1AC
1AC – Advocacy Text
The United States should legalize marijuana in the United States.
1AC – War on Drugs
Marijuana prohibition is a flawed, racist and classist policy in the status
quo---US legalization initiates a step against this violent social control
Jelani Hayes 14, Media Intern at the Drug Policy Alliance, "Ending Marijuana Prohibition Must Take a
Historical Perspective", August 21, www.huffingtonpost.com/jelani-hayes/marijuana-prohibitionhistory_b_5697152.html
When the N Y Times called for the federal government to repeal its prohibition of marijuana
for
recreational use, production, and sale -- it did not rely solely on issues of the here and now
Instead, through the publication of seven
pieces, the
board provided a comprehensive argument in support of their stance
For the New York Times, history matters -- as it should for the legalization campaign
¶
Underlying marijuana prohibition is a familiar philosophy: to preserve social order and white supremacy
and secure profits for an influential few
Historically, this philosophy
has been advanced by governmental action, guided by special interests. The traditional tactics:
manufacturing mass fear, criminalizing the target
and profiting from their subjugation ¶
Cannabis prohibition did all three
The federal law that
makes possession of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of
hysteria in the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and AfricanAmericans , who were associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted history lives on in
current federal policy , which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is almost impervious to reason.
¶
business interests play a part in keeping
cannabis illegal pharmaceutical companies, drug-prevention nonprofits, law enforcement agencies, and
the private prison industry have an economic interest in criminalization, what is known as the drug
control industrial complex.
¶ The
United States should legalize marijuana . It should also end the drug war
¶ The war on drugs is a mechanism of social control -- not unlike African slavery, Jim Crow
or
relegation of immigrants to an illegal status or substandard existence
all of these
institutions were tools used to control and profit from the criminalization
of minority
communities
To address this cycle, we must put
cannabis prohibition (and the drug war) in its historical context and connect the dots where appropriate ¶
ew
fate --
ork
and let the states decide its
medicinal or
, such as
economics, science, public safety, and current levels of racial disparities in arrests and incarceration rates (all of which are important considerations).
editorial
more
, connecting today's legalization movement to the
past's criminalization crusade.
nationwide.
, it is permissible, even advisable, to construct profit-bearing institutions of social control.
or demoting them to a sub-citizen status,
.
. The Times editorial board dedicated an entire article to explaining this phenomenon. Part 3 of the series begins, "
"
This limited analysis refers to the refer madness hysteria and xenophobia that infiltrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration.
Additionally,
. Some
It pays big to help fight the war on drugs, and marijuana prohibition is a crucial facet of that effort. The Nation has recently called these interests "The Real Reason Pot is Still Illegal."
, which would be a tremendous and beautiful accomplishment, but it would not be
enough.
, alcohol Prohibition,
the systematic
. Different in their nature and severity,
, regulation, and dehumanization
. Legalizing marijuana will not alone rid society of the tendency to turn fear into hatred, hatred into regulation, and regulation into profit.
.
Already we have seen that the reality of legalization does not alone ensure justice or equality. As law professor and best selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander points out, thousands of black men
remain in jail or prison in Colorado (where licit weed has been on the market since January) while white men make money from the now legal marijuana market -- selling the drug just as the incarcerated men had done. She warns that legalization without reparation
is not sufficient, drawing the parallel to what happened to black Americans post-Reconstruction. "And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was imposed -- Jim Crow -- and another extraordinary movement arose and brought the old Jim Crow to
its knees...Americans said, OK, we'll stop now. We'll take down the whites-only signs, we'll stop doing that," she said. "But there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done except for Martin Luther King
Alexander's historical perspective is warranted because despite the size and
intensity of marijuana prohibition, of the drug war in its entirety, its purpose is not unlike that of Jim
Crow or other structural forms of social control and oppression
¶ We must
frame the campaigns for cannabis legalization across the states as civil rights movements -- as
institutional reform efforts -- so that the public might demand justice oriented outcomes from the
campaigns. We must also make the public aware of the dangerous relationship between profit and
criminalization so that they can identity the
dangerous
relationship between profit and
legalization. We must make legalization about more than raising tax revenue, increasing civil liberties,
and lowering arrests rates for possession
¶ In order to undue the damage
that the criminalization of marijuana specifically and the war on drugs more broadly have
caused, we must
retroactively apply reformed drug laws
we must undermine the
philosophies that allow for the construction of institutional harm, and we must be able to identify them
when they creep up again and be ready to take action against them
¶
make history matter so that it doesn't repeat itself -- again, and again, and
again
Day, one day out of the year. And I feel like, here we go again." ¶
. The drug war was never about drugs. Therefore, our solution to it can't be either.
potential
within the
(all of which are important and positive outcomes of legalization, nonetheless).
-- to
the extent that that is possible --
pay reparations and
. More importantly,
, to arm our minds and our bodies against the next wave of social oppression -- whatever and
wherever it may be and to whomever it may be applied.
.
This is my plea to
The war on drugs is a continuous extermination of minority populations
that must be stopped---as Americans, we must speak out in public spaces
about the injustice of laws
BW 12, Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75
Years of Racial Control: Happy Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brownwatch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-black-brown-men-75-years-ofracial.html
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana
As we
approach the 75th anniversary of marijuana prohibition in the United States on October 1, it is important to remember
why marijuana was deemed illicit in the first place, and why we as Americans must open our eyes to the
insidious strategy behind 75 years of failed policy and ruined lives . Marijuana laws were designed not to
control marijuana, but to control the Mexican immigrants who had brought this native plant with them to the U.S.
usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”- Harry Anslinger, first Drug Czar. From [HERE]
Fears over loss of jobs and of the Mexicans themselves led cities to look for ways to keep a close eye on the newcomers. In 1914, El Paso Texas became the first jurisdiction in the
This ban gave police the right to search, detain and question Mexican
immigrants without reason, except the suspicion that they were in possession of marijuana. Folklore started to erupt about the effect that marijuana had on
those who used it. As Harry Anslinger stated, “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.”¶ Fast forward to 2012. Marijuana is still an
illicit substance and the laws are still being used to justify the search, detainment and questioning of
populations deemed “untrustworthy” and “suspicious” by modern society, namely the poor and young men of color. A prime
example is New York’s Stop and Frisk program, which stopped nearly 700,000 people in 2011. Hailed as a strategy for removing guns and violent crime from the
streets, this method of stopping and questioning “suspicious” individuals, highlights the racial inequities associated with drug laws.
From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made up close to 90% of people stopped. This is not
U.S. to ban the sale and possession of marijuana.
limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, 12 times more likely to go to prison with a felony marijuana charge,
The strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and
imprison poor and minority populations must stop NOW . In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of
the benign nature of the marijuana plant, and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the
rampant misinformation about the effects of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering that a
marijuana CONVICTION can bring. In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for possession. A drug conviction in
and 3 times more likely to go to prison with a marijuana possession charge.¶
America is the gift that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma that can prevent employment, home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be
a parent. The issue of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs is featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In the film, Richard L. Miller, author of Drug Warriors
drug laws , such
as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation aimed at poor and minority populations . Miller
poses that drug laws are designed to identify, ostracize, confiscate, concentrate, and annihilate these
populations by assigning the label of drug user, criminal, or addict, seizing property, taking away freedom
and institutionalizing entire communities in our ever growing prison system.¶ We can stop this from
happening . Marijuana was deemed illegal without acknowledging science or the will of the people. 75 years later, 50% of the population
supports marijuana legalization, and families are still being torn apart and lives destroyed over the criminal
sanctions associated with its use. The most vulnerable members of our society are also the targets of a prison industrial
complex out of control and getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S. every 38 seconds,
we have no time to waste , tax and regulate now.¶ Oregon, Colorado and Washington are all considering a more sensible and humane approach
to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives on their ballots this November. This is a unique opportunity for citizens to cast a vote
heard round the world, to stand up not only for the freedom to consume marijuana, but against the atrocities and
human suffering that result from the criminalization of it.
and Their Prey, From Police Power to Police State, presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness. Miller suggests that
Legalization of marijuana is a useful starting point to end the drug war--technical debates allow radical transformation that benefits minorities
more than the privileged
Neill Franklin 14, Executive Director of Law, Enforcement Against Prohibition, "3 Reasons Marijuana
Legalization in Colorado Is Good for People for Color", 1/23, www.huffingtonpost.com/neillfranklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.html
For the first time, President Obama acknowledged this week that the prohibition of marijuana is unfairly enforced against AfricanAmericans and Latinos, and for that reason, he says, legalization in Colorado and Washington should go
forward. Without explicitly endorsing the laws, he told the New Yorker, "it's important for [them] to go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people
have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."¶ ¶ As the president acknowledged, marijuana prohibition targets black and brown
people (even though marijuana users are equally or more likely to be white). Ending prohibition through passing legalization laws , as Colorado and
Washington have, will reduce this racial disparity .¶ The war on drugs, as we all know, has led to mass criminalization and
incarceration for people of color. The legalization of marijuana , which took effect for the first time in the country in Colorado on January 1, is
one step toward ending that war. While the new law won't eradicate systemic racism in our criminal
justice system completely, it is one of the most effective thing s we can do to address it . Here are three concrete ways that
Colorado's law is good for people of color.¶ 1. The new law means there will be no more arrests for
marijuana possession in Colorado.¶ Under Colorado's new law, residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will
have a real and measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where the racial disparities in
marijuana possession arrests have been reprehensible. In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than three times
the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates. As noted by the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the
These arrests can have devastating and longlasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people
(largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for being caught with marijuana are
relegated to a permanent second-class status. When we make marijuana legal, we stop those arrests from
happening.¶ 2. Unlike under decriminalization , the new law means there will be no more arrests for mere
marijuana possession in Colorado, period.¶ In the Jan. 6 article "#Breaking Black: Why Colorado's weed laws may backfire for black Americans," Goldie Taylor
mistakenly suggests that Colorado's new legalization law may "further tip the scales in favor of a privileged class
already largely safe from criminalization." Much of the stubborn "this-changes-nothing" belief about the
new law stems from confusion between decriminalization and legalization . There is a profound difference
between the hodgepodge of laws known collectively as "decriminalization" passed in several states over the past 30 years, and
Colorado's unprecedented legalization law. Decriminalization usually refers to a change in the law which removes
criminal but not civil penalties for marijuana possession, allowing police to issue civil fines (similar to speeding tickets), or require
drug education or expensive treatment programs in lieu of being arrested.¶ Because of the ambiguity in some states with
decriminalization, cops still arrest users with small amounts of marijuana due to technicalities, such as having illegal
paraphernalia, or for having marijuana in "public view" after asking them to empty their pockets. One only need look as far as the infamous stop-and-frisk
law in New York, where marijuana is decriminalized, to see how these ambiguities might be abused to the
detriment of people of color.¶ In Colorado, however, the marijuana industry is now legal and aboveground. People therefore have a right to possess and use marijuana products , although as with alcohol, there are restrictions relating to
things like age, driving, and public use. Police won't be able to racially profile by claiming they smelled marijuana or saw it in plain
view.¶ 3. We will reduce real problems associated with the illicit market .¶ As marijuana users shift to making purchases at regulated stores,
we'll start to see improvement in problems that were blamed on marijuana but are in fact consequences of
its prohibition. The violence related to the street-corner drug trade will begin to fall as the illicit market is slowly replaced by
people arrested for private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population.¶
well-guarded stores with cameras and security systems. And consumers will now know what they're getting; instead of buying whatever's in a baggie, they have the benefit of choosing from a wide variety of
marijuana products at the price level and potency they desire.¶ Goldie Taylor made the dubious claim that since marijuana prices were initially high in Colorado's new stores, the creation of a legal market won't
affect the existing illicit market. But despite sensational headlines, prices for marijuana are just like anything else. They respond to levels of supply and demand. In the first couple weeks, prices were high because
only a small fraction of marijuana businesses in Colorado opened, and what looked like every user in the state was in line to make a purchase on the day the historic law took effect. As the novelty-fueled demand
levels off and the rest of the stores across the state begin to open, increasing supply, prices will drop. For their money, purchasers can conveniently buy a product they know is tested and unadulterated. And for
those who don't want to buy at a store, Colorado residents over 21 are permitted to grow up to six marijuana plants at home.
Connecting our critiques to an advocacy of the legalization of marijuana
uniquely provides a training ground for broader reform---legalization is
vital and allows effective coalition-building
Katherine Tate 14, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and
the Legalization of Marijuana, pg. 9
For increasing numbers of Americans, legalization of personal- use marijuana is the only alternative to draconian
laws drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decades. It is well established that concern and paranoia
over petty "crack" cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of California's prisons and jail populations to become the
largest in the United States (Lusane 1991: Provine 2007: Reinerman and Levine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007). Miller (2008) contends that
the U.S. federal system of crime control has left minority citizens less able to challenge unfair sentencing
laws. Noting that marijuana possession constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrests in the 1990s. Michelle Alexander
(2010) insists that this period of "unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison sentences (rather than dismissal,
community service, or probation)" to the degree that "in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000 the number of
people incarcerated in our nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300.000 to more than 2 million.
By the end of 2007. more than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31 adults— were behind bars, on
probation, or parole" (Alexander 2010. 59). Pushed by drug prosecutions, the rising rate of incarceration reached
unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Today's movement toward more prisons, mandatory minimums and reinstatement of the death
penalty logically followed the racially exploitative "law and order" campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American
politicians use the mythical Black or Hispanic male drug dealer, like the Black female welfare queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus in
reported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks suggests that African
Americans bear the brunt of law-andorder management of U.S. marijuana laws because of how marijuana use is racialized . Political scientist Doris
Provine contends that the U.S. government increased its punitive response toward drug use as a response to
racial fears and stereotypes. She writes: "[d]rugs remain, symbolically, a menace to white, middle-class
values" (2007. 89). Both politicians and media have used this issue to construct a crisis and sustain punitive state drug laws. The war on
drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed minority citizens through their imprisonment, contributing to deep
inequalities in education, housing, health care, and equal opportunities to advance economically . The facts of
use. sales, and possession, confirmed by academic and critical legal studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media
choose to present them. One study focusing on marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000 potential new users)
increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in 1968. reached a peak at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976). then remained high throughout the late
1970s. Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early 1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1.
respectively), then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual incidence rate rose during late
1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey on Drug Use 1999). Individuals
and groups in civil society, advocacy
communities, and state legislatures must put forth a serious struggle among activists and potential coalition
partners who can understand the need for reform as a matter of civil rights and justice, and not the morality of marijuana
consumption. Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the training ground for a new generation of leadership in
addressing the larger problem of mass incarceration and social and political isolation associated with it .
For Black people and their allies who long for the days— against all odds—of political education, voter
mobilization, legal reform , group solidarity, challenge to the political parties, and political empowerment,
expressed in the modern civil rights movement, the matter of decriminalization is ripe for galvanizing a
collaboration at the grassroots . Too many Blacks have assumed that the "War on Drugs" ended with the
dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalization—rather than
incarceration—of Black people has been more perennial . If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing that mass
incarceration has effectively reasserted Jim Crow second-class citizenship (or no citizenship) rights on African
American people, then they must get off the sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or decriminalization struggle and stop allowing others to
fight what is essentially their battle. This has long been the case in the challenge to the crushing "prison industrial complex." Whites and others,
for the most part, have been the leaders in reform efforts concerning such things as mandatory
minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health care for geriatric or HIV AIDS
patients in prisons, while we have seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the congressional Black Caucus to our
young. When ordinary people change their thinking and consciousness and begin to demystify small, personaluse marijuana, then the leaders will eventually come around without reticence or fear. The marijuana
debate needs to be reframed to remove all penalties against its use (Scherlen 2012). This is our exit strategy:
decriminalization reform is the only path to reversing the dismal trends minorities face in America.
The 1AC is a non-reformist reform---institutional engagement is necessary
to actualize the ideals of revolution while avoiding the failures of typical
reform
Julia Sudbury 8, Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in
the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist
organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial
Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4]
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison
authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for
programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists,
who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic
education programs. As prison populations continue to swell, anti-prison
activists are faced with the limitations of reformist
strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on
cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19
Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and
respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of
prison reform efforts to cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms
that do not lead to bigger and “better” prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights
advocacy and reforms, building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important
step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration . In this way,
human rights advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a
radical anti-prison agenda . Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim not to create more humane, culturally sensitive,
women-centered prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and
resources outside the penal system. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions
and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21
Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers
to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration sentences” that felons are subjected to has
led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other
citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union
address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the
endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism,
poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or
None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group, Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada.
All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms of
discrimination that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former
prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, All of Us
Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold
Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a
leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state
levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime
welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employment. In
addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners.
24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of
12-step programs, treatment programs, community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from
addiction, offers an alternative response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery
movement's focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to
criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or tap the
radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social
change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex firsthand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the
movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected
by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal” to
inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from
communities appears the only logical means of creating safety. Activists
who pursue decarceration challenge stereotypical
images of the “criminal” by making visible the human stories of prisoners, with the goal of demonstrating
the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful
acts. Decarceration usually involves targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk
and arguing for an end to the use of imprisonment for this population. Decarcerative strategies often
involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive and more effective than
prison and jail. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which passed in California in 2000 and allowed
first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels
Drug law reform is a key area of decarcerative work .
Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform include Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners,
criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial
justice, economic, and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of
prisoners of color from New York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a
approximately 35,000 people into treatment annually. 25
transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to
mandatory minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and
the expansion of alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative
efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her
relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was
incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing interviews and feature articles in national
media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow
drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of
Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public
expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war,
prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums
(FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in federal and state
prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and photographs. 27 The
“Faces of FAMM” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to galvanize public support for sentencing
reform. At the same time, it dismantles
popular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection
against dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving
long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities or for being intimately connected to someone involved in
these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform. Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of incarcerated survivors
is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser
in challenging their convictions by demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an
African–American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five parole
board recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit of justice made
visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of women imprisoned for killing or
assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23 cases—FBW's campaign for
the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of gender-oppressed prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that
experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict
with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population
generally viewed with sympathy—survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence,
arguing that “the violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors
have experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children.” 29 In
theorizing the intersections of racialized state
violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader abolitionist
agenda that refutes the legitimacy of incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social inequalities based
on interlocking systems of oppression . By gradually shrinking the prison system, Black women activists
involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of imprisonment as a
commonsense response to a wide range of social ills. At the other end of anti-expansionist work are activists who take a more
confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to
embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and
jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return imprisonment to the
public sector, prison moratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium
Project (PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does this work through
popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP uses compilations of
progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on people of color. PMP's strategies have
been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition, succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of
Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections
between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth incarceration through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” By demonstrating
how zero tolerance policies and increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with underfunded classrooms and
overstretched teachers, has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization
of public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves campaigns to
prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example, the
Prisoner Justice Action Committee formed the
“81 Reasons” campaign, a multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison activists, youth and
student organizers , in response to proposals to build a youth “superjail ” in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto. 32 The
campaign combined popular education on injustices in the juvenile system, including the disproportionate
incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth, with an exercise in popular democracy that invited young people to decide
themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail. Campaigners mobilized public
concerns about spending cuts in other areas, including health care and education, to create pressure on the
provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to incarceration for youth.
While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was reduced. More importantly, the
campaign built a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth movement and raised public awareness of the
social and economic costs of incarceration. Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition from advocates who believe that building
prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of
global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the context of economic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable,
well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has worked
to challenge these assertions by documenting the actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in California's Central
Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically
depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air,
land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm
workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline.
34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a communities and absorb land and water previously used for
agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in
promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration. Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the
political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the
environment. 35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison activism and in turn informs the work of other activists,
demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and the anti-prison movement. 36 Many
anti-prison
activists view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as building blocks toward the ultimate goal of
abolition. These practical actions promise short and medium-term successes that are essential markers
on the road to long-term transformation. However, abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of
racialized state violence that cannot be “fixed.” The contemporary prison abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada
dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with
other radical activists and scholars in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, began to call for the dismantling of
prisons. 38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation,
American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed
into an understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics were
also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion. These
“common”
prisoners, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for everyday acts of survival, challenged the state's legitimacy by
declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual punishment and confronting the brute force of state
power. 40 By adopting the term “abolition” activists drew deliberate links between the dismantling of prisons and the
abolition of slavery. Through historical excavations, the “new abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the
unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations
that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include Critical Resistance (CR), New York's
Prison Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in
the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), the Prisoners' Justice Day Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in Canada. CR was
founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on
popular education and movement building, coordinating large conferences where diverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the
prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with
imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes abolition as: [A] political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by
creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment … . An
abolitionist vision means that we must build models
today that can represent how we want to live in the future . It means developing practical strategies for
taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead the average person to
believe that things really could be different . It means living this vision in our daily lives . 42 In this sense,
prison abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that they
can believe that a world without prisons is possible , and second, taking practical steps to oppose the
prison-industrial complex. Making abolition more than a utopian vision requires practical steps toward
this long-term goal . CR describes four steps that activists can get involved in: shrinking the system ,
creating alternatives, shifting public opinion and public policy , and building leadership among those directly impacted by
the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay Area, Critical Resistance has become a national organization with
chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played
a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the U.S. This work is rooted in the radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.
Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than
pushing it away
Richard Delgado 9, 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
. 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.
victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand
Institutional macropolitical policy engagement is vital to solve---any
alternative results in cooption and moot activism
Orly Lobel 7, Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL
ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS, Harvard Law
Review, Vol. 120
Both the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to broaden our
inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics — that is, attempts to produce
meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and
political action. This vision rejects a shared theory of social reform, rejects formal programmatic agendas, and
embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices. Thus, it is described in such terms as a plan of no plan,211 “a project of
pro- jects,”212 “anti-theory theory,”213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 “practice over theory,”216 and
chaos and openness over order and formality. As a result, the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive
vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts . As Professor Joel
Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights movement has disappeared.217
There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor
Handler warns that this move away from grand narratives is self-defeating precisely because only certain
parts of the political spectrum have accepted this new stance: “[T]he opposition is not playing that game .
. . . [E]veryone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .”218 Intertwined with the resignation from
law and policy, the new bromide of “neither left nor right” has become axiomatic only for some.219 The contemporary critical legal
consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are
interested, for example, in a more competitive securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of
“conservative public interest lawyer[ing].”220 Although “public interest law” was originally associated exclusively with liberal
projects, in the past three decades conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of
traditional legal strategies to promote their causes.221 This growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in
juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested
that there may be “something inherent in the left’s conception of social change — focused as it is on participation and empowerment
— that produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.”222 Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original
disenchantment with legal reform. Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to
legal reform models and as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they
generate very limited improvement in existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here
can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common
pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for
example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities
translate into a more complete transformation . This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to
rely on an aggregate approach — an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something
substantial. In fact, the myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced , while the
broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few
instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution.
Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the
actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through mere reframing. At the
same time, the elephant in the room — the rising level of economic inequality — is left unaddressed and
comes to be understood as natural and inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists
decry as losers’ self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the product of
their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of
their willed reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the
distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism — the law and organizing
model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere
of action — all produce a fantasy that change can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized
transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the
audience is national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge
to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on
American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story could
translate into a “time of the nation” body of knowledge and motivation .227 In contemporary legal thought, a
corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent
proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations have emerged in the
United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth
century are in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent
intermediate public sphere, which has been termed “the missing middle” by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New
social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant
institutional change through grassroots activism . Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the
ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale
dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate ? It is important
for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness, to recognize that not all
extralegal associational life is transformative. We must differentiate , for example, between inward-looking
groups , which tend to be self- regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate in
political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities .231 We
must differentiate between professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments
of the community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller scale than
earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need
to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should question the narrative that imagines
consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action as directly translating into change.
Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed to
programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are
situated in opposition to any form of institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are
fighting against and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the
narrow space that is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted ,
and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.
A dialectical process of revolutionary reforms is necessary---the aff is a
concrete expression of a more systemic critique
Ben Wray 14, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms,
http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/
We need revolutionary change. There’s no two ways about it – if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to be the central dynamic
driving economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe. ¶ But as I’ve discussed in the previous five parts of this
series, getting from where we are to a revolutionary transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations
of the capitalist economy and replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the world’s resources is not as simple
as declaring our desire for it to be so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing the overthrow of
capitalism. If one million people signed that petition and one million people signed a further petition to
introduce full collective bargaining rights for trade-unions in the UK, which one would move us closer to the
overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter.¶ Whilst having an end goal in sight is important, most people
don’t change their thinking about the world based on bold visions of what could be done at some point in the future:
they change their ideas based on evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of the status quo. In other words, we
need to have ideas that build upon people’s lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a representative democracy
system, we
need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms have to help rather than
hinder a move to more revolutionary transformation that challenges the very core of the capitalist
system.¶ The dialectic of reform and revolution¶ What we need, therefore, is a strategy of revolutionary reforms. Such a notion
would appear as a contradiction in terms to many who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see the two as dichotomous, but
there is no reason why this should be the case. Indeed, history has shown that revolutionary transformations have
always happened as a dialectical interaction between rapid, revolutionary movements and more
institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the revolutionary part of that dialectic has always been motivated by the immediate needs
of the participants involved – ‘land, bread and peace’ being the first half of the slogan of the Russian Revolution. ¶ What does a strategy of
‘revolutionary
reforms’ entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a political strategy that builds towards revolutionary
change by using reforms to ‘push up against the limits’ of the ‘logic of capitalism’ in practice :¶ “At first
these “feasible objectives” will be limited to reforms within capitalism—or at least to measures which, from
the standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness, appear to be legitimate and achievable within the
system, but which may actually run counter to the logic of capitalism and start to push up against its
limits. As the working class engages in struggle, however, the anti-capitalist implications of its needs and
aspirations are gradually revealed. At the same time, through its experience of struggle for reform, the working
class learns about its capacity for “self-management, initiative and collective decision ” and can have a “foretaste of
what emancipation means”. In this way struggle for reform helps prepare the class psychologically,
ideologically and materially for revolution .” The late Daniel Bensaid expressed this argument through the lens of the history of the
socialist movement:¶ “In reality all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenin’s
pamphlet of the summer of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by Trotsky in 1937): the need for
transitional demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on the dialectic (not
antinomy) between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the idea of separating an (‘anti-neoliberal’) minimum
programme and an (anti-capitalist) ‘maximum’ programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that
the two are interlinked by the dynamic of struggle.Ӧ So revolutionary
reforms means a policy agenda that, as Alberto Toscano
has put it, “at
one and the same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits further movement
against capitalism”. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a ‘war of positon’.
Student debates over responses to suffering are good --- taking a particular
stand is key
Kim Sawchuk 2, PhD, Social and Political Thought, York University, prof of comm at Concordia, editor of the Canadian
Journal of Communication, general book review of Distant Suffering by Luc Boltanski, Canadian journal of Communication Vol
27, No 1 (2002)
Inherent in the politics of pity in the modern period is the problem of dealing with suffering from a distance and the
"massification of a collection of unfortunates who are not there in person" (p. 13). Although contemporary media may have
"dramatized" the spectacle of distant suffering in the past 30 years, they neither invented nor caused this
condition. Historical examples also bolster Boltanski's claim that the media did not inaugurate the politics of pity - rather, its logic was set out more than 200 years
ago. Boltanski carefully examines this logic and the paradoxes it creates in the book's three sections. Part 1 lays out the argument. Part 2 relies heavily on literary sources to
analyze the "topos," a term he borrows from rhetoric, of the idea of pity and suffering. The third section deals with the question of pity and misfortune, drawing primarily
on historical and contemporary examples, such as the work of Doctors Without Borders and the clash in the late 1950s between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Each chapter is
replete with insight, making this a difficult book to summarize. Every word and every argument is so intricately intertwined with the next that paraphrasing seems a
travesty.¶ The third section should be of interest to those located in the disciplines of communications or media studies. Here it is important to recall the subtitle of the
Boltanski returns to the question of the spectator and the anxieties of those
who wish to do something about what they see unfolding on their screens . He asks: "[H]ow might the contemporary
book, Morality, the Media and Politics.
spectators' anxiety be reduced without averting their gaze from misfortune or by abandoning the project inherent in the modern definition of politics of facing up to
What could political action be, given the fact that suffering does occur at
a distance and that not every struggle can be taken on with equal commitment? First, he argues that there is a
political, technical, and moral necessity to open up a discussion of commitment and ideology,
although what he means by ideology is not adequately explained. Second, he contends that witnessing suffering means that
morally we are asked to act. Commitment is commitment to some kind of action . Third, he promotes the idea that
speech is action. "One can commit oneself through speech; by taking a stance, even when alone, of
someone who speaks to somebody else about what they have seen" (p. xv). By speaking - to others and even to
oneself - we recognize and acknowledge that speech must be understood as a form of action (p. 154).¶ One of the
unnecessary suffering and relieving it[?]" (p. 159).
conditions of Boltanski's argument is a clear distinction between the world of representation and the world of action. He writes: "Informed by representation, words must
He is critical of deconstructionist criticism, primarily meaning the writings of Jean
Baudrillard, which blurs this distinction to too great an extreme , thereby "holding the order of action" at
arm's length or making it illusionary (p. 154). He contends that this position makes the very intention to act
nothing but a naïve illusion creating an "empire of suspicion" (p. 158). Boltanski does not claim that we remain without an
emotional commitment to causes, but rather that "to prevent the unacceptable drift of emotions close towards the fictional we must maintain an
orientation towards action, a disposition to act, even if this is only by speaking out in support of the
unfortunate" (p. 153).¶ What then are the properties of effective speech? Boltanski turns to phenomenology and semantics, concluding that effective speech
really be deployed in the world of action in order to be effective" (p. 154).
involves: (a) intentionality; (b) incorporation in bodily gestures and movements; (c) sacrifice of other possible actions; (d) the presence of others; and, (e) a commitment
(p. 185). Intentionality involves an intention to speak meaningfully, not just engage in idle chatter. Action and intention are connected to each other in effective action
realized in the world. Intention incorporated in action is "expression." This kind of expressive political speech must involve risk for spectators - they may be chastized, they
may be contested, or they may be at physical risk in authoritarian regimes. Boltanski goes on to classify different types of action as strong and weak, collective and
individual. He builds an argument for local chapters of groups supporting humanitarian movements, such as Amnesty International, for they enable one to avoid the
alternative of either on-the-spot involvement or distant spectacle. They are one way to breach the schism between abstract universalism and communitarian withdrawal:
"The humanitarian claim for more or less distant causes can thus avoid the alternative of abstract universalism - easily accused of being fired up for distant suffering the
better to avert its eyes from those close at hand - or of communitarian withdrawal into itself - which only attends to misfortune when it affects those nearest - by being
rooted in groups and thereby linked to preexisting solidarities and local interests" (p. 190). In other words, expression is most "authentic" for Boltanski when made
manifest in actions, like participating in a demonstration or protest, which incarnates our beliefs and displays our commitments. By incorporating an action, the person
concerned by apathy and asks us to consider that we are doomed, inevitably, to
we must make the attempt to be "moral subjects" - that is, committed and engaged
communicates an observable tendency.¶ But is this enough? Boltanski is
imperfection in our politics. Despite this,
subjects. Because he recognizes the difficulties of negotiating these contradictions, he avoids moralizing. He is no Habermasian trying to outline the conditions for
we live in imperfect worlds and we must contend with this. He
asks that we resurrect compassion into our politics, which he says is always particular and
practical, as it is oriented toward doing something about a situation . Unlike pity, it engages with the person suffering . But
an ideal-speech situation. In Boltanski's book,
pity isn't always a bad thing in this analysis. Pity generalizes in order to deal with distance, and in so doing one may discover emotion and feeling for others that may
A spectacle of suffering may end with a commitment to involvement.¶ Boltanski realizes the
remains optimistic that humans are capable of such a move
translate into speech or action.
challenge, yet
. There are, as he notes, an "excess of unfortunates" in our
world. The problem remains to whom we extend aid or pity, given their great numbers (p. 155). This is true both in the realm of action, but also in the realm of
representation. So many people are suffering and there is not enough media space for them all (p. 155). Boltanski does not prioritize causes or instances of grief. He does,
however, suggest that the media represent any unfortunate groups taking action to confront and escape their distress. It is unethical to only depict them in the passive act
of suffering (p. 190). He acknowledges that the mediatization of suffering may incite action. For example, it may protect populations against their own rulers, if only
temporarily, for such depictions do not necessarily change the internal political situation. His analysis assumes that spectators, who are
democratic
citizens, have a role to play in lobbying and pressuring their own governments to take
action (p. 184). Again, while aware that public opinion may be manipulated, he argues that public-opinion polls are powerful tools. Answering a poll is depicted as a
potentially effective form of speech and an "adequate response to the call for action" (p. 185).¶ Distant Suffering thus describes, in sometimes painful detail, a
wavering between selfish egoism and altruistic commitment to causes. Boltanski describes how we may, unfortunately,
cultivate ourselves by becoming absorbed in our own pity when looking at the spectacle of someone else's suffering, a phenomenon that has been far too present since the
tries to lead us out of this self-absorption into the
world of effective political action by offering a range of involvement. While advocating commitment and debates about
September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Boltanski
morality as part of the solution, this is no smug celebration of the "return to kindness" or an easy denunciation of the perverse delight of spectacles of suffering. In
considering distant suffering as the "logical consequence" of the introduction of pity into politics over 200 years ago, we are asked to concern ourselves with the present.¶
To be
concerned with the present is no small matter . For over the past, ever gone by, and over the future, still non-existent, the present
has an overwhelming privilege: that of being real" (p. 192). Naive? Perhaps. Boltanski does not provide simple or quick answers to the
dilemma, but leaves one with the hope that pity might lead to compassion, commitment, and social change - even if such
measures do not end all suffering once and for all. As such, this translation from the original French text is a welcome addition to
Boltanski ends his fine treatise by exhorting us to quit looking to past injustices, to stop anticipating future injustice, and to stay focused on the present. "
contemporary debates in political communication.
Acting to resolve suffering is the ultimate life-celebration---any alt is
blindness to ongoing misery
Todd May 5, professor @ Clemson. “To change the world, to celebrate life,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol 31 nos 5–6 pp.
517–531
To change the world and to celebrate life. This, as the theologian Harvey Cox saw, is the struggle within us. It is a struggle in
which one cannot choose sides; or better, a struggle in which one must choose both sides. The abandonment of one for the sake of
the other can lead only to disaster or callousness. Forsaking the celebration of life for the sake of changing the
world is the path of the sad revolutionary. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault writes that one does not have to be sad in order to he
revolutionarv. The matter is more urgent than that, however. One cannot be both sad and revolutionary lacking a sense of the wondrous that is already here, among us,
one who is bent upon changing the world can only become solemn or bitter. He or she is focused only on the future; the present is what is to be
overcome. The vision of what is not but must come to be overwhelms all else, and the point of change itself
becomes lost. The history of the left in the 20th century offers numerous examples of this, and the disaster that attends to it should be evident to all of us by now.
The alternative is surely not to shift one’s allegiance to the pure celebration of life , although there are many who have
chosen this path. It is at best blindness not to see the misery that envelops so many of our fellow humans, to say nothing of
what happens to sentient nonhuman creatures. The attempt to jettison world-changing for an uncritical
assent to the world as it is requires a self-deception that I assume would be anathema for those of us who have studied Foucault. Indeed, it is
anathema for all of us who awaken each day to an America whose expansive boldness is matched only by an equally
expansive disregard for those we place in harm’s way. This is the struggle, then. The one between the desire
for life celebration and the desire for world-changing. The struggle between reveling in the contingent and
fragile joys that constitute our world and wresting it from its intolerability . I am sure it is a struggle that is not foreign to anyone
who is reading this. I am sure as well that the stakes for choosing one side over another that I have recalled here are obvious to everyone. The question then
becomes one of how to choose both sides at once. III Maybe it happens this way. You walk into a small meeting room at the back of a local
bookstore. There are eight or ten people milling about. They’re dressed in dark clothes, nothing fancy, and one or two of them have earrings or dreadlocks. They vary in age. You
don’t know any of them. You’ve never seen them before. Several of them seem to know one another. They are affectionate, hugging, letting a hand linger on a shoulder or an
elbow. A younger man, tall and thin, with an open face and a blue baseball cap bearing no logo, glides into the room. Two others, a man and a woman, shout, ‘Tim!’ and he glides
over to them and hugs them, one at a time. They tell him how glad they are that he could make it, and he says that he just got back into town and heard about the meeting. You
stand a little off to the side. Nobody has taken a seat at the rectangle of folding tables yet. You don’t want to be the first to sit down. Tim looks around the room and smiles.
Several other people filter in. You’re not quite sure where to put your hands so you slide them into your jean pockets. You hunch your shoulders. Tim’s arrival has made you feel
more of an outsider. But then he sees you. He edges his way around several others and walks up to you and introduces himself. You respond. Tim asks and you tell him that this
is your first time at a meeting like this. He doesn’t ask about politics but about where you’re from. He tells you he has a friend in that neighborhood and do you know . . . ? Then
several things happen that you only vaguely notice because you’re talking with Tim. People start to sit down at the rectangle of tables. One of them pulls out a legal pad with
notes on it. She sits at the head of the rectangle; or rather, when she sits down there, it becomes the head. And there’s something you don’t notice at all. You are more relaxed,
your shoulders have stopped hunching, and when you sit down the seat feels familiar. The woman at the head of the table looks around. She smiles; her eyes linger over you and
I can offer only a suggestion of an answer
a couple of others that you take to be new faces, like yours. She says, ‘Maybe we should begin.’ IV
here
today. It is a suggestion that brings together some thoughts from the late writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with those of Foucault, in order to sketch not even a framework for
thought, but the mere outlines of a framework. It is not a framework that would seek to find the unconscious of each in the writings of the other. Neither thinker finishes or
accomplishes the other. (Often, for example regarding methodology, they do not even agree.) Rather, it is a framework that requires both of them, from their very different
the suggestion I would like
to make here is not one for resolving for each of us the struggle of life-celebration and world-changing, but
of offering a way to conceive ourselves that allows us to embrace both sides of this battle at the same time. Given the
angles, in order to be able to think it. My goal in constructing the outlines of this framework is largely philosophical. That is to say,
thinkers I have chosen as reference points, it will be no surprise when I say that that conception runs through the body. Let me start with Merleau-Ponty. In his last writings,
particularly in The Visible and the Invisible, he offers a conception of the body that is neither at odds nor even entangled with the world, but is of the very world itself. His
concept of the flesh introduces a point of contact that is also a point of undifferentiation. The flesh, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body,
of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, as tangible it descends
among them’.2 We must recall this economy of the flesh before we turn to Foucault. There is, for Merleau-Ponty, a single Being. Our world is of that Being, and we are of our
world. We are not something that confronts the world from outside, but are born into it and do not leave it. This does not mean that we cannot remove ourselves from the
immediacy of its grasp. What it means is that to remove ourselves from that immediacy is neither the breaking of a bond nor the discovery of an original dichotomy or dualism.
What is remarkable about human beings is precisely our capacity to confront the world, to reflect upon it, understand it, and change it, while still being of a piece with it. To
grasp this remarkable character, it is perhaps worth recalling Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold. The world is not composed of different parts; there is no transcendent, whether
of God or of subjectivity. The world is one. As Deleuze sometimes says, being is univocal. This oneness is not, however, inert or inanimate. Among other things, it can fold over
on itself, creating spaces that are at once insides and outsides, at once different from and continuous with one another. The flesh is a fold of Being in this sense. It is of the world,
and yet encounters it as if from a perceptual or cognitive distance. It is a visibility that sees, a tangible that touches, an audible that hears. Merleau- Ponty writes: There is vision,
touch when a certain visible, a certain tangible, turns back upon the whole of the visible, the whole of the tangible, of which it is a part, or when suddenly it finds itself
surrounded by them, or when between it and them, and through their commerce, is formed a Visibility, a Tangible in itself, which belong properly neither to the body qua fact
nor to the world qua fact . . . and which therefore form a couple, a couple more real than either of them.3 For Merleau-Ponty, thought and reflection do not attach themselves to
this flesh from beyond it, but arise through it. As our body is of this world, our thought is of our bodies, its language of a piece with the world it addresses. ‘[I]f we were to make
completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see the possibilities of language already
given in it.’4 This conception of the body as flesh of the world is not foreign to Foucault, although of course the terms Merleau-Ponty uses are not his. We might read Foucault’s
politics as starting from here, inaugurated at the point of undifferentiation between body and world. The crucial addition he would make is that that point of undifferentiation is
not historically inert. The body/world nexus is inscribed in a history that leaves its traces on both at the same time, and that crosses the border of the flesh and reaches the
language that arises from it, and the thought that language expresses. How does this work?V Maybe it doesn’t happen that way. Maybe it happens another way. Maybe you walk
into a room at a local community center. The room is large, but there aren’t many people, at least yet. There’s a rectangular table in the center, and everyone is sitting around it.
A couple of people look up as you walk in. They nod slightly. You nod back, even more slightly. At the head of the table is someone with a legal pad. She does not look up. She is
reading the notes on the pad, making occasional marks with the pen in her right hand. Other people come in and take places at the table. One or two of them open laptop
computers and look for an outlet. Eventually, the table fills up and people start sitting in chairs behind the table. Your feel as though you’re in an inner circle where you don’t
belong. You wonder whether you should give up your chair and go sit on the outside with the others who are just coming in now. Maybe people notice you, think you don’t
belong there. At this moment you’d like to leave. You begin to feel at once large and small, visually intrusive and an object of scrutiny. You don’t move because maybe this is OK
after all. You just don’t know. The room is quiet. A couple of people cough. Then the woman seated at the head of the table looks up. She scans the room as if taking attendance.
She says, ‘Maybe we should begin.’ VI Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body as flesh is an ontological one. Although he does not see the body as remote from its historical
For a body to be of the world is also for it to be temporal, to be
encrusted in the continuous emerging of the world over time. And this emerging is not abstract; rather, it is concrete.
The body/world nexus evolves during particular historical periods. This fold of the flesh, this body, is not nowhere and at any time.
It is there, then; or it is here, now. A body is entangled within a web of specific events and relations that, precisely
because it is of this world, are inescapably a part of that body’s destiny. As Merleau-Ponty tells us in Phenomenology of
inscription, his discussion does not incorporate the role such inscription plays.
Perception, ‘our open and personal existence rests on an initial foundation of acquired and stabilized existence. But it could not be otherwise, if we are temporality, since the
The medium for the body’s insertion into a particular net of events and
is that of social practices. Our bodies are not first and foremost creatures of the state or the economy, no
more than they are atomized wholes distinct from the world they inhabit. Or better, they are creatures of the state
and the economy inasmuch as those appear through social practices, through the everyday practices that are the ether of our
dialectic of acquisition and future is what constitutes time.’5
relations
lives. Social practices are the sedimentation of history at the level of the body. When I teach, when I write this article, when I run a race or teach one of my children how to ride a
bicycle, my body is oriented in particular ways, conforming to or rejecting particular norms, responding to the constraints and restraints of those practices as they have evolved
in interaction with other practices over time. Through its engagement in these practices, my body has taken on a history that is not of my making but is nevertheless part of my
inheritance. It is precisely because, as Merleau-Ponty has written, the body and the world are not separate things but rather in a chiasmic relation that we can think this
inheritance. And it is because of Foucault’s histories that we can recognize that this inheritance is granted through specific social practices. And of course, as Foucault has taught
us, social practices are where the power is. It is not, or not simply, at the level of the state or the modes of production where power arises. It is, as he sometimes puts it, at the
capillaries. One of the lessons of Discipline and Punish is that, if the soul is the prison of the body, this is because the body is inserted into a set of practices that create for it a
soul. These practices are not merely the choices of an individual whose thought surveys the world from above, but instead the fate of a body that is of a particular world at a
particular time and place. Moreover, these practices are not merely in service to a power that exists outside of them; they are mechanisms of power in their own right. It is not
because Jeremy Bentham disliked the prison population that the Panopticon became a grid for thinking about penal institutions. It is instead because the evolution of penal
practices at that time created an opening for the economy of visibility that the Panopticon represented. When Foucault writes that . . . the soul has a reality, it is produced
permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and
corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives6 his claim is informed by
four other ones that lie behind it: that bodies are of a piece with the world, that the body/world nexus is a temporal one, that the medium of that corporeal temporality is the
practices a body is engaged in, and that that medium is political as well as social. The last three claims are, of course, of the framework of Foucault’s thought. The first one is the
ontological scaffolding provided by Merleau-Ponty. And it is by means of all four that we can begin to conceive things so as to be able to choose both world-changing and
lifecelebrating at the same time. VII It could happen yet another way. Increasingly, it does. There is no meeting. There are no tables and no legal pads. Nobody sits down in a
room together, at least nobody sits down at a place you know about. There may not even be a leaflet. Maybe you just got an email that was forwarded by someone you know
slightly and who thought you might be interested. At the bottom there’s a link, in case you want to unsubscribe. If you don’t unsubscribe you get more notices, with petitions to
sign or times and places for rallies or teach-ins or marches. Maybe there’s also a link for feedback or a list for virtual conversations or suggestions. If you show up, it’s not to
something you put together but to something that was already in place before you arrived. How did you decide on this rally or teach-in? You sat in front of your computer screen,
stared at it, pondering. Maybe you emailed somebody you know, asking for their advice. Is it worth going? If it’s on campus you probably did. It matters who will see you,
whether you have tenure, how much you’ve published. There are no Tims here. You’ve decided to go. If it’s a teach-in, you’ve got plausible deniability; you’re just there as an
observer. If it’s a rally, you can stand to the side. But maybe you won’t do that. The issue is too important. You don’t know the people who will be there, but you will stand among
them, walk among them. You will be with them, in some way. Bodies at the same time and place. You agree on the issue, but it’s a virtual agreement, one that does not come
through gestures or words but through sharing the same values and the same internet connections. As you march, as you stand there, nearly shoulder to shoulder with others of
like mind, you’re already somewhere else, telling this story to someone you know, trying to get them to understand the feeling of solidarity that you are projecting back into this
There are many ways to conceive the bond between
world-changing and life-celebrating. Let me isolate two: one that runs from Merleau-Ponty to Foucault, from the body’s chiasmic relation with the world
to the politics of its practices; and the other one running back in the opposite direction. The ontology Merleau-Ponty offers in his late work is one of
wonder. Abandoning the sterile philosophical debates about the relation of mind and body, subject and object, about the relation of reason to
that which is not reason, or the problem of other minds, his ontology forges a unity of body and world that puts us in immediate
contact with all of its aspects. No longer are we to be thought the self-enclosed creatures of the philosophical tradition. We are now in touch
with the world, because we are of it. Art, for example, does not appeal solely to our minds; its beauty is not merely a matter of the convergence of our
moment. You say to yourself that maybe you should have brought a friend along.
faculties. We are moved by art, often literally moved, because our bodies and the work of art share the same world. As Merleau-Ponty says, ‘I would be at great pains to say where
is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I do a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see
according to it, or with it, than that I see it.’7 It is only because my body is a fold of this world that art can affect me so. But this affection is also a vulnerability. As my look can
happen according to a work of art, so it can happen according to a social practice. And even more so in proportion as that social practice and its effects are suffused through the
world in which I carry on my life, the world my body navigates throughout the day, every day. I do not have a chance to look according to a painting by Cezanne very often; but I
do encounter the effects of normalization as it has filtered through the practices of my employment, of my students’ upbringing, and of my family’s expectations of themselves
The vulnerability of the body, then, is at once its exposure to beauty and its opening to what is
intolerable. We might also see things from the other end, starting from politics and ending at the body. I take it that this is what Foucault suggests when he talks about
bodies and pleasures at the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality. If we are a product of our practices and the conception of
ourselves and the world that those practices have fostered, so to change our practices is to experiment in
new possibilities both for living and, inseparably, for conceiving the world. To experiment in sexuality is not to see where the desire that
and one another.
lies at the core of our being may lead us; that is simply the continuation of our oppression by other means. Rather, it is to construct practices where what is at issue is no longer
desire but something else, something that might go by the name of bodies and pleasures. In doing so, we not only act differently, we think differently, both about ourselves and
because these experiments are practices of our bodies, and because our
bodies are encrusted in the world, these experiments become not merely acts of political resistance but
new folds in the body/ world nexus. To construct new practices is to appeal to aspects or possibilities of
about the world those selves are inseparable from. And
the world that have been previously closed to us. It is to offer novel, and perhaps more tolerable,
engagements in the chiasm of body and world. Thus we might say of politics what Merleau-Ponty has said of painting, that we see according to it.
Here, I take it, is where the idea of freedom in Foucault lies. For Foucault, freedom is not a metaphysical condition. It does not lie in the nature of being human,
nor is it a warping, an atomic swerve, in the web of causal relations in which we find ourselves. To seek our freedom in a space apart from our
encrustation in the world is not so much to liberate ourselves from its influence as to build our own private
prison. Foucault once said: There’s an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn’t be better. My optimism would consist rather in saying
that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than with necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident,
more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological
constraints . . .8 That is where to discover our freedom. And what happens from there? From the meetings, from the rallies, from the
petitions and the teach-ins? What happens next? There is, after all, always a next. If you win this time – end aid to the contras, divest from apartheid South Africa,
force debt-forgiveness by technologically advanced countries – there is always more to do. There is the de-unionization of workers, there are gay rights, there is
Burma, there are the Palestinians, the Tibetans. There will always be Tibetans, even if they aren’t in Tibet, even if they aren’t Asian. But is that the only question: Next? Or is that
Isn’t there more going on than that? After all,
engaging in political organizing is a practice, or a group of practices. It contributes to making you who you
are. It’s where the power is, and where your life is, and where the intersection of your life and those of
others (many of whom you will never meet, even if it’s for their sake that you’re involved) and the buildings and streets of your town is. This moment when
you are seeking to change the world, whether by making a suggestion in a meeting or singing at a rally or marching in
silence or asking for a signature on a petition, is not a moment in which you don’t exist. It’s not a moment of yours that you
sacrifice for others so that it no longer belongs to you. It remains a moment of your life , sedimenting in you to make
just the question we focus on? What’s the next move in this campaign, what’s the next campaign?
you what you will become, emerging out of a past that is yours as well. What will you make of it, this moment? How will you be with others, those others around you who also do
The illusion is to think that this has nothing to do with you.
You’ve made a decision to participate in world-changing. Will that be all there is to it? Will it seem to you a simple sacrifice, for this small
period of time, of who you are for the sake of others? Are you, for this moment, a political ascetic? Asceticism like that is dangerous. Freedom lies not in our
distance from the world but in the historically fragile and contingent ways we are folded into it, just as we ourselves are
folds of it. If we take Merleau-Ponty’s Being not as a rigid foundation or a truth behind appearances but as the historical folding and refolding of a univocity, then our
freedom lies in the possibility of other foldings. Merleau-Ponty is not insensitive to this point. His elusive concept of the invisible seems to
not cease to exist when they begin to organize or to protest or to resist?
gesture in this direction. Of painting, he writes: the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence . . .
There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below . . . and that which reaches it from above . . .
where it no longer participates in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments.9 Elsewhere, in The Visible and the Invisible, he says: if . . . the surface of the visible, is
doubled up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve; and if, finally, in our flesh as the flesh of things, the actual, empirical, ontic visible, by a sort of folding back,
invagination, or padding, exhibits a visibility, a possibility that is not the shadow of the actual but its principle . . . an interior horizon and an exterior horizon between which the
actual visible is a partitioning and which, nonetheless, open indefinitely only upon other visibles . . .10 What are we to make of these references? We can, to be sure, see the hand
There is an ontology of
freedom at work here, one that situates freedom not in the private reserve of an individual but in the
unfinished character of any historical situation. There is more to our historical juncture, as there is to a painting,
than appears to us on the surface of its visibility. The trick is to recognize this, and to take advantage of it, not
only with our thoughts but with our lives. And that is why, in the end, there can be no such thing as a sad
revolutionary. To seek to change the world is to offer a new form of life-celebration . It is to articulate a
fresh way of being, which is at once a way of seeing, thinking, acting, and being acted upon. It is to fold
Being once again upon itself, this time at a new point, to see what that might yield. There is, as Foucault often reminds us, no
guarantee that this fold will not itself turn out to contain the intolerable. In a complex world with which we are inescapably
entwined, a world we cannot view from above or outside, there is no certainty about the results of our experiments. Our politics are
constructed from the same vulnerability that is the stuff of our art and our daily practices. But to refuse to experiment is to resign oneself to
the intolerable ; it is to abandon both the struggle to change the world and the opportunity to celebrate
living within it. And to seek one aspect without the other – life-celebration without world-changing, worldchanging without life-celebration – is to refuse to acknowledge the chiasm of body and world that is the
wellspring of both. If we are to celebrate our lives, if we are to change our world, then perhaps the best place to
begin to think is our bodies, which are the openings to celebration and to change, and perhaps the point at which the war within
of Heidegger in them. But we may also, and for present purposes more relevantly, see an intersection with Foucault’s work on freedom.
us that I spoke of earlier can be both waged and resolved. That is the fragile beauty that, in their different ways, both Merleau- Ponty and Foucault have placed before us. The
So how might you be a political body, woven into the
fabric of the world as a celebrator and as a changer? You went to the meeting, and then to the
demonstration. How was it there? Were the bodies in harmony or in counterpoint? Did you sing with your feet, did your voice soar? Did your mind come
question before us is whether, in our lives and in our politics, we can be worthy of it.
alive? Did you see possibilities you had not seen before? Were there people whose words or clothes, or even the way they walked hand in hand (how long has it been since you’ve
walked hand in hand with someone out in public?) offer you a possibility, or make you feel alive as well as righteous? And how about those people off to the side, the ones on the
sidewalk watching? Maybe they just stared, or maybe nodded as you went past. Or maybe some of them shouted at you to stop blocking the streets with your nonsense. Did you
recoil within yourself, see yourself as in a mirror, or as the person at Sartre’s keyhole who’s just been caught? Did you feel superior to them, smug in your knowledge? Or did
they, too, show you something you might learn from? Are they you at another moment, a moment in the past or in the future? Are they your parents that you have not explained
to, sat down beside, or just shared a meal with? That one over there, the old man slightly stooped in the long overcoat: whom does he remind you of? What message might he
have unwittingly brought for you? And why does it have to be a demonstration?
You go to a few meetings, a few more demonstrations. You
By then
write some letters to legislators. You send an email to the President. And then more meetings. The next thing you know, you’re involved in a political campaign.
you may have stopped asking why. This is how it goes: demonstrations, meetings with legislators, internet contacts. Does it have to be like this? Are
demonstrations and meetings your only means? Do they become, sooner or later, not only means but ends? And what kinds of ends? In
some sense they should always be ends: a meeting is a celebration, after all. But there are other ends as well. You go to the meeting because that fulfills your obligation to your
. Does it come to that? There are other means, other ends. Other means/ends. Some people ride
bicycles, en masse, slowly through crowded urban streets. You want environmentalism? Then have it. The streets are beautiful with their tall corniced buildings and
political conscience
wide avenues. To ride a bike through these streets instead of hiding in the armor of a car would be exhilarating. If enough of you do it together it would make for a pleasant ride,
as well as a little lived environmentalism. Would you want to call it a demonstration? Would it matter? There are others as well who do other things with their bodies, more
Some people
put their bodies between
Palestinians and
Israeli soldiers
dangerous things.
have gone to Palestine in order to
the
the
and settlers who attack them. They lie down next to Palestinians in front of the bulldozers that would destroy homes or build a wall through a family’s olive orchard. They feel
the bodies of those they are in solidarity with. They smell the soil of Palestine as they lay there. Sometimes, they are harmed by it. A young woman, Rachel Corrie, was
deliberately crushed by a US bulldozer operated by an Israeli soldier as she kneeled in front of a Palestinian home, hoping to stop its demolition. To do politics with one’s body
To resist, to celebrate, is also to be vulnerable. The world that you embrace, the world of which you are a part, can kill you too. And
so you experiment. You try this and you try that. You are a phenomenologist and a genealogist. You sense what is around you, attend to the way
your body is encrusted in your political involvements. And you know that that sensing has its own history, a history that often escapes you even as it envelops you. There is
always more to what you are, and to what you are involved in, than you can know. So you try to keep vigilant,
seeking the possibilities without scorning the realities. It’s a difficult balance. You can neglect it if you like. Many do.
But your body is there, woven into the fabric of all the other bodies, animate and inanimate. Whether you like it or
not, whether you recognize it or not. The only question is whether you will take up the world that you are of, or
leave it to others, to those others who would be more than willing to take your world up for you.
can be like this.
2AC
Case
Distancing
Incarceration renders violence out of sight and out of mind---calling out
this particular injustice is necessary
David Cole 11, Professor at Georgetown Law, Turning the Corner on Mass Incarceration?, 9 Ohio St. J.
Crim. L. 27-51 (2011)
Among criminal justice experts, the reforms laid out above are familiar and generally viewed positively. While there are, as with any group of experts,
areas of disagreement about what collection of measures would work best, the areas of consensus far outweigh the areas of dispute. The
challenge
in addressing America’s incarceration problem is not that the experts disagree about what should be done, but that politicians,
and the public at large, lack the political will to effectuate reform. At the core of the dilemma is the fact that, as Loïc Waquant
and others have pointed out, “mass incarceration” is actually a misnomer .80 Even though the United States has an unprecedented
number of people behind bars, far outstripping any other nation, the incarcerated population is still less than 1% of the total
population. Thus, the vast majority of Americans have not been in prison and probably do not even know anyone in prison. Moreover, the
concentration of incarceration among impoverished African American and Latino residents of inner-city
communities means that the likelihood that the majority knows anyone in prison is even lower than the general
figures suggest. How does one convince the public to care about prison reform when the vast majority do not know anyone in prison and are
probably reassured that most people who do spend time in prison are not like them? ¶ There are two principal schools of thought on this front. Some
seek to appeal to self-interest by demonstrating the ways that current policies impose unnecessary and ineffectual costs on all taxpayers.81 Others insist
that we must highlight the race and class inequities that plague the criminal justice system.82 In my view, we can and should do both.83¶ It seems clear
that, at least in the last several years, budget pressures have prompted states to take criminal justice reform more seriously. Arguments that
incarcerating low-level drug offenders is unnecessary, costly, and ineffective appeal to everyone’s self-interest as taxpayers at a minimum. Thus, it
continues to be critical to emphasize the costs of overreliance on incarceration. In recent years, this work has moved beyond a focus on how much it
costs to house a prisoner— itself a major expense—to an examination of the indirect collateral costs of incarceration on individuals, family members
and communities. 84 ¶ The appeal of emphasizing collateral costs in particular is that these effects extend beyond the offender to innocent third
parties—including children, other family members, and even unrelated neighbors. There are 2.7 million children in the United States with a parent in
prison or jail.85 Children with an incarcerated parent confront substantial psychological and economic difficulties.86 Yet children can hardly be
“blamed” for having a parent in prison. Nor, for that matter, can the prisoner’s wife or next-door neighbor. Yet studies have shown that the collateral
consequences of concentrated incarceration extend beyond the family to the neighborhood as a whole, degrading its “social capital,” undermining its
support networks, and denying imprisonment the stigma so critical to its deterrent effects.87 ¶ By emphasizing collateral consequences that affect
persons other than the offender himself, reform advocates may make their appeals more sympathetic. Even those collateral consequences that are, at
least in the first instance, limited to the individual offender himself have negative effects, as they interfere with the reintegration of offenders into the
community, making it harder for former convicts to pursue a law-abiding path and more likely that they will return to offending.88 The costs of the
consequent criminal behavior are, in turn, shared more broadly, first by the individuals or community victimized by the crimes, and second by society
at large, which must again foot the bill for the offender’s incarceration. ¶ But as powerful as these economic arguments are, they are likely insufficient
standing alone. As the response to 9/11 dramatically illustrates, fear tends to overwhelm virtually all considerations of cost. Economic arguments may
work as long as crime rates seem relatively manageable but may not have much lasting effect if crime rates again begin to rise (or if, for some other
reason, fear of crime increases).89 In addition, as Marc Mauer has argued, fiscal concerns are a double-edged sword, for while they may lead legislators
to look for cost savings by reducing incarceration, they are also likely to lead to reduced expenditures on the social services that help those at risk avoid
arguments that focus on economic concerns and fail to address the racial injustice of a
system that so disproportionately relegates black and Latino men to lives of imprisonment and
hopelessness are necessarily incomplete . The level of incarceration in the United States would be shameful even
if its distribution matched the race and class makeup of the nation at large (although today’s incarceration levels would likely be
politically unthinkable if they were equally distributed). But the fact that the burden of incarceration is borne largely by
black and Latino men from impoverished inner-city communities, that one of every three black male babies born today can expect to spend
time in prison, and that 60% of black male high school dropouts will be imprisoned, adds a distinct element of injustice.91 As a
moral matter, reformers should not be afraid to take on that particular injustice . As a political matter, it
seems unlikely that substantial reform will come until the country as a whole comes to reject the existing
state of affairs. One solid ground for finding it unacceptable is its inequitable distribution. As Michelle Alexander has argued, “Martin Luther
crime in the first place.90¶ Moreover,
King, Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was
beside the point. It should be beside the point today.”92
Transgression K
AT: Zizek Cap K
Rejecting the aff locks in the racist status quo—race first can solve cap, but
cap first cant solve race
Aaron Vasintjan 14, writer and researcher living in Montreal and Barcelona. His focus is on social
movements, gentrification, and food politics, “When Race is Equated With Class,”
http://ibw21.org/featured/when-race-is-equated-with-class/
A lot has been said about the recent events in Ferguson. It’s all-too-clear we’re dealing with a significant event in
America’s history, and perhaps a trigger that could kick-start a new anti-racism movement. Instead of focusing on
the facts of the shootings, which have been debated at length elsewhere, I want to quickly criticize one claim that I’ve
heard many times before, and have seen popping up once again: that it’s not racism we should be worried about,
it’s really all about class.¶ On August 17th, 2014 Time Magazine published a piece by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that did just that,
using the Ferguson protests as a jumping board. The article is titled, “The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race”, and in it, AbdulJabbar, a renowned author on black history and former NBA star, deftly jumps from drawing attention to the Ferguson protests
toward a word that rarely graces the pages of mainstream media: class warfare. So far, so good.¶ But I knew something was up when
I read the following sentences:¶ This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets
of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor.¶ After dismissing
race as secondary to poverty, Abdul-Jabbar proposes some things we can do beyond racialized finger-pointing:¶ I’m not saying the
protests in Ferguson aren’t justified—they are. In fact, we need more protests across the country. Where’s our Kent State? What will
it take to mobilize 4 million students in peaceful protest? Because that’s what it will take to evoke actual change. The middle class
has to join the poor and whites have to join African-Americans in mass demonstrations, in ousting corrupt politicians, in boycotting
exploitative businesses, in passing legislation that promotes economic equality and opportunity, and in punishing those who gamble
with our financial future.¶ And then you have the clincher:¶ If we don’t have a specific agenda—a list of exactly what we want to
change and how—we will be gathering over and over again beside the dead bodies of our murdered children, parents, and
neighbors.¶ There you have it, what started out as a polite shift away from race toward class quickly became a set of demands. This
tendency is a problem that ensnares many liberal progressive thinkers. Let’s call it “What we really need to do is…” It goes like this:¶
-Race is a problem.¶ -The problem with race is actually a problem of class.¶ -Let’s focus on the big problems like class, instead of
focusing on race.¶ -This will help create a bigger movement.¶ -Let’s agree to a certain set of demands for this movement, some of
which I’ve already thought about.¶ Now many of Abdul-Jabbar’s points are valid. Of course Ferguson isn’t just about race.
Of course the US is seeing sky-rocketing inequality. Of course the middle class is suffering . And it’s true,
what we need now more than ever is a form of class warfare.¶ But do you see what’s happening here?
Abdul-Jabbar neatly and quickly is able to manipulate the discussion away from what people are angry
about, what people are organizing around, and turn it into a vision for where he thinks social movements
should go. The author is, in effect, trying to bottle a spontaneous uprising into a program.¶ It reminds me of Peter Gelderloos’
Counterpunch article, “In defense of leaderless revolutions.” Here he responds to Cihan Tugal’s claim that we need movements with
leaders and programs. The article as a whole is worth reading, but one paragraph stands out to me:¶ Tugal is dead wrong when he
writes about “the fallacy that the people can take power without an agenda, an alternative platform, an ideology, and leaders.” That
someone can still talk about taking power as a liberatory proposition without getting laughed off stage, in the face of so many
historical examples that show what taking power actually means, shows how deep our collective amnesia runs. ¶ It is no surprise,
however, that some people keep sounding the call for unifying behind leaders and a platform in order to take power.¶ So when
Abdul-Jabbar talks about “class war” and “a specific agenda”, he’s doing what so many well-intentioned
progressivists have done before him: propose a platform, a set of demands, a political party, and, in-so-doing, try to
maneuver the political strife back into their own territory, try to control the conversation. In Gelderloos’ terms, they
are practicing to be authoritarians. This is a bit of a hyperbole, but the point is, trying to control a movement, tell it
what to do , will only serve to stifle it .¶ Here’s an example. In 1963, blacks all over the US decided that
enough was enough, and they would march on Washington and demand equality . As Malcolm X noted, “This
was a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless. Predominantly, it was young Negroes, defiant of whatever might be
the consequences, sick and tired of the black man’s neck under the white man’s heel.” When the White House got word of
this, they panicked. Quickly, they brought civil rights leaders to Washington, and told them to stop the march. Since these
leaders didn’t start it, they said they couldn’t do anything. So white politicians opted for the next best thing: endorsing the march,
sponsoring it, and electing black civil rights leaders to take it over. What started as an angry demand for justice and equal rights by
blacks ended with whites and blacks marching together, carrying the same empty signs, singing “we shall overcome”. Again, in
Malcolm X’s words, “It had become an outing, a picnic … [a]nd the black masses in America were—and still are—having a
nightmare.Ӧ When movements get appropriated and made palatable for the white middle class, demands
get diluted. This happens very easily by, for example, black intellectuals defining the conversation, saying race is
really about class.¶ What I find most troubling about Abdul-Jabbar’s call for a coherent program is that he does so
through a
clever bait-and-switch : “I’m really concerned about racism, but I also think we’re doing it all
wrong. Let’s focus on the big problems, like class.”¶ Another concern: Abdul-Jabbar insinuates that, while
Ferguson and Jackson State were race issues, Kent State had broader appeal and therefore was more powerful
in raising the nation’s ire. What Abdul-Jabbar wants is “mass demonstrations” that are so huge they force the government’s
hand. This kind of “massifying” is typical of liberal leftists, who think that a broad-based movement is the
only key to true change. Not only is this kind of thinking historically wrong and disrespectful of minorities who
have successfully struggled for recognition of their rights, it also serves to, like what happened with the march on Washington,
shut out any dissenting voices in social movements. Dissent and difference within movements and a
diversity of movements are critical for movement-building and developing strategies. ¶ The broad appeal of
events like Kent State do not at all mean that systemic racism is less important than systemic inequality. To be clear: antiracism and class warfare are related, but not the same . Both battles need to be fought, both require
different strategies, and these strategies ought to be determined by those most affected .¶ What’s more, the
author’s list of demands shows exactly the kind of revolution he’s thinking of: he wants to tackle corruption, exploitative and
high-risk capitalism, and promote economic equality. While these are all valid, and necessary changes, choosing to
focus “on the big problems” like corruption and inequality while ignoring racism means shutting out a whole
movement, rather than growing it. It means half-assed demands, rather than demands that have the potential
to change everything.¶ It’s not a surprise, then, that the author’s revolution is one directed at crony capitalism,
nothing more. His list of demands stops short at tackling corruption and fixing welfare. But welfare itself has always been a tool
for exclusion, and corruption is not a bug, but a feature inherent to state capitalism. As a result, Abdul-Jabbar’s crafty plot to
overthrow the 1% will do nothing beyond grafting another authoritarian head onto the capitalist body
politic .¶ The thing is, I’ve heard this way of thinking all-too-often. Like Gelderloos, I’m amazed at how many times I hear liberal
calls for “mass movements”, “a clear set of demands”, and “let’s focus on the big problems”, “it’s not race, it’s class” and people
don’t heckle them immediately. This is a strong tendency in the largely privileged liberal left, and it will be
impossible for movements to move beyond a racist, hierarchical, class system if such an ideology
persists.¶ We have yet to see how Ferguson unravels, and if people’s honest fury will help to address the nation’s systemic race
issues. But whatever happens, wherever the movement goes, let it be a movement where not one person speaks over others and
decides the course of action. We need leaderless, anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, anti-capitalist movements, now
more than ever. This doesn’t mean equating race and class; it means encouraging diverse tactics,
proliferating strategies, and allowing myriad movements.
AT: Chocolate Laxative
Chocolate laxatives K totally stupid
Dan T. Olson 9 - MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and am in the process of
completing another MA in philosophy at LMU, 8/1/9, HAUERWAS, ZIZEK, PATAGONIA AND ROB
BELL: CAPITALISM’S CHOCOLATE LAXATIVES AND THE CHURCH
http://dtomolson.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/hauerwas-zizek-patagonia-and-rob-bell-capitalismschocolate-laxatives-and-the-church/
To get back to the point, Zizek suggests that the reason these liberal-communists and their chocolate
laxatives must be rejected is that they are the quick fixes that allow the system to continue to grind on,
grinding up the masses as it does. The chocolate laxative may momentarily loosen your stool, but it will
not fix the main cause of the problem. In order to do that one must stop living off of chocolate and eat
some roughage, which doesn’t taste all that good to a palate used to sugar, cocoa and butter.
One possible danger in Zizek’s answer, for me, is that it is in danger of making the same mistake that
every other purely human revolution, insurrection, or rescue mission has made. That is, in view of what
must be achieved some sacrifices must be made—some heads of the aristocracy, some infidels, a couple of
thousand Iraqi or Afghani civilians lives or the massive suffering and starvation of many of the wretched
of the earth who depend on the charity of the liberal communists. For the Christian this is always
unacceptable. People are not goods to be used no matter how lofty the purpose but persons to be loved.
(Of course how this love works itself out is what is in question here.)
Many theologians have told us, rightly, that the poor are the sight of the in breaking and redeeming work
of Christ. This is different than being the subjective location of, or potential for, the revolution. One must
be careful that in order to achieve one’s end, the end of capitalist hegemony, an end that I believe is
completely in line with the Gospel, one does not sacrifice those who cannot choose otherwise.
This does not mean that on the other hand we shut our eyes and continue to rejoice in liberal communists
and chocolate laxatives. We cannot be content to wear our Tom’s Shoes and Gap Red T-shirts while
drinking our fair trade coffee and going about our day pleased with the current social order. There has
to be a third or middle way, a political option better than Elizabeth’s ecclesial via media.
No, Marijuana legalization = catalyst for radicalism, doesn’t lull the masses
Martin A Lee 13, director of Project CBD, a cannabis science information service, and cofounder of the
media watch group FAIR, 17 Dec 2013, “Why the Fight to Legalize Marijuana Is Part of a Much Larger
Populist Struggle,” http://www.pdamerica.org/issues/healthcare-for-allsingle-payer/item/1962-why-thefight-to-legalize-marijuana-is-part-of-a-much-larger-populist-struggle
Ginsberg sensed that marijuana, a substance essentially banned by the US government since 1937, “ was going
to be an enormous political catalyst.” Though marijuana prohibition didn’t deter widespread use, the funny stuff
did encourage doubts about officialdom in general. It wasn’t the chemical composition of cannabis that
fostered skepticism toward authority —it was the contradiction between lived experience and the hoary
propaganda of “reefer madness,” enshrined in draconian legislation mandating five years in prison for possession of a
nickel bag of grass.¶ Marijuana’s status as a forbidden substance added to its allure in the 1960s, when cannabis first emerged as a
defining force in a culture war that has yet to cease. From the outset, efforts to
end pot prohibition were inextricably
linked to a broader movement for social justice that encompassed many causes. Marijuana was never a
single-issue obsession for Ginsberg or Sanders. Both were high-profile peace activists who protested against nuclear
proliferation, racial discrimination and censorship. In October 1967, Sanders and his folk-rock ensemble, the Fugs,
stood on a flatbed truck and performed “The Exorcism of the Pentagon” at a huge antiwar rally that bequeathed to the world another
iconic image: the stunning picture of flowers sprouting from the rifle barrels of young soldiers guarding the high church of the
military-industrial complex.¶ For good or ill, cannabis was
intimately associated with the rising tide of cognitive
dissonance that prompted millions of Americans to question, re-evaluate and oppose their nation’s bullyboy foreign policy. “You couldn’t separate laws against drugs from the war,” said Yippie impresario Paul Krassner, who declared at
a peace rally that he “wouldn’t stop smoking pot until it was legal.” To many onlookers, however, the widespread consumption of
cannabis was a symptom—if not the actual cause—of public disorder and moral decay. Henry Giordano, chief of the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics in the mid-1960s, told Congress that calls to legalize pot were “just another effort to break down our whole American
system.” Denigrated by politicians and deified by dissidents, the little flower that millions loved to smoke had become a totem of
rebellion, a multivalent symbol of societal conflict.
AT: Psycho
The negatives claim that we must accept posited conditions founded on
transgression eliminates any possibility for incremental or revolutionary
reform and creates conflict by promoting antagonism as inescapable
ROBINSON 5, SCHOOL OF POLITICS – NOTTINGHAM, 2K5 [ANDREW, THEORY & EVENT, 8:1,
“The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique”]
The basic claim of Lacanian theory is that identity - whether individual or social - is founded on a lack. Therefore, social
relations are always irreducibly concerned with antagonism, conflict, strife and exclusion. Chantal Mouffe, for instance,
writes of 'the primary reality of strife in social life'4, while Slavoj Žižek seeks an 'ethics grounded in reference to the
traumatic Real which resists symbolization'5. 'Lack ("castration") is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as "stolen"'6.
According to Stavrakakis, the Real is 'inherent in human experience' and 'doesn't stop not being written'7. Hence, the
primary element of social life is a negativity, which prevents the emergence of any social "whole". In Mouffe's words, 'society
is the illusion... that hides the struggle and antagonism behind the scenes', putting the 'harsh reality' of antagonism behind a
'protective veil'. For Newman, 'war is the reality', whereas 'society is the illusion... that hides the struggle and antagonism
behind the scenes'9. For Stavrakakis, 'personal trauma, social crisis and political rupture are constant characteristics of
human experience'10. Such claims have political consequences, because they rule out the possibility of achieving substantial
improvements (whether "reformist" or "revolutionary") in any area on which this fundamental negativity bears. The
dimension of antagonism is, after all, 'ineradicable'. Instead of the imperative to overcome antagonism which one finds in
forms as diverse as Marxian revolution and deliberative democracy, Lacanian political theory posits as the central political
imperative a demand that one "accept" the underlying lack and the constitutive character of antagonism. While the various
authors disagree about the means of achieving this, they agree on its desirability. Lacanian theory thus entails an
ethical commitment to create conflict and antagonism. This ethics mostly expresses itself via a detour into
ontology: the ethical imperative is to 'accept' or 'grasp' the truth of the primacy of lack, and the accusation against opponents
is that they fall into some kind of fallacy (illusion, delusion, blindness, failure to accept, and so on). At other times, however,
one finds a direct ethical advocacy of exclusion and conflict as almost goods in themselves.
Particular Demands Key
Our demand cannot be reduced to mere particularity - it interlinks with a
broader chain of equivalence that is itself a collective and universal struggle
Laclau 2k (Ernesto, Professor of Political Theory - University of Essex, CONTINGENCY,
HEGEMONY, UNIVERSALITY, p. 209-211)
The central point is that for a certain demand, subject position, identity, and so on, to become political means that it is
something other than itself, living its own particularity as a moment or link in a chain of equivalences that
transcends and, in this way, universalizes it. Food riots in France had taken place following a remarkably similar pattern
since the Middle Ages; but it was only when they broke their local particularism and became a link in the more universalistic
discourse of the pliilosophes that they became a force for systemic change. That is my basic quarrel with the category 'class struggle":
it tends to anchor the moment of struggle and antagonism in the sectorial identity of a group, while any meaningful struggle
transcends any sectorial identity and becomes a complexly articulated 'collective will'. In that sense a truly political mobilization,
even if it is conducted mainly by workers, is never simply a 'working-ctass struggle'. Here again we find the basic political dilemma '
of our age: will the proliferation of new social actors lead to the enlarge¬ment of the equivalential chains which will enable the
emergence of stronger collective wills; or will they dissolve into mere particularism, making it easier for the system to integrate and
subordinate them? 3. What, however, about the structure of the equivalential discourses which would enable the emergence of new
collective wills? If the equivalential chains extend to a wide variety of concrete demands, so that the ground
of the equivalence cannot be found in the specificity of any one of them, it is clear that the resulting collective
will will find its anchoring point on the level of the social imaginary, and the core of that social imaginary is what we
have called empty significrs. It is the empty character of these anchoring points that truly universalizes a
discourse, making it the surface of inscription of a plurality of demands beyond their particularities.
(jheitjaiticularities) And, as an emancipatory discourse presupposes the aggregation of a plurality of discrete demands, we can say
that there is no true emancipation except in a discourse whose anchoring terms remain empty. It is not necessary that the term does
not have a precise meaning, in as much as there is a gap between its concrete content and the set of equivalential meanings
associated with it. Front Populaire des¬ignated an alliance of political forces, but in the political climate of the France of the 1930s it
raised a wide variety of social hopes that far exceeded its actual political reality. It is important to point out that these social
There
is no universality , as we have seen, except through an equivalence between particularities, and such
equiv¬alences are always contingent and context-dependent. Any step beyond this limit would necessarily
fall into a historical teleology with the result that universality, which should' be considered as a horizon, would become a
ground. I want to stress above all the function of surfaces of inscription that these, horizons exercise. Once they become the
generalized language of social change, any new demand will be constructed as one more link in the
equivalential chain embraced by those horizons. They become, in this sense, powerful instruments in the
displacement of the relations of force in society. Conversely, their decline is linked to their decreasing aouuy to embrace
imaginaries organized around some empty signifiers represent Jn my view, the limit of socially attainable universalization.
social demands, which recognize them¬selves less and less in the political language provided by that horizon.
Suffering K
2AC Top-Shelf
Our critique of structural injustice turns vampirism. Contextualizing
vulnerability, and the background of injustice balances emphasizing with
material suffering and avoiding sentimentality
Michalinos Zembylas 13, Education @ Open (Cyprus), “The ‘Crisis of Pity” and the Radicalization of
Solidarity: Toward Critical Pedagogies of Compassion”, Educational Studies 49, p. 512-516
a politics of compassion that takes into consideration the possible dangers of compassion fatigue,
desensitization, and victimization has to begin from acknowledging common vulnerability and its
influence in inspiring meaningful actions that avoid presumptuous paternalism
The
recognition of one’s own vulnerability can constitute a powerful point of departure for developing
compassion and solidarity
First of all,
self-
human
(Porter 2006; Whitebrook 2002).
with the other’s vulnerability (Butler 2004). As Butler asserts: “Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies. ... We cannot ... will away this
vulnerability. We must attend to it” (2004, p. 29). Butler’s description of the vulnerable body and self refers to the way we perform and are performed upon, and part of what we fear in the other is a projection of our own selves. Hence, Butler suggests that
recognition of our own vulnerability opens up the potential for recognition of all humanity as vulnerable.
Vulnerability may
be a more appropriate term than suffering
because the focus is
not merely on the alleviation of material suffering and hence a slide from compassion
to benevolence and sentimentality
Suggesting this epistemological shift
does not imply
that a narrative that focuses on the alleviation of material suffering will necessarily result in a slide
into sentimentality
political applications of compassion cannot be completely separated from
questions of material suffering
The idea of common vulnerability enables us—teachers and students
to explore how
we might move beyond dichotomies that single out the self or the other as victims, and therefore
deserving someone else’s pity. That is, the idea of common vulnerability puts in perspective the notion of
all of us as vulnerable, rather than the individual-other who needs our compassion. This addresses
concerns of students
who seem to be stuck in self-victimization claims and refuse to acknowledge
that others also suffer
common vulnerability
opens space to problematize
moralistic positioning
, therefore,
to ground the political applications of compassion,
(Porter 2006; Whitebrook 2002).
of focus
,
however,
. Undoubtedly, the
. Thus, it needs to be acknowledged that although the move away from suffering may be theoretically useful, the shift to a narrative of common human vulnerability is not completely
unproblematic. 8
in the classroom, for instance—
as
notion
the
, for example,
. Although the idea of
does not guarantee any departure from such claims, it
some
. In addition, the notion of common vulnerability attacks a major emotional ideology grounded in the view that it is natural or normal to be fearful of the other, especially if it involves racial differences. This is
one of the most common and pernicious emotional ideologies underlying resistance (especially among White, middle-class students) to identifying with the other. However, if vulnerability concerns everyone and yet compassion is assigned differently (i.e., students
Through
addressing this issue
it is possible to respond to some of the desensitization
concerns outlined earlier, because the dichotomies between we and they will become meaningless and
unproductive.
compassion serves to reinforce a strong connection between the personal and the
political and accentuates the interpersonal and the interrelational
Empathetic identification with
the plight of others , then, is not a sentimental recognition of potential sameness —you are in pain and so
am I, so we both suffer the same— but a realization of our own common humanity, while acknowledging
asymmetries of suffering , inequality, and injustice. A discourse of vulnerability neither eschews questions
of material suffering nor obscures issues of inequality
on the contrary, it highlights both the
symmetries and the asymmetries of vulnerability
although the experience of vulnerability may be
universal, the discourse of common vulnerability raises important critical questions such as “vulnerable to
what? to whom?” to dismiss the possibility of sliding into a sentimental recognition of
sameness—
which is what a politics of compassion
seeks to avoid
If properly recognized
this realization can
potentially address both the concern about the desensitization of students and that of their selfvictimization, because the distance between spectator and sufferer will not be taken for granted any
more, but rather its multiple complexities will be acknowledged and interrogated
the kind of
compassion that is explored here requires a simultaneous identification and disidentification with the
suffering of the other. The simultaneous recognition of symmetry and asymmetry with the other removes
the arrogance of claiming that we know and feel their
suffering. This emotional ambivalence of
simultaneous identification and disidentification is needed to focus attention on the other’s suffering, but
not becoming too identified with it
awareness that others
are vulnerable is important in the struggle for action-oriented solidarity and the avoidance of
think that some deserve compassion but others do not), then it is important to explore what it would take for students to begin imagining themselves as objects of lesser compassion in an unsuspected vulnerable moment.
in ways that do not reify stereotypes or promote essentialism,
Second,
(Whitebrook 2002).
and injustice;
. That is,
more or less
potential
exactly
ardently
. Without this double realization—that is, we are all vulnerable but not in the same manner—our actions run the danger
of being a form of charity and condescension toward those who are systematically and institutionally oppressed (Bunch 2002).
in schools,
double
. In a sense then,
pain and
—a point raised earlier in Nelson’s (2004) reading of Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann’s trial. Students who already endure forms of suffering, of course, do not need a pedagogy to
enlighten them how to disidentify with their own suffering. This does not imply, however, that pedagogies that interrogate pity and encourage critical compassion are not for them; on the contrary, the critical
, too,
egocentricity and cultural narcissism
. Finally, the third element of a politics of compassion is attentiveness to how the ethics of compassion questions injustice and inequality. 9 In particular, an important
component of a politics of compassion that is critical and justice-oriented is how it deals with anger at injustice (Hoggett 2006). A politics of compassion does not intentionally seek to cause anger, however, but rather encourages students and teachers to develop a
critical analysis of anger, as it is likely that they will experience such feelings, when they begin questioning long-held assumptions and beliefs about other people and social events (Zembylas 2007). Anger may call attention to demands for recognition, but also
emphasize inequalities (Holmes 2004) and injustices at the civic level (Silber 2011). Anger at injustice can be a positive and powerful source of personal and political insight in education (Lorde 1984), because it helps to move teachers and students out of a cycle of
self-pity, blame, or guilt into a mode of action that somehow responds to injustice. For example, civic anger can be promoted in the classroom as a form of cultivating individual and collective political consciousness and social resistance to injustices in the students’
community, although anger is not inevitably emancipatory. However, recognizing the positive power of anger and its link to the struggle against injustice in one’s own community is valuable, if teachers want to promote options for action that may change the
The pedagogical challenge for critical pedagogues is how to encourage students to become
active participants with a nuanced understanding of the emotional complexities involved in histories of
injustice and oppression
conditions of others’ vulnerability.
.
Alt Bad – Black Suffering
Alt silences black suffering
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Washington
U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, 180-3
Recognizing the political valence of pain—of speaking pain—is essential to black survival . Given the
poorer health status of African Americans in the United States, the fact that pain is often ignored or borne silently before seeking care, and undertreated once
care is sought, those who work with African Americans need to emphasize the right to tell stories of pain .
Obstacles to black storytelling not only come from white institutional sources, but they also come from
self-perceptions that if African Americans can claim nothing else, they can claim strength . The strong-black-woman
stereotype, John Henry, the brave and stoic kids integrating the store, and other models of black strength fill the U.S. imaginary. Reinterpreting
the naming and speaking of pain can be an act of power, not an act of powerlessness. One person who recognized the power in
speaking about pain was Audre Lorde. In The Cancer Journals she described how she wanted people to respond to her cancer in a way that was atten- tive her identity, to the fact that she was black and feminist
and a lesbian. After her mastectomy, she journaled, “I want to write about the pain.”74 She wanted to write about the pain because she would “willingly pay whatever price in pain was needed, to savor the weight
of completion; to be utterly fi lled, not with conviction nor with ¶ 181¶ faith, but with experience—knowledge, direct and different from all other certainties.” Writing about the pain, speaking about the pain
medical
storytelling is a visceral example of how black pain has been dismissed or reframed in relationship to various
political agendas. Sentimental political storytelling, for all its faults, provides an important intervention .¶ A
Coda on Moving from Spectator/ Spectacle to Agents in Our Own Care¶ This intervention can be, as in the best examples of sentimental
political storytelling, both public and private, both therapeutic and a political call to arms. When I saw a call for papers for
imparts knowledge, a different kind of knowledge than that validated by the allegedly objective methodologies of medicine and science, but knowledge nonetheless. The example of
the “Anarcha Symposium,” The Anarcha Project’s Michigan workshop, I applied with both public and private work. I shared academic scholarship I had written about Anarcha as well as creative nonfi ction about
my surgery, fi nding the rare space in the academy that made space for both. Called together in 2007, many of us engaged in scholarship who did not see ourselves as scholars, in creative performance when we did
not see ourselves as performers. The group who came together to discuss Anarcha, J. Marion Sims, and the issues the history raised were eclectic: undergraduates taking classes in disability studies, scholars and
performers who focused on African American culture, dancers, singers, those who had movement constraints, and those of us who had constraints that were less visible. Over the course of a few days we performed
physical and mental exercises, bonding in both small and large groups in order to shape a performance at the end of our time together. We were transformed from spectators into spectacle, but it was a process of
constructing a spectacle that was by no means one way—we looked back in history and looked out to those who could engage with us. While minimalist in presentation, it contained the excesses of our emotional
If a problem with sentimental political storytelling is the conflation with other kinds of
oppressed bodies, the productively messy conflations pushed us to think about a broader nexus of
institutional oppression. We were divided into small performance groups, and we ¶ 182¶ struggled to fi nd a collective response that refl ected all of our readings of Anarcha’s, Lucy’s, and
response to Anarcha’s history and our presents. ¶
Betsey’s histories, as well as the histories of other unnamed women. On a stark stage, with our bodies, micro- phones, and lights shaping the space, my group produced a short choreo-piece after two days of work
in which the group collectively prompted individual stories with the refrain, “This is Anarcha’s story, and . . .” it was the story of all of us. One of us challenged the his- torical record that Anarcha “willingly
consented” in Sims’s narrative while also addressing the issue of her relatives’ lack of consent to medical experimentation during the Nazi Holocaust. Another of us without the use of her legs told the story of being
sexually molested by a medical caregiver, describing “histories and futures lost . . . one black, one white, one slave, one not . . . neither touched by request, both silenced by circumstance.” In drawing a comparison
between the invisible stories—Anarcha’s and her own—she explored how the broader issue of nonconsent and voicelessness in medical care can be read across history and identity. One of us discussed the lack of
choices and resistance when fi ghting “medical men”; another discussed fear shaped by history. Drawing on my history, I added to the chorus with a recognition of my difference from Anarcha as well as my sense
as we moved in
and out of our individual and collective refrains shaped by our specific stories, the chorus built
community, acknowledging the differences between our histories and our similar investments at the same
time. We learned, as Boal suggests in Theater of the Oppressed, to “practice theater as a language that is living and present, not as
a finished product displaying images from the past.”75 ¶ I fi nd telling my own story diffi cult; in some ways, telling the story of pain management after my
of connection to her: “I am not Anarcha,” but see her story as my story, “not because my issues are hers, but because I need someone to hear her pain . . . and alleviate it.” And
surgery and telling of the Anarcha Symposium performance are equally diffi cult. Two spaces of judgment are possible—judgment of my tolerance for pain and judgment of my creative work, both of which are
linked to what it means to make myself vulnerable. I was advised to cut my personal story from this chapter because of the danger of exposing myself. But if we take sentimental political storytelling seriously as an
opportunity to treat affect and the story of pain as essential to political progress, what example would I set if I remained continually in a space of academic distance when I believe in the political efficacy ¶ 183¶ of
the sentimental narrative? As a subject who has been raced and pained in the United States, I must don the mantle of articulating my affective investment in recognizing the relationship between race and pain
without shame. ¶ As I say that it is hard to talk about pain—broadly—in the U.S. without talking about race, I recognize that the claim can be read as hyperbolic, and inadequately supported. The charge of
When we
recognize that we can be subjects of various discourses about race and pain, and not only subject to a
specialized language, such a shift in understand- ing may empower people , as health-care advocates encourage, to be agents
in their own care. Silence, as Audre Lorde, famously wrote, will not protect you.76 Allowing stories of pain to be silenced, dismissed, or obscured,
however, will surely kill you. We must speak pain to power.
hyperbole is often leveled against sentimental rhetoric. But a review of history, rhetoric, and social and medical discourse reveals that these concepts are often linked in the United States.
Sentiment w/ Political Action Solves
Their sentiment K is totally wrong---stories of pain combined with political
action avoid vampiristic consumption and motivate effective harmreduction
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Washington
U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, 228-232
Despite my disappointment in these films and frequent annoyance with the narrative trajectory of many of their productions, I admit that I have a bit of
a soft spot for the Lifetime network. I,
too, used to automatically criticize made-for-television movies “inspired by a true
story” about women at risk. I found them exploitative, as any film can be that makes entertainment out of a
personal tragedy. Lifetime Television has been called “television for victims,” in a criticism of its seemingly endless capacity to show fi lms about
the victimization of women.5 One of the questions that this moniker raises is what kind of storylines about people have the most dramatic impact.
Popular fi lms with high dramatic impact depict violence, stories of surviv- ing some atypical traumatic event, or struggling with some more powerful
person or entity. One aspect of the criticisms of Lifetime is the objection to formulaic melodrama in itself, framed within the gendered derision of
women’s victimization narratives or, on the other side of the political spectrum, discomfort with such narratives as demeaning, reductive, and trite. The
fi lms shown on the network, some produced by Lifetime but most produced elsewhere, vary in quality, but the criticisms of Lifetime raise a question
that I have explored throughout this book: What is the best way to represent a story of suffering? ¶ 229¶ Simply
crying at a Lifetime film
clearly cannot sustain any sub- stantive political work—but what if the crying citizen is directed to, at the
very least, awareness, and in the best case scenario, action, after their emotional catharsis? Sorrow
produced at the sight of a dead or wounded woman may not accomplish anything unless the representation
is framed in relationship to some political action , but tears in relation to abolition and child abduction
did produce action. However, a major ethical problem with using sympathy and compassion as the primary mechanism for political change is
that sentimental politics depends on the cultural feelings of those in power, and the disempowered must depend on patronage. Hannah Arendt argues
that compassion cannot embrace a larger population, but pity can, and pity is a dangerous affect because it cannot exist without misfortune, thus “it has
just as much vested interest in the existence of the unhappy as thirst for power has a vested interest in the existence of the weak . . . by being a virtue of
sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glorifi cation of its cause, which is the suffering of others.”6
the charge against Lifetime could be that it thus encourages sadism because watchers could
take pleasure in pity. Or, as literary critic Marianne Noble has suggested in her study of sentimentality, the network might embrace masochism
because watchers would identify with the sufferer and might begin to take pleasure in these fantasies of subjection.7 However, these
readings of the pleasures of consuming stories of subjection are too narrow . In the case of Lifetime, casting these
films as only narratives of victimization is too limited a reading. After watching several fi lms, I began to be compelled by stories I
had not heard before about women interven- ing when the state fails to protect them. The stories were clearly not only about
victimization, but also about survival. The movies negotiate a balance between structural critique and
stories of individual heroism, and I am often disappointed, as with the fi lms discussed above, with how much weight is placed on the side
¶ Following Arendt,
of individual transformation. Nonetheless I later began defending the network out of political principle, as part of a broader effort to challenge the ¶
230¶ facile denunciation of the word “victim.” Lifetime’s fi lms are often poor in terms of artistic merit, but the network is contributing to a national
conversation about what agency can look like. ¶ My
argument may seem as if I am looking for politics in all the wrong
places, relying on sentimentality when I should focus on politically rational arguments that eschew the appeals of emotional response. I am not
asking for radical progressivism from popular culture. Instead, I am arguing that politics is often
accomplished through the popular and conventional work of emotional appeals, as many activists throughout
history have demonstrated. The question facing activists for African American women—or, for that matter,
advocates for any identity group outside the national imaginary of ideal citizenship—is not only how to expose discrimination, but
also how to make use of existing rhetoric so that attacks on their bodies can be read as pressing concerns
for all U.S. citizens. Affect and popular culture can be easily criticized as tools of anti-intellectual conservative
machines. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno rightly argue, popular culture focuses on producing narratives of comfort or affects that can
ultimately serve the state’s purposes.8 Totally escaping the political storytelling of the status quo elicited by massproduced texts is indeed impossible. However, the impossibility of total escape does not preclude the
possibility of making use of tools produced by ideology. Mobilizing affect demands use of proven rhetorical
tools, but this use need not forestall a criticism of the need to employ the structures in the first place .
Negotiating the relationship between challenging the “master’s tools” and making use of them to garner
financial support and political power is not an easy project, but it is a necessary one. ¶ The book’s title is inspired by this
very tension between see- ing popular cultural productions as inevitably politically ineffi cacious and recognizing the possibilities offered by making use
of widely circulated genres and media. When Gil Scott-Heron produced his famous choreo-poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in 1974, he
called attention to the disconnect between radical action and violent struggles taking place in the streets and the pleasures of oblivion offered by
scripted television and commercials.9 Television stood in for mass-produced media that would not show what was really occurring in the streets, like
“pigs shooting down brothers in instant replay.” Scott-Heron pointed to the need for his audience to take to the streets and participate, live, in the
revolution. Indeed, a ¶ 231¶ rue revolution requires “live” political action and organizing, and television and many cultural productions neglect a
multitude of issues that are politically urgent. However, it is clearly no longer the case that “pigs shooting down brothers in the street is left off of
instant replay.” Important events are depicted on the news, in scripted tele- vision shows, in genre fi ction, in magazines, in movies, and on the
Internet. You can even catch the occasional social message in a television commercial. Rather than reject various media wholesale, we are left with a set
of questions about what to do with contemporary media realities. How and why are certain kinds of traditionally neglected issues represented? Once
represented, how are they interpreted, and can activists play a role in that interpretation? What do activists do about the complexities lost when they
make use of certain kinds of mass-marketed discourses? ¶ Octavia Butler perhaps best articulated this problem in her science-fi ction novel Parable of
the Talents. The novel exemplifi es what Lauren Berlant calls the postsentimental text—one that exhibits longing for the unconfl icted intimacy and
political promise senti- mentality offers but is skeptical of the ultimate political effi cacy of making feeling central to political change. Her heroine,
Olamina, suffers from “hyperempathy” syndrome, which allows her to feel the emotions of others, but Butler is careful to argue that being able to feel
the pain of others is not the means for liberation—it is a “delusional disorder.” Thus Olamina focuses on other modes of political change, and struggles
to gain followers for her politi- cal and spiritual project for survival, Earthseed, in a United States devastated by environmental destruction and the
domination of a repressive fusion of government and a religious right organiza- tion called Christian America. Through Olamina’s struggle, Butler
addresses the intellectual discomfort with consumption by having a character explicitly argue that only strategic commodifi cation will result in
successful dissemination of radical ideas. Olamina struggles with the means by which she can circulate Earthseed, until someone suggests to her that
she must use the marketing tools she slightly disparages to compel people to her project. Her companion, Len, argues that Olamina must “focus on
what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it.” She resists the call to “preach” the way her Christian American enemy Jarret
does, rejecting “preaching,” “telling folksy stories,” emphasizing a profi t motive, and self-consciously using her charismatic persona to sell Earthseed. ¶
232¶ Len argues that her resistance to using the tools of commodifi cation “leaves the fi eld to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the
world.”10 Butler ultimately presents the moral that the project of producing populist texts for mass consumption cannot be left to those with
unproductive or dangerous dreams, abandoned by a Left that desires not only revolution but also political change resulting in real material gains.¶
Clearly, the productions
of mass-culture are not the only way to move people to action, but they are no doubt a
tool. The dismissiveness accompanying the label of the sentimental in contemporary culture is because academic
critics claim that it does not do anything, it is the antithesis of action. However, this book is about how
sentimentality is doing things all the time . For better or worse, it teaches people to identify “proper” objects of
sympathy. It teaches people how to relate to each other. It teaches people how to make compelling
arguments about their pain. The circulation of sentimental political storytelling often depends on media to which many progressives have a
schizophrenic relationship. News media and television are often tools of the state, but citizens depend on the news for the free circulation of
information and often look for progressive politics in television shows. Others disavow the “idiot box” altogether and have faith only in alternative news
sources. However, the dichotomy between the popular and other spaces in which people tell stories about suffering is a false one. Sentimental political
storytelling is omnipresent in U.S. culture. While
the discourse has many short-comings, people interested in political
change are taking a perilous road if they ignore the possibilities of imperfect stories told about citizens in
pain .
Perm Solves
That’s best --- sentimentality is politically effective when it is recognized as
part of a larger project
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Washington
U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, p. 9
However, sentimentality cannot easily be understood as progressive or conservative. When
theorists criticize producers of
sentimentality for conservative politics, they sometimes attack a rhetoric that is reactionary or designed to serve
the status quo. At other times, such critics express disappointment at a text’s possibly radical revolutionary or otherwise progressive potential having
been short-circuited in favor of feel-good closure offered by the sentimental narrative. World Trade Center provoked exactly this response from movie
critic David Edelstein, who wanted the fi lm about the event of 9/11 to be “more political,” because the “heartwarming conclusion” to the fi lm is
“unrepresentative—to the point where it almost seems like a denial of the deeper and more enduring horror.”22 Sentimental texts present themselves
frequently as progressive about social justice issues while they eventually preserve the status quo. Indeed, that is an overlying tendency of most
sentimental texts. However, the
binaries of good and bad, Left and Right are insufficient to categorize
sentimentality as it does, by its nature, have a progressive political thrust. It addresses the suffering of the
politically disadvantaged but utilizes conventional narratives and practices that will not fundamentally disrupt power. Rather than
characterizing U.S. sentimentality as “good” or “bad” politics, a more precise characterization—albeit more of
a mouthful and less dramatic—is to call it a politically effective but insufficient means of political change.
AT: Ressentiment = Extinction
Ressentiment doesn’t cause extinction
Bernard N. Meltzer 2, and Gil Richard Musolf, profs of sociology at Central Michigan University,
“Resentment and Ressentiment,” Sociological Inquiry, V72 N2, Spring, 240-55
Given this negative characterization—a prevailing evaluation—of ressentiment, it is not surprising to learn that Sartre (1965, p. 14) describes those who
experience the emotion as individuals who ‘‘establish their human personality as a perpetual negation.’’ Augmenting the negative view of this emotion
is a widely held view among scholars that both resentment and ressentiment tend to be base, dastardly emotions resorted to by thin-skinned
individuals and seekers after excuses for failure, that these emotions are often felt irrationally, on occasions in which one has not been morally
wronged. Thus, Solomon (1995) refers to a ‘‘vindictive’’ emotion, frequently a personal, petty, disproportionate reaction to a slight; Ortony, Clore, and
Collins (1988) write of a ‘‘distasteful’’ emotion; and Adam Smith [1759] (1969) designates a ‘‘disagreeable’’ passion.7 On the other hand, Solomon
ressentiment, pointing out that it often entails compassion for others in the
same situation, and its implicit sense of injustice may lead to corrective action; thus, ressentiment can be
seen as an expression of ‘‘the socially responsible insistence of the community on justice and
justification’’ (p. 124). Similarly, Haber (1991) argues that resentment can be a form of personal protest that
expresses regard for oneself, for others, and for the normative order (p. 48). Moreover, Haber (1991, p. 82) holds that a
display of resentment may serve as an instrument of individual or social change. In fact, the
historian Hippolyte Taine (cited in Jameson 1976, p. 131) sought to explain revolutions in terms of underlying
ressentiment, and Jameson (1976) contends that this emotion is the very content of revolutions. In the same vein, various scholars have asserted
that ‘‘the individual of ressentiment is a potential revolutionary’’ (Vaneigem 1979, p. 9) and that ‘‘our revolutionaries are men and
women of resentment’’(Solomon 1995, p. 266).8 Thus, Merton (1957, p. 155) maintains that ‘‘organized rebellion may draw
upon a vast reservoir of the resentful and discontented as institutional dislocations become acute.’’ In the light
(1994), elsewhere, takes a more positive view of
of such characterizations, the role of the political agitator is readily recognized as that of raising consciousness of unjust treatment (where such
consciousness is absent), inducing ressentiment (where the emotion is absent), and organizing resistance to the recurrence or continuation of unjust
That ressentiment can be used
to initiate (and sustain) revolution argues against the more passive—and contemptuous—conceptions
held by Nietzsche , Scheler, and their many followers.
treatment. Moreover, Folger (1987) claims that revolutionary ideologies can help to create ressentiment.
AT: Ressentiment – Productive/K Links
Ressentiment is productive—inseparable for some freedom and their
crusade against it links just as much
Stefan P. Dolger 10, Brock University, "In Praise of Ressentiment: Or, How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love Glenn Beck", APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper,
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1642232&download=yes
After Ressentiment ¶ In closing I would suggest that my praise of ressentiment is also in line with the more deliberatively
conceived multiculturalism of the Left than is the current puritanical disdain. As Monique Deveaux argues, it is a
failure of political imagination when we fixate on liberal principles as preconditions lo multicultural dialogue, and in particular it is
necessary to move toward a deeper level of intercultural respect rather than mere toleration (Deveaux 2000).10 But if it is
appropriate to go beyond simply tolerating non- liberal peoples abroad and in immigrant communities, if we must go beyond
toleration to do justice to the rich tradition of cultural pluralism, then perhaps we can also open our hearts and minds to the
possibility that the ressentiment-suffused need to be heard out as well. Perhaps rather than demonizing ressentiment as a
toxin to politics, as the worst of the worst for subjects whom we purport to free, we must accept that
ressentiment is for many inseparable from their conception of their own freedom. Perhaps rather than
pitying these poor fools, in ways that we would never pity a plural wife in the global South, we should ponder whether
ressentiment as a precondition of subjectivity is as much a gift as a curse.¶ And are we so sure, after all, we late
Nietzscheans, that our crusade against ressentiment is not itself suffused with ressentiment ? Is not itself fully in
the grips of it? How would we know if it were or weren’t? Perhaps we are, in our own way, as spiteful, vain, petty,
weak, subjected, enraged against the past, capitalized, consumerized, unfree, as those we purport to want to free from the
chains of slave morality. Perhaps it is ourselves that we need to give a break to, that we need to get over, when we first look to
purge the other of ressentiment. Perhaps we all swim in this current, perhaps we are all Ressentiment’s children,
and perhaps that is OK – even to the extreme of the using ressentiment unconsciously in the effort to rid the
world of ressentiment. Though just in saying so I wouldn’t expect that to do much to overturn Ressentiment’s reign. No, she is
far too puissant for that. But we do not need to rage against the weakness in others because we fear the dependence
and weakness in ourselves. ¶ As Vetlesen puts it, defending Amery: “Against Nietzsche, who despised victims
because he saw them as weak, as losers in life’s struggles, Amery upholds the dignity of having been forced by
circumstances beyond one’s control into that position, thus reminding Nietzsche that as humans we are
essentially relational beings, dependent, not self-sufficient. In hailing the strong and despising the weak, in denying
that vulnerability is a basic ineluctably given human condition, a condition from which not only the role of victim springs but that of
the morally responsible agent too, Nietzsche fails to be the provocateur he loves to believe he is: He sides with
the complacent majority and so helps reinforce the existential and moral loneliness felt by Amery, the
individual victim who speaks up precisely in that capacity” (Vetlesen 2006, 43). Perhaps we can begin to see how we have
been using the weak, the viewers of Glenn Beck and others, as the targets for our need to find blameworthy
agents. And that too is fine. The trouble comes when we think we’ve gone beyond Ressentiment when in fact
we’re just listening to her whisperings without realizing it. We think that we can well and truly look down
on the Rush Limbaughs, these destroyers of civilization, because they are possessed by something that we are
above. And far be it from me to suggest that we should not resent, should not blame; I merely suggest we direct our blame
toward more useful ends than where it is currently located.
AT: Ressentiment – Perm Solves/KT Justice
Perm solves – ressentiment may often be destructive, but it is necessary for
a baseline of social justice
Robert Soloman 94, Philosophy @ UT Austin, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality p. 123-124
Nietzsche separates what he calls “justice” from the “reactive emotions,” defending justice as a rare and unusually noble sentiment while attacking such
emotions as resentment for their impotence. This is no less questionable. But we
need not therefore disagree when he objects to
the abuse of justice as a façade for the defense of one’s own interests, whether in the name of “rights” or
equality and we need not endorse the consequent “leveling” effect of enforced modernity . In the name of
“justice,” for example, one may adopt an egalitarian standpoint, but look only in one direction . The
French bourgeoisie during the French Revolution only looked up at the aristocrats they wanted to replace,
but they never looked down at the rest of the “third estate” who were much worse off. The hard question is
whether there is any “neutral” social position (other than our position as outside observers) that would provide the proper standpoint for making such
evaluations. Justice
always begins as situated with the self and its personal passions: but it need not
therefore be selfish, and resentment need not be petty or opposed to a noble sense of generosity and
compassion . Indeed, given that we are not Nietzsche’s fantasized Ubermenschen, wholly satisfied and in
charge of our world, it is hard to even imagine what justice —and for that matter morality— would be
without resentment and the modicum of selfishness that makes it possible . Perhaps Duhring was right: the home of
justice is to be sought in the “sphere of the reactive feelings.”