Foucault Kritik Affirmative
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Varsity Division
Foucault Kritik Affirmative Answers – Table of Contents
Summary.............................................................................................................................................. 2
Glossary............................................................................................................................................ 3-4
Link Answers
Permutation – Do the Plan and the Alternative ..................................................................................... 5
Link Turn – Law Protects ...................................................................................................................... 6
Link Turn – Reforms Work .................................................................................................................... 7
Impact Answers
No Impact – No Endless Warfare .......................................................................................................... 8
No Impact – Panopticon Overly Paranoid ............................................................................................. 9
Impact Turn – Surveillance Liberates.................................................................................................. 10
Existence Outweighs Value to Life ...................................................................................................... 11
War Outweighs Structural Violence .................................................................................................... 12
Alternative Answers
No Alternative – Abstract Movements Fail .......................................................................................... 13
No Alternative – Rejections of the Law Lead to Abuse ....................................................................... 14
No Alternative – Rejecting Reformism Causes Global War ................................................................ 15
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Foucault Kritik Affirmative
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Summary
The Affirmative strategy against the Foucault Kritik should engage with the core of the criticism. The
Kritik says that anything short of full rejection of the surveillance state allows the normalization of
surveillance in society, which inevitably leads to the fulfillment of the surveillance state. There are
inherent issues with this logic that can be exploited by the Affirmative team.
First, the Affirmative can contend that the law and reforms have historically worked to broaden
protections of human rights, and while there have been instances where the law was used to restrict
human rights, the general trend is in the other direction. This refocuses the debate towards the
comparative analysis of empiricism and philosophical reasoning, and shifts the Negative towards
having to make more empirically-supported arguments.
Second, the Affirmative can attack the supposed harms of the surveillance state. Surely there must
be benefits to living in a safer society. Another area to focus on is the fact that surveillance gives the
state the ability to abuse its power, but that doesn’t prove the state will abuse its power. Refocus the
debate so that the Negative has to prove that the state will abuse its power, and the Affirmative
should be able to easily weigh the risk of the case solving for tangible harms against the low risk that
the state will abuse surveillance powers.
Third, the Affirmative should challenge the alternative presented by the Kritik. If nothing short of total
rejection of the surveillance state is necessary to combat it, then any acceptance of it by the Negative
also robs them of victory. In addition, question whether a total rejection is even possible. Finally, try
to see if there are any reasons why a total rejection of the state could also lead to other problems that
are even worse.
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Glossary (1/2)
Acculturation – The process of cultural change and psychological change that results following
meeting between cultures.
Accumulation – The acquisition or gradual gathering of something.
Biopower – A technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for managing populations. It
incorporates certain aspects of disciplinary power. If disciplinary power is about training the actions of
bodies, biopower is about managing the births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population.
Capital – Goods that can be used in the production of other goods that are made by humans, in
contrast to "land," which refers to naturally occurring resources such as geographical locations and
minerals. It is not used up immediately in the process of production, unlike raw materials or
intermediate goods.
Carcinogen – Any substance, radionuclide, or radiation that is an agent directly involved in causing
cancer.
COINTELPRO – A series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting
domestic political organizations.
Commodification – The transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other entities that
normally may not be considered goods, into a commodity, or something that can be bought and sold.
Discipline – A mechanism of power which regulates the behavior of individuals in the social body.
This is done by regulating the organization of space (architecture etc.), of time (timetables) and
people's activity and behavior (drills, posture, movement). It is enforced with the aid of complex
systems of surveillance. Foucault emphasizes that power is not discipline, rather discipline is simply
one way in which power can be exercised.
Exclusion – The examination of the situation of people existing on the margins of society is one of
the mainstays of Foucault's work. His analysis focuses on the 'negative structures' of society or
excluded groups, as opposed to more traditional approaches which focus on the mainstream.
Imperialism – a policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonization,
annexation, use of military force, or other means.
Institution - A society or organization that are utilized by the state in a way of freezing particular
relations of power so that a certain number of people are advantaged.
Liberalism – A political ideology, a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties and political
freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes economic freedom.
Necropolitics – The relationship between sovereignty and power over life and death.
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Glossary (2/2)
Nihilism – A philosophical doctrine that suggests the negation of one or more reputedly meaningful
aspects of life.
Normalization – The process of making “normal”.
Normative – Establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior.
Ontology – The philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as
the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of
philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or
may be said to exist, and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and
subdivided according to similarities and differences.
Orwellian – An adjective describing the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell
identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a
brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and
manipulation of the past, including the "unperson" – a person whose past existence is expunged from
the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments. Often, this includes the
circumstances depicted in his novels, particularly 1984.
Panopticon – A design for a prison produced by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century
which grouped cells around a central viewing tower. Although the prison was never actually built the
idea was used as a model for numerous institutions including some prisons. Foucault uses this as a
metaphor for the operation of power and surveillance in contemporary society.
Politicization – The act of transforming something outside of the realm of politics into something
inside the realm of politics.
Security – The concept that a government should protect the state and its citizens against all kind of
"national" crises through a variety of power projections, such as political power, diplomacy, economic
power, military might, and so on.
Totalitarianism – A political system in which the state holds total control over the society and seeks
to control all aspects of public and private life wherever possible.
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Permutation – Do the Plan and the Alternative
[___] Permutation – do the plan and implement the alternative. If implementing the plan can
still be a good idea even with some failures, the perm enables transformative potential.
Nunes, 2012
(Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies, João Nunes, Security
Dialogue 2012 43: 345, Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK, p. sage
publications)
This tendency in the literature is problematic for the critique of security in at least three ways. First, it
constitutes a blind spot in the effort of politicization. The assumption of an exclusionary, totalizing or
violent logic of security can be seen as an essentialization and a moment of closure. To be faithful to
itself, the politicization of security would need to recognize that there is nothing natural or necessary
about security – and that security as a paradigm of thought or a register of meaning is also a
construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance through practice. The exclusionary
and violent meanings that have been attached to security are themselves the result of social
and historical processes, and can thus be changed. Second, the institution of this apolitical
realm runs counter to the purposes of critique by foreclosing an engagement with the different
ways in which security may be constructed. As Matt McDonald (2012) has argued, because security
means different things for different people, one must always understand it in context.
Assuming from the start that security implies the narrowing of choice and the empowerment
of an elite forecloses the acknowledgment of security claims that may seek to achieve exactly
the opposite: alternative possibilities in an already narrow debate and the contestation of elite
power.5 In connection to this, the claims to insecurity put forward by individuals and groups run the
risk of being neglected if the desire to be more secure is identified with a compulsion towards
totalization, and if aspirations to a life with a degree of predictability are identified with violence.
Finally, this tendency blunts critical security studies as a resource for practical politics. By
overlooking the possibility of reconsidering security from within – opting instead for its
replacement with other ideals – the critical field weakens its capacity to confront head-on the
exceptionalist connotations that security has acquired in policymaking circles. Critical scholars run
the risk of playing into this agenda when they tie security to exclusionary and violent practices,
thereby failing to question security actors as they take those views for granted and act as if
they were inevitable. Overall, security is just too important – both as a concept and as a political
instrument – to be simply abandoned by critical scholars. As McDonald (2012: 163) has put it, If
security is politically powerful, is the foundation of political legitimacy for a range of actors, and
involves the articulation of our core values and the means of their protection, we cannot afford to
allow dominant discourses of security to be confused with the essence of security itself. In sum, the
trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations. The
politicization of security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security
ideas and practices; however, it has paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the meaning of
security itself. By foreclosing the possibility of alternative notions of security, this imbalanced
politicization weakens the analytical capacity of critical security studies, undermines its ability
to function as a political resource and runs the risk of being politically counterproductive.
Seeking to address these limitations, the next section revisits emancipatory understandings of
security.
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Link Turn – Law Protects
[___]
[___] Foucault's conception of power within the law is outdated---law now protects subjects
from state coercion.
Smith, 2000
(Carole, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at Univ of Manchester, “The sovereign state v
Foucault: law and disciplinary power”, The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, p. 291-2)
Foucault's analysis has much to offer in terms of his creative and radical thinking about the nature of
power, the relationship between power and knowledge, the role of disciplinary power as it works to
regulate the subject from without and to constrain the subject from within, and forms of modern
government. The rise of liberal democracy, the thrust of welfare policy, government by administrative
regulation and the enormous influence of expert knowledge and therapeutic intervention (Giddens.
1991; Rose. 1990; Miller and Rose. 1994) have all had an impact on law and operations of the
juridical field. I would argue, however, that Foucault's characterisation of law, in the context of
the modern liberal state, does not reflect our everyday experience of the means through which
power and government are exercised. Similarly, the role played by expert knowledge and
discursive power relations in Foucault's conceptualisation of modernity, such that law is fated to justify
its operations by 'perpetual reference to something other than itself* and to 'be redefined by
knowledge' (Foucault, 1991: 22), does not accord with the world of mundane practice. In their
sympathetic critique of his work. Hunt and Wickham (1998) point to the way in which Foucault's
treatment of sovereignty and law must necessarily lead him to neglect two related possibilities.
First, that law may effectively re-define forms of disciplinary power in its own terms and
second, that law and legal rights may act to protect the subject from the coercive influence of
such power. Reported judgments on sterilisation and caesarean interventions, without
consent, show how law can achieve both of these reversals of power. They also demonstrate
law's ability to turn the 'normalizing gaze’, as the production of expert knowledge, back upon
the normative behaviour of experts themselves.
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Link Turn – Reforms Work
[___]
[___] Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than pushing it
away.
Delgado 2009
(Richard, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including
six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American
Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor
Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does
Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590)
2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform.
Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to
create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to
disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to
the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that
the system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case
method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the
current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case
method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly
political fashion. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong.
Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land
is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples
how they should interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to
disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not.
In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to
them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of
paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat
now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some
incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away.
Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat.
The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘
critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether
total change, when it comes, will be what we want.
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Foucault Kritik Affirmative
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No Impact – No Endless Warfare
[___] There is no risk of endless warfare.
Gray 2007
(Colin, Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations and
Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford,
Founder and Senior Associate to the National Institute for Public Policy, formerly with the
International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson Institute, July 2007, “The Implications of
Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A Reconsideration”,
http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf)
7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so.
Most controversial policies contain within them the possibility of misuse. In the hands of a
paranoid or boundlessly ambitious political leader, prevention could be a policy for endless
warfare. However, the American political system, with its checks and balances, was designed
explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive from excessive folly. Both the Vietnam
and the contemporary Iraqi experiences reveal clearly that although the conduct of war is an
executive prerogative, in practice that authority is disciplined by public attitudes. Clausewitz made this
point superbly with his designation of the passion, the sentiments, of the people as a vital component
of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that power can be, and indeed is often, abused,
both personally and nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste for the apparent swift
decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the option. One might argue that the easy success
achieved against Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a similarly rapid
success against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In other words, the delights of military success can be habit
forming. On balance, claim seven is not persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A
country with unmatched wealth and power, unused to physical insecurity at home—notwithstanding
42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crime—is vulnerable to demands for policies that
supposedly can restore security. But we ought not to endorse the argument that the United
States should eschew the preventive war option because it could lead to a futile, endless
search for absolute security. One might as well argue that the United States should adopt a
defense policy and develop capabilities shaped strictly for homeland security approached in a
narrowly geographical sense. Since a president might misuse a military instrument that had a
global reach, why not deny the White House even the possibility of such misuse? In other
words, constrain policy ends by limiting policy’s military means. This argument has circulated
for many decades and, it must be admitted, it does have a certain elementary logic. It is the opinion of
this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy which includes the preventive option might lead to a
search for total security is not at all convincing. Of course, folly in high places is always possible,
which is one of the many reasons why popular democracy is the superior form of government. It
would be absurd to permit the fear of a futile and dangerous quest for absolute security to
preclude prevention as a policy option. Despite its absurdity, this rhetorical charge against
prevention is a stock favorite among prevention’s critics. It should be recognized and dismissed
for what it is, a debating point with little pragmatic merit. And strategy, though not always
policy, must be nothing if not pragmatic.
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No Impact – Panopticon Overly Paranoid
[___]
[___] Don’t be paranoid. The Panopticon isn’t omnipresent or destructive—video cameras
aren’t the end of the world.
Simon, 2014
(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.
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Impact Turn – Surveillance Liberates
[___]
[___] The safety of surveillance empowers one to experiment with new behaviors and is
conducive to autonomy.
Simon, 2014
(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)
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.
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Existence Outweighs Value to Life
[___]
[___] “No value to life” doesn’t outweigh—You should prioritize existence because value is
subjective and could change in the future.
Tännsjö, 2011
[Torbjörn, the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011,
“Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HStexter/shaltthou.pdf]
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then
according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this
does not mean that, each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when
I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to
collective actions as well. It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some even claim
that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim
that people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may
avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. It is also a possibility that,
even if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some may believe
that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future lives will be better. They may
be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future. From the point of view of
evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old
age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected
that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance,
known from psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we
do. My strong belief is that most of us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives
are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it is at least not very far-fetched to
think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic. Let us just for
the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if
this is so, we should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question
what we should do, each one of us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The
explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how
this will happen: ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are
quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's
anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself.
Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the
sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide. The
fact that all our lives lack meaning, if they do, does not mean that others will follow my
example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at least for a while
devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my
life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in
my life).
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War Outweighs Structural Violence
[___]
[___] Preventing war is a pre-requisite to preventing structural violence.
Folk, 1978
(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.
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No Alternative – Abstract Movements Fail
[___]
[___] The alternative fails—abstract movements won’t produce political results besides
violence. We should embrace the hard work of pragmatic reform.
Condit, 2015
(Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia,
“Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change,” Feb 4, 2015, Quarterly
Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015)
Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without
a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are
never certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for
reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite
clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to
gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian
states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by
predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic
movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for
that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first
iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions
has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure
of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of
that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to
the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century
otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That
rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined
forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as
dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult,
requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity than the typical
academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical
Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up
by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the
latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most
people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll get
rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant
local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis
of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language, and of the limitations
of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left
Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear
materially feasible.
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Foucault Kritik Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
No Alternative – Rejections of the Law Lead to Abuse
[___] No alternative to the law/legal system---other ideas bring more inequality and abuse.
Auerbach, 1983
(Jerold S., Professor of History at Wellesley, “Justice Without Law?”, 1983, p. 144-146)
Not incidentally, alternatives prevent the use of courts for redistributive purposes in the interest of
equality, by consigning the rights of disadvantaged citizens to institutions with minimal power to
enforce or protect them. It is, therefore, necessary to beware of the seductive appeal of alternative
institutions. They may deflect energy from political organization by groups of people with common
grievances; or discourage effective litigation strategies that could provide substantial benefits. They
may, in the end, create a two-track justice system that dispenses informal "justice" to poor people with "small"
claims and "minor" disputes, who cannot afford legal services, and who are denied access to courts. (Bar
associations do not recommend that corporate law firms divert their clients to mediation, or that business
deductions for legal expenses—a gigantic government subsidy for litigation—be eliminated.) Justice according
to law will be reserved for the affluent, hardly a novel development in American history but one that needs little
encouragement from the spread of alternative dispute-settlement institutions. It is social context and political
choice that determine whether courts, or alternative institutions, can render justice more or less accessible—
and to whom. Both can be discretionary, arbitrary, domineering—and unjust. Law can symbolize justice, or
conceal repression. It can reduce exploitation, or facilitate it. It can prohibit the abuse of power, or disguise
abuse in procedural forms. It can promote equality, or sustain inequality. Despite the resiliency and power of
law, it seems unable to eradicate the tension between legality and justice: even in a society of (legal) equals,
some still remain more equal than others. But diversion from the legal system is likely to accentuate that
inequality. Without legal power the imbalance between aggrieved individuals and corporations, or
government agencies, cannot be redressed. In American society, as Laura Nader has observed,
"disputing without the force of law ... [is| doomed to fail."7 Instructive examples document the
deleterious effect of coerced informality (even if others demonstrate the creative possibilities of indigenous
experimentation). Freed slaves after the Civil War and factory workers at the turn of the century, like
inner-city poor people now, have all been assigned places in informal proceedings that offer
substantially weaker safeguards than law can provide. Legal institutions may not provide equal justice
under law, but in a society ruled by law it is their responsibility. It is chimerical to believe that mediation or
arbitration can now accomplish what law seems powerless to achieve. The American deification of
individual rights requires an accessible legal system for their protection. Understandably, diminished
faith in its capacities will encourage the yearning for alternatives. But the rhetoric of "community" and "justice"
should not be permitted to conceal the deterioration of community life and the unraveling of substantive notions
of justice that has accompanied its demise. There is every reason why the values that historically are
associated with informal justice should remain compelling: especially the preference for trust, harmony, and
reciprocity within a communal setting. These are not, however, the values that American society encourages or
sustains; in their absence there is no effective alternative to legal institutions. The quest for community
may indeed be "timeless and universal."8 In this century, however, the communitarian search for justice
without law has deteriorated beyond recognition into a stunted off-shoot of the legal system. The historical
progression is clear: from community justice without formal legal institutions to the rule of law, all too often
without justice. But injustice without law is an even worse possibility, which misguided enthusiasm for
alternative dispute settlement now seems likely to encourage. Our legal culture too accurately expresses
the individualistic and materialistic values that most Americans deeply cherish to inspire optimism about the
imminent restoration of communitarian purpose.
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Foucault Kritik Affirmative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
No Alternative – Rejecting Reformism Causes Global War
[___]
[___] The alternative lacks a mechanism for resolving global violence—the impact is global
war.
Moore, 2004
(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 of these may 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 "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.
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