Topicality

Our interpretation is that an affirmative should defend a topical action by the USfg as the
endpoint of their advocacy. This does not mandate roleplaying, immediate fiat or any
particular means of impact calculus.

The resolution indicates affs should advocate topical government change
Ericson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et
al., The Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have
slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---The United
States in The United States should adopt a policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the
agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3.
An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or
policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase
free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic
recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is
about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to
offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

First, a limited topic of discussion that provides for equitable ground is key to productive
inculcation of decision-making and advocacy skills in every and all facets of life---even if
their position is contestable thats distinct from it being valuably debatable---we do NOT
force them back in the closet---this still provides room for flexibility, creativity, and
innovation, but targets the discussion
Steinberg & Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal,
personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication
Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision
Making pp45-
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of
interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need
for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be
pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply
no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no
clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot
produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be
answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal
immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration
and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from
American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the
responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers?
Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal
immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as
human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families
impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build
a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should
we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be
addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in
this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be
productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line
demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be
stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor
decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress
to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007. Someone
disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially
disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are
overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to
maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision,
such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their
frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their
discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding
points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise
question is posedsuch as "What can be done to improve public education?"then a more profitable area of
discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution
step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions
for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal
government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a
school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate.
They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points
of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making
by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be
clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or
"global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish
profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is
mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear
argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we
can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose. Although we now
have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-
organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned withpoems, novels, government documents, website
development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being
comparedfists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty
or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument
could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual
defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution.
This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the
controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of
the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that
debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of
difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.

Ocean education is crucial to the environment, scientific literacy and requires a focus on
policymaking. We have to create student networks of global ocean advocates, a purely local
focus ignores the fundamental interconnectedness of the ocean
Sosnowski 13 Sosnowski (Ford Apprentice Scholar in Marine Science a Eckerd College, Researcher at National Systematics Laboratory,
Smithsonian Institutions Natural Museum of Natural History) 13 (Amanda, Ocean Literacy: Fishing Down the Food Web, April 28, 2013,
http://www.eckerd.edu/academics/ford/files/13/AmandaSosnowski.pdf)
There is a desperate need for the ability to understand science, or scientific literacy, in todays society. Matters like technologys progress,
understanding the natural world around us, and environmental issues on a global scale all require a science literate public, as well as officials
supporting this concept. Global matters concerning the natural world are the source of practical understandings needed for informed decisions
in our everyday lives, such as health, sustenance, environmental sustainability, etc. Scientific literacy is an important way to note that science is
not isolated from other disciplines in our lives; it generally provides context for concepts in different disciplines. Perhaps the most
valuable skill gained from scientific literacy is the ability to understand concepts across different
subjects and make connections within a particular subject area, essentially producing a more
robust comprehension of information. It is necessary to revisit my introduction and why I understood ocean sciences to be a
great field to study: water is the basis for all life on earth. With that said, the ability to understand science, the study of the
physical and natural world, must be linked with the ability to understand the oceans, which contain the
basis for all life on earth. The question then arises: can scientific literacy exist without ocean literacy? Strange et al. (2007) argued:
Research consistently affirms the ocean's vital role in maintaining the unity of our world. Without its vast ocean, Earth could be inhospitably cold
like Mars or a stifling greenhouse like Venus. On the other hand, the interconnectedness of the ocean and the atmosphere has had negative
impacts. Ocean waters absorb airborne industrial chemicals that are carried thousands of miles from their source to the Arctic region. These
pollutants are found in the bodies of top predators such as polar bears, which absorb the chemicals through their diet of fish and seals.
Whether we live on the coast or inland, eat seafood or not, humans are inextricably tied to the ocean. Thus
the scientifically literate citizens we grow in our schools must become familiar with ocean issues
that may or may not be happening in their own backyards. The simple answer to this question is, no,
scientific literacy and ocean literacy are inextricably intertwined. While both scientific literacy and ocean literacy
are vital skills needed in todays society, most significant science concepts can be demonstrated through ocean examples such as biodiversity,
geography, climate, etc. The National Marine Educators Association has defined an ocean literate person as someone who has the ability to
understand the essential principles and fundamental concepts about the ocean, can communicate this information in a meaningful way, and make
informed and responsible decisions regarding the ocean and its resources (Strang et al., 2011). Because the oceans are at the
crux of extremely important environmental issues of our time, such as global climate change and the future health of our
planet, it is necessary to employ ocean literacy as the forefront form of scientific literacy.
Kritik

The Aff has failed in their goal of providing an accurate and effective genealogy of the
Middle Passage, and modern political antagonisms. Their narrative of the slave is one of a
countless series of stand-ins for the Animal, contingently reduced to something less than
humanity in order to justify violence. The very idea of the exposure to gratuitous
violence is the basic condition of the Animal in modern society and makes the world
fundamentally unethical and endless massacres inevitable
Sanbomatsu (associate professor of philosophy at Worchester Polytechnic) 11
(Jon, Introduction to Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 10-13)
This episteme to borrow Foucaults term, has subtended and conditioned the whole of civilization
from its beginning, providing the very basis of positive human culture. For centuries, our
sciences and systems of knowledge have conspired to divide sentient life, conscious being-in-
the-world, into two neat, mutually exclusive, and utterly fraudulent halves"the human"
versus "the rest" other, we end up disavowing our own humanity (itself, after all, a form of animality)
embracing a "machine civilization" based in death-fetishism. "How is it possible" Reich wondered, "that [man]
does not see the damages (psychic illnesses, biopathies, sadism, and wars) to his health, culture, and mind that
23 are caused by this biologic renunciation?" It is striking that Reich, Adorno, and Horkheimer, all of whom
were per- sonally forced to flee Germany by Hitler, had no qualms about comparing the human treatment of
animals to the treatment of Jews and other enemies of the 24 ;Third Reich under fascism. After the war,
Adorno famously wrote that "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and
thinks: they're only animals," a once-obscure quote that recently has been given new life by animal
rights activists and sympathetic scholars. In fact, pointed com- parisons of our treatment of other animals to the
Nazis' treatment of the Jews and others in the Holocaust are peppered throughout Adorno's work, some- times
showing up in the most unexpected places (including a study of Beethoven's music). As Mendieta observes
here, Adorno drew an explicit link between Kant's denial of any meaningful subjectivity or
moral worth to ani- mals and the catastrophes of the twentieth century, including the rise of
National Socialism. "Nothing is more abhorrent to the Kantian," he wrote, "than a reminder of man's
resemblance to animals. This taboo is always at work when the idealist berates the materialist. Animals play
for the idealist system virtually the same role as the Jews for fascism?25 Indeed, is speciesism itself not a form
of fascism, perhaps even its paradig- matic or primordial form? The very word "massacre," Semelin
observes, originally meant "putting an animal to death": human massacres of other humans
have always been realized through the semiotic transposition of the one abject subject onto
the other. "Killing supposedly human animals' then becomes entirely possible."26 Adorno made a similar
point in Minima Mora- liat sixty years earlier: "The constantly encountered assertion that savages,
blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The
possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human
being," What is crucial to bear in mind, however, as Victoria Johnson points out in her chapter here ("Ev-
eryday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism, Stratification, and the Fluidity of Animal' Domination") the very
"power of such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural understanding of other animals
themselves, as beings who are by nature abject, degraded, and hence worthy of
extermination." The animal, thus, rests at the intersection of race and caste systems. And nowhere is the link
between the human and nonhuman caste systems clearer than "in fascist ideology," for "no other discourse so
completely authorizes absolute violence against the weak," In our own contemporary society too, Johnson
emphasizes, we find daily life and meaning based on elaborate rituals in- tended to keep us from
acknowledging the violence we do to subordinate classes of beings, above all the animals. So numerous in fact
are the parallelssemiotic, ideological, psychological, historical, cultural, technical, and so forthbetween
the Nazis' extermination of the Jews and Roma and the routinized mass murder of nonhuman beings, that
Charles Pattersons recent book on the subject, Eternal Trehlinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,
despite its strengths, only manages to scratch the surface of a topic whose true dimensions have yet to be
fathomed. In the ideological mechanisms used to legitimate killing, in the bad faith of the human beings who
collude with the killing through indifference or "ignorance of the facts," above all in the technologies of
organized mur- derpractices of confinement and control, modes of legitimation and decep- tion, methods of
elimination (gassing, shooting, clubbing, burning, vivisect- ing, and so on)the mass killing of animals today
cannot but recall the Nazi liquidation of European Jewry and Roma. The late Jacques Derrida observed that
"there are also animal genocides." he wrote with uncharacteristic moral sobriety: [T]he annihilation of certain
species is indeed in progress, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial,
infernal, virtually in- terminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged
monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of
their continued existence or even overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or
gas chambers (lets say Nazis) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and
overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial in- semination, so that, being more
numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the
imposition of genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or fire. What would it mean for us to
come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of development and culture,
has been premised and built upon exterminationon a history experienced as "terror without end" (to
borrow a phrase from Adorno)? To dwell with such a thought would be to throw into almost
unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace
and moral superiority, on one side, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence,
on the other. We congratulate ourselves for our social prog- ressfor democratic governance and
state-protected civil and human rights (however notional or incompletely defended)yet continue to
enslave and kill millions of sensitive creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and
cognitive, particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a contradiction is to comprehend our self-
understanding to be not merely flawed, but to be al- most comically delusional. Immanuel Kant dreamed of a
moral order in which we would all participate as equals in a "kingdom of ends" But it is time to ask
whether morality as such is even possible under conditions of universal bad faith and hidden
slaughter, in the same way that we might ask whether acts of private morality under National Socialism were
not compromised or diminished by the larger context in which they occurred.

Anti-blackness fails to explain the massacres of Messenians by the Spartans, Native
Americans by the Spanish, the Chinese by the Japanese, Roma and Jews by the Germans.
The Aff will doubtlessly say these were not structural antagonisms, they were merely
contingent slaughter but our argument is that everyone of these is emblematic of the
ongoing ontological division between human and animal and that everyone of these deaths
matter and should be mourned.
Johnson (associate professor of sociology at University of Missouri) 11
(Victoria, Everyday Rituals of the Master Race, in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 203-4)
History is littered with episodes of the brutal exploitation and murder of groups that have
been portrayed as subhuman animals and therefore not de- serving of the moral and legal protections of
human beings. Going back as far as 300 BCE, Spartans turned the newly conquered
Messenians into a slave- serf class through rituals of subordination that required the
Messenians to wear "dog skins" to dance while drunk to humiliate themselves, and to be 1 hunted in an
annual war the Spartans declared on them. More recent exam- ples of the "animalization" of human
beings can be found throughout the co- lonial period, for instance in the European
characterization of Native Ameri- cans as "wild beasts," a view early Spanish explorers
adopted as they massacred entire towns, including women, children, and the elderly"not only
stabbing and dismembering" (de las Casas later described) "but cutting them to pieces 2 as if
dealing with sheep in the slaughter house." African human beings too were treated "like
animals"branded, muzzled, collared, bred, packed into small enclosures for transportation, and sold at
slave markets modeled after 3 cattle markets. Similarly, in the East, the Japanese characterized
the Chinese as subhuman and "animal"-like to justify the colonization of China and its
inhabitants in the early twentieth century. Thus the Japanese soldier who, later describing
how he felt pushing Chinese prisoners into a pit and setting them 4 on fire, said that it was
"identical to when he slaughtered pigs." Perhaps the best-known episode of the dehumanization
which is to say, animalizationof human populations was the Nazi extermination of Jews dur- 5 ing World
War Two. Scholars seeking to understand how engaging in acts of dehumanization "made sense" to the
perpetrators of atrocities have focused es pecially on the cultural narratives used by the Nazis to rationalize
their violence. According to Kenneth Burke, Hitlers war rhetoric constructed Jews through a "devil" function
that unified those who constituted absolute good in opposition to those who constituted absolute evil, and who
hence were beyond moral re- 6 demption. The more recent work of Felicity Rash has identified the ways that
Hitler used metaphor, metonymy, and personification to degrade opponents*! Not surprisingly these forms of
linguistic violence included numerous animal representations. Both Burke and Rash reveal a dualism
interwoven in Hitlers rhetoric between Aryans and "subordinate" beingsspecifically the Jews; whose very
nature was seen as being so fundamentally different from the "su- perordinate" Aryans as to constitute a
separate species. In Mein Kampf, Hitler depicts Jews as being biologically inferior: as unable to produce
culture, as lack- ing souls, as being less intelligent, and as being physically and mentally weaker than the
"master race." The latter term might as easily have been "the master 8 species." And in fact, Hitler
occasionally used the term "species" interchangeably with "race" in Mein Kampf . Such
examples could be multiplied. But there is another dimension to the "animalization" of human persons
that is often overlookednamely, that the power of such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural
understanding of other animals themselves, as beings who are by nature abject, degraded,
and hence worthy of extermination. In fact, on examination we find that Nazi nar- ratives justifying the
domination of human subordinates are strikingly similar to beliefs about animals that are widely held to this
day, beliefs that human beings use to justify the exploitation and killing of nonhuman beings. For example,
defending the use of animals for experimentation, John Martin, a cardiovascular researcher and academic in
Great Britain, has argued that the superior moral status of human beings is sufficient justification for
vivisection and experimentation on primates. He argues that only human beings have the ability for abstract
thought and reflection, which allows us to learn over gen- 10 erations and to produce music and poetry. A
recent article in Christianity Today argued that "[h]umans alone have souls which confers upon them a unique
moral status. . . . Scriptures tells us that animals are soulless creatures 11 and will perish with the rest of
creation."

Their concept of Social Death prevents emancipation for all bodies. It plays into deeply
conservative notions of sociology that presume the social to be equivalent to the Human
and superior to the natural and that there exists a single, unitary social sphere that beings
can be ejected from by other humans. This dualism between social life and death is part of
a mode of thinking that makes oppression of billions of others possible.
Rejecting this way of thinking is a necessary prior step to addressing the destruction of
human and non-human animal life particularly for abjected Black and brown bodies
Taylor (Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University; PhD in Sociology from Manchester Metropolitan
University) 11
(Nik, Can Sociology Contribute To The Emancipation Of Animals?, Theorizing Animals: Rethinking Humanimal
Relations, pg. 209)
Social theory is littered with grand meta-theories which seek to reduce the complexities of social life to
something simple and, ulti- mately, explainable. Social life however is, in reality, messy and often refuses to
conform to this idealized view. Take, for example, our relationships with other animals. We eat them, wear
them, love them, live with them, abuse them, consider them family members, deify them, and much more.
Moreover, any individual in any one lifetime may do any, or all, of these with one, or many, animals. Our
relationships with other animals often defy categorization (as does much of social life) yet
for the most part we seek to explain and understand these relationships with recourse to
traditional social theories, now centuries old and having their roots in entirely different social sys- tems,
which maintain that we can, and should, neatly categorize social life. As social theory (and sociology in
particular) attempts to come to grips with 'the animal question' it is finding that a direct corollary of this is the
need to revisit 'the social question' as our current conceptions of animals are based on a belief in
the social-natural divide. Moreover it is precisely this divide which maintains current
oppressive animal practices. Within modernity, culture is cast as firm opposite, as 'Other,' to
nature. This "ideological fiction" (Haraway 1992, 13) is then embedded in such a way that it becomes the
taken-for-granted base of an epistemologically realist science which reiterates the 'truth' of these beliefs
axiomatically. These 'truths' are not limited to the justification of human domination of other
species but also include those of women and people of color. Furthermore this oppression of
Others is often inextricably interwoven. For example, Marjorie Spiegel (1988) documents how, historically,
African Americans were 'dehumanized' in order to justify their continued slavery. This was achieved, she
argues, largely by comparing them to negative stereotypes of non-human animals. Similarly Keith Thomas
points out that "once perceived as beasts people were likely to be treated accordingly. The ethic of human
domination removed animals from the sphere of concern. But it also legitimized the ill-treatment of humans
who were supposedly in an animal condition" (Thomas 1983, 44). More con- troversially, Patterson (2002)
points out the similarities in the justificatory rhetoric used by the Nazis and other eugenicists who historically
supported slavery and that used by modern proponents of animal use for human benefit. Whilst quick to
point out the dualistic, and thus reductivist, tendencies in other theoretical paradigms, social
scientists rarely apply this level of criticism to their own work. I am interested in what may happen
if, in taking 'the animal question' seriously, we seek to move away from this idea that human-animal
relationships (and the rest of social life) are neat and categorize-able and cease seeking 'the one'
theory which will explain it all. It is my contention that Sociology in its current forms can not contribute
effectively to the emancipation of animals in anything other than the most superficial of ways. This is due to
the fact that the vast majority of social thought is based in the very epistemological,
ontological (and methodological) systems that maintain the (anti-animal) status quo and thus
maintain the inferior status of animals in the first place. Indeed, it may even be argued that sociologists
inadvertently contribute to the maintenance of such oppression with their attachment to
theories and concepts which (often unintentionally) reinforce current oppressions. In order to
fully contribute to the emancipation of animals (and, for that matter, other oppressed groups),
sociologists must first address the very epistemic foundations of the discipline. This means re-
addressing social theory on the broadest of levels. This is not a new endeavor. It has been oft pointed out that
much Sociology is based upon essentialist and/or dualist thinking and that, in order to remain topical and
relevant to the changes in modern life, Sociology must abandon such modernist pretensions (e.g. Latour 1993).
Despite this, the history of Sociology is littered with failed attempts to move away from the structure-agency
divide and/or attempts to rethink this divide. Indeed some have argued that the social sciences "have alternated
between two types of equally power- ful dissatisfactions," those of micro and macro level theories (Latour
2004a. 16V This is evidenced in the numerous attempts within Sociology to either move beyond dualistic
modes of thought (e.g. Garfinkel 1967) or to re-unify the structure-agency divide (e.g. Giddens 1984). It is
worth noting here that such attempts to re-cast the structure- agency divide do so from within 'traditional'
Sociology with its 'mod- ernist' overtones. Traditional sociology, broadly conceived, is positivist in orientation
and as such operates under the assumption that there is a reality 'Out There' to be understood through the appli-
cation of various scientific methods to the problem at hand. As such, these theories begin from a structural
perspective which sees the structures or social forces in society as more powerful than those who inhabit them.
Arguably, this has little relevance to modern society with its unstructured and mobile character. That is to say
that there is increasing recognition that the hitherto assumed stability of society and the relationships within it
are now increasingly drawn into ques- tion. Gone are the ideas of the past where "'the social' was about
conformity; the rest was anomie, anomaly, pathology or deviance: the a-social, the anti-social" (Baurnan 2004,
21). Instead, in their place lie conceptions of society as liquid-modern,' as ultimately and irrevoca- bly mobile
and emergent, i.e. as constantly in a state of flux and change and as produced by its inhabitants as opposed to
being pre- existing. With this re-conceptualization of society as fluid, mobile, messy, and often un-
categorisable comes an emphasis on "the pro- cessuality of relationships" (Bauman 2004, 22). In other words
schol- ars are starting to abandon the idea of concrete relationships that have a pre-existing form and instead
see them as a processas always on the move, in flux and always under creation. Thus sociologists, now freed
from the limiting confines of studying only relationships, can begin instead to study their 'relating,' i.e. the
processes not the person (Latour 2004a, 20). Theoretically this allows a move away from the inherent
psychologism of Sociology and away from traditional, dualist accounts towards a "praxiological,
constructionist account" (Coulter 1989, 6). Crucially, for human-animal studies, this means that 'the social' is
no longer synonymous with 'the human.' To date, attempts to re-work social theory in such light have, how-
ever, failed and still return to either some form of essentialism or rest upon some kind of dualism(s) or, more
typically, both. After all, this way of knowing the social world is so deeply ingrained that it usually goes
unquestioned, even by sociologists. It is, however, this intellectual traditionof Cartesian dualistic
modes of thoughtwhich justifies many of the oppressions in our world today by creating
'Others' to whom we deny key things such as the right to be fully counted as a 'social being'
(for further discussion see Spiegel 1988). Thus it would seem logical to hypothesize that if such modes of
thought could be eradicated it may well lead to a concomitant eradication of the the forms of
oppression they so easily lead to and justify, chief amongst which is animal oppression.


Case

The Middle Passage did not uniquely privilege racism the affs starting point is both
historically incorrect and serves to justify the racism inherent in modernity and the
European Enlightenment
Gikandi 02 Simon, Currently Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he
is the recipient of awards from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim
Foundation. His most recent books include Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism and Ngugi Wa Thiong'O,
Available from Project MUSE, American Literary History, 14.3, pg. 604,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v014/14.3gikandi.html, Race and Cosmopolitanism | ADM
Modernity has been a central category in Gilroy's work for a while now. As he sees it, the challenge of
blackness in the world today is how to come to terms with the economy of the modern. Many of the
arguments in Against Race are animated by Gilroy's conviction that whatever our origins and localities, we live under the
structure and sign of modernity. Our identity is premised on the teleology of modernity and its
promise of progress, human rights, and equality. At the same time, however, Gilroy is quick to
acknowledge that modernity is itself a sign of crisis, that it emerges from a regimen simultaneously defined by the
promise of right and reason and their failure. The most prominent sign of this failure, he argues, is race and
racialism. Some of the most poignant moments of Against Race are the ones in which Gilroy underlines how " modernity
transformed the ways 'race' was understood and acted upon" (57) or rehearses the long history in which the
central ideas of modernity were shaped and haunted by the reality of difference. This is a very important aspect of
Gilroy's book because it goes against the tendency, especially prevalent in American social theory, to
privilege race and racism as a peculiar and hence unique phenomenon of the New World, the
product of the experience of modern slavery. Against Race is an important book for students of
American culture precisely because of its European terms of reference, which enable the author to
trace the long hand of racialism to our western heritage, including our legacy of Enlightenment.