able to “free” myself from some established psychoanalytic assumptions. Politics
and diplomacy necessarily deal
with the psychology of large groups, the psychology of leader-followers, and the psychology of relationships between enemy
groups and their leaders. Sigmund Freud was interested in these topics, but he also left a legacy that discouraged his followers from
pursuing them. In his letter to Albert Einstein, Freud (1932) was pessimistic about human nature and the role of
psychoanalysis in preventing wars or war-like situations. Although Jacob Arlow (1973) later suggested some optimism in some of Freud’s
writings on this subject, Freud’s pessimism, I believe, played a role in the limited psychoanalytic contributions to
the fields of politics and diplomacy. There were, of course, exceptions (Glower, 1947 and Fornari, 1966). However, those exceptions followed
Freud’s lead in another area, and this too blocked the potential influence of psychoanalysis on politics and diplomacy: these writers, like Freud,
focused on individuals’ unconscious perceptions of what the image of political leaders and the mental
representations of a large group symbolically stand for, instead of on large-group psychology and leaderfollower relations in their own right. Psychoanalysis remained primarily an investigative tool of an individual’s
internal world and massive human movements were examined according to individual psychology
that brings people together and not according to the psychology of large-group rituals and
interactions. It was all right to study the internal motivations of political leaders as they influence their followers, but psychoanalysis largely
failed to consider how mental representations of societal processes influenced the personality development of individuals
belonging to the same large group and changed that group’s historical or political movements. Only relatively recently a handful of historians with
psychoanalytic training are focusing on this phenomenon. For example, Peter Loewenberg (1991, 1995) described the history of the Weimer Republic, its
humiliation and its economic collapse as a major factor in creating shared personality characteristics among the German youth and their welcoming the Nazi
ideology. Freud’s (1921) well-known theory of large-group psychology reflects a theme that mainly focuses on the understanding of the individual: the members of
the group sublimate their aggression toward the leader and turn it into loyalty in a process that is similar to that of a son turning his negative feelings toward his
Oedipal father. In turn, the members
of a large group idealize the leader, identify with each other, and rally around the
leader. Freud’s theory is based on a “male-oriented” psychological process. More importantly, as Waelder (1971) noted, Freud was speaking only of regressed
groups. Given such shortcomings, some psychoanalysts who study large groups and their leaders shifted
their approach in the last decade or so from emphasizing the image of the leader to focusing on the
mental representation of the large group itself as experienced by the individual. For example, Didier Anzieu (1971,
1984) Janine Chassequet-Smirgel (1984), and Otto Kernberg (1980, 1989) wrote about shared fantasies of members of a large group. They suggested that large
groups represent idealized mothers (breast mothers) who repair all narcissistic injuries. I, (Volkan, 2004) added that idealized but unintegrated self images
accompany idealized mother images in members’ experience of the large group in which they belong. But, again, these theories primarily focus on individuals’
perceptions. It is assumed that external
processes that threaten the group members’ image of an idealized
mother can initiate political processes and influence international affairs. Nevertheless, an approach
that focuses on individuals’ perceptions does not offer specificity concerning a political or diplomatic
process. Thus, it does not excite practitioners of politics and diplomacy or receive much attention from political scientists. I came to realize that what the
psychoanalytic tradition lacks is the study of both large-group psychology in its own right and the specific elements of various mass movements.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Exts. Psycho Wrong
Psychology can’t impact policy—alt fails
Blight 86 – James G. Blight is a professor of IR at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. (“How Might Psychology Contribute to
Reducing the Risk of Nuclear War?”, Political Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 19), pp. 617-660)
This suggests that, whatever
may be discovered or already known by behavioral scientists about decision-making, it is quite
unlikely that this knowledge will ever significantly reduce the risk of nuclear war, simply because it cannot intrude
into the policy making process. The fundamental reason for this is that policy making is not an applied science. Contrast this with clinical medicine,
which rests on, and is to a greater extent than ever before an application of, biomedical research. This is not true of the relation between behavioral science and
foreign policy making. The former is in many respects a science, though a fairly primitive one; the latter is an art. Each grew up separately from the other and only
one side—the psychological—seems interested in a rapprochement What is the likelihood that behavioral psychology might, in principle, become something like a
basic science underlying and intimately connected with the construction and execution of nuclear policy? The answer, I believe, is: Extremely low. The
obstacle is not the mere (though presently substantial) problem of reflexivity. It is related to Tetlock's point about the uniqueness and
individuality of the variables a foreign policy maker must confront , but it goes much deeper into the very nature of decision-making in
situations where nuclear war may appear to be a live option. Everyone acknowledges that such decisions must be awesome to contemplate and momentous to
execute. Yet behavioral psychologists
have tended to conclude from these facts that the central danger in such situations is that stress
will occur and that decision-making will thus become faulty, resulting in decisions to enact policies which are riskier than they need to
be (see e.g., George, 1980, pp. 47-49; Janis, 1982, pp. 250-259; Lebow, 1987). But this approach fails to address a basic characteristic of such
decisions, which is that they constitute attempts to confront and transcend profound moral dilemmas. In fact, they are exemplars of a condition
the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls a "moral blind alley...a choice between morally abominable courses of action...[with] no way to escape" (1979, p. 74; see also
Hoffmann, 1981, p. 81). For the essence of a nuclear crisis, from the standpoint of an American president or Soviet chairman, would be the confrontation with a set
of policy options, all of which are believed to require raising the risk of nuclear war, whether in the short run or the long run. No matter which way he turns, he
faces increased risk of initiating a holocaust of unprecedented and (in his own mind) totally unjustifiable magnitude. In such situations, decision-makers
are unlikely to believe they are at something resembling a choice point in a behavioral psychologist's "decision tree." Instead,
the situation they are in is likely to look much more like a "moral blind alley," and it will look this way not because stress has distorted their cognition
and perception, but because that is the way it really is .
Psychoanalysis doesn’t affect policy
Gordon 01 – Paul Gordon is a psychotherapist living and working in London. (Race & Class, “Psychoanalysis and racism: the politics of defeat”, April,
2001)
Cohen's work unavoidably raises the question of the status of psycho- analysis as a social or political theory, as distinct from a clinical one. Can psychoanalysis, in
other words, apply to the social world of groups, institutions, nations, states and cultures in the way that it does, or at least may do, to individuals? Certainly there is
now a considerable body of literature and a plethora of academic courses, and so on, claim- ing that psychoanalysis is a social theory. And, of course, in popular
discourse, it is now a commonplace to hear of nations and societies spoken of in personalised ways. Thus `truth commissions' and the like, which have become so
common in the past decade in countries which have undergone turbulent change, are seen as forms of national therapy or catharsis, even if this is far from being
their purpose. Never- theless, the question remains: does
it make sense, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, to speak of nations having
psyches the way that individuals do? `Can a nation's past make people ill as we know repressed memories sometimes make individuals ill? . . .
Can we speak of nations ``working through'' a civil war or an atrocity as we speak of individuals
working through a traumatic memory or event?'47 The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to
social institutions is that there can be no testing of the claims made. If someone says, for instance, that
nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to replace the body of the mother one has lost, or that the
popular appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved? The
pioneers of psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the context of their work with
individual patients and their ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic
encounter where the validity of an interpretation, for example, is a matter for dialogue between therapist and patient. Outside of the
consulting room, there can be no such verification process, and the further one moves from the
individual patient, the less purchase psycho- analytic ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter,
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
anything and everything can be true, psychoanalytically speaking. But if everything is true, then
nothing can be false and therefore nothing can be true.
Alt can’t solve—utopianism can’t impact policy and ignores reality
Blight 86 – James G. Blight is a professor of IR at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. (“How Might Psychology Contribute to
Reducing the Risk of Nuclear War?”, Political Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 19), pp. 617-660)
I believe, with many others, that avoiding
nuclear war is the most important public policy problem of our time . As
a psychologist, I do not believe my colleagues and I have contributed significantly to its solution, which
must, in my view, consist of piecemeal attempts to understand the dimensions of the risk of nuclear war
and then to suggest ways of reducing that risk. I do not believe that reducing the risk of nuclear war is
primarily a psychologists' problem although, as a psychologist, I do tend to frame the issue so as to make certain psychological aspects of the
problem appear to be basic. Failure on the part of psychologists and psychiatrists to enter more fully into the
policy makers' construction of the central aspects of nuclear risk lay, it seems to me, behind our tendency,
especially at the level of intermediate causes, toward solutions we pluck off our own shelves but which are not easily
integrated into the policy makers' modus operandi. It has also led, I think, to Utopian schemes put
forward as solutions to the deep psychological causes, solutions which fail to take adequately into
account either the historical record or political reality.
Freud made negative sense
Mootz 2K – Francis J. Mootz II is a Visiting Professor of Law at Pennsylvania State University in the Dickinson School of Law. (Yale Journal of the Law &
Humanities, 12 Yale J.L. & Human. 299, p. 319-320)
Freudian psychoanalysis increasingly is the target of blistering criticism from a wide variety of commentators. In a recent review, Frederick Crews reports that
independent studies have begun to converge toward a verdict... that there is literally nothing to be
said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its
component dogmas Analysis as a whole remains powerless... and understandably so, because a thoroughgoing
epistemological critique, based on commonly acknowledged standards of evidence and logic decertifies
every distinctively psychoanalytic proposition. The most telling criticism of Freud's psychoanalytic theory is that it has
proven no more effective in producing therapeutic benefits than have other forms of psychotherapy. 56
Critics draw the obvious conclusion that the benefits (if any) of psychotherapy are neither explained nor
facilitated by psychoanalytic theories. Although Freudian psychoanalytic theory purports to provide a truthful account of the operations of the
psyche and the causes for mental disturbances, critics argue that psychoanalytic theory may prove in the end to be nothing
more than fancy verbiage that tends to obscure whatever healing effects psychotherapeutic dialogue
may have. Freudian psychoanalysis failed because it could not make good on its claim to be a rigorous and
empirical science. Although Freud's mystique is premised on a widespread belief that psychoanalysis was a profound innovation made possible by his
genius, Freud claimed only that he was extending the scientific research of his day within the organizing context of a biological model of the human mind. [*320]
Freud's adherents created the embarrassing cult of personality and the myth of a self-validating
psychoanalytic method only after Freud's empirical claims could not withstand critical scrutiny in
accordance with the scientific methodology demanded by his metapsychology. The record is clear that
Freud believed that psychoanalysis would take its place among the sciences and that his clinical work provided empirical confirmation of his
theories. This belief now appears to be completely unfounded and indefensible. Freud's quest for a scientifically grounded
psychotherapy was not amateurish or naive. Although Freud viewed his "metapsychology as a set of directives for constructing a scientific psychology," n60 Patricia
Kitcher makes a persuasive case that he was not a blind dogmatist who refused to adjust his metapsychology in the face of contradictory evidence. n61 Freud's
commitment to the scientific method, coupled with his creative vision, led him to construct a
comprehensive and integrative metapsychology that drew from a number of scientific disciplines in an
impressive and persuasive manner. n62 However, the natural and social sciences upon which he built his derivative and interdisciplinary
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
approach developed
too rapidly and unpredictably for him to respond. n63 As developments in biology quickly
undermined Freud's theory, he "began to look to linguistics and especially to anthropology as more hopeful
sources of support," n64 but this strategy later in his career proved equally [*321] unsuccessful. n65 The scientific
justification claimed by Freud literally eroded when the knowledge base underlying his theory
collapsed, leaving his disciples with the impossible task of defending a theory whose presuppositions no
longer were plausible according to their own criteria of validation. n66
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—We’re Still Right
Psychoanalysis does not disprove our factual claims—the burden of proof is on the
Neg
Yudkowsky 06 (Eliezer, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks,” forthcoming
in Global Catastrophic Risks, August 31)
Every true idea which discomforts you will seem to match the pattern of at least one psychological error. Robert Pirsig said: "The world's biggest fool can say the sun
is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out." If
you believe someone is guilty of a psychological error, then
demonstrate your competence by first demolishing their consequential factual errors. If there are no factual errors, then what
matters the psychology? The temptation of psychology is that, knowing a little psychology, we can meddle in arguments
where we have no technical expertise instead sagely analyzing the psychology of the disputants. If someone wrote a novel
about an asteroid strike destroying modern civilization, then someone might criticize that novel as extreme, dystopian,
apocalyptic; symptomatic of the author's naive inability to deal with a complex technological society. We should recognize this as a
literary criticism, not a scientific one; it is about good or bad novels, not good or bad hypotheses. To quantify the annual probability of an
asteroid strike in real life, one must study astronomy and the historical record: no amount of literary criticism can put a number on it. Garreau (2005) seems to hold
that a scenario of a mind slowly increasing in capability, is more mature and sophisticated than a scenario of extremely rapid intelligence increase. But that's
a
technical question, not a matter of taste; no amount of psychologizing can tell you the exact slope of that curve. It's harder to abuse
heuristics and biases than psychoanalysis. Accusing someone of conjunction fallacy leads naturally into listing the specific details that you think are burdensome and
drive down the joint probability. Even so, do not lose track of the real-world facts of primary interest; do not let the argument become about psychology. Despite all
dangers and temptations, it is better to know about psychological biases than to not know. Otherwise we will walk directly into the whirling helicopter blades of life.
But be very careful not to have too much fun accusing others of biases. That is the road that leads to becoming a sophisticated arguer someone who, faced with any
discomforting argument, finds at once a bias in it. The one whom you must watch above all is yourself. Jerry Cleaver said: "What does you in is not failure to apply
some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It's overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball." Analyses
testable real-world assertions. Do not take your eye off the ball.
should finally center on
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Discourse Not First
There is no gap between the symbolic and the real because reality shapes language
Roskoski and Peabody 91 (Matthew and Joe, Florida State University, “A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of Language "Arguments"
http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-LangCritiques)
Before we begin to discuss the validity of the hypothesis, we ought first to note that there are two varieties of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong
version claims
that language actually creates reality, while the weak version merely claims that language influences reality in some way
(Grace). As Bloom has conceded, the strong version - "the claim that language or languages we learn determine the ways we think" is "clearly untenable" (Bloom
275). Further, the weak form of the hypothesis will likely fail the direct causal nexus test required to censor speech. The courts require a "close causal nexus
between speech and harm before penalizing speech" (Smolla 205) and we believe debate critics should do the same. We dismiss the weak form of the hypothesis as
inadequate to justify language "arguments" and will focus on the strong form. Initially, it is important to note that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does not intrinsically
deserve presumption, although many authors assume its validity without empirical support. The reason it does not deserve presumption is that "on a priori grounds
one can contest it by asking how, if we are unable to organize our thinking beyond the limits set by our native language, we could ever become aware of those
limits" (Robins 101). Au explains that "because it has received so little convincing support, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has stimulated little research" (Au 1984 156).
However, many critical scholars take the hypothesis for granted because it is a necessary but uninteresting precondition for the claims they really want to defend.
Khosroshahi explains: However, the empirical tests of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity have yielded more equivocal results. But independently of its empirical
status, Whorf's view is quite widely held. In fact, many social movements have attempted reforms of language and have thus taken Whorf's thesis for granted.
(Khosroshahi 505). One reason for the hypothesis being taken for granted is that on first glance it seems intuitively valid to some. However, after research is
conducted it becomes clear that this intuition is no longer true. Rosch notes that the
hypothesis "not only does not appear to be
empirically true in any major respect, but it no longer even seems profoundly and ineffably true" (Rosch
276). The implication for language "arguments" is clear: a debater must do more than simply read cards from feminist or
critical scholars that say language creates reality. Instead, the debater must support this claim with
empirical studies or other forms of scientifically valid research. Mere intuition is not enough, and it is our belief that valid
empirical studies do not support the hypothesis. After assessing the studies up to and including 1989, Takano claimed that the
hypothesis "has no empirical support" (Takano 142). Further, Miller & McNeill claim that "nearly all" of the studies
performed on the Whorfian hypothesis "are best regarded as efforts to substantiate the weak version of
the hypothesis" (Miller & McNeill 734). We additionally will offer four reasons the hypothesis is not valid. The first reason is that it is impossible to generate
empirical validation for the hypothesis. Because the hypothesis is so metaphysical and because it relies so heavily on intuition it is difficult if not impossible to
operationalize. Rosch asserts that "profound and ineffable truths are not, in that form, subject to scientific investigation" (Rosch 259). We concur for two reasons.
The first is that the hypothesis is phrased as a philosophical first principle and hence would not have an objective referent. The second is there would be intrinsic
problems in any such test. The independent variable would be the language used by the subject. The dependent variable would be the subject's subjective reality.
The problem is that the dependent variable can only be measured through self- reporting, which - naturally - entails the use of language. Hence, it is impossible to
separate the dependent and independent variables. In other words, we have no way of knowing if the effects on "reality" are actual or merely artifacts of the
language being used as a measuring tool. The second reason that the hypothesis is flawed is that there are problems with the causal relationship it describes. Simply
put, it
is just as plausible (in fact infinitely more so) that reality shapes language. Again we echo the words of Dr. Rosch,
who says: {C}ovariation does not determine the direction of causality. On the simplest level, cultures are very likely to have names for
physical objects which exist in their culture and not to have names for objects outside of their
experience. Where television sets exists, there are words to refer to them. However, it would be difficult
to argue that the objects are caused by the words. The same reasoning probably holds in the case of
institutions and other, more abstract, entities and their names. (Rosch 264). The color studies reported by Cole & Means tend to
support this claim (Cole & Means 75). Even in the best case scenario for the Whorfians, one could only claim that there are causal operations working both ways i.e. reality shapes language and language shapes reality. If that was found to be true, which at this point it still has not, the hypothesis would still be scientifically
problematic because "we would have difficulty calculating the extent to which the language we use determines our thought" (Schultz 134). The third objection is
that the hypothesis self- implodes. If
language creates reality, then different cultures with different languages would
have different realities. Were that the case, then meaningful cross- cultural communication would be difficult if not impossible. In Au's words: "it is
never the case that something expressed in Zuni or Hopi or Latin cannot be expressed at all in English. Were it the case, Whorf could not have written his articles as
he did entirely in English" (Au 156). The fourth and final objection is that the
hypothesis cannot account for single words with
multiple meanings. For example, as Takano notes, the word "bank" has multiple meanings (Takano 149). If language truly created reality then this would
not be possible. Further, most if not all language "arguments" in debate are accompanied by the claim that intent is irrelevant because the actual rhetoric exists
apart from the rhetor's intent. If this is so, then the Whorfian advocate cannot claim that the intent of the speaker distinguishes what reality the rhetoric creates.
The prevalence of such multiple meanings in a debate context is demonstrated with every new topicality
debate, where debaters spend entire rounds quibbling over multiple interpretations of a few words.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Lacan (Defense)
The alternative destroys real action by scapegoating real progress on engaging
theoretical signifiers
Johnston 05 – Adrian Johnston is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. (“The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Zizek And The Dynamis of
Belief”, 1005, http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/8/24)
However, the absence of this type of Lacan-underwritten argument in Zizek's sociopolitical thought indicates something important. Following Lacan, Zizek describes
instances of the tactic of 'lying in the guise of truth" and points to late-capitalist cynicism as a key example of this (here, cynically knowing the truth that 'the
System" is a vacuous sham produces no real change in behavior, no decision to stop acting as if this big Other is something with genuine substantiality). Zizek
proclaims that, "the starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth."
Although the Lacanian blurring of the boundary between theoretical thinking and practical action
might very well be completely true, accepting it as true inevitably risks strengthening a convenient alibi—the creation of
this alibi has long been a fait accompli for which Lacan alone could hardly be held responsible—for the worst sort of intellectualized avoidance of
praxis. Academics can convincingly reassure themselves that their inaccessible, abstract musings, the publications of which are
perused only by their tiny self-enclosed circle of "ivory lower" colleagues, aren't irrelevant obscurities made possible by tacit complicity with a
certain socio-economic status quo, but, rather, radical political interventions that promise sweeping changes of the
predominating situation. If working on signifiers is the same as working in the streets, then why dirty one's
hands bothering with the latter? Consequently, if Zizek is to avoid allowing for a lapse into this comfortable academic illusion, an illusion for
which Lacan could all too easily be perverted into offering rationalizing excuses, he must eventually stipulate a series of "naive" extra-theoretical/extra-discursive
actions (actions that will hopefully become acts after their enactment) as part of a coherent political platform for the embattled Left His rejection of Marx's positive
prescriptive program as anachronistic is quite justified. But, in the wake of Zizeks clearing of the ground for something New in politics, there is still much to be done
A brief remark by Zizek hints that, despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment of traditional Marxism, he basically agrees with the Marxist conviction that the
demise of capitalism is an inevitable, unavoidable historical necessity—"The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are Utopian should thus
be that, today, the true Utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes."" This hurling
of the charge of utopianism back at those making it is quite convincing. In fact, any system proclaiming to be the embodiment of 'the end of history" invariably
appears to be Utopian. Given what is known about the merciless march of history, believing that an ultimate, unsurpassable socio-political arrangement finally has
arrived is almost impossible. So, one should indeed accept as true the unlikelihood of capitalism continuing on indefinitely; it must eventually give way to something
else, even if this "x" cannot be envisioned clearly from within the present context. Nonetheless, Zizek's own theorizing calls for a great deal of cautious reservation
about the consequences of embracing this outlook as true, of falling into the trap of (to invoke this motif once more) lying in the guise of truth. Just as the
combination of a purely negative, critical Marxism with the
anticipation of the event of the act-miracle threatens to turn
into an intellectual fetish (in the Zizekian ideological sense of something that renders the present reality bearable), so too might acknowledging the
truth of capitalism's finitude have the same unfortunate side-effect. One can tolerate today's capitalism, because one knows that it cannot last forever; one can
passively and patiently wait it out (at one point. Zizek
identifies this anticipation of indeterminate change-yet-to-come as a
disempowering lure, although he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that his own work on ideology sometimes
appears to be enthralled by just such a lure). In both cases, the danger is that the very analyses developed by Zizek in his assault upon
late-capitalist ideology might serve to facilitate the sustenance of the cynical distance whose underlying complicity with the present state of affairs he describes so
well.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Lacan (Offense)
Lacanian psychoanalysis constructs its own theory of the fantasy based on the false
assumptions of the lack as a true fact and desire as negative. But desire doesn’t lack
anything—it’s the thing that lacks desire—pushed to the end, psychoanalysis destroys
desire and leaves us trapped in a world without action stifling movements—turns the
alternative
Deleuze and Guattari 72 – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (“Anti-Oedipus, pg. 25-27)
In point of fact, if
desire is the lack of the real object, its very nature as a real entity depends upon an "essence
of lack" that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production
of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis. On the very lowest level of interpretation, this means that
the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically
produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a "dreamed-of object behind every real object," or a mental production
behind all real productions. This conception does not necessarily compel psychoanalysis to engage in a study of gadgets and markets, in the form of an utterly
dreary and dull psychoanalysis of the object: psychoanalytic studies of packages of noodles, cars, or "thingumajigs." But
even when the fantasy is
interpreted in depth, not simply as an object, but as a specific machine that brings desire itself front and
center, this machine is merely theatrical, and the complementarity of what it sets apart still remains: it is
now need that is defined in terms of a relative lack and determined by its own object, whereas desire is
regarded as what produces the fantasy and produces itself by detaching itself from the object, though at
the same time it intensifies the lack by making it absolute: an "incurable insufficiency of being," an
"inability-to-be that is life itself." Hence the presentation of desire as something supported by needs,
while these needs, and their relationship to the object as something that is lacking or missing, continue
to be the basis of the productivity of desire (theory of an underlying support). In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production
to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of "industrial"
production. Clement Rosset puts it very well: every
time the emphasis is put on a lack that desire supposedly suffers
from as a way of defining its object, "the world acquires as its double some other sort of world, in
accordance with the following line of argument: there is an object that desire feels the lack of; hence the
world does not contain each and every object that exists; there is at least one object missing, the one
that desire feels the lack of; hence there exists some other place that contains the key to desire (missing in
this world)."29 If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the
real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial
objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the
result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack
anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks
a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the
same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Hence the product is
something removed or deducted from the process of producing: between the act of producing and the product, something becomes detached, thus giving the
vagabond, nomad subject a residuum. The
objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself.* There is no particular
form of existence that can be labeled "psychic reality." As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but
passion, as a "natural and sensuous object." Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are
derived from desire: they are counter-products within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social. Desire
always remains in close touch with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows
them, shifts when they shift, and does not outlive them. For that reason it so often becomes the desire to die, whereas need is a
measure of the withdrawal of a subject that has lost its desire at the same time that it loses the passive syntheses of these conditions. This is precisely the
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
significance of need as a search in a void: hunting about, trying to capture or become a parasite of passive syntheses in whatever vague world they may happen to
exist in. It is no use saying: We are not green plants; we have long since been unable to synthesize chlorophyll, so it's necessary to eat. . .. Desire
then
becomes this abject fear of lacking something. But it should be noted that this is not a phrase uttered by the poor or the
dispossessed. On the contrary, such people know that they are close to grass, almost akin to it, and that desire
"needs" very few things-not those leftovers that chance to come their way, but the very things that are
continually taken from them-and that what is missing is not things a subject feels the lack of somewhere
deep down inside himself, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being of man, for whom to
desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Lol Wat?
Their evidence is incoherent psychobabble
Mahrer 99 Alvin R., professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa School of Psychology, “Embarrassing Problems for the Field of Psychotherapy” John
Wiley
& Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 55: 1147–1156, 1999. p. 1153, via Wiley Inter Science
One of the main things that characterize psychotherapists and that distinguish them from others is their spouting psychobabble.
They learn to say terms that give the illusion of genuine knowledge, of professionalism, of science (Illich, 1970; Schon, 1982). They are
elite and specialized because they spout jargon terms like unconditioned positive regard, contingency control, transference, reframing, double bind,
existential analysis, bioenergetics, phallic stage, archetype, multimodal therapy, systematic desensitization, cognitive schema, catharsis, impulse control, avoidance
conditioning, stimulus control, ego diffusion, countertransference, logotherapy, and attribution theory. Psychotherapists are distinguished mainly by their using
these terms with effortless ease, as if they knew what the terms meant. Then they can speak in impressive paragraphs such as this, taken from a table of random
psychobabble phrases: “This client is characterized by free-floating anxiety in a borderline disorder, brought about by a traumatic childhood history of emotional
abuse, lack of a stable support system, and inadequate cognitive development. Accordingly, the treatment of choice is systemic therapy, with reframing of core
conceptual schemata, to heighten self-efficacy in a supportive therapist-client alliance emphasizing positive regard and minimizing interpretive probing into stressful
pockets of serious psychopathology.” The
speaker may have no idea what he or she is saying, or may even secretly know that he or
she is playing the game of silly psychobabble, but if the speaker carries it off with professional aplomb, he or she probably can
be accepted into the inner ranks of professional psychotherapists.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Consent
Get out of my head—consent is key and I don’t give it—that’s a D-rule
ABE 04 – American Board of Examiners in Clinical Social Work. (“THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: A SPECIALTY OF CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK”, January
2004, http://www.abecsw.org/images/PsychoAnalysis.PDF, Callahan)
At the level of advanced specialty practice, the clinical social worker psychoanalyst must have mastery of the knowledge base and practice skills specific to that
specialty area. In addition, the
analyst endorses core clinical social work values, expressed and amplified by the following convictions: # to
honor the dignity and well-being of the analysand and his/her right to self-determination, privacy,
confidentiality, and informed choice # to advocate for analysands in service provision, access to care, and program evaluation (although
analysands, by virtue of certain social and cultural characteristics, may tend not to need advocacy in the ways that other clients do) # to practice
ethically and legally, with competence and integrity, and with respect for culture and diversity (age, ethnicity, gender, and lifestyle) 26# to contribute to
a society that offers opportunities to all of its members in a just and non-discriminatory fashion # to deliver the most appropriate
treatment and level of care, according to the analysand’s needs and informed consent.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Horrorism K
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Death Drive Wrong
Reject their totalizing assertions about how the world is structured—the death drive is
a reductive, dogmatic theory that doesn’t explain behavior
Carel 06 – Havi Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. (“Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger”)
The notion of the death drive is on the one hand too wide, explaining all types of aggression as well as the
putative urge towards complete rest. This leads the notion to be economically incoherent, as will be discussed
in the next section. But a prior point must be examined: are all types of aggression the same? Freud suggests a positive answer, but as a
psychological taxonomy this approach seems to erase important differences. For example, if both sadism and
masochism stem from the same aggressive source, should they be classified as belonging to the same
group? Should they be clinically approached in a similar fashion? The answer to both these questions seems to be no. The
problems and symptoms characterising sadism are very different from the ones characterising masochism, as is their treatment. Another example, group
aggression and individual aggression: should we attempt to describe or treat the two as belonging to
the same cluster? Again, the answer seems to be negative. As to the second point, one could justifiably ask: what does the death drive mean?
Because it is so general, the notion of the death drive is vague. The death drive cannot explain a given
situation because it itself becomes meaningful only as a collection of situations. On Freud's account, any
behaviour meriting the adjective 'aggressive' arises from the death drive. If we take a certain set of aggressive
behaviours, say, sadistic ones, the death drive would come to signify this set. If we take another set of masochistic behaviours, the death drive would mean this set.
As it stands, the
significance of the notion seems entirely dependent on the observed phenomenon. If
Freud were never to meet any masochists, would his notion of the death drive exclude masochism ? Any
science relying on observation and empirical data relics on this data and should be willing, in principle, to modify and update its concepts in accordance with new
empirical observations. The opening paragraph of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes describes this process. We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be
built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific
activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to
avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone [...]. They
must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this
condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been
derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed <SK 14:1U;GW 10:210). This seems to be a sophisticated, fruitfully flexible approach. But in the case of the
death drive, it seems to be too flexible. There
is no initial restriction on the type of behaviour that could be classified
as aggressive or as lowering tension. Hence we find sadism and masochism, passive-aggressive and
substance-induced aggression, aggression displayed in group situation and aggressive fantasy, all tied
to the death drive as their source. By analogy, any behaviour that leads to discharge of energy or
lowering of tension would be in accordance with the Nirvana principle. One way of responding to this issue is by applying
the term 'aggression* purely descriptively. Karli, for example, proposes the following definition: aggression means, "threatening or striking at the physical or psychic
integrity of another living being" (Karli, 1991, p. 10). He sees the danger in the shift from using aggression descriptively to attributing to it an explanatory and causal
role. When
accorded a causal role, aggression is reified and becomes a natural entity, a danger that can be avoided
metaphysical
view, which cannot be taken to be purely descriptive, because it is embedded in a physicalist view of the
drives as elements connecting body and psyche, and is meant to have an explanatory and causal role
in the explanation of behaviour. Although Freud would reject the purely descriptive use of the concept of aggression, this suggestion will be
useful when we discuss the reconstruction of the death drive. As to the third point, it seems that the explanatory value of the death drive
is not satisfactory. Because of the two problems set out above - the excessive promiscuity of the notion of aggression and the fact that it irons significant
differences between the various phenomena — its explanatory value is limited The concept as presented by Freud does allow too much in and lumps
together behaviours and tendencies whose differences are significant. In this sense, those rejecting the
by using the term strictly descriptively. This suggestion makes a lot of sense, but it would be unacceptable for Freud. For he is proposing a
death drive as an unhelpful speculation are justified in their criticism.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Exts. Death Drive Wrong
The death drive doesn’t cause extinction, it prevents it—we must make the best
predictions we can
Boucher 02 – Geoff Boucher is a Cultural Studies Professor at the University of Melbourne. (“The Politics of Universal Truth”, January 29,
http://home.mira.net/~deller/ethicalpolitics/geoff-boucher/2002/zizek.htm)
The answer, then, to Žižek’s question (“is not Lacan’s entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options:
between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing?”), is “No ”. This is a
false statement of the alternatives, an ethical mirror image of the political “dilemma” of postmodern post-politics (either postmarxian
acceptance of the impossibility/undesirability of revolution, or totalitarian madness and the horrors of a fresh gulag). Zupancic’s statement of the ethics of the Real
demonstrates that “not giving way on one’s desire” (the ethical maxim of psychoanalysis) is compatible with the modern moral imperative, “do your duty!”
Modern ethics involves neither the direct immersion in the death drive (which leads to Žižek’s ethical decisionism and
political voluntarism), nor the avoidance of the drive in a return to the ethics of the master. Instead of Žižek’s
“suicidal” politico-ethical Act that aims directly for the Real, the ethical act involves symbolic suicide - a political
intervention guided by an ethical imperative that brooks no exceptions and is prepared to go all the
way in its impossible demand, “the revolution in permanence”. For, in the final analysis, is not symbolic suicide
infinitely more anxiety provoking than real suicide, than one’s physical destruction (and the
destruction of others)? There is a strange comfort in knowing that you are the instrument of the historical process. Who wants to end up as an
excremental remainder on a “planet without a visa,” having sacrificed everything and yet still having no absolute guarantee that you have done the right thing? By
contrast with the ethics of the drive, Žižek’s
“psychotic” politico-ethical Act that aims directly for the Real can only terminate in a terrorist
ethics, in an ethics that substitutes violence in the Real for the dialectics of the spirit (that is, for interventions in the symbolic fields of culture and politics), and in
a politics that desperately attempts to “galvanise” the historical process through the “propaganda of
the deed,” through exemplary acts of violence or extraordinary acts of transgression. This is what Zupancic
calls the “ethics of fantasy” (“the ethics of desire is the ethics of fantasy (or what we have also called the ethics of the master)” (Zupancic, 2000: 254)), and it is, I
suggest, the
ethics of the antagonist, the ethics of nationalism, fundamentalism and fascism. The Left does not
need such an ethics. A politics of Universal Truth? Yes, absolutely! Up to, and including, “repeating Lenin”. But repetition entails a minimum of
difference: our repetition of Lenin will not be a slavish imitation of the past (up to and including a rehabilitation of Stalin!), but a creative adaptation. We no more
need to imitate Lenin than we need to rush out and join one of the splinters of the Fourth International (and imitate Trotsky). Nor should we imagine that an ethics
(a concept of ethical life, an ethics of the Real) can ground a politics in the traditional sense of supplying an Absolute Guarantee of the ethical validity of every
political act. There
are no “short-circuits” between ethics and politics, nor any “deductions,” in the grand metaphysical style of
Hegel, of the political consequences of the dialectical unfolding of ethical life. Instead, there is a relation of singular articulation, of invention, between ethics and
politics. We
act without final guarantees - which is to say, we accept an infinite responsibility for the
unforeseeable consequences of our acts - but not without criteria (such as universality and the
treatment of persons as ends, not means). We accept that there are many politics minimally compatible with modern ethics, and refuse to
substitute moral judgement for the rational cognition of alternative claims (“moralism”). The leftwing claim is not that socialism is the only ethical politics. It is that
it is the best.
The thesis of the death drive is wrong
Robinson 05 – Andrew Robinson has a Ph.D. in Political Theory from the University of Nottingham. (Theory and Event, Volume 8, Issue 1)
Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis makes clear the myths which underlie it. 'Psychoanalysis transforms and deforms the unconscious by forcing it to pass through
the grid of its system of inscription and representation. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is always already there, genetically programmed, structured, and
finalized on objectives of conformity to social norms'104. Similarly, Reich
has already exposed a predecessor of the idea of "constitutive lack" - the
Freudian "death instinct" - as a denial that "I don't know". It is, he says, a metaphysical attempt to explain as yet
inexplicable phenomena, an attempt which gets in the way of fact-finding about these phenomena105. He
provides a detailed clinical rebuttal of the idea of the "death instinct" which is equally apt as an attack on Lacanians (who seem unaware of Reich's intervention). In
Reich's view, the
masochistic tendencies Freud associates with the "death instinct" are secondary drives
arising from anxiety, and are attributable to 'the disastrous effect of social conditions on the
biopsychic apparatus. This entailed the necessity of criticizing the social conditions which created the
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
neuroses - a necessity which the hypothesis of a biological will to suffer had circumvented'106. The idea
of the "death instinct" leads to a cultural philosophy in which suffering is assumed to be inevitable,
whereas Reich's alternative - to attribute neurosis to frustrations with origins in the social system - leads to a
critical sociological stance107. The relevance of Reich's critique to the political theory of constitutive lack is striking. The "death instinct" is
connected to an idea of primordial masochism which, in the form of "aphanisis" or "subjective destitution", recurs throughout Lacanian political theory. Žižek in
particular advocates masochism, in the guise of "shooting at" or "beating" oneself, as a radical gesture
which reveals the essence of the self and breaks the constraints of an oppressive reality108, although the masochistic gesture is present in all
Lacanian theorists. The death instinct is typified by Žižek as a pathological (in the Kantian sense), contingent attitude which finds satisfaction in the process of selfblockage109. It is identical with the Lacanian concept of jouissance or enjoyment. For him, 'enjoyment (jouissance) is not to be equated with pleasure: enjoyment is
precisely "pleasure in unpleasure"; it designates the paradoxical satisfaction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the
pleasure principle. In other words, enjoyment is located "beyond the pleasure principle"'110. It is also the core of the self, since enjoyment is 'the only "substance"
acknowledged by psychoanalysis', and 'the subject fully "exists" only through enjoyment'111. Primordial masochism is therefore central to the Lacanian concept of
the Real, which depends on there being a universal moment at which active desire - sometimes given the slightly misleading name of the "pleasure principle" - is
suspended, not for a greater or delayed pleasure, but out of a direct desire for unpleasure (i.e. a primary reactive desire). Furthermore, this reactive desire is
supposed to be ontologically prior to active desire. Dominick LaCapra offers a similar but distinct critique to my own, claiming that Lacanian and similar theories
induce a post-traumatic compulsion repetition or an 'endless, quasi-transcendental grieving that may be indistinguishable from interminable melancholy'112.
Reich has already provided a rebuttal of "primordial masochism", which, paradoxically given Žižek's claims to radicalism, was denounced by
orthodox Freudians as communist propaganda. In Reich's view, masochism operates as a relief at a lesser pain which operates as armouring against anxiety about
an underlying trauma113. Regardless of what one thinks of Reich's specific account of the origins of masochism, what is crucial
is his critique of the
idea of a death drive. 'Such hypotheses as are criticised here are often only a sign of therapeutic failure. For if one
explains masochism by a death instinct, one confirms to the patient his [sic] alleged will to suffer'114. Thus, Lacanian
metaphysics conceal Lacanians' encouragement of a variety of neurosis complicit with oppressive
social realities. Politically, the thesis of primordial masochism provides a mystifying cover for the
social forces which cause and benefit from the contingent emergence of masochistic attachments (i.e.
sadistic power apparatuses). One could compare this remark to Butler's claim that Žižek 'defends the trauma of the real... over and against a
different kind of threat'115.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Enmity Good
Enmity is good
Reinhard 04 – Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Jewish Studies at UCLA, 2004, “Towards a Political Theology- Of the Neighbor,” online:
http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf
If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition, the world we find ourselves in today is one from which the
political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange new shape. A
world not anchored by the “us” and
“them” binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically, as
Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of Friendship: The effects of this destructuration would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be
looking for new reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation-states; it would sustain at any
price so-called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies
without which … it would lose its political being … without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself,
qua a self? (PF 77) If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the political, the disappearance of the enemy results in something like global
psychosis: since the mirroring relationship between Us and Them provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective
identifications and repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props up
the psychotic with a sort of pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and
paranoia. Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is surrounded by enemies;
as Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for “an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing
neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented – therefore monstrous –forms; a violence in the face of which what is called
hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable” (PF 83).
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Exts. Enmity Good
Enmity is inevitable and good—the alternative’s project of embracing vulnerability can
only end in a violent war on difference
Prozorov 06 – Sergei Prozorov, collegium fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Professor of International
Relations in the Department of International Relations, Faculty of Politics and Social Sciences, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia, 2006, “Liberal Enmity: The
Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, p. 75-99
Schmitt’s prophecy about the infinite plasticity of the category of the foe as ‘proscribed by nature itself’ may be elaborated with reference to the naturalistic
political ontology of liberal government, discussed in Foucault’s analytics of governmentality and multiple post-Foucauldian studies in this field. In this section we
shall argue that it is precisely the combination of the universalist ethos, at work in the deployment of the category of humanity, with a naturalist political ontology
that accounts for the emergence of friend–foe ultra-politics in contemporary Western liberal democracies. The radical innovation of liberal
governmentality, which emerged as a critique of the theory of ‘police science’ and the practice of ‘police states’ of the
seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, is the reinscription of the social order in terms of socio-economic processes, which, in the episteme of classical
liberalism, are deemed to be natural, self-regulating, antecedent to authority and as having an intrinsic logic of their own that is not fully transparent to state
knowledge: ‘Inscribed within the very logic of liberalism is a certain naturalism.’55 From this epistemic principle follows the central tenet of liberal government:
the suspicion that ‘one always governs too much’. The liberal solution to this problem consists in adapting the
techniques of government to the principles found in the naturalised reality of the social and making government itself accountable to these
principles of the ‘system of natural liberty’.57 At the same time, liberal policies of laissez-faire are not a passive abandonment of an aboriginal reality to its
own devices, but an elaborate activist and interventionist course that secures natural liberty by taking necessary measures to correct its perversions. This
‘corrective’ aspect points to what Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess have respectively termed the ‘illiberality of liberalism’ and the ‘liberal government of
unfreedom’.58 Within the ‘natural’ realm of the social, liberal government has historically identified manifold categories of the population, whose properties or acts
were ‘contrary to nature’ and had to be rectified through governmental intervention, which historically has taken manifold forms, from the confinement of madmen
to the correction of juvenile delinquents.59 It is in this possibility of governmental ‘re-naturalisation’, which we have elsewhere described in terms of the
‘pedagogical technology’ of liberalism60 that we may locate the condition of emergence of the figure of the foe as the ‘enemy of liberalism’. The centrality of
pedagogical interventions to liberal governmentality demonstrates that despite its avowed naturalism, liberalism remains conditioned by the constitutive,
asymmetric and individualising ‘pastoral power’ that Foucault has famously identified as the condition of emergence of modern governmentality as such.61 What
unites all the objects of liberal corrections, irrespectively of whether they are deemed to be evil, mentally disabled, morally deficient or simply ‘irrational’, is their
functioning in the liberal discourse as beings, whose existence is deemed to be contrary to nature. On the one hand, these individuals and groups belong to the
social realm, cast as ontologically and axiologically prior to government in the liberal episteme. On the other hand, however, their practices are not in accordance
with the liberal vision of ‘natural liberty’ and thus require corrective interventions of liberal government, whose modus operandi is itself adapted to the natural
processes of the social. ‘Natural liberty’ is therefore not an aboriginal property of the subject, but an effect of governmental intervention. The Other, who was so
generously let into the global liberal ‘homeland’, is endowed with liberty only on condition of his or her subjection to the corrective interventions that eradicate his
or her alterity. This Foucauldian thesis parallels Schmitt’s critique of the ‘educational theory’ involved in the valorisation of liberal democracy: The people can be
brought to recognise and express their own will correctly through the right education. This means nothing else than that the educator identifies his will at least
provisionally with that of the people, not to mention that the content of education that the pupil will receive is also decided by the educator. The
consequence of this educational theory is a dictatorship that suspends democracy in the name of a true
democracy that is still to be created.62 Thus, liberal government finds its condition of (im)possibility in the generalised illiberality of pedagogical
interventionism, which manifestly violates liberalism’s own naturalist presuppositions but is nonetheless essential to its existence, functioning in the manner of the
Derridean supplement, ‘a strange difference which constitutes [liberalism] by breaching it’.63 In Dean’s argument, this paradox makes liberalism a potentially ‘total’
modality of government, ‘because its program of self-limitation is linked to the facilitation and augmentation of the powers of civil society and its use of these
powers, in conjunction with the sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical powers of the state itself, to establish a comprehensive normalisation of social, economic
and cultural existence’.64 The naturalisation of a certain artefactual conception of the social permits perpetual interventions in the name of its natural values,
disavowing the constitutive and frequently violent character of governmental practices. At the heart of liberal government we may therefore observe the aporia
whereby the naturalist ontology is always contaminated by the logic of supplementarity and every ‘natural liberty’ bears traces of governmental ‘corrective’
interventions.65 This relationship is at work not only in liberal domestic politics, but also, and with an even greater intensity, in the international domain, where
liberal governmentality is deployed in such diverse contexts as military interventions ‘in the name of democracy’, neoliberal programmes of development assistance
and economic restructuring, and even the global campaign for the promotion of ‘human rights’. As William Rasch argues in his reading of the discourse of human
rights as a form of geopolitics, ‘the term “human” is not descriptive, but evaluative. To be truly human, one needs to be corrected.’66 It is this object of liberal
corrective interventions, whether domestic or international, that epitomises the figure of the foe – a ‘not truly human’ being ‘proscribed by nature itself’. The
‘incomplete’ humanity of this creature renders it infinitely inferior to the ‘fully’ liberal rights-holders, which justifies the deployment of asymmetric subject–object
relations in pedagogical practices of correction, while the ‘unnaturality’ of this creature provokes a degree of apprehension: even if the foe is infinitely weaker than
‘us’, any engagement with him is dangerous, as one never knows what these ‘monsters’ are capable of. To recall our discussion in the previous section, the
fear
of the Other that animates Schmitt’s discourse on enmity does not disappear in the liberal political ontology of monistic naturalism.
Instead, it is supplemented with a violent project of eradicating this dangerous alterity that liberalism has itself incorporated
into its ‘universal homeland’ through manifold corrective, disciplinary and punitive practices, which have no rationality whatsoever in the Schmittian pluriverse of
irreducible alterity. The foe is therefore, as it were, a double enemy: both a transcendental Other that is intrinsically dangerous in Schmitt’s sense of radical alterity
and an empirical Other, whose dangerousness is established by his or her actual resistance to the efforts of liberal government to purge this alterity. We may specify
the liberal construct of the foe with the help of Foucault’s idiosyncratic contrast between the savage and the barbarian. The savage (usually presented as ‘noble’) is
manifestly a natural being, albeit probably a prehistoric one, a being that exists before society and who is central in founding society in the mythology of the ‘social
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
contract’ – a central presupposition of liberal political ontology. Moreover, for the liberal economic rationality the savage is an essential presupposition that
provides a referent to the abstract figure of the ‘homo economicus’, ‘a man without past or a history, who is motivated only by self-interest and who exchanges his
product for another product’.67 The savage is therefore both a precursor of civilisation and a condition of its possibility. Thus, when modern liberal subjects
perceive the Other as a ‘savage’, they may be said to be encountering their own selves in pure essence; hence the interest in and even a mild fondness for the
‘exotic otherness’ of the savage throughout the history of liberalism, from the colonial period to the contemporary ‘multiculturalism’. The barbarian, on the other
hand, is ‘someone who can be understood, characterised, and defined only in relation to a civilisation, and by the fact that he exists outside it. There can be no
barbarian unless an island of civilisation exists somewhere, unless he lives outside it, and unless he fights it.’68 Crucially, unlike the savage, who becomes a subject
only insofar as he enters or founds a civilised social relationship, the barbarian is an active subject from the outset, yet solely a negative subject of refusal, resistance
and destruction. ‘Unlike the savage, the barbarian does not emerge from some natural backdrop to which he belongs. He appears only when civilisation already
exists, and only when he is in conflict with it. He does not make his entrance into history by founding a society, but by penetrating a civilisation, setting it ablaze and
destroying it.’69 What is the criterion that distinguishes the barbarian as the foe to be battled and annihilated from the ‘noble savage’, whose authenticity we might
revel in and whose safe eccentricities we might even valorise in the spirit of liberal ‘tolerance’? The savage is manifestly the object of the liberal pastoral, whose
transformation into a liberal subject does not, in the aporetic ontology of liberalism, detract from his naturality, but rather completes it, transforming a ‘not truly
human’ being into a full-fledged ‘free subject’. The pedagogical endowment of the savage with a ‘natural liberty’ transforms this Other, that from the perspective of
the ‘most extreme possibility’ is always a ‘potential enemy’, into a liberal ‘friend’, thereby creating the conditions for the universalisation of the ‘liberal peace’. In
contrast, the barbarian is simply the savage who resists this civilising correction and thus forfeits his own nature, becoming a monstrous foe. The barbarian is thus
anyone who does not feel at home in the universal liberal homeland and continues to assert his Otherness despite his inclusion in global civilisation. It is thus
resistance and daringness to resist that turns the savage, a mute and passive Other, into the most extreme form of the enemy, the enemy of both nature and
civilisation, insofar as in the liberal ontology the two function in a mutually supplementary manner. The enemy of liberalism is thus, by necessity, a foe, which
entails that a Schmittian relation of ‘just
enmity’ is entirely foreclosed in the liberal political ontology. While in the latter relation a
minimal identity of all interacting subjects as sovereign states provided a common framework of legitimate equality between particularistic communities, liberalism
is constituted by a strict dividing line between societies that are in accordance with ‘natural liberty’ and those that are not. The latter may either function in the
modality of the savage, the passively acquiescent objects of pedagogical correctional practices, or, in the case of their resistance to such interventions, are
automatically cast as inhuman and unnatural foes, with whom no relationship of legitimate equality may be conceivable. If the transformation of the savage into a
liberal subject functions as a condition for ‘liberal peace’, the ultrapolitical engagement with the foe may well be viewed as the continuation of the liberal peace by
other means. Thus, the distinguishing feature of the liberal ‘politics of enmity’ is that its utopian desire
human condition inevitably
to eliminate enmity as such from the
leads to the return of the foreclosed in the most obscene form – for liberalism, there indeed are
no enemies, just friends and foes. President Bush’s infamous diatribe ‘you are either with us or against us’ should not be read as an extreme deviation from the
liberal standard of tolerance, but rather as an expression, at an ‘inappropriate’ site of the transatlantic ‘community of friends’, of the binary liberal logic. When both
nature and humanity are a priori on the side of liberalism, there is no need for a Schmittian reflection on how to manage co-existence with radical alterity for the
purposes of limiting a permanently possible confrontation. One is either with ‘us’ or against ‘us’, and, in the latter case, one forfeits not merely a place within ‘our’
community of friends, but also one’s belonging to nature and humanity. Conclusion: Beyond the Ultra-Political Terrain The present hegemony of liberal ultra-politics
is well illustrated by the contemporary phenomenon of the global ‘war on terror’. The ‘war on terror’ offers a fruitful site for inquiring into the politics of enmity for
two reasons. First, the widely perceived undecidability of the category of ‘terrorism’ to the extent that it is frequently attributed to the very same states that have
launched the ‘war on terror’ illuminates starkly the contingency of the friend–enemy distinction. This contingency, i.e. the absence of both essence and necessity to
any particular empirical form of enmity, points to the permanent gap between the transcendental function of the friend–enemy distinction and its particular
historical modality. The deployment of the ultra-political objectification of the enemy as a terrorist ‘rogue’ is a purely contingent option, made possible by a
fundamental asymmetry that endows the subjects of the ‘war on terror’ with what Derrida terms the ‘reason of the strongest’, an epistemico-moral self-certitude
that itself has something roguish about it: [T]hose states that are able or are in a state to denounce or accuse some ‘rogue state’ of violating the law, of failing to live
up to the law, of being guilty of some perversion or deviation, those states that claim to uphold international law and that take the initiative of war, of police or
peacekeeping operations because they have the force to do so, are themselves, as sovereign, the first rogue states. This is true even before any evidence is gathered
to make a case against them, however useful and enlightening such a case may be. There are always (no) more rogue states than one thinks.70 Secondly and
consequently, the ‘war on terror’ is of particular interest, insofar as the perception of this fundamental inequality is arguably constitutive of the very subjectposition of the ‘terrorist’ foe. Indeed, contemporary terrorist violence may be grasped as a retort of the foe, a paradoxical refusal of the subject-position, imposed
on the enemy of liberalism, through its assumption in a hyperbolic and excessive manner, whereby the foe ‘acts out’, with a vengeance, an identity attributed to
him or her. Let us suggest that the specificity of terrorist violence is not derivative of extra-political factors that may function as its background motives (poverty,
economic inequality, underdevelopment, lack of education, etc.), but is rather a direct expression of a properly political grievance, a retort against the humiliation,
incurred in not being recognised as a legitimate enemy. Our demonstration of the monistic nature of liberal pluralism and the artefactual character of liberal
naturalism points to the fact that the subject-position of the foe is preconstituted in the political ontology of liberalism, insofar as the appropriation of the capacity
to adjudicate what is human and what, within humanity, is natural makes exclusion and stigmatisation a permanently available option for dealing with expressions
of dissent. The image of the terrorist foe is thus both entirely contingent from the standpoint of a Schmittian transcendental function of enmity and always-already
articulated within the ontological edifice of liberalism. While the motives for particular acts of terrorism might be distinct in each particular case, we may suggest
that all these acts, first, take place in the preconstituted subject position of the ‘enemy of liberalism’ and, secondly, target precisely this subject position as a priori
inferior. Terrorism is little more and nothing less than the resentful acceptance by the Other of the ultra-political terms of engagement, if only because there is no
other way that the present global order can be legitimately opposed: the refusal to be liberalism’s ‘noble savage’ inevitably turns one into a barbarian. If our enemy
can only be a monster, should we be surprised that the acts of our enemies are so monstrous? The uncanny effect of the liberal negation of pluralistic antagonism is
that in the eyes of its adversaries liberalism may no longer be opposed other than by murderous and meaningless destruction. To the oft-cited empirical claims that
contemporary terrorism has been produced as an effect of Cold War policies of Western powers, we must add a conceptual thesis: terrorism is the practical
expression of that mode of enmity which the liberal West has constituted as the sole political possibility due to its appropriation of both nature and humanity. The
‘war on terror’ is not an accidental deviation from the maxims of Western liberalism but rather an exemplary model of the only kind of ‘war’ that the liberal
foreclosure of political enmity permits, i.e. a war against an a priori ‘unjust enemy’. It should therefore not be surprising to see this model generalised beyond its
original articulation, whereby it becomes a standard response to the worldwide expressions of anti-liberal dissent. For this reason, one gains nothing by attempting
to battle terrorism either on its constitutive ultra-political terms or, as much of critical thought suggests, on the extra-political fronts of development, poverty relief,
civic education, democratisation, etc. Instead, any authentic confrontation with terrorism must logically pass through the stage of questioning what confrontation,
struggle and antagonism actually mean today, who we fight, how we fight and, possibly, whether we still have any meaningful willingness to fight. During the 1970s,
Foucault frequently lamented that the proverbial ‘class struggle’ tended to be theorised in critical thought in terms of ‘class’ rather than ‘struggle’, the latter term
functioning as a mere metaphor.71 The same problem is still with us today – the proliferation of metaphors (‘culture wars’, ‘wars on drugs’, ‘fight against poverty’)
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
is increasingly obscuring the reflection on the concrete meaning of antagonism in contemporary political life. In the interbellum of the 1990s, one frequently
encountered discussions of who the new enemy might be after the demise of the Soviet Union. As subsequent events have demonstrated, it is entirely redundant to
attempt a theoretical deduction of the concrete enemy, which is after all always constituted in a political decision. However, while the ‘who’ question may be
entrusted to history and politics, what requires reflection is a question of how enmity is to be managed. Should
we maintain the present ultrapolitics of the foe despite its evident boomerang effects on our societies, or should we attempt to return to the structure of
‘legitimate enmity’ of the Westphalian era, expanding it beyond the European system to the entire international society? Should we put our trust in and
surrender our freedom to the governmental apparatuses of ‘homeland security’ or should we heed Schmitt’s warning that no security may ever be attained as long
as our sense of the world is that in which there is ‘only a homeland’? This article has demonstrated that it
is impossible to evade these
questions by the plethoric yet repetitive discourse on overcoming enmity in the chimerical project of ‘world unity’ and
that answers to these questions require an interrogation of many ontological assumptions that frame the conduct of modern liberal politics. We have seen that
the desire to dispense with enmity as such, arising out of liberal epistemicomoral certitude, has not brought about a
‘universal friendship’ but rather produced a limited but universalistic community, which permanently
feels threatened due to its incomplete embrace of the globe and, for the same reason, threatens everyone
outside itself. The escape from the murderous ultra-politics of the foe is impossible unless it passes through the stage of an ontological critique of liberalism,
hence the present importance of Schmitt.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Techno-Control K
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Eco-Managerialism
Ecological managerialism is good—key to prevent extinction
Ward 09 – Peter Ward is the Professor of Biology and Space Science at the University of Washington. (“The Medea Hypothesis”, pg. XX-XXII)
To argue my case, I will use new discoveries from geology, biology, and most of the fossil record . To me,
these new understandings are like a memory exhumed from some deep sleep, in reality from the deep past, that
shows the absolute need to construct a new paradigm about both past and future, one that will
require a rather painful shift from the kinds of conservation and environmentalism that are practiced
now. The philosophical underpinnings of modern environmentalism are that the planet must be
returned to environmental conditions that existed prior to the evolution of humankind's technological civilization,
with the resulting planetwide changes to almost every facet of the environment. Instead, we humans must resort to wholesale
planetary engineering if we are to overcome the tendencies of life around us—and those of our own species—to
make the Earth a less salubrious (and eventually lethal) abode for life. The sum of this record, which is meant to be the theme of this work,
is the interpretation that the evolution of life triggered a series of disasters that are inimical to life and will continue to do so into the future. If true, one implication
is that the environmental challenges confronting our species and its civilizations are far more than simple overpopulation and all that entails. The fact is that we
live on a rapidly aging planet, and we will soon have but two choices if our species is to survive:
engineer on a planetary scale or get off. Instead of restoring our planet to how it was before humans,
we have to do exactly what the Gaia hypothesis suggests that life has done all along: optimize
conditions for further life. We have to confront the nature of life itself and deal especially with groups
of life that we animals have battled throughout our history: armies of microbes that cause their own
kind of pollution, inimical to our kind of life. I will try to show in the pages to come that the cause of this inherent tendency of life on Earth is due to one of
Earth life's most deeply inherent characteristics, so deeply rooted that it would not be life without this aspect. It is that all Earth life is a slave to a process called
evolution, Darwinian evolution in fact, for Charles Darwin got the process spectacularly correct even without understanding how any characteristic could be
heritable. Along with replication and metabolism, evolution
is one of the three tripods that defines life on Earth; take any of
evolve or your
species goes extinct, for the Earth keeps changing, and the formation of our own form of life was made possible because of this
these legs away and it falls into the nonlife category. Life can no more help evolving than we can stop breathing and stay alive. You
characteristic. When life first appeared, some 3.7 billion years ago at the latest, our planet was a far more energetic and dangerous place to live on or in, and only
through the ability to change generation by generation could the earliest forms of life survive. It was not only survival of the fittest, but also survival of the best and
fastest evolvers. Natural
selection not only worked on better ways to get energy and withstand
environmental difficulties but evolved better ways to evolve. Before all else, life worked on perfecting
energy acquisition, replicating quickly and with fidelity, and evolving ever more quickly . But the price
to pay is that each and every species innately "tries" to become the dominant species on the planet,
with no regard to other species. Be it bacteria or bees, all try to produce as many individuals as
possible and in so doing can and do poison the environment in various ways for all other species, including the species in question. How much longer will the Earth sustain life in the face of this relentless overpopulation by a variety of species,
which tends to use up resources—unless we humans step in and save things, of course? Alone among all the creatures large and small,
our species can extend the length of the biosphere on Earth, which, like all of us, has a finite lifespan. Yet that lifespan,
currently dictated by life itself, can be lengthened. Vastly lengthened.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Repression
Repression doesn’t lead to lashout
Carel 06 – Havi Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. (“Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger”)
Secondly, the constancy principle on which these ideas are based is incompatible with observational data. Once the passive model of the nervous system has been
discarded, there was no need for external excitation in order for discharge to take place, and more generally, " the
behavioural picture seemed
to negate the notion of drive, as a separate energizer of behaviour" {Hcbb. 1982. p.35). According to Holt, the
nervous system is not passive; it does not take in and conduct out energy from the environment, and
it shows no tendency to discharge its impulses. 'The principle of constancy is quite without any
biological basis" (1965, p. 109). He goes on to present the difficulties that arise from the pleasure principle as linked to a tension-reduction theory. The
notion of tension is "conveniently ambiguous": it has phenomenological, physiological and abstract meaning. But empirical
evidence against the theory of tension reduction has been "mounting steadily" and any further
attempts to link pleasure with a reduction of physiological tension are "decisively refuted" (1965, pp. 1102).
Additionally, the organism and the mental system are no longer considered closed systems. So the main
arguments for the economic view collapse, as does the entropic argument for the death drive (1965, p.
114). A final, more general criticism of Freud's economic theory is sounded by Compton, who argues, "Freud fills in psychological discontinuities with neurological
hypotheses" (1981, p. 195). The
Nirvana principle is part and parcel of the economic view and the incomplete
and erroneous assumptions about the nervous system (Hobson, 1988, p.277). It is an extension ad extremis of the pleasure
principle, and as such is vulnerable to all the above criticisms. The overall contemporary view provides strong support for discarding the Nirvana principle and
reconstructing the death drive as aggression.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Transhumanism
A technological relationship with nature is critical to transcending the human condition
Bostrom 05 – Nick Bostrom is a British Academy Research Fellow at Oxford University who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from LSE. He was previously a
professor at Yale University in the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. (“Transhumanist Values”, Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Volume 4, May 2005,
www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html)
Basic conditions for realizing the transhumanist project If this is the grand vision, what are the more particular objectives that it
translates into when considered as a guide to policy? What is needed for the realization of the transhumanist dream is that technological means necessary for
venturing into the posthuman space are made available to those who wish to use them, and that society be organized in such a manner that such explorations can
be undertaken without causing unacceptable damage to the social fabric and without imposing unacceptable existential risks. Global security. While disasters and
setbacks are inevitable in the implementation of the transhumanist project (just as they are if the transhumanist project is not pursued), there is one kind of
catastrophe that must be avoided at any cost: Existential risk – one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or
permanently and drastically curtail its potential.[6] Several recent discussions have argued that the combined probability of the existential risks is very
substantial.[7] The relevance of the condition of existential safety to the transhumanist vision is obvious: if we go extinct or permanently destroy our potential to
develop further, then the transhumanist core value will not be realized. Global security is the most fundamental and nonnegotiable requirement of the
transhumanist project. Technological progress. That technological
progress is generally desirable from a transhumanist point
of view is also self-evident. Many of our biological shortcomings (aging, disease, feeble memories and intellects, a limited emotional
repertoire and inadequate capacity for sustained well-being) are difficult to overcome, and to do so will require advanced
tools. Developing these tools is a gargantuan challenge for the collective problem-solving capacities
of our species. Since technological progress is closely linked to economic development, economic growth – or more precisely, productivity growth – can in
some cases serve as a proxy for technological progress. (Productivity growth is, of course, only an imperfect measure of the relevant form of technological progress,
which, in turn, is an imperfect measure of overall improvement, since it omits such factors as equity of distribution, ecological diversity, and quality of human
relationships.) The history of economic and technological development, and the concomitant growth of civilization, is appropriately regarded with awe, as
humanity’s most glorious achievement. Thanks to the gradual accumulation of improvements over the past several thousand years, large portions of humanity have
been freed from illiteracy, life-expectancies of twenty years, alarming infant-mortality rates, horrible diseases endured without palliatives, and periodic starvation
and water shortages.
Technology , in this context, is not just gadgets but includes all instrumentally useful
objects and systems that have been deliberately created . This broad definition encompasses
practices and institutions, such as double-entry accounting, scientific peer-review, legal systems, and the applied sciences.
Transhumanism outweighs—we don’t even know what we want to want without
transcending biological humanism
Bostrom 05 – Nick Bostrom is a British Academy Research Fellow at Oxford University who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from LSE. He was previously a
professor at Yale University in the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. (“Transhumanist Values”, Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Volume 4, May 2005,
www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html)
The conjecture that there are greater values than we can currently fathom does not imply that values are not defined in terms of our current dispositions. Take, for
example, a dispositional theory of value such as the one described by David Lewis.[5] According to Lewis’s theory, something is a value for you if and only if you
would want to want it if you were perfectly acquainted with it and you were thinking and deliberating as clearly as possible about it. On this view, there
may
be values that we do not currently want, and that we do not even currently want to want, because we may
not be perfectly acquainted with them or because we are not ideal deliberators. Some values pertaining to certain forms of
posthuman existence may well be of this sort; they may be values for us now, and they may be so in virtue of our current dispositions,
and yet we may not be able to fully appreciate them with our current limited deliberative capacities and our
lack of the receptive faculties required for full acquaintance with them. This point is important because it shows that the transhumanist view that we ought
to explore the realm of posthuman values does not entail that we should forego our current values. The
posthuman values can be our current values, albeit ones that we have not yet clearly comprehended. Transhumanism does not require us to
say that we should favor posthuman beings over human beings, but that the right way of favoring
human beings is by enabling us to realize our ideals better and that some of our ideals may well be
located outside the space of modes of being that are accessible to us with our current biological
constitution.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Anxiety Good
Anxiety is good
Shepard 07 (Mark, Neuro Linguistic Programming Expert, “Anxiety - the ultimate survival tool!,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/2050501/Anxiety-TheUltimate-Survival-Skill)
As much pain and suffering that highly sensitive people go through because of our worry and anxiety
habits, these are traits that have ensured
humanity's survival since time immemorial. What do I mean? First of all you have to understand that anxiety is a thought process. It
is not a mental disease. When you are anxious, what are you thinking about? What's great? What's wonderful? How everything is going to turn out better
than you can possibly imagine? No! You are imagining the worst case scenario. Anxiety is thinking about what you do not want to
have happen. Think about it! Let's float back in time for a moment to One Gazillion B.C. You are hanging out with your hunter gatherer buddies and it's
summer time...There's plenty to eat and it's warm. All of a sudden you have an anxious thought. You think of something unpleasant about the future. You suddenly
think of the coming... winter! You imagine digging through snow drifts scavenging for whatever scraps of food you can find. You imagine starving. You imagine your
children, hungry, cold, sick. That's anxiety. Thinking about what you do not want to have happen. What it's supposed to do is trigger
a resourceful
response. In this case, you come up with a brilliant idea. In order to avoid starvation in the coming winter you start drying food and storing it in underground
containers. Thinking about the cold, you come up with the idea that you can make warm clothing. Come Fall you gladly trade that little summer loin cloth in for a
nice woolly mammoth coat. Thus the first root cellar is born and the fur coat is invented, because of anxiety. Your
ability to think ahead and visualize
bad things happening enables you to plan ahead and take decisive action to create a different outcome. This
planning for the winter results in your family and tribe surviving! Your children and their children pass along this anxiety gene. The "lug-heads" who don't have this
ability perish. Survival is good, isn't it? So those
plan and as a result create
who were able to foresee the future and imagine the worst were able to better
a better future. Now. Fast forward to today. I would be willing to bet that you've been using this wonderful imagination of
yours to imagine the worst. The added factor here is that your unconscious mind does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined, so when
you imagine the worst, your body reacts as if that bad thing is really happening. That releases all sorts of stress hormones and chemicals in your body. The point is
to stop beating yourself up for having anxiety. Anxiety
is merely an excellent survival tool that's been pushed beyond its
original purpose. You can reclaim it's usefulness by doing what ancient people did. Become aware of a possible
negative outcome in the future and then take positive, decisive action to make sure something better
happens. If it's something beyond your control, practice imagining it working out positively and see
how that feels in your body. For example: if you are worried about your kids driving home from college in a snow storm imagine them arriving
safely and sitting in front of the fire sipping hot cocoa.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Exts. Anxiety Good
Many, many of these cards have been released. Environmental Security answers file, K
answers files, etc. All of the cards that explain why your discourse of catastrophes are
good, specifically for the environment (if you read an environment impact).
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Dodds
Dodds is wrong
Lertzmen 12 – Renee Lertzman has a Ph.D. and works in the Associate Faculty of Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, in
Canada. (“Review of Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze/Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis
by Joseph Dodds”, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2012, we don’t endorse any ableist language in this evidence)
However, Dodds
doesn’t rest easy with psychoanalysis entirely. As others have pointed out (Lertzman, 2012b; Zizek, 2010),
psychoanalysis has its blind spots as well. Specifically, going back to the legacy of Freud’s exclusive focus on
the human-populated world— interpsychic and the intrapsychic dimensions, also referred to as object
relations—psychoanalysis runs the great risk of being too disconnected with the physical, breathing,
and natural world, and frankly too caught up in its own intricate theories of the human psyche to take notice of concurrent streams of ecological thought
over the past several decades. In other words, when psychoanalysts come to ecological topics, there can be a lack of
acknowledgement and recognition of related bodies of work and research that can both support and
complement the psychoanalytic contributions. As a result, the risk of appearing “out of touch” and in a
bubble continues to be negotiated.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Naturalism K
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Notes
Lots of answers from the Techno-Control K and the Anthro/Heidegger K apply here.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Interdependence
The alternative fails—humans need to be separate from nature
Trumbore 96 – Sam Trumbore is the minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany. (“A Case Against Deep Ecology”,
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Charlotte County, http://www.trumbore.org/sam/sermons/s624.htm, Feburary 26, 1996)
The biocentric
egalitarianism of deep ecology, on the other hand, is accused of being misanthropic, anti-people,
fearful and distrustful. Certainly comments by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, an environmental eco-terrorist organization, about the benefits
to the planet of the AIDS virus thinning the human herd don't sound very friendly. This organization drives metal spikes into old-growth redwood trees to destroy
the blades of chain saws and saw mills. These spikes can also become quite dangerous if they shatter in the cutting process, and people can get hurt. The objection
here is that human
beings are demoted in value to just another species competing for food and shelter. Our
power over the environment is to be abandoned for the good of the
status at the top of the food chain and our
whole. The native intelligence of the eco-system is postulated to be much greater than our wisdom to strike a harmonious balance between different competing
species. We should reduce our demands because we are smart enough to understand the consequences of our actions. The major problem with this is just who
determines what is the appropriate role for human beings in the ecosystem? There is a dimension of
coercion which enters the picture to which many object. If we can't all have 400-horsepower speedboats, who does get them? If our population
becomes too large for Charlotte County by some environmental yardstick, who decides who can move here, who must leave and who may stay? Who
determines if I can plow up my backyard and can cut down a tree? It must either come from the inside, from a sense of
environmental altruism or from outside by those dreaded burdensome government regulations the Republican candidates for president complain about constantly.
As we know from the tangled web of regulations we already have, they may end up being unfair as well. Deep ecologists
will dodge these coercion
questions by saying that a change of heart is needed in the human race, the same spiritual shift that moves the deep
ecologist to want to change eco-destructive habits. Certainly our process of democratic government would be much more pleasant if we
could all just get along better. But the reality of being a creature of any kind is having competing desires which
may not be mutually compatible . The lion's hunger is not compatible with the gazelle's desire for peaceful grazing. Climbing vines have no
concern for the host they choke from the light. The spider sheds no tears for the fly caught in its web.
Human desire and aversion show no
sign of being tamed anytime soon, especially here in this country where stimulating desire is raised to a cultural icon by advertisers. This is an
appropriate place to insert the critique of deep ecology by the social ecologists led by Murray Bookchin. In the late 80's, Bookchin began to distance himself from
the deep ecologist view because he felt it was a misanthropic departure from the real ecological villains: capitalism, the maldistribution of wealth and our classist
society. As he puts it: "They are barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones and outright social reactionaries who offer a vague, formless often self
contradictory and invertebrate [movement] and a kind of crude eco-brutalism similar to Hitler's. Deep ecologists feed on human disasters, suffering and
misery…[and are guilty of thinking which]…legitimates extremely regressive, primitivistic and even highly reactionary notions.[2] Strong language with perhaps more
heat than light, but it does join with the eco-feminist critique which points out that not enough analysis is done by deep ecology of the social forces at work in the
destruction of the biosphere. Certainly the waste inherent in capitalism is an important factor for consideration but communism and socialism are hardly immune
from ecocide as we have seen with the end of the cold war. The
valuing of people as a collective rather than individuals still doesn't
change the anthropocentric view into an ecocentric view. The platform the social ecologists reject as genocidal is the reduction in
world population. Typically when we read this we think of the teeming masses in underdeveloped parts of the world. But measured in ecological impact, the impact
of one American child is equivalent to the impact of maybe 50 babies in Bangladesh, Namibia or Pakistan over the course of their lifetimes. Each American
consumes an enormous amount of resources directly and indirectly. If there is a place that needs to depopulate for the good of the ecosystem, it is America first.
The politics of limiting family size are difficult at best, even in a socially conformist nation like China. Evidence suggests educated and employed women have smaller
families, so the solution to this one may be voluntary. What is unlikely to happen any time soon without coercion is the reduction of the world population to the
levels deep ecologists hope for. One
of the biggest problems I've had with deep ecology is the celebration of the good old
days when indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes covered a world which was a Garden of Eden overflowing with a
cornucopia of abundance. These tribes are celebrated for their harmonious relationship with their
environment and the spiritual world-view from which comes much of their meaning and satisfaction. A kind of wisdom is posited in these
tribes which we supposedly have lost. Implied in the praise of indigenous peoples is the message that we should cast
off our suits and ties, don a loincloth and return to the jungle. The villain of course is technology , the
apple of knowledge, which ejects us again and again from the Garden. First, many primitive tribes were not and still are not terribly wise in being ecocentric. Sam's
rule is this: The good old days are rarely as good as we might wish they really were. Riane Eisler (author of the Chalice and the Blade) is specific: "If we carefully
examine both our past and present, we see that many
peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
been blindly destructive of their environment. While many indigenous societies have a great reverence for nature, there are also both
non-Western and Western peasant and nomadic cultures that have overgrazed and overcultivated land, decimated forests, and where population pressures have
been severe, killed off animals needlessly and indifferently. And while there is much we can learn today from tribal cultures, it is important not to indiscriminately
idealize all non-Western cultures…For clearly such tribal practices as cannibalism, torture, and female genital mutilation antedate modern times.[3] Rene Dubos
summarizes the available evidence, "All
over the globe and at all times in the past, men have pillaged nature and
disturbed the ecological equilibrium, usually out of ignorance, but also because they have always been more concerned with immediate
advantages than with long-range goals".[4] I think it is tragic for us to idealize the past. Yes, let us learn from it, but with our superior knowledge we can create a
better understanding which integrates old and new. Ken Wilber makes this point colorfully: My point is that it
is one thing to remember and embrace and
honor our roots; quite another to hack off our leaves and branches and celebrate that as the solution
to leaf rot.[5] This leads into my final critique of deep ecology: its anti-industrial and therefore anti-technological bias. As one who has spent a lifetime
engaged with technology, I'm not quite ready to just toss it over the side of the boat. There is no question that technology is complicit in the current rape of the
environment. Without the machines, the forests couldn't be so easily leveled. Our use of internal combustion engines to generate power is driving global warming
through the emission of carbon dioxide. The modern weapons of war take a high toll on our environment. The
critique of technology is
myopic, though, if it doesn't also enumerate the many benefits of better food production, better health
care, better methods of transportation and communication which have improved our lives. Imagine what old
age would be like without the assortment of medicines which manage medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. The ability to replace a joint can
greatly improve quality of life.
Technology is a tool no better or worse than the person who uses it . A shovel can be used
for landscaping or as a weapon for murder. Factory automation can be used to improve the quality and productivity of workers' jobs or to replace people with
machines. This was an area of concern for me as a former manufacturing engineer. One of the reasons I wanted to get out of the world of engineering was because I
saw our technical ability growing much faster than our ethics to guide its wise use. Rather than using my abilities to advance technology, I thought a better use
would be in the ethical domain as a minister working to see technology used to serve the well-being of people rather than exploit them. Technology
such
as is used in tracking animal and bird migrations or cleaning up oil spills can be part of the solution to
reverse some of the damage we do and have done.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Individualism K
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
Notes
Many answers from the security answers file apply here.
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
2AC—Security
Psychological threat construction is inevitable and key to rational decisionmaking
Pyszczynski et al 6 – Tom Pysczczynski is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado. Sheldon Solomon is the Professor of
Psychology at Skidmore College. Jeff Greenberg is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Molly Maxfield works at the University of Colorado. (“On
the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations”, Psychological Inquiry, Volume 17, Issue 4)
Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is wedded to an outmoded assumption that human
beings
share with many other species a survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive
challenges in specific situations, and thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly
defined adaptive response. Our use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight the general orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many
of an organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverseapproach and avoidance tendencies
that
promote its survival and reproduction,ultimately leading to genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also
reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank
(1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival
instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organism’s genes. However, whether
one construes these adaptations
as a series of discrete mechanisms or a general overarching tendency that encompasses many
specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection usually orients organisms to approach things that
facilitate continued existence and to avoid things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for
characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species or even all humans, will always choose life over other valued goals in all
circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists because staying alive is essential for reproduction in most species, as
well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of independent modules that produce
responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that adaptation involves a variety of inter-related
mechanisms working together to insure that genes responsible for these mechanisms are more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g.,
Tattersall, 1998). For example, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be
useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in terms of the overarching function of the heart and
pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific
solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning (Dawkins, 1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved
survival rates and reproductive success of lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether those characteristics become
widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-approaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as oriented
toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism designed to generally foster life or
insure reproduction, or cognitive representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The
selfish gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are
individual survival and
reproduction. … Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and
accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their
children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that humans fear death. Somewhat
ironically, in the early days of the theory,we felt compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics adamantly insisted,
for reasons that were never clear to us, that most people do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability of death
is frightening because people know they are alive and because they want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that humans do not
fear death? Although people sometimes claim that they are not afraid of death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their
death, this requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and preparation and immersion in a belief system that makes this
possible (see TMT for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting question, but not essential to the
logic of the theory. Even if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself,
selected for, it is indisputable that many discrete and integrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for. A
desire to stay alive,
and a fear of anything that threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of these
many discrete mechanisms that result from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities for
symbolic, future- oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our
limbic reactions to threats of death and of our many systems oriented toward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that
illustrate this point. First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT: “Such
constant expenditure of
psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death
were not as constant” (p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any
intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewil- derment and dread it has been
taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young
and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight: Phyllis: I learned something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die. An important
consequence of the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to
anxiety due to events or stimuli that are not immediately present and novel threats to survival that did not exist for our
ancestors,such as AIDS, guns, or nuclear weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has
ever faced a man with a gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into
{FILE TITLE}
GBS 2014
[AUTHOR NAME]
one’s lane can attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow,
or any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical
structures be if they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear reactions in response to such threats?