2015 NDI 6WS – Aff K of TSA CASE NEG
Lasers CP
1NC Shell
1NC—Lasers CP
Laser based molecular scanners are more cognizant of privacy- they allow us to look
for only the things that would endanger the general public
Simbro 2014 (Andrea M- JD candidate, University of Arizona. “The Sky's The Limit: A Modern Approach
To Airport Security” Arizona Law Review. http://arizonalawreview.org/56-2/simbro///GH)
Airport screening procedures have steadily become more invasive as threats have escalated. n243 While a
magnetometer screening is minimally intrusive, n244 the public has condemned the use of advanced imaging technology as
an overly intrusive "virtual strip search" that is not narrowly tailored to meet airport security needs. n245 In a blog, a former TSA
screener detailed the disturbing activities that took place in the image operator room before the TSA agreed to remove
its x-ray backscatter machines. n246 He witnessed "light sexual play among officers . . . and a whole lot of officers laughing
and clowning in regard to some of [*586] [the passengers'] nude images." n247 Although automatic target
recognition software will prevent TSA officers from viewing passengers' naked images from a back room,
n248 the pat-down opt-out option n249 creates even more privacy concerns. Passengers expressed outrage at being
subjected to these aggressive pat-downs. n250 Victims of such pat-downs include a four-year-old girl who feared the TSA
agents because of "stranger danger," n251 a cancer survivor who had to endure a flight covered in his own
urine after a TSA agent popped his urostomy bag during a pat-down, n252 and John Tyner--the famous
"don't touch my junk" disgruntled passenger. n253 Although the pat-down option contributed to the constitutionality of advanced imaging
technology, n254 laser-based molecular scanners would be a more desirable option. Unlike a probing pat-down,
laser-based molecular scanners can detect threats without even touching passengers. n255 With the goal of
"quickly identify[ing] explosives, dangerous chemicals, or bioweapons at a distance," n256 the scanners permit
passengers to speed through security without the fear of being groped by strangers. Passengers would not have to check
their privacy interests at the gate when they chose to fly.
LBMS is better at preventing terrorist attacks
Simbro 2014 (Andrea M- JD candidate, University of Arizona. “The Sky's The Limit: A Modern Approach
To Airport Security” Arizona Law Review. http://arizonalawreview.org/56-2/simbro///GH)
Current screening technology has proven ineffective at detecting and deterring threats. In fact, the TSA has employed
a reactive approach to terrorism. n229 As new threats have emerged, the TSA has rushed to develop solutions, n230 but none have
permanently solved the problem. Because of emerging nonmetallic threats, n231 it appears that magnetometers will soon become obsolete.
The Fifth Circuit identified this shift to nonmetallic threats in the 1970s, explaining that "modern technology has made it possible to miniaturize to
such a degree that enough plastic explosives to blow up an airplane can be concealed in a toothpaste tube. A detonator planted in a fountain pen is all
that is required to set it off." n232 As the thwarted British liquid explosives plot n233 and the attempted underwear and shoe bombing incidents
reveal, n234 magnetometers are ineffective at detecting such threats. [*585] Although
advanced imaging technology can better
detect nonmetallic threats, it is not perfect. A 27-year-old engineer named Jonathan Corbett recently exposed a flaw in the technology.
n235 A viral video documented Corbett's successful attempt to outsmart both types of AIT scanners. n236 He sewed a pocket to the side of a shirt,
placed a metal carrying case inside it, and walked through the scanners undetected. n237 Although such a case could "easily alarm any of the old metal
detectors," the supposedly more advanced body scanners did not detect it. n238 Federal investigators conceded these vulnerabilities. n239 Laser-
based molecular scanners can fill these loopholes by disclosing metallic and nonmetallic threats that are
overlooked by current technology. n240 In fact, the scanners have the capability to precisely detect traces of
substances. n241 To ensure that the scanners' effectiveness is not reduced by a false positive problem, however,
they should be programmed to alert to substances greater than a specified amount. Such a limitation would avoid the
"Big Brother" scenarios depicted in the Introduction of this Note. n242
Congress CP
1NC Shell
1NC—Congress CP
Congress should put guidelines on TSA surveillance
Hoff 2014 (Jessica- editor of the Michigan State Law Review. “Enhancing Security While Protecting Privacy: The Rights
Implicated By Supposedly Heightened Airport Security” Michigan State Law Review.
http://www.lexisnexis.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lnacui2api/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T22
289642469&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T22289642473&cisb=22_T22289642472&t
reeMax=true&treeWidth=0&selRCNodeID=2&nodeStateId=411en_US,1&docsInCategory=10&csi=144692&docNo=5//GH)
While scholars have taken a variety of approaches to resolving questions on the constitutionality of TSA measures, n218 none have suggested a
satisfactory solution to protecting privacy. Indeed, one
glaringly missing solution is for Congress to explicitly limit the
TSA's authority. n219 Although some have suggested that Congress should set guidelines for TSA security methods so that privacy will be
respected, n220 any such guidelines could still provide the TSA with too much discretion, as they are extremely vague and would be [*1645] practically
impervious to challenges by citizens due to the high degree of deference that the TSA would continue to receive from courts in carrying out its
mandates. n221 While
Congress should indeed set guidelines, like requiring the TSA to explicitly consider the
invasiveness of its measures, n222 such vague guidelines are simply insufficient to protect privacy and need to be
supplemented by other, more clear directions to the TSA. The problem remains that the TSA has too little oversight for
the vast amount of authority it has to invade individual privacy. Even though some of the TSA's measures have been held constitutional, n223
Congress should still play a more active role in limiting the TSA's discretion in areas that so heavily invade
personal privacy and dignity. Although Congress cannot foresee every potential abuse of privacy in new technological
developments, when threats are clear, Congress should be ready and willing to do what it is able to do: protect
Americans from gross invasions of privacy by the agencies it creates. n224 While Congress cannot protect Americans from
every threat, foreign or domestic, it ought not to stand idly by while the privacy of Americans is daily infringed upon
without significantly enhancing safety. n225 Although Benjamin Franklin's warning that "'[t]hose [who] would give up their liberty for
security deserve neither and lose both'" n226 is rather strong, at a certain point, the sacrifice of privacy and liberty for the sake of
security becomes too great as the "benefits" of increased invasiveness hit levels of diminishing returns on the
amount of safety gained. While the TSA was charged with increasing security at airports, n227 surely Congress did not intend that security
come at any cost. n228 However, since [*1646] security is still vitally important, some type of system must be worked out to both provide for security
and protect privacy.
Conditions CP
1NC Shell
1NC—Conditions CP
Congress should condition TSA funding on presidential approval
Hoff 2014 (Jessica- editor of the Michigan State Law Review. “Enhancing Security While Protecting Privacy: The Rights
Implicated By Supposedly Heightened Airport Security” Michigan State Law Review.
http://www.lexisnexis.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lnacui2api/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T22
289642469&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T22289642473&cisb=22_T22289642472&t
reeMax=true&treeWidth=0&selRCNodeID=2&nodeStateId=411en_US,1&docsInCategory=10&csi=144692&docNo=5//GH)
Alternatively, Congress
could require the President to make a finding that a given security measure's benefits,
measured in the value of lives saved, n259 outweigh its costs, measured both in monetary expenses and
privacy costs. n260 Congress could condition funds for the TSA's security measures or condition permission
for the TSA to use certain security measures on the President making this finding. Imposing such requirements would
be easier than having Congress pass laws on specific methods the TSA wants to use. n261 Further, this could be undone much more
easily than passing another law through Congress, as the President could make another finding that the condition is
no longer satisfied. n262 Overall, this alternative would allow for the benefit of increasing the TSA's political
accountability by centering attention for these decisions on the President. However, it could also have a danger of being too
micromanaging over the agency, just as could be the problem with Congress making rules that are too specific. n263 Even considering the potential
disadvantages of the President or Congress taking a more active role, the
protections for privacy are worth it.
advantages of increased accountability and greater
Trusted Traveler CP
1NC Shell
1NC—Trusted Traveler Cp
cp text: the usfg should create a trusted traveler program open for all persons to
apply for. #noideologypls?
CP is good (:^0)
Riley ’11 - Vice President at RAND National Security Research Division, Ph.D. in public policy analysis, (K. Jack, “Air Travel Security Since
9/11”, RAND Corporation, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/corporate_pubs/2011/RAND_CP635.pdf)// HH
There are a variety of ways in which we could configure a trusted traveler program. No program will be bulletproof,
but, frankly, it does not need to be, given the extremely low odds of a suicide terrorist being on a flight originating in the United States. The
characteristics, or combinations of characteristics, around which a trusted traveler program could be
organized include
• Possession
of a security clearance issued by a U.S. government agency. Most U.S. government security clearances are
issued after a comprehensive background investigation that includes an examination of foreign ties. These
clearances, which are far more stringent than the criminal background checks conducted on TSA agents, permit the holders to work on
the government’s most pressing and sensitive problems. The Washington Post reported in 2010 that more than 850,000 people
held top secret clearances, a credential that requires an investigation covering the preceding ten years that includes contact with employers, coworkers,
and others; investigation of education, professional, personal, and civic affiliations; and agency checks of spouses and significant others.16 Hundreds
of thousands hold lesser clearances that require similar, although not as stringent, investigations.
•A
profile that involves frequent travel. An individual traveling 100,000 miles per year is, by conservative estimates,
spending 200 hours on airplanes each year. That is approximately 10 percent of a standard 2,000-hour work
year. This, combined again with the extremely low likelihood of terrorists or suicide bombers being on flights originating in the United States,
suggests that such travelers can be screened via the basic procedures that were in existence prior to the
deployment of WBI machines and pat downs. Airlines generally do not make information on the size of their frequent-flyer pools
publicly available, but such individuals are thought to number in the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Even at the lower end of the
range, they would still be responsible for a significant fraction of the annual enplanements in the United States.
• Travelers
willing to submit to the equivalent of a security clearance process. Some business and leisure
travelers would consider it well worth the time and expense to obtain such a credential in exchange for the
ability to get through an airport more quickly. Several programs, including Global Entry, NEXUS, and SENTRI, already
allow travelers to become pre-approved for expedited clearance for entry into the United States at borders.
Global Entry members, for example, pay a fee, undergo an interview and background check, and provide fingerprints as part of seeking approval.
Again, numbers are generally not easily available, but the combined programs likely cover hundreds of thousands of frequent travelers.
It is important to note that I
am not advocating that travelers with these characteristics be exempt from security
screening. Rather, they should be eligible for a level of primary screening that is not as intrusive and time
consuming as WBIs and frisks. These trusted traveler screenings would be supplemented by random applications of more-intensive
secondary screening on small portions of this population. The random secondary screenings would help prevent contraband
and risk from creeping in through the process. In the meantime, the more-intensive methods can be more effectively used on people
about whom we know little. In addition to allowing resources to be more effectively used, we would also likely
significantly reduce the number of machines, and therefore people, needed for security procedures at airports,
thereby reducing the expense of operating the system
AT FRAMING MEANS THE CP CAN’T
SOLVE
Their indicts are logically incoherent—we can use the master’s tools to dismantle the
master’s house—make them provide specific indicts against our radical vision of
liberalism
Mills 12 [2012, Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, “Occupy
Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why They’re All
Wrong)”, Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 15 number 2 (2012): 305–323]
Few lines in the anti-colonial and anti-racist traditions of the last few decades or so have been as often quoted
as Audre Lorde's (1984) celebrated dictum: "The master's tools can never be used to dismantle the master's
house." The reason for its popularity is obvious: it sums up so well, in such a neat epigrammatical form, a seemingly radical and
uncompromising metatheoretical position. But with all due respect to my late fellow Caribbean- American, the multiple oppressions
she had to suffer in the racist, sexist, and heterosexist United States, and her courage in resisting her subordination, affirming her identity, and making
such an invaluable contribution to the distinctive feminism of women of color, this
celebrated dictum is just false. It's not itself
pretending to be an argument, of course—it's just an assertion. But one does try to come up with a (good)
argument for its truth, one quickly finds oneself floundering. Lorde is not saying: "The masters tools sometimes can,
and sometimes cannot, be used to dismantle the masters house." Such a qualification, while having the happy virtue of making
the claim true, would have the unhappy vice of reducing it to banality—not what one wants in a good aphorism or epigram. Moreover, it would be a
banality that nullifies its impact, since, of course, it gets its force precisely from its implicit uncompromisingness: "The master's tools can never be used
to dismantle the master's house." But only
a few seconds' thought—more than most of its reciters have apparently ever given to it—
should be sufficient to demonstrate the obvious falseness of this claim. Take it, to begin with, at the most literal level,
since if an aphorism is untrue in the concrete it is hardly any more likely to be true at the abstract level meant to be figured and represented by the
concrete. Imagine
we're a group of escaped slaves who have begun by dismanding the master (presumably using our
own tools) and now wish to move on to his house. Hunting around the plantation, we come across a tool-shed of
hammers, pickaxes, saws, barrels of gunpowder, and so forth. Cannot we take these tools and—hammering,
digging, sawing in half, blowing up—demolish the master's house? Of course we can—^you just watch. So the moment one
examines the maxim, it falls apart. Only if it could plausibly be demonstrated that there is something intrinsic in the
tool itself that prohibits any such emancipatory use of it would the dictum be true. But obviously there will be
many tools, like hammers, which can be used for a wide variety of ends, so that even if the master has used
them, inter alia, to build his plantation mansion (with our forced labor, of course), this does not mean that we cannot use
them for different purposes once he is no longer with us. Appropriating the master's tools—after all, we figure he
owes us a lot of back pay—^we head out West, where we construct freedmen's towns with them. Who will refuse to move
into these houses because they were built with the master's tools? Consider now the abstract level of conceptual tools and
theoretical frameworks that the material tools are supposed to represent. I suggest that Lorde's dictum is no truer here.
Some tools, such as racism, will be intrinsically oppressive, so that one should be dubious about—to cite a famous example—
Jean-Paul Sartre's claim in "Black Orpheus" that an "antiracist racism" is possible. But liberalism and contract theory, I
would claim, are different. Admittedly, liberalism and contractarianism have historically been racialized—this was the
whole burden of The Racial Contract. But the crucial disanalogy as "tools" between racism on the one hand, and
liberalism and contractarianism, on the other hand, is that once you purge racism of its scientific errors and moral
viciousness there is nothing left:, while for liberalism and contractarianism, this is not the case. Racism as an
ideology about the natural differentiation of humanity into discrete, hierarchically ordered biological groups, or racism as moral disregard for people
because of their race, collapses into nothingness once it is realized that not only are the groups historically taken to
be races not in a hierarchy, but that in fact they do not even exist as discrete biological entities in the first
place, and that racially based disregard for people is morally unconscionable. But liberalism and contractarianism
as descriptive and normative claims about how we should think of the formation of society and the rights that
morally equal humans should have within that society can survive the removal of racist conceptions of
who should be counted as fully human and fully equal. The latter "tools," unlike the former, have other
dimensions beside the goal of subordination, and so can be reclaimed. An anti-contractarian contractarianism
is possible in a way that an anti-racist racism is not.
State PIK
1NC Shell #1
We advocate the entirety of the 1AC with the exception of their “lens [of] United States federal
government economic policy”
There is no internal link between the plan text and the solvency.
Schlag 90 (Pierre Schlag, professor of law@ univ. Colorado, stanford law review, november, page lexis)
In fact, normative
legal thought is so much in a hurry that it will tell you what to do even though there
is not the slightest chance that you might actually be in a position to do it. For instance, when was the last time
you were in a position to put the difference principle n31 into effect, or to restructure [*179] the doctrinal corpus of the first amendment? "In the
future, we should. . . ." When was the last time you were in a position to rule whether judges should become pragmatists, efficiency purveyors, civic
republicans, or Hercules surrogates? Normative
legal thought doesn't seem overly concerned with such worldly
questions about the character and the effectiveness of its own discourse. It just goes along and
proposes, recommends, prescribes, solves, and resolves. Yet despite its obvious desire to have
worldly effects, worldly consequences, normative legal thought remains seemingly unconcerned that
for all practical purposes, its only consumers are legal academics and perhaps a few law students -- persons who
are virtually never in a position to put any of its wonderful normative advice into effect.
Externalizing ethics onto legal institutions trades off with personal ethics—turns the case and
independently kills value to life
Rozo, 4
Diego Rozo, MA in philosophy and Cultural Analysis; “Forgiving the Unforgivable: On Violence, Power, and
the Possibility of Justice,” p. 19-21 //bghs-ms
[Gender modified]
Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where suffering is exchanged
for more, but ‘legal’ suffering, because these relations are no longer regulated by the “culture of the heart”
[Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin describes it, the “legal system tries to erect, in all areas where individual ends
could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be realized only by legal power.” (CV 238) The
individual is not to take law in his their own hands; no conflict should be susceptible of being solved without
the direct intervention of law, lest its authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as
indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The consequence of this infiltration of law throughout
the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the
individual becomes. Legal and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the possibility
of forgiveness is monopolized by the state under the ‘right of mercy’. Hence the responsibility of the person toward the
others is now delegated on the authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents of (legal)
vengeance exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others, breaking the moral proximity that
makes every ethics possible.20 Thus I am no longer obliged to an other that by his/her very presence would
demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of every occasion), because law, by seeking to regulate affairs between
individuals, makes this other anonymous, virtual: his their otherness is equaled to that of every possible other.
The Other becomes faceless, making it all too easy for me to ignore his their demands of justice, and even to
exert on him them violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of evil, then, becomes not a means but an
end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of the state’s survival. Hence, the ever-present possibility of the
worst takes the form of my unconditional responsibility towards the other being delegated on the ideological
and totalitarian institutions of a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self-preserving vengeance. The undecidability of
the origin of law, and its consequent meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that the worst could be exerted in the name of
law. Even the very notion of crimes against humanity, which seeks to protect the life of the population, can
be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own population.22 From now on, my
responsibility towards the Other is taken from me, at the price of my own existence being constantly
threatened by the imminent and fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate
offence. In this picture, the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of state violence
– the law infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts.
They are more interested in playing hermeneutic games than engaging in politics, the
preoccupation with pretending to be policymakers traps them in a spectator position and bars them
from recognizing the bureaucratic violence of legal praxis.
Schlag 90 (Pierre Schlag, professor of law@ univ. Colorado, stanford law review, november, page lexis)
All of this can seem very funny. That's because it is very funny. It is also deadly serious. It is deadly serious, because all this normative
legal
thought, as Robert Cover explained, takes place in a field of pain and death. n56 And in a very real sense Cover was right. Yet
as it takes place, normative legal thought is playing language games -- utterly oblivious to the character of
the language games it plays, and thus, utterly uninterested in considering its own rhetorical and
political contributions (or lack thereof) to the field of pain and death. To be sure, normative legal
thinkers are often genuinely concerned with reducing the pain and the death. However, the problem is not what
normative legal thinkers do with normative legal thought, but what normative legal thought does with normative legal thinkers. What is
missing in normative legal thought is any serious questioning, let alone tracing, of the relations that
the practice, the rhetoric, the routine of normative legal thought have (or do not have) to the field of pain
and death. And there is a reason for that: Normative legal thought misunderstands its own situation. Typically, normative legal thought
understands itself to be outside the field of pain and death and in charge of organizing and policing that field. It is as if the action of normative legal
thought could be separated from the background field of pain and death. This theatrical distinction is what allows normative legal thought its own selfimportant, self-righteous, self-image -- its congratulatory sense of its own accomplishments and effectiveness. All this self-congratulation works very
nicely so long as normative legal [*188] thought continues to imagine itself as outside the field of pain and death and as having effects within that field.
n57 Yet it is doubtful this image can be maintained. It is not so much the case that normative legal thought has effects on the field of pain and death -at least not in the direct, originary way it imagines. Rather, it is more the case that normative
legal thought is the pattern, is the
operation of the bureaucratic distribution and the institutional allocation of the pain and the death.
n58 And apart from the leftover ego-centered rationalist rhetoric of the eighteenth century (and our routine), there is nothing at this point to suggest
that we, as legal thinkers, are in control of normative legal thought. The problem for us, as legal thinkers, is that the
normative appeal of
normative legal thought systematically turns us away from recognizing that normative legal thought
is grounded on an utterly unbelievable re-presentation of the field it claims to describe and regulate.
The problem for us is that normative legal thought, rather than assisting in the understanding of
present political and moral situations, stands in the way. It systematically reinscribes its own
aesthetic -- its own fantastic understanding of the political and moral scene. n59Until normative legal thought
begins to deal with its own paradoxical postmodern rhetorical situation, it will remain something of an irresponsible
enterprise. In its rhetorical structure, it will continue to populate the legal academic world with
individual humanist subjects who think themselves empowered Cartesian egos, but who are largely
the manipulated constructions of bureaucratic practices -- academic and otherwise.
1nc shell #2
My partner and I advocate the entirety of the 1ac minus the plan text.
The affirmative’s concept of violence as external from their own lives allows individuals to abdicate
their responsibility. Denial of our individual culpability with violence forecloses the possibility of
meaningful change; in the process, violence becomes more likely.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn
University. "The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior", p. 1-4)
What is striking is that the violence which is talked about is always the violence committed by someone else:
women talk about the violence of men, adults about the violence of young people; the left, liberals and the centre about the violence of right
extremists; the right, centre and liberals about the violence of leftist extremists; political activists talk about structural violence, police and
politicians about violence in the `street', and all together about the violence in our society. Similarly, Westerners talk about violence in the
Balkans, Western citizens together with their generals about the violence of the Serbian army. Violence is
recognized and
measured by its visible effects, the spectacular blood of wounded bodies, the material destruction of
objects, the visible damage left in the world of `objects'. In its measurable damage we see the proof that
violence has taken place, the violence being reduced to this damage. The violation as such, or invisible forms of
violence - the non-physical violence of threat and terror, of insult and humiliation, the violation of human dignity - are hardly ever the
issue except to some extent in feminist and anti-racist analyses, or under the name of psychological
violence. Here violence is recognized by the victims and defined from their perspective - an important
step away from the catalogue of violent acts and the exclusive evidence of material traces in the object.
Yet even here the focus tends to be on the effects and experience of violence, either the objective and
scientific measure of psychological damage, or the increasingly subjective definition of violence as
experience. Violence is perceived as a phenomenon for science to research and for politics to get a grip
on. But violence is not a phenomenon: it is the behaviour of people, human action which may be
analysed. What is missing is an analysis of violence as action - not just as acts of violence, or the cause of
its effects, but as the actions of people in relation to other people and beings or things. Feminist
critique, as well as other political critiques, has analysed the preconditions of violence, the unequal
power relations which enable it to take place. However, under the pressure of mainstream science and a
sociological perspective which increasingly dominates our thinking, it is becoming standard to argue as if
it were these power relations which cause the violence. Underlying is a behaviourist model which
prefers to see human action as the exclusive product of circumstances, ignoring the personal decision of
the agent to act, implying in turn that circumstances virtually dictate certain forms of behaviour. Even
though we would probably not underwrite these propositions in their crass form, there is nevertheless a growing tendency, not just
in social science, to explain violent behaviour by its circumstances. (Compare the question, `Does pornography cause
violence?') The circumstances identified may differ according to the politics of the explainers, but the method of explanation remains the same.
While consideration of mitigating circumstances has its rightful place in a court of law trying (and defending) an offender, this
does not
automatically make it an adequate or sufficient practice for political analysis. It begs the question, in
particular, `What is considered to be part of the circumstances (and by whom)?' Thus in the case of sexual offenders, there is
a routine search - on the part of the tabloid press or professionals of violence - for experiences of violence in the offender's own past, an
understanding which is rapidly solidifying in scientific model of a `cycle of violence'. That is, the
relevant factors are sought in the
distant past and in other contexts of action, e a crucial factor in the present context is ignored, namely
the agent's decision to act as he did. Even politically oppositional groups are not immune to this
mainstream sociologizing. Some left groups have tried to explain men's sexual violence as the result of
class oppression, while some Black theoreticians have explained the violence of Black men as the result
of racist oppression. The ostensible aim of these arguments may be to draw attention to the pervasive
and structural violence of classism and racism, yet they not only fail to combat such inequality, they
actively contribute to it. Although such oppression is a very real part of an agent's life context, these
`explanations' ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the same oppression uses violence, that is,
that these circumstances do not `cause' violent behaviour. They overlook, in other words, that the
perpetrator has decided to violate, even if this decision was made in circumstances of limited choice. To
overlook this decision, however, is itself a political decision, serving particular interests. In the first instance it
serves to exonerate the perpetrators, whose responsibility is thus transferred to circumstances and a
history for which other people (who remain beyond reach) are responsible. Moreover, it helps to stigmatize all
those living in poverty and oppression; because they are obvious victims of violence and oppression,
they are held to be potential perpetrators themselves.' This slanders all the women who have
experienced sexual violence, yet do not use violence against others, and libels those experiencing racist
and class oppression, yet do not necessarily act out violence. Far from supporting those oppressed by
classist, racist or sexist oppression, it sells out these entire groups in the interest of exonerating
individual members. It is a version of collective victim-blaming, of stigmatizing entire social strata as
potential hotbeds of violence, which rests on and perpetuates the mainstream division of society into
so-called marginal groups - the classic clienteles of social work and care politics (and of police repression) - and an implied
`centre' to which all the speakers, explainers, researchers and careers themselves belong, and which we
are to assume to be a zone of non-violence. Explaining people's violent behaviour by their circumstances
also has the advantage of implying that the `solution' lies in a change to circumstances. Thus it has
become fashionable among socially minded politicians and intellectuals in Germany to argue that the rising neoNazi violence of young people (men), especially in former East Germany, needs to be countered by combating
poverty and unemployment in these areas. Likewise anti-racist groups like the Anti. Racist Alliance or
the Anti-Nazi League in Britain argue that `the causes of racism, like poverty and unemployment, should
be tackled and that it is `problems like unemployment and bad housing which lead to racism'.' Besides being
no explanation at all of why (white poverty and unemployment should lead specifically to racist violence (and what would explain middle- and
upper-class racism), it
is more than questionable to combat poverty only (but precisely) when and where violence
is exercised. It not only legitimates the violence (by `explaining' it), but constitutes an incentive to violence,
confirming that social problems will be taken seriously when and where `they attract attention by
means of violence - just as the most unruly children in schools (mostly boys) tend to get more attention from teachers than well-behaved
and quiet children (mostly girls). Thus if German neo-Nazi youths and youth groups, since their murderous assaults on refugees and migrants in
Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Dresden etc., are treated to special youth projects and social care measures (to the tune of DM 20 million per year),
including `educative' trips to Morocco and Israel,' this is am unmistakable signal to society that racist violence does indeed 'pay off'.
Political violence is sustained by organized thinking that looks at violence through meta-analysis. We
need to have deeper insight that realizes that each of us are culpable for violence. This is integral to
ending the cycle of violence.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn
University. "The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior", p. 8-11)
Moreover, personal
behaviour is no alternative to `political' action; there is no question of either/or. My
concern, on the contrary, is the connection between these recognized forms of violence and the forms
of everyday behaviour which we consider `normal' but which betray our own will to violence - the
connection, in other words, between our own actions and those acts of violence which are normally the
focus of our political critiques. Precisely because there is no choice between dedicating oneself either to
`political issues' or to `personal behaviour', the question of the politics of personal behaviour has (also)
to be moved into the centre of our politics and our critique. Violence - what we usually recognize as such - is no
exception to the rules, no deviation from the normal and nothing out of the ordinary, in a society in which
exploitation and oppression are the norm, the ordinary and the rule. It is no misbehaviour of a minority amid good behaviour by the majority,
nor the deeds of inhuman monsters amid humane humans, in a society in which there is no equality, in which people divide others according to
race, class, sex and many other factors in order to rule, exploit, use, objectify, enslave, sell, torture and kill them, in which millions of animals
are tortured, genetically manipulated, enslaved and slaughtered daily for `harmless' consumption by humans. It
is no error of
judgement, no moral lapse and no transgression against the customs of a culture which is thoroughly
steeped in the values of profit and desire, of self-realization, expansion and progress. Violence as we
usually perceive it is `simply' a specific - and to us still visible - form of violence, the consistent and
logical application of the principles of our culture and everyday life. War does not suddenly break out
in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist
attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no
solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense
everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation,
the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the `outbreak' of war, of
sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all. 'We are the war', writes
Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her existential analysis of the question, `what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell [my friend], but I
see it everywhere. It
is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But
it is also in your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have
a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our
feelings, relationships, values - in short: us. We are the war ... And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone
else responsible. We make this war possible, we permit it to happen.' `We are the war' - and we also
`are' the sexual violence, the racist violence, the exploitation and the will to violence in all its
manifestations in a society in so-called `peacetime', for we make them possible and we permit them
to happen. `We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and
diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck
says, upholding the notion of `collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the
conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal.' On the contrary, the
object is precisely to
analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to
unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and
to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and
actions without lessening theirs by any collective `assumption' of responsibility . Yet our habit of
focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in
relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility - leading to the
well-known illusion of our apparent `powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called
political disillusionment. Single citizens - even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in their
obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or
Somalia - since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we
are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us
into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement,
and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it
seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events,
or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It
not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls `organized irresponsibility', upholding the
apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually
organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our
personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot
`do' anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we
are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely
disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of `What
would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister
of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political
analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative
insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own
action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more
prevalent formulations like `I want to stop this war', `I want military intervention', `I want to stop this backlash', or `I want a moral revolution.' 7
, We
are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks,
our 'non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own
thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the
ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the
advantages these offer. And we `are' the war in our `unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of
the `fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't' - our readiness, in other words, to build
identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the `others'. We share
in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the
way we shape `our feelings, our relationships, our values' according to the structures and the values
of war and violence. So if we move beyond the usual frame of violence, towards the structures of
thought employed in decisions to act, this also means making an analysis of action. This seems all the
more urgent as action seems barely to be perceived any longer. There is talk of the government doing
`nothing', of its `inaction', of the need for action, the time for action, the need for strategies, our
inability to act as well as our desire to become `active' again. We seem to deem ourselves in a kind of
action vacuum which, like the cosmic black hole, tends to consume any renewed effort only to
increase its size. Hence this is also an attempt to shift the focus again to the fact that we are
continually acting and doing, and that there is no such thing as not acting or doing nothing.
namely as Drakulic says, in
None of us have our hands on the levers of power; instead we need to interrogate our own will to
violence; only by politicizing the way we think about violence can we find ways to end the cycle of
violence.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn
University. "The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior", p. 4-5)
If we nevertheless continue to explain violence by its ‘circumstances’ and attempt to counter it by
changing these circumstances, it is also because in this way we stay in command of the problem. In
particular, we do not complicate the problem by any suggestions that it might be people who need to
change. Instead, we turn the perpetrators of violence into the victims of circumstances, who as
victims by definition, cannot act sensibly (but in changed circumstances will behave differently. ‘We,’
on the other hand, are the subjects able to take in hand the task of changing the circumstances. Even
if changing the circumstance – combating poverty, unemployment, injustice, etc. – may not be easy, it
nevertheless remains within ‘our’ scope at least theoretically and by means of state power. Changing
people, on the other hand, is neither within our power nor, it seems, ultimately in our interest: we
prefer to keep certain people under control, putting limits on their violent behavior, but we
apparently have no interest in a politics that presupposes people's ability to change and aims at
changing attitudes and behavior. For changing (as opposed to restricting) other people's behavior is
beyond the range and influence of our own power; only they themselves can change it. It requires
their will to change, their will not to abuse power and not to use violence. A politics aiming at a
change in people's behavior would require political work that is very much more cumbersome and
very much less promising of success than is the use of state power and social control. It would require
political consciousness-raising — politicizing the way we think — which cannot be imposed on others
by force or compulsory educational measures. It would require a view of people which takes seriously
and reckons with their will, both their will to violence and their will to change. To take seriously the
will of others however would mean recognizing one's own, and putting people's will, including our
own, at the centre of political reflection. A political analysis of violence needs to recognize this will,
the personal decision in favour of violence - not just to describe acts of violence, or the conditions
which enable them to take place, but also to capture the moment of decision which is the real impetus
for violent action. For without this decision there will be no violent act, not even in circumstances
which potentially permit it. It is the decision to violate, not just the act itself, which makes a person a
perpetrator of violence - just as it is the decision not to do so which makes people not act violently
and not abuse their power in a situation which would nevertheless permit it. This moment of decision,
therefore, is also the locus of potential resistance to violence. To understand the structures of thinking
and the criteria, by which such decisions are reached, but above all to regard this decision as an act of
choice, seems to me a necessary precondition for any political struggle against violence and for a nonviolent society.
Ext – impact
When the State Becomes a Sacred Event Unrestrained Nationalism Produces Endless
Slaughter.
Beres 94 (Louis Rene, Professor of International Law in the Department of Political Science @ Purdue University,
Ph.D., Princeton University. Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, “ARTICLE: SELFDETERMINATION, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND SURVIVAL ON PLANET EARTH” Spring 1994. Lexis
Nexis)
The State presents itself as sacred. The idea of the State as sacred is met with horror and indignation, especially in the democratic,
secular West, but this notion is indisputable. Throughout much of the contemporary world, the expectations of government are
always cast in terms of religious obligation. And in those places where the peremptory claims of faith are in conflict with such expectations, it is the
latter that invariably prevail. With States as the new gods, the profane has become not only permissible, it is now
altogether sacred. Consider the changing place of the State in world affairs. Although it has long been observed that States must continually
search for an improved power position as a practical matter, the sacralization of the State is a development
of modern times. This sacralization, representing a break from the traditional [*20] political realism of
Thucydides, n57 Thrasymachus n58 and Machiavelli, n59 was fully developed in Germany. From Fichte 1160 and Hegel, through Ranke and von
led the planet to its current problematic rendezvous with selfdetermination. Rationalist philosophy derived the idea of national sovereignty from the notion of individual liberty, but cast in its modem, post-seventeenth century
expression, the idea has normally prohibited intervention n62 and acted to oppose human dignity and human rights. 1163 Left to develop on its
continuous flight from reason, the legacy of unrestrained nationalism can only be endless loathing and
Treitschke, n6 1 the modern transformation of Realpolitik has
slaughter. Ultimately, as Lewis Mumford has observed, all human energies will be placed at the disposal of a
murderous “megamachine” with whose advent we will all be drawn unsparingly into a “dreadful
ceremony” of worldwide sacrifice. The State that commits itself to mass butchery does not intend to
do evil. Rather, according to Hegel’s description in the Philosophy of Right, “the State is the actualitv of the ethical Idea.” It commits itself to
death for the sake of life, prodding killing with conviction and pure heart. A sanctified killer, the State that accepts Realpolitik
generates an incessant search for victims. Though mired in blood, the search is tranquil and self-assured,
born of the knowledge that the State’s deeds are neither infamous nor shameful, but heroic. N65 With
Hegel’s characterization of the State as “the march of God in the world,” John Locke’s notion of a Social Contract – the notion upon which the
United States was founded n66 – is fully disposed of, relegated to the ash heap of history. While the purpose of the State, for Locke, is to provide
protection that is otherwise unavailable to individuals – the “preservation of their lives, liberties and States” – for Hegel, the
State stands
above any private interests. It is the spirit of the State, Volksgeist, rather than of individuals, that is the
presumed creator of advanced civilization. And it is in war, rather than in peace, that a State is judged to demonstrate its true worth and potential.
How easily humankind still gives itself to the new gods. Promised relief from the most terrifying of possibilities -- death
and disannearance – our species regularly surrenders itself to formal structures of power and immunity. Ironically, such
surrender brings about an enlargement of the very terrors that created the new gods in the first place,
but we surrender nonetheless. In the words of William Reich, we lay waste to ourselves by embracing the “political plaguemongers.” A necrophilous partnership that promises purity and vitality through the killing of “outsiders.” Fear
of death, to summarize, not only cripples life, it also creates entire fields of premature corpses. But how can we
be reminded of our mortality in a productive way, a way that would point to a new and dignified polity of private selves and, significantly, to fewer
untimely deaths? One answer lies in the ethics of Epicurus, an enlightened creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will are essential for international
stability.
Ext - link – discourse
heir Routinized Depiction of “Government” Surrenders Consent – The Word Terrocrat
Threatens Authority – [Prefer Our Linguistics Analysis]
Mann, 98. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. “Report
#TL07B: The Nature of Government”” Online. [KevC])
We could also describe hallucination as "seeing" or "perceiving" what's not there - or "seeing" or
"perceiving" more than exists in reality. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) could be described
as the science of representational systems. In our brains we have "neural patterns" or "models" that
attempt to represent reality. For example, in my brain I have a "picture" of a table. If someone asks me to draw a picture of a table, I access the "picture" or "model" in my
head, from which I then draw a table. These "pictures," "models," or "neural patterns" are called representational systems. They include intellectual, emotional, visual, auditory, and other sensory data .
Our representational systems are more or less "useful." To the extent that we use them to predict
accurately and produce desirable results, we regard them as useful. Neuro-Linguistic Programming
people have identified three major ways in which our representational systems differ from reality:
Generalization - e.g., the representational system called "furniture" - or the "intellectual" neural pattern: "all women are the same." Distortion - e.g., "the color of my car is
blue" - the physicist tells us this is a distortion; it's more accurate to say that my car's outer surface reflects light with the wavelength we call "blue," while absorbing light with other wavelengths.
Deletion - e.g., "Tom is a wonderful, generous, happy, healthy individual" - Tom has many other attributes, some of which have been ignored or "deleted" from my representational system.
I've identified a very important fourth way in which our representational systems differ from reality:
Addition - e.g., "John-the-stranger is a King, therefore he has special powers; and the words that come out of his mouth are special and therefore are the law which must be obeyed." John is
really an ordinary man. By representing him as a "King" in our representational systems, we have added something to what exists in reality. Similarly, John's words are ordinary like those of the rest of
we have added something to what occurs in reality.
The essence of hallucination is "seeing" or "perceiving" what doesn't really exist or occur. The
phenomenon of addition, as described above, is simply hallucination. To have a neural patterns or
mental models that say "the government runs the country," "government makes law," "Slick Willy is President
of the U.S.A.," all constitute hallucination. It's these forms of hallucination that keep "government" in
place. Because practically all humans suffer from similar political hallucinations, they tend to all agree
with each other about certain fundamental political concepts and notions - such as "government,"
"state," "country," "nation," "constitution," "king," "president," "law," etc. If anybody questions or challenges these concepts or nations, they tend to think he's crazy. The
phenomenon is mass hallucination. Here is one of my favorite sentences: "The notion of "law" (so-called) is an hallawcinotion" - it sounds even better in French:
"La notion de la "loi" (soi-disant) est une halloicinotion." How's that for self-referencing?! "Government" is Kept in Place by Terror and by
Violence Ultimately, political power comes from the barrel of the gun - as Mao said. The last resort of
the monsters who masquerade as "government" is terror and violence. That's why they need the IRS, the ATF, the FBI, the CIA,
etc. They have to threaten, terrorize, punish, and kill to retain their coercive power . Make examples out of those who question, threaten, or
challenge their so-called "authority." That's why it's appropriate to call them "territorial gangsters"
or "territorial criminals" or "terrocrats" - monsters who use fraud, coercion, and violence to claim
"jurisdiction" over a certain area, and the people who happen to be in that area. The monsters do so
in order to control and dominate, and to live like parasites or cannibals off the values created by their
victims. The foregoing is another very useful definition of "government!"us, and when we represent some of his words as "the law" in our representational systems,
Ext: linguistic link
Even If Meaning is Fluid, Certain Words Accumulate Meaning Based on Repetition – Our
Linguistic Analysis is More Accurate – It’s Based on the Most Inclusive Studies – Their Evidence is
Flawed.
Mann, 97. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. “The Anatomy
of Slavespeak” Online.
GENERAL SEMANTICS goes furthest -- it deals not only with words, assertions and their referents
in nature but also with effects on human behavior. For a 'general semanticist,' communication
consists not merely of words in proper order, properly inflected (as for the grammarian), or
assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician), or assertions in proper relation to
referents (as for the semanticist), but all these, together with the reactions of the nervous systems of
the human beings involved in the communication." The following GS principles (with my personal interpretations and
extensions) I regard as most germane to the subject of Slavespeak. Words Don't Have Meanings; People Have Meanings Many people suffer from the
basic linguistic illusion that "words have meanings." If a word has a meaning, where do you find it? Can it be found in the sound when you say it? Can
you find it in the ink when you write it? Can you find it in the dictionary, or does the dictionary contain only words? What characterizes or
distinguishes a meaning and how can you recognize it? Consider the possibility that: Meanings reside in the individual
brain; Individuals create, maintain and update their meanings; Meanings consist of a "neuralpatterns-of-instructions-and-associations"; A "neural-pattern-of-instructions-and-associations" can be compared to a computer
program that essentially tells the user how to use a particular word; In order for an individual to use a word in a manner
such that he or she can think and communicate effectively, using that word, requires a brain program vastly more complex, than the "brief-userinstructions" in the dictionary; Even if you claim that the "brief-user-instructions" constitute the meaning of
a
word, an individual couldn't use that word effectively without integrating at least the meanings of all
the words used in the "brief-user-instructions"; In order to use a word effectively, the "brief-userinstructions" have to be "enriched" a thousand-fold, maybe a million-fold; Operating on the basis
that you personally create all the meaning in "your universe" greatly increases your control over your
mental processes, enabling you to think, communicate, and act much more effectively. Corresponding to
the word "chair" I have in my brain a generalized picture or template of a range of kinds of objects that qualify as chairs. This forms part of my
meaning for the word "chair." I also have links to other patterns and memories I relate to "chair." All of this complexity constitutes my meaning for
the word "chair" -- a meaning unique to me and vastly greater and more complex than any "meaning" to be found in a dictionary -- yet similar to the
meanings others have for the word "chair." My meaning (brain-program) for using the word "chair" includes a module enabling me to determine,
when others use the word "chair," whether they use it more or less the same way I do. (No such "meaning" can be found in the dictionary.) We can
communicate because (we have to assume that) when I say "chair," you trigger, engage, or "boot up" in your brain a meaning similar to mine. Through
observing responses to communication we discern whether or not we refer the same object when we say "chair." Most importantly, we individually
create, maintain, and update our personal meanings. Over time, we can improve our ability to use any particular word more effectively. We can learn
vastly more about any given word than can be found in the dictionary. For example, I utilized a variant of English called E-Prime to write the portion
of this report dealing with GS. E-Prime does not contain the verb "to be" or any of its variants; otherwise E-Prime mirrors standard English. (You'll
find the reasons for writing this way, below.) You'll also find below, that my meaning for "to be" and its forms varies dramatically from any "meaning"
you can find in a regular dictionary. Now, what if our meanings constitute our most important creations by a long shot? If so, to what extent do we
render ourselves oblivious of our most important creations? Can we create anything physical, without first creating it internally in a form that includes
meaning? If we render ourselves relatively oblivious of creating our meanings, how do we affect our awareness of our physical creations and how
much control do we have? How much responsibility can we demonstrate? If we ascribe the creation of our meanings to
agencies outside ourselves ("words have meanings"), do we perhaps disown a most important part
of ourselves? Do we perform most of our "meaning-processing" more or less unconsciously? For a more extensive discussion of this principle,
see Report #50A: Semantic Rigidity, Flexibility, and Freedom. The Map Differs from the Territory The word differs from the thing.
In our minds we make all kinds of maps and models of how we think the world works. Our concepts
(basic ideas) and words constitute maps or models which represent or reflect (we hope) aspects of
the world. Our models and maps can be more or less useful, measured by the results we produce
using them. Our models and maps -- including our words -- can never do more than approximate the
actual world or the actual phenomena they seek to represent. Our maps, models, and words (symbols) constitute
incomplete abstractions -- condensed, simplified, and approximated. Ultimately, the actual territory defies verbal
description. Ultimately, the word cannot describe the thing. The world (territory) has its form or
nature. Our description of it (map) includes at best incomplete details. Hense the GS aphorism (converted into E-Prime): "Whatever description
you give something differs from the thing itself!" The word differs from the thing it tries to describe, reflect, or represent. Neuro-Linguistic
Programming (NLP), describes three basic ways in which our models or maps differ from the
territory: Deletion -- at best we use partial maps; they can seldom (if ever) include all the details of
the territory. Distortion -- our maps often include minor or even major inaccuracies; one person "sees" a red
car with two people, another "sees" a brown car with three people; one tennis player "sees" the ball as "in," the opponent "sees" it as "out."
Generalization -- we often have one generalized map that represents many different parts of the
territory. For example, my generalized "cow" map might represent cows in general. If someone asks me what breed of cow I saw, a Jersey,
Guernsey, Hereford, etc.?, I reply, "What do I care! All cows look the same to me!" A fourth way in which our maps may differ
from the territory, we've already covered briefly: addition or hallucination. We "see" and put into our
map what does not exist in the territory. We "see" a "constellation" where only individual stars
exist. Our map contains more than what can be found in the territory -- addition or hallucination.
When scientists tried to find a substance corresponding to the way they "understood" the word "heat," they attempted to add to the territory an
expected "substance" they could never find. Of course, scientists eventually discovered their error because they require physical evidence which they
could never find. Preponderance of Means over Ends As far as I know (a GS qualification), Hans Vaihinger first enunciated this principle in his book
The Philosophy of As If. He said that our means tend to become more important than our ends. For example, we want to become happy. We figure if
we make lots of money we'll be happy. Money becomes the means to achieve the end of happiness. Many of us then focus on making money (means),
to the extent that we lose sight of becoming happy (end). The money becomes more important than the happiness; means preponderate over ends. In
GS a specific aspect of the more general principle above, can be formulated as: The preponderance of the map over the
territory; or, regarding the map as more important than the territory. Making the word more
important than the thing. Korzybski called this "Intensional Evaluation -- "Facts" Last." If we
elevate our words in importance above our experience of the world, we evaluate intensionally. He
called this orientation "un-sane" because its linguistic delusions can endanger our success or
survival. For example, if we believe that we can achieve good health by saying, "I create that whatever I eat is good for me," and continue with
unhealthy habits, we behave intensionally or in an un-sane manner. Korzybski claimed that elevating words over facts causes much human misery,
because it leads to dysfunctional, un-sane, evaluating and behavior. To achieve more sane behaviors, we must look first to experience. Korzybski called
this "Extensional Evaluation -- "Facts" First." The term extensional refers to elevating experience above language. When we observe, sense, and then
describe, we evaluate extensionally. Korzybski considered this a sane way to make our evaluations of the world. To look, observe, touch, feel, test,
sample, etc.; and then to describe. Now, if you look back at our two tribes, you'll find that tribe 1 (the sane ones) practice extensional evaluation, while
tribe 2 (the un-sane ones) practice intensional evaluation. It may be worthwhile to reread the two-tribes story to better grasp the
extensional/intensional distinction. The scientists looking for a substance corresponding to the word "heat," evaluated intensionally. They started with
the description "heat," then looked and searched the territory in vain for the "fact" of "heat." We experience the world in at least
two basic ways: Through our senses; Through language. We experience the world through our
senses as directly as we can. We could call it extensional experience -- tends toward greater sanity.
When we experience the world through the intermediary of language indirectly, we could call it
intensional experience -- tends toward less sanity. Hypostatization "Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity
to conclude that for every name, a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name must exist; and every complex idea which the mind has
formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual things, had to have an outward objective reality answering to it." [converted into EPrime] - J.S. Mill, A System of Logic "The Fascist State has a consciousness of its own, and a will of its own, on this account constitutes an "ethical"
state." [converted into E-Prime] - Mussolini on the Doctrine of Fascism Hypostatization basically refers to construing a
word as a thing, or regarding a purely conceptual idea as a real existent or concrete thing.
Hypostatization closely resembles reification -- regarding something abstract as a material thing. In
his book The Comforts of Unreason: A Study of the Motives behind Irrational Thought, Rupert Crayshaw-Williams has a chapter on hypostatization,
where he analyses hypostatized abstractions like "England," "Germany," "country," and "nation." He uses the
phrases "collective abstraction" and "empty linguistic convenience." Mill above describes hypostatization or
reification. Mussolini combines reification with personification by treating his hypostatized "fascist
state" (empty linguistic convenience) as a person with a conscience and a will. Mussolini's map
contains more than can be found in the reality or territory it seeks to represent -- addition, in
Mussolini's case, extreme hallucination -- "seeing" what can't be found. Hypostatization represents
the extreme case of glorifying a map without a territory -- a word without a thing or discernible
referent -- such as the word "government." To then go further and ascribe to this supposed
"government" volition and magical powers ("The purpose of government is to do for people what
they cannot do for themselves." -- Abraham Lincoln), reflects personification -- even deification.
Hypostatization represents extreme intensional evaluation -- an empty description, such that, if you look,
observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc., you fail to find a referent. Vonnegut in effect said, " government represents a granfalloon."
Bentham's "Look to the letter, you find nonsense -- look beyond the letter, you find nothing" applies here. For a philosophical analysis of
"government" (or "state") as an empty linguistic convenience, see the article: Deep Anarchy - An Eliminativist View Of "The State". The
majority of political Slavespeak words constitute examples of hypostatization and intensional
evaluation -- words first, "facts" last; or "false-over-facts"; words without corresponding things or
referents; granfalloons. "Heat" again, represents a classic example of hypostatization. Because scientists had the abstract idea of "heat," they
assumed that if they searched long enough, they would eventually find a substance corresponding to their map. Hypostatization,
reification, personification, deification, and intensional evaluation may all have their roots in the
more primitive forms of a phenomenon called "participation mystique" by anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl in
his book How Natives Think. Participation mystique can have various elements: kinds of maps and models of how we think the
world works. Our concepts (basic ideas) and words constitute maps or models which represent or reflect (we
hope) aspects of the world. Our models and maps can be more or less useful, measured by the results we
produce using them. Our models and maps -- including our words -- can never do more than approximate the
actual world or the actual phenomena they seek to represent. Our maps, models, and words (symbols) constitute incomplete
abstractions -- condensed, simplified, and approximated. Ultimately, the actual territory defies verbal description. Ultimately,
the word cannot describe the thing. The world (territory) has its form or nature. Our description of it (map) includes at
best incomplete details. Hense the GS aphorism (converted into E-Prime): "Whatever description you give something differs from the thing itself!"
The word differs from the thing it tries to describe, reflect, or represent . Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), describes three
basic ways in which our models or maps differ from the territory: Deletion -- at best we use partial maps; they
can seldom (if ever) include all the details of the territory. Distortion -- our maps often include minor or even
major inaccuracies; one person "sees" a red car with two people, another "sees" a brown car with three people; one tennis player "sees" the ball
as "in," the opponent "sees" it as "out." Generalization -- we often have one generalized map that represents many
different parts of the territory. For example, my generalized "cow" map might represent cows in general. If someone asks me what breed of
cow I saw, a Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, etc.?, I reply, "What do I care! All cows look the same to me !" A fourth way in which our maps
may differ from the territory, we've already covered briefly: addition or hallucination. We "see" and put into
our map what does not exist in the territory. We "see" a "constellation" where only individual stars exist. Our
map contains more than what can be found in the territory -- addition or hallucination. When scientists tried to find a
substance corresponding to the way they "understood" the word "heat," they attempted to add to the territory an expected "substance" they could
never find. Of course, scientists eventually discovered their error because they require physical evidence which they could never find. Preponderance
of Means over Ends As far as I know (a GS qualification), Hans Vaihinger first enunciated this principle in his book The Philosophy of As If. He said
that our means tend to become more important than our ends. For example, we want to become happy. We figure if we make lots of money we'll be
happy. Money becomes the means to achieve the end of happiness. Many of us then focus on making money (means), to the extent that we lose sight
of becoming happy (end). The money becomes more important than the happiness; means preponderate over ends. In GS a specific aspect of the
more general principle above, can be formulated as: The preponderance of the map over the territory; or, regarding the map
as more important than the territory. Making the word more important than the thing. Korzybski called this
"Intensional Evaluation -- "Facts" Last." If we elevate our words in importance above our experience of the
world, we evaluate intensionally. He called this orientation "un-sane" because its linguistic delusions can
endanger our success or survival. For example, if we believe that we can achieve good health by saying, "I create that whatever I eat is
good for me," and continue with unhealthy habits, we behave intensionally or in an un-sane manner. Korzybski claimed that elevating words over facts
causes much human misery, because it leads to dysfunctional, un-sane, evaluating and behavior. To achieve more sane behaviors, we must look first to
experience. Korzybski called this "Extensional Evaluation -- "Facts" First." The term extensional refers to elevating experience above language. When
we observe, sense, and then describe, we evaluate extensionally. Korzybski considered this a sane way to make our evaluations of the world. To look,
observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc.; and then to describe. Now, if you look back at our two tribes, you'll find that tribe 1 (the sane ones) practice
extensional evaluation, while tribe 2 (the un-sane ones) practice intensional evaluation. It may be worthwhile to reread the two-tribes story to better
grasp the extensional/intensional distinction. The scientists looking for a substance corresponding to the word "heat," evaluated intensionally. They
started with the description "heat," then looked and searched the territory in vain for the "fact" of "heat." We experience the world in at
least two basic ways: Through our senses; Through language. We experience the world through our senses as
directly as we can. We could call it extensional experience -- tends toward greater sanity. When we experience
the world through the intermediary of language indirectly, we could call it intensional experience -- tends
toward less sanity. Hypostatization "Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that for every name, a distinguishable
separate entity corresponding to the name must exist; and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions
of individual things, had to have an outward objective reality answering to it." [converted into E-Prime] - J.S. Mill, A System of Logic "The Fascist
State has a consciousness of its own, and a will of its own, on this account constitutes an "ethical" state." [converted into E-Prime] - Mussolini on the
Doctrine of Fascism Hypostatization basically refers to construing a word as a thing, or regarding a purely
conceptual idea as a real existent or concrete thing. Hypostatization closely resembles reification -- regarding
something abstract as a material thing. In his book The Comforts of Unreason: A Study of the Motives behind Irrational Thought,
Rupert Crayshaw-Williams has a chapter on hypostatization, where he analyses hypostatized abstractions like "England," "Germany,"
"country," and "nation." He uses the phrases "collective abstraction" and "empty linguistic convenience." Mill
above describes hypostatization or reification. Mussolini combines reification with personification by treating his
hypostatized "fascist state" (empty linguistic convenience) as a person with a conscience and a will.
Mussolini's map contains more than can be found in the reality or territory it seeks to represent -- addition, in
Mussolini's case, extreme hallucination -- "seeing" what can't be found. Hypostatization represents the
extreme case of glorifying a map without a territory -- a word without a thing or discernible referent -- such as
the word "government." To then go further and ascribe to this supposed "government" volition and magical
powers ("The purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves." -- Abraham
Lincoln), reflects personification -- even deification. Hypostatization represents extreme intensional evaluation -an empty description, such that, if you look, observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc., you fail to find a referent. Vonnegut in effect said,
"government represents a granfalloon." Bentham's "Look to the letter, you find nonsense -- look beyond the letter, you find nothing"
applies here. For a philosophical analysis of "government" (or "state") as an empty linguistic convenience, see the article: Deep Anarchy - An
Eliminativist View Of "The State". The majority of political Slavespeak words constitute examples of hypostatization
and intensional evaluation -- words first, "facts" last; or "false-over-facts"; words without corresponding
things or referents; granfalloons. "Heat" again, represents a classic example of hypostatization. Because scientists had the abstract idea of
"heat," they assumed that if they searched long enough, they would eventually find a substance corresponding to their map. Hypostatization,
reification, personification, deification, and intensional evaluation may all have their roots in the more
primitive forms of a phenomenon called "participation mystique" by anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl in his book How
Natives Think. Participation mystique can have various elements:
Ext link
The Word “State” Maintains the Myth of a Unified Nationalist Identity
Mann, 98. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. “Report
#TL07B: The Nature of Government”” Online. [KevC] BBBB)
Reading Spooner's pamphlet was an assault on my whole knowledge structure. It triggered a process of questioning many concepts such as
"constitution" (so-called) - what does this word represent in reality? If Spooner was right, then it represented but an empty fraud. It also meant
that words did not necessarily correspond with reality. There were "fraud-words" which served only
to mislead. And if there is no valid "constitution," then what does the word "country" mean? What does it really represent? Similar
questions followed about ''government," "state," "king," "law," etc. In the Introduction by James J. Martin to Spooner's No Treason, I
read: "Since late Neolithic times, men in their political capacity, have lived almost exclusively by myths [more appropriate:
"fraudulent fabrications "or "murderous misrepresentations!"] And these political myths have continued to evolve,
proliferate, and grow more complex and intricate, even though there has been a steady replacement of one by another over the
centuries. A series of entirely theoretical constructs, sometimes mystical, usually deductive and speculative, they seek to explain the status and
relationships in the community... It is the assault upon the abstract and verbal underpinnings of this institution which draws blood, so to speak... those
who attack the rationale of the game... are its most formidable adversaries." [emphasis added] Spooner attacked words and phrases like "the
government," "our country," "the United States," "member of congress," "King," "constitution of the United States," "nations", "the people,"
"emperor," "divine right," "president," "monarch," "ambassador," "national debt," "senator," "judge," etc. He indicated that these were
all fraud-words designed to dupe the gullible. In a letter to Thomas F. Bayard, Spooner wrote: "In practice, the constitution has
been an utter fraud from the beginning. Professing to have been 'ordained and established' by we, the people of the United States, it has never been
submitted to them, as individuals, for their voluntary acceptance... very few of them have ever read, or even seen it; or ever will read or see it. Of its
legal meaning (if it can be said to have any) they really know nothing; and never did. Nor ever will know anything." Spooner indicated that the people
who masqueraded as the so-called "government" could be more accurately described as fraudulent impostors or a "secret band of thieves, robbers and
murderers." Rick Maybury wrote as follows in an article, "Profiting from the Constitutional Convention," published in the November, 1984 issue of an
investment newsletter, World Market Perspective: "Government" is Kept in Place by Certain Fraud-
Words Politicians and bureaucrats use mostly words to impose their will upon others - even when
physical violence is involved, they use words to attempt to justify their actions. Thomas Szasz wrote in The
Second Sin, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control
of man." The language used to control and dominate others I collectively lump together as "Slavespeak." My "Slavespeak" is similar to the word
"Newspeak," invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use "Slavespeak" in essentially the same way that Orwell
used "Newspeak,", but within the domain of "Slavespeak" I subsume words that I don't think Orwell would have included under
"Newspeak,": "state," "government," "law," "king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime minister," etc. Slavespeak has
developed over many centuries. I contend that the use of Slavespeak by freedom lovers as if valid (i.e., without
questioning its validity, and without considering its consequences), may easily become counterproductive. I specifically use Slavespeak in the sense of Orwell's "B vocabulary": "The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been
deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political
implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them...
the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth
Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the
tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations...
the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral,
as nearly as possible independent of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx
without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak' meaning 'to quack like a duck.'"
[emphasis added] I'm also introducing here the concept of "fraud-word." I'm saying that certain words are fraudulent in themselves. You don't even
have to use them in a sentence; the word itself is a lie. For example, the word "King." We have a perfectly good word "man." When a man calls himself
"King," he's lying as did John-the-stranger above. The word itself is a fraud. In his superb book Restoring the American Dream, Robert Ringer
devoted an entire chapter to how "government" is kept in place by certain words - Chapter 8: "Keeping It All in Place." Here is my list of
statist fraud-words: "government," "state," "country," "nation," "U.S.A.," "empire," "commonwealth," "republic," "society," "emperor,"
"king," "queen," "prince," "princess," "president," "prime minister," "law," "constitution," "public interest," "national interest," "fair share," "common
good," "national security," "social contract," "public policy," "mandate from the people," etc. Two of the Worst Fraud-Words: "Constitution," and
"Law" If you think about it, you will realize the role of language in practically all coercion: be it parents or teachers
coercing the young; or those masquerading as (so-called) "state" or "government" coercing (so-called) "subjects." Politicians
and
bureaucrats have an armory of weapons they use to coerce their victims. I put it to you that fraud-words are the
most formidable weapons in their armory - not guns and explosives. Do politicians and bureaucrats use guns or words? I further put it to you that next
to "government," two of their most powerful fraud-words are "law" and "constitution."
Ext: impact
Investing in the law as a marker and method for alleviating violence reifies a liberal understanding of
freedom which has empirically amplified and cloaked racism.
Kandaswamy 2012/Priya, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Mills College “SYMPOSIUM ON
EXPLORING POWER, AGENCY & ACTION IN A WORLD OF MOVING FRONTIERS: ARTICLE:
THE OBLIGATIONS OF FREEDOM AND THE LIMITS OF LEGAL EQUALITY,” 41 Sw. L. Rev.
265/
Despite vast
ways in which the U.S. state is deeply invested in¶ maintaining social relations
of racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, it is still quite commonplace to assume that to¶ remedy social
injustices one must turn first to the law The pursuit of legal equality is frequently understood as the
most¶ pragmatic approach and a necessary first step to any kind of broad scale social change. In practice
legal equality struggles have failed to deliver substantive social justice for many groups
¶ the
incompleteness of legal change, failures areoften invoked as evidence of the need for further legal
reform¶ rather than prompting the serious consideration of the law's actual capacity to effect change that
perhaps they should ¶
¶
the law
maintains a¶fierce hold on the political imagination ¶
, I argue for the importance of severing that
hold. The assumptions that legal reform is a pragmatic and¶ necessary first step to social justice is a reflection
of the boundaries that circumscribe what is imagined as politically¶ possible within dominant discourse rather
than the essential truths they are often taken to be
legal¶ interventions will always simultaneously
reinforce the legal authority of the U.S. state, legal reform is bound to reiterate¶ rather than transform unequal
distributions of power. Pinning political possibilities to the law circumscribes the¶ boundaries of change in
very narrow ways
¶
¶
a
array of critiques that have elucidated the
.
,
however,
. Frequently written off as a sign of
these
. Even those critical of legal strategies frequently fall back on them, citing legal reform as a necessary evil, the best that
can be achieved in the current political context, or the first step toward broader changes. In this way,
. In this essay
. To the extent that
. Instead, movements for social justice must seek to open up possibilities for transformation and evaluate their engagements with the law in terms of the [*266] future possibilities those engagements might open or foreclose. In other words, rather than
presume legal equality is the answer, it is necessary to ¶ engage with the more complex questions about what freedom should and could look like and locate legal interventions ¶ in relation to this broader vision.¶ In order to illustrate these points, I turn first to the historical example of emancipation
and the consequent conferral ¶ of citizenship to formerly enslaved people, a quintessential moment in the expansion of legal rights in U.S. history. I ¶ look to Reconstruction Era struggles over the meaning of citizenship specifically because they mark a particularly ¶ defining moment in the
reconfiguration of racial violence through the construct of the liberal subject. Given the ways ¶ that U.S. citizenship had been defined against blackness, the Fourteenth Amendment's extension of citizenship rights to ¶ freed people forced the nation to grapple with what racially inclusive citizenship in a
nation forged through racial ¶ violence would look like. Therefore, considering the legacies of this historical period raises crucial issues for ¶ contemporary struggles for inclusion, equality and the extension of legal rights, particularly given the role emancipation ¶ has played as an important historical
reference point for these struggles.¶ Emancipation marked a moment of great possibility, and freed people held broad and diverse visions of freedom ¶ that included reparations, land ownership, freedom of mobility, and other self-defined mechanisms of individual and ¶ collective self-determination.
legal recognition as citizens worked to constrain¶ and curtail these more expansive possibilities
of freedom by locking freedom
into an idiom defined by¶ obligation, indebtedness, and responsibility n2
Rather than mitigate the significance of racial difference in the national¶ imagination the conferral of
rights
collaborated in "the persistent production of blackness as abject,¶ threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent,
irrational, and infectious" n3 and obliged freed people to shoulder the¶ responsibilities and burdens of
perpetually having to demonstrate their preparedness for and deservingness of¶ citizenship in a context where
their blackness marked them as otherwise
evident in the ways that¶ state institutions prioritized
enforcing labor and sexual discipline amongst freed people
¶
¶
¶
¶
racism
fundamentally shaped recognition as a liberal subject While for white¶ male citizensliberal individualism had
afforded a kind of entitlement and self-determination, for freed people,¶ recognition as a liberal subject
rendered one responsible and therefore blameworthy.
¶
n1 However, as Saidiya Hartman shows,
for black people
.
,
. n4 This was
citizenship
[*267]
. n5 As the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau's Assistant Commissioner Orlando Brown wrote, if freed people were to be citizens, it was
necessary "to make the Freedmen into a self-supporting class of free laborers, who shall understand the necessity of steady employment and the responsibility of providing for themselves and [their] families." n6 As Hartman shows, anti-black
. n7
n8 This was particularly evident in the workings of contract. A key distinction between the free person and the slave was self-ownership signified
primarily¶ through the capacity to enter into contract. n9 The understanding of legal freedom as self-possession meant that there¶ was no inherent contradiction between subordination and freedom as long as subordination was secured through a freely ¶ entered into contract, a phenomenon most
clearly illustrated by the labor and marriage contracts. n10 For freed people ¶ who had both been structurally denied access to other material resources through slavery and who were subject to¶ vagrancy laws that criminalized the refusal to enter into long-term labor contracts, contracts were very much
despite the fact that they functioned to limit black people's mobility, secure the hyper-exploitation
of¶ black labor, and provided the ground for the development of carceral institutions directed at the
punishment of black¶ people entering into the labor contract became discursively understood as the
quintessential sign of freedom ¶
¶
contract
provided a rubric for reinventing relations of subordination¶ by obscuring national responsibility for the
injustices of slavery and instead displacing this responsibility onto the¶ shoulders of the formerly enslaved.
¶ ¶ Liberal concepts of freedom also functioned as a mechanism of regulating
gender and sexuality through the¶ marriage contract
¶
coerced. n11 However,
, n12
. n13 In fact, freed people were called upon to demonstrate their independence and deservingness of freedom by fulfilling the
terms of the [*268] labor contract. n14 In this way,
n15
Freedom was rewritten as obligation and independence manifested as a burden. n16
. While marriages and other kinship ties were not legally recognized under slavery, one of the first rights freed people gained was marriage recognition. n17
However, as Katherine Franke points out, the extension of ¶ marriage rights was grounded in the belief that marriage
instilling¶ heteropatriarchal gender norms
as an institution would help civilize freed people by
. n18 A key element of the rationalization of slavery was the construction of black ¶ inferiority as marked by a lack of the gender differentiation that was seen as characteristic of civilization.
n19 As Matt¶ Richardson describes, "early attempts to congeal racist taxonomies of difference through anatomical investigation and¶ ethnographic observation produced the Black body as always already variant and Black people as the essence of gender ¶ aberrance, thereby defining the norm by
making the Black its opposite." n20 While marriage recognition did provide ¶ some tangible protections to married freed people, the belief in marriage as a civilizing institution simultaneously ¶ reiterated and valorized white supremacist beliefs that black people's inferiority was evidenced in their lack
of¶ appropriate gender and sexuality. n21 Additionally, the extension of marriage rights provided the ground upon which ¶ alternative sexual arrangements were criminalized and rationalized state austerity toward black people by constructing ¶ the self-sufficient household as the means to economic
As a result of the legal recognition of black¶ marriages, many freed people faced convictions for adultery,
fornication, cohabitation, and the failure to provide for¶ their lega dependents
created new¶ obligations and new grounds upon which people might be punished ¶
biopower ¶
¶
the¶ capacity to "make live" in particular ways
¶
security. n22
l [*269]
fact
. n23 In this way, much like the labor contract, the extension of rights in
black
the modern state is the emergence of
. Michel Foucault argues that one of the distinguishing features of
. n24 Unlike sovereign power that is expressed in the capacity to take life, biopower is invested in the production of
ultimately
knowledge about and regulation of populations, processes of normalization and regularization, and
. n25 However, Foucault also notes that sovereign power does not simply disappear but rather that the state continues to exercise sovereign power alongside
biopower. n26 This process is¶ delimited by state racism, which "introduces a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break¶ between what must live and what must die." n27 As biopower becomes concerned with regulating the life of the ¶ population, racism marks the bodies
upon which sovereign power must still be exercised. n28 Killing the internal or¶ external racial threat becomes understood as a necessary element to making the population stronger. n29 ¶ Scholars such as Ann Stoler and Scott Morgensen have elaborated on Foucault's rather scant discussion of
Hartman's¶ analysis of anti-black racism and the constitution of
highlights the central role of racial violence in the elaboration of
racism¶ showing the ways in which biopower in fact emerges in relation to and as a function of colonial violence. n30
the liberal subject
state pow
complicates Foucault's analysis and adds to ¶ scholarship that
er. n31 As Hartman shows,¶ during Reconstruction, black people were simultaneously subject to the normalizing and violent powers of the state, or ¶ perhaps more accurately normalizing processes became yet another vehicle for state violence. n32 On the one hand, ¶ freed
people were subject to [*270] constant surveillance as their moral capacity for citizenship was always in ¶ question, and any failure to comply with labor or marriage contracts was read as evidence of this incapacity. n33 On the ¶ other hand, contractual freedom provided a basis for the state's total
the seeming contradictions between racial¶inclusion and racial
violence were effectively displaced by locating responsibility for state violence in those who¶ suffered from its
effects.
¶
¶
disinvestment in black life, thereby making it more ¶ or less impossible to live up to the ideals of citizenship. n34 In this way,
The black subject was thus brought into the fold of citizenship but as a subject always in need of reform or punishment. This historical example powerfully illustrates the ways in which inclusion into citizenship rights c an operate as a technique of domination and the role the
construct of the liberal subject plays in maintaining state racism. n35 Certainly, ¶ laws have changed a great deal since Reconstruction. However, the differentiated structure of citizenship grounded in ¶ anti-black racism that Hartman describes still operates. n36 For example, contemporary political
struggles over marriage¶ reflect the processes by which marriage can secure entitlements for one social group while exacting social obligations ¶ from another. On the one hand, a mainstream, predominantly white gay and lesbian movement seeks access to a wide ¶ array of property and social rights
through same-sex marriage recognition. n37 On the other hand, marriage incentive ¶ programs and increasingly punitive welfare regulations cast marriage and the economic self-sufficiency that supposedly ¶ [*271] comes with it as an obligation for welfare recipients who are most frequently represented
as black women. n38¶ Another terrain upon which racially stratified constructions of citizenship are evident is in struggles for state protection ¶ from violence. Legislation that has increasingly criminalized violence against women and hate crimes against LGBT ¶ people holds out the promise of greater
equality and freedom for some by expanding a system of mass incarceration that ¶ targets women of color and queer and transgender people of color. n39 In fact, the increasingly punitive and austere ¶ orientation of the U.S. welfare state and the expansion of the prison industrial complex can be
understood as the logical ¶ extension of the processes of liberal subjection that Hartman outlines. n40 On the one hand, the state disinvests in black ¶ life. n41 On the other hand, processes of criminalization hold individuals responsible for the effects of that ¶ disinvestment, displacing responsibility for
The assumption that legal equality strategies are the most pragmatic
pathways through which resistance movement¶ might effect change presumes that recognition as a free and
equal liberal subject by the state is universally desirable,¶ possible, and emancipatory. A historical
view, however, demonstrates that the abstract construction of the liberal¶ subject has functioned in particular
ways to secure continued anti-black violence and that, for many, liberal subjecthood¶ itself rationalizes and
begets state violence. It is essential that the utility of the law for social change be assessed from¶ the vantage
point of people who live at this conjuncture ¶ My point then is to insist on the necessity
of vociferously challenging hegemonic understanding of how the law¶ works and what the law offers
movements for social change by centering the experiences of those for whom legal¶ citizenship and the
extension of rights have undermined rather than advanced struggles for freedom. Legal change
is¶ often construed as the benchmark of success for social movements. However, the case
of Reconstruction clearly¶ demonstrates how legal recognition can in practice [*272] produce a narrowing of
political possibilities and a fixing of¶ responsibility for social injustice onto the black
bodies While Reconstruction is frequently narrated as the transition¶ from slavery to freedom, it is more
accurate to recognize the ways in which the state reduced the multiple possible¶ meanings of freedom to the
rubrics of liberal individualism and contract
¶
¶
state violence onto those who feel its effects most and punishing those ¶ bodies for their structural location. n42¶
.
.
. These rubrics produced black people as both formally free and structurally subordinated thereby reconciling state racism with the extension of citizenship. However, it is
important to remember that both in the past and in the present many other concepts of freedom exist ¶ and are exercised. For example, Elsa Barkley Brown demonstrates how freed people sought to defy liberal ¶ individualism and the exclusion of women from suffrage by exercising the vote as a
collective resource. n43 Tera Hunter¶ shows how black women saw freedom as something to enjoy by reclaiming their time and their bodies. n44 In addition,¶ there is a vast black radical tradition of intellectual and cultural production that has persistently challenged anti -black¶ racism while putting
forward alternate visions of freedom. n45 In the contemporary moment, Native American ¶ conceptions of sovereignty actively challenge settler colonialism and show how structures of collective belonging that ¶ are not embedded in state violence might be instated. n46 A vibrant prison abolition
movement seeks to dismantle¶ incarceration in all its form and imagine a world without prisons. n47 Queer and gender nonconforming communities ¶ have developed a broad range of strategies for securing community survival and creating spaces to develop different ¶ ways of living without relying
Rather than
building on and cultivating these more expansive notions of freedom ¶ insistence that legal equality
is a pragmatic and necessary first step to change erases them.
¶
it is imperative to¶ decenter the law in struggles for social justice. Rather than
viewing legal change as a benchmark of success or situating¶ legal equality as a primary goal, it might be more
effective to focus struggles around specific harms.
¶
¶
upon the law. n48 Feminists of color are building community based mechanisms for ¶ addressing interpersonal and state violence against women. n49 These are but a few important examples of what [*273] ¶ exists beyond the purview of the law.
, however,
While there is no easy solution to the dilemmas the law produces for social justice movements, I conclude by suggesting some
important principles that might be used to rethink our relationship to the law. First,
For example, the historical case I have discussed shows that legal equality and inclusion is not the most productive site of struggle because even if it is secured it
does not ameliorate and can actually reproduce the violence people experience in their ¶ lives. It seems more appropriate to target those forms of violence directly by naming them, targeting their root causes,¶ and holding state institutions accountable for their perpetuation rather than relying upon an
abstract rubric of equality.¶ n.
Ext impact
Investing Power in the Word “Government” Has Caused the Death of Millions as Bodies
Become Mobilized for a Nationalist Identity
Mann, 97. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. “The Anatomy
of Slavespeak” Online. AAAA)
The Killer Word "Government" In Restoring The American Dream Robert Ringer acknowledges the influence of Sy Leon, author of None of The
Above. Sy Leon attacked the arrogant and pretentious words and phrases politicians used (what I call Slavespeak): "Mandate of the people," "majority
rule," "democracy," "treason" (betraying a politician), "assassination" (killing a politician), "tax" (stealing by a politician), "the draft" (slavery practiced
by politicians), "war" (murder organized by politicians on a massive scale), "conspiracy" (talking with others about defending yourself against
politicians), "perjury" (lying to a politician), "public good," "public welfare," "public duty," "national interest," "public service," "public servant,"
"eminent domain" (theft of property by politicians), "legal tender," "counterfeiter" (a non-politician who prints paper currency), "society," "domestic
policy," "foreign policy," "cutthroat competition," etc. Sy Leon writes about "the verbal legerdemain of politicalese" as "one of the worst frauds ever
perpetrated on mankind..." In The Virtue Of Selfishness Ayn Rand wrote: "It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The
meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word "selfishness" is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual "package-deal" [of
contradictory elements and emotional associations], which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of
mankind." The use of one word can have vast and far-reaching consequences. Suppose I brand you as "selfish" in
front of a typical audience. This probably triggers emotions in the audience, such as disgust and hatred. It probably also triggers associations, such as:
"He only cares about himself"; "He's greedy"; "He takes unfair advantage of others"; etc. The word "selfishness" constitutes a devastating packagedeal. And I suggest that most Slavespeak words (like "government," "state," "constitution," "law," "king," "president," etc.) are such
intellect-devastating, thought-destroying package-deals -- that tend to trigger automatic meanings,
images, associations, emotions, attitudes, and hypnotic, stupefying inhibitions -- beneficial to terrocrats and harmful to their
victims. In None of the Above Sy Leon wrote: "Politics is an intellectual anesthetic. It can dull the mind, put it to sleep, or even kill
it permanently. This is not an incidental side effect; it is a calculated result that keeps the politician in business..." The effect is created through
the deliberate and careful use of certain words. "Keeping It All in Place" is Robert Ringer's title for Chapter 8 of his Restoring
The American Dream. Most of the chapter is devoted to theARSENAL (collection of weapons) -- what I call political
Slavespeak -- of words terrocrats use to maintain their power and keep their victims in subjugation. Robert Ringer
analyses terms such as: "government," "society," "country," "taxation," "conscription," "loophole," "windfall," "inflation," "patriotic," "obligation,"
"justice," "fair," "decent," "duty," "public morals," "public property," "public good," "public interest," "good of society," "duty to society," etc. Each
of these terms, to the degree that it's accepted as valid, adds to the power of terrocrats and reduces the
power and freedom of their victims. Now let's focus our attention on one word: "government." In None of the Above Sy Leon also wrote:
"...[I]ntellectually active people do not think in a rut; they consider new ways, new alternatives; many of which may never have been attempted before.
But this kind of questioning spells death for politics ...[C]onsidering alternatives; the willingness to challenge and explore -- this is what freedom and
independence are all about." Author Kurt Vonnegut coined the word "granfalloon" to describe abstract concepts like "nation," "state," "country,"
"government," "society," "IBM," etc. He wrote, "To discover the substance of a granfalloon, just prick a hole in a toy balloon." In his book The
Incredible Secret Money Machine, Don Lancaster explains: "A granfalloon is any large bureaucratic figment of people's imagination. For instance,
there's really no such thing as the Feds or the General Veeblefeltzer Corporation. There are a bunch of people out there that relate to each other, and
there's some structures, and some paper. In fact, there's lots and lots of paper. The people sit in the structures and pass paper back and forth to each
other and charge you to do so. All these people, structures, and paper are real. But nowhere can you point to the larger concept of "government" or
"corporation" and say, "There it is, kiddies!" The monolithic, big "they" is all in your mind." [emphasis added] A granfalloon is the lumping together of
many diverse elements into an abstract collection, and to then think and speak as if the abstract collection is one single entity capable of performing
actions. This phenomenon leads people to say things like "the government runs the country." I hope you realize by now just how absurd the previous
Slavespeak sentence is! Consider the possibility that because people generally consider this word/concept as
valid and a given, they think, communicate, and behave in ways that have resulted in over a hundred
million people slaughtered during this, the Twentieth Century. Because of political brainwashing
the "citizens" believe they must "fight for their country." When the terrocrats say, "Go kill the
evil enemy," the "loyal citizens" take up arms and proceed to slaughter each other. Would this happen on such a massive scale in the absence of
Slavespeak? Consider the possibility that in the same way that the entire "legal" industry basically rests on the concept/word "law," the
entire
coercive political system basically rests on the concept/word "government." To begin to see why this might be
so, imagine a world in which there are some would-be-terrocrats and a population of enlightened individuals who either don't understand the word
"government" or they think it's a silly joke. (For the purpose of this thought-experiment, assume that there's no equivalent word available to would-beterrocrats.) So a would-be-terrocrat says, I represent "your government" and I want you to pay me "your taxes" so I can defend your property and
safety. I also want you to join "our army," so we can go and shoot "your enemies" in the "country" next door. What success would the would-beterrocrat have? Realize that once
the basic concept/word "government" is accepted, a whole constellation of
Slavespeak concepts/words soon follow in its trail. If you accept the "government" concept, you also
accept that the terrocrats who call themselves "government" have the power to "make laws," force children into
"schools" for political brainwashing, force people to pay "taxes," force people into "armies" to kill each other, etc., etc. -- what Ayn Rand calls a
devastating package deal. By accepting the basic concept/word "government," you position the terrocrats who call
themselves "government" as superior (more powerful) and you position yourself as inferior (less powerful). If
you operate from this perspective, the kind of thing you tend to do to promote liberty is to beg the terrocrats to "change the law" so you can enjoy a
little more freedom. You position them in power and you position yourself in weakness. You
also operate in a way that, in the
long run, reinforces and perpetuates the master-slave relationship between terrocrats and their
victims
alt - Fleshmobs
Embrace fleshmobs.
Lauren B Wilcox, 2015 (Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations,
Chapter 4)
If “don’t touch my junk” is about making bodies less visible, and “strategic visibility” is, precisely, about increasing visibility in order to streamline the
airport security process, a type of protest
known as “flesh- mobs” (after the performance art style of “flashmobs”) is about making
bodies hypervisible. In Germany, critics of the security procedures have subjected themselves to screenings while naked,
or nearly naked. These “fleshmobs” critique the excess of vision that characterizes the scanners’ “virtual strip search”
(Magnet and Rodgers 2012) by making other trav- elers and airport personnel, rather than only authorized
government personnel, into observers of bodies. Some of these protesters have done even more to make their bodies “legible”
according to the terms of the security assemblage: one German protester wrote “prosthetic” on her arm, and “piercing” with an arrow pointed at her
breast (Zetter 2010). John Brennan, a man from Portland, Oregon, was acquitted on charges of indecent exposure for stripping in protest of TSA
screening procedures. Brennan’s
statement points to the reversal of the power dynamics in such an act: “The irony that they
want to see me naked, but I don’t get to take off my clothes off.. . . You have all these machines that pretend to do it” (KATU
2012).¶ Unlike “don’t touch my junk” protests, which are about preserving the body as sovereign, especially for those viewed as unlikely to constitute
terrorist threats (such as children, the elderly, “wives and mothers,” and white men), “fleshmob”
protests are not about defending a
liberal sphere of autonomy against government intrusion so much as challenging the log- ics of bodily visibility. By
stripping down, fleshmobs render body-scanning procedures a meaningless gesture in terms of producing
information, and only valuable as a means of humiliation and domination. In his court tes- timony, Brennan described his act
of stripping naked as intended to reveal to the TSA the effect its policies have on passengers, especially of the body-scanning procedures: “I want to
show them it’s a two-way street. . . I don’t like a naked picture of me being available” (Duara 2012). Clearly, the “two-way street” Brennan is referring
to does not mean that TSA personnel are made naked and subject to the gaze of passengers; rather, the “two-way¶ [ 128 ] Bodies of Violence¶ street” is
about control over viewing the body. Stripping
naked at security screenings is a refusal to have one’s body made into an
image viewed and interpreted only by unseen, authorized viewers (and possibly leaked into wider circulation) and turns
the tables by making the naked body visible to everyone in the vicinity. The airport security assemblages are made
to appear meaningless by the redistribution of economies of observers and observed: bystanders are not only
bodies waiting to be scanned them- selves, but are viewers of the bodies of the fleshmobs as well. Such observ- ers are
necessary for the protest: this protest of excessive visibility only works if there is an audience to view bodies that are
both “safe” in that they could not be concealing contraband, and are “pornographic” in the naked- ness of
their bodies. The protest hinges on the juxtaposition of the scandal of too much visibility of naked bodies in public spaces with the visibility of
naked bodies as a security measure. The naked protesters, or “fleshmobs,” court arrest that would reveal the hypocrisy
of the state producing images of naked bodies for their own purposes, while disallowing nakedness in general.
In these protests, the naked body of the security assemblage that was a “safe” body because it has nothing to hide becomes a
dangerous body as it subverts the logic implicit in the security assemblages of the state as authorized viewer
of the body. By becoming a “dangerous body,” the “naked body” parodies the logic of the airport security apparatus. In
mak- ing their bodies hypervisible, “fleshmob” protesters destabilize the state’s prerogative to surveil bodies
and the production of bodies as state-owned information.
Our alternative is to hijack the security process - individual critical activism can
expose the contradictions inherent to the system and create new forms of liberation
Rocco Bellanova and Gloria Gonzalez Fuster 2013 (International Political Sociology 7; "Politics of
Disappearance: Scanners and (Unobserved) Bodies as Mediators of Security Practices")
Various processes of the obliteration of bodies through the bodies–scanners set- ting have been described. There is also a parallel and inverse set of phenomena. In stark
contrast to such processes, critics of the machines have
consistently (re) introduced, wherever possible, references to bodies and to
the appearance of nakedness resulting from the invisibility of clothes in the images displayed by the original scanners. As in the other set of processes,
bodies are enacted both in linguistic and material ways. Many journalists and activists keep referring to “nude” airport
scanners (Kravets 2011), virtual strip searches (The Privacy Coalition 2010), and whole body imaging or body scanners (Electronic
Privacy Information Center (EPIC) 2012). In a similar fashion, it is possible to highlight a move to retranslate the spectral images of
original scanners into naked, living bodies, and then re-engineer the body-as-object into body-as-subject.¶ This
aspect is very strong in more artistic forms of criticism. One of the most interesting cases, and with the most explicitly political intentions, is that of the naked activists of
the Berlin
Pirate Party, demonstrating in the Berlin Tegel airport against body scanners in January 2010. They define their
political perfor- mance as a “fleshmob,” a sort of biopolitical version of the more classical flash- mob
(Piratenpartei Berlin 2010; emphasis added). As shown in Figure 6, a pick from a two-minute YouTube video, activists distributed pamphlets to passengers while wearing
only their underwear and tattoo-like messages.¶ Nakedness
appears to have been one of the most disturbing features of the
images initially generated by body scanners. This nakedness, perceived as prob- lematic, was, in a sense, an excess of visibility
of the bodies. The potential for further controversy was apparent with the production of images in which individ- uals were not
only portrayed naked but also without face and/or identity, rein- forcing their potential association with
images of bodies presented as mere “objects” of desire, that is, pornography. The enactment of the bodies–scanners setting as a
potentially pornographic site underpinned some artistic and activist protests against the scanners, as in the case of planned and video-recorded strip- teases (for example,
Furry Girl 2010). Specific
enactments within the bodies– scanners setting are not, however, always critical moves, but can also be
used for commercial purposes, as in the case of a Las Vegas–based company that relies on and fosters the nakedness controversy in an attempt to market
so-called flying pasties on their website (Flyingpasties.com 2012).¶ The bodies–scanners setting is not only productive “in favor of”
securitization. It can also produce a different type of politics, one that can potentially question specific
articulations of the security setting. In this sense, the different tactics, and all the alternative enactments of the
bodies—including the concealment of bodies and the resistance to such concealment—keep open the possibility of a political landscape.
Importantly, to do so, some of the elements of the setting have to be enrolled to the criticism, either in a material or in a linguistic way, and
either stressing their presence or their absence. Processes of disappearance can be hijacked, be it by the introduction, and articulation, of further
new actants, or by maintaining the visibility of those that the setting is masking.¶ Taking into account playful and/or
critical approaches, such as the fleshmob or the planned striptease, we better realize that the bodies within the
bodies– scanner are not predestined to become only docile, constrained bodies. From this perspective, even the “arms
up” gesture that the bodies going through the machines are forced to adopt could at the same time be a
movement of submis- sion (it is the gesture of those arrested and of those threatened with violence) and, within a specific association of elements, a
movement of potential libera- tion, a brief interruption in an oppressive security continuum.
More fleshmobbing
Eric Kula, 2011 (American Political Science Association, " Full-Body Scanners, Live Information and Rights
in the Airport: A Theoretical Perspective on Information Circulation")
In the immediate aftermath of the Christmas day underwear terror plot, the U.S. was not the only state aggressively rushing out new security measures.
Other nations, including Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, were already in the testing or implementation phases of their body- scanner initiative.
In January 2010, only a few weeks after the failed underwear bombing attempt, protesters from Germany‟s
Pirate Party organized a
protest the privacy invasion associated
with the “visual strip search.” These protesters, however, approached the issue in a very different way. A small number of people
descended on the airport more or less unclothed (most were wearing only underwear.) A statement on the party's website said they
opposed the new security scanners because they threaten the “private sphere and the personal rights of passengers.”19 In order to highlight
their privacy concerns, the protesters had words written on their skin. “One woman has the word “diaper” scrawled on her
protest at Berlin-Tegel airport. Like the U.S. Opt Out Day protest, this act was specifically designed to
lower back with an arrow pointing to her underwear and the word “prosthetic” printed on her leg. The word “piercing” and an arrow point to one of
her breasts. Another woman dressed in a beige sweater and flesh- colored tights wears a sign reading “pixelated.”20 Not
only were they
taking aim at the invasive procedure itself, but they were also mocking claims made by government officials
that this technology can protect a person‟s privacy by blurring or “pixelating” the image to hide personally
identifiable information.¶ ¶ By writing slogans and descriptions on their skin, the protesters had introduced a new form
of legibility into the airport space. Presumably, what they were attempting to do was to equate their written words with the technically
legible body image created by the scanners. By turning themselves into walking examples of privacy violations, the
protesters were drawing a comparison to the technically derived image. The images that the airport security agents see are far less
detailed than the YouTube protest video the Pirate Party posted online. In fact, the images produced by the body scanners cannot be seen by the
human eye. We don‟t have x-ray vision and we don‟t see bodies as chalk outlines. But, by boldly
equating the technical circulation of
x-rays and electromagnetic waves with the circulation of information through language and human vision, the
protesters claimed that informational privacy in the technical sphere should be considered identical to that in
the experiential sphere of the human senses.
alt—Michael Stipes
Michael Stipe alt
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, 28-08-2014 (Critical Studies on Surveillance 2(2), "Step Forward Please", available
at https://www.academia.edu/8122906/Step_Forward_Please_-_Critical_Security_Studies_2_2_)
And then suddenly something magical happens. Is that Michael Stipe singing? That’s definitely Michael Stipe – what song is this? And you
concentrate hard to block out the tannoy and the music from the other bars, tilting your head towards the bar and towards R.E.M. It’s got to be
suddenly everybody stops. Everything stops.¶ The tannoy ceases to bray. And
out of respect for ‘nightswimming’ the other bars turn off their music. People stop moving . Transit ceases. And
suddenly there is a ‘we’. We’re alone in this deserted airport with only R.E.M to guide us. I look around and everyone is swaying. The flow of
people past the bar has vanished. With eyes half closed and drinks resting on the table-tops, everybody is semi-present
– letting Michael Stipe’s voice move through them, and restraining themselves from singing their favourite
lines. “I’m not sure all these people understand/It’s not like years ago – the fear of getting caught/The recklessness of water/They cannot see me
‘nightswimming’. That piano riff is unmistakeable. And
naked/These things they go away – replaced by everyday/Nightswimming deserves a quiet night”.¶ And I’m not from braced for impact – far from it.
everybody is
respectfully silent. And we all look around, sharing a few smiles. There is a ‘we’. The barman whistles along with the
I notice that my hand is gripping the edge of the table, nails digging into the wood to stop from physically singing along. And
piano riff as we wipes the tables. When was the last time we heard the tannoy? When did someone last walk past? When did I last hear someone speak?
We all sway and its bliss. ¶ But all too soon it’s over. The chatter rises, the moment is lost. People are moving past again in herds. Flight #173 to
wherever is still delayed, and it is still requested that people visit information desk three for their refreshment vouchers. People go back to their
separate lives, their conversations rise, and a wall of people once again bustles through the airport. ¶ The moment is lost. But it was there. I saw it. And
as I move to the plane, I occasionally hear quiet whistles of the ‘Nightswimming’ refrain from people I pass on the
way to gate 53 – testament to the fact that something magical really did happen, if all too briefly. I try to catch their eyes,
and fail.¶ I’m tempted to switch to academic prose to explain the point of this story, if there even is one. To tell you something about intimacy in the
face of airport technologies which atomise and process, about people who don’t see each other, about technologies which utilise people in their quest
whatever an airport is – there are ways of defeating it. Michael
Stipe did it with just a voice and a piano, and his success dwarfed my smiling Jesus Christ pose through
security. And after 6 weeks in transit, that was truly special. For 3-and-a-half minutes, no-one bought anything, no-one
moved anywhere, and we shared something. There was no airport. There was security in the sense that we
were together, not apart. Something touched us in a way that pat-down searches and a biometric ID’s were
unable to comprehend. Thank you Michael Stipe.
to see darkly. But in truth, all I can really say for sure is that
alt—Opt Out
Opt out alt
Eric Kula, 2011 (American Political Science Association, " Full-Body Scanners, Live Information and Rights
in the Airport: A Theoretical Perspective on Information Circulation")
The American Protest¶ For a variety of reasons, the U.S. public has begun vocalizing concern about the body scanners, the conduct of airport security
screeners, and the way that some aspects of this screening process occur in the full view of other passengers. Fueled by two websites OptOutDay.com and WeWontFly.com- a call
for protest went out asking flyers to cause delay by refusing the body
scanner screening just as millions of Americans were trying to fly off for annual family feasts. “Atop the protesters‟ tactical list:
urging passengers to “opt out” of full- body scans, forcing TSA employees to instead administer „enhanced,‟ hand-sliding, pat downs that can include
feeling a person‟s inner thighs and buttocks.”18¶ What is noteworthy about the protest, for the context of this analysis, is the suggested mode of
protest. People
were not encouraged to stay home and not fly. They were encouraged¶ to opt out of the full-body
scan and to receive the traditional pat down. The government has always maintained that a choice exists for passengers to undergo
either form of screening. Therefore, there seems a reasonable outlet for people that do not want revealing body scans to protect their privacy.
However, the
mode of protest, to increase delays by opting for pat downs, still requires what many believe to be an
uncomfortable invasion of their personal space. The protest wasn‟t designed to rebel against this invasion. The protest was
designed to demonstrate that, in the larger picture of the entire commercial air industry and government regulations, people don‟t
really have a choice but to submit to the body scanner. The protesters realized that an obscured tension does
exist in the dual structure of experience. The “here and now” experience of that submission ties people (and very
personal, private information) to the larger flows of information, to the circulation of bodies, to the commerce of the air industry, and to
the efficacy of government security regulations. By recognizing that the information generated from their bodies is a
contingent part (indeed, an essential component) of the functionality of the entire airport space, they have tapped
into the tension that exists there and organized a political movement that brings that tension into focus for others to see.
By reemphasizing the tactile nature of the body, they resist any attempt to generate information in the form
of images. By imposing time constraints (the time of delay) back onto the TSA, I believe that the protest could demonstrate that the
technical expectation of access to bodily information is unreasonable when separated from its technical
supports. It is not a matter of protecting bodily information, but rather a matter of opposing a particular mode of information
circulation that already presumes that body space will be included in the production of social space.
At perm
Blurring Disadvantage –Affirming Exceptions is the Logic that Masks Statism – Reject
Every Deployment of Statist Language
Mann, 97. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. “Why You
Must Recognize and Understand Coercion” On-line. [KevC])
Some people say, "I believe in freedom and individual sovereignty, except for..." The problem is that
if you add up all the coercive exceptions of the people who profess their love for freedom and
individual sovereignty,
you get the modern slave-state that all countries are now in, at least to some extent. Coercion is the
essence of slavery. Coercion is the negation of individual freedom, self-ownership, and individual
sovereignty. Can we formulate another principle: Become wise, strong, and powerful - or suffer coercion? Some forms of coercion imply that the
information of the coerced or victim is no good and/or the victim can't think for himself or herself (can't process information). Therefore the coercer
must decide for the victim. For example, compulsory state "education" (coercion at its most insidious), compulsory compliance with "regulations",
"anti-drug laws", etc., imply that people are powerless victims, nothings, and nobodies who can't think for themselves. Most coercive bureaucracies
operate on the same principle: creating dependency, helplessness, and powerlessness.
When coercion is perpetrated, there is almost always a loser. Coercive "government" is a win-lose
or lose-lose game - it's destructive. In contrast, voluntary exchange is win-win - it benefits all parties. Reject Coercion Practice using
your mind to persuade, instead of your muscles to force, and you'll become much more capable. The recognition and rejection of coercion
constitutes the shift from backwards, barbaric savagery, to true civilization!
It is vital to our progress and survival that the currently increasing trend of coercion, perpetrated by
those who call themselves "government", be stopped, reversed, and ultimately eliminated
altogether!
The solution for the individual is to reject the use of coercion, prevent yourself from being coerced,
and withdraw your support from coercers - the means for doing this is called Freedom Technology.
It’s Mutually Exclusive
Esteva, 2k5. (Gustavo Esteva, Professor @ Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca. “The Revolution of the New Commons” Lecture. September 6, 2006. Online.
[KevC])
What we want to say is that there
is an alternative vision. There are alternative convictions. There is the conviction that
people can govern themselves. That they don’t need someone upstairs governing them. This is a different notion of power. In fact,
we cannot use the same words. In the villages that you will visit, you will see that when they are talking about how they govern themselves, and they really
govern their lives by themselves, they don’t use the word “government”. The word “government” is used for that external oppressive
structure out there. That is the “government”. What they have governing themselves, they don’t call that
“government”. When you use the word “government”, you have those governing and those governed. Two
classes of people. Here in the communities they are the same people. They are not two classes of people. They are governing themselves. All the
structures are they themselves governing themselves. Perhaps the word “government” is not the right word
to describe that kind of situation. To govern ourselves, of course, we need the pertinent political bodies -- different kinds of political bodies -- but not
those in a democratic structure. What we have now is a transition from a conventional power structure to another
conventional power structure, or to a different kind of organization of the society, a radically new
organization of the society. For this, for the second option, what we need to do is basically conclude the
dismantling of the old regime, and, second, reorganize the society from the bottom up.
Permutation Fails – Their Advocacy is Mutually Exclusive
Mann, 98. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. “Report #TL07B: The Nature of Government”” Online. [KevC])
Unfortunately, for most people - including many freedom lovers - it seems impossible to grasp the above refutation because they
are locked into the habit of thinking, talking, and writing about "government" as a volitional entity. They say
"government does this and that" - as if "government" is some kind of living, breathing entity capable of
performing actions - collectivist thinking. Sometimes it seems that when you say to these people, "Look at anything that "government" supposedly
does, like running a school, and you'll find that all the work is being done by individual human beings," - individualist thinking - they can't hear you. They seem so
brainwashed with the notion that "government does things," that their brains automatically shut out anything
to the contrary.
At cooption
No Cooption – Reclaiming Agency Comes First
Kenney & Zio, 2k9 (Shawna and Zio; “Anarchy in the USA,” Swindle Magazine, June 12 2009
http://swindlemagazine.com/news/anarchy-in-the-usa/)
American anarchists made headlines later in 1999 while protesting the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Wash., as the
black-masked portion of the more than 40,000 demonstrators. Political scientist and author Dr. Shira Tarrant says it’s exactly such
awareness today’s anarchists are responsible for, despite media’s depictions and misconceptions. “Anarchists have
brought such important attention to global issues like the IMF and World Bank and how unelected people are making policies
affecting workers around the world,” she says. “Mainstream media focuses on wild demonstrators who wear
black and throw rocks at The Gap. But more important is how anarchist groups have drawn attention to
the politics of global exploitation. This especially matters because media is so incredibly
controlled by corporate consolidation.” Much of modern American anarchy exists as civil disobedience, residing in ideas like
co-ops and community effort. “Anarchist groups get the word out. They’re also great about organizing grassroots Free
Stores and Food Not Bombs so that food, clothes and other necessities get straight to the people who need
it,” states Tarrant. Numerous anarchist bookstores and publishers thrive here. AK Press, a San Francisco-based worker-run collective that
publishes and distributes anarchist literature, states on its website anarchism “doesn’t tell people what to do. It is about
emancipation, empowerment and agency.” The statement goes on to encourage people to ask “what would your ideal
transportation system, agricultural system, neighborhood, school, or workplace look like? Now ask yourself how much influence you and the
people around you have over these issues? Can we afford to leave these decisions to the same people who have been screwing up our lives thus
“There’s always
the danger that a radical political philosophy will become co-opted by the mainstream status quo,
that it will become just a watered down fashion statement,” says Tarrant, but she stresses the positive
change that anarchism can bring “in the face of sexism, racism, unethical capitalist pressures, or
even co-optation.” In the recent documentary film Anarchism in America, Murray Bookchin agrees. “It’s illusory to think a food co-op
can replace Grand Union or Peoples’ Bank could replace Chase Manhattan. It is basically impossible to live a thoroughly
anarchist life within a capitalist system,” he says. “But I do believe this: One can try to maintain a high ethical
standard. That is one of the beautiful things about anarchism—that it brings ethics into socialism instead of mere science. One can
concern oneself personally with what is humane. One can protest and try to work with projects in which people learn
far?” Such questioning goes well beyond kids sporting patches with the anarchy symbol like a trendy corporate logo.
how to take control of their lives.”
Terror DA
Uniqueness/brink
US surveillance is on the brink—no EU cooperation.
Lombard 2010 (Etienne- JD candidate at Tulane University. “Bombing Out: Using Full-Body Imaging To Conduct Airport
Searches in the United States and Europe Amidst Privacy Concerns”. Winter 2010, Tulane Journal of International and Comparative
Law, https://litigationessentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=19+Tul.+J.+Int%27l+%26+Co
mp.+L.+337&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=aa985e4d46ce815557319e05bc877ccd//GH)
The short list of vulnerabilities identified supra militates against investing $ 150,000 to purchase only one scanner. Accordingly, the
United
States and EU should pool their resources together to develop a comprehensive technology that
considers each of the identified vulnera-bilities and guards against them while concomitantly preserving
privacy. As aviation security expert Bruce Schneier observed, aviation security methods typically lack foresight because they guard against only one
type of threat. n161 To better protect their citizens, security administrators from the EU and the United States must
collaborate. By sharing ideas and financial resources these hegemons are better equipped to develop the
technology required to detect multiple potential forms of attack, such as bombs hidden in body cavities, without impinging upon passenger
health. Until then, a piecemeal approach will continue to leave airports and passengers exposed to the risk
of injury or death. The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right to be secure in the person. Likewise, the EU
Charter expressly guarantees rights to privacy and modesty. Arguably, AIT infringes upon these rights. Although reasonable minds may differ, one
can easily understand why someone would find it unreasonable to use backscatter or MMW technology that
depicts naked images of men, women, and [*367] children. This understanding becomes readily apparent when consider-ing that
other forms of available technology accomplish the same precise objective. Perhaps this conclusion would be different if passengers voluntarily
decided to walk through the airports completely naked. However, the
fact that passengers are clothed suggests that they retain a
reasonable expectation in the privacy of their naked bodies. Accordingly, the use of AIT violates expressly guaranteed rights in
the EU and protected rights in the United States. Thus, the imposition of AIT absent some restraint upon government decision makers denotes that,
truly, as one commentator remarked, "we
are moving toward a world of significantly less information privacy." n162
Link
Full-body scanners are key to detect hidden objects.
Eggen et al. 09 (Dan, “Plane suspect was listed in terror database after father alerted U.S. officials,” The
Washington Post, 12/27, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/12/25/AR2009122501355.html?sid=ST2009122601151)//FJ
Several top Republicans criticized the administration's approach to counterterrorism, saying the government had not pieced together warning signs in
recent cases, including the slayings of 13 people at Fort Hood, allegedly by a Muslim soldier. "I think the administration is finally recognizing that they
got this terrorism thing all wrong," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee and a state
gubernatorial candidate. "I think we came very, very close to losing that plane last night." After
being briefed by federal authorities,
Abdulmutallab did not undergo body scans that might have helped detect the
explosive material when he went through security at airports in Nigeria and Amsterdam. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.),
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said
chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released a statement saying he was "troubled by several aspects" of the case, including the visit
by Abdulmutallab's father to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. Democrats in the House and Senate vowed to hold hearings in January but also urged
caution in jumping to conclusions. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said a
federal official briefed lawmakers about "strong suggestions of a Yemen-al-Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the plane over U.S. airspace."
Administration officials said President Obama is seeking accountability in the incident, although he has not demanded any sort of special review. He is
getting detailed briefings on the facts of the case and the airport security changes while on vacation in Hawaii, the officials said. One administration
official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said Abdulmutallab received his 2008
tourist visa from the U.S. Embassy in London. "We interviewed him, and his name was run against the watch list maintained by [the Department of
Homeland Security] and the FBI," the official said. "There was no indication of any derogatory information. There is every indication that whatever
radicalization took place occurred recently." In a new emergency order effective until Wednesday, TSA is requiring that all passengers bound for the
United States undergo a "thorough pat-down" at boarding gates, concentrating on the upper legs and torso. All carry-on baggage also should be
inspected, focusing on syringes with powders or liquids, TSA said. In addition, passengers must remain seated and may not access carry-on baggage for
the final hour before the landing or hold any personal item on their laps. The extraordinary steps came as former
senior U.S. officials
spoke in unusually blunt terms about the apparent failure of aviation security measures to detect a common
military explosive allegedly brought on board. Michael Chertoff, who was homeland security secretary from 2005 to
2009, said terrorists appear to have exploited the natural inhibition of screeners to conduct overly
intrusive searches, and he renewed calls for widespread expansion of whole-body imaging scanners
that use radio waves or X-rays to reveal objects beneath a person's clothes. Chertoff said the government
has sought to expand use of imaging scanners, but privacy advocates and Congress have raised objections.
"This plot is an example of something we've known could exist in theory, and in order to be able to detect it,
you've got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at," Chertoff said. "It's
either pat-downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."
Body scanners key to stop potential terrorist threats.
Meserve and Ahlers 10 (*Jeanne AND **Mike M., “Full-body scanners improve security, TSA says,”
CNN, 4/2, http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/04/01/airport.body.scanners)//FJ
Full-body imaging machines that see through clothes have significantly improved security in airports where they
are deployed, and have revealed more than 60 "artfully concealed" illegal or prohibited items in the past year, the
Transportation Security Administration says. To date, no explosives have been detected by the machines, but their ability to spot even small
concealed objects demonstrates their effectiveness as a security tool, officials said. "It is absolutely a tremendous
improvement of what we can detect at the checkpoints," TSA Acting Administrator Gale Rossides said this week. "It is an
excellent piece of technology that will significantly improve our detection capabilities." As evidence of the machines' capabilities, the security agency
released five photos of drugs or suspected drugs that airport screeners found after scans revealed anomalies on the ghost-like images of people's
bodies. The agency said metal detectors would not have revealed the items. Screeners using the technology also found
small of a person's back at the Richmond, Virginia, airport,
a knife hidden in the
a concealed razor blade on a passenger in Phoenix, Arizona, and other
concealed items such as large bottles of lotion, which are prohibited as carry-on items. In addition, the machines have revealed numerous
prohibited items that passengers evidently inadvertently left in pockets. Those items are confiscated but are not counted in the tally, a TSA spokesman
said. The agency field-tested the full-body imagers for more than a year before announcing last month the deployment of machines to 11 airports
nationwide. Today, 46 machines are in place in 23 airports, and the agency is stepping up deployments and plans to have about 1,000 set up by the end
of 2011. Interest in the machines has heightened since the Christmas Day incident in which a man allegedly attempted to detonate an explosive
concealed in his underwear. In an appearance before Congress last month, Rossides declined to say whether the machines could have detected the
underwear bomb. But to illustrate the machines' effectiveness, Rossides showed a packet of white powder smaller than a tea bag, saying it was identical
to a concealed bag detected by an imager. "The amazing thing is that our officers, as they get more and more familiar with this technology, are actually
finding very, very small things that are being secreted on the body," she said. But some passengers say the machine's capabilities are presenting new
Fourth Amendment questions about the government's searches, saying the machines -- in detecting very small objects -- are subjecting passengers to
scrutiny beyond what is needed to safeguard the plane. "I can't imaging an explosive that is powerful enough in that [tea-bag size] quantity to endanger
an aircraft," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who once took the TSA to court after a search of his checked luggage revealed a
small amount of drugs. "Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth Amendment, and often we have to reclaim
the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives us powers that were not envisioned by the Founding Fathers," Barlow said. The security agency said
that it searches only for prohibited items -- not illegal items such as drugs. When it finds illegal items during a search, it refers the item to local law
enforcement officers, it says. "What we're trying to resolve is the anomaly that we're seeing on the body," said Rossides. "If it's drugs, then we call in
local law enforcement and they handle it from there." Barlow predicted that the body scanner will lead to another court case to clarify the extent it can
be used to search the body. "Eventually they're going to bust somebody for something that was clearly and obviously not a threat to the aircraft, and
any reasonable person would have known that [while looking at the] body scan. And at that point somebody is going to make it an issue," he said.
Rossides said the
body imagers are especially useful because they can expose contraband on parts of the body
that aren't fully explored in pat-downs, such as the groin. "I think what was so telling about the Christmas Day
attack was that it exploited our cultural norms, that we don't frequently pat down persons in that part of the
body. This technology will give us the image of the entire body," she said.
Full-body scanners are key—Amsterdam member proves and counterterrorism
programs must be exaggerated in order to be successful.
Hunter 09 (Marnie, “Body scanners not 'magic technology' against terror,” CNN, 12/31,
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/12/30/airport.security.screening/)//FJ
The full-body scanning technology being adopted and discussed since the attempt to take down a passenger plane on Christmas Day isn't a "magic
machine" that will solve aviation security issues, experts say. "Regardless of the sophistication of the piece of technology, if you can collect the
information on how it works and what its technical parameters are, then that machine is not going to deter a [sophisticated] terrorist operation," said
Dr. Richard Bloom, director of terrorism, intelligence and security studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Full-body
screening and
other security measures are more effective in detecting threats from an increasing number of unsophisticated,
mentally troubled suspects acting alone, he said. The technology is "only a piece" of aviation security. "If you know ahead of time what
you're going to be facing, you either plan to beat it, or you go somewhere else," Bloom said. The advanced imaging scanners would not have caught
substances hidden in a bodily orifice or substances concealed by folds of skin on an obese suspect, he added. The
Transportation Security
Administration cannot discuss specific detection capabilities of its technology for security reasons, said TSA spokesman
Greg Soule. Security technologist Bruce Schneier believes that the body scanning machines are a waste of money. Investigation and intelligence
gathering is where the money would make a difference, he said. "Stop trying to guess. You take away guns and bombs, the terrorists use box cutters.
You take away box cutters, they put explosives in their shoes. You screen shoes, they use liquids. You take away liquids, they strap explosives to their
body. You use full-body scanners, they're going to do something else," said Schneier, who is the author of a number of security-related books,
including "Beyond Fear." Federal authorities
have charged Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, 23, of Nigeria with trying to detonate
explosives hidden in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan. The device failed to fully
detonate. In Amsterdam, metal detectors and X-ray machines were in place, but the advanced scanning technology was not
available. Dutch authorities have said they are confident about how AbdulMutallab was screened but acknowledge that they
could not have detected the explosive material that he was said to be carrying. Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport will begin
using the full-body scanners on all passengers taking flights to the United States, the Dutch interior minister said Wednesday. Also Wednesday, the
airport authority in Nigeria, where AbdulMutallab's flight to Amsterdam originated, announced plans to add body scanners to its security system. In
the United States, 40 of these advanced imaging machines are in use in 19 airports, according to the TSA. Only in six airports are they used as a
primary screening option. An additional 150 advanced imaging machines will be installed in U.S. airports over the next year, and the TSA plans to
purchase 300 more machines in 2010, the TSA's Soule said. The
controversial technology, first used in a U.S. airport in 2007, can find
hidden objects that metal detectors can't. "Advanced imaging technology enhances security by safely
screening passengers for metallic and non-metallic threats including weapons, explosives and other objects
concealed under layers of clothing without physical contact," Soule said. Privacy rights groups are wary of movements to impose
the anatomically revealing technology on all travelers as a primary screening method. "Obviously, we have a concern, because it's a virtual strip search
that is terribly invasive," said Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a
Washington-based public interest research center, filed a lawsuit in November against the Department of Homeland Security seeking details under the
Freedom of Information Act about the department's use of the advanced imaging technology. The privacy rights group is concerned that the focus on
hidden explosives will push the TSA to ramp up use of the machines as a primary screening tool without resolving concerns about appropriate use of
the technology, said associate director Lillie Coney. Addressing
privacy concerns, the TSA says faces are blurred on the
body scans generated by the agency's machines. Agents who deal directly with passengers do not see the
scans, and the agents who review the scans do not see the passengers. Because only a handful of the machines currently are
in use in the U.S. as a primary screening measure and only a few other countries are using the technology, most travelers flagged for secondary
screening would encounter other means of detecting threats, including pat-down searches and technology that can detect traces of explosives. Some
security analysts say pat-down searches -- which are often perfunctory -- are useless. "Basically, any pat-down that you
are not violated and embarrassed after is ineffective," Schneier said. In April 2008, the TSA announced an "enhanced pat-down search" to address
items that could be hidden in "sensitive areas of the body," including the chest and groin. The more thorough searches, the announcement said, would
be used only when all other screening measures failed to resolve a security alarm. The agency said Wednesday that this is not the current procedure but
declined to offer further details on how pat-down guidelines have evolved. A separate technology that analyzes samples for traces of explosive material
is in place at every airport, Soule said. More than 7,000 explosives trace detectors are in use in airports across the country. Screening procedures and
technology constitute only one layer in combating terrorism, Bloom said. There is no "magic machine" or "magic technology." "Security has to be
layered and the layering has much more to do than pat downs and technology, it also includes collecting intelligence, analyzing it and transmitting it in
a prompt and responsive and secure fashion," he said. "In general, the
odds are really stacked in the terrorists' favor ... because
they only have to be successful one time and the government has to be successful all the time."
Key experts agree that full-body scanners are necessary in the fight against terrorism.
Malveaux 10 (Suzanne, “Obama stands by controversial air security screening methods,” CNN, 11/21,
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/11/20/obama.tsa/)//FJ
President Barack Obama
stood by new controversial screening measures Saturday, calling methods such as pat-downs
and body scans necessary to assure airline safety. Speaking at a NATO press conference in Lisbon, Portugal, the president
called the balance between protecting travelers' rights and their security a "tough situation." Per the new rules, travelers may be subject to full-body
scans at 400 such machines in 69 airports nationwide. Those who voluntarily opt out -- as well as those who set off a scanning machine or a metal
detector -- are subject to a pat-down. Some travelers have likened the pat-downs to groping. The president said such
methods are needed
after what happened December 25, 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria allegedly boarded a
flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear. Abdulmutallab reportedly failed to set off the
bomb, which metal detectors didn't detect, though his attempt led to airport screening procedures that have caused a holiday travel uproar. "At this
point, the
Transportation Security Administration, in consultation with our counterterrorism experts, have indicated
to me that the procedures that they've been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to
be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing," said Obama. TSA officers can use
"professional discretion" to determine whether individuals should be subject to further screening, according to a statement from the federal agency.
Critics have called the procedures invasive, with Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead saying the agency "is forcing travelers to consent to a
virtual strip search or allow an unknown officer to literally place his or her hands in your pants." The president, while noting that he didn't have
personal experience with the new security measures, said he understands "people's frustrations. He said he's asked TSA for assurances that "what we're
doing is the only way to assure the American people's safety." He said that he has also told the federal agency's administrators that they must consider
whether there are "less intrusive" ways to obtain the same goals. "One of the most frustrating aspects of this fight against terrorism is that it has
created a whole security apparatus around us that causes huge inconvenience for all of us," he said. Obama said that transportation security officials
have a tough task, facing "enormous pressure" to prevent a terrorist attack. In a public statement released Saturday, TSA Administrator John Pistole
spelled out the new security measures and offered tips to those flying this Thanksgiving week. "As you travel this holiday season, I want to remind you
that TSA's mission is to ensure the safety of you the traveling public and we are committed to doing so efficiently, courteously and professionally,"
Pistole said. In Portugal, the president vowed he'd try to find a way to make passengers feel more both comfortable and safe, whether it is through the
current policies or with new ones. "Every
week I meet with my counterterrorism team and I'm constantly asking them
whether -- is what we're doing absolutely necessary? Have we thought it through? Are there other ways of
accomplishing it that meet the same objectives?" he said.
AT: It’s Invasive
Full-body scanners are crucial for detecting terrorists—there are no privacy violations
and the alternative is pat downs which is far worse.
Carafano 10—a senior research fellow for national and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation
(James Jay, “Airline Travelers Should Fear Terrorists More Than Full-Body Scanners,” The Heritage
Foundation, 1/22, http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/01/airline-travelers-should-fearterrorists-more-than-full-body-scanners)//FJ
Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." And it seems a lot of people in Washington take that mantra seriously. Witness
the ferocious debate over the use of full-body scanners in the wake of the Christmas crotch-bomber episode. The scanning technologies basically allow
airport security to look through your clothes to see if anything is hidden underneath. The very idea seems to enrage some, while others appear besotted
with the machines. The emotion -- and rhetoric -- are running so high, one suspects the two camps are either ignorant of the legal, testing, and
deployment questions surrounding the scanners or they are just playing politics with the issue. As for
those "outraged" by the
deployment of the scanners, where have you been since 9/11? These technologies are not new. The
Transportation Security Administration has tested and evaluated them for years and given ample opportunity for public
comment on how to regulate their use. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees TSA, has even
received kudos from the privacy and civil liberties community for the outreach it conducted in
developing guidelines for employing the scanners. Members of Congress and ACLU lawyers have no doubt already stepped through them at one time
or another at Washington's Reagan National Airport. So
why is stopping the scanners suddenly a cause célèbre in some
quarters? Their righteous-sounding indignation does not bear up well under scrutiny. And the privacy argument seems shakiest of all. If folks truly
think the scanners represent an unreasonable search, why didn't they file suit the day the first passenger walked through the machine? One possible
reason: There is plenty of case law holding that individuals' right to (i.e., expectation of) privacy is far less when passing through a government security
checkpoint than when in their own home. Furthermore, it's hard to argue that a search for bombs hidden in clothing is unreasonable. Richard Reid's
shoes and now Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's under-pants have put that argument to rest. Consider
the alternative: a pat down.
Since most bombs are hidden in the areas that security officials will feel most uncomfortable touching, an
effective pat down requires feeling around the breasts and crotch. Talk about invasive! Concerns that those scanned
would be subject to ridicule are overblown as well. Scanners render faces nondescript. Breasts and genitals
are tactfully blurred. The image is seen only by a professional screener, and it is not retained. Sunbathers give away
more at the beach. Arguing that the scanners aren't efficacious doesn't hold up so well, either. They were used during Saddam Hussein's trial so
suicide bombers wouldn't sneak into the courtroom. They have been tested extensively by the TSA. Are they perfect? No. But
no screening technology is. Every system has its shortfalls. Bomb dogs tire quickly, and there aren't enough of them to go around. They
can't find hidden guns and knives. Additionally, many people are scared by dogs, which can be disruptive. Explosive-trace technologies have
limi-tations, too. The detection systems used to swab bags are too slow to allow universal screening. And, like dogs, they're useless for detecting knives
and guns. Scanners make sense. Yet security zealots who want to put them at every checkpoint in every airport are equally wrongheaded. Even fullbody scanners can be beaten. One technique is the "booty bomb." Explosives are either placed in the anal cavity or swallowed, then set off with an
external detonator like a cellphone. A body scanner wouldn't find a booty bomb. "Scans for some" makes sense. "Scans for everyone" doesn't. Erect a
Maginot line of scanners in every airport in the world, and airplanes will suffer the same fate as the French at the onset of World War II. Put all your
security eggs in one basket, and the enemy will find a way around it … no matter how technologically advanced that basket is. The
hard truth:
Terrorists can't be stopped with defense alone. An unseemly rush to buy more body scanners will shift resources from the most
effective means of countering terrorists: a good offense. Without question, the best security tactic is to stop terrorists before they even enter an airport.
Effective counterterrorism operations find and take down plots before they are put in motion. That's how authorities disrupted the 2006 Londonbased plot to smuggle liquid explosives onto United States-bound flights. Next best, security needs to funnel suspicious travelers into secondary
screening where scanners as well as other technologies and techniques can be used to keep malicious actors off airplanes. Let's not let security-vs.liberty diatribes hijack the debate. Keep the focus where it belongs: on how best to fight terrorists. Scanners
don't undermine our privacy
or freedom. In fact, they help keep terrorists from killing us -- the ultimate deprivation of liberty. On the other
hand, they are no cure-all for terrorism. They should be used judiciously.
Full-body scanners don’t invade privacy rights and pat-downs are worse.
Capehart 10 (Jonathan, “I'll take the full-body scan,” The Washington Post, 1/4,
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/01/call_it_the_third-grader_in.html)//FJ
The full-body scanner controversy is much ado about nothing, if you ask me. And I’ll take an electronic scan
over a hands-on pat-down any day. A quick synopsis: There are two types of full-body scanners. The backscatter emits low-level xrays at you to determine whether you're trying to get through security with more than God gave you. It takes all of 20 seconds from beginning to end.
The millimeter-wave machine takes up to 40 seconds to do the same thing with radio waves. There are 150 backscatters on order and there are 40
millimeter-wave scanners in operation at 19 airports. My take: We need more. But privacy rights groups are up in arms because the equipment
produces what looks like negatives of nudie pictures (millimeter wave) or like the chalky outlines of victims at Pompeii (backscatter). The rights groups
leave the impression that your business will be bared for inspection right there in front of everyone. Not true. The
images are viewed in a
secure room away from the security checkpoint and they are destroyed once each passenger is cleared. I’d agree
with Jon Adler, of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, who told The Post: "I think a bomb detonating on a plane is the
biggest invasion of privacy a person can experience," Or as Quentin Hines wrote on my Facebook wall after I posted the bootybomb citation: "Have these ‘flyers rights’ [folks] forgotten that flyers reserve the right to take whatever measures neccesary [sic] to escape being blown
to bits in midair? I fly constantly and would gladly submit to a strip search, colonoscopy or the infamous 'please turn your head and cough' for even
the slightest increase in MY safety." How vivid. But I have no doubt his sentiment is widely shared.
Transparency K
1NC—Transparency K
Focus on transparency and revealing ignores the ways in which certain bodies are
systematically concealed - turns case
Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta 2015 (Feminist Surveillance Studies, Chapter 8: "The
Public Fetus and the Veiled Woman: Transnational surrogacy blogs as Surveillant Assuemblage")
Lowry builds on these understandings to assert that reproductive technologies and services form “an assemblage that monitors and dis- tributes
information about pregnant women” (2004, 364). She points to gestational ultrasonography’s abstraction of the fetus from the maternal body as an
example of how the surveillance assemblage of reproductive technologies breaks down, abstracts, and reassembles female bodies. In addition to
Lowry’s understanding of reproductive technologies as sur- veillant assemblages, Hall’s (2007; this volume) formulation of the aes- thetics of
transparency influences our discussion. Hall locates her analy- sis at national rather than reproductive borderlands, where Ziplock bags revealing the
body’s hygiene products represent the state’s investment in policing bodies and bodily interiors. Such policing becomes framed as a way to “root out
terror,” that is, perceived threats to a particular formu- lated notion of national (and racial) integrity. In Hall’s words, “The aes- thetics of transparency
is motivated by the desire to turn the world (the body) inside-out such that there would no longer be any secrets or interi- ors, human or geographical,
in which our enemies (or the enemy within) might find refuge. . . . [It] establishes a binary opposition between interi- ority and exteriority and
privileges the external or visible surface over the suspect’s word” (2007, 321). Fetal
images are consistent with Lowry’s discussions
of reproductive-imaging technologies, such as ultrasound, which fetishize the fetus as something separate from the mother. And yet,
images of pregnant surrogates, even “veiled” or headless surrogates, seemingly contradict this impulse, bringing
the fetal context (the gestat- ing maternal body) firmly into view. These two gestures appear to bring into conflict
Hall’s assertion that an aesthetics of transparency relies on a “binary opposition between interiority and
exteriority.” We investigate the tension between the kind of reproductive surveillance undertaken in clinic rooms and the
sort of national borderland surveillance conducted in airports. While the former visualizes reproductive interiority in the form
of the fetus, the latter brings into focus the exteriority of the gen- dered and racialized “foreign” subject—
desired for the products of her labor, yet simultaneously distanced and suspect. We examine how trans- national iP blogs, which routinely post both
sorts of images, exemplify a new, globalized world order of surveillance not operated from “above” but horizontally, as part of a digital “rhizometric
crisscrossing of gaze[s].” The ultrasonographic and photographic images posted on the blogs of infertile couples from the Global North become part
of the information networks and “centers of calculation” (Haggerty and Ericsson 2000, 603) of an international surveillant assemblage, playing out on
the bodies of women from the Global South.
2NC TK—Top Level
Better card for the above
Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta 2015 (Feminist Surveillance Studies, Chapter 8: "The
Public Fetus and the Veiled Woman: Transnational surrogacy blogs as Surveillant Assuemblage")
We see here the tension between transparent interiors and inscrutable exteriors, paralleling the same tensions in
the type of surveillance done at national borderlands to “root out terror.” In the words of Hall, “The aesthetics of transparency can
thus be defined as an attempt by the secu- rity state to force a correspondence between interiority and exteriority on the objects of the preventative
gaze” (this volume, 127). The
distant, impoverished surrogate represents a reproductive, if not traditional, na- tional security
threat. Her poverty, her foreignness, her racial otherness all represent sources of potential “terror” to the iP
digital nation. In turn, the iP digital nation attempts to neutralize this threat by “knowing” the surrogate’s
nutritional and vitamin status and visualizing her uterine in- teriors in the form of the fetal ultrasound.
Ubiquitous requests to see her baby bump via Skype and emailed photos may represent what Hall calls an attempt to “flatten the object of
surveillance” (this volume, 128), yet the surrogate’s ultimate distance and inscrutability remain.¶ In
the Levinasian formulation of
mutuality, it is the “face” of the other that is brought into the light of recognition by the self who heeds¶ 164
Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta¶ the other’s “primordial call” (Irvine 2005). As such, the headless belly- bump
shot signals an undermining of this sort of recognition: it is a “re- veiling” of the surrogate such that not only is she unable
to “be recog- nized” or to gaze back, but her reproductive body alone is present and not her subjecthood. For
the Western iP digital nation, it is ultimately the fetal “face” which is unveiled through biotechnology, and it is this fetal image which
replaces the surrogate’s own literal and figurative face in the Western iP gaze. In the words of Barbara Katz Rothman,
“Babies, at least healthy white babies, are very precious products these days. Mothers, rather like South African diamond miners, are cheap, expendable, not-too-trustworthy labour necessary to produce the precious prod- uct” (2004, 19).¶ In
Margaret Atwood’s postapocalyptic
novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Earth’s few remaining fertile women are forced to be “handmaids”— bearing children for the (infertile) ruling
class. In the Red Center, their restrictive dormitory, they are taught that no other parts of their bodies other than their uteruses matter; their hands and
feet, for instance, are subject to torture and abuse. So, too, are the handmaids’
heads and most of their faces covered by a “stiff
white veil,” which they must wear or risk punishment of death. There are no mirrors in their world; they are not meant
to see or be seen, but exist solely for the reproductive potential they offer “the Commander” and his wife.
Faces disappear from the mem- ory of one handmaid, even as she herself becomes “de-faced” by her surroundings.¶ I try to congure [sic], to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still
behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won’t stay still for me, they move, there’s a smile and it’s gone, their features curl and
bend as if the paper’s burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces.
But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I
want to say. But they won’t.¶ It’s my fault. I am forgetting too much. (Atwood 1985, 193)¶ Where, in all this, is
the voice of the Indian
surrogate? Like her veiled or headless image, she is by and large voiceless—made invisible and mute— on iP blogs and discussion
sites, unable to participate in Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) “rhizometric criss-crossing of the gaze.” She is looked¶ Public Fetus
and Veiled Woman 165¶ upon, but does not look and cannot implicate others in her looking. These conversations remain haunted by her
faceless image, as is this essay itself. In our critique, our desire to contextualize the sighting of her (internal and external) body and its broader
sociopolitical implications, we seek to conjure her face and spirit. We do not “speak for” but “speak with” her, listening hard for her reply.18
Eroticism K
1NC Shell
1NC—Eroticism K
We endorse a reality porn aesthetic- The stage is the scanner and our bodies are the
seductive performers
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. “Surveillance is Sexy”. Surveillance & Society. Pg 204205. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3281//GH)
To begin, I want to turn my attention to Ruth Barcan’s (2002, 2004) discussion of ‘homemade’ and ‘reality porn’, which for her includes ‘found’ and
covert footage, paparazzi and other unauthorized images of ‘celebrity skin’, amateur porn, and forms of porn fashioned to look like found, amateur or
covert footage. While ‘amateur
porn’ has a history that outstretches modern surveillance technologies, I think it is
possible to trace, in contemporary forms, a mobilization of a ‘surveillance aesthetic’ – where the technologies
and staging of pornographic images plays on ideas of surveillance, voyeurism and exhibitionism and where the
technologies of surveillance structure the narrative, the action and most importantly the ‘look’ of porn. Barcan notes the increasing popularity of
‘reality porn’ within the overall ‘pornscape’, and describes how this genre fetishizes authenticity and ‘brazenness’ or ‘rawness’.
Readable as a response to the ‘pornonormativity’ of much mainstream commercial porn, reality porn paradoxically at
once ‘ordinariizes’ porn and challenges the normativity of the standard porn recipe or script (see also Hardy 2008). The growth of
ordinari-ized amateur porn featuring ‘real people’ has been especially propagated by the Internet, though it has migrated across other porn platforms,
and even into the ‘mainstream’, for example on the TV show Pants Off Dance Off, which features ‘ordinary people’ stripping and dancing on
camera.1 Central to the ‘realiti-ization’ of porn for Barcan (itself embedded of course in the broader rise of other ‘reality’ formats) are ‘technological
changes that have democratized access to image-making technologies and to circuits of both amateur and commercial exchange of images’ (Barcan
2002: 88). These technological
changes’, she adds, ‘have impacted on both the economics of porn production and the
cultures of porn viewing’ (ibid.). The increasing ubiquity of Internet and other digital imaging technologies has dramatically changed the
‘pornscape’ for Barcan, bringing about three especially significant and interconnected transformations: first, the sheer scale, reach and quantity of
pornographic images it makes available; second, the increased visibility of pornographic practices (in the sense that many different kinds of porn
become available, or known about, to any home in which there is a computer connected to the Internet); and third, changes in the nature of privacy
itself, owing to the ambiguously public/private nature of the Internet. (Barcan 2002: 89). Barcan’s second point, about the increased visibility of porn
practices, connects to broader current arguments about the sexualization or pornification of the public sphere (eg Cover 2003; Paasonen Nikunen and
Saarenmaa 2008). The
proliferation of porn and porn-like images, practices and aesthetics, I want to argue, makes
available a new idiom that can be redeployed subversively – in this instance, against normative (and normalizing)
surveillance. The pornification of surveillance (which is not to deny its always-already porn-ness, as Koskela points out) draws on
and connects to the ‘reality porn’ aesthetic in diverse ways, sexualizing the positions of both watcher and
watched, and the ‘realness’ and ‘truthfulness’ that underpins the logic of surveillance just as it underwrites the
‘realness’ of ‘reality porn’. While ‘pornification’ and eroticization should in no way be collapsed together, my argument here is that the
knowing deployment of this ‘surveillance aesthetic’ in ‘reality porn’ serves as an interesting site to consider
the hijacking and repurposing of surveillance. It asks us to think about the pleasures of looking and being
looked at, about the possibility of different ways of configuring the ‘algebra of surveillance’, and about ways
of performing surveillance that are about taking back control over images and their uses. Like other sexual practices
which eroticize power dynamics, such as sadomasochism, this argument goes beyond what some people would think of as
liberatory. And of course, there are much trickier issues at stake here, in terms of the porn industry, the exploitation of people on both sides of the
camera, and questions of whether porn can ever be truly emancipatory. These are questions that this paper cannot settle; but I would like to avoid
closing down the possibility of ‘surveillance porn’ being considered as part of an ‘erotics of resistance’ in surveillance society. I shall return to this issue
in the conclusion.
Seductive practices flip normative power relations- Our performance in the reality
porn aesthetic seduces the surveillance state and collapses its domination reversing
the system of power
Robinson 12 (Andrew, political theorist and activist, “Jean Baudrillard: Strategies of Subversion”,
September 7th, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-11/)CDD
Baudrillard proposes alternatives to the language of the code, which can restore other forms of
social relations.Changes in media content are assumed to have little effect. Rather, effective changes alter the
form of media. In the field of language and signs, Baudrillard sees poetry, graffiti and seduction as types of
In some passages,
alternative practice which create different ways of relating. Poetic language is the form of symbolic exchange within language. This is because it is not
reducible to the expression of the code. It renders language open to being broken down into its particular components – like in Freirean education. It is therefore opposed to language as value, and to
identity. According to Baudrillard, in the dominant language, elements are accumulated as dead weight because they are never symbolically destroyed. Poetic language creates a kind of vertigo, leaving
the place of the signified empty. It is the force which destroys the code. Baudrillard thus sees poetic language as non-representational. It implies reversibility. It escapes the fate of language to silence and
separate, allowing ambiguity. This view is advanced against the idea of poetry as simply a loosening of fixed meanings (the position taken by most poststructuralists). In Baudrillard’s discussions of
poetry, a special place is reserved for Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s art is praised as enchanted, ironic, ecstatic, repeating and exceeding the logic of the system. Irony is seen as an expression of the
indifference of the object. Baudrillard also provides an interpretation of graffiti, particularly the kind involving tagging. He sees it as a ‘savage offensive’ in response to the enclosure of people and signs
in ghettos. The city encloses people in the form of the sign, or the code. Ghettos cut-up social life, downgrade particular lives, and symbolically destroy social relations. Graffiti exterminates this space of
the code by exceeding the code in its non-referentiality: a tag refers to even less than the code does. Tags are an anti-discourse of empty signifiers, often borrowed from comics. In resistance to the
proper name and private individuality of capitalism, graffiti writes ‘tribal’ names with symbolic force. They territorialise spaces which have been decoded by the system, turning areas into collective
territories. These signs are quasi-anonymous, and they can be given and exchanged freely. They dismantle or scramble the signals of the order of signs. They resist both assigned identities and
impersonal anonymity. This resistance repeats the system’s own simulations. Graffiti tags reproduce mass relations in that they allow no response. But they are subversive because they simulate symbolic
exchange, play, and non-functional space. They avoid any reference or origin, consisting of nothing but names, and with no message. (Trying to interpret graffiti as art or as expression of identity is for
Baudrillard recuperation). This, for Baudrillard, provides a model for resistance. To dismantle the network of codes, we need to attack coded difference. The means to do this is through an uncodeable
Baudrillard also writes of reinventing the power of illusion and seduction, the power ‘to tear the
same away from the same’, to invent signs which point nowhere, to master the art of escaping chance and
causality and causing disappearances. Obscenity and seduction are closely related. Hence, Baudrillard is
almost talking about acquiring the same power the system has obtained, to create pure images which exist
beyond binaries. Yet he is also talking about recreating the scene, the type of illusion the system has
destroyed. He distinguishes seduction from fascination. Seduction has something in common with passion,
with the ‘hot’ sphere which is lost. It is an art of withdrawing something from the visible order – and hence
counterposed to liberation and production. It also recreates the experience of destiny. The fetish performs a
miracle of summoning an experience of destiny from the accidental nature of the world – fate instead of
chance. It creates a world which is connected, rather than aleatory. Things have a predestined linkage. Connections occur through the cycle of
absolute difference.
metamorphoses. Fate happens because everything seems to be linked to everything else, without exception. One can experience oneself as being a decisive element in a situation without willing it – as
Such unexpected connections can at most be imitated by strategy. They escape the rule of the
code. They take us into a world which is neither random nor causal, instead resting on the equivalence of the
signs of emergence and disappearance. Seduction brings things outside their objective or rational causal
connections, instead connecting them by arbitrary signs or codes. However, they do not seem arbitrary. They
are experienced as destined. This reverses cause and effect. Effects seem to generate their causes. Neither a chancebased nor a causal world is as appealing an idea as a world ruled by willed or destined coincidences. From a symbolic point of view, a neutral world is
repugnant. Destiny thus exists in a Manichean conflict with causality and chance. In seduction, the experience of events is altered. One
experiences a pure event rather than a rational sequence. In a pure event, one experiences oneself as a thing
rather than a word (e.g. as an embodied self rather than a rational ego). This event needs to be transmuted further, into a spectacle or
scene with a magical effect, beyond representation and causality. And it blurs the barriers between Good and
Evil. People secretly desire the unravelling of rational connections and their replacement with events, in
which things come together spontaneously in a single site of intensity. Such experiences can be created
through unexpected connections. Seduction is antagonistic, like a duel. It is counterposed to the ideal of
universal love. It thus restores symbolic exchange. Baudrillard suggests that love is part of the Christian defeat of symbolic exchange and the fall into
individuation. It is connected to the ‘maternal’ and the Oedipal family. It is an imaginary replacement for the actual loss of connections. Its
loss or absence today is cruelly felt. To love, according to Baudrillard, is to isolate someone from the world, and dispossess her/him of her/his secret or shadow. Love
being indispensable.
consists of a floating libido which tries to invest its environment in a cold, dispassionate way. It can be manipulated by the code because it floats in this way. Baudrillard is advocating, against this ‘cool’
To seduce something is to return
it to the cycle of appearance and disappearance, hence of metamorphosis. There is a void behind power.
Seduction and reversibility causes it to collapse. In seduction, the object is seductive. The subject dominates
the object, but the object can reverse this domination. Signs become simply a game of appearances, rather
than referring to an absent reality. The ontological status of destiny in Baudrillard’s argument is often unclear. Baudrillard’s argument seems to be that it is best for us to
form of desire, a return to the ‘hot’ intensities of seduction and passion. He also argues that seduction is more basic than sex or the orgasm.
believe in destiny, and act as if it exists. He argues for it from its emotional appeal and its role in societies with symbolic exchange. It is the way in which signs obtain intensity, and hence a counterpoint
Crucially, seduction
reverses the usual power of the subject over the object. The object traps the subject through seduction, and
drags it down to annihilation. Seduction has the effect of making a particular sign or object no longer
arbitrary. Signs become objects become impossible to turn into metaphors. This, presumably, stops the
interchangeability of the code, creating a particular existential territory or connection. The object is always the
master of the game in seduction. Seduction aims for a kind of contact as if in adversity, which carries out a magical integration of what is otherwise distinct.
to the ‘cool’ signs of today. He also argues that everything is of the order of initiation and symbolic exchange, since everything comes into being and disappears.
Our reality porn aesthetic is an implosive strategy- We bring the surveillant
assemblage to its limit and leave the system to die- Simple rejection of the
surveillance state leaves its subjects in a static form that allows it to re-establish itself
inevitably
Robinson 12 (Andrew, political theorist and activist, “Jean Baudrillard: Strategies of Subversion”,
September 7th, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-11/)CDD
Baudrillard proposes that opponents of the system replace explosive strategies with implosive strategies. Such
strategies outbid the system in the direction in which it is already going, and/or restore symbolic exchange.
Explosion responds to the order of production. Implosion and reversal similarly respond to the order of
networks, combinations and flows. We live in an era when games of chance and vertigo have replaced competitive, expressive games. For Baudrillard, an effective
subversion today would involve becoming more aleatory than the system. Baudrillard sees this as possible through ‘symbolic disorder’, the return of symbolic exchange. Death offers a higher order than
Baudrillard argues for catastrophic – rather than dialectical – responses.
Catastrophic responses involve pushing things to their limit. Catastrophe is not necessarily a negative idea –
Baudrillard means catastrophe for the system, not for anyone else. Something is catastrophic in the bad sense
only from a linear mode of thought. From another point of view, it is a winding-down of a cycle to its
horizon or to a transition-point where an event happens. The catastrophe is the point of transition after which nothing has meaning from one’s own
point of view. But the rejection of the code’s demand for meaning makes catastrophe no longer negative. Catastrophe is the passage to an entirely different world. The challenge must
now be taken up at a higher level. The challenge the code poses for us is the liquidation of all its structures,
finding at the end only symbolic exchange. Baudrillard proposes that we ‘become the nomads of this desert, but disengaged from the mechanical illusion of value’. We
the code, one which can move beyond and overthrow it.
should live this space, devoid of meaning, as a return to the territory, as symbolic exchange. To become, as one writer puts it, ‘the hunters and gatherers of the contemporary megacity’. We should
Baudrillard was
writing this before the rise of contemporary surveillance and policing practices, which make it far harder
to live in the system’s spaces as if they were territorial. It seems the system has somehow gained a reprieve
from death, as it has several times before. It has done this by further deepening and expanding the code, and
by drawing on reactionary and fascistic energies. According to Baudrillard, the challenge is to avoid
fascination with the death throes of the system, to avoid giving it our energies in this way – to simply leave it
to die. The system keeps itself alive by staging the ‘ruse’ of its death, while leaving the subjects it has created
intact. It is, rather, through our own ‘death’ (or metamorphosis) that the system collapses. With the social failing, it seeks new energy, drawing on the marginal rebellions of excluded groups. For
this reason, Baudrillard is suspicious of attempts to recreate marginal systems of meaning, instead calling for the
logical exacerbation of the system’s logic.
reconstruct the current space as a sacred space, a space without pathways, while rejecting the seduction of value – allowing work, value, the dying system to bury themselves.
2NC Arguments
2NC AT: Baudrillard’s sexist
Baudrilard isn’t sexist- They misinterpret his definition of feminine and the power
relations of seduction
Karre 11 (Erin, PhD in Philosophy, “The Seduction of Feminist Theory”,
http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/168/)CDD
Seduction (1979) is a further attempt to articulate this challenge and relies on a dichotomy whereby all
systems of meaning are masculine. In one sense, the position outside of this structure, which poses a radical
challenge to the authority of this system, is feminine, but Baudrillard posits the word “feminine,” as it relates
to seduction, outside the dichotomous structure of masculine/feminine, which he says is also masculine. In
Seduction, Baudrillard exposes the difficulty, the almost unavoidable trap, of attempting to think outside of
the productive system. The fact that Baudrillard instantiates another “code,” “masculine/feminine /feminine,” in order to posit an “outside” to the system of production, is certainly contradictory because his entire
argument is against the political backslash. However, for Baudrillard, to be able to theorize without contradiction is the first sign that a theory itself has run its course—is passé. This is an argument he makes in critiquing Marx, Freud, and later
For Baudrillard, contradiction is positive because, wherever contradiction is exposed, “reality” and
“truth” cannot be assumed or contained – power cannot be enacted. When contradiction does not occur, we become too close to arguing for universality, and
Foucault.10
inevitably create new hierarchies of belief. Allowing Baudrillard the admittedly generous benefit of irony (as we most certainly do for many feminists) and acknowledging that his writing is, to an extent, performative of his own theory, we can
approach Seduction as a self-consciously productive discourse of anti-production rather than as instantiating an authoritative discourse. In Seduction, Baudrillard argues that Freud and Foucault are similar to Marx in that they do not challenge
the concept of sexual desire as a natural given—something that exists before discourse and before regulatory practices. Expanding on his earlier argument that “use value” constitutes “need,” Baudrillard argues that the process of signification
constitutes both “sex” and “sexuality.” These terms are never value free. In his readings of both Freud and Foucault, Baudrillard argues that these theorists not only argue that desire is regulated and structured by discourses but also believe
that sexual desire exists prior to such systems.11 For Freud, all children start off bisexual and mature into heterosexuality or homosexuality. For Foucault sexual desire is regulated through discourses that produce heterosexuals and
homosexuals as either natural or aberrant identities. While Marx takes production as a social given, Freud and Foucault assume that sexual desire, the desire for a specific sexual object, is a social given. As such, human beings are structured by
how they relate to each other as sexual subjects with desire. But Baudrillard sees no natural desire, nor does he define sexuality in terms of desire for a certain sex object. Rather, he argues that what we come to think of as object desire is also
created and regulated ideologically. Heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality are ideologies rather than identities.12 These discourses structure how we come to think about ourselves as possessing a natural capacity for sex and desire. Freud
was not only describing sex and sexuality he was also creating/constituting it, just as Foucault was not only describing power but also enacting it. For Baudrillard, the moment that Freud became productive in thought was the moment he
dismissed his theory of seduction. Freud’s theory of seduction came about as a result of his work on female hysteria. Freud initially argued that hysteria was a result of latent childhood trauma whereby the young girl experiences sexual
advances from her father, or another male relation. But he eventually, and controversially, dismissed this theory of seduction, arguing that the female hysteric was fantasizing about her father’s sexual advances. Baudrillard argues that Freud’s
dismissal of the seduction theory was his first step to becoming productivist because Freud formally established a structural code, a political backslash between fantasy and reality in which a father would not seduce his own daughter. Freud
established a reality of mythic proportions whereby female children possess a universal desire for their father, the hysteric being the pathological variant on this theme. Fathers, on the other hand, remain powerful in that no negative value is
The reason that Baudrillard defines seduction as feminine has nothing to do with “real” women but
is precisely because seduction is a concept that exposes the weakness of masculine, productive, realist thought
through the challenge and the game: seduction is where meaning dies. In order to function as reality, the
masculine order needs constant affirmation of its “truth” – “truth” that, for Baudrillard, feminists are all too
willing to grant. Thus, he is not trying to deny women “subjectivity” or “sexuality” in an attempt to keep
women within the roles of the “oppressed” feminine, but to show the ways that “subjectivity” and “sexuality”
are products of productive discourse grounded in hierarchy, domination, and power. This is what Baudrillard means when he accuses
feminism of going in the direction of the system that it claims to disavow. By arguing for a “feminine” subjectivity, a “feminine” sexuality, a
“feminine” identity, we expand and propagate an oppressive structure that is based on difference and
hierarchy. Even multiplying these conceptual ideologies into pluralities (identities or sexualities) does not change the underlying structure. Baudrillard conceptualizes seduction as a challenge, a game, artifice, gambling, oneupmanship, secrecy, surface, ritual, and weakness. And nowhere does seduction assert truth. Everything from cosmetics to animals, from cards to actresses, from fairy tales to drag queens falls under his theory of seduction. What
these concepts all have in common is their disruption of the concepts of both meaning and value. They do
not carry meaning – and they indicate no reality. Meaning is imposed upon them by productive discourse, and
the meaning that is imposed exposes the inherent weakness of meaning-making systems.
ascribed to them.13
2NC AT: Perm
The perm fails1. Situation- Body scanners are uniquely situated at airports, places of mobility and
border crossings. This specific situation is important foregrounding for a flipping of
power dynamics as it’s interacting with the most obvious entrance into the
surveillance state. There’s no point to seduction if it’s not visible, and the hypervisibility of airports and scanners isolated in the 1AC prove them as the best method.
2. State-based surveillance- Camera cuties aren’t involved with state surveillance.
The entire context of the alt is flirting with the state surveillance machine, not with
individual’s camera phones.
3. Aff turn- It doesn’t capture alt solvency as all the reasons the 1AC presents for why
body scanners are a uniquely bad form of surveillance are DA’s to the perm.
2NC AT: Reality porn bad
Using reality porn as a method of engagement recognizes the inherent wrongs with
the porn industry and re embodies the latent sexualization of being watched
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. “Surveillance is Sexy”. Surveillance & Society. Pg 210211. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3281//GH)
Yet there are lingering questions – what’s at stake in claiming these images and practices as forms of resistance? Have I
been led astray by my own imagination, and seen resistance where there is none? As with any work seeking to advance arguments about the political
uses of sexualization or eorticization, there
is a danger of getting mired in debates about, among other things, the ‘effects’ of
sexualized and pornographic materials. In my analysis I have (sometimes hesitantly) positioned these materials and practices in the
context of Albrechtslund and Dubbeld’s (2005) call for work on ‘playful’ or ‘entertaining’ surveillance. But in positioning ‘surveillance porn’ as play or
entertainment, and as part of the popular culture of surveillance, I am
aware that alternative viewpoints would immediately
contest such an upbeat analysis, and want instead to emphasize the harmfulness of pornography, and perhaps
especially the increasing harms that new regimes of pornographic production, distribution and consumption
propagate (Hearn, 2008). What, we might ask, is being resisted by these images, exactly? I do not want to simply wave those counterarguments
away; certainly, to echo (and add to) Koskela (2003: 295), ‘the politics [and erotics] of seeing and being seen are complex’. But neither do I want
to say that we cannot ever think about sexualized surveillance as a mode of resistance simply because it brings
us into contact with the heat of the ‘pornography debates’. In fact, this paper speaks implicitly to those debates,
in that it seeks to think about the radical potential of sexualized looking and being-looked-at as, at the
very least, re-visibilizing and re-embodying surveillance, while also highlighting the omnipresent, latent
sexualization of surveillance. What these images do, in short, is to bring to the surface that already eroticized
potential of surveillance. In this context, the possibility of rethinking the act of being surveilled as one of
exhibitionism, and simultaneously making apparent the voyeuristic element of the surveillant gaze, offers an
alternative way of responding to and acting in the surveillance society. That’s way Big Brother is such an important resource:
it dramatizes what’s going on all around us. In the same way, ‘reality porn’ doesn’t resist by trying to evade surveillance: it confronts it head-on, with its
own brazen imagery. “Look at me all you want”, it says, “I know you want to”. And then, of course, it adds “I like to be watched”. At the same time,
as Hardy (2008: 62) argues, ‘reality
porn’ as a genre ‘offers the promise of a general queering of pornographic texts’, to
porn contributes to this broader transformation (see also Barcan 2002).
This might seem like a small, even insignificant resistance; but opening up the erotic to new possibilities surely can’t be
all bad.
some extent democratizing pornography; surveillance
2NC Surveillance good
Using the Big Brother allows us to realize the power of constant surveillance- this
can be used to disrupt the flow of normalized surveillance structures
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. “Surveillance is Sexy”. Surveillance & Society. Pg 209210. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3281//GH)*Ableist language
While discussion of surveillance has largely focused on its disciplinary, panoptical properties, I agree with Albrechtslund and Dubbeld (2005: 220) when they write that
‘the time has come for Surveillance Studies to recognize and take seriously the fun side of surveillance’. For the
past decade, we have been privileged witnesses to the playing out of those ‘reveries of voyeurism, exhibitionism and
narcissism’ that Tabor (2001) writes of, in the form of reality TV show Big Brother. While reality TV is not necessarily or
straightforwardly a show about surveillance, I would argue that the logics, aesthetics and cultural
understandings of reality shows like Big Brother are intimately enmeshed in the culture of
surveillance. For example, the omnipresence of the camera’s gaze on set and the countless ways that contestants
respond to being filmed, both consciously and unconsciously, make shows like Big Brother experiments
in surveillance as much as they are supposed experiments in interpersonal relations. And, I would argue, as reality TV has become a
prominent feature of TV scheduling, so the contestants, programme-makers and viewers come to understand
the logics of surveillance through Big Brother. It teaches us all about how to act in front of an ever-watchful camera, and about the
power of images caught on camera. It also teaches us that it is still possible, even under conditions of
voluntary hyper-surveillance, to ‘forget’ one’s public exposure, and reminds us of the eternal afterlife of
images beyond our control – websites like YouTube are cluttered with clips from Big Brother shows around the world. It’s hard to believe the initial
hesitancy and lack of comprehension that met the first series of Big Brother in the UK, as audiences and commentators struggled to make sense of the programme and
grasp its impact on the landscape of celebrity (Frith 2008). Yet Big
Brother also offers rich insights into the ways in which ‘selfconscious pro-filmic subjects’ play with surveillance. Borrowing its logic and aesthetic at least in part from the
‘everyday webcam’ sites, the show sought to reveal what happens to its subjects when they are
knowingly exposed to constant panoptic surveillance. The contestants on Big Brother reflexively manage
their own exhibitionism, knowing that they are participating in the ‘attention economy’ (Wise 2004), knowing that one way
to profit from surveillance is to be interesting, even shocking – though within limits. The viewer-voting structure of the show reveals the audience’s expectations and
tolerance for self-exposure, its voyeuristic tastes, and the relationship between exhibitionism and ‘success’. As Mark Andrejevic (2004: 175) puts it, shows
like Big
Brother depict ‘the economic potential of the exploitation of voyeurism (and exhibitionism) in an era
characterized by the increasingly important economic role of electronic surveillance’. And as the franchise has evolved,
globalized and spawned countless variants, so we have seen the growth of what we might call the popular culture of surveillance – a new savvy, even blasé attitude to
surveillance, which sees its potential entertainment value (but also knows its disciplining limits). However, some commentators argue that while this surveillance-savviness,
shared by participants and audiences of reality TV may be perverse, is certainly not subversive. In his reading of the show Temptation Island, Andrejevic (2004) highlights
the show’s (and the audience’s) socially complicit, even conservative effects. For Andrejevic, Temptation Island’s deployment of voyeurism/exhibitionism is socially
productive of the ‘logic of late capitalism’ precisely because self-revelation is tied to economic ‘success’. In his reading, the idea that ‘submission serves as a form of
empowerment’ is exposed as a fantasy that serves the market and enslaves the individual (Andrejevic 2004: 192). Yet this psychoanalytic theorizing runs counter to the
empirically grounded analysis of exhibitionism provided by Hugh-Jones et al (2005). While I find much of what Andrejevic writes persuasive, it makes for pessimistic
reading of the (im)possibility of resisting surveillance in that resistance is so easily recuperated by the market. For him, this is the end of the line: ideas, images and actions
that might appear subversive are actually revealed as complicit (and perverse). While
I think that the ‘commodification of resistance’
needn’t be the end game – there are, after all, countless ways to resist within capitalism -- I would also like to think there is a more
productive argument to be made, perhaps by aligning voyeurism/ exhibitionism with work on
countersurveillance. In her broad cultural analysis of nudity, Barcan (2004: 93) argues that ‘nakedness is linked to selfassertion or rebellion. In societies where
there is a legislated taboo on public nudity, the naked body is an effective weapon in political protests’. While it might well be a stretch to see most of the forms of
there is surely an argument to be made for the ways that
sexualization confronts the logic of surveillance, not least in reminding us of its ever closer scrutiny of the intimate sphere. As already
sexualized surveillance discussed here as ‘political’ in this sense,
noted, there are parallels with accounts of countersurveillance that I think are fruitfully resonant. Discussing Steve Mann’s Shooting Back, for example, Monahan (2006:
524) suggests that this ‘is a
provocative project because it calls attention to the embodied experiences of watching and
being watched, of recording and being recorded. … Shooting Back disrupts the illusion of detached, objective, impersonal, disembodied
monitoring’. In embracing those reveries of voyeurism, exhibitionism and narcissism, there is also a refusal to passively accept surveillance; rather than attempting to block
or hide from the camera, being over-exposed is arguably a more response, tapping into what Tabor (2001: 135) calls ‘the glamour of surveillance’. Moreover, given Cuff’s
(2007) key point about the omnipresence of surveillance, deploying
its logic and its glamour, flashing back so to speak, works equally well to
denaturalize and disrupt the authorized uses and ‘flow’ of surveillance.
We are all modern voyeurs as a result of surveillance- using the deviant body in
opposite to the normative system allows us to flirt with the surveillance system in a
subversive method
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. “Surveillance is Sexy”. Surveillance & Society. Pg 211.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3281//GH)
So we arrive at the bigger questions. In what ways can surveillance-savvy exhibitionism and voyeurism be considered resistance? What or who is being
resisted? Where do issues of power and agency sit in my account? Clearly, there
are precedents for arguing that claiming the
right to the erotic is an act of resistance in an ‘erotophobic’ or ‘erotonormative’ culture. Debates about
‘transgressive’ sexual acts as political acts have a long history, especially among ‘dissident’ sexual cultures (Califia 2000). Here resistance is about
confronting the limits of what is considered morally, ethically or legally acceptable behaviour, asking who gets
to decide what is acceptable, and asking what’s at stake in setting the bounds of acceptability in this way. An
oppositional erotics is thus framed against a ‘mainstream’ variously characterized as heteronormative,
erotonormative, heteropatriarchal, somatophobic, or just plain ‘straight’. There are well established (though not
uncontested) modes of activism that mobilize the ‘deviant’ body and ‘deviant’ sex as oppositional to this
‘mainstream’, most notably perhaps in forms of queer politics (though critics argue this is ultimately an unsuccessful political tactic;
see Weeks, 1998). Part of my thinking here would be to group the practices I have discussed above in with these tactics, not least because they
share what we might call an ‘erotics of resistance’ – using sexualization as a political tactic, but also sexualizing the
oppositional or resistive position itself. In common with the strategy of dissident sexualities which works to claim ‘pride’ in
practices and identities previously rendered shameful, we might also suggest that the sexualization of surveillance opens up the
possibility to resist not through rejection of dominant logics (here, of surveillance) but by playful, ‘loud and
proud’ engagement with and celebration of sexy surveillance. In his short story ‘The Modern Voyeur’, written to accompany a
book of staged voyeurism photos by Richard Kern, Geoff Nicholson (2008) describes this exchange between his male narrator/voyeur, and the
woman he has been following and covertly photographing: “The Peeping Tom is furtive, inhibited, sweaty,” he says. “The voyeur is open, confident,
cool. The Peeping Tom is small-time, limited, has narrow horizons. The voyeur is worldly, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. The Peeping Tom skulks. The
voyeur holds his head high.” “I see,” she says. “Not yet you don’t. The Peeping Tom is ashamed, apologetic, self-hating. The voyeur knows himself,
accepts himself for what he is, and demands that you do the same. “The Peeping Tom is square, old-fashioned, out of touch. The voyeur is hip,
fashionable, current, modern (very possibly moderne). The modern voyeur is just like me.” (Nicholson 2008: 7). While
this isn’t quite a call
for ‘voyeurs’ pride’, it nevertheless articulates quite neatly the kind of reflexive engagement with looking and being
looked at that I have been trying to explore here. In this sense, my argument would be that we are all of us, all of the time,
modern voyeurs and modern exhibitionists. The modern voyeur and modern exhibitionist are, as Nicholson’s narrator says, just
like me. Even if we don’t partake of the offerings of ‘reality porn’ (or even reality TV), our embeddedness in surveillance makes part
of its algebra. And while a more obvious resistance route to take might be evasion, secrecy, trying to become invisible
(and never looking, either), as Groombridge (2002: 43) argues, ‘many people are [in fact] seeking to increase their
visibility’, and are playing with, goading and yes, even flirting with surveillance.
K links
Antiblackness
The queer political body is inevitably fetishized and participates in the sustenance of
racial structures – suffocates all possibilities for racial liberation.
Agathangelou 13 [Anna M. Agathangelou, Associate Professor at Department of Political Science,
“Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:4, 453-476,
December 17 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.841560]//JIH
This essay tracks a range of often neglected politics, texts, policies, legal practices, spaces and theories to reveal an emergent political body: the
reconstructed sexual queer, whose recognizable humanity (i.e., imminent living-capacity) is constituted into a
recognizable sexual orientation and gender identity, part of an emerging form of a sovereign body politic,
which presupposes immanent (a Deleuzian outside) slave incapacity for suture (Dayan 2011). Concomitantly, this suffering
fetishized ‘queer’ political body participates in the redaction and subsequent sustenance of racialized
structures with its recognizable sexual orientation and gender identity, whereby white bodies become
signifiers of ‘legitimate’, radical alterity in the form of queerness and blacks are presumed imminently
incapacious, never registering in the ‘legitimate’ global political economy of sex and sexuality (Agathangelou 2004) as
well as law. I offer a peripatetic presentation of the Human Rights Watch reports on Iraq (2011) and Hillary Clinton’s speech to the UN to articulate
their political positions, yoking them without collapsing them into comparison. In so doing, I suggest that the
three moves outlined above
constitute not only the ‘straightjacketing’ of sexuality, but also racial terror – where ‘gay rights’ becomes a
discourse and a practice of (perceived) racial economic superiority and (actual) racial subordination. Querying
the genealogy of sex, neoliberalism and capitalism from the vantage point of black terror (i.e., lynchings, convict
leasing to political disenfranchisement, chain gangs; see Morrison 1987; Dayan 2011) accords us an orientation from which to
understand such ‘terror [that] allow[s] to demonise others . . . to do unspeakable things to them’ all in the
name of ‘order’ (Dayan 2011: 32–3) as well as the visions of radical justice emanating from antislavery and anticolonial struggles. In the following sections, I theorize the ways in which slavery becomes collapsed as sexuality into the
neoliberal imperium within which blacks and black life serve as the literal raw materials to guarantee longterm growth (Davis 2003: 94). I also point to insurgent social life as a struggle for ‘total freedom’ (Goddard 2006). In so doing, I work with two
political (ethico-juridical) archives tracing their force on bodies directly. First, I reengage with Hillary Clinton’s UN speech to trace how the queer is
constituted as value in a speculative economy (i.e., the ‘rational’ basis for passing laws that integrate them as capacious civil subjects) that reconfigures
capital and globality by distinguishing between different forms of governance and violence, placing the queer on the inside of the civil society and
relegating the hovering black outside the ‘bounds of the civil’ (Dayan 2011: 22) consequently changing the world itself and ‘all levels of social existence’
(Quijano 2000: 547). Second, I use the Human Rights Reports in Iraq to trace how sexual and racial technologies are deployed, exposing how
the
suturing of a queer speculative economy ‘here’ and ‘there’ depends fundamentally on ‘value’ as an abstraction
device and a risk threshold that distinguishes between queers, racialized gays as well as the structurally
impossible and ontologically dead (i.e., blacks; see Agathangelou 2009). Central to my analysis is the concept that queer economies
could not and do not escape being entangled with capital’s foundational terror. In fact, analysing these reports, I show
the ways the neoliberal imperium biopolitically constitutes and manages queer life while ignoring the wailing, the
sounds of living death emitting from the chains and the screams from the slave ships of the Atlantic crossing
and from places such as Attica, Abu Ghraib and US prison states (Morrison 1987: 2010–11 cited in Childs 2009; Dayan 2011). I end with some
thoughts on the possibility that queer projects and the Black Struggle can contravene, noting how differentiations
between bodies,
sexualities, and races in world politics emerge as strategies that foreclose and suffocates a range of
possibilities, globally constituted imaginaries and freedoms all in the name of overcoming limits, such as
death, stagnation and the loss of material value.
cap
The affirmative’s focus on decentering identity traits and individual queer liberation promotes the
goals of global capitalism and destroys hope for political action.
Kirsch 06 [Max Kirsch, PhD Florida Atlantic University, “Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia,” Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. ½, 2006, pp. 19-45]//JIH
Jameson has proposed that the
concept of alienation in late capitalism has been replaced with fragmentation (1991,
we must now ask ourselves is whether it is precisely
this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere that has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue
that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy is once enjoyed as one level among others
in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or
extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the autonomous sphere of culture throughout the
social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life–from economic value and state power to
practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself–can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original
and yet untheorized sense. This proposition is, however, substantially quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or
simulacrum and a transformation of the “real” into so many pseudoevents. (Jameson, 1991, p. 48) The fragmentation of social life
repeats itself in the proposal that sexuality and gender are separate and autonomous from bureaucratic state
organization. If, as in Jameson’s terms, differences can be equated, then this should not pose a problem for the
mobilization of resistance to inequality. However, as postmodernist and poststructuralist writers assume a
position that this equation is impossible and undesirable, then the dominant modes of power will prevail
without analysis or opposition. The danger, of course, is that while we concentrate on decentering identity, we
succeed in promoting the very goals of global capitalism that work against the formation of communities or
provide the means to destroy those that already exist, and with them, any hope for political action. For those who
p.14). Fragmentation highlights the it also becomes more abstract: What
are not included in traditional sources of community building–in particular, kinship based groupings–the building of an “affectional community . . .
must be as much a part of our political movement as are campaigns for civil rights” (Weeks, 1985, p. 176). This
building of communities
requires identification. If we cannot recognize traits that form the bases of our relationships with others, how
then can communities be built? The preoccupation of Lyotard and Foucault, as examples, with the
overwhelming power of “master narratives,” posits a conclusion that emphasizes individual resistance and
that ironically, ends up reinforcing the “narrative” itself.
Capitalism is the root cause of your impacts, and your impacts are inevitable until capitalism is
destroyed.
Khader 13 Will the Real Robert Neville Please, Come Out? Vampirism, the Ethics of Queer Monstrosity, and
Capitalism in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend? Journal of Homosexuality Jamil Khader PhD* Volume 60,
Issue 4, 2013
Despite its multiculturalist politics of recognition, no matter how progressive it was for its time, Matheson's I Am Legend is as interpellated as
Lawrence's (2007) film within capitalist ideology, in that they both translate “antagonism into difference” (Žižek, 2006, p. 362), substituting sexual
difference for the importance of class struggle. Transvaluing the antagonism (class struggle) underpinning capitalist relations of production into the
politics of identity and difference obscures the problematic relationship between capitalism and queer subjectivity. Indeed, the
text establishes
neoliberal capitalism as an absent presence, by reproducing the ultimate capitalist fantasy of commodity
fetishism, while at the same time eliding the extent to which capitalism commodifies and exploits queer
sexuality. In other words, neoliberal capitalism is invested with the power to assert itself as the end of history, to the extent that it has subtracted
itself from public discourse to become a completely invisible signifier around which everything revolves but that refuses to be named. As D'Emilio
(1993) memorably states in his article on capitalism and gay identity, “In the most profound sense, capitalism is the problem” (p. 474). The
absent
presence of capitalism as the transcendent signifier especially, for sexual minorities, constitutes the ultimate
site for their doing and undoing. For D'Emilio (1993), sexual minorities inhabit an ambivalent position within the
neoliberal capitalist system, since it facilitates both their emergence as consumers and producers, allowing,
thus, their integration into the labor market as well as their exploitation to benefit corporate interests, and the
homophobic backlash against them. 5 He attributes this ambivalence to the contradictory position that the nuclear family occupies in the
capitalist system: Capitalism, he argues, has not only subverted the material basis of heteronormative families, allowing
family members to live outside of the family structure, but has also enshrined these families for their reproductive value as
the only functional model of intimate and personal relationships. He thus states, “in divesting the family of its economic
independence and fostering separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize
personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex” (pp. 473–474). Moreover,
capitalism has provided the
conditions for commodifying sexuality and erotic desire as a matter of choice outside the parameters of
procreative sexual economy. As long as such erotic choices are coopted and contained as a “form of play,
positive and self-enhancing,” in D'Emilio's (1993) words (p. 474), sexual identity can be evacuated from its excessive
threats and history of struggle, only to circulate as a fetish of erotic pleasure. To this extent, sexual identity
becomes then the grounds for collective organization that, nonetheless, substitutes consumption for
production. Not all forms of queer transgression, that is, are necessarily subversive, until the proliferation of the semiotics of queer identity is
understood in relation to the larger social inequalities (Taylor, 2009, p. 201). While capitalism continues to undermine the fabric of
social relations, moreover, queer communities have been paradoxically blamed for the social ills and instabilities
of the capitalist system. As such, capitalism as the name of the social totality is left untouched and invisible.
Similarly, Matheson's (1954) text naturalizes and normalizes capitalism and its social relations, by disavowing the need for recognizing class struggle in
“its terrifying dimension” (Žižek, 1986, p. 5). As a work of fantasy, that is, Matheson's novella tries to deny the specific conflicts that embody the
capitalist conditions of its production: What the power of the hegemonic capitalist ideology will not have disclosed, in short, is the presence of
capitalism itself. Throughout the text, therefore, Neville takes for granted the free commodities he consumes, be it the lathe from Sears, the gasoline,
and the water bottles, allowing him to push a shopping cart, what he calls “the metal wagon,” “up and own the silent dust-thick aisles” (Matheson,
1954, p. 26), clinging as much as he can to the norms of his bourgeois suburban life as if nothing happened around him. Indeed, Neville lives the pure
fantasy of commodity fetishism that does not only offer him the opportunity to fulfill his fantasy of living in a world of abundant free commodities
and surplus enjoyment (which for the last man on earth can indeed be considered infinite—he would have to live many more lives to be able to
exhaust all these resources), but also to kill the undead owners of the store in which he was shopping, and, thus, foreclose the question of labor
altogether. 6 Moreover, Neville's death operates as a nostalgic affirmation of neoliberal capitalism. After all, it is only when he can no longer maintain
his sovereignty over his private property that the vampires could intrude upon it; in its absent presence, neoliberal capitalism could at least guarantee
his safety inside of his private property. This critique of capitalism in Matheson can also be supplemented by an attention to the ways in which
Matheson (1954) represents revolutionary societies and forms of enjoyment, and more specifically, the Soviet Union with its spies, collaborators, and
purges. Since this new vampire society is specifically structured by the same violent forms of enjoyment embodied in revolutionary movements, I
contend that Matheson's alleged subversion of the us-them binary of Cold War politics constitutes, in fact, both a thinly disguised liberal critique of
Stalinist terror and a nostalgic affirmation of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, it is worth pointing out, Matheson's representation of revolutionary
society blends and obscures in an Arendtian fashion, as Žižek (1986) would say, the distinction between fascism and Stalinism in their differential
relations to class struggle. (For a very useful and clear discussion of Žižek's political views, see Dean [2006, pp. 45–94].) While fascists neutralize class
struggle and displace it on a racialized other such as the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany, as Žižek contends, Stalinism abolishes the class struggle and
reenacts the capitalist fantasy of unbridled production and consumption without adhering nonetheless to the constraints of the capitalist form (private
property). For Matheson (1954), recognizing the monstrosity of one's own nonnormative desire facilitates the relational understanding of the dialectical
relationship between the self and the other, in a way that reinscribes them both within a democratic site of multicultural exchange and tolerance.
Nonetheless, the
belief in the legitimacy of sexual rights is maintained without rethinking its ramifications in
relation to the ability of the capitalist system to coopt and contain any threat that may be embedded in queer
sexuality. Identity politics, therefore, cannot effectively serve as the basis for a genuine politics of gay
liberation. Only acknowledging class struggle, as the fundamental gap that constitutes the totality of
the social field, can render the absence and invisibility of capitalism present, by clearing a space for a
radical reconfiguration of the ethical relationship to the other, and recharting alternative forms of solidarity,
beyond identity politics, that can struggle with other oppressed constituencies in order to dismantle and
reimagine the neoliberal capitalist system itself.
Historical Marxism provides a better frame for analyzing queerness than queer theory itself
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Sexuality, once a largely unexplored continent for historical materialism, has long since ceased to be so. In the 1970s and early ’80s lesbian/gay
historians, using Marxist and feminist analytical tools among others, began to chart the 1. Some initial thoughts for this article originated as a talk at the
IIRE Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Strategy Seminar in Amsterdam in August 2000; many thanks to the 2000, 2002 and 2009 IIRE Seminar participants for
their comments and ideas. Criticisms and observations by Nina Trige Anderson, Pascale Berthault, Terry Conway and Jamie Gough, and especially
comments, suggestions and written exchanges with Alan Sears, were particularly helpful. Thanks as well to David Fernbach and to the editorial
committee of Science & Society for comments on earlier versions, to Christopher Beck for his support and stimulating comments and questions, and
to Historical Materialism board-members, especially Paul Reynolds, for their comments and suggestions. This article is dedicated to Torvald Patterson
(1964–2005), in-your-face revolutionary queer, in loving memory. 4 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 emergence of contemporary
lesbian/gay identities.2 Although historical materialist categories have been supplemented and then to a large extent supplanted in the field by
Foucauldian approaches since the 1980s and queer theory since the 1990s, elements contributed by the first, Marxist-influenced generation of
historians and theorists still survive to some extent within a broad range of social-constructionist perspectives. Most historians and theorists – if not
necessarily most lesbian and gay laypeople – agree that modern lesbian/gay identities are unique, clearly distinguishable from any of the same-sex
sexualities that existed before the last century or so and from many that still exist in various parts of the world. Whether they cite Marx, Foucault, or
both, historians’
analysis of lesbian/ gay identity has linked its emergence to the development of modern,
industrialised, urbanised societies. Some historians3 have linked its emergence, in a more-or-less explicitly
Marxist way, to the development of capitalism. This connection has continued to be made by writers working
within a Marxist framework.4 Recently, Kevin Floyd has detected more broadly a ‘greater openness [in queer thought] to the kind of direct
engagement with Marxism that emphasizes its explanatory power’.5 Yet some theorists have seemed uneasy in recent years about the questions that
were initially not asked in these accounts. Once this specific form of lesbian/gay identity has been explored and its emergence mapped, the question
arises: is this the end of the story? Especially as more writings have charted the spread of LGBT communities in Asia and Africa, some have wondered
whether all
other forms of same-sex sexuality are surrendering to what Dennis Altman has critiqued as the
triumphant ‘global gay’, a monolithic figure riding the wave of capitalist globalisation.6 In much the same way that
homo sapiens was once naively viewed as the culmination of biological evolution, and liberal democracy (according to Francis Fukuyama) as the
culmination of human history, one might have sometimes imagined that all roads of LGBT history 2. For example, Fernbach 1981; D’Emilio 1983a
and 1983b. A word on terminology: the term ‘lesbian/gay’ in this article refers to a historically specific phenomenon, defined in Section I below.
‘LGBT’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) is used as a broader term for people with same-sex sexualities or identities. Although the word ‘queer’
is sometimes used by others to refer generally to LGBT people, I try to reserve the word in this article to those who self-identify as queer, who are
often rebelling, not only against the heterosexual norm, but also against the dominant forms of lesbian/gay identity. I sometimes use ‘gay’,
‘lesbian/gay’ or ‘LGB’ particularly to refer to more ‘respectable’ people who emphatically do not identify as queer. 3. See, for example, D’Emilio
1983a. 4. See, for example, Hennessy 2000; Sears 2005. 5. Floyd 2009, p. 2. 6. Altman 2003. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 5 led
to Castro Street in San Francisco. A few queer theorists have tried to undermine any such monolithic vision of gay identity, rejecting the
onedimensional focus on gender-orientation that underlies it.7 But, despite their abstract championing of ‘difference’, they have rarely engaged
concretely with the historiography that sometimes seems to suggest that LGBT history is a one-way street. In Paul Reynolds’s words, they have
‘centred on the social production of categories discursively rather than determinantly through essential causality and power of the social relations of
production’.8 This
article argues that there are socioeconomic forces that have been leading LGBT people to
question lesbian/gay identity as it took shape by the 1970s. A historically-based, social constructionist,
Marxist approach9 can examine historically different sexual identities under capitalism, without privileging
any particular form of identity; can chart not only the emergence of lesbian/gay identities, but also shifts in
sexual identities in recent decades, exploring connections between shifting identities and successive phases of
capitalist development. One useful tool is the Marxist theory of capitalist long waves, and specifically Marxist analyses of the mode of capitalist
accumulation that was on the upswing until the early 1970s and turned sharply downward with the recessions of 1974–5 and 1979–82.10 A
historical-materialist analysis of this kind may provide a more solid theoretical basis for addressing a central
political concern of recent queer theory – the defence of nonconformist or less privileged LGBT people
against ‘homonormativity’11 – than queer theory itself offers, while helping to lay the foundation for a queer
anticapitalism. It is by now nothing new to link the rise of what might be called classic lesbian/gay identity to
the rise of a ‘free’ labour-force under capitalism. This has taken centuries, and historians have generally looked at it as a long process.
But the breakthrough of gay identity as we know it on a mass-scale is in fact very recent, more a matter of
decades than of centuries. On closer examination, 7. For example, Seidman 1997, p. 195. 8. Reynolds 2003. 9. This article uses the
term ‘social constructionism’ simply as the opposite of ‘essentialism’ (a view of sexual identities as biologically determined or otherwise transhistorical),
not to refer to a specific school of thought contrary to Marxism. Although Marxists such as Klara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai wrote insightfully
about sexuality within a purely Marxist framework, more recent Marxist treatments of the subject have almost always engaged critically with other
approaches, such as psychoanalysis, feminism, Foucauldianism, post-colonialism and queer theory. I believe that a rigorous Marxist approach to
sexuality is not only compatible with an engagement with other social-constructionist approaches, but in fact requires it. 10. Mandel 1978 and 1995. 11.
Lisa Duggan has defined ‘homonormativity’ as a set of norms that ‘does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but
upholds and sustains them’ (Duggan 2002, p. 179). 6 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 the
consolidation and spread of
gay identity, especially among the mass of working-class people, took place to a large extent during what
some Marxist economists refer to as the expansive long wave of 1945–73. Gay identity on a mass-scale,
emerging gradually after a period of repression from the 1930s to the 1950s,12 was dependent on the growing
prosperity of the working and middle-classes, catalysed by profound cultural changes from the 1940s to the
1970s (from the upheavals of the Second World-War13 to the mass-radicalisation of the New Left years) that
prosperity helped make possible. This means that gay identity was shaped in many ways by the mode of
capitalist accumulation that some economists call ‘Fordism’: specifically by mass-consumer societies and
welfare-states.14 The decline of Fordism has also had implications for LGBT identities, communities and politics. The decades of slower
economic growth that began with the 1974–5 recession had a differentiated impact on LGBT people and their communities. On the one hand,
commercial gay scenes and sexual identities compatible with these scenes advanced and were consolidated in many parts of the world, particularly
among middle-class layers. On the other hand, commercial scenes have not been equally determinant for the lifestyles or identities of all LGBT people.
In the dependent world, many poor people simply have a hard time taking part in commercial gay scenes. In developed capitalist countries, while
commercial scenes are more accessible to even lowerincome LGBTs, growing economic inequality has meant increasingly divergent realities in LGBT
people’s lives. Alienation has mounted among some LGBT people from the overconsumption increasingly characteristic of many aspects of the
commercial gay scene, which inevitably marginalises many LGBT people. Alternative scenes of various sorts (not always necessarily less commercial)
have proliferated.
Resistance purely rooted in queer studies cannot effectively confront neoliberalism
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There is of course no one-to-one correspondence between economic and social developments and shifts in sexual, cultural and political identities. In
LGBT communities, as in the world at large, there
is a whole set of institutions that produce (among other things)
lesbian/gay ideology and identity, mediate the underlying class and social dynamics, and represent ‘the
imaginary 12. See, for example, Chauncey 1994, pp. 334–46. 13. Bérubé 1983. 14. The concept of Fordism has been largely associated with the
French ‘régulation’ school, the current of Marxist economics relied on by, for example, Floyd (Floyd 2009). Many of the basic elements of what
regulationists call the Fordist mode of accumulation are also to be found in Mandelian long-wave theory or the ‘social structure of accumulation’approach. These different schools differ with each other particularly about the causes of the rise and decline of different modes of accumulation. While
important, these debates are not directly relevant to this article. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 7 relationship
of
individuals to their real conditions of existence’.15 To analyse how all these institutions – from newspapers
and magazines to porn-video producers to (divisions of ) publishing houses to websites and chat-rooms to
lesbian/gay-studies departments to small-business associations to sports clubs and beyond – functioned
ideologically under Fordism, and tended to function differently with the rise of neoliberalism, would go
beyond this article’s scope. Nevertheless, no aspect of capitalist culture, including sexual culture, exists in
complete isolation from the mode of production as a whole; fundamental shifts in capitalism are detectable,
however indirectly, at the level of gender and sexuality as at other levels of the systemic totality.16 This basic
understanding can give us the audacity, even in the absence of fully worked-out mediations, to point out
some trends that correspond to changing class-dynamics in LGBT communities. A large proportion of the institutions
that define LGBT communities and produce their self-images tend to reproduce and defend a unifying lesbian/gay identity in apparent continuity with
the identity that took shape by the 1970s. But even a
schematic analysis can show that classic lesbian/gay subcultures and
identities were put under pressure or into question in various ways by the decline of Fordism. Ultimately, as the
class and social reality of LGBT communities became more fragmented and conflict-ridden, so did their
ideological and even sexual expressions. In the end, the ‘mode of production of material life condition[ed]
[their] social, political and intellectual life process in general’; their ‘social being . . . determine[d] their
consciousness’.17 The changes have included development of a queer identity seen at least in part as in opposition to existing lesbian/gay
identities, a growing visibility of transgender identities, and the proliferation of a variety of other identities linked
to specific sexual practices or rôles. Despite these identities’ extraordinary diversity, their rootedness in
characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be detected in a number of more-or-less common features.
Whether or not they are explicitly defined as queer, they respond to the increasingly repressive character of the neoliberal
order through their stubborn affirmation of sexual practices that are still – or are increasingly – stigmatised.
They also reflect the growing inequality and polarisation of neoliberal capitalism by making sexual powerdifferentials explicit, and above all through gender-nonconformity. To understand these features better, this
article looks briefly, first, at the material basis of the emergence of lesbian/gay identity by the 1970s, and
second at the material basis of factors that have been fracturing it. It then 15. Althusser 1971, p. 162. 16. Floyd 2009. 17. Marx
1968, p. 182. 8 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 examines the ways in which economic changes have been ideologically mediated
in new expressions of gender and sexual identity, particularly among transgendered and other queers. The last section discusses the political
implications of these changes and the challenges facing twenty-first-century LGBT communities.
LGBT identity and culture emerged and were formed under the development of modern capitalism
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I. Classic gay identity Classic lesbian/gay identity, as opposed to the many other forms of same-sex identity that have existed in human history, is (or
was) an identity reserved for people whose primary sexual and emotional ties are with their own sex; who generally do not conclude heterosexual
marriages or form heterosexual families (unlike, say, latter-day gay icon Oscar Wilde); who do not radically change their gender-identity in adopting a
lesbian/gay sexuality (unlike transgendered people in a great variety of cultures); and in which both partners in relationships consider themselves part
of the same lesbian/gay community (a bizarre notion to millions of men around the world who fuck men or boys without considering themselves gay,
and to millions of women at the less explicit end of the ‘lesbian continuum’).18 This
kind of gay identity emerged in developed
capitalist countries in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries mainly among middle-class layers
(middle-class consumption was particularly crucial to capitalaccumulation in the expansive long wave that lasted from the mid-1890s to the mid1910s). In this same period, declining birth-rates and advancements in birth-control made procreation less crucial as a focus of at least middle-class
sexuality, and sexual desire and object-choice more crucial.
The growing importance of consumption and desire helped foster
a shift in the construction of gender under capitalism, from conceptions of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’
focused on the innate character required for production and reproduction, to conceptions of masculinity and
femininity that were (in Judith Butler’s term) more ‘performative’,19 defined to a greater extent by patterns of
consumption, dress and everyday behaviour.20 In this same period, middle-class men and women (particularly
women with education and professions) increasingly had 18. Rich 1983; Wekker 1999. Fernbach (Fernbach 1981, pp. 71–5) gave
an early and clear account of the uniqueness of lesbian/gay identity among historically existing forms of same-sex sexuality. Greenberg 1988 provides
the most comprehensive survey available of the range of same-sex sexualities. 19. Butler 1999. 20. Floyd 2009, pp. 57–66. P. Drucker / Historical
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 9 the
economic and social resources to live independently of their families and to defy
convention. As John D’Emilio explained in a seminal article, capitalist development in this way created the conditions for
the rise of gay identity.21 The result was the reification of sexual desire based on gendered object-choice, the
rapid spread among the middle-classes of medical and later specifically psychoanalytical visions of sexuality,22
and ‘the invention of heterosexuality’ as well as homosexuality as sexological and social categories.23 Workingclass and poor people even in developed countries, by contrast, tended well into the twentieth century to focus on conceptions of manhood and
womanhood rather than reified conceptions of sexuality.24
Working-class men in the US in particular continued to form
relationships between transgendered people (‘fairies’) on the one hand and non-transgendered, often married
men on the other,25 or to engage in sex with other men for money or social benefit without taking on any
distinctive sexual identity. In the same period in Germany, a homosexuality defined as masculine was notably
championed by the middle-class ‘Community of the Special’, while Magnus Hirschfeld’s studies of same-sex
relations among largely working-class men led him to uphold a transgender ‘third sex’-model.26 After 1945,
however, working-class living standards in capitalist countries went up rapidly under the Fordist order, in
which increases in labourproductivity were matched to a large extent by increasing real wages that sustained
increasing effective demand, and various forms of social insurance cushioned the blows that hit working
people during dips in the business-cycle. As a result, for the first time masses of working-class people – living
off what D’Emilio, following Marx, calls ‘free’ labour – as well as students and others were also able to live
independently of their families, and give sexual objectchoice a greater rôle in their lives and identities. Workingclass family-structures and gender-rôles also changed. For the first time since the mid- to late-nineteenth century – when the
family-wage had become a cherished ideal, and sometimes a reality, for broad working-class layers – the
Second World-War made waged work at least temporarily normal for even respectable working-class and
middle-class women. This made a dent in the pronounced gender-polarisation that had been characteristic of
both working-class heterosexuality and homosexuality in the first decades of the 21. D’Emilio 1983a. 22. Floyd 2009, pp.
43–5, following Foucault 1978, pp. 118–23. 23. Katz 1995. 24. Foucault 1978, p. 121. 25. Chauncey 1994. 26. Drucker 1997, p. 37. 10 P. Drucker /
Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 twentieth
century. In fact, as evidence from both the US and the Netherlands shows, emerging
lesbian/gay communities and organisations in the postwar period tended increasingly to squelch effeminacy
among gay men and masculinity among lesbians.27 At the same time, higher funding for education and expansion of a social safetynet (in developed countries at least) decreased people’s economic dependence on parents to support them as students or young people, on spouses to
help pay the rent, and on children to save them from poverty in old age. Full employment meant more job-opportunities for some people who had
previously been marginalised. The
combination of increased economic possibilities and a reconfiguration of genderrôles helped many more people in the 1950s and 1960s shape a sexually hedonistic culture extending beyond
the largely middle-class limits of the earlier nonconformist milieu of the 1910s and 1920s. Within this broad
hedonistic culture it became possible for a growing minority to form same-sex relationships and networks. While ‘Fordist mass
consumption was, above all, an attempt to secure a broad and sustained accumulation of capital’, the
diversification of consumer-marketing that it entailed created space for an ‘underground circulation of
homoerotic images’ in ‘an increasingly less underground gay male [and lesbian] network’.28 What remained to prevent
people from living openly lesbian/gay lives were the constraints of the law, police, employers, landlords, and social pressure of many sorts. The
lesbian/gay movements of the 1960s and ’70s rebelled against these constraints, inspired by a wave of other
social rebellions: black, youth, anti-war, feminist and (at least in some European countries) working-class.29
Supplementing the attempts of early lesbian/gay groups to discipline their members’ gender-norms, the second wave of feminism was
key in drastically reining in the butch-femme patterns that were still largely hegemonic in 1950s lesbian
subcultures (or at least in turning them into ‘a subterranean game’).30 The first lesbian/gay legal victories in the 1970s made mass, open lesbian/
gay/bisexual (LGB) communities possible in the developed countries for the first time in history. Among the preconditions for these communities
were the general increase in people’s living standards and economic security, which made autonomous lesbian/gay lives possible; the fact that the
millions of people who came out around the 1970s had a certain relative social homogeneity, thanks in part to generational bonds of the baby-boom
and in part to the narrowing of economic divides in the 1950s and ’60s, so that there 27. Warmerdam and Koenders 1987, pp. 125, 153, 169; Floyd
2009, pp. 167–8. 28. Floyd 2009, p. 174. 29. D’Emilio 1983b. 30. Califia 2003, p. 3. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 11 were fewer
barriers to a common sense of identity; and a relatively favourable political/cultural climate. The homogeneity of 1970s lesbian/gay communities was
of course relative. Class and sexual differences always existed.
The relative ease with which women and men coexisted in the
early years of gay liberation lasted only until women became too fed-up with the treatment they often
received at the hands of gay men. Although gender-norms relaxed to a certain extent in the 1960s and ’70s, this led to a true devaluation
of masculinity and femininity only in the context of a radical-feminist critique, which was never hegemonic;31 even in the New Left, gender-relaxing
countercultural influences coexisted with Third-Worldist macho posturing.32 Racism
was always a reality. Differences that existed
in the 1970s became far greater in the 1980s and 1990s, however, for reasons that go deeper than an
inevitable sorting-out.
Capitalism fractures LGBT society, hinders the development of individual identities and renders
LGBT resistance impossilbe
Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/156920611x606412; The Fracturing of
LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
II. Gays in the post-Fordist economy The
depressive long wave that began by 1974–5 was met by the late 1970s with a
neoliberal offensive. This offensive included (to be very schematic): a shift to ‘Toyotist’ production-techniques and to ‘lean
production’ generally; economic globalisation, liberalisation and deregulation, taking advantage of new
technologies that ‘accelerated the speed and dispersed the space of production’;33 privatisation of many
public enterprises and social services; an increase in the wealth and power of capital at labour’s expense; an increase in inequality among
countries (through the debt-crisis and structural-adjustment policies) and within countries (through regressive tax and welfare-‘reforms’ and attacks on
unions), and luxury-consumption that increasingly replaced mass-consumption as a motor of economic growth. This
offensive among other
things fragmented the world’s working classes. Big differences (re) surfaced between better and worse-paid
workers, permanent and temporary workers, white and black, native-born and immigrant, employed and
unemployed.34 The less pronounced differences in income and job-security in 31. See Floyd 2009, pp. 177–8. 32. Floyd 2009, pp. 168–9. 33.
Hennessy 2000, p. 6. 34. One study of wage-trends shows that among manufacturing workers in the US, ‘inequality soared in the 1970s and 1980s,
reaching levels far higher than those existing during the Depression. The recovery after 1994 brought inequality down again, but only to just below that
of the worst years of the 1930s’ (Galbraith and Cantú 2001, p. 83). Mike Davis noted ‘extreme income/skill polarization’ in the growing US healthcare,
business-service, banking and real-estate sectors, resulting in a ‘split-level economy’ and ‘reshaping the traditional income pyramid into a 12 P. Drucker
/ Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 national
working classes in the 1960s, which were the backdrop to the rise of
lesbian/gay identity, became a thing of the past. One factor complicating the neoliberal offensive was the
difficulty of rolling back some of the achievements of black, women’s and lesbian/gay movements. The
contradictions of these emancipatory movements in a time of workingclass weakness and growing inequality
were played out in many of the ideological debates of the 1980s and ’90s. Women’s equality and racial equality
became steadily more established as political commonplaces (in rhetoric if not in reality) at the same time that
redistributive and counter-cyclical economic policies, far less controversial 40 years ago, were dismissed as
outmoded and counterproductive (until the 2008 crisis prompted massive redistribution of wealth to the world’s biggest banks and various
forms of stimulus). What has the effect of all this been on LGBT people, communities and movements? The end of the Fordist expansive long wave
was not bad news for everyone by any means, and not for all LGB people specifically. Particularly among some middle-class and upper-working-class
social layers that prospered in the 1980s and ’90s, especially but not only in developed capitalist countries, commercial gay scenes continued to grow,
continuing to underlie lesbian/gay identity.35 Market-friendly
lesbian/gay identities prospered in commercialised spaces,
in the construction of two-income households among better-off gays and to a lesser extent lesbians, and in
the tolerant public space fostered by gay-rights victories. Many relatively better-paid lesbian/gay people who benefited from both
economic success and gay-rights reforms have some cause to be contented with the progress they have made: ‘inside a cozy brownstone, curled up
next to a health-insured domestic partner in front of a Melissa Etheridge video on MTV, flipping through Out magazine and sipping an Absolut and
tonic, capitalism can feel pretty good’.36
While all social relations under capitalism are reified – distorted so that
relations between people are perceived as relations with or even between things – the shift under
neoliberalism to economic growth founded increasingly on middle-class overconsumption raised the
reification of human relations among neoliberalism’s beneficiaries to new heights. This applied notably to
sexual and emotional relations among middleclass gay men and lesbians. new income hourglass’ (Davis 1986, pp. 214–18).
Figures from the US Federal Reserve show that income-inequality increased further at the end of the 1990s (Andrews 2003). 35. Altman 1982, pp. 79–
97. 36. Gluckman and Reed 1997, p. xv. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 13 The 1970s, ’80s and ’90s and the first decade of the
new millennium were also years in which open LGBT communities and identities became more prominent in much of the dependent world, first in
Latin America and later in many Asian and African countries. Given that dependent countries as a whole have suffered especially with the decline of
the old forms of capitalaccumulation, communities and identities there have taken on very contrasting forms.37
The period of slower
growth and neoliberal reaction in the global North was a time of recurrent and devastating crisis in many
parts of the South even before the generalised crisis of 2008 (notably in Latin America after 1982, in Mexico
again after 1994, in much of Southeast Asia after 1997, in Brazil for several years after 1998, and in much of
Africa with scarcely a breathing-space). But this did not prevent the growth of middle-classes in the South
with incomes far above their countries’ averages and linked to global consumer-capitalism – including gay
consumer-capitalism. Commercialised, Western-oriented lesbian/gay identities seem in this context to have a
complex and contradictory relationship with other same-sex sexualities that co-exist with them in the
dependent world. In many ways ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are still largely middle or upper-class, US or Eurocentric concepts, even if in other ways they
provide a reference-point in struggles for sexual emancipation.38 In both developed and dependent capitalist countries, the ideological and cultural
sway of gay identities in LGBT communities has spread beyond the more privileged social layers in which people’s lives fit these identities most
comfortably. LGBT media in dependent countries rely to some extent on lesbian/gay media in the capitalist metropoles for their material and
imagery.39 In the developed capitalist countries, despite the proliferation of websites and zines defining identities and subcultures for minorities within
the minorities, the most widely circulated books, periodicals and videos tend to be those most closely linked to the new, predominantly middle-class,
gay mainstream. Even those who are economically least well-equipped for the commercial gay scene are often dependent on it as a market for potential
more fundamentally, even celibate or monogamous people who are at least temporarily
not in the market for a partner still tend to define themselves in the culturally hegemonic categories of
lesbian, gay, bisexual or straight. Even poor transgendered and queer people whose lives are most remote
from the images of the gay mainstream sometimes incorporate aspects of gay mainstream-culture into their
aspirations and fantasies, constructing 37. Drucker 2009, pp. 826–8. 38. Altman 2000; Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8. 39. Drucker 2000a, pp.
26–7. 14 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 their identities in part from images that may be borrowed and
adapted from very different social realities. This hegemony of lesbian/gay identity over much of the LGBT
world, and the physical coexistence of LGBT people of different classes in lesbian/gay spaces, provides
arguments to those who downplay the importance of class in ‘mixed-class’ LGBT communities.40 It is true that
the class-segregation that characterised early-twentieth-century LGBT scenes eased in the Fordist period. But cultural commonalities and
cross-class relationships do not make lesbian/gay identity and spaces class-neutral, any more than the existence of sexual
(short or long-term) partners;
relationships between masters and slaves meant that slavery was not a significant factor in them. ‘ “Undifferentiated” accounts of gay life tend to
narrate relatively well-resourced and privileged experience as gay experience, and normatively promote this as a script for how gay life should be
conceived and lived.’41 Lesbian/gay
spaces are not islands, but heavily influenced by the structures of class in the
surrounding societies: research on young LGBT people’s schooling in Britain, for example, identifies ‘social
class as a major axis of power which positions LGBT people unequally and unjustly’.42 Moreover, as the next section
shows, the fracturing of LGBT scenes in recent decades also has a class-dimension. Both in the centres and at the margins of the
world-capitalist system, three aspects of the lesbian/gay identity that stabilised by the early 1980s fit well with
the emerging neoliberal order: the community’s self-definition as a stable minority, its increasing tendency
towards gender-conformity, and marginalisation of its own sexual minorities. Lesbians’ and gay men’s self-definition as a
minority group, which built on the reification of sexual desire that progressively consolidated the categories of gay and straight over the course of the
twentieth century, at the same time expressed a profound social fact about lesbian/gay life as it took shape specifically under neoliberalism. To
the
extent that lesbians and gays were increasingly defined as people who inhabited a certain economic space
(went to certain bars, bathhouses and discos, patronised certain businesses, and, in the US at least, even lived
to some extent in certain neighbourhoods), they were more ghettoised than before, more clearly demarcated
from a majority defined as straight. The fact that a fair proportion of those in the bars and bathhouses were always people with at least
one foot in the straight world, sometimes even married people with children, was always an open secret, but one which few people announced with
fanfare; they were generally seen as 40. For example, Seidman 2011. 41. Heaphy 2011. 42. McDermott 2011, p. 64. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism
19.4 (2011) 3–32 15 people who were still half ‘in the closet’, tended to be discreet in order to avoid unpleasantness, and were in any event generally
marginal to the developing lesbian/gay culture. The fact that people continued to come out and join the community at all ages – or, for that matter,
sometimes form heterosexual relationships at later ages and as a result often decrease their participation in the community – was also none too visible.
The tendency of many early theorists of lesbian/gay liberation to question the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, emphasise the fluidity
of sexual identity and speculate about universal bisexuality tended to fade away with time as the community’s material reality became more sharpedged. The lesbian/gay-rights movement accordingly ran less risk of seeming sexually subversive of the broader sexual order of gendered capitalism.
The decline of butch/femme rôle-playing among lesbians and of camp culture among gay men also
contributed to a hardening of the genderboundaries that remain central to capitalist societies. The drag queens who,
rebelling against the postwar tightening of gender-discipline, had played a leading rôle in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion found that as social tolerance of
lesbians and gays in general began to increase in the 1970s, social tolerance for gender-nonconformity in many lesbian/gay spaces decreased once
more. In the earlier, smaller community of the immediate post-Stonewall years, nongender-conforming gay men and lesbians, less able or less inclined
to hide, had been a higher proportion of the visible lesbian/gay milieu; as lesbian/gay communities
expanded, the influx of more
‘normal-seeming’ lesbians and gay men diluted the prominence of transgendered people. In addition, the less
polarised gender-rôles in the broader culture, which had initially facilitated the emergence of lesbian/gay identities, now increasingly restricted the
room available for more gender-polarised lesbian/gay identities. Although the temporary relaxation of gender-norms in the 1960s had created some
space for playful gender-bending, full-fledged drag often seemed anomalous and even embarrassing in the context of the androgynous imagery that
was in vogue in the early 1970s. LGB
communities thus increasingly defined themselves in ways that placed
transgendered people – whose communities predated the new lesbian/gay identity by millennia – and other
visible nonconformists on the margins, if not completely out of bounds. Kevin Floyd’s identification of ‘an ongoing, radical
uncertainty about whether gay male sexual practice necessarily feminizes any of the men involved’43 does not do justice to the ways in which the
relation between gender and sexuality is configured differently at different times and 43. Floyd 2009, p. 64. 16 P.
Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 locations within a global-capitalist totality that is neither static nor
uniform, but rather strongly differentiated by period, class, gender, and the processes of combined and
uneven development. We have seen, for example, that transgendered sexuality was more common in the working class than in the middle-class
in developed countries in the early-twentieth century, as it still tends to be in some parts of the dependent world. The late 1970s, at the cusp of the
transition from Fordism to neoliberalism, was the time in developed countries when space for transgendered sexualities (and thus Floyd’s ‘radical
uncertainty’) was at its historical nadir. While gay-male sexuality was masculinised and lesbianism feminised, the
increased centrality of
consumption to LGB identity resulted in a series of shifts in its sexual contours, some already apparent by the
late 1970s and early ’80s, others emerging only in the ’90s or later. Obviously these shifts did not reflect an instantaneous,
spontaneous sea-change in all LGBT people’s felt desires or sexual practices. Individual desire and psychology are more resilient than that and are
shaped over the course of lifetimes, not totally transmuted by the social developments of a decade or two. In some cases the winds of erotic fashion
undoubtedly have shallower causes than profound socioeconomic change, and it would be a mistake to read too much into them. But when sexual
identities and imagery took on more unequal and gender-polarised forms at just the time when the surrounding societies were undergoing a sharp,
long-term rise in inequality, it would be implausible to dismiss the correlation as pure coincidence. In any event, as the decline of Fordism put welfarestate programmes under pressure, a renewed emphasis on the centrality of the family to social reproduction helped put a brake on the relaxation of
gender-norms that had characterised the 1960s. This conservative turn in the broader society was accompanied by a shift among gay men from the
largely androgynous imagery and occasional gender-bending of the early 1970s to the more masculine ‘clone’-culture that took hold by the early ’80s.
Feminine forms of selfpresentation that lesbian feminists once frowned on had also become more common and acceptable among ‘lipstick-lesbians’ by
the 1990s – a ‘celebration of femininity’ that Gayle Rubin, for example, thought could ‘reinforce traditional gender roles and values of appropriate
female behavior’.44
A higher degree of gender-conformity among LGB people facilitated their incorporation into
a neoliberal social and sexual order. This conformity was congenial for the growing number of gay men and lesbians who pursued
professional, business or political careers in a number of 44. Rubin 1982, p. 214. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 17 capitalist
societies, without necessarily renouncing or hiding their sexuality but preferably without ‘flaunting’ it. Even the lesbian/gay middle-class layers that live
off gay businesses and nonprofits – far from all of whom were among the real economic winners of recent decades, but who tended to be spoken for
by those among them who were – preferred in general to keep LGB communityexpressions culturally inoffensive. Another layer of middle-class or
middleclass-identified lesbian/gay people, who were making their careers inside mainstream businesses and institutions, sometimes cringed at
manifestations of a lesbian/gay community that marked them off too much from other people of their class. Many of these people would like to be
able to pursue their careers in straight companies and institutions while being open about their same-sex relationships – fewer people are willing to
contract heterosexual marriages these days and to keep their homosexual lives completely hidden and marginal – and for the rest deny or minimise
differences between them and middle-class straights. This professional layer has provided the solid social base for the most moderate currents of LGB
movements, which have often seen same-sex marriage as the culminating moment in the process of gay emancipation. And, in fact, same-sex marriage
and adoption can be the culmination of some LGBT people’s integration into the productive and reproductive order of gendered capitalism.
Paradoxically, while neoliberalism has in many ways undermined the direct and obvious domination of wives and daughters by husbands and fathers
neoliberal cutbacks in social services, by privatising the provision of basic
needs, have been restoring the centrality of the family-unit to the social reproduction of labour – in classed
ways. While legal same-sex marriage or partnership can in this context secure new benefits for middle-class and privileged working-class lesbians and
under the original Fordist gender-régime,45
gays, for those most dependent on the welfare-state in countries such as Britain and the Netherlands legal recognition of their partnerships can lead to
cuts in benefits.46 As the number of children being raised in households headed by same-sex couples has risen, same-sex marriage and adoption can
serve to legitimise and regulate the growing rôle that lesbian and gay couples are playing in social production, consumption and reproduction. Yet the
rise of same-sex-coupleheaded nuclear families redefines and even reinforces rather than overcomes the gay-straight divide, since the ways in which
lesbians and gay men form 45. Brenner 2003, pp. 78–9. 46. Browne 2011. 18 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 families (through
sperm-donorship, adoption, the break-up of straight families or other trajectories) necessarily remain distinctive. In the twenty-first century, an
ideological factor has also played a crucial rôle in integrating lesbian/gay people into the neoliberal order: the
instrumentalisation of lesbian/gay rights in the service of imperialist and Islamophobic ideologies, which
Jasbir Puar has defined as ‘homonationalism’.47 Particularly but not only in countries such as the Netherlands48 and Denmark, where
both same-sex partnership-rights and anti-immigrant racism are strongly developed, this homonationalism has been key to consolidating and taming
lesbian/gay identity. III. Social and sexual roots of alternative identities The apparent uniformity of lesbian/gay culture in the mid-1970s in fact helped
disguise social and economic fractures opening up among LGB people. As a result, the relatively homogeneous lesbian/gay identities that had taken
shape in North America and Western Europe by the 1970s were challenged and fragmented over the following decades, though to different degrees in
different countries. There has been, in particular, a proliferation of alternative sexual or gender-identities, more-or-less outside of the mainstream
commercial scene. Some, though far from all, of these alternative identities represent challenges to the basic parameters of the gay/straight divide that
emerged and was consolidated through much of the twentieth century. Contrary to much right-wing anti-gay rhetoric, the prosperous couples focused
on by glossy lesbian/gay magazines were never typical of LGBTs in general. Data gathered by the US National Opinion Research Center’s General
Social Survey in the 1990s suggested that lesbian and bisexual women were still far less likely than other women to have professional or technical jobs
and more likely to have service or craft/operative jobs, while gay and bisexual men were more likely than other men to have professional/technical,
clerical/sales or service-jobs but less likely to have managerial jobs.49 The heteronormative constraints of many economic sectors – the pressures to
abide by a heterosexual norm of behaviour – seems to drive many ‘low-wage service workers . . . to accept a lower wage than they would be paid
elsewhere in exchange for the relative comfort of working in a queer environment’.50 47. Puar 2007, pp. xxiv, 38–9. 48. Mepschen, Duyvendak and
Tonkens 2010. 49. Badgett 1997, p. 81. 50. Sears 2005, p. 106. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 19 Whatever the causes (less
ability or willingness to meet gendered jobexpectations, migration to more competitive job-markets, discrimination), the
net result (contrary
to unfounded claims made not only by anti-gay ideologues but also by some gay publications) was that, at
least in the US, both gay men and lesbians were under-represented in the higher-income brackets (with
family-incomes of $50,000 or more), while gay men in particular were over-represented in the lower-income
brackets (with familyincomes of $30,000 or less).51 A more recent study showed that men in samesex couples were still earning significantly less on
average than their straight counterparts in 2005 ($43,117 compared to $49,777); while women in samesex couples earn more on
average than straight married women, their income is, of course, less than men’s.52 Transgendered people are
even worse off: a 2006 study found that in San Francisco 60% of them earned less than $15,300 a year, only
25% had fulltime jobs, and nearly 9% had no source of income.53 The expansion of LGBT communities centred on gay
commercial scenes did not improve the situation of lower-income LGBTs. On the contrary, Jeffrey Escoffier has noted that ‘the gay market, like
markets in general, tends to segment the lesbian and gay community by income, by class, by race and by gender’.54 This is especially true of same-sex
couples, particularly same-sex couples raising children together, since two women living together are in a sense doubling the economic disadvantages
they both experience as women. LGBTs are, moreover, more likely to be cut off from broader family-support networks, and as the social safety-net
has frayed,
inequalities resulting from wage-differentials have affected them with particular intensity.55 Across
the capitalist world, the welfare-state has been shredded, unions have been weakened, and inequality has
grown. In this context, polarisation within LGBT communities has been particularly great. Lower-income LGBs,
transgendered people, street-youth and LGBT people of colour have been under assault in various ways in recent decades, as attacks on poor people
and minorities have multiplied, racism has intensified even more in the US, and new forms of antagonism to black and immigrant communities
(especially of Muslim origin) have grown up in European countries. Young LGBTs and sexworkers in particular have been victims of intensified forms
of coercive 51. Badgett and King 1997, pp. 68–9. 52. Romero, Baumle, Badgett and Gates 2007, p. 2, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 241. 53. Transgender Law
Center and San Francisco Bay Guardian 2006, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 147. 54. Escoffier 1997, p. 131. 55. Jacobs 1997. 20 P. Drucker / Historical
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 policing.56 Social
polarisation within LGBT communities has coincided with greater
prominence for forms of sexual identity and practice that focus explicitly on gender and power-differences
and rôle-playing. One of the first notable mutations in LGBT identity with the rise of neoliberalism was the
rôle that SM and leather played in the more masculine culture that took hold among gay men by the early
1980s. While one gaymale leather-bar opened in New York as early as 1955 and many more followed by the
early 1970s, only from 1976 on did leather-culture become a subject of attention and debate in the broader
lesbian/gay community.57 Soon SM came ‘to be linked with male homosexuality in the eighties as firmly as effeminacy and an attack on
gender roles was in the sixties and early seventies’,58 while SM clubs such as New York’s Mineshaft became ‘an arena for the masculinization of the
gay male’.59 Paradoxically at this stage, while divisions between ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ that would earlier have been widely rejected on liberationist
grounds became acceptable and sometimes blatant, virtually all the men in the scene were masculinised in the process. It was as if SM, while
celebrating ‘difference and power’, served, in Dennis Altman’s term, as a ritual of ‘catharsis’, of both acting out and exorcising the growing violence
and inequality of the broader society.60 As Gayle Rubin put it, ‘class, race, and gender neither determine nor correspond to the roles adopted for S/M
play’.61 By the early 1980s, forms of sexuality that diverged from the perceived feminist norm also affected the previously hegemonic lesbian-feminist
culture. Lesbian-feminist culture in a sense already struck a divergent note in the 1970s. The sense has persisted that lesbians in general play less of a
rôle in commercial scenes and persevere more in trying to sustain alternative scenes. While of course some lesbians, like some gay men, are middleclass or rich, the fact that women trying to survive independently of men have lower incomes on average and are thus more likely to be working-class
or poor has contributed to this sense. But while
lesbian feminists had put working-class and poor women under great
pressure in the 1970s to abandon butch-femme relationships that had been common among them for
decades, some lesbians began in the 1980s to 56. Sears 2005, p. 103. 57. Rubin 1982, p. 219; Califia 1982, pp. 280, 244–8. 58. Altman
1982, p. 191. 59. Ira Tattleman, ‘Staging Masculinity at the Mineshaft’, cited in Moore 2004, p. 20. 60. Altman 1982, p. 195. 61. Rubin 1982, p. 222. P.
Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 21 defend butch-femme vigorously.62 At about the same time some lesbians took a
visible part in SM culture, particularly in San Francisco. This dovetailed with a general upheaval in the lesbian world through conflict between currents
that defined themselves as ‘anti-pornography’ and others that defined themselves as ‘pro-sex’.63 The most explosive issue in the ‘sex-wars’ was, briefly,
the issue of intergenerational sex, which was the subject of a major confrontation during the organisation of the first US national lesbian/gay-rights
march in 1979. Going beyond understandable and legitimate concerns about coercion and abuse of authority, some currents perceived powerdifferences between adults and youths as precluding the possibility of consent to sex.64 However, the very explosiveness of the issue quickly placed it
beyond the pale of discussion. In hindsight, the
‘clone’ and SM subcultures, lipstick-lesbianism and sex-wars of the 1980s
were only an initial phase in a longer-term fracturing of LGBT identity. The consolidation of Reaganism and Thatcherism
by the mid-1980s coincided for LGBT people with the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, a trauma experienced as a sharp generational break. While
some men who survived the epidemic followed a gay variant of the trajectory of the middle-class baby-boom generation, many
younger people
who came of age in the era of AIDS and neoliberalism found the road to a safer middle-class existence
strewn with obstacles. Beginning in the mid-1980s a queer social milieu emerged, made up to a large extent of young people on the bottom of
the unequal social hourglass that had resulted from economic restructuring.65 One aspect of the underlying social reality is that the lower young
queers’ incomes were and the more meagre their job-prospects, the less on average they identified with or wanted to join the lesbian/gay community
that had grown up since the 1960s and ’70s. ‘Economic changes . . . meant more part-time and contract work, especially for young people, which left
many unable to see a place for themselves in the by then established gay middle class.’66 Above all initially in English-speaking developed-capitalist
countries – the developed countries where social polarisation is greatest – young queers resisted disco-culture, a bar-centred ghetto, and the kind of
segregation that fit 62. Nestle 1989; Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, pp. 397–404. 63. Vance (ed.) 1989; Linden, Pagano, Russell and Star (eds.) 1982;
Califia 1982, pp. 250–9. 64. The state enforces a related point of view, as shown in hundreds of prosecutions of LGBT people each year under age-ofconsent laws, the repeated prosecutions of the Canadian gay paper Body Politic for discussing the issue in print, and US Senator Jesse Helms’s
successful move to block UN recognition of any LGBT group that condones ‘paedophilia’. 65. Drucker 1993, p. 29. 66. Patterson 2000. 22 P. Drucker
/ Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 with ethnic-style minority-group politics. Self-identified queers refused ‘to be comfortable on the social
periphery – in the ghettos’.67 English-speaking queer scenes have been echoed in some ways by queers in squatters’ milieus in continental Western
Europe. This generation had also grown up in far more diverse and changeable family-structures, which made the notion of modelling lesbian/gay
households on traditional straight ones all the more implausible for them. In some milieus of young rebels, gender and sexual categories have become
more fluid than would be usual in mainstream straight, gay male or lesbian scenes. Economic
marginalisation and cultural alienation
were closely interlinked in the emergence of a queer milieu, making it hard in many cases to say to what
extent poverty was a cause of alienation, to what extent the choice of a queer lifestyle contributed to more-orless voluntary poverty, and to what extent some queers were middle-class gays – particularly students and
academics – dressing and talking like down-and-outs, in some cases perhaps only for a period of a few years
of ‘float[ing] in and out of deviance or propriety’.68 In other cases queerness may be defined so much by dress, style or performance
that it becomes as much a matter of consumer-choice and an expression of reification as the middle-class gay identities it rejects.69 Nevertheless,
the overall correlation between lower incomes and queer selfidentification seems clear. If economic
pressures made integration into the dominant lesbian/gay culture a dubious proposition for many
young and disadvantaged queers in developed countries, the barriers have been all the greater for
poor and working-class LGBTs in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Dependent capitalist countries have
been the site over the last forty years of social constructions of sexuality that are neither completely different
from the predominant lesbian/ gay identities in imperialist countries in the 1970s nor merely expressions of a
single ‘modern’, globalised identity.70 Sexualities that were indigenous to the dependent world’s precapitalist or early-capitalist social
formations (such as the traditional transgender identities of Southeast Asia and Latin America) have persisted, while coexisting with lesbian/gay
identities. The
result of this intersection of dependent development, sexuality and culture was that poor and
working-class LGBT people in the dependent world were less likely than middle-class LGBs to have identities
(let alone incomes) that facilitated their integration into a Westernised, commercialised 67. Seidman 1997, p. 193; Drucker 1993, p. 29. 68. Califia 2003,
p. xiv. 69. Hennessy 2000, pp. 140–1. 70. Drucker 1996. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 23 gay scene.71 They were more likely
to be transgendered people, more likely to be subject to violence, and more likely to be dependent on family and/or community-structures for their
survival. The economic marginalisation that they experience tended to make post-Fordist lesbian/gay identity at least as problematic and alien for them
as for young self-identified queers in North America or Britain. Marginalisation
of millions of LGBT people worldwide
because they are poor, young or black has impelled many of them towards developing or adopting identities
that have broken to some extent with the dominant patterns of post-Fordist gay identity. As we have seen, the
dominant trend since the 1980s, based particularly on the reality of more prosperous LGB people’s lives, was for the lesbian/gay community to define
itself as a stable and distinct minority, tend increasingly towards gender-conformity, and marginalise its own sexual minorities. By contrast,
the
nonconformist sexual and genderidentities that have grown up among more marginalised layers have tended
to be non-homonormative: to identify with broader communities of oppressed or rebellious people, to fail to
conform to dominant gender-norms, and/or to emphasise power-differentials that dominant lesbian/gay
imagery tends to elide. While these counter-identities have shown little sign of coalescing into any overarching alternative identity – on the
contrary, different counteridentities can and do clash with each other72 – they do share a number of features that correspond to
structural similarities in their bearers’ positions under neoliberal capitalism. Non-homonormative identities defined by
marginalisation on the basis of age, class, region and/or ethnicity have overlapped with the growth or persistence of subcultures that have been
marginal in the commercial scene because they constitute (sometimes extensive) niche markets at best and illicit ones at worse. The relationship
between alternative identities and marginalised sexual practices is elusive, but there does appear to be a correlation. There are, of course, many LGBTs
who limit their sexual rebellion to the safety of a particular brand of bar. But the more attached people are to their sexual identities, the more reluctant
many of them become to give them up at work or in public. Not coincidentally, the more visible transgendered people are, the less likely they are in
most societies to get one of the well-paid, permanent, full-time jobs that have become scarcer and more coveted commodities in post-Fordist
economies. Moreover, some people are virtually or entirely incapable of hiding 71. Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8. 72. See, for example, Drucker 1993, p. 29.
24 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 aspects of their identities, particularly effeminacy in men or butchness in women, that are
often rightly or wrongly associated with sexualities that are neither hetero- nor homonormative. Voluntary or involuntary, tell-tale signs of sexual
deviance often lead to management’s excluding people from professional or service-jobs or to fellow workers’ hostility that impels people to avoid or
flee certain workplaces. Paradoxically, in the absence of general guarantees for workers’ job-security or free expression at work, antidiscrimination laws
that protect LGB people in general may be of less than no use to the sexually marginalised, as Ruthann Robson has noted: ‘If a company employs four
lesbians, a new manager can fearlessly fire the one who has her nose pierced or who is most outspoken or who walks the dykiest.’73 These
factors
help explain the correlation that exists between subaltern social positions and various alternative sexual scenes
and identities that do not fit into standard post-Fordist lesbian/gay moulds. This is not a straightforward correlation
between non-homonormative identities and working-class affiliation. On the contrary, working-class lesbians and gays and lesbians and gays of colour
(sometimes, of course, the same people) have sometimes reacted against self-defined queer or other sexually dissident groups when such groups
demanded visibility of them that would make their lives more difficult in particular workplaces or communities.74 The correlation has been rather with
particular sectors of the working class – on average younger, less skilled, less organised and lower-paid – that have expanded since the 1970s. Part of
the younger queer generation has taken up, and to some extent recast, claims for some of the stigmatised sexual practices that were made during the
sex-wars of the early 1980s. In doing so they have rebelled against homonormative ‘confining straightjackets that inserted some queers as the tolerated
“others” within the existing social relations of gender and sexuality and marginalized others’.75 ‘ “Queer” [thus] potentially includes “deviants” and
“perverts” who may traverse or confuse the homo/hetero division’.76 By contrast with the earlier period, SM has been less in the forefront – SM
seems less politically laden now than it was in the sex-wars of the early 1980s – and gender-bending and transgender all the more. SM seems to have
become less central to LGBT culture as it has increasingly, in diluted form, come to permeate the broader sexual culture, as seen in the spread of
piercing, tattooing, and leather-fashion and accessories. Among LGBTs, the queer generation has 73. Robson 1992, p. 87, cited in Robson 1997, p.
175, n. 13. 74. Drucker 1993, p. 29. 75. Sears 2005, p. 100. 76. Hennessy 2000, p. 113. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 25 tended
more to play with issues of inequality and power-difference in other ways that expose their artificiality and facilitate their subversion. The
contradictions of gender and power have been particularly visible in transgender and gender-bending subcultures since the 1990s. As Dennis Altman
points out, drag has always to a certain extent subverted mainstream gender-rôles through ‘veneration of the strong woman who defies social
expectations to assert herself’;77 and Judith Butler has argued that drag subverts gender by exposing it as a ‘performatively enacted signification’.78
Forms of gender-bending have shifted over the decades, however. In the 1980s, Amber Hollibaugh proclaimed that her vision of butch/femme was
not a reaffirmation of existing gender-categories but a new system of ‘gay gender’. More recently, younger transgendered people seem more likely to
take on gender-identities that are difficult to subsume (if at all) under existing feminine or masculine rôles. ‘Today lesbian butch/femme is acquiring
more flexibility than it had in the ’70s when I came out’, says Patrick Califia, thanks in part to a crosspollination of butch/femme with SM which
creates space for ‘butch bottoms’ and ‘femme tops’.79 These more flexible and ambiguous forms of transgender can be associated simultaneously with
the myriad forms of transgender that have existed for millennia around the planet, and with queer milieus that have only emerged since the late 1980s
in rebellion against the lesbian/gay mainstream. They are thus, in a sense, very old and very new. New forms of transgender contrast with the forms of
transexuality, which themselves arose only in the 1950s and ’60s, as defined by a wing of the medical establishment. The medical experts not only tend
to prescribe sexreassignment surgery as the standard cure for intense gender-nonconformity but also tend to urge transexuals to adapt (perhaps
somewhat less rigidly than in the past) to the norms of their ‘new gender’.80 Queer-identified transgendered people do not necessarily reject hormonetreatments or surgery, but they can be selective in what they do or do not choose for themselves. Califia links this new trend among transgendered
people to SM people’s attitude towards ‘body-modification’: ‘A new sort of transgendered person has emerged, one who approaches sex reassignment
with the same mindset that they would obtaining a piercing or a tattoo’.81 Often these transpeople do not see themselves as transitioning from male to
female or vice versa, but rather as transgendered as opposed to male or female. 77. Altman 1982, p. 154. 78. Butler 1999, p. 44. 79. Califia 2000, pp.
186–9. 80. Califia 2003, pp. 52–85. 81. Califia 2003, p. 224. 26 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 More traditional poor and
working-class transpeople for their part can often struggle for years to save the money for their operations, including in dependent countries, or simply
change each others’ genitals without resorting to official medicine. The thousands of transgender hijras in South Asia, increasingly visible and militant
among the poorest people of their region and notably at the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, do not often seem to share European and North
American queers’ interest in transcending or blurring gender-categories. For that matter, even many intersex people (born with genitals that do not
identify them as unambiguously male or female) ‘are perfectly comfortable adopting either a male or female gender identity’.82 Just the same, many
LGBTs in dependent countries have been trying in their own ways to resist pressures to claim them for a homogeneous, middleclass-dominated
lesbian/gay community, purge them of ‘old-fashioned’ aspects of their identities, or make them come out in ways that would tear them away from
their families and communities without providing them with equivalent support-systems. Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, for example, has expressed his
identification with Santiago’s downtrodden locas [transvestites] and his rejection of the gay-male model he encountered in New York.83 To a greater
or lesser extent, different forms of transgender are radically subversive of the lesbian/gay identity that emerged under Fordism, in a way that the
would-be all-encompassing acronym LGBT fails to successfully subsume in a single social subject. Transexuals who identify as straight (albeit ‘born in
the wrong body’) often question what they have in common with lesbians, gays or bisexuals. South Asian hijras, identifying with neither gender, cannot
be legitimately classified as either gay or straight. Nor can transgendered queers who insist that they have moved beyond male and female. In
capitalism both North and South in this time of crisis, then, lesbian/gay identity has been undergoing
simultaneous construction and fracturing.84 A very diverse and diffuse set of alternative sexual identities has been diverging more and
more from the post-Fordist, gender-conformist, consumerist lesbian/ gay mainstream, and in some cases challenge the very social and conceptual basis
of straight or lesbian/gay self-definition.
Class struggles and LGBT struggles are not mutually exclusive-queer conceptions of sexuality solve
for a free society
Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/156920611x606412; The Fracturing of
LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
IV. Implications for liberation Recognising
the deep roots of the fracturing of same-sex identities necessarily puts in
question any universalism that ignores class, gender, sexual, cultural, 82. Herndon 2006, p. 1, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 230. 83.
Mansilla 1996, p. 23, cited in Palaversich 2002, p. 104. 84. Drucker 2000a. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 27 racial/ethnic
and other differences within LGBT communities. These communities and identities are being fractured in
large part by fundamental changes in the productive and reproductive order of gendered capitalism. Young
queers, working-class and poor LGBTs, transgendered people and other marginalised groups have increasingly found themselves in objectively
different situations from people in the consolidating gay mainstream. It is thus no surprise that they have tended to some extent to define distinct
identities. The forms taken by alternative, non-homonormative sexual identities do not necessarily win them easy acceptance among feminists or
socialists. The lesbian/gay identity that emerged by the 1970s had much to commend it from the broad-Left’s point of view (once the Left had largely
overcome its initial homophobia). By
contrast, transgendered and other queers can raise the hackles of many on the
Left, since their sexuality strikes many as at variance with the mores to be expected and hoped for in an
egalitarian, peaceful, rational future. One may doubt, however, whether any sexuality existing under capitalism can
serve as a model for sexualities to be forecast or desired under socialism. Nor is it useful to privilege any particular existing
form of sexuality in present-day struggles for sexual liberation. Socialists’ aim should not be to replace the traditional
‘hierarchical system of sexual value’85 with a new hierarchy of our own. As Amber Hollibaugh pointed out many years ago,
sexual history has first of all to be ‘able to talk realistically about what people are sexually’.86 And in radical struggles over sexuality, as in
radical struggles over production, the basic imperative is to welcome and stimulate self-organisation and
resistance by people subjected to exploitation, exclusion, marginalisation or oppression, in the forms that
oppressed people’s own experience proves to be most effective. This is not to say that Marxists should simply adopt a liberal
attitude of unthinking approval of sexual diversity in general, in a spirit of ‘anything goes’. Our central concern must be to advance the
sexual liberation of the working class and its allies, who today include straights, LGBs and – particularly
among its most oppressed layers – transgendered and other queers. Resisting the retreat from class in LGBT
activism and queer studies, Marxists should combat heterosexism and bourgeois hegemony among straights,
homonormativity and bourgeois hegemony among LGBs, and blanket hostility to straights and non-queeridentified gays where it exists among 85. Rubin 1989, p. 279. 86. Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, p. 396. 28 P. Drucker / Historical
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 self-identified queers. This will require seeking new tactics and forms of organising within
LGBT movements. The post-Stonewall lesbian/gay movement waged an effective fight against discrimination and won many victories on the
basis of an identity widely shared by those engaged in same-sex erotic or emotional relationships. But this classic lesbian/gay identity has not been the
only basis in history for movements for sexual emancipation. In the German homophile-struggle from 1897 to 1933, for example, Magnus Hirschfeld’s
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the wing of the movement closer to the social-democratic Left, tended to put forward polarised ‘third sex’theories.87 This
is what one might predict on the basis of the evidence that egalitarian gay identities were at first
primarily a middle-class phenomenon, while transgender and gender-polarised patterns persisted longer in the
working class and among the poor.88 Today in the dependent world as well, transgender identities seem to be more common among the
less prosperous and less Westernised.89 Rather than privileging same-sex sexualities more common among the less oppressed, however superficially
egalitarian, the Left should be particularly supportive of those same-sex sexualities more common among the most oppressed, however polarised.
Another important consideration is the challenge that alternative, nonhomonormative sexualities can sometimes pose to the reification of sexual desire
that the categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and straight embody.
Marxists question the fantasy of consumers under
neoliberalism that obtaining the ‘right’ commodities will define them as unique individuals and secure their
happiness; we should not uncritically accept an ideology that defines individuals and their happiness on the
basis of a quest for a partner of the ‘right’ gender.90 How will LGBT communities and movements be structured in a time of
increasingly divergent identities? Self-defined queer activist-groups, which emerged initially in the US and Britain in the early 1990s, have also appeared
in recent years in a number of countries in continental Europe. They pose a 87. See Fernbach 1998, p. 51; Drucker 1997, p. 37. 88. Chauncey 1994. 89.
Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8. 90. Kevin Floyd argues that ‘the reifying of sexual desire needs to be understood as a condition of possibility for a complex,
variable history of sexually nonnormative discourses, practices, sites, subjectivities, imaginaries, collective formations, and collective aspirations’ (Floyd
2009, pp. 74–5). Having earlier recalled Lukács’s later criticism of the conflation of objectification and reification in his History and Class
Consciousness, Floyd here reproduces it upside down, celebrating both as Lukács had rejected both. Objectification, the alternate adoption of subject
and objectpositions in an interplay between different human individuals, is inherent to sexuality; reification, the petrifaction of specific rôles and sexual
identities, is not. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 29 radical challenge to mainstream lesbian/gay organisations, although they
have yet to show much of an orientation towards large-scale mobilisation, to take root among the racially and nationally oppressed, or to prove their
adaptability to the dependent world.91 In countries where civil rights and same-sex marriage have been won, the process of seeking new horizons and
finding appropriate forms of organising seems likely to be a prolonged one – especially since the LGBT social and political landscape seems likely to
remain more fragmented and conflict-ridden than it was in the immediate post-Stonewall period. While lesbian/gay identity has lost the central place it
occupied in the LGBT world of the 1970s and ’80s, it is still far from marginalised; on the contrary, the new homonormativity shows no signs of
succumbing to queer assaults in the foreseeable future. In the dependent world particularly, the diversity of LGBT communities has resulted in an
alliance-model of organising as an alternative or a supplement to the model of a single, broad, unified organisation. The broadest possible unity across
different identities remains desirable in basic fights against violence, criminalisation and discrimination as well as more ambitious struggles for equality,
for example in parenting. On other issues, LGBT rights can be best defended by working and demanding space within broader movements, such as
trade-unions, the women’s movement and the globaljustice movement.92 At the same time, an alliance-model has in some cases facilitated the process
of negotiating unity among constituencies – such as transgendered people on the one hand and lesbian/gay people on the other93 – who are unlikely
to feel fully included in any one unitary structure. It can constitute a united front between those whose identities fit the basic parameters of the gaystraight divide and those whose identities do not, fostering the development of a truly queer conception of sexuality that, in Gloria Wekker’s words, is
‘multiple, malleable, dynamic, and possessing male and female elements’.94 In
a more visionary perspective, developing an
inclusive, queer conception of sexuality can be seen as a way to move towards that ‘truly free civilization’ that
Herbert Marcuse described a half-century ago in Eros and Civilization, in which ‘all laws are self-given by the individuals’, the values of ‘play and
display’ triumph over those of ‘productiveness and performance’, the entire human 91. For discussions from an anticapitalist perspective of the
potential and limits of queer radicalism, see Drucker 1993 and Drucker 2010. 92. On sexual politics in the global-justice movement, see Drucker 2009.
93. Califia 2003, p. 256. 94. Wekker 1999, p. 132. 30 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 personality is eroticised, and the ‘instinctual
substance’ of ‘the perversions . . . may well express itself in other forms’.95
Case
AT structural violence
War turns structural violence
Folk 78 [Jerry, Professor of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, “Peace Educations – Peace
Studies : Towards an Integrated Approach,” Peace & Change, volume V, number 1, Spring, p. 58]
Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work of researchers and educators coming
to the field from the perspective of negative peace too easily forget that the prevention of a nuclear
confrontation of global dimensions is the prerequisite for all other peace research, education, and action.
Unless such a confrontation can be avoided there will be no world left in which to build positive peace.
Moreover, the blanket condemnation of all such negative peace oriented research, education or action as a
reactionary attempt to support and reinforce the status quo is doctrinaire. Conflict theory and resolution, disarmament
studies, studies of the international system and of international organizations, and integration studies are in themselves neutral. They do not
intrinsically support either the status quo or revolutionary efforts to change or overthrow it. Rather they offer a body of knowledge which can be used
for either purpose or for some purpose in between.
It is much more logical for those who understand peace as positive peace
to integrate this knowledge into their own framework and to utilize it in achieving their own purposes. A
balanced peace studies program should therefore offer the student exposure to the questions and concerns which occupy those
who view the field essentially from the point of view of negative peace.
The alt lacks a mechanism for resolving global violence -- the impact is global war
Moore 4 [Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential appointee, & Honorary
Editor of the American Journal of International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace,
John Norton Moore, pages 41-2]
If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an absence of effective deterrence,
what is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war? Past, and many contemporary, theories of war have focused on
the role of specific disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty or social injustice, competition for
resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, and perceptions of "honor," or many other such factors. Such factors may well play a
role in motivating aggression or in serving as a means for generating fear and manipulating public opinion. The reality, however, is that while
some
have more potential to contribute to war than others, there may well be an infinite set of motivating
factors, or human wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent existence of such motivating factors for war
but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high risk decisions leading to war that is the key to
more effectively controlling war. And the same may also be true of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on
of these may
"ethnic conflict," as though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention from the
reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan Tutsis as well as its Hutu
opponents.I1 Certainly
if we were able to press a button and end poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice,
and endless disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic governments must remain committed
to policies that will produce a better world by all measures of human progress. The broader
achievement of democracy and the rule of law will itself assist in this progress. No one, however, has yet been
able to demonstrate the kind of robust correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of war as is reflected
in the "democratic peace." Further, given the difficulties in overcoming many of these social problems, an
approach to war exclusively dependent on their solution may be to doom us to war for generations to
come.
Extinction outweighs
Wapner, professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American
University, 2003
(Paul, “Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age,” Dissent Winter
2003 http://www.dissentmagazine. org/menutest/archives/2003/ wi03/wapner.html, ldg)
All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one. Even
the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the
distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum
to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is
crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently,
yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf
(including environmentalists who do that). But
we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is
existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Ecocritics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the
difficulty of identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In fact,
if there is one thing they
vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual contexts of
human experience. Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-François Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is characterized
fundamentally by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Nonetheless, I can't see how postmodern critics can do otherwise
than accept the value of preserving the nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme "other"; it stands in contradistinction to
humans as a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of reification, postmodernism inherently
advances an ethic of respecting the "other." At the very least, respect must involve ensuring that the
"other" actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting the actuality of the nonhuman.
Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Postmodern critics should find this
particularly disturbing. If they don't, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their
fundamental moral commitment.
Responsibility to future generations only framework that allows for ethical
responsibility.
Kurasawa, Professor of Sociology at York University, 2004
(Fuyuki, “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight”, Constellations
Volume 11 Issue 4, Pages 453 – 475, Blackwell, ldg)
What can be done in the face of short-sightedness? Cosmopolitanism provides some of the clues to an answer, thanks to its formulation of a universal duty of care
for humankind that transcends all geographical and socio-cultural borders. I
want to expand the notion of cosmopolitan
universalism in a temporal direction, so that it can become applicable to future generations and thereby
nourish a vibrant culture of prevention. Consequently, we need to begin thinking about a farsighted cosmopolitanism, a chrono-cosmopolitics
that takes seriously a sense of “intergenerational solidarity” toward human beings who will live in our wake as much as those living amidst us today.26 But for a
farsighted cosmopolitanism to take root in global civil society, the latter must adopt a thicker regulative principle of care for the future than the one currently in
vogue (which amounts to little more than an afterthought of the nondescript ‘don’t forget later generations’ ilk). Hans Jonas’s “imperative of responsibility” is
valuable precisely because it prescribes an ethico-political relationship to the future consonant with the work of farsightedness.27 Fully appreciating Jonas’s
position requires that we grasp the rupture it establishes with the presentist assumptions imbedded in the intentionalist tradition of Western ethics. In
brief,
intentionalism can be explained by reference to its best-known formulation, the Kantian categorical
imperative, according to which the moral worth of a deed depends upon whether the a priori “principle of the will” or “volition” of the person performing it –
that is, his or her intention – should become a universal law.28 Ex post facto evaluation of an act’s outcomes, and of whether
they correspond to the initial intention, is peripheral to moral judgment. A variant of this logic is found
in Weber’s discussion of the “ethic of absolute ends,” the “passionate devotion to a cause” elevating the
realization of a vision of the world above all other considerations; conviction without the restraint of
caution and prudence is intensely presentist.29 By contrast, Jonas’s strong consequentialism takes a cue from Weber’s “ethic of
responsibility,” which stipulates that we must carefully ponder the potential impacts of our actions and assume responsibility for them – even for the incidence of
unexpected and unintended results. Neither the contingency of outcomes nor the retrospective nature of certain moral judgments exempts an act from normative
evaluation. On
the contrary, consequentialism reconnects what intentionalism prefers to keep distinct: the
moral worth of ends partly depends upon the means selected to attain them (and vice versa), while the
correspondence between intentions and results is crucial. At the same time, Jonas goes further than Weber in breaking with
presentism by advocating an “ethic of long-range responsibility” that refuses to accept the future’s indeterminacy, gesturing instead toward a practice of farsighted
preparation for crises that could occur.30 From
a consequentialist perspective, then, intergenerational solidarity would
consist of striving to prevent our endeavors from causing large-scale human suffering and damage to the
natural world over time. Jonas reformulates the categorical imperative along these lines: “Act so that the effects
of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life,” or “ Act so that the effects of your action are not
destructive of the future possibility of such life.”31 What we find here, I would hold, is a substantive
and future-oriented ethos on the basis of which civic associations can enact the work of preventive
foresight.
Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity
Cummiskey, philosophy professor Bates College, 1996
(David, Kantian Consequentialism, pg 145-146, ldg)
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some
abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive
"overall social good." Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for
the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the
fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has." 12 But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By
emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one
life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational
beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that "rational nature exists as an end in itself" ( GMM429).
Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If
one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal
value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and
liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to
justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a nonvaluebased rationale. But we have seen that Kant's normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How
can a concern for the value of
rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more
extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their
ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers
of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons
may have "dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth" that transcends any market value
( GMM436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give
way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view
that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the
equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice
some to save many.
AT Util
Utilitarianism in the context of surveillance is key.
Laval 12—Professor of Sociology at the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Christian,
“Discipline and Prevent: The New Panopticon Society,” Revue du MAUSS, 2/2012, No. 40, pg. 47-72)//FJ
According to Bentham’s utilitarianism, humans are governed by a quest for personal satisfaction and want to
maximize it at all times and in all places. This consideration is important for understanding the philosophy
behind the panopticon. Humans are calculating beings who seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. They are also small economical
machines designed to increase profits and reduce costs. All of society—including all institutions, laws, and standards—must adapt to the
fact that the goal of all institutional systems and the primary aim of governments is to produce the greatest
happiness for the greatest number while regulating and influencing behaviors so that the satisfaction of
individual interests leads to the greatest possible sum of happiness for society at large. In other words, since we are by
nature economic beings governed by our interests, it is only right that governments should take this fact fully into account. The new system of laws,
the balance between rewards and punishments, and the institutional cogwheels must be designed to encourage each person to calculate his personal
interests and pursue his personal goals while taking collective interests into account. This
means that individuals must be free to
make their own decisions and choices, but also that they must be carefully dissuaded from acting in ways that
go against collective interests and instead encouraged to make choices that are best for all. The paradox is that while
these “self-centered calculators” supposedly make free choices, their choices are shaped by the expectation of reward or punishment from the
normative system instituted and maintained by governments. Here
lies a paradox: if individuals pursue personal interests, they
cannot be trusted since they will spontaneously defend their own selfish interests. Therefore, they must be
under constant surveillance, and governments must indirectly influence their decisions so that while
they pursue personal interests, they still contribute to the greater collective good. 9 As David Hume, a
predecessor of Bentham, pointed out, humans are rascals. Bentham also thought that everyone was a potential delinquent. Therefore, utilitarian
philosophers tried to design a socio-political system in which individuals would be free to make choices according to their own calculations while
orienting behaviors toward the common interest, which would require keeping a constant eye on potential delinquents. Freedom
and security
are thus two aspects of the same political practice. Although social space is now open to all, each agent who can move through it
freely, establish the relations he desires, and pursue the business of his choosing must have interiorized within his calculation of pleasure and pain the
relative weight of the punishments and rewards his actions may produce. Therefore, the
best government acts on behaviors
indirectly, silently, internally, and at a distance by integrating itself into the calculation of probability of being
caught each person makes before committing a crime or of being rewarded before carrying out a good deed. 10 The
importance of surveillance in this new form of power should now be clear: it is intended to influence each
individual’s calculation of probabilities. The more we conform to the “economic man” model and the more free we believe ourselves to
be, the more we need watching. This is Bentham’s key point. Security is a condition of collective happiness. Happiness is
the overarching goal, and surveillance in the name of security is the primary means of attaining it.
AT: Predictions Bad
Evaluate high magnitude predictions first - best way to communicate threats while
facilitating effective responses in the public.
Cover ’14 - Assistant Professor of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and the Director at the Institute for Global
Security Law and Policy, (Avidan Y., “Presumed Imminence: Judicial Risk Assessment in the Post-9/11 World”,
http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1561&context=faculty_publications)//HH
Consider the following study’s findings: “[W]hen people are asked how much they will pay for flight insurance for losses resulting from ‘terrorism,’
they will pay more than if they are asked how much they will pay for flight insurance from all causes.”56 The
specter of terrorism and the
emotional wallop it entails leads people to make significant judgments in error regarding the likelihood of
certain harms.57 Moreover, a psychological study further determined that just the discussion of a low-probability
risk, even one in which trustworthy sources elaborate on the minimal risk, increases perceptions of the risk’s
probability.58 What are termed “dread risks,” “worst-case scenarios,” or “low-probability, high-consequence events,”
powerfully impact human behavior.59 Consider that in the three months after the 9/11 attacks occurred, numerous Americans stopped
flying and a good proportion of those people chose to drive instead.60 Flying remains, even with the specter of terrorism, a far less risky endeavor
than driving.61 Yet, people disregarded this fact. The increase in road traffic led to 353 more fatalities nationwide “in the last [three] months of 2001”
when compared to the last quarter of the preceding five years, 1996–2000.62 Also at work here may be an alarmist bias. When
differing
accounts of risk are presented, people are more likely to favor the more “alarming” version, crediting the
accounts that describe more dangers as more informative. W. Kip Viscusi characterizes this outcome as one of
“‘irrational asymmetry: respondents overweigh[] the value of a high risk judgement.’”63 In fact, there may even be
reason to believe that the fear engendered by the 9/11 attacks has contagion effects, leading people to fear
increased risks from sources well beyond terrorism. For example, a study of ninth graders in California found that adolescents
surveyed prior to 9/11 perceived a lesser risk of dying than those surveyed a few weeks after the attacks.64 Specifically, respondents believed there was
a 34.62% chance of dying by a tornado before 9/11, but the perception of such a risk increased to 64.33% after the attacks.65 The perceived risk of
dying by earthquake increased from 24.64% to 41.94%.66 When
seized by fear, people make probability determinations that
they would otherwise not make. Moreover, these decisions do not track the variations in probability. One study asked
participants what they would pay to avoid participating in an experiment in which there was a chance they would be subjected to a painful electric
shock or to a $20 penalty.67 Faced with a 1%, 99%, or 100% risk of shock, participants’ median willingness to pay ranged from $7 to avoid the 1%
risk to $10 to avoid the 99% risk.68 In contrast, the willingness to pay to avoid the $20 penalty ranged from $1 to avoid the 1% chance to $18 to avoid
the 99% chance.69 The results demonstrate that people
are willing to pay a lot to avoid the low probability of an “affectrich outcome,” but that their willingness to pay does not vary greatly with the probability of the occurrence of
the event.70 Similarly, even when the risks of a high outrage occurrence such as nuclear waste radiation, and a low outrage event, like radon
exposure, were the same, people perceived the high outrage threat as a higher risk and expressed a greater intention
to limit that threat.71 Another study found that people perceived a greater risk from a terrorist event causing the same number of casualties as a
non-terrorist propane tank explosion or release of an infectious disease.72
Even if predictions aren’t perfect, the alternative is political ignorance - leads to
worse political decision-making.
Fitzsimmons ’06 - Defense analyst, (Michael, December 1, 2006, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning”, International
Institute for Strategic Studies, Ebsco)//HH
But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challenging. If
not sufficiently bounded, a high degree of variability
in planning factors can exact a significant price on planning. The complexity presented by great variability
strains the cognitive abilities of even the most sophisticated decisionmakers.15 And even a robust decisionmaking process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as
variability and complexity grows. It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk, variability in strategic
calculation should be carefully tailored to available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm
can an imbalance between complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or
inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic
surprise, in ‘an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and validity,
ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ... The
greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of
preconceptions.’16 The decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military
crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environment brings upon himself
some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism about the
validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to
which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly,
the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic,
deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well.
Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible
bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little more than a set of
worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be
more or less well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their
application to particular strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational
judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the organisations charged with
their implementation. At their worst, such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers
themselves. Moreover, this style of decision-making is self-reinforcing. A strategist dismissive of explicit models of prediction
or cause and effect is likely to have a much higher threshold of resistance to adjusting strategy in the face of
changing circumstances. It is much harder to be proven wrong if changing or emerging information is systematically discounted on the
grounds that the strategic environment is inherently unpredictable. The result may be a bias toward momentum in the current
direction, toward the status quo. This is the antithesis of flexibility. Facts on the ground change faster than belief systems, so the extent to
which a strategy is based on the latter rather than the former may be a reasonable measure of strategic rigidity. In this way, undue emphasis in
planning on uncertainty creates an intellectual temptation to cognitive dissonance on the one hand, and
confirmatory bias on the other. And the effect, both insidious and ironic, is that the appreciation for uncertainty subverts
exactly the value that it professes to serve: flexibility.
AT complexity theory
Their concept of predictions is nonsensical in the political sphere
Rosenau 97 – (James, professor emeritus of international affairs – George Washington University, “Many
Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs,” in Complexity, Global Politics, and
National Security, eds. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski, National Defense University)
In this emergent epoch of multiple contradictions that I have labeled "fragmegration" in order to summarily capture the tensions
between the fragmenting and integrating forces that sustain world affairs,2 a little noticed—and yet potentially significant—discrepancy
prevails between our intellectual progress toward grasping the underlying complexity of human systems and
our emotional expectation that advances in complexity theory may somehow point the way to policies which can
ameliorate the uncertainties inherent in a fragmegrative world. The links here are profoundly causal: the more uncertainty has spread since the
end of the Cold War, the more are analysts inclined to seek panaceas for instability and thus the more have they latched onto
recent strides in complexity theory in the hope that it will yield solutions to the intractable problems that beset us. No
less important, all these links—the uncertainty, the search for panaceas, and the strides in complexity theory—are huge, interactive, and
still intensifying, thus rendering the causal dynamics ever more relevant to the course of events. In short, all the circumstances are in
place for an eventual disillusionment with complexity theory. For despite the strides, there are severe limits to the
extent to which such theory can generate concrete policies that lessen the uncertainties of a fragmegrated world. And as these
limits become increasingly evident subsequent to the present period of euphoria over the theory’s potential utility, a
reaction against it may well set in and encourage a reversion back to simplistic, either/or modes of
thought. Such a development would be regrettable. Complexity theory does have insights to offer. It provides a
cast of mind that can clarify, that can alert observers to otherwise unrecognized problems, and that can serve as a brake on undue enthusiasm for
particular courses of action. But these benefits can be exaggerated and thus disillusioning. Hence the central purpose of this
paper is to offer a layman’s appraisal of both the potentials and the limits of complexity theory—to differentiate what range of issues and processes in
world affairs it can be reasonably expected to clarify from those that are likely to remain obscure.
The complexity thesis is wrong---makes policymaking impossible and destroys hegemony
Gorka et al 12 (Dr. Sebastian L. V., Director of the Homeland Defense Fellows Program at the College of
International Security Affairs, National Defense University, teaches Irregular Warfare and US National
Security at NDU and Georgetown, et al., Spring 2012, “The Complexity Trap,” Parameters,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Geltzer_Gorka.pdf
We live in a world of unprecedented complexity, or so we are told. President Obama’s words above echo an increasingly common
narrative in the American foreign policy and national security establishments: the forces of globalization, rising nonstate actors, irregular conflict, and
proliferating destructive technologies have made crafting sound national security strategy more elusive than ever before. 2 If
“strategy is the art of
creating power” by specifying the relationship among ends, ways, and means, 3 then the existence of
unprecedented complexity would seem to make this art not only uniquely difficult today but also downright dangerous,
inasmuch as choosing any particular course of action would preclude infinitely adaptive responses in the
future. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates memorably described, the pre-9/11 challenges to American national security were “amateur night
compared to the world today.” 4 And as former State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter recently stated, there is a
“universal awareness that we are living through a time of rapid and universal change,” one in which the assumptions of the twentieth century make
little sense. 5 The “Mr. Y” article that occasioned her comments argued that, in contrast to the “closed system” of the twentieth century that could be
controlled by mankind, we now live in an “open system” defined by its supremely complex and protean nature. 6 Unparalleled
complexity, it
seems, is the hallmark of our strategic age.¶ These invocations of complexity permeate today’s American national
security documents and inform Washington’s post-Cold War and -9/11 strategic culture. The latest Quadrennial Defense Review
begins its analysis with a description of the “complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate. Not since
the fall of the Soviet Union or the end of World War II has the international terrain been affected by such farreaching and consequential shifts.” 7 In a
similar vein, the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 argues that the international system is trending towards greater degrees of
complexity as power is diffused and actors multiply. 8 The Director of National Intelligence’s Vision 2015 terms our time the “Era of Uncertainty,”
one “in which the pace, scope, and complexity of change are increasing.” 9 Disturbingly, the younger generation of foreign policy and national security
professionals seems to accept and embrace these statements declaiming a fundamental change in our world and our capacity to cope with it. The
orientation for the multi-thousand-member group of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy calls “conquering complexity” the fundamental challenge
for the millennial generation. Complexity, it appears, is all the rage. ¶ We challenge
these declarations and assumptions—not
simply because they are empirically unfounded but, far more importantly, because they negate the very art of strategy
and make the realization of the American national interest impossible. We begin by showing the rather unsavory
consequences of the current trend toward worshipping at complexity’s altar and thus becoming a member of the “Cult of Complexity.” Next, we
question whether the world was ever quite as simple as today’s avowers of complexity suggest, thus revealing the
notion of today’s unprecedented complexity to be descriptively false. We then underscore that this idea is dangerous,
given the consequences of an addiction to complexity. Finally, we offer an escape from the complexity trap, with an emphasis on
the need for prioritization in today’s admittedly distinctive international security environment. Throughout, we hope to underscore that today’s
obsession with complexity results in a dangerous denial of the need to strategize.
Complexity minimizes commitment to legitimate problems –establishing priorities key
Dr. Sebastian L. V. Gorka et al 12, Director of the Homeland Defense Fellows Program at the College of
International Security Affairs, National Defense University, teaches Irregular Warfare and US National
Security at NDU and Georgetown, et al., Spring 2012, “The Complexity Trap,” Parameters,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Geltzer_Gorka.pdf
These competing views of America’s national security concerns indicate an important and distinctive characteristic of today’s global landscape:
prioritization is simultaneously very difficult and very important for the United States. Each of these threats
and potential threats—al Qaeda, China, nuclear proliferation, climate change, global disease, and so
on—can conjure up a worstcase scenario that is immensely intimidating. Given the difficulty of combining
estimates of probabilities with the levels of risk associated with these threats, it is challenging to establish priorities. Such choices
and trade-offs are difficult, but not impossible. 30 In fact, they are the stock-in-trade of the strategist and
planner. If the United States is going to respond proactively and effectively to today’s international
environment, prioritization is the key first step—and precisely the opposite reaction to the complacency
and undifferentiated fear that the notion of unprecedented complexity encourages. Complexity suggests
a maximization of flexibility and minimization of commitment; but prioritization demands wise allotment
of resources and attention in a way that commits American power and effort most effectively and
efficiently. Phrased differently, complexity induces deciding not to decide; prioritization encourages
deciding which decisions matter most. Today’s world of diverse threats characterized by uncertain probabilities and
unclear risks will overwhelm us if the specter of complexity seduces us into either paralysis or paranoia. Some
priorities need to be set if the United States is to find the resources to confront what threatens it most. 31 As Michael Doran recently argued
in reference to the Arab Spring, “the United States must train itself to see a large dune as something more formidable than just endless grains of
sand.”32¶ This
is not to deny the possibility of nonlinear phenomena, butterfly effects, self-organizing
systems that exhibit patterns in the absence of centralized authority, or emergent properties. 33 If anything, these hallmarks of
complexity theory remind strategists of the importance of revisiting key assumptions in light of new
data and allowing for tactical flexibility in case of unintended consequences. Sound strategy requires hard choices
and commitments, but it need not be inflexible. We can prioritize without being procrustean. But a
model in which everything is potentially relevant is a model in which nothing is.
Complexity theory is terrible pseudoscience
Phelan 1 (Steven E., William G. Rohrer Professorial Chair in Entrepreneurship, Director of the Center for
Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Ph.D. in economics from La Trobe University, Australia; an M.B.A. in
marketing from Monash University; and a B.S. in psychology from the University of Melbourne , “What Is
Complexity Science, Really?” EMERGENCE, 3(1), 120–36 Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc.)
The need for a special issue of Emergence on the question “What
is complexity science?” is disturbing on several levels. At one level, one
voluminous literature generated in recent years on chaos and complexity theory
must contain a clear exposition of the definition, mission, and scope of complexity science. That this exposition has
not been forthcoming, or is the subject of controversy, is disconcerting. On another level, the inability to differentiate
science clearly from pseudoscience in complexity studies is also problematic. Allowing pseudoscience to
penetrate a field of study lowers the credibility of that field with mainstream scientists and hinders the flow of resources
for future development. It is my contention that much of the work in complexity theory has indeed been pseudoscience, that is, many writers in this field have used the symbols and methods of complexity science (either
erroneously or deliberately) to give the illusion of science even though they lack supporting evidence and
plausibility (Shermer, 1997). This proliferation of pseudo-science has, in turn, obscured the meaning and agenda of
the science of complexity. The purpose of this article is twofold: to provide a working definition of complexity science; and to use this
could be forgiven for thinking that the
definition to differentiate complexity science from complexity pseudo-science. This is a play in three acts. In the first section, I will undertake an
examination of science and the factors differentiating science from nonscience. In the second section, I examine the relationship between complexity
and science, leading to a definition of complexity science. In the final section, I offer a test for distinguishing between science and pseudo-science in
complexity studies and provide several examples of the latter. I also describe why it
is important for scientists working in the area vigorously
to reject pseudo-scientific theories.
There is zero empirical basis for extending complexity to social systems- they have their
epistemology backwards- complexity needs to be meaningfully capable of describing an empirical
example of emergence otherwise it is a buzzword- the standard of complexity science should be
prescriptive- this is the d-rule for adjudicating complexity in physics and biology
Terrence W. Deacon, Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at University of
California Berkeley- he is the foremost expert on different orders of emergence in thermodynamic, biology,
and neurological systems, “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub,” 2006
Over the past few decades, this compositional usage has become more and more prominent as scientists in different fields have encountered similar
transitional patterns in systems as diverse as liquid convection patterns and the appearance of unprecedented social dynamics. In non-technical
discussions the phrase 'the
whole is more than the sum of the parts' is often quoted to convey this sense of novelty
generated via ascent in scale. This phrase originates with Aristotle and captures two aspects of the emergence concept: the distinction between a
merely quantitative difference and a qualitative one, and effects involving the combination of elements whose patterns of interaction contribute to
global properties that are not evident in the components themselves. There
is something a bit misleading about this way of
phrasing the relationship that harkens back to a something-from-nothing conception. Exactly what
'more' is being appealed to, if not the parts and their relationships, is seldom made explicit. This additive
conception has often led to the expectation that new classes of physical laws come into existence with increases in scale and the interaction effects that
result. This conception of emergence is often described as 'strong emergence' because it implies a dissociation from the physics relevant to the parts
and their relationships. It is contrasted with 'weak emergence' that does not entail introduction of any new physical principles. The latter is often seen
merely as a redescriptive variant of standard reductionistic causality, and thus as emergence only with respect to human observers and their limited
analytic tools. In this essay I will argue that we can still understand the emergence of novel forms of causality without attributing it to the introduction
of unprecedented physical laws. Indeed, I will argue that only to the extent that an unbroken chain of causal principles links such higher-order
phenomena as consciousness to more basic physical processes will we have an adequate theory of emergence. In
the last decades of the
twentieth century the concept of emergence has taken on a merely descriptive function in many
fields. It is applied to any case of the spontaneous production of complex dynamical patterns from
uncorrelated interactions of component parts. This shift from a largely philosophical to this more
descriptive usage of the term emergence has been strongly influenced by the increasing use of computational simulations to study
complex systems. Some of the more elaborate examples of these phenomena have been the topics of so-called chaos and complexity
theories, and have become commonplace in computational models of dynamical systems, cellular automata, and simulations of non-equilibrium
thermodynamic processes. This
more general conception of emergence has been adopted by many other fields where
the social sciences. Evolutionary and mental processes are also
treated as producing emergent effects, though the complexity of evolution, not to mention cognition
compared with dynamical systems, suggests that more subtle distinction between kinds of
emergence may be necessary (see below). Because of this terminological promiscuity there is likely to be
no common underlying causal principle that ties all these uses together. Nevertheless, I think that with
care a technical usage tied to a well-characterized class of empirical exemplars can be articulated for
which a clear theory of emergent processes can be formulated. The exemplars of emergent phenomena that serve as
complex interaction effects may be relevant, such as in
guides for this analysis occupy a middle position in the taxonomy of different emergent dynamics that I describe below. They represent a wellunderstood set of physical and computational systems that all share a form-amplifying, form-propagating, form-replicating feature. This feature is
exhibited irrespective of whether they are physical or computational phenomena. These phenomena are often called self-organizing, because their
regularities are not externally imposed but generated by iterative interaction processes occurring in the media that comprise them. They serve as a
useful starting point because they allow us to extrapolate both upward to more complex living phenomena and downward to simpler, merely
mechanistic phenomena. I
decry using emergence as an anti-reductionistic code word in holistic criticisms of
standard explanations. In this use, the concept of emergence is a place holder, indicating points
where standard reductionistic accounts seem to be incomplete in explaining apparent
discontinuities. In this negative usage, emergence serves only as a philosophically motivated
promissory note for a missing explanation that, critics argue, is needed to flll in a gap. In contrast, the
purpose of the present essay is to outline a technical sense of emergence that explicitly describes a specifc class of
causal topologies (i.e. self-constituting causal structures) and then attempts to show how this may help to explain
many of the attributes that have motivated the emergence concept. This approach avoids engaging
the pointless semantic debates about the completeness of reductionism or dealing with metaphysical
questions about the ontological status of emergence. The term will only be applied to well-understood empirical processes,
and yet I will argue that it does indeed mark the transition to unprecedented and indecomposable causal architectures. It may be wondered, then, what
more besides a taxonomic exercise is provided by identifying the emergent architectural features of known physical processes? By
providing an
explicit account of how apparent reversals of causal logic come about, how variant forms of these
processes are related to one another, and what aspects of their dynamic organization are most
critical to the development of these attributes, we can gain critical perspective on the apparent
discontinuities between simple mechanistic and teleological models of causality.
Complexity can’t explain human interactions—it doesn’t account for cooperation
Snooks 07 (Graeme D., Foundation Timothy Coghlan Research Professor Institute of Advanced Studies
Australian National University, 1989-2010, Executive Director Institute of Global Dynamics Systems
Canberra, Australia, since 2010 “SELF-ORGANISATION OR SELFCREATION? FROM SOCIAL
PHYSICS TO REALIST DYNAMICS” Social Evolution and History, 6.1, March, online:
http://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140541/)
Cooperation is a vital but problematical concept in social physics. Cooperation is vital because the idea of
order on the edge of chaos – self-organised criticality – is a frightening one for physicists who have little
understanding of the self-sustaining nature of human society. Cooperation is seen as a way of avoiding the
descent into chaos. One commentator writes: ‘If we know that cooperation is possible, even in a world that
lacks altruism, we have no reason to despair’ (Ball 2004: 563). And cooperation is problematical for social
physicists because complexity theory cannot explain it persuasively. Self-organisation theory is all
about physical interaction – or primitive competition – not about working together on a joint life pursuit.
Indeed, no supply-side theory – whether it beneo-Darwinist or game theoretic – can deal successfully
with cooperation as it appears in the real world (Snooks 2003). It is for the above reasons that some
physical and social scientists, convinced of the importance of self-organisation theory, are concerned about
the implications of the Snooks-Panov algorithm. This algorithm is a mathematical formulation showing that
the process of biological/technological transformation over the past 4,000 myrs has occurred exponentially
(Snooks 1996: 79–82, 92–95, 402–405; Snooks 2005a: 229–231; Panov 2005). These scholars are concerned,
unnecessarily, that the checks and balances required to prevent the order of human society from descending
into chaos are not sufficiently robust (Nazaretyan 2005a-c; Panov 2005). Their unwarranted concern is
primarily the result of the limitations of a supply-side complexity theory. As my demand-side dynamicstrategy theory shows, robust checks and balances do in fact exist, with the result that the exponential
growth of life and human society has occurred over the past 4,000 myrs, and will continue to occur, at a
constant, not an increasing,compound rate of growth (Snooks 2005b; 2005c). Human society is not about
to launch itself into the chasm of chaos, because strategic agents are past masters at managing
feedback. How do social physicists attempt to resolve this dilemma – of cooperation or chaos – which is of
their own making. The role of governments in compelling cooperation and punishing transgressors is usually
considered but finally rejected by all except those with authoritarian tendencies. So, in hope rather than
conviction, it is suggested that game theory – another supply-side approach – might provide the answer all
concerned social physicists are looking for. This would be a happy outcome indeed, because game theory was
the joint product of the statistical physicist John Von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern,
which resulted in the celebrated Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944. The often-expressed
hope of social physicists is that ‘cooperation can evolve’. It is believed that through repeated interactions,
players in the game of life will learn from past errors and develop ‘mutual trust’. One problem with this line
of argument is that the results of organised games are not encouraging. In the late 1970s, Robert Axelrod
(1984) organised a series of internet tournaments to discover how interactive games could be most effectively
played. He found that there is no ‘best’ way to play these games, as it all depends on who the participants are
and what tactics (‘strategies’ in this context is a misnomer) they are convinced in advance will win – which
merely demonstrates that the physical interaction model makes little sense. What did emerge clearly from
these games is that even when convinced cooperators made initial gains, they were always ultimately
vulnerable to rogue defectors. Even a small band of defectors could totally destroy a cooperative culture.
Some have concluded that only a strong and harsh central government could prevent this, which is hardly a
solution for liberal democracies. And, of course, this brings us back to the very reason that game theory was
resorted to by social physicists in the first place! It is also clear from any realist stance that game theory is not
well founded. First, games like ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ and ‘tit-for-tat’ (in its various forms) are highly artificial
and unrealistic. They are merely the result of arbitrary rules that can be changed to obtain the outcomes one
desires. In reality, the rules of engagement are set by strategic demand in any life system. Second, the
implications of this approach for our understanding of reality are metaphysical. It suggests that life resembles
a supply-side computer world in which the rules of interaction are determined and arbitrarily changed by an
all-powerful being from outside the system. Game theory, as in ACE ‘artificial’ societies, requires ‘God’ to
make it work – to generate order and prevent chaos. The only solution to this problem is a robust
general dynamic theory that is capable of generating all the necessary rules of engagement
endogenously. This brings us to the third and most fundamental problem. Social physicists have failed to
recognise the existence, let alone the role, of ‘strategic exchange’, which is the central feature of a demanddominated general dynamic theory. Social physics is, as I have mentioned before, like one hand clapping, as it
focuses solely on the supply-side interaction between agents. In doing so, it fails to appreciate the
existence of a dominant demand side that shapes the social order as well as the rules of engagement.
It is, as we have seen, the demand side that provides the ‘directionality’ lacking in self-organisation
theory. Strategic demand, which changes as the dominant dynamic strategy unfolds, calls forth a joint
response from all active agents in any society. This is the process of strategic exchange. And in this
process, trust is invested by individuals in the successful strategic pursuit – reflected in an increasing material
prosperity – and not in each other. Cooperation is the outcome. When the success of the strategic
pursuit wanes, both trust and cooperation decline and, under conditions of extreme crisis, evaporate
completely. Competition, or interaction, between agents is a phenomenon that is secondary to ‘strategic
cooperation’. Order, therefore, is the outcome of a successfully unfolding dominant dynamic
strategy. The anxiety expressed by social physicists about sustaining order on the edge of chaos is
the outcome of a fundamentally flawed theory – a science fiction. There can be no social physics, only
‘social stratology’ – a new study of the dynamics of the strategic pursuit.
Body Scanners Defense
Squo Solves
Status quo solves—full-body scanners being removed now.
Ahlers 13—(Mike M., “TSA removes body scanners criticized as too revealing,” CNN, 5/30,
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/29/travel/tsa-backscatter/)//FJ
The harshest critics labeled them "virtual strip searches." Airport passenger screening that produced particularly realistic full-body images using
backscatter technology. Others also expressed health concerns about low doses of radiation from the X-rays underpinning those scans. Well, it's all
over now as the
Transportation Security Administration says it has met a June 1 deadline to remove all 250 backscatter
machines from U.S. airports. Travelers will still go through other full-body scans that rely on a system that uses radio waves and
produces less detailed body imaging. The millimeter wave machines raise fewer privacy and virtually no health concerns. "I think from the
privacy perspective, that (the elimination of backscatter machines) has to be considered a victory," said Marc
Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The TSA maintained that the backscatter machines, manufactured by Rapiscan Systems, were
safe and effective. The agency had developed protocols to assure that screeners who saw imagery of passengers never saw the passengers themselves.
But Congress
voted to require all body scanners to have privacy-protecting software, and the TSA announced
in February it was phasing out backscatter systems because they could not meet the new standard. The last
backscatter machines were removed about two weeks ago, a TSA spokesman said. All 250 units were removed at Rapiscan's expense, the agency said.
New scanners solve
Tek84, no date ("Body Scanner Continued" http://www.tek84.com/bodyscanner-more.html)
Current backscatter X-ray body scanners are based upon the technology invented by Dr. Smith in 1992 (Secure 1000). These systems were designed as
single sided units. Persons would stand in front of the refrigerator-sized machine and be scanned at least twice (front and
back poses) and perhaps as many as four times (additional left and right side poses) to attain full coverage over the body. Vendors have recently introduced twosided systems by placing two of the base units face-to-face; this allows single pose (front and back) scanning which is more convenient in high throughput applications.
Ait84
is a two-sided (single pose) system designed from scratch, utilizing state-of-the-art technology to overcome three problems of
current technology:¶ First, Ait84 is "Dual Mode" and acquires 5 views of the passenger; thereby improving detection of the
hardest to find threats that can be hidden in private/groin areas or on the sides of the body. ¶ Ait84 acquires these Dual Mode images within the
passenger dose limits prescribed by the "ANSI N43.17 General Use" standard that is recognized by the TSA. Furthermore, all dual mode images
are acquired within the same scan time required by current technologies. ¶ Second, by acquiring dual mode 5 view-images, AIT84 is able to screen the feet,
turbans, hijab, burqa, and some casts and prosthetics - far surpassing the capabilities of other body scanners. Other scanners are
unable to screen these items and passengers are subjected to additional hand searches and delays. In this way,
AIT84 provides fair and equal screening for all persons - thereby improving throughput and convenience.
Many single pose portals are now installed at US airports - the fundamental design of these systems is now 20 years old. Ait84 is a next generation body scanner.
Alt to Scanners is Worse
Full-body scanners don’t invade privacy rights and the alternative is worse.
Cendrowicz 10—the Brussels correspondent for TIME magazine (Leo, “Can Airport Body Scanners Stop
Terrorist Attacks?,” TIME, 1/5,http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1951529,00.html)//FJ
Even following the attempted attack on the Northwest flight, critics remain resolutely opposed to the
machines. "A knee-jerk reaction which sees body scanners, with their known drawbacks of passenger delays and privacy threats, as a magic solution
is a bad move," says Sarah Ludford, a British member of the European Parliament. "In the Christmas Day case, as in the 9/11 and 7/7 [London]
bombings, the failure was not to join the dots of available information." Advocates of civil liberties agree. Simon Davies, director of the
London-based human-rights watchdog Privacy International, describes the scanners as a "fashionable and unproven technology" and an "assault on
the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate." But Stephen Phipson, president of Britain-based
Smiths Detection, the world's largest maker of full-body scanners,
insists that the machines only produce images that
show the outlines of the human body, not anatomical parts. "The privacy concerns are valid," he says. "But our
software can blur out parts of the body. And the scanners are far less intrusive than the traditional pat
down of the body." At the U.S. airports where scanners have been installed, security officers must look at the images in
isolated rooms and are not allowed to have any piece of equipment, such as a camera or mobile phone, that
could be used to capture or copy the images.
Even if body scanners aren’t perfect, they’re the best option we have.
Mowery et al. 14—sixth-year graduate student at UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and
Engineering (Keaton, “Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner,” Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security
Symposium, August 2014, pg. 14, https://www.radsec.org/secure1000-sec14.pdf)//FJ
Despite the flaws we identified, we are not able to categorically reject TSA’s claim that AITs represent
the best available tradeoff for airport passenger screening. Hardened cockpit doors may mitigate the hijacking threat from
firearms and knives; what is clearly needed, with or without AITs, is a robust means for detecting explosives. The millimeter-wave scanners
currently deployed to airports will likely behave differently from the backscatter scanner we studied. We
recommend that those scanners, as well as any future AITs— whether of the millimeter-wave or backscatter [34] variety— be subjected to
independent, adversarial testing, and that this testing specifically consider software security
TSA Accountable
TSA regulations check
TSA, no date (https://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/transgender-travelers)
TSA recognizes the concerns members of the transgender community may have with undergoing the security
screening process at our Nation’s airports and is committed to conducting screening in a dignified and respectful
manner. These travel tips will explain the various screening processes and technologies travelers may encounter at security checkpoints.¶ Preparing
for Travel¶ Making Reservations: Secure Flight requires airlines to collect a traveler’s full name, date of birth, gender and Redress Number (if
applicable) to significantly decrease the likelihood of watch list misidentification. Travelers are encouraged to use the same name, gender, and birth
date when making the reservation that match the name, gender, and birth date indicated on the government-issued ID that the traveler intends to use
during travel.¶ Packing a Carry-on: All carry-on baggage must go through the screening process. If
a traveler has any medical equipment
or prosthetics in a carry-on bag, the items will be allowed through the checkpoint after completing the
screening process. Travelers may ask that bags be screened in private if a bag must be opened by an officer to resolve an
alarm. Travelers should be aware that prosthetics worn under the clothing that alarm a walk through metal detector or appear as an anomaly during
Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) screening may result in additional screening, to include a thorough pat-down. Travelers
may request a
private screening at any time during the security screening process.¶ Contacting TSA in Advance of Travel: Travelers may
contact TSA prior to a flight through the TSA Contact Center at 1-866-289-9673 and TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov.¶ The Screening Process¶ Private
Screening: Screening
can be conducted in a private screening area with a witness or companion of the traveler’s
choosing. A traveler may request private screening or to speak with a supervisor at any time during the screening process.¶ Travel Document
Checker: The traveler will show their government-issued identification and boarding pass to an officer to ensure the identification and boarding pass
are authentic and match. Transgender travelers are encouraged to book their reservations such that they match the gender and name data indicated on
the government-issued ID.¶ Walk Through Metal Detector: Metal detectors are in use at all airports.¶ Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT):
Screening with advanced imaging technology is voluntary and travelers may “opt out” at any time. Travelers who
“opt out” of the AIT screening are required to undergo a thorough pat-down by an officer of the same gender as the traveler presents.¶ New
Advanced Imaging Technology Software: TSA
new software called Automated
has upgraded all millimeter wave advanced imaging technology units with
Target Recognition to further enhance privacy protections by eliminating the
image of an actual traveler and replacing it with a generic outline of a person.¶ Pat-Down: A pat-down may be performed if there is an alarm
of the metal detector, if an anomaly is detected using advanced imaging technology, if an officer determines that the traveler is wearing non-form
fitting clothing, or on a random basis. If
a pat-down is chosen or otherwise necessary, private screening may be
requested. Pat-downs are conducted by an officer of the same gender as presented by the individual at the
checkpoint.¶ Prosthetics: A TSA Officer may ask you to lift/raise your clothing to screen a prosthetic (only if doing so would not reveal a sensitive
area). Sensitive areas should not be exposed during the screening process.¶ Behavior Detection Program: Behavior Detection
Officers screen travelers using non-intrusive behavior observation and analysis techniques to identify potentially high-risk passengers. Officers are
designated to detect individuals exhibiting behaviors that indicate they may be a threat to aviation and/or transportation security. Individuals exhibiting
specific observable behaviors may be referred for additional screening, which can include a pat-down and physical inspection of carry-on baggage.¶
TSA recognizes that exhibiting some of these behaviors does not automatically mean a person has terrorist or
criminal intent. Referrals for additional screening are solely based on specific observed behaviors.¶ Reporting
Travel Issues or Concerns¶ Travelers who believe they have experienced unprofessional conduct at a security
checkpoint are encouraged to request a supervisor at the checkpoint to discuss the matter immediately or to
submit a concern to TSA’s Contact Center at: TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov.¶ Travelers who believe they have
experienced discriminatory conduct because of a protected basis may file a concern with TSA’s Office of Civil Rights
& Liberties, Ombudsman and Traveler Engagement at: Civil Rights for Travelers.¶ Travelers may also file
discrimination concerns with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at:
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
TSA Cares solves
MDA, no date ("TSA Cares to Aid Travelers with Disabilities" http://www.mda.org/quest/tsa-cares-aidair-travelers-disabilities)
People with disabilities, and especially those who use wheelchairs or other assistive equipment, have at times experienced overly
intrusive and embarrassing TSA searches; been forbidden to board planes with some types of respiratory
equipment; and in some instances not been allowed to fly at all.¶ TSA Cares is a new toll-free telephone help line
that the agency says should alleviate those problems.¶ Travelers who hope to expedite their passage through the security webs at
most airports are advised to call (855) 787-2227 at least 72 hours before their flight. The TSA Cares system operates Monday through
Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, except on federal holidays. Callers can ask questions about screening policies and
procedures, and what they can expect at security checkpoints.¶ One thing that hasn’t changed is the requirement that everyone
still must be screened before entering airports’ secure areas. The fashion in which the screening is conducted will depend on
passengers’ physical abilities and any assistive devices they may bring with them. That’s where a call to TSA
Cares may help avoid miscommunication.¶ If problems still arise at the terminal, all travelers are guaranteed the
right to speak to a TSA supervisor simply by asking to do so.¶ For those who have bumped heads with TSA screeners in the
past, this new program may seem like it’s a decade overdue. The agency explains that it consulted with a large number of disability
rights and medical condition advocacy organizations — 70 of them, including MDA — before designing and putting
into action the TSA Cares program. The agency meets with a coalition of those groups quarterly to determine
how well it’s doing at meeting their expectations.
TSA self-reflexive
TSA, 2013 ("TSA Hosts 11th annual disability and multicultural coalition conference")
http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2013/09/24/tsa-hosts-11th-annual-disability-and-multicultural-coalitionconference
WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hosted nearly 40 disability
and multicultural
organizations at the 11th Annual TSA Coalition Conference held at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Sept. 19,
2013. The TSA Disability and Multicultural Coalition include leaders from organizations representing various disabilities,
cultural and religious communities.¶ The annual conference brings together coalition members and TSA senior
leaders to discuss advances in transportation security screening and achievable best practices to improve the screening
experience for coalition members and their constituencies.¶ “TSA commends the coalition for its devoted advocacy work on behalf of so
many travelers,” said TSA Deputy Administrator John W. Halinski, who spoke at the conference to discuss TSA’s risk-based, intelligence-driven
approach to transportation security. “The conference
reinforces TSA’s ongoing commitment to the best and most
efficient transportation security for all travelers, including the multicultural community and those with
disabilities.”¶ “As TSA continues to evolve, we have significantly expanded our unique Passenger Support Specialists program,” said Kimberly
Walton, TSA assistant administrator, Office of Civil Rights and Liberties, Ombudsman and Traveler Engagement. “More than 3,000 specially
trained TSA employees are voluntarily committed to assisting passengers who require additional assistance during
security checkpoint screening. Improving the quality of our training remains a top priority. We are committed to the ongoing
education of our workforce to accommodate the needs of travelers from the various disability and multicultural groups.Ӧ
This year’s conference focused on improving the security screening experience for travelers with disabilities and
individuals from religious and cultural groups. Speakers from TSA shared the latest information regarding new TSA screening
initiatives, including enhanced employee training and the continued progress of risk-based security initiatives.
Additionally, the conference included an overview of TSA Pre✓™ and an opportunity to engage in an optional TSA Pre✓™ demonstration.¶
Coalition members and event attendees provided feedback and ideas from their respective communities in order
to engage in a dialogue about the security screening process.¶ More than 40 disability groups, multicultural groups and federal agencies attended the
conference. The groups represented included: American Diabetes Association, Muslim Public Affairs Council, National Association of the Deaf,
National Center for Transgender Equality, National Council on Disability, National Council on Independent Living and Sikh American Legal Defense
and Education Fund.¶ # # #¶ TSA Cares:¶ TSA Cares is a help line to assist travelers with disabilities and medical conditions. TSA recommends that
passengers call 72 hours ahead of travel to for information about what to expect during screening. Travelers may call TSA Cares toll free at 1-855-7872227 prior to traveling with questions about screening policies, procedures and what to expect at the security checkpoint. TSA
Cares will serve
as an additional, dedicated resource specifically for passengers with disabilities, medical conditions or other
circumstances or their loved ones who want to prepare for the screening process prior to flying. Since its launch in
December 2011, more than 27,000 passengers with disabilities and their families have called TSA Cares seeking information. Many passengers were
referred to TSA’s Disability Branch in Washington for additional support for their upcoming travel.¶ Passenger Support Specialists:¶ The Passenger
Support Specialist (PSS)
program is comprised of Transportation Security Officers and Supervisors who have
received special training to provide assistance and resolve traveler-related screening concerns. Training for Passenger
Support Specialists includes enhanced training from TSA and the disability and multicultural community on assisting
individuals with special needs, communicating with passengers by listening and explaining, and disability
etiquette and disability civil rights. Travelers requiring special accommodations or concerned about checkpoint screening may ask a
checkpoint officer or supervisor for a Passenger Support Specialist who will provide on-the-spot assistance.¶
Aff impacts exaggerated
Security outweighs and they exaggerate
Al D'Amato, 2010 ("The Small Price to Pay for Our Safety", http://liherald.com/stories/The-small-priceto-pay-for-oursafety,29218?content_source=&category_id=34&search_filter=&event_mode=&event_ts_from=&list_type
=most_commented&order_by=&order_sort=&content_class=&sub_type=&town_id=)
More than 40 million people were expected to travel over the Thanksgiving weekend. We must ask ourselves, Are
we willing to sacrifice our
safety to protect our personal freedoms?¶ You know what I think? Keeping us safe in the “friendly” skies should be
our top priority. The TSA isn’t our enemy, friends. Our enemy is Al Qaeda, and this is one instance when I can say that I don’t mind if
Big Brother government steps in to keep those who want to harm this country off our airplanes.¶ How soon we forget. The threat to our
airport security didn’t end with Sept. 11. Just a year later, Richard Reid pleaded guilty to terrorism for his attempt
to blow up an airplane by detonating a shoe bomb. Last Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a plane with
a powerful plastic explosive sewn into his underwear. Luckily he was unable to detonate the explosive on the plane and was
apprehended. However, we can’t always rely on luck.¶ Just think, if Abdulmutallab had been forced to go through the body
scanner or pat-down, he never would have been able to board that plane.¶ In a recent New York Post editorial, U.S. Rep.
Peter King pointed out that, unfortunately, the media has once again slanted the debate and created a frenzy. He wrote,
“If you listen to the debate you get the impression that one day the TSA said, okay, let’s make everybody
naked on the body-scanners. And without any idea of the eight or nine years of what’s gone on before and
what’s been tested.”
Surveillance is inevitable and doesn’t cause violence
Simon 14 [William H., Professor of Law at Columbia University - Law School, October 2014, “In Defense of
the Panopticon,” Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 14-412, Stanford Public Law Working Paper No.
2492211, https://www.google.com/search?q=william+h.+simon&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8]
In urban areas, most people’s activity outdoors and in the common spaces of buildings is recorded most of the time. Surveillance cameras
are everywhere. When people move around, their paths are registered on building access cards or subway fare cards or automobile toll devices.
Their telephone and e-mail communications, internet searches, and movements are tracked by telephone companies and other intermediaries. All their
credit card transactions – which for many people, means nearly all of their transactions -- are documented by time, place, and
substance. The health system extracts and records detailed information about their psychic and bodily functions. Anyone arrested, and many who
fear arrest, in the criminal justice system typically surrender a variety of personal information and often have to submit to ongoing monitoring. Even
within the home, water and energy consumption is monitored, and some people choose to install cameras to monitor children or protect against
burglars. To many people, this society looks like the Panopticon – a prison designed as a circular tower so that the inmates can be
easily observed by a centrally located authority figure. Jeremy Bentham originated the Panopticon idea as a low-cost form of subjugation for convicted
criminals. Michel Foucault adopted it as a metaphor for what he regarded as the insidiously pervasive forms of social control in contemporary society.
To him, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and government agencies all engaged in repressive forms of surveillance analogous to the Panopticon. In the
United States, paranoid political style has been associated traditionally with the right and the less educated. But Foucault
helped made it attractive to liberal intellectuals. His contribution was largely a matter of style. Foucault was the most moralistic of
social theorists, but he purported to disdain morality (“normativity”) and refused to acknowledge, much less defend, the
moral implications of his arguments. He gave intellectual respectability to the three principal tropes of the paranoid style. First, there is
the idea of guilt by association. The resemblance between some feature of a strikingly cruel or crackpot regime of the
past or in fiction (especially in 1984) and a more ambiguous contemporary one is emphasized in order to condemn
the latter. Thus, the elaborate individualized calibration of tortures in 18th and 19th century penology is used to make us feel uncomfortable about
the graduated responses to noncompliance in contemporary drug treatment courts. Orwell’s image of television cameras
transmitting images from inside the home to the political police is used to induce anxiety about devices that
monitor electricity usage so that the hot water tank will re-heat during off-peak hours. The second trope of the
paranoid style is the portrayal of virtually all tacit social pressure as insidious. What people experience as voluntary
choice is substantially conditioned by unconscious internalized dispositions to conform to norms, and a key
mechanism of such conformity is the actual, imagined, or anticipated gaze of others. Almost everyone who thinks about it
recognizes that such pressures are potentially benign, but people differ in their rhetorical predispositions
toward them. The individualist streak in American culture tends to exalt individual choice in a way that makes social
influence suspect. Foucault disdained individualism, but he introduced a conception of “power” that was so vague
and sinister that it could be applied to make almost any social force seem creepy. When Neil Richards
writes in the Harvard Law Review that surveillance “affects the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched,
giving the watcher greater power to influence or direct the subject of surveillance,” he is channeling Foucault. So is Julie Cohen, when she
writes in the Stanford Law Review: “Pervasive monitoring of every first move or false start will, at the margin, incline choices toward the bland and the
mainstream.” We have come a far cry from Jane Jacobs’s idea of “eyes on the street” as the critical foundation of urban vibrancy. For Jacobs,
the
experience of being observed by diverse strangers induces, not anxiety or timidity, but an empowering sense of
security and stimulation. It makes people willing to go out into new situations and to experiment with new
behaviors. Eyes-on-the-street implies a tacit social pact that people will intervene to protect each other’s safety but that they will refrain from
judging their peers’ non-dangerous behavior. Electronic surveillance is not precisely the same thing as Jacobean eyes-on-the-street,
but it does offer the combination of potentially benign intervention and the absence of censorious judgment
that Jacobs saw as conducive to autonomy.
No impact outside of vague buzzwords that can be mystically asserted in any context
– assign it zero political value or predictive power
Mwajeh 5 [Z Al-Mwajeh, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and Research
Department of English, “CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS
EMBODIED (MUSLIM) OTHERS”, August 2005,
https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20Al-Mwajeh.pdf?sequence=1]
However, I also think that key
postmodernism tenets of radical alterity, incommensurability and undecidability
cannot be easily thematized in writing, nor can they be realized in praxis. They are aporiatic. The only way to explicate their
meanings and possibilities is through using modernist vocabulary they initially oppose and deconstruct.
Sometimes, thematizing these aporiatic concepts, one lapses into cryptic and even incantational figurative language,
a practice that exposes the practical limitation and limited accessibility of such cherished concepts (or
non-concepts). As a result, their translation into, or coextension with, lived realities become basically
hypothetical, too. Consequently, the abstract and idealized postmodern concepts verge on, and intersect with, mystic,
(sometimes Biblical) allusions and traditions, a situation that problematizes their political value and descriptive
power in the realm of action. For example, in Levinasian thought, knowing the other is incompatible with preserving its alterity. All
representational endeavors reduce, or fail to capture, what they supposedly represent not only due to imperfect linguistic mediums, but also due to the
fact that representation itself is a logocentric institution. It represents the other or the object from the perspective of the Same, usually a priori
reducing its uniqueness or sublimity to the known, quantifiable and predictable. To curb such modernist reductive practices, Levinas’s alterity
escapes all modernist categories as it is an Other not in a relational or quantifiable way. Rather, it is an Other in
the sense of eliding comprehension and representation. Such Other resembles Levinas’s (Biblical) conception of God as absolute
Alterity where our epistemological categories or mind cannot contain or represent Him. More important, the ethics of alterity usually
soars above urgent concrete issues that involve politically and economically charged self-other
transactions. Levinas’s other is ‘disembodied,’ not in Dr. Laing’s sense (e.g. The Divided Self). Rather, Levinas’s alterity
cannot be substantiated. Defining or embodying the other violates its alterity and sublimity. Hence, any
grand appeal such ethics may initially spark becomes questionable when juxtaposed to our existing realities
and the factors that regulate self/other different modes of relations. 6 Statement of the Problem, Limitations of the Study
and Methods In this study, I attempt to dislodge postmodern ethics from its speculative and elitist tendencies through turning to self-other ethical
relations in various literary, discursive and political situations. I focus on bridging the gaps between theory and practice in order to expose the rifts and
blind spots in postmodern ethics of alterity. I think that the demands that ‘alterity’ as a generalized abstract term exert differ from those raised by
placed and temporalized others. For example, there is an urgent need to know how well Levinas’s concept of ‘absolute alterity’ or Derrida’s concept of
‘undecidability’ fares in political situations. In other words, to argue for prioritizing alterity as a new ethical turn is not the same as to motivate and
effect such prioritization. While I agree that Levinas’s “infinite obligation to the other” sounds uplifting, realizing/effecting such a formula is a
different story. Theoretically speaking, alterity is embraceable, but in lived realities, others fall on a spectrum of difference (sometimes opposition)
from self according to various criteria. Actually, there is a general tendency to posit self and others in terms of difference and opposition, when in fact
these are relative and operational terms. Polarizing self and other risks ossifying them into rigid negatively defining entities at the expense of their
interdependence and mutual constitution. The terms other and self do not only designate metaphysical figures or linguistic relations, they also describe
ontological realities. The metaphor of the ‘embrace’ may in it turn conceal a whole repertoire of idealism, philanthropy, and logocentrism/humanism.
Worse, sometimes Levinasian ethics seems so good to be true or realizable, at least if taken literally. For the
demand to meet the other on
a neutral ground, pre-ontologically, looks more like an aesthetic ideal/condition that cannot be achieved as
we always meet the other in context with our conceptions, motivations and values. Blaming Western
Metaphysics, or ontology, for the imbalanced self-other relations somehow brackets subject’s role and
agency in the self-other various equations.7 Moreover, we may indulge alterity ethics in closed and limited
contexts that favor our train of thought and take that for a sufficient action. We may embrace the other or theorize about
embracing and preserving alterity as ethics per se, but we may still live according to dialectical ‘alterity-blind’
institutions and practices. In such cases, we are either, consciously or subconsciously, acknowledging and maintaining
theory/practice divisions, or we know that acting ethically toward the other entails more than theorizing
about what form the most ethical relation should take. Acting ethically demands sharing power and
taking risks. More problematically, the theoretical formulas may not function in the first place as the roots
of ‘unethical’ self-other relations cannot be automatically corrected by theoretically replacing
modernist self-centered by alterity-centered ethics. Furthermore, most of the writings about postmodernism—engage strenuous
debates and often deploy elitist jargon, a practice that limits their accessibility and descriptive value. Very often philosophical and theoretical
elitist debates alienate larger audiences and may even thrive at the expense of addressing concrete self-other
transactions. To a certain degree, these debates are inflated and divorced from the stakes involved in political selfother lived transactions. Once one crosses the threshold of speculating about self-other relations into
considering them in light of indispensable concrete constituencies of race, gender, nationality,
power grid, and other variables, cherished postmodern key terms—such as undecidability, alterity,
and non-judgmentalism—become anomalous. Hard lived realities demand resolutions and involve
recalcitrant stakes. To solely dwell on the linguistic/discursive as the origin of self/other imbalance is to
overlook the complex and intricate relations among discourses and actions. To put it differently, there has to be
some mutual trafficking between metaphysics and lived realities, but one cannot be reduced to the other in
any straight predictable manner. Nor are their relations reducible to cause-effect ones where Western
Metaphysics’ privileging the subject and reducing the other/object is the causer, while racism, sexism, and
colonial exploitation are the effects. This does not deny that there exists a ‘cause-effect’ relation between thought and lived realities,
however. Alterity-centered postmodernism shows how modernist epistemology has failed to establish self-other
relations as basically ethical by relegating the other to the status of a hierarchically inferior object or
difference. But the downside to such critique is the transformation of the modernist individual/self into
postmodernist subject. The postmodernist subject may not be more than a node or a surface/cite constructed
by linguistic, economic and media systems. Thus, the ethical turn toward alterity loses its halo when one
considers the diminutive role played by human agency and intentionality. Emphasizing the negative side of
constructivism—being constructed by external or upper systems—postmodernism glosses over the subjects’ other various roles
in sustaining and continuing, sometimes disrupting, dominant epistemological, economic and political
systems. In other words, modernist subjects are primarily products of metaphysically pre-ordained itineraries
sidestepping other senses such as being a subject by initiating and performing actions by choice. If
subject primarily means subjected to, the ethics, responsibility and obligations, all become paradoxical.
Furthermore, Levinas’s dictum to pre-ontologically encounter alterity makes sense; he thinks that the ethical should, or actually does,
precede the ontological. But practically, such divisions may be divisions of convenience rather than of actuality
as if the political and ethical belonged to different modes of living. I think that we do not need to submit to modernist
disciplinary divisions of convenience nor do we need to separate the ethical from the political or from the ontological. I believe that ethics is not a
formula or a prescription we choose to apply or we choose to leave behind. Ethics
is intrinsic to action. Levinas’s move, however, has to be
desire to remove self other relations from under modernist epistemological reductions and
pragmatic/utilitarian arrangements that he wants to go back to a pure self-other encounter—before self-other dialectics. He wants to
encounter the other before reductive logic moves in. Yet such a move ends in an impasse. Leaping back into the preontological stems from Levinas’s ontological or epistemological consciousness. The irony is that one just
cannot exit the ontological and still use its structures and vocabularies. Still, Levinas’s ethical dictum exposes the working of
contextualized. It is his
unconscious ethnocentrism or conscious bias in our self-other relations, systems and existence, unless we always foreground alterity. Consequently,
alterity ethics is both a meta-ethical argument, or for some it constitutes a ‘moral principle,’ or a basic revelation about our human conditions: We are
always in relation to—indebted to—the other. We may choose to elide such a realization, but we cannot change it.
at: biopolitics impact
The thesis of biopolitics is wrong---it’s based on a faulty understanding of liberalism
Selby 13 [Jan, Senior Lecturer of IR at the University of Sussex, "The myth of liberal peace-building", March
13, Conflict, Security & Development, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2013]
Most of the above features are shared right across the liberal peace-building debate and have been advanced from any number of theoretical
perspectives. Thus it
has been claimed from a constructivist perspective that contemporary peace-building is rooted in
liberal ‘international norms’.36 Invoking Foucault, it has been argued that the liberal peace-building project is an
exercise in global bio-politics or governmentality, which aims to govern and construct liberal populations and
subjectivities.37 From a post-colonial perspective, liberal peace-building has been described as a colonial project,
‘cast in the mould of colonialism’, and aiming to restructure Southern societies in accordance with Northern metropolitan
ideology.38And in neo-Gramscian terms, peace-building has been critiqued as part of a transnational neo-liberal
project, ‘reflecting the hegemony of liberal values that reigns in global politics’.39 Right across this variegated theoretical
terrain, peace-building is represented as a liberal project, founded on liberal ideas, pushed forward by a decentralised plurality of institutions
irrespective of the particularity of war-endings and peace agreements, in which global consensus is counterposed by local dissensus or disorder. Yet
for all this trans-theoretical consensus, these shared emphases within liberal peace- building discourse constitute a
questionable foundation for the analysis of contemporary peacemaking. Again, this is not to suggest that the liberal peace-building
literature is without merit: the critical literature, in particular, provides much compelling evidence of the hubris of liberal internationalism, of the
destruction wrought by World Bank-IMF policies and of the frequent complicity of peace-building projects in coercive processes of state-building,
dispossession and subjugation. My contention is not that liberal peace- building research is without value, but that the
above parameters are
unnecessarily limiting, and can generate significant interpretive errors. To advance this case, my focus in the remainder of
this paper is on the relations between post-conflict peace-building on the one hand, and peace agreements and their negotiation on the other. What
this will reveal is that peace-building
is neither a discrete sphere of action, nor the dominant element within
contemporary peace processes; that states, strategy and geopolitics continue, as ever, to be crucial determinants
of these processes; and that the influence of liberalism, and the degree of global consensus over the liberal peace, are
significantly overstated within liberal peace- building discourse. We start by considering one
Biopolitical control is no longer a threat---crisis of the sovereign state has caused
violence to be abandoned
Short 5 [Jonathan, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought, York
University, “Life and Law: Agamben and Foucault on Governmentality and Sovereignty,” Journal for the
Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1]
Adding to the dangerousness of this logic of control, however, is that while there is a crisis of undecidability in the domain of life, it corresponds to a similar crisis at the
level of law and the national state. It should be noted here that despite
the new forms of biopolitical control in operation today, Rose
has become generally less dangerous in recent times than even in the early part of the last
century. At that time, bio- politics was linked to the project of the expanding national state in his opinion. In
disciplinary-pastoral society, bio-politics involved a process of social selection of those characteristics thought useful to
the nationalist project. Hence, according to Rose, "once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics
believes that bio-politics
has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation" (2001: 3). Disciplinary-pastoral bio- politics sets itself the task of eliminating "differences
coded as defects", and in pursuit of this goal the most horrible programs of eugenics, forced sterilization, and outright extermination, were enacted (ibid.: 3). If Rose is more
optimistic about bio-politics in 'advanced liberal' societies, it is because this
notion of 'national fitness', in terms of bio- political
competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous decline thanks in large part to a crisis of the
perceived unity of the national state as a viable political project (ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again, "the idea of 'society' as a single, if
heterogeneous, domain with a national culture, a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and the powers of a national political
government" no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the governmentalization of the state here, Rose
claims that the
territorial state, the primary institution of enclosure, has become subject to fragmentation along a
number of lines. National culture has given way to cultural pluralism; national identity has been
overshadowed by a diverse cluster of identifications, many of them transcending the national territory on which they take place, while the same
pluralization has affected the once singular conception of community (ibid.: 5). Under these conditions, Rose argues, the bio-political programmes of the
molar enclosure known as the nation-state have fallen into disrepute and have been all but abandoned.