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Black Death K
We will begin with a thesis claim: the semiotics of black social life are
incompatible with the social schemas of white civil society. The
ontological vertigo that constitutes black life in America renders it a
repository for the violent urges of modernity. Slave subjectivity is not
just a cornerstone of white life but an invitation to dance with the
annihilation of white society.
Wilderson 2007 [Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys Silent Scandal in Warfare
in the American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 31-2]
Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality. The black American subject does not generate
historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to
the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the
Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This
places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations
of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position becauseand this is keyour presence
works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject even-the most massacred among
them, Indiansis required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom the
nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes,
"Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a
program of complete
disorder."12 If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the
Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its
magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence,
through which civil society is possible namely, those bodies for which violence is,
or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the
Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of
history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an
experience without analoga past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute
dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon),
whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever says "aids" says blackthe
"Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage,
the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it
should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowalnot at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such
as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then
it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we
must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to
the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the
steps. They have been, and e todayeven in the most antiracist movements, such as the
prison abolition movementinvested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire
today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes
radicalism more dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or
community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative
dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder." One
must embrace its
disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, ones
politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not
the desire that underwrites ones politics, then through what strategy of
legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this
movements lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder
and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one,
for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few
so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blacknessand the state of political
movements in the United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more
coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the foy of black than there is in the joy of sex
(unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil societywith
hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the
work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black
subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers
and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as
crowding y out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a
factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the
reconfiguration of civil society, the
positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-
in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society,
the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims
blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of
"absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war,
then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a
black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied
(via reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.

Independently the futuristic politics of the 1ac construct a white

fantasy of safety founded on the slow annihilation of black
subjectivity from the semiotic field of white civil society. The very
symbolic implications of black positionality render safety impossible.
Wilderson8 [Frank B; Professor at UC IRVINE and member of ANC; Absence of
subjective presence Biko Lives; pg 97-98; Other sections are by Andile Mngxitama; Amanda
Alexander and Nigel Gibson; Published by Palgrave Macmillan; July 8 2008]
I am not saying that we welcomed the prophesy of our collective death. I am arguing thatthe threat of our collective death,
a threat in response to the gesture of our collective our living will made us feel as though we were alive as though we
possessed what in fact we could not posses, Human life as opposed to black life
(which is always already substitutively dead, a fatal way of being alive)- we could die because we lived. It was
as though we had penetrated three layers of absence in the libidinal economy; an economy that organizes the structure of reality in ways that were too
often eschewed by south African Marxists and charterists more broadly in favor of the verifiable data of political economy; an economy that in many
respects was at the center of steven bikos meditations and the foundation of black consciousness. Like steven Biko before him, lewis Gordon also a
close reader of frantz fanon reminds us of the
serious pitfalls and limitations in excluding the evasive
aspects of affect from interpretation of reality. Building on lewis gordons ontological schema of absence and
presence that is a reconstruction and elaboration of fanons ontological arguments in Black skin White masks, I designate three layers of black absence
subjective, cartographic and political, through which we might read the cheering that erupted as affective (rather than discursive) symptoms of an
ontological discovery.The world cannot accommodate a blackened relation at the level of
bodies subjectivity. Thus, Black presence is a form of absence for to see a black is
to see the black an ontological frienze that waits for a gaze, rather than a living
ontology moving with agency in the field of vision. The Blacks moment of recognition by the other is always
already blackness upon which supplements are lavished- American, Caribbean, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. But the supplements are superfluous
rather than substantive they dont unblacken. As Gordon points out, there is something
absent whenever blacks are present. The more present a black is the more absent is this something. And the
more absent a black is, the more present is this something. Blackness, then, is the
destruction of presence, for blacks seem to suck presence into themselves as a
black hole, pretty much like the astrophysical phenomenon that bears that name.
The discursive fortification of white life that the 1ac constitutes
creates an affective bondage to xenophobic attitudes and produces an
exceedingly violent political apparatus founded on the predatory fear-
mongering of neoliberal elites.
Livingston 12 (Alexander, Assistant Prof of Govt @ Cornell. postdoctoral fellow in the
department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and a doctoral fellow at the Centre
for Ethics at the University of Toronto, Avoiding Deliberative Democracy? Micropolitics,
Manipulation, and the Public Sphere, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2012), pp. 269-294,
Project MUSE
Deliberative democracy is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. A politics of pure deliberation is
the dream of hare-brained philosophy professors who, fetishizing consensus, would reduce all political conflict to moral disagreement, purge passion
from politics, and substitute the disinterested and boring experience of jury duty for the vital and indispensable experience of action, and all this just
for the sake of theoretical parsimony. At its best deliberative democracys moralization and rationalization of politics stinks of a bad nostalgia for a
classical participatory democracy that never existed. At its worst, it is a license for an exclusionary politics of elite
decision making that silences the voices of the needy and degenerates into a variant of technocratic management from above. [End Page
269] Or so much of the rhetoric of its critics goes.1 That this caricature of deliberative democracy is familiar ought to be the occasion for some worry. A
general skepticism concerning the claims of public reason has seeped into much of the landscape of contemporary political theory, making this kind of
easy rejection of deliberation both comprehensible and all too plausible. Yet this kind of rejection is too fast and depends on a straw man account of
what deliberative democracy means. The aim of this article is to make the case that this caricature is wrong and that such skepticism about public
reason is unwarranted. Deliberative democracy is a robust theory of the political that, at its best, lays the groundwork for an egalitarian and even
radical democratic politics. To this end, I propose to read the recent work of William E. Connolly as an expression of political theorys skeptical critique
of public reason. Connolly is exemplary of this wider skepticism in that while he offers a powerful critique of deliberative democracy, his critical
alternative is only plausible when rearticulated as a variant of deliberative democracy itself. Connolly argues that contemporary
findings in neuroscience and cognitive science, mixed with a healthy dose of Gilles Deleuzes cosmological
pluralism, reveal a deep, visceral register of human thinking that theories of
deliberative democracy overlook at their own peril. Deliberative democracys rationalism turns a blind eye to this political
unconscious and relegates the theory to an ineffectual intellectualism, but, according to Connolly, the left today needs to make this unconscious lower
neoconservative micropolitics of
register its fighting grounds if it hopes to hold its ground against an insurgent
media manipulation. This is a suggestive line of argument, but ought it lead to a rejection of deliberative democracy or instead to a
more robust and complex account of communicative agency in our media-saturated world? Connolly travels the first route, but I argue that his
alternative to deliberation that he dubs micropolitics, a politics of the ordinary that politicizes habits, dispositions, feelings, the body, emotions, and
thinking as potential sites of domination and resistance below the register of formal principles and procedures, can only be defended by following the
second route. Given the way that Connolly presents the problem of the visceral register there does not seem to be much role for deliberation in his
vision of democratic politics. While he often stresses that intellectualism is constitutively insufficient to ethics, he strains to remind us that saying this
is not the same as saying that deliberation has no role to play (2002, 111). Issuing a series of caveats, Connolly notes that nothing in the [End Page 270]
above carries the implication of eliminating argument, rationality, language, or conscious thought from public discourse and that he only means to
flag the insufficiency of argument to ethical life without denying its pertinence (1999, 36; 2002, 108). The goal of his turn to micropolitics is not to
replace deliberation but rather to augment intellectualist models of thinking and culture (2002, 13). Given the role of affective modes of appraisal in
politics, I agree with Connolly that theories of public reason ought to be amended and augmented in many ways. Yet, for all his caveats, Connollys
vision of micropolitical engagement seems to give short shrift to practices of public deliberation. Indeed, his theory only announces their compatibility
but does not follow through in enacting it. In what follows, I try to close this circle, so to speak, by demonstrating the deliberative potential of
Connollys agonistic pluralism.2 I agree that a politics of the visceral reveals the shortcomings of theories of deliberative democracy that prioritize small
community meetings and experimental mini-publics as the sine qua non of democratic citizenship today, but Connolly overlooks the resources
provided by an alternative account of deliberative democracy; namely, a critical and sociologically complex theory of deliberative democracy that aims
at revising our self-understandings and provoking self-transformation. Intellectualism and the Visceral Register The first step in exploring the potential
of William Connollys reluctant theory of deliberative democracy is to come to terms with the reasons why he thinks extant accounts of communicative
politics are insufficient. Intellectualism, Connolly argues, is the grand failing of deliberative democracy. In accusing deliberative democracy of
intellectualism, he is not issuing a by-now familiar criticism of deliberative rationalism. To say that deliberative democracy is guilty of intellectualism is
not to say that it is blind to questions of power, or identity, or differenceor at least its not only to say thisbut rather that deliberative models of
democracy are working with a faulty conception of thinking. They have been captured by what Gilles Deleuze calls the image of thoughtthe idea that
thinking is an autonomous, linguistically mediated process of mind that is oriented toward coherence and truth (1994, 12967). Deliberative thinking
takes place at one relatively transparent register where our reasons for action can be compared, reasoned about, and revised through the force of the
better argument. This image of thought is intellectualist because it fails to see how thought is a layered process of neural, perceptual, and embodied
activity not reducible to conceptual ratiocination alone. Attempts to give priority to the highest and conceptually most sophisticated brain nodules in
thinking and judgment, Connolly argues, may encourage those invested in these theories to underestimate the importance of body image,
unconscious motor memory, and thought-imbued affect (2002, 10). Against the intellectualist image of thought, Connolly argues that thinking is
distributed across multiple registers that make possible visceral modes of appraisal (1999, 27). It is these deep, intensive, and reactive visceral modes
of thinking and judgment that the deliberative image of thinking overlooks. Disgust, for example, is a visceral response that makes your stomach turn.
It seems to well up inside you without your willing it. The values and beliefs of others can sometimes stimulate this kind of feeling, say, if they present
you with a defense of cloning, or euthanasia, or gay marriage, as the case may be. You cant always put your finger on what it is that strikes you as so
disgusting and morally contaminating about such proposals, but sometimes you just feel that they are plain wrong. Were unable to provide defensible
reasons for our responses. Sometimes things just rub us the wrong way. Connollys point is that visceral and embodied responses like disgust, shame,
and hatred come to play a role in political decision makingas they evidently do in political deliberations about matters such as cloning, euthanasia,
either require that
and gay marriageand that a deliberative approach is poorly equipped to deal with them. Deliberative democrats
these sorts of affective feelings are purged from the public sphere as unfortunate
distortions of real communication, or they suggest that they can be subject to
deliberation and argument just as any other sort of belief, interest, or prejudice
can be. Connolly thinks that both of these approaches are bound to fail. Visceral reactions are not conceptually
sophisticated thoughts and as such are not amenable to deliberation, argumentation, or verbal
persuasion. The exchange of validity claims alone is not enough to stop your stomach from churning when you think about the right to die. Deliberative
democrats need to learn how much more there is to thinking than argument and to begin experimenting with alternative forms of political
engagement (1999, 149). Because political judgment is so often carried out at the level of this visceral or virtual register, deliberation cannot provide a
privileged or efficacious form of participation, justification, or transformation. To corroborate these claims about the multiple registers of thinking,
Connolly turns to recent findings in neuroscience that suggest a more intimate
relationship between reason, the emotions, and the body than [End Page 272] the
intellectualist account assumes. Like some other political theorists, Connolly hopes that a closer engagement
with neurology and cognitive science will provide grounds for a more adequate
account of subjectivity, reason, and ethics.3 The kind of thinking that intellectualists privilegesophisticated, conceptual, reflective,
deliberative, and linguistically mediated thoughtpertains to the activity of the largest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. It is
through the rich and complex layers of neural activity in the cortex that we can perform intricate activities like planning, speaking, reasoning, and
is in fact in some
arguing. What recent findings in neuroscience suggest, however, is that cortical activity is not autonomous and
ways subservient to the parts of the brain that control emotions, memory, and
affect.4 In particular, the cortex responds to information from the limbic system, the small curved part of the brain below the cortex that controls
emotion and fine motor movement. Made up of the basal ganglia, the hippo-campus, and the amygdala, the limbic system enables the fast, intensive,
and reactive action of affects. The jolt of fear that makes ones hair stand on end or the disgust that we feel in the pit of our stomachs is the work of the
part of the limbic system called the amygdala. The sort of reactions governed by this system are an evolutionary necessity for a species that needs to
appraise and respond to dangerous situations quickly and effectively without much cognitive expenditure. The decision to jump out of the way of a
speeding car needs to happen in a split second. It is not the sort of situation that allows you to deliberate about the relative merits of your different
options before acting. But this is not to say that the limbic system is entirely thoughtless. It is not concerned with sophisticated, conceptual, and
deliberative thinking, but its actions certainly are symbolically mediated or thought imbued in some sense (the expression is Connollys). These
intense affective responses are not entirely biologically determined but instead take a fair deal of cultural learning. The limbic system in a sense learns
or records cultural standards of what is dangerous and what is disgusting and then habituates them as automated response.5 Between the cortex and
limbic system there is a feedback loop of mutual influence through which these fast, affective, proto-thoughts of the limbic system shape the slow,
reflective thinking of the cortex (2002). The existence of these intensive, instinctive elements moving below the register of reflective judgment means
that human reason is not pure and autonomous but rather is shaped in a complex way at the neural level by the influence of the emotions and affects.6
David Hume, it would seem, [End Page 273] was right to say that reason is in fact the slave of the passions. And what this means for politics is that the
emotions and affects that shape and guide thinking are themselves deeply influenced by values and opinions that we may or may not actually want to
endorse. Racist,
sexist, homophobic, and other ideological sentiments may lodge
themselves deeply into this body-brain-culture network (2002). Where this is the
case, valid and sound argumentation is at a loss to dislodge them and the force of the better argument may be
powerless to persuade us to respect, tolerate, or trust each other in the ways that democratic cooperation require. Connolly explains: Culturally
preorganized charges shape perception and judgment in ways that exceed the picture of the world supported by the models of calculative reason,
intersubjective culture, and deliberative democracy. They show us how linguistically complex brain regions respond not only to events in the world but
also, proprioceptively, to cultural habits, skills, memory traces, and affects mixed into our muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brain regions. (2002, 36) This
all culminates in a critique of deliberative models of democracy: the inability of practical reason to influence these potentially dangerous or hateful
culturally preorganized charges points to its undoing. Visceral Politics Before analyzing the merits of Connollys critique of deliberative democracy I
want to first situate his charge of intellectualism within its political context. At its heart, Connollys objection to the deliberative turn in democratic
theory boil down to his belief that too much focus on the terms of justification and legitimation ignores the everyday sensibilities expressed and
reproduced in the actions of citizens. These sensibilities are not identical to doctrinal beliefs or articulate reasons; or, as he prefers to put it in his most
recent book, spirituality is not identical with doctrinal creed (2008). Rather, the sensibility that determines how it is that we hold our beliefs or creed
is unreflectively informs this visceral register of judgment and thinking. Where these sensibilities have been cultivated to promote respect,
responsiveness, and generosity a pluralistic liberalism can thrive. The political problem, however, is that in contemporary America this noble ethos is
largely absent. Instead Connolly argues that this
visceral register has become a vehicle for a stingy
sensibility animated by resentment, fear, and a desire for revenge (1999, 7). The deep roots of existential resentment
in an increasingly disempowered American working class today provide the spiritual common ground for the an emerging coalition of competing
neoconservative and neoliberal elites who share a punitive and vengeful ethic while disagreeing on matters of doctrine. The resulting theological-
corporate-media apparatus Connolly calls the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine wreaks havoc on American democracy today as it proceeds to
undermine the terms of liberal pluralism and roll back the hard-won achievements of the liberal democratic struggles of the last hundred years (2008,
3968). Democratic theorys idea of deliberation seems poorly equipped to confront this threat. Connollys contention is that the failing of the left in
America today is due in no small part to its resistance to accepting the role of the visceral register in politics. Instead, it is still caught up in a potentially
antiquated search for some better argument that would bring reason and truth together to serve the ends of justice. The
American
right, however, has been a much better student of the visceral elements of thinking and has crafted an array of
strategies that seek to manipulate it to punitive ends. Among working-class Americans who have suffered
unemployment with the collapse of the industrial economy, cultural alienation from a powerfully secular and liberal cultural elite, and social
fragmentation from the increasing speed, ethnic pluralism, and diversity of a globalizing world, there exists a reserve of resentment to be tapped.
Neoliberals and neoconservatives on the American right have overcome their traditional antagonism to draw on this resentment and channel it into a
shared spirituality of revenge that vilifies foreigners, immigrants, nonwhites, women,
queers, liberals, and secularists.7 Crucial to the success of this resonance machine has been its
most powerful echo chamber: the media. Savvy exploitation of new media technologies
enable conditions of mass persuasion through which the sentiments of resentment
are validated, entering the thought-imbued feelings of viewers before being
subjected to critical scrutiny (2008, 55), and channeled to political ends. Twenty-four-
hour news shows, aggressive and partisan pundits, and the constant fluctuation of
terror alerts all combine to excite, code, and steer visceral fear and anxiety. The result is the
proliferation of ugly dispositions that the powerful media machinery of the right can foment and amplify, installing them in habitual patterns of
perception, identity, interest, and judgments of entitlement (2008, 53). Micropolitics
as the manipulation of
embodied, intensive affects along the visceral register of thinking is a familiar
tactic in the repertoire of [End Page 275] commercial capitalism and the state. Marketers
and advertisers have long drawn on findings in psychology, neurobiology, and
related fields to manufacture the desires their commodities satisfy. Branding is only the most recent affective
technique of assuring consumer loyalty in a long history of unconscious and unwilled consumption. Marketers now talk about low-involvement
advertising that bypasses the higher-level cognitive functions of viewers to appeal to nonconscious mental processing. Similarly, the
manipulation of intensive reactions and affect has been crucial in sustaining
consent for Americas open-ended war on terror. The color-coded terror alert system in place to warn
Americans of the likelihood of terrorist attacks functions as a perceptual marker by which public fear and anxiety are
calibrated. The aggressive rhetorical tactics, facial gestures, and vocal timbre of conservative media pundits like
Bill OReilly and Rush Limbaugh as well as the explosive graphics, and fast cutting techniques of twenty-four-hour news channels all have the effect of
of affective persuasion that
expressing the spinelessness of the liberals they browbeat.8 And the list goes on. Techniques
function through sub-discursive modes of communication are ubiquitous and powerful in the
modern world (2008, 66). The challenge of confronting them today, Connolly wagers, means learning to play their game. The left is done arguing. Its
time to learn how fight fire with fire (2006, 74). What Kind of Politics Are Micropolitics? A more fundamental source of Connollys skepticism about
deliberative democracy than the findings of neurological science is Gilles Deleuzes cosmological pluralism. In Connollys texts, these scientific and
metaphysical sources dovetail elegantly, but one is always left with the impression that the scientific arguments are deployed only to the extent that
they readily accord with these more basic philosophical commitments to a deep and radical pluralism in the world.9 Deleuzes concepts of multiplicity,
rhizomes, micropolitics, deterritorialization, and war machines infuse Connollys writing and offer an alternative discourse to the allegedly problematic
language of public reason. In fact, Deleuze himself, in his magisterial collaboration with Flix Guattari, could be said to prefigure a certain denigration
of deliberative politics.10 It would of course be anachronistic to describe Deleuze and Guattari as critics of deliberative democracy, or even worse, as
denizens of the American culture wars. But that said, there are passing remarks concerning deliberation in their texts that seem to connect with [End
Page 276] Connollys claims. More important than decision making and deliberation are the molecular and unconscious forces that open us up to new
ways of thinking and experiencing the world. When Deleuze and Guattari do mention political deliberation it is invariably to dismiss it as an example of
what they call arboreal, state thinking: Politics operates by macrodecisions and binary choices, binary interests; but the realm of the decidable remains
very slim. Political decision making necessarily descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions, and desires, which it must sound out or
evaluate in a different fashion. Beneath linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of flows and their quanta. (1987, 221) A politics that
addresses these microdeterminations, what Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics, is more basic than deliberation because it concerns the boundaries
of the realm of the decidable. The appeal of reason
can only function within existing narrow and rigid
boundaries. Strategic appeals to affect, however, can help close or expand this realm
and open up new issues to deliberation and participation. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari consider micropolitics as
essentially underlying deliberation. Creative becoming, not practical reason, is at the heart of their vision of politics. How does a democratic
micropolitics, then, attempt to reshuffle the rigid segments of a stingy American public culture? Connolly argues that the only way we can achieve a
public ethos of pluralism is by cultivating the civic virtues of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness (2005, 65). If the work of politics aspires
to more than a further round in a vicious circle of existential revenge, citizens must first nurture an ethics of micropolitical receptivity to the
interdependence of their conflicting identities claims in a complex, ever faster late-modern world (1999, 149). To this end, Connolly draws on Deleuze
and Guattaris thinking to devise tactics and techniques of nudging or exerting modest influence on the visceral register of the self and of public
culture more widely (2002, 77; 1999, 29). In some passages, Connolly describes this as the search for more expansive modes of persuasion, while in
others he appeals to the force of a sort of mystical experience (1999, 8; 2002, 120). Yet this dependence on Deleuze and Guattaris micropolitics
draws Connolly away from his own best insights and leads him to marginalize the democratic core of a leftist response to an insurgent neoconservative
micropolitics. [End Page 277] Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy provides a powerful tool for theorizing the symbolic meanings and dispositions carried
at visceral register of experience. While they do not frame their project in terms of embodied registers or the differential processing structures of brain,
they provide an analogous conception of experience, drawing on Henri Bergsons concept of the virtual (Bergson 1990; Deleuze 1988). Emotions,
memory traces, infrasensible experiences, habitual gestures, and the unconscious exist virtually, such that we cannot always articulate them at the
level of language, yet they play a role in shaping our higher-register experiences of the world. The virtual represents a lower register of experience than
the conscious and reflective register of ideas, doctrines, and interests. To the extent that A Thousand Plateaus can be regarded as a text of political
philosophy, it can be said to be a treatise concerned with political potential of this virtual register as both a site of subjectification and resistance.
Micropolitics is Deleuze and Guatarris name for this politics of the virtual. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of
micropolitics in their analysis of political regimes. Against the received image of the state as a centralized,
stable, and sovereign territorial entity, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the state is better
described as a macropolitical assemblage that depends on more ubiquitous, fluid, and supple micropolitical
assemblages. The molar organization of the state depends on a micro- or molecular organization of
forces such as affects, moods, memories, and habits that sustain and propagate the states ends.
In short, they write, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics (1987, 213). Despite appearances
to the contrary, even the most monolithic and centralized assemblages of power, such as the state, are in fact fluid and lively micro-assemblages
resonating together in an only relatively stable manner. Taking the stark example of the fascist state, Deleuze and Guattari make the case that it too is in
fact only a decentered plurality that depends on the micropolitics that sustain it: The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical
level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular
focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or
neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veterans fascism, fascism on [End Page 278] the Left and fascism on the Right, fascism of the couple,
family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in
a great, generalized central black hole.

Our politics must begin from the position of the structurally

unthought. Only theorizing black social life through the lens of the
absolute rejection of political survivalism can render the constitutive
values of white society inoperable.
Cacho 12 (Lisa, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Social Death: Racialized
Rightlesness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, page 31-33)
Toward Unthinkable Politics This book is not a critique of activists and academics who ascribe social value to devalued people and places but rather an
analysis of our limits and an examination of the reasons why other options are less accessible, less influential, and, perhaps more often than we think,
less intelligible. Contemporary progressive politics must rely not only on what dominant groups find palatable (i.e., the family, legality) but also on the
value practices that will make social statuses recognizable as valuable to (and often for) the very priv- ileged of U.S. society. Because value is
fundamentally relational despite all appearances to the contrary,82 to ascribe (legible) value to devalued populations, we have to evaluate them in
relation to differently devalued groups and according to normative criteria. Indeed, as an explicitly comparative race project, my analyses cannot escape
these contradictions; nor can they offer a politics that finds a way out of the violence of value. Because we cannot escape the
devaluation in revaluation, I instead take up Barretts challenge: to re-member
the Other by dismembering value.83 For me, this means sus- pending the impulse to reject criminalizing stereotypes
precisely because the mere chance to recuperate social value is contingent on that rejection. As Hong reminds us, a politics that rejects
social value is inconceivable. When the alternative to social value is social death,
and social death means brutally exacerbated conditions of racialized violence,
incarceration, and coercion, the allure of legibility is undeniably difficult to resist.
Indeed, imagining a politics based on the refusal of social value is an impossible,
unthinkable option, one, in truth, outside of any available notion of the political.84
Dismembering social value by refusing the lure of legibility re-members the other because it gives us the space to be more critical of the automatic,
understandable impulse to deny and be offended by criminalizing stereo- types. In this space, the space of social death, we can re-member the other by
asking ourselves: Whom does this rejection really benefit and whom does it hurt? This project is not concerned with whether something is politically
practical or logistically possible because these approaches need to assume that legal apparatuses are legitimate and fixable. If we suspend the need to be
practical, we might be able see what is possible differently. A
focus on social death enables us to start at the
places we dare not go because it en- ables us to privilege the populations who are
most frequently and most eas- ily disavowed, those who are regularly regarded with contempt, those whose
interests are bracketed at best because to address their needs in meaningful ways requires taking a step beyond what is palatable, practical, and
possible. Like Barrett, Hong, and Holland, I find empowering oppositional narra- tives in the devastating spaces
of social death
and their populations abstract existences, but empowering narratives do not
necessarily give us happy endings. Nor do they always leave us inspired.85 In the
spaces of social death, empowerment is not contingent on taking power or
securing small victories. Empowerment comes from deciding that the outcome of
struggle doesnt matter as much as the decision to struggle. Deciding to struggle against all odds armed
only with fingers crossed on both hands is both an unusual po- litical strategy and a well-informed worldview. It is a choice premised upon what
Derrick Bell calls racial realism. Racial
realism is a form of unthinkable politics because it
proposes that we begin battles weve already lost, that we acknowledge and accept that ev- erything we do may
not ever result in social change. When implementing Racial Realism we must simultaneously acknowledge that our actions are not likely to lead to
transcendent change and, despite our best efforts, may be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system we are trying to help.
Nevertheless, our realization, and the dedication based on that realization, can lead to policy positions and campaigns that are less likely to worsen
conditions for those we are trying to help and more likely to remind those in power that there are imaginative, unabashed risk-takers who refuse to be
trammeled upon. Yet confrontation with our oppressors is not our sole reason for Racial Real- ism. Continued struggle can bring about unexpected
benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor.The fight itself has meaning and should give us
hope for the future.86 Although racial realism takes failure for granted, it does
not equate failure with defeat. Accepting hopelessness is not necessarily
equivalent to abandoning hope. As Sara Ahmed writes in her critique of happiness, To kill joy . . . is to open a life, to make
room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.87 To take unthinkable politics seriously, we need to
entertain counter- intuitive thoughts and practice imagining otherwise. To imagine other-
wise, Fiona Ngo argues, failure need not be overcome, rehabilitation need not be desired,
subjectivity need not be recovered. Instead, she insists, we must conceive of an
ethical stance that refuses to cover over the violence that brought us to the
present.88 If the critical task is not to resolve the contradic-tions of reintegrating the socially dead
into a capitalist society that sees most of humanity as a necessary but negative resource, then it makes sense to
mobilize against preserving this way of life or the ways of knowing that this life preserves.
Rather than breathe life into the spaces of social death (gentrifi- cation, privatization, and
democratization), we might conscientiously work against the logic of survivability,89
which in the United States sees the pres- ervation of U.S. capital as central and
indispensable to the American way of life. In neoliberal ways of knowing, the
value of life is subjected to an eco- nomic analysis and assessed accordingly: How
has this person contributed to society? What will he or she accomplish in the
future? Is it worthwhile to invest in this neighborhood and its residents or will such an investment be only a waste of resources?

The white supremacist imperative is calcified through a collective

imaginary of sacrificial violence whereby black and brown bodies are
made the fungible victims of a violent colonial will-to-power that
requires absolute structural and psychic domination over racialized
others. Thus vote negative to embrace the slaves dance with death
and refuse the grammar of white futurity.
Marriott 7 (David, Professor of History @ UC Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and
Black Modernity Pg 237-240)
In Fanon it may be that the imperative of decolonization becomes an ethical law
hence his ambiguous references to Kanta law justifying risk and ruin rather than sacrifice and resignation. Hence, the move from
colonialism to decolonization represents a move, not from the ethical into history,
but involves a radical leap into a way of life based on indeterminate negation, a
negation without end but always at work in the depths of history. On the other hand, Fanon also
states, "My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values. It is a long time since the starry sky that took away Kant's breath revealed the last of its
secrets to us. And the moral law is not certain of itself" (Fanon; Black Skin, 227). This statement follows another explicit reference to Kant: "One duty
alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices" (229). The text referred to here is Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, which concludes
as follows: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry
heavens above me and the moral law within me."19 It is important to note that Fanon is not denying Kant's confidence in the sublime presentation of
moral ideas, which, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues discloses the whole power (Macht) of the mind. Rather he is stating that Kant's
enthusiasm for the infinitude of the starry heavens-the infinitude of which allows us to recognize, in turn, the infinite destiny of our own moral nature-
cannot happen in the Antilles. It cannot happen there precisely because of the racial distribution of guilt and its paralysis at the level of the imaginary.
Fanon's critique of Kant echoes that of Nietzsche's. For Nietzsche, the sacrificial exercise of morality in Kantian ethics results in impotence when the
will to obey the law against natural desire and out of no interested motive-not even fear-overwhelms the individual and produces the resort to
ressentiment, the culture of reaction. Nietzsche is not condemning the disciplining of natural desire, on the contrary, he commends it, but what he
objects to is its moralized accountability, when it is justified as disinterested submission to categorical law For Nietzsche (and Fanon), the law is
the meaning of sovereignty depends on a
interested, which is not to deny it is sovereign or universal, but to imply that
principle of calculability, which, in his view, is to suspend the law itself and the
opposition of disinterested reverence and natural desire. For the genealogist the moral law in the
universality of its form constitutes the misrecognized form, not of law, but of will to power. Its crueltyfrom Kants perspective its indifference to
heteronomous interestsis the displaced symptom of its affective truth. For Fanon, it is this cruelty and this impotence
which is deeply racialized both in terms of its psychology and historical sociology. In
considering the uncertainty of moral law, of racism and of time, Fanon holds fast to a notion of the colonial
subject as always divided and never fully present to itself. The aporias between
blackness and history, for example, illustrated this in the form of blacks as reactive or
nihilistic Black Skin, White Masks explores this aporia in terms of a question: namely, what is it about colonial authority that allows it to
generate forms of nihilistic passivity rather than Kants inner freedom of moral law? What is it about the autonomous imposition of duty that turns the
black subject into a reactive affect, thematized here as a submission to racialized time and history? Colonial power reveals the limits of Kants
categorical law here understood as the autonomous imposition of duty. The moral law is uncertain of itself in the Antilles because colonial racism
makes that law, in terms of duty, an impossible demand which is aporetic: be like me and do not be like me, be white but not quite. As such, colonialism
transforms the moral law into a will to power based on racial exclusion. In order to grasp why Fanon thinks this is the case, I have explored the relation
negativity that exposes,
between the loss that racial forgetting represents and the negative sublimity of moral law in the Antilles. A
almost inevitably, the
extent to which the will to power in the colonial nation-state is one
defined by its perpetual readiness to wage war against the colonized at the level of
both ideological fantasy and psyche. For Fanon, colonialism operates a pure power
politics completely divested of ethical and universalistic considerations. A war in
which blackness is understood as a source of historical failure in need of cathartic
cure and/or annihilation. A war in which the death of blacks, as utter abjection, is a nothingness without history and so
indistinguishable from the unhistorical nothingness of a people without time. In conclusion, given that Fanon's last work-The Wretched of the Earth-
was an attempt to work out the idea of an ethical state in the context of decolonization, many commentators have tended to lose sight of how the
political question of social justice and revolutionary struggle was, for Fanon, invariably tangled up with questions of responsibility and risk. 20 In other
words, the difficult task Fanon set himself was how to resolve the problem of power and justice in cultures distinguished by Manichaeism. What could
the idea of an ethical state mean in nations divided according to whether blacks are the remnants of an unhistorical, unethical substance, .neither life
nor being, but the unhappy existence of spectral life? Notions which were not only inscribed in economic and social relations but, more often than not,
in judicial procedures and constitutional and parliamentary practices of executive governance. Fanon's idea of revolution
should therefore not be restricted to the political but must also be seen as an
attempt to describe how national desires come to be bound by somatic fantasies.
Fanon's error, according to many, may have been in conceiving imperialism too psychologically, but his ideal of the decolonized cultural nation
and political state cannot be understood without taking into account his ideas on the heteronomy of political demands and unconscious desires. If
Fanon's political vision of the world was essentially Nietzschean-divided between sovereign life and slavish abjection his call for national
liberation and unity in the developing nations went hand in hand with a call to look at death in the face,
to make death as such possible for blacks otherwise condemned to the nothingness
of death, death as the representation of lawless violence. In Fanon's oeuvre the
politics of black experience calls for the endurance of such negation and hence its
movement, but only in the knowledge that the death within us cannot be
determined, and this is the price we pay for life lived at the limits of both political
virtue and political violence
 Death Good DA
Life is a confidence trick to delude us from the cruel truth of our own
metaphysical worthlessness. We are all rotting meat on crumbling
bones hulking towards infinity in an echo-chamber of consciousness
so violent it dooms every moment to absolute suffering.
Ligotti 12 (Thomas (2012-06-23). The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of
Horror (Kindle Locations 111-126). Hippocampus Press. Kindle Edition)
Established: Consciousness is not often viewed as being an instrument of tragedy in human life. But to Zapffe, consciousness
would
long past have proved fatal for human beings if we did not do something about it.
Why, Zapffe asked, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals
perish because they fail to endure the strain of living because cognition gives them more than they can carry? Zapffes answer: Most people learn to
save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness. From an evolutionary viewpoint, in Zapffes observation,
consciousness was a blunder that required corrections for its effects. It was an adventitious
outgrowth that made us into a race of contradictory beings uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation. Because of
consciousness, parent of all horrors, we became susceptible to thoughts that were
startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never been equitably balanced by those that are collected and reassuring. Our
minds now began dredging up horrors, flagrantly joyless possibilities, enough of
them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of self-soiling consternation
should they go untrammeled. This potentiality necessitated that certain defense
mechanisms be put to use to keep us balanced on the knife-edge of vitality as a species. While a modicum of
consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution so one theory goes this faculty soon enough
became a seditious agent working against us. As Zapffe concluded, we need to hamper our consciousness for all
we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to
see, which, as the Norwegian philosopher saw it, along with every other pessimist, is the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.
Whether or not one agrees that there is a brotherhood of suffering between everything alive, we can all agree that human beings are the only
organisms that can have such a conception of existence, or any conception period. That we can conceive of the phenomenon of suffering, our own as
well as that of other organisms, is a property unique to us as a dangerously conscious species. We know there is suffering, and we do take action against
it, which includes downplaying it by artificially limiting the content of consciousness. Between taking action against and downplaying suffering,
mainly the latter, most of us do not worry that it has overly sullied our existence. As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual
or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We
have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a brotherhood of suffering between
everything alive would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life.
What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next as if we were playing a board
game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as
a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the
undead and the human puppet. Undoing I For the rest of the earths organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things:
survival, reproduction, death and nothing else. But we
know too much to content ourselves with
surviving, reproducing, dying and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives
before suffering slowly or quickly as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we enjoy as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the
womb of nature . And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to
be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into
the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are hunks
of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are
susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a
confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us
stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the
paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will
human extinction.
do, per Zapffe, although in The Last Messiah the character after whom the essay is named does all the talking about
Elsewhere Zapffe speaks for himself on the subject. The sooner humanity dares to harmonize itself with its biological predicament, the
better. And this means to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species
went extinct when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our
discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our
hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarization is the doctrine that the individual has a duty to suffer nameless agony
and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of revulsion being
directed at the world-order engendering of the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things; no
future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being
against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead
toward new bland sensations and mass deaths. ( Fragments of an Interview, Aftenposten, 1959) More
provocative than it is astonishing, Zapffes thought is perhaps the most elementary in the history of philosophical pessimism. As penetrable as it is
cheerless, it rests on taboo commonplaces and outlawed truisms while eschewing the recondite brain-twisters of his forerunners, all of whom engaged
in the kind of convoluted cerebration that for thousands of years has been philosophys stock in trade. For example, The World as Will and
Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lays out one of the most absorbingly intricate
metaphysical systems ever contrived a quasi-mystical elaboration of a Will-to-live as the hypostasis of reality, a mindless and untiring master of all
being, a directionless force that makes everything do what it does, an imbecilic puppeteer that sustains the ruckus of our world. But Schopenhauers
Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for
specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffes principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors or practitioners of
philosophy, who typically circle around the minutiae of theories and not the gross facts of our lives. If we must think, it should be done only in circles,
outside of which lies the unthinkable. Evidence: While commentators on Schopenhauers thought have seized upon it as a philosophical system ripe for
academic analysis, they do not emphasize that its ideal endpoint the denial of the Will-to-liveis a construct for the end of human existence. But even
Schopenhauer himself did not push this as aspect of his philosophy to its ideal endpoint, which has kept him in fair repute as a philosopher.

Independently preserving the egoistic assumptions about life-

bringing the 1ac propagates makes violence inevitable.
Luchte 9 ( James (03/16/2009). "The Body of Sublime Knowledge: The Aesthetic
Phenomenology of Arthur Schopenhauer". Heythrop journal (0018-1196), 50 (2), p. 228.
Returning to Schopenhauer's moral judgment against existence, and his advocacy of quieting the Will, we have established that he
regards disinterestedness, will-less-ness as the criteria of art and ethics. Despite his disclosure of the aesthetic dimension to the
sublime, in which such unambiguous will-less-ness is deemed impossible, he still expresses a moral judgment against the 'world' and
calls on us to silence the will. His lament, his honest denunciation of life as deception, his declaration that pleasure is a temporary,
illusory release, expresses an ontology and ethics of suffering, of nihilism, which for Nietzsche and Bataille is merely an attempt to
escape from an abyss of desire and voluptuousness.29 While it is clear from Book Four that Schopenhauer is not propounding a
exclusively negative philosophy of Will, it is also certain that his ultimate ethical judgment on life is negative. He acknowledges
there exist affirmations of the Will, in our sense for the Will in the body and the
will-to-live in sexual reproduction; he subverts this 'discovery', however, through an objection to the 'results' of
such an affirmation. On the one hand, the will to live, a situation of limit, is the place
where the Idea of the species itself becomes manifest, as the begetter is identical
with the begotten in essence; he even holds that the primary object of the will here is the genitals (as the object of
knowledge is the brain). On the other hand, however, he connects this will to life with its opposite, death, in examples drawn from
the myths of Adam, Proserpine and Shiva. The
relationship between sexual procreation and death
thereby becomes manifest, and thus the futility of life, as the curse of finitude is
inflicted onto successive generations, casting numberless hordes into the jaws of
pain, suffering and extinction (thus, for Schopenhauer, the shame of erotic life, and his misogyny). Schopenhauer
thereby founds a nihilistic pessimism which, while acknowledging the actuality of life in its willing energy, simultaneously denies to
withdrawing any affirmation of for our
this life any possibility of self-fulfilment or self-knowledge, thereby
tragic predicament. His is a philosophy whose purpose is the preparation for death.
 Nuclearism DA
Placing nuclear war within a doomsday frame allows privilege to side-
step issues of racism and oppression people of color have lost their
culture for centuries and live in constant war every day
Omolade 84 [Barbara Omolade Calvin College first dean of multicultural affairs, Women
of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust, Womens Studies Quarterly vol. 12, No. 2]
To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear disarmament must
overcome its reluctance to speak in terms of power, of institutional racism and
imperialist military terror. The issues of nuclear disarmament and peace have
been mystified because they have been placed within a doomsday frame which
separates these issues from other ones, saying. "How can we talk about struggles
against racism, poverty, and exploitation when there will be no world after they
drop the bombs?" The struggle for peace cannot be separated from, nor considered more sacrosanct than, other struggles concerned with human life and change In April.
1979. the US Aims Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the
effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the
United States and The Soviet Union. 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This
is approximately the same number of African people who died between 1492 and
1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also comments on the destruction of
urban housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war. as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages Of course, for people of color the world over, starvation is already a
common problem, when, for example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people And the housing of people of color throughout the world's urban areas are already blighted and

For people of color,

inhumane, families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets, even in the urban areas of North America, the poor may live without heat or running water.

the world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world. with its Own languages,
customs and ways, ended And we are only now beginning to see with increasing
clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for It, and rebuild it in our
own image The "death culture" we live in has convinced many to be more
concerned with death than with life. more willing to demonstrate for "survival at
any cost" than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity Nuclear disarmament
becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of racism,
to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered Acts of war, nuclear

holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families, and
our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba. In Guinea-Bissau, and
in such struggles as the civil rights movement. The women's movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but The only
means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of our people
 Kato DA
The notion that nuclear war causes extinction ignores the on-going
nuclear war conducting against indigenous nations delocalizes
catastrophe
Kato 93 [Masahide, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii,
Alternatives 18, 339-360]
The complex problematics involved in nuclear
Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of "extinction" as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear catastrophe.

catastrophe are thus reduced to the single possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly
designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: "human extinctionwhose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about"35 Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a

Unlike the other

detour in their efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence:

wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human
memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never
occurred, itself; it is a non-event The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only
be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text. At least today apparendy.36 By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear

nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear

catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void),

violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The
"real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe." The history of nuclear violence offers, at best,
a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succincdy, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct
slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects."38 Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "derealization" of nuclear violence.

Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global"
catastrophe. The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism through
which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze:
nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of extinction" is configured. Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction"
reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived

the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a
through the strategic gaze. In other words,

figure on which the notion of extinction is being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in
locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will

suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it;
we will be dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already."39 Robert Lifton attributed such difficulty in locating the subject
to the "numbing effect" of nuclear psychology. In other words, Lifton tied the difficulty involved here not to the question of subjectivity per se but to psychological defenses against the overwhelming possibility of
extinction. The hollowness of extinction can be unraveled better if we locate it in the mode of perception rather than in nebulous nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is a result of "confusing figure
with the object"40 This phenomenon, called "the delirium of interpretation" by Virilio, is a mechanical process in which incorporeal existence is given a meaning via the figure.41 It is no doubt a manifestation of
technosubjectivity symptomatic of late capitalism. Hence, the obscurity of the subject in the configuration of extinction results from the dislocation of the subject by the technosubject functioning as a meaning-
generating machine. Technosubjectivity deployed in configuring "extinction" is the product of interfaces among the camera's eyes, photo (or video) image, the ultimate speed materialized by rockets and satellite
communications, and nuclear warheads. Carol Cohn persuasively analyzed one such aspect of the interface in shaping and structuring the discourse of defense intellectuals: in the discourse, of nuclear war,
national security, and nuclear criticism, it is the bomb that is the subject of discourse.42 The satellite communications, rockets, camera's eye, nuclear warheads, and other technostrategic gadgets, which are
rendered subject in the field of discourse and perception, are essentially a fixed capital. Therefore, although the problem of technosubjectivity seems to be a new phenomenon in the age of high technology, it
remains part of an ongoing process of subject-object inversion inherent in the very concept of capital. Having established the link between the disqualification (or derealization) of the history ("real") of nuclear
catastrophe on the one hand and the mode of Nuclear criticism offers preservation of self and matter as a solution to its own imaginary/ideological construct of extinction (as manifested in the buzzword "freeze").
Accordingly, preservation of self and matter as an alternative to the inertia of the "unthinkable" cannot be anything but an imaginary/ideological construct It is in this fantasy that one can find the ideological

content of globalism.The proposition of preservation as a solution to the imagined extinction at the

same time involves redefinition of the notion of "humanity." The image of extinction drove even a

Marxist, namely, E. E Thompson, to abandon "class" analysis, embracing humanity instead: "exterminism itself is not a 'class issue': it is a human issue."43 In this sense, nuclear criticism recreates

the Renaissance in the late capitalist era in its reinvention of humanity through
technosubjectivity. Robert Lifton defined the collectivity in danger by comparing the threat of extinction with the hostage-taking, which I turn entails a very revealing redefinition of
humanity: But unlike ordinary hostage taking, nuclear terror encompasses everyone. Precisely for that reason it throws us back on our collective humanity. In calling into question the idea of human future, it

what does "humanity" designate?

raises equally ultimate questions about our evolutionary equipment for shaping that threatened future. <CONTINUED> But

Who are "we"? Sontag also encountered this obscure notion of humanity created by the photo images, and she deciphered it as "a quality things have in common when they are viewed as
photographs."45 Again we cannot escape from finding the figural origin (i.e., photo image of the globe) of the construction of "humanity." Herein the "interpretative delirium" proceeds with the disguise of
"universalism," establishing a total "deregulation" in exchanges among what are reconstructed as objects by way of figure. The regime of the "absolute" subject (i.e., technosubject) governs this deregulated image

The notion of humanity is

economy where heterogeneous existence of subjectivity (whose epistemological basis is anchored in locality) is reduced to one of many objects.

a reification of the regime of the absolute technosubject cloaked in pseudo-

thus

universality.
This erasure of history is the logic that legitimizes nuclear atrocities
Kato 93 [Masahide, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii,
Alternatives 18, 339-360]
Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial

The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe

rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically contextualized.

perceived and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the
nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And
yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the
name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions
have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36

The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of
times).29

Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times),
the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare
to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the
Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations. The dismal
consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the

from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous

Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus,

Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real
catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars

have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as

mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear
explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness
of the First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real"
of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear testing" in the
Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and
which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself. Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the
Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject ("we") is located

ongoing processes
higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the

of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of

nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear warfare has
been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over
the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
Top Shelf
 Overview
The apparatus of American civil society is founded in violent
juxtaposition to the antihuman black body. Spheres of social relations
are founded on a degree of normalcy and control defined by the
ongoing hegemony of white values is the safe foundation of
modernity. That social is not only sustained by black death but
reliant on the exclusion of black bodies in order to maintain its
absolute fortification against the deviance that compromises the
fantasy of white life.

The desire to prevent extinction is merely an extension of the

hegemony of white supremacy. Wilderson and Cacho indicate that the
ontological coordinates of white liberalism are founded in the moral
imperatives that structure the discourse and methodology of political
discussions. The futuristic framing of the 1ac is merely a psychic
extension of the social order that renders social life a structural
impossibility for blackness.

This is not a normal antiblackness argument you should be

suspicious of their offense because it all assumes things like reform
good are offense when they arent. They have to prove the semiotics
of white social relations are productive in order to win any offense on
the kritik.
 2NC Impacts
The extension of white life through the forestalling of extinction has
several impacts:

A) Objective Vertigo: the ontological nature of antiblackness makes

grasping selfhood impossible for black bodies. That process of
alienation from the body through ongoing material violence
produces a state of constant disorientation whereby black
subjects are incapable of ever fixing themselves to a coherent
phenomenological relationship with the world not found in the
grammar of humanism.

You concede a framing issue: the ontological nature of the operations

of the western nation-state are ones defined by a reactive will to
power that demands an absolute dominion over life and death in a
process that incrementally annihilates meaning from the ontological
spectrum of western semiotics and replaces that void with the
systematic exclusion of black and brown bodies in order to maintain
the faade of western hegemony.

B) Ressentiment: the desire to sustain a vice-grip on the world via

western hegemony is an unachievable objective spread through
the symbolic value systems of white supremacy. The inevitable
lapse in western control creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of
endless failure that creates politically infantile subjects who
withdraw to complacency out of a feeling of ineptitude.

C) Ontological Lashout: the colonial will to power is founded on

apparatuses of control that striate white societys relationship
with blackness an render is a repository for violence. The
inevitable breaks in the fantasy of absolute control of black life
makes lashout a structural requirement of civil society and
results in things like drone striking black Muslims in Somalia or
local violence like the killing of Freddy Grey.
 2NC Link Wall
We will isolate several link arguments:

A) What is death if not a white fantasy of completion: the

Wilderson evidence indicts the western notion of biological
finitude because it reflects a reactive will to power founded on
calcifying subjectivity that renders the black body a constant
deviant whose zombie positionality of biological life and social
death situates it at a nexus of violence visa-vis its interruption in
the field of white values.

B) Futurity: the aff merely preserves the longevity of civil society by

fortifying the white psyche against death. The desire to preserve
a safe field of social relations endlessly defers freedom to the
horizon of the unthought for black bodies and unifies society
around the fantasy of a social order that must be protected by
any means necessary.

C) Privileging biological life fortifies antiblackness: social death

makes material death a luxury to the black body, not a
consequence. By preserving the nation state, the aff only extends
the violence done to black bodies and ensures social death is
maintained in exchange for the relegation of bodies to objects of
fetishistic white violence.

D) The aff is a discourse of liberal humanism: their framework

arguments prove that their attempt to reclaim agency and
elevate themselves as subjects who can master death and
determine their own fate are all extensions of enlightenment
personhood that valorizes individualism and preserves a
manifest-destiny relationship to the world parasitic on the black
savage as the antithesis of liberal elevation Thats Wilderson
 E) Survivalism will never be receptive to the positionality of the
unthought: the loss of self and ontological incoherency that
renders death meaningful does not exist within the cartography
of antiblackness. The subjective freedoms enjoyed by the living
are founded against the slave-like conditions of anti-black
violence. That means refusing the call for white freedom in the
domain of the living has to be the precursor to disconfiguring
what it means to live at all.
Their attempt to protect a supposedly universal humanity is a part of
white supremacist civil defense pedagogy that propagates eugenicist
public sphere. Turns the AFF.
Preston 8 [John, Professor of Education at University of East London, Protect and Survive:
whiteness and the middle-class family in civil defence pedagogies, Journal of Education
Policy, Vol. 23, No. 5]
That civil defense pedagogies exist to save lives and allow for the continuation of
society and (in the case of nuclear war) the survival of humanity suggests that these are
universal and neutral conceptions. This is not the case. Notions of what is meant as a viable human and of the
continuation of humanity have their foundations in debates concerning eugenics. Eugenics has often been considered to be a historical relic, located in
the work of early Victorian geneticists and in the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. This understanding of eugenics has been supplanted by work
which considers eugenics to be central in understanding social policy across a range of national contexts, contemporary as well as historical (Burdett
2006). Eugenics is based on understandings of genetics that locate social and moral defects in the genetic material (bio-plasm) of individuals and
families. Historically, this has led to the codification, regulation, sterilisation and (in some circumstances) extermination of those individuals
considered to be genetically aberrant (Ordover 2003; Bruinius 2006). In addition, individuals and families of good genetic stock were encouraged to
produce offspring (Stern 2005). Another strand of eugenic thought (and one which influences the discussion here) is the fear that over civilisation
would lead to a situation whereby Darwinist processes of survival of the fittest would not apply and those with superior genes would become
complacent, being outbred by those of poor genetic stock. According to Sharp (2007), these Darwinist ideologies of survival
of the fittest have been most influential in determining civil defence policies in the
USA. In practice, the fittest is taken to be the white middle-class heteronormative
family. The meaning of white or whiteness in this context is a moral and political category (states and collectives determine who is white and
can act for or against white interests) which requires both material practice and symbolic
performance for its maintenance (Ignatiev and Garvey 1996). Whiteness is often an implicit facet of middle-class formation
which, until relatively recently, has passed without comment in the USA and the UK (Frankenberg 1993, 1999; Reay 2005). This work draws on an
often unacknowledged history of writing by people of colour (a long historical tradition of black radicalism including Fanon (1986), DuBois (1989,
1999), and in his collected educational writings by Provenzo (2002), Sojourner Truth (1998) and more recently the work of hooks (1989, 1999)). It is
not possible to discuss the formation of the middle classes in these countries and across historical contexts without a discussion of whiteness, explicitly
without a discussion of whiteness(es) (see Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1999, 2002, 2005; Bonnett 2000a; Preston 2007b). Whiteness(es) refers to different
formations and boundaries of whiteness, but its flexibility does not mean that those belonging to the category white do not exercise forms of cultural
and economic domination as part of an over-arching system of white supremacy (Ansley 1997; Allen 2001, 2004; Gillborn 2005, 2006; Leonardo 2005;
Chakrabarty 2006). Given this emphasis on whiteness as both social construction system of social domination, critical race theory (CRT) is a useful
conceptual apparatus for considering the relationship between race, class and pedagogies (Ladson-Billings 2004) including those around civil defence
and preparedness. Notions
of white supremacy, interest convergence and betrayal (Bell 1980, 1989, 1992) are
congruent with the discursive development of civil defence pedagogies. In addition, the
critique of whiteness from critical whiteness studies is important in comprehending these pedagogies. Firstly, it is essential to de-reify whiteness by
seeing it as a socially constructed identity which is historically contingent and liable to change over time. Whiteness in 1950s America had a different
historical meaning to whiteness in 1980s England, for example. In the former context, it was associated with the development of suburbia and the
assimilation of various white-American immigrant groups into the suburban middle classes. In the latter, it was a racial form which had developed from
imperialism and the welfare state, which was both consolidated by state expansion and new British imperialisms of the 1980s, but also undercut by
marketisation and mass unemployment (Bonnett 2000b). Secondly, from CRT an understanding not only of white privilege but also of its structural
cognate (Leonardo 2005) white supremacy which enables an understanding of how whiteness works through white racial practices (racism and ethnic
preference) and institutional and structural embeddedness. In
terms of civil defence, white supremacy works
through eugenic discourses and a particular understanding of humanity which
explains why the white middle classes were particularly favoured in civil defence
pedagogies, their value reinforced by both their whiteness and their class position.
F) Blackness is before death: the Wilderson and Cacho evidence
indicates that blackness is intimately bound with death and
destruction on the terrain of the symbolic order. The 1ac is not
just about what they said, but also what they meant. The shield
oneself from mortality and defer death is merely an insidious
psychic defense imposed by civil society against blackness.
 2NC Alternative
Vote negative to dance with death and understand that mortality as
we know it is defined by social relations parasitic on violence against
the black body. Martinot is amazing on the question the
preservation of the western self only occurs through fortification
against security threats that present the possibility of violating the
western will to power founded on organizing and distributing death.
That means only embracing the negativistic refusal of death as a
means of producing social life amongst the rubble of civil society can
produce the conditions for black freedom. We will isolate three net
benefits the permutation does not access:

A) It allows for a politics of the unthought: Wilderson and Cacho

both indicate that our relationship to blackness is one founded
on the presentation of symbols and rhetorical constructions that
render the black body nearer to death and more object-like than
their white counterparts. Only embracing the fatalistic
destruction of the world can position politics outside the
intelligible ethical calculus of the west.

B) It primes violence: the fear of death and need for control stifles
revolutionary movements. Using this space as a theatre of
violence that primes subjects for their own extinction produces
the revolutionary vitality that necessitates producing material
violent conflicts. Even if they win the individual action of voting
negative doesnt do anything your job as an educator should be
to produce the conditions for revolution.

C) Black social life: only through our understanding of blackness

as absolutely oppositional to the semiotics of white supremacy
can we produce the conditions for meaning beyond violent
terrains of civil society. Embracing death is the absolute gesture
of control whereby agency is realized in the capture of fate and
to refuse white supremacy the right to kill in favor of a gesture
towards dying implodes the foundational power-hierarchies that
constitute modern violence.
The fiat double bind should frame your impact debate: either your
impacts are constructed and you are fearmongering white
supremacists or your impacts will happen before you can change
Congress. That means individual ethics should frame your ballot.

Ending the world has to be a prior question your survivalist

narrative only reproduces a western notion of linear time parasitic on
the annihilation of black and brown bodies. Only embracing
extinction can produce the conditions for the end of white supremacy.
Brady 12 [12/21/12, Nicholas Brady, The End is Here: Thoughts towards a Blackened
World, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/the-end-is-here-thoughts-
towards-a-blackened-world/]
The end is near. The end is here. Yet this begs the question, what can one call the end? How can we define the end? Does it
mean that there will be no life on the earth? Does this mean the atmosphere will be broken by the
trajectory of a million asteroids; or the land and ocean will dry up into a lifeless desert; or some random code will be activated and all the
nuclear weapons on earth will launch? This seems to be missing the point. The end of the
Mayan calendar is not necessarily about predicting the wrath of an unseen God or the demise of all beings instead it is about the end
of life as we know it. This is about the end in the way of being in the world, a way of
being that has defined the world as the world-in-itself. An end of human being(s). This is the end of our world, a
world I have never been able to be in. An end of an era, an end of this time and this place. And it is in this spirit that I
stand in solidarity with this, let us pray for the end of the world! I demand for the end of the world that began
and continues to live with my end. I am talking about the end of the life-worlds of my ancestors denied the status of
being my kin that began with the raiding of the continent, the forced opening of its limbs, dragging black flesh east and west. If it is true to consider
Africa as the womb of humanity where all of us can trace our origin to, then the unconsensual invasion of Africa that can be dated back to 625 a.d.
unmakes the continent into a disfigured and silenced womb, what Marlene Nourbese powerfully describes in her essay Dis Place as a radical
innerspace to repopulate the outer space that gave birth to Asia, Europe, and the New World as we know it. This
is to see the
middle passage as a womb, a pregnancy, a violent birth an end that is a beginning, a
beginning that is an end. An end of life-worlds that produced black people was the beginning of the white/non-black world. The end is near, for the end
was already here for us. Later today, an activist I respect greatly, Dominique Stevenson, will make a journey toward a prison to demand for the
reinstatement of a program began by her, political prisoner Eddie Conway, and other men on the inside named Friend of a Friend. The program was
terminated for being subversive and revolutionary. On the day that many people will post either sarcastic statuses or ones denouncing the Mayan
calendar, she will stand up to a system built on warehousing and murdering black flesh. She and others will scream into the abyss, demand to be heard
by those who could not bear the sight, let alone the sound, of their existence. Against the end of the program, they will demand the end of an order built
on ending us. For all you out there skeptical about the end of the world, this is what it means to end the world: tear down the institutions built on using
our end as a means to their ends. Fuck civility and democracy, this is not a deconstruction, this
is the destruction of an
order that attempted to destroy us! Destruction is an act of love for a community
made impossible by machinations of violence that use us a means for an end. It is
irreconcilable to love the world and love those destroyed for its very existence. For too
long black politics has been sitting in that zone of indecision and confusion, trying to love Amerikkka and ourselves at the same time. We have been
trying for too long to heal a nation through the brute strength of our own bodies, willing to be murdered to protect a nation inflicting the unspeakable
and unspoken pain. These sacrifices are to be revered, but not repeated. I respect past generations and those of us currently who use this methodology,
but I will accept it for myself no more. Slavery is not a scar on the foundation of a nation, it is the scar that is the foundation the point of no return
that gave birth to its terrible existence. Slavery is not something to get past or beyond. The beginning was the end and we can never go home again. So
the road to the future is not a road at all, it is destruction as an act of love. Against the world
that could not hear Anna Brown scream as she slowly died as she was being dragged out of a hospital into a prison cell. Against a world that murders a
black person every thirty-six hours. Black
suffering is so normal and redundant that when it
occurs, when the police rape and murder, when 4 year children are suspended, when schools are closed while youth jails are opened, it
registers little emotion, little response aside from further infliction of pain and punishment. How can some deaths be mourned
nationally while others occur in a space of unthought? Everyday we are blackened, beaten, bruised, until we meet our demise at their hands, clubs,
guns, ropes, whips, chains. This world loves to destroy us and we
must demand its end through a radical form
of love, a love of blackness. The world that blackened Africa and its people in order to bring itself into standing must now be made black. This is
the destructive process that the radical black tradition has called for. The
end is this process of making the world
black. This is to demand the world to pay the costs of blackness, the cost we pay everyday with our flesh and our lives. The demand has been called
abolition or reparations, black nationalism or even the pan-Africanism of W.E.B. Dubois and third-worldism of Frantz Fanon and the Black Panthers to
name only a few. The demand for the world to be black is an ethical call with political dimensions, a call for the world that began with our end to meet
its end too, to fall into the black hole of the dark continent and become the dark world. A friend just told me a few days ago that I was a black partisan
and I responded, if such a thing as a black party could exist, I certainly would be. Across the globe groups with the stated purpose of blackening the
world, of demanding for it to meet its end at the point of our own creative oblivion have sprouted up and I feel nothing but
solidarity with the revolutionary forces in this world and in this nation. If one black party is not possible, then a cold
war fought on multiple fronts, led by forces underground and outer-space, making incoherent demands, using tactics of the
unthought, speaking from the inner-most point of unspeakability might bring about the impossibility of a creative destruction, an end without means.
A revolution that truly irrupts out of nowhere. The end is not about a day, an hour, or a minute. The world will
not end when my clock turns midnight or when it turned midnight in Australia or California. We are lost at sea, ripped apart
and divided into the singularity. Time has no meaning for the black. We exist in a
non-time in a radical state of non-being. Time ended for us long ago, and, in a way,
it did for you as well. This end is not an event, but an event horizon, an endless
end. This is a different type of calendar, a black form of time not governed by the setting sun or changing seasons, but the end of an epoch. Let
December 21st be stretched across the horizon, elongated and divided infinitely, spaghettified until sub-atomic presence is ripped apart and the world
meets the singularity of our suffering. Let us pray for the end of the end. The end is not near, for it is here!
 2NC Cruel Optimism Impact
You are conceding large parts of the Livingston evidence that is an
impact turn to your framework arguments. The process of using the
affective appeal to fear in order to persuade audiences towards policy
decisions is a labor of cruel optimism that makes non-violent political
action structurally impossible and transforms debate into an echo-
chamber for the far-right. We will isolate 2 unique impacts:

A) It annihilates agency: the affective attachment to fear

propagated by the 1ac creates a docile socius that submits to
oligarchs and talking head in exchange for biological
preservation, which only destroys politics further by creating a
passive masses who become incrementally more anti-black as
the politicians who sculpt their powers extend the violence of
white supremacy to the limit.
B) Neurological Xenophobia: neuroscience is on our side. The
appeal to a demonic other that must be dominated and crushed
by western hegemonic ordering creates a process of internal
suspicion whereby people become hostile towards alterity
because their understanding of non-western bodies is
intrinsically bound by the struggle for survival. That makes your
impacts inevitable.
 2NC Social Death Impact
I will do the entire social death debate here. The only paradigm for
analyzing violence is the one that understands anti-black conflict on
all three semiotic registers:

A) The Real: the black body is magnetized to bullets through things

like police violence and the war on drugs.
B) The Symbolic: the symbolic order determines the social
conventions that structure how we relate with other people. The
Atlantic Slave Trade and the ontological void it left behind is
violence without analogue that cannot be compared or
measured to the degree of other historical conflicts.
C) The Imaginary the very linguistic and value laden
connotations that determine social relations are bound by the
black body. Whoever says black says rape, aids, and murder.
Whoever says white says purity and innocence.
 Framework Top
The roll of the ballot is to answer the fundamental ethical question of
what it means to live in civil society. There is no justification for the
preservation of the world and we are winning several key reasons that
abandoning survivalism has to be the pedagogical starting point for
the debate:

A) Relationality: white life is found and given meaning through the

semiotics of black death and the constant circulation of the
libidinal economy of anti-black violence that means inverting
the register of value and producing a crisis of value through the
eradication of white life has to be a prior question when
structuring our relationship with the world

B) Humanism: the survivalist logic is a neoliberal construction that

preserves life in civil society only to sustain the black body as a
repository for violence through the elevation of the white to the
status of human juxtaposed against blackness. That means
abandoning survival has to be the foundational logic of absolute
irreconcilability for revolutionary politics thats Cacho

C) Social Life: Cacho and Marriot say it is not about winning the
revolution, but deciding to revolt. If, at the end of this round,
you cant justify the presence of the USFG as an actor you should
gut check negative because it implicates all their pedagogy
arguments. Only an absolutely oppositional stance to white
supremacy can produce the conditions for a meaningful
orientation against anti-black violence.

Vote negative in the affs framework we are impact turning your

notion of survivalism. All your arguments about warding off threats
are founded on racial constructions that necessitate lashout and make
conflict inevitable.
There is no grammar for black life in the biological preservation of
the white hegemon. Only starting the debate from the conceptual
basis of an absolute uprooting of the humanistic orientation towards
life and the absolute theorization of black object-hood can produce
the revolutionary politics crucial to the demolition of civil society.
Weheliye 14 (Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at
Northwestern University, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human, page 135-8)
Because black cultures have frequently not had access to Mans language, world, future,
or humanity, black studies has developed a set of assemblages through which to perceive and understand a world in which
black studies, if it is to
subjection is but one path to humanity, neither its exception nor its idealized sole feature. Yet
remain critical and oppositional, cannot fall prey to juridical humanity and its
concomitant pitfalls, since this only affects change in the domain of the map but
not the territory. In order to do so, the hieroglyphics of the flesh should not be
conceptualized as just exceptional or radically particular, since this habitually
leads to the comparative tabulation of different systems of oppression that then
serve as the basis for defining personhood as possession. As Frantz Fanon states: All forms
of exploitation are identical, since they apply to the same object: man. 28 Accordingly,
humans are exploited as part of the Homo sapiens species for the benefit of other humans, which at the same time yields a surplus
version of the human: Man. Man represents the western configuration of the human as synonymous with the heteromasculine,
white, propertied, and liberal subject that renders all those who do not conform to these characteristics as exploitable nonhumans,
we must locate at least some of the
literal legal no-bodies. If we are to affect significant systemic changes, then
struggles for justice in the region of humanity as a relational ontological totality (an
object of knowledge) that cannot be reduced to either the universal or particular. According to Wynter, this process requires us to
recognize the emancipation from the psychic dictates of our present . . . genre of being human and therefore from the unbearable
wrongness of being, of desetre, which it imposes upon . . . all non-white peoples, as an imperative function of its enactment as such
a mode of being[;] this emancipation had been effected at the level of the map rather than at the level of the territory. 29 The level
of the
map encompasses the nominal inclusion of nonwhite subjects in the false
universality of western humanity in the wake of radical movements of the 1960s,
while the territory Wynter invokes in this context, and in all of her work, is the figure of Man as a
racializing assemblage. Wielding this very particular and historically malleable classification is not an uncritical
reiteration of the humanist episteme or an insistence on the exceptional particularity of black humanity. Rather, Afro-diasporic
cultures provide singular, mutable, and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion in or
humanity, however, needs to be
critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal humanism. The problematic of
highlighted as one of the prime objects of knowledge of black studies, since not doing so
will sustain the structures, discourses, and institutions that detain black life and thought within the strictures of particularity so as to
facilitate the violent conflation of Man and the human. Otherwise, the general theory of how humanity has been lived,
conceptualized, shrieked, hungered into being, and imagined by those subjects violently barred from this domain and touched by the
hieroglyphics of the flesh will sink back into the deafening ocean of prelinguistic particularity. This, in turn, will also render apparent
that black studies, especially as it is imagined by thinkers such as Spillers and Wynter, is engaged in engendering forms of the
black
human vital to understanding not only black cultures but past, present, and future humanities. As a demonic island,
studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison, particularity, and
exception to reveal an aquatic outlook far away from the continent of man. 30 The
poetics and politics that I have been discussing under the heading of habeas viscus
or the flesh are concerned not with inclusion in reigning precincts of the status
quo but, in Cedric Robinsons apt phrasing, the continuing development of a collective
consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared
sense of obligation to preserve [and I would add also to reimagine] the collective being, the ontological totality. 31 Though the laws
of Man place the flesh outside the ferocious and ravenous perimeters of the legal body, habeas viscus defies domestication both on
the basis of particularized personhood as a result of suffering, as in human rights discourse, and on the grounds of the universalized
version of western Man. Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of humanity as a relational
assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given that the law can bequeath or
rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the property of proper persons
but does not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh
found in the traditions of the oppressed. As a way of conceptualizing politics, then, habeas viscus diverges
from the discourses and institutions that yoke the flesh to political violence in the modus of deviance. Instead, it translates the
hieroglyphics of the flesh into a potentiality in any and all things, an originating leap in the imagining of future anterior freedoms
and new genres of humanity. To envisage habeas viscus as a forceful assemblage of humanity entails leaving behind the world of
Man and some of its attendant humanist pieties. As opposed to depositing the flesh outside politics, the normal, the human, and so
on, we need a better understanding of its varied workings in order to disrobe the cloak of Man, which gives the human a long-
overdue extreme makeover; or, in the words of Sylvia Wynter, the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing
imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e. western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which
overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral
autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. 32 Claiming
and dwelling in the monstrosity of the
flesh present some of the weapons in the guerrilla warfare to secure the full
cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species, since these liberate
from captivity assemblages of life, thought, and politics from the tradition of the oppressed and, as
a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the sign for the human. As an assemblage of humanity, habeas viscus animates the
elsewheres of Man and emancipates the true potentiality that rests in those subjects who live behind the veil of the permanent state
of exception: freedom; assemblages of freedom that sway to the temporality of new syncopated beginnings for the human beyond the
world and continent of Man. German r&b group Glashauss track Bald (und wir sind frei) [Soon (and We Are Free)] performs this
overdetermined idea of freedom as disarticulated from Man both graphically and sonically. Paying tribute to both the nineteenth-
century spiritual Well Soon Be Free, written on the eve of the American Civil War, and Donny Hathaways 1973 recording,
Someday Well All Be Free, Glashauss title Bald (und wir sind frei) enacts the disrupted yet intertwined notions of freedom,
temporality, and sociality that I am gesturing to here. 33 In contrast to its predecessors, which are resolutely located in the future via
the use of soon / someday and the future tense, Glashauss version renders freedom in the present tense, albeit qualified by the
imminent future of bald [soon] and by the typographical parenthetical enclosure of (und wir sind frei) [and we are free]. The flow
of the parentheses intimates both distance and nearness, ragging the homogeneous, empty future of soon with a potential present
of a responsible freedom (Spillers) and/as sociality. The and and the parentheses are the conduits for bringing-into-relation
freedoms nowtime and its constitutive potential futurity without resolving their tension. The lyrics of Bald (und wir sind frei) once
again exemplify this complementary strain in that the words in the verses are resolutely future oriented, ending with the invocation
of bald just before the chorus, which, held in the potential abyss of the present, repeats, und wir sind frei. Likewise, in the verses,
Glashauss singer Cassandra Steen, accompanied only by a grand piano, just about whispers, whereas she opens up to a more
mellifluous style of singing in the chorus; as a result, the verses (bald/future) sound constricted and restrictive but only when heard
in relation to the expansive spatiality of the chorus (present). What initially looks like a bracketed afterthought on the page
punctures the putatively central point in the sonic realm. It is not a vacant, uniform, or universal future that sets in motion liberty
but rather the future as it is seen, felt, and heard from the enfleshed parenthetical present of the oppressed, since this groups now is
always already bracketed (held captive and set aside indefinitely) in, if not antithetical to, the world of Man. The domain of habeas
viscus represents one significant mechanism by which the world of Man constrains subjects to the parenthetical, while at the same
time disavowing this tendency via recourse to the abnormal and/ or inhuman. Heard, seen, tasted, felt, and lived in the ethereal
shadows of Mans world, however, a habeas viscus unearths the freedom that exists within the hieroglyphics of the flesh. For the
oppressed the future will have been now, since Man tucks away this groups present in brackets. Consequently, the
future
anterior transmutes the simple (parenthetical) present of the dysselected into the
nowtime of humanity during which the fleshy hieroglyphics of the oppressed will
have actualized the honeyed prophecy of another kind of freedom (which can be
imagined but not [yet] described) in the revolutionary apocatastasis of human
genres.

The 2acs call to speak the language of beureacrats creates an

allegiance to elites that makes us complicit in the global genocidal
politics of the west.
Fasching and deChant 11 (Darrell and Dell, Prof. of Religious Studies @ University of South
Florida, Prof. of Religious Studies @ USF, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach,
Pg. 42-43)
Interpreting our own historical situation is a risky business, for we are still too close to the events. We do not have the distance
needed to put everything into proper perspective. Nevertheless, without such an interpretation it is impossible to identify the ethical
challenges that face us, so we must risk it. In this chapter we argue that two major trends unfolded in the twentieth century that are
of significance for thinking about ethics: (1) the phenomenon of mass killing encouraged by sacred narratives that authorize "killing
in order to heal," as symbolized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and (2) a cross-cultural and interreligious ethic of non-violent
resistance or civil disobedience symbolized by figures like Gandhi and King one that functions as an ethic of audacity on behalf of
the stranger. The second, we suggest, offers an ethic of the holy in response to the sacred morality of the first. The
modern
period, which began with a utopian hope that science and technology would create
an age of peace, prosperity, and progress, ended in an apocalyptic nightmare of
mass death, symbolized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, leaving us with the task of
creating a post/modern ethic that can transcend the techno-bureaucratic tribalism
that expressed itself in two world wars. Technobureaucratic tribalism occurs when sacred narratives are
combined with the technical capacity to produce mass death. While we do not pretend to offer an exhaustive explanation of the
modern propensity for mass death, we do suggest two key elements: (1) the use of sacred narratives that define killing as a form of
healing, and (2) the undermining of ethical consciousness by techno-bureaucratic
organization through a psychological process of doubling (separating one's
personal and professional identities), which enables individuals to deny that they are
responsible for some of their actions. Through sacred stories, the stranger is defined as less than human and
therefore beyond the pale of ethical obligation, as well as a threat to sacred order. At the same time, bureaucracies
encourage one to engage in a total surrender of self in unquestioning obedience to
higher (sacred) authority (whether God, religious leaders, or political leaders), so that when
one acts as a professional self on behalf of an institution (the state, the military, the church, etc.)
one can say, "It is not I that acts: a higher authority is acting through me, so I am
not personally responsible." Yet, despite the seemingly overwhelming dominance of techno-
bureaucratic tribalism and mass killing in the twentieth century, a modest but important counter-
trend also emerged a cross-cultural and interreligious ethic of audacity on behalf of the stranger, linked to such names as Tolstoy,
Gandhi, and King. The purpose of this chapter is to grasp the ethical challenge of modernity as symbolized by Auschwitz and
Hiroshima. The purpose of the remainder of this book is to examine the potential of the ethical response to that challenge offered by
the tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, symbolized by Gandhi and King, for a cross-cultural and interreligious post/modern
ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation.
 AT: Choice
There is no choice for black life their assumption that we should
extend the luxury of agency to the oppressor only extends the half-life
of civil society by allowing it to use the faade of ethicality to
perpetuate the justification of its own existence. We have several DAs
to your interpretation of life-bringing:
A) It gives a white monopoly on death: call on the state to be the
arbiter of who lives and dies only extends a master-slave
dichotomy whereby the state becomes the arbiter of fate for the
global south and allows it to create the exact conditions it claims
to be preventing. Independently the extension of the colonial
will to power makes the violence of the compromised fantasy
inevitable.

B) It will never resolve the libidinal nature of anti-black violence:

even if white society can value the life of all people in the
abstract the semiotic register of antiblack violence makes it so
things like 12 year olds with water guns get shot regardless of the
subjective ethics, which means that compromising those
fundamental relationships has to be a prior question.

C) Humanistic politics can never encapsulate the register of the

unthought: in order to create an absolute interruption in the
echo-chamber of white supremacy, we have to destroy the
humanist remnants that attempt to register black subjectivity as
derelict. That means we must start with the foundational
antagonism of white death to sustain a structural kritik of white
supremacy.
 AT: Death is Evil
We will impact turn the internal warrant for why death is evil yours
authors inevitably default to the assumption that death either
ontologically destroys the subject or precludes joy, with that in mind:

There is no ontological order to the black subject it is

phenomenologically outside the world as a zone of dereliction
whereby white fantasies of absolute control are played out on the
body of the blacks in order to maintain a fantasy of absolute control
thats Marriot.

The subjective features of living are all parasitic on black life. Even if
you like your family and friends, the world we live in is founded on
black death which makes their very presence an extension of the
annihilation of black life. That means risking that loss has to be a
prior ontological question because it structures our commitment to
fracturing the world as we know it.
 AT: Perm
I will do the theory first:
A) Severance: the perm severs out of the death representations and
political methodology of the plan. That has to be a voter because
it makes the 2ac a moving target and makes garnering negative
offense structurally impossible.

B) You dont get a permutation: this is a method debate. The 1ac

has grounded itself in the script of white liberalism that relies
on normative tropes of survivalism as an extension of white
sovereignty which means this is a debate about how to be
political.

Now the link debate, if we win one the permutation is incoherent

because the alternative is affectively to refuse the plan:

We have external DAs to the permutation:

A) Will-to-Power: the desire to maintain the western hegemonic

monopoly of violence is sustained through reformist practices
that create micro-legitimacy projects for the state that create the
image of its absolute necessity in preserving the world order all
founded on the racial fantasy of a safe white world.
B) Fantasmic Politics: the extension of the 1ac only allows the
western nation state to preserve itself through the fantasy of an
absolutely unified social sphere. The desire to suture the void
that lies within the self and the other produces scapegoats who
bear the brunt of anti-black violence.
C) Rationalist Violence: the affirmative justifies itself through a
western conception of rationalist linearity that gains coherence
through the eradication of the irrational anti-human.
Leonard and Willis 8 (Timothy, Prof Emeritus at College of Education at Saint Xavier, and Peter, Senior Lecturer in
Adult Learning and Education at U of South Australia, Pedagogies of the Imagination, p 265,
www.springerlink.com/content/t1603l22316633q8/)

The insight that the human mind is a function of imagination is the unifying thread of the mythopoetic
project in curriculum and pedagogy. It is clearly the underlying commitment of the authors in this collection ,
whose work is
filled with an uncommon hope in a time dominated by forces that would kill
imagination in favor of linear, controllable rationality. Of course imagination and the stories that it
generates is never killed as such, but it can be repressed and heavily disguised. Current western militarist culture
has sought to control human imagination through the ''spin making" of image
industries under control of state and large corporations and the unfettered appropriation of the
power of the imagination in advertising. Curriculum in cultural studies that attempts to unmask the iron fist in the velvet glove of
such advertising and media ''spin" has been a valuable contribution to a socially aware curriculum. It does the learners a service in
evoking critical attention and skepticism towards the truth claims of consumerist culture but of course the critical approach tends to
be focused on the important but not exclusive arena of logical rationality. Logical
rationality, this book has argued,
needs to be complemented and enriched by the creative dimensions of human
imagining with its links to the heart as well as the head and this has become more
and more necessary. A commonly held contemporary stance that curriculum must
be a process contained within mathematically measurable parameters is not
neutral. It is hegemonic. It is a corollary of the view that all persons are
commodities, that all human interactions are markets, and that all conflicts are
wars. It has two major toxic elements. Through its passion for control, this linear/rational orientation
towards education has the potential to crush the imagination of its teachers and
produce a culture that is literally mindless. Fundamentalist upheavals in the world's religions are the most
newsworthy reactions to this imperialist rationalism and, having gathered momentum for almost a century, these movements have
become a credible threat in their own right to the future of imagination, mind, and reason itself. Paradoxically, then, an unbalanced
and narrow rationality has spawned two dark enemies of reason: firstly, its own insistence that all knowledge is derived from science
and technology, and secondly, the fundamentalist response that all knowledge is contained in the literal interpretation of divinely
revealed texts.

D) Predications: the desire to produce and predict the future

creates an ontological security apparatus that makes their
impacts inevitable
Aitken 11 [Rob Aitken, University of Alberta, Canada, Financializing security: Political
prediction markets and the commodification of uncertainty, Security Dialogue April 2011 vol.
42 no. 2 123-141]
It is perhaps most baldly articulated by Abramowicz, who, as we noted above, was not too bothered about the superiority of information markets'
those who would seek to exercise freedom,
predictions, so long, it transpires, as they could still help discipline
either in their own name or that of others, since the predictions of well
functioning information markets are objective (2003, Executive Summary). The objective here has a curious
relation to the real, a revealing problematic which perhaps indicates much of what is fundamentally at stake here. For the objective is not so much the
actually existing, rather it is that which can be ascertained without objection. Consider as particular exemplification of this point the following.
Abramowizc, in suggesting ever more arcane ways to ensure that only fundamental traders hold sway in the final analysis of a market's arbitration,
posits the possibility of a two stage information market. In the first players effectively bet on the outcome of a second, with the second open only briefly,
after the close of the first, with only the payouts of the second dependent upon the verification (or not) of some future event. For Abramowizc one virtue
of such a device is that there will no longer be risk associated with real world
randomness(note 156)! It is thus not reality itself and the randomness it entails that
concerns those that seek solace in prediction markets but rather certainty and
reduction; a reality perhaps, but like the freedom we encountered above, only that reality which has been suitably reformulated. Made single,
indisputable, and dead; not manifold, contestable and lived. Such a singular representation of reality can only
be a simulation, in the most pejorative of senses, that which will always be by
passed, confounded and exceeded by practical experience (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 155). For
there is always irruption of that minimum of reversibility which exists in every
irreversible process (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161), requiring our endless human intervention to
secure it, to keep its mask in place and to maintain the illusion that it is outside of
us and that we are not required for its maintenance. Indeed, one could go further. Our endless defence, our securing of our simulated worlds, against
the ceaseless encroachment of the entropy from which they are formed is, according to Baudrillard, that which gives them their purchase upon us. They
ordered production and
are only made interesting by this interminable maintenance requirement. The attractiveness of
prediction (see also, Cooper, 2005) is thus ironically provided by its potential to fall back into
disorder, which secretly ruins and dismantles it while simultaneously ensuring that a minimal continuity of pleasure traverses it, without
which it would be nothing (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161). And for Baudrillard this means that the seduction through which all our attempts to stabilize the
real world are undone doesn't belong to the order of the real but rather surrounds it, providing the background against which our small victories over
chaos are able to shine, just as derivatives markets surround those in their underlying assets. [S]eduction envelops the whole real process of power, as
well as the whole real order of production, with endless reversibility and disaccumulation without which neither power nor production [nor indeed
prediction] would exist (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 159, original emphases). This continual disintegration of order and manufactured form is the very
ground that production, prediction and power require for their perpetuation. It is what makes these latter processes seductive. The
lack of
real prediction associated with PAM and similar systems is made abundantly clear by Mason Richey (2005).
Here PAM is indicted not for the reasons we have encountered above in the media furore surrounding its announcement but rather on more
philosophical terms, entirely consonant with the line of argument we have been developing. Richey follows the logic of PAM to its selfdefeating
terminal conclusion. Traders purchase a contract on PAM if they think its underlying event is more likely than its current price would suggest. En
masse such trading will raise the price of that contract. But PAM is an information and prediction market. Its raison d'tre is to provide a signal to those
who are interested in the occurrence, or rather the prevention, of the events that underlie traded contracts. Thus a
rise in prices is
likely to instigate a response from those for whom the market was created as
signalling mechanism. In turn this thus reduces the likelihood of the occurrence of
the event. I bet, you see I bet, you act, I lose. Or as Richey (2005, p. 10) puts it: The idea that government authorities employ the market to foresee
events that they will prevent would, a priori, mute the signal. But this is not the most fundamental of the flaws. It merely reflects one of a deeper level.
And it is precisely why Hanson seems so misguided in his rendering of existing instruments as being in need of supplementation if they are to deliver
prediction of a precise enough nature. For in the act of specification of the possible future, the job that the signalling market of derivatives is intended
to achieve is already done. In the case of PAM, again in Richey's (2005, p. 10) words: [T]he derivatives of maximal predictive interest, the impetus for
the system's design, terrorism derivatives, must be explicitly articulated in order to be offered. But if the market designers can list a specific terrorist
event, then they have already defined, determined, and predicted the very event that the market is designed to identify. If the market designers know
which terrorist derivatives to offer, then they have already done the work of the market. For Richey (2005, p. 10) then: The system does
both too little and too much. This combination of inadequacy and excess is intimately tied to PAM's curious relation to a
simulated future of an ordered, predicted, singular real. Our reading of Dillon (2004, 2006, forthcoming) suggests that such
fetishization of fixation is increasingly anathema to key strands of, themselves
increasingly dominant, thinking within the strategic centres of our Western
security apparatus. As he pithily puts it, the contingent has become a new order of the
real[17]. This contingent is the strategic thinking that both we, and any securing
agency, actually need to engender in a world in which human being is
increasingly relativised in space and time through technologies of communication and information (Cooper, 2005, p. 10); a world
exemplified by PAM and its derivatives. What we, and they, certainly do not need to engage in is evergreater emplacement. For in a world ever more
clearly revealed by the congenitally failing securing action of such technologies as an inexhaustible informational remainder which, strangely, appears
only to disappear (Cooper, 2005, p. 22), such yearning for the objective, for a singular real in which to find and found ourselves is futile in the extreme.
Indeed, one could go further it
is in the desire for and the violent imposition of a singular truth
that most contemporary conflict is rooted. It is only a manifold real that has sufficient play of space and space of play
to prevent the horrors attendant upon crusades for the truth. So where do we end up? We began by invoking the range of different readings of PAM's
demise and worked through the differences and similarities between them. At the same time we considered the differences and similarities between
PAM and other markets. What was revealed by both of these comparisons was the tension between instrumental representation and the prior
simulation upon which it depends, a tension embodied perhaps most quintessentially by markets themselves. Markets are able to reconcile the
reversible imminence of simulation through endless deferral both between different markets and their derivatives and indeed between the present
and the future, so long as the latter always remains deferred and can never definitively be reached. In doing so they encompass both effectcause and
causeeffect. As such they are able to sustain manifold reality so long as the world keeps turning and money keeps making it go round. But what they
cannot do, except in nave and impoverished accounts, such as those of many of the protagonists we considered, is be simply resolved to one, singular
reality that would arbitrate the truth, particularly the truth of a prediction. PAM's attempt to capture effect in order to enable intervention at the level of
cause is forever undone by the ways in which such effect is both overly prefigured and by the ways in which such prefiguring, when coupled with the
informative role the market is intended to perform for interventionists, acts to ensure that its signals are suppressed. Despite their myriad other
disagreements, the extraction of a singular reality from the manifold is what most of our commentators seem desperate to achieve. However the
divergence in their views does not thus reveal some underlying neutral core of truth from which each raps out a different line. Rather, we witness the
opposite. A manifold, polyphonous world that endlessly resists and undoes any singular articulation of its nature or trajectory. Such a world allows each
to tell a different story of its benefits and costs. We thus happily join in celebrating the cessation of PAM's singular call. But we would equally revel in
the silencing, or rather the drowning out via cacophony, of those other monologues that brought about its end.
 AT: Psychoanalysis Wrong
Using Lacanian language does not make us Lacan: the 1nc was an
assault on the humanist ethic of the affirmative. Our process is the
only one that explains the reasons certain violence happens. Gut
check what other theory articulates why unarmed children get shot
by cops.
 AT: Reformism
*Insert social death impact if not already read*

Reforms are not improvements, but palliatives to assuage the social

order. Slavery lead to sharecropping, a practice that was arguably
more violent. Then prison slavery, then Jim Crow, lynchings, and
slave-wages in production jobs. Now modernity is marked by
segregation worse than in the 50s and a prison industrial complex
that controls the lives of more folk of color than any institution in
history.

Over Seas Violence turns your reformism arguments even if you win
some slight improvement domestically, foreign violence is still a
modern colonial killing field. U.S. narratives of progress only solidify
justification for violence abroad. Our inclusion here justifies
ignoring genocides in Rwanda and blowing up medical factories in
Iran. Coloniality is alive and well across the planet. Thats Martinot
 AT: Soc. Death = Colonialism
The three pillars of antiblackness that wilderson uses to justify his
ontology claim are general dishonor, natal alienation, and gratuitous
violence. These three coalesce to form the black positionality. The
experience of the middle passage was so parasitic that it led to a shift
in what it meant to be human i.e. they entered the ships as Africans
and came off as Blacks which lead to a fundamental difference in their
being.

We will impact turn Hudsons assumptions about the libidinal

economy their assumption that race does not fundamentally exist is
a pivot towards white fluidity that allows whites to become black and
produce a multicultural discourse of assimilationism that absolves
whites of their guilt and extends the materiality of antiblack violence.

Hudson concludes neg there is no social life within the liberal world
order
Hudson 13 [Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg , South Africa, has been on the editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The
South African Journal of Sociology and Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory and
Transformation, and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, The
state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013, Taylor
and Francis]
Liberal democracy doesnt recognize black experience; it says, this isnt the
experience of colonialism the struggle is over: weve got a liberal constitutional democracy this kind
of expression (of colonialism) that is if liberal democracy even acknowledges its very existence), isnt really colonialism. Its an
ersatz colonialism, neutered by the very form of its expression i.e., via freedom of expression in a liberal democracy. Therefore it
should just be allowed to pass ignored. If
you take such objects out of the colonial frame
deprive them of their historic meaning then what are they? Individual dignity eroded?
Perhaps. But if you put them in their colonial name as you just have to), then it isnt a matter of individual dignity of any individual
the specifically black subject as object
or of the individual, but it is a matter now of colonialism itself, i.e.
in the gaze of the white (self-possessed) master. This is what liberalism, no matter how
democratic, cannot appreciate: it cannot grasp what is at stake in these stagings of the colonial unconscious,
because its very premises an individualist social ontology wont allow it to. Remember, for the
black, the effect of perceiving these objects is to be ontologically reduced, emptied
out, amputated (Fanon 1968). For the white, the effect is the opposite: to feel confirmed, at home, in what is, after all, the
white gaze on the black man. Destitution/plenitude, the elementary doublet of colonial experience and the colonial relation itself.
Even if we assume whites and blacks to be both unconsciously in thrall to the signifier white, the effect is quite different in the two
cases;for the black, the effect of non-existence is still impossible for him, not to
feel. What such objects show is precisely that colonials is still with us; it isnt just structural inertia combined with ANC
corruption and mismanagement that explains the ongoing racial distribution of life chances and assets in South Africa .
Colonial identifications are still with us, and working silently to maintain the
status quo. An object such as The Spear is both revelatory of this and, at the same time, reinforces these identities. It stands
out, however, because its as close to not being silent, to being not silent as the distinction between unconscious and conscious will
allow. Its as close to being transparent to consciousness as it is possible to be, without being transparent to consciousness. Perhaps
Conclusion Colonialism of a very special
this explains something of the excess passion is has produced in the public space.
type To the extent that post 1994, at last, structurally colonial white and black identities are prohibited
but not destroyed, the state is involved in a politics of the unconsciousness. 274 P.
Hudson Downloaded by [] at 10:53 22 July 2015 The colonial unconscious is part of the Colonialism of a Special Type (CST)
historically, the conceptual model of the ANC and the SACP, today the tri-partite alliance. This fantasy is itself still a fundamental
component of South African society which resists, in different ways, the NDR. As weve seen, its identificatory effects antagonise and
subvert the NDR (and this is not only from without, but also within the NDR itself). So this is a fight that includes blacks, because
whites and blacks are interpellated by the white master signifier; blacks too (to the extent
they havent separated themselves from their self-identification in the terms of the white imaginary) recognise themselves in such
presentations, because colonial logic entails that they see themselves through
white eyes. Perhaps they dont know it, but what they see (in this object) pulls them in and
(re)colonises them, ratcheting up their existing white identifications. The white
colonial unconscious is a site of political struggle because where a liberal democratic perspective implies tolerance and even silence,
it is fundamentally challenged by this unconscious
a national democratic state because
signifier (whiteness) has to do something. But what? Fight it on liberal democratic individualist grounds? Or as hate
speech? But it has already lost its specificity once named as hate speech rather than colonial speech. This said, neither should
the National Democratic state seek to become an apparatus by which the nervous systems of its inhabitants are regulated (Groys
2011, 17), thereby saturating all modalities of subjectivisation. The hypothesis of total power (Badiou 2001, 83) and telos of
absolute closure must be resisted. The National Democratic Revolution is unlikely to be able to avoid being eclipsed by liberal
democracy, thus bringing to a close a determinate sequence in the history of the South African state unless it succeeds in charting a
course against both the effect of amnesia of liberal individualisation (vis--vis colonialism), and the fantasy of national democratic
plenitude.
 AT: Soc. Death = Despair
Resisting anti-Blackness is an active life affirming process accepting
and flipping pathology
Sexton 11 [Jared, PhD, Director, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, The Social Life
of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism, InTensions, Vol 5,
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/notefromtheeditor/notefromtheeditor.php]
[23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his

Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial
first several books:

seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social

pathologiesthey become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology (Gordon
2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Motens contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense
of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic

this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he
association to the level of identity. And yet,

fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world

that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive
stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and
an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this
acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to
pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a
black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to
the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an
affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in
a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to
sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, The Black Man and Language: A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case
of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of

white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperativeabove all, dont

be black (Gordon 1997: 63)in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward
blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that resides in the idea that I am
thought of as less than human (Nyongo 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a
transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without
pathos.
 AT: Util
FIRST vote neg under a utilitarian calculus utilitarianism means
you maximize happiness, not lives saved the amount of suffering in
the world of the aff is exponentially greater than the world of a
nuclear war because black suffering is ontological while the suffering
caused by nukes is experiential, thats Wilderson

SECOND util is bad

A HERRENVOLK ETHICS utilitarianism is the ethics of the master

race this card is devastating.
Mills 97 [Charles Mills, 1997, The Racial Contract, p. 96-102]
This partitioned moral concern can usefully be thought of as a kind of "Herrenvolk ethics," with the principles applicable to
the white subset (the humans) mutating suitably as they cross the color line to the nonwhite subset (the less-than-humans). (Susan Opotow has done a detailed study of
moralities of exclusion, in which certain "individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rides, and considerations of fairness apply"; so this
would be a racial version of such a morality.)7 One could then generate, variously, a Herrenvolk Lockeanism, where whiteness itself becomes property, nonwhites do not fully, or
at all, own themselves, and nonwhite labor does not appropriate nature,8 a Herrenvolk Kantianism, where nonwhites count as subpersons of considerably less than infinite
value, required to give racial deference rather than equal respect to white persons, and white sell-respect, correspondingly, is conceptually tied to this nonwhite deference,9 and

aHerrenvolk utilitarianism, where nonwhites count distributively for less than one
and are deemed to suffer less acutely than whites.10 The actual details of the basic values of the particular normative theory (property rights, personhood and respect, welfare)
are not important, since all theories can be appropriately adjusted internally to bring about the desired outcome: what is crucial is the theorist's adherence to the Racial
Contract. / Being its primary victims, nonwhites have, of course, always been aware of this peculiar schism running through the white psyche. Many years ago, in his classic
novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison had his nameless black narrator point out that whites must have a peculiar reciprocal "construction of [their] inner eyes" which renders black
Americans invisible, since they "refuse to see me." The Racial Contract includes an epistcmological contract, an epistemology of ignorance. "Recognition is a form of agreement,"
and by the terms of the Racial Contract, whites have agreed not to recognize blacks as equal persons. Thus the white pedestrian who bumps into the black narrator at the start is
a representative figure, somebody "lost in a dream world." "But didn't he control that dream worldwhich, alas, is only too real!and didn't he rule me out of it? And if he had
yelled for a policeman, wouldn't I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes!"11 Similarly, James Baldwin argues that white supremacy "forced [white] Americans into
rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological," generating a tortured ignorance so structured that one cannot raise certain issues with whites "because even
if I should speak, no one would believe me," and paradoxically, "they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true."12 / Evasion and self-
deception th us become the epistemic norm. Describing America's "national web of self-deceptions" on race, Richard Drinnon cites as an explanation Montesquieu's wry
observation about African enslavement: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we
ourselves are not Christians." The founding ideology of the white settler state required the conceptual erasure of those societies that had been there before: "For [a writer of the
time) to have consistently regarded Indians as persons with a psychology of their own would have upended his world. It would have meant recognizing that 'the state of nature'
really had full-fledged people in it and that both it and the cherished 'civil society' had started out as lethal figments of the European imagination."13 An Australian historian
comments likewise on the existence of "something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale" with respect to Aborigines." Lewis Got don, working in the existential
phenomenological tradition, draws on Sartrean notions to argue that in a world structured around race, bad faith necessarily becomes pervasive: "In bad faith, I flee a
displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. I must convince myself that a falsehood is in fact true. . . . Under the model of bad faith, the stubborn racist has made a choice not to
admit certain uncomfortable truths about his group and chooses not to challenge certain comfortable falsehoods about other people. . . . Since he has made this choice, he will
resist whatever threatens it. .. . The more the racist plays the game of evasion, the more estranged he will make himself from his 'inferiors' and the more he will sink into the
world that is required to maintain this evasion."15 In the ideal polity one seeks to know oneself and to know the world; here such knowledge may be dangerous. /

the Racial Contract also explains the actual astonishing historical record
Correspondingly,

of European atrocity against nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers and horrific detail, cumulatively
dwarfs all other kinds of ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together: la leyenda negrathe
black legendof Spanish colonialism, defamatory only in its invidious singling out of the Spanish, since it would later be emulated by Spain's envious competitors, the Dutch,

French, and English, seeking to create legends of their own; the killing through mass murder and disease of 95
percent of the indigenous population of the Americas, with recent revisionist scholarship, as mentioned, having dramatically increased the
estimates of the preconquest population, so that at roughly 100 million victimsthis would
easily rank as the single greatest act of genocide in human history;16 the infamous slogans, now somewhat embarrassing to a generation living under a different phase of the
Contract"Kill the nits, and you'll have no lice!" as American cavalryman John House advised when he shot a Sauk infant at the Wisconsin Rad Axe massacre,17 and "The only

the slow-motion Holocaust of African slavery, which is now estimated by some to

good injun is a dead injun";

have claimed thirty to sixty million lives in Africa, the Middle Passage, and the "seasoning" process, even before the degradation and
destruction of slave life in the Americas;18 the casual acceptance as no crime, just the necessary clearing of the territory of pestilential "varmints" and "critters," of the random
killing of stray Indians in America or Aborigines in Australia or Bushmen in South Africa; the massively punitive European colonial retaliations after native uprisings; the death
toll from the direct and indirect consequences of the forced labor of the colonial economics, such as the millions (original estimates as high as ten million) who died in the
Belgian Congo as a result of Leopold II's quest for rubber, though strangely it is to Congolese rather than European savagery that a "heart of darkness" is attributed;19 the
appropriation of the nonwhite body, not merely metaphorically (as the black body can be said to have been consumed on the slave plantations to produce European capital), but

Native Americans were occasionally skinned and

literally, whether as utilitarian tool or as war trophy. As utilitarian tools,

made into bridle reins (for example by U.S. President Andrew Jackson),20
Tasmanians were killed and used as dog meat,21 and in World War II Jewish hair
was made into cushions, and (not as well known) Japanese bones were made by some
Americans into letter openers. As war trophies, Indian scalps, Vietnamese ears, and Japanese ears, gold teeth, and skulls were all collected
(Life magazine carried a photograph of a Japanese skull being used as a hood ornament on a U.S. military vehicle, and some soldiers sent skulls home as presents for their
girlfriends).22 To these we can add the fact that because of the penal reforms advocated by Cesare Beccaria and others, torture was more or less eliminated in Europe by the end
of the eighteenth century, while it continued to be routinely practiced in the colonies and on the slave plantationswhippings, castrations, dismemberments, roastings over slow
fires, being smeared with sugar, buried up to the neck, and then left for the insects to devour, being filled with gunpowder and then blown up, and so on;23 the fact that in
America the medieval tradition of the auto-da-fe, the public burning, survived well into the twentieth century, with thousands of spectators sometimes gathering for the festive
occasion of the southern barbecue, bringing children, picnic baskets, etc., and subsequently fighting over the remains to see who could get the toes or the knucklebones before
adjourning to a celebratory dance in the evening;24 the fact that the rules of war at least theoretically regulating intra-European combat were abandoned or suspended for non-
Europeans, so that by papal edict the use of the crossbow was initially forbidden against Christians but permitted against Islam, the dumdum (hollow-point) bullet was originally
prohibited within Europe but used in the colonial wars,25 the machine gun was brought to perfection in the late nineteenth century in subjugating Africans armed usually only

eleven thousand black

with spears or a few obsolete firearms, so that in the glorious 1898 British victory over the Sudanese at Omdurman, for example,

warriors were killed at the cost of forty-eight British soldiers, a long-distance massacre in which no
Sudanese "got closer than three hundred yards from the British positions,"26 the atomic bomb was used not once but twice

against the civilian population of a yellow people at a time when military necessity could only questionably be cited
(causing Justice Radhabinod Pal, in his dissenting opinion in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, to argue that Allied leaders should have been put on trial with the Japanese).27 We
can mention the six million Jews killed in the camps and ghettos of Europe and the millions of members of other "inferior" races (Romani, Slavs) killed there and by the
Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front by the Nazi rewriting of the Racial Contract to make them too nonwhites,28 the pattern of unpunished rape, torture, and massacre in the
twentieth-century colonial/neocolonial and in part racial wars of Algeria (during the course of which about one million Algerians, or one-tenth of the country's population,
perished) and Vietnam, illustrated by the fact that Lieutenant William Calley was the only American convicted of war crimes in Vietnam and, for his role in directing the mass
murder of five hundred women, children, and old men (or, more cautiously and qualifiedly, "Oriental human beings," as the deposition put it), was sentenced to life at hard labor
but had his sentence quickly commuted by presidential intervention to "house arrest" at his Fort Renning bachelor apartment, where he remained for three years before being
freed on parole, then and now doubtless a bit puzzled by the fuss, since, as he told the military psychiatrists examining him, "he did not feel as if he were killing humans but

the ideal Kantian

rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason."29 / For these and many other horrors too numerous to list,

(social contract) norm of the infinite value of all human lift thus has to be rewritten to relied the
actual (Racial Contract) norm of the far greater value of white life, and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly differential outrage over white and nonwhite death,
white and nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking across), one wants to ask "But how could they?" the answer is that it is easy once a certain social
ontology has been created. Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for granted the morality of the literal social contract as a norm; once one begins from the
Racial Contract, the mystery evaporates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychology transparent; one is not continually being "surprised" when one examines the
historical record, because this is the psychology the contract prescribes. (The theory of the Racial Contract is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical breakdown,
a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renunciation of the project of understanding the world and human evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsarian man. The "Racial
Contract" is simply realistwilling to look at the facts without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then you will end up with that.)

B your impacts arent offense the fiat double bind is a reason

ethical orientation towards violence should structure your impact
calculus.

C reduce the probability of catastrophe scenarios to zero

Rescher 83 (Nicholas Rescher, 1983, Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburg, Risk: A Philosophical Introduction to the Theory
of Risk Evaluation and Management, University Press of America, p. 39-40)

But in decision theory there are two different, more pressing reasons for dismissing sufficiently
improbable possibilities. One is that there are just too many of them. To be asked to
reckon with such remote possibilities is to baffle our thought by sending it on a chase
after endless alternatives. Another reason lies in our need and desire to avoid stultifying
action. Its simply human nature to dismiss sufficiently remote eventualities in ones personal
calculations. The Vacationers Dilemma of Figure 1 illustrates this. Only by dismissing certain sufficiently remote catastrophic

possibilities as outside the range of real possibilities can we avoid the

stultification of action on anything like standard decision-making approach
represented by expected-value calculations. The vacationer takes the plausible line of reviewing the chance of disaster as
effectively zero, thereby eliminating that unacceptable possible outcome from playing a role by way of intimidation. People generally (and justifiedly)

proceed on the assumption that the probability of sufficiently unlikely disasters

can be set at zero; that unpleasant eventuations of substantial improbability can
be dismissed and taken to lie outside the realm of real possibilities.
Death Good DA
 Overview
Life is an eternal Treblinka of human suffering. Consciousness is the
cosmic mistake that gives inherently hedonistic and violent animals
called humans the capacity to recognize the pitiful meaninglessness of
their own existence. We are living on a meat grinder and each day we
watch our dreams, friends, and loved ones slip off the conveyor belt
into death. The planet is defined by black and brown suffering
whereby starvation, water shortages, genocide, and neo-slavery
define the lived experience of the bulk of the worlds population. The
precautionary principle should frame all their offense allowing the
human race to continue is should be seen as a deliberate action of
torture whereby you force those who have not yet been born to
endure the near-limitless amounts of suffering that they will
inevitable face once born.

There is only pain pleasure is merely the brief absence of suffering

in a wasteland of pain, which means only suffering should matter in
your decision calculus.
Aveek 11 [Aveek, political philosopher, extensively citing Arthur Schopenhauer, German
philosopher extraordinaire, In Search of Negative Utilitarianism, 16 January 2011,
http://socialproblemsarelikemaths.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-search-of-negative-
utilitarianism.html, Evan]
There is yet a third reason why proposition A might be rejected. If we believe that happiness is illusory or unattainable,
then there is nothing to give moral weight to. Proposition A is rendered meaningless or redundant. The most
famous proponent of such pessimism in Western philosophy is Arthur Schopenhauer. To better understand the reasoning behind the pessimistic denial
of happiness, it is instructive to investigate his treatment of the concept. The first premise of Schopenhauers philosophy is that existence, for all living
creatures, entails striving. We are all particular manifestations of the will to life, and as such, we are all perpetually consumed by desires of one sort or
another, which tend generally to our survival and reproduction as a species (Note the striking parallels with evolutionary biology). For Schopenhauer,
happiness consists in the satisfaction of the will, in the fulfilment of our desires.
Now it is unclear from Schopenhauers philosophy how this specialised use of the term happiness relates to the more common meaning of happiness
as a positive feeling or disposition. On one reading, Schopenhauer seems to deny that happiness in this
second sense is ever possible: Schopenhauer scholar Christopher Janaway calls this the negativity of
satisfaction thesis. Alternatively, Schopenhauer may merely be saying that the satisfaction of preferences produces positive
feelings only rarely and/or fleetingly. With the negativity of satisfaction thesis, Schopenhauer suggests that
happiness is an illusion: "All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and
essentially always negative only, and never positive.satisfaction or gratification can never be more
than deliverance from a pain, from a want.consequently, we are only in the same position as we were before this pain or
suffering appeared." "We feel pain, but not painlessness; care, but not freedom from care; fear, but not safety
and security. We feel this desire as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has been satisfied, it is like
the mouthful of food that has been taken, and which ceases to exist for our feelings
the moment it is swallowed." Schopenhauers core assertion is that attaining what we strive for never produces any positive
feeling, but all that we experience is absence of the longing or suffering that we felt before. When we fall in love, all we experience is the absence of
loneliness. When we win a game, all we feel is respite from the fear of losing. Life, for Schopenhauer, is
nothing but suffering
after suffering, broken up by the occasional period of numbness. The pursuit of
happiness is a hunt for game that does not exist. It is interesting to place this argument in the context of
Benthams definition of pleasure: I call pleasure every sensation that a man would rather feel at that instance than feel none. But as weve seen,
Schopenhauer, according to the negativity of satisfaction thesis, would insist that it is impossible to have a sensation
that is better than feeling none at all. The reason that we are inclined to seek pleasure is simply because the satisfaction
of preferences allows us to feel nothing at all. Thus on Schopenhauers account, pleasure (which of course utilitarians take to be equivalent to
happiness) does not exist. It appears as though finally we have a genuine form of negative utilitarianism that denies
proposition A, and grants no weight to happiness. Anyone who accepts pessimism (negativity of satisfaction), hedonism (pain
is the sole metric of value in the universe) and consequentialism (the rightness of action depends only on the extent to which it maximises value) seems
committed to negative utilitarianism. It may be objected that Schopenhauer would not accept hedonism and consequentialism, the central elements of
utilitarianism, since his ethical theory is closer to a form of virtue ethics. Even if this is the case, it does not undermine my general argument. All I
sought to show is negative utilitarianism is conceivable. Since there have been people who have accepted the precepts if utilitarianism and people who
have accepted the negativity of satisfaction thesis, there is no reason why a person could not affirm both. Such a person, I contend, would be committed
to negative utilitarianism. However, it is interesting to note that in the arguments discussed here, Schopenhauer comes incredibly close to espousing
negative utilitarianism. Janaway notes that An undefended assumption in his argument is a stark form of hedonism: something adds positive value to
life if and only if it involves a felt pleasure, while something contributes negative value if and only if it involves a felt pain. Indeed, Janaway explicitly
portrays Schopenhauer as a negative utilitarian, in all but name: we see that Schopenhauer has done something quite bizarre: he has used as the test of
value a hedonic calculus in which each felt pain accumulates points on the down side of life, but where the total figure for satisfaction is permanently
set at zero. What is this bizarre hedonic calculus but the negative utilitarians metric of value?! Of course, for Schopenhauers view to fully morph into
negative utilitarianism, he would need to accept consequentialism, which he does not, to my knowledge. Yet in showing that Schopenhauers
philosophy is so concordant with hedonism, we have brought the pessimist and the utilitarian one step closer to the unification we seek. At some points,
Schopenhauer even looks to be arguing for the lexical priority of suffering over happiness, quoting Petrarch: A
thousand pleasures
do not compensate for one pain. He continues, For that thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away with
the anguish and death-agony of one individual; and just as little does my present well-being undo my previous sufferings. Therefore, were the evil in the
world even a hundred times less than it is, its mere existence would still be sufficient to establish a truth that may be expressed in various waysnamely
that we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world; that its
non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which at the bottom ought not to be."
Schopenhauer accepts the essential proposition of lexical negative utilitarianism: that no amount of happiness can make
up for the mere existence of unhappiness. Fascinatingly, Schopenhauer appears to embrace the supposedly
repugnant conclusion R.N. Smart takes to undermine negative utilitarianism: "Suppose that a ruler controls a weapon capable of instantly and
painlessly destroying the human race. Now it is empirically certain that there would be some suffering before all those alive on any proposed
destruction day were to die in the natural course of events. Consequently the use of the weapon is bound to diminish suffering, and would be the rulers
duty on NU grounds." Schopenhauers dogged insistence that it would be better if the world had never existed surely means that he would embrace a
simple and painless way to put humanity out of its misery. Once again, it is Schopenhauers philosophy that contains the tools necessary to defend
negative utilitarianism and render it plausible.

There is an external impact the desire to preserve life reflects an

egoistic desire for expansion that makes violence inevitable. Anything
that threatens our desire for life and expression in the traditionally
western form is eradicated and made fungible to the death-machine
of the global west. That makes orienting yourself towards extinction
uniquely valuable because it destroys the telos of preservation that
makes suffering inevitable.

Independently the aff is an example of the faade of being where we

invest ourselves passively in ideologies and delusions that give life a
false sense of meaning in exchange for the absolute eradication of
otherness in the name of the ego.
Ligotti 12, Thomas. Novelist, philosopher, dark horror cult figure. The Conspiracy Against the
Human Race. Page 23-25 NKF
SOLUTIONS Thinkers who agitate for pessimism are often dismissed with the riposte that their griping solves none of humanitys chronic ills, all of
which may be subsumed under the main head of SUFFERING. It goes without saying, or should go without saying, that no one has any
solutions for suffering, only stopgaps. But Zapffe does offer a solution, one that obviates
all othersa solution to solutions. It may not be a realistic solution for a stopgap world, or even a novel solution, but it
is one that would end all human suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimists credo, or one of them, is that
nonexistence never hurt anyone and that conscious existence hurts everyone.
Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist agrees. It is also a mistake that has taken humankind down
a black hole of logic, according to Zapffes Paradox. To correct this mistake, we should desist from procreating. What could be more judicious or more
urgent? At the very least, we might give some regard to this theory of the mistake as a thought experiment. All galaxies grow cold and ghostly with the
All species die out. All civilizations become defunct. There is even an
dying of their suns.
expiration date on the universe itself. We have already spoken of individuals, who are born with a ticking clock within
them. Human beings would certainly not be the first phenomenon to go belly up. But we could be the first to spot our design-flaw, that absent-minded
engineering of nature called consciousness, and do something about it. And if we are mistaken about consciousness being a mistake, our self-
removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move on our part, the most laudable
masterstroke of our existence . . . and the only one. Fluke or mutation, rather than mistake, would be more accurate designations, since it is not in
the nature of Nature to make mistakesit just makes what it makes. Mistake has been used for its pejorative connotation in Zapffes The Last
Messiah and in the works of other writers discussed herein. The American writer H. P. Lovecraft attributed the existence of humanity to a mistake or a
joke on the part of the Old Ones, the prehistoric parents of our species. 12 Schopenhauer, once he drafted his theory that everything in
the universe is energized by a Will-to-live, paints a picture of a humanity inattentive to the possibility that its life is a
concatenation of snafus: Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual for his own sake; but many thousands fall
sacrifice to it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with one
another; then the sweat and blood of the multitude must flow, to carry through the
ideas of individuals, or to atone for their shortcomings. In peace, industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are
navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends of the earth; the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning,
others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed
individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate cases with endurable want and comparative
painlessness (though boredom is at once on the lookout for this), and then the propagation of this race and of its activities. With this evident want of
proportion between the effort and the reward, the
will-to-live, taken objectively, appears to us from this
point of view as a folly, or taken subjectively, as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with
the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value. But on closer consideration,
we shall find here also that it is rather a blind urge, an impulse wholly without ground and motive. After toiling to explain in circuitous and abstract
terms why the universe is the way it is, Schopenhauer is straightforward here in limning his awareness that, for human beings, being
alive is
an exercise in folly and delusion. He also noted elsewhere in his work that consciousness is an accident of life, an
epiphenomenon of a world composed chiefly of inanimate things and not of organisms.
 2NC Precautionary Principle
We have an ethical duty to prevent future lives being born always
necessitates suffering while theres no impact to nonexistence
because there is nobody to be deprived of pleasure in the first place.
Benatar 97 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, "Why it
is better never to come into existence." American Philosophical Quarterly 34.3 (1997): 345+.
General OneFile.)
There is a common assumption in the literature about future possible people that, all things being equal, one does no wrong
by bringing into existence people whose lives will be good on balance. This assumption rests on another, namely that being brought
into existence (with decent life prospects) is a benefit (even though not being born is not a harm). All this is
assumed without argument. I wish to argue that the underlying assumption is erroneous. Being brought into existence is
not a benefit but always a harm. Many people will find this deeply unsettling claim to be counter-intuitive and will wish to
dismiss it. For this reason, I propose not only to defend the claim, but also to suggest why people might be resistant to it . As a matter of
empirical fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy
to think of the millions who live a life of poverty or of those who live much of their
lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be spared these fates, but most of us who do nonetheless suffer ill-health
at some stage during our lives. Often the suffering is excruciating, even if it is only in our final days. Some are condemned
by nature to years of frailty. We all face death.(1) We infrequently contemplate the harms that
await any new-born child: pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief and death.or any given child
we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. (Only the
prematurely deceased are spared some but not the last.) None
of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existence
suffer harm. Of course I have not told the whole story. Not only bad things but also good things happen only to those who exist. Pleasures,
joys, and satisfaction can be had only by existers. Thus, the cheerful will say, we must weigh up the pleasures of life against the evils. As long as the
former outweigh the latter, the life is worth living. Coming into being with such a life is, on this view, a benefit. However, this conclusion does not
follow. This is because there is a crucial difference between harms and benefits which makes the advantages of existence over non-existence(2) hollow
but the disadvantages real. Consider pains and pleasures as exemplars of harms and benefits. It
such a symmetrical
is uncontroversial to say that: 1) the presence of pain is bad and that 2) the presence of pleasure is good. However,
evaluation does not apply to the absence of pain and pleasure, for: 3) the absence
of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, whereas 4) the absence
of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a
deprivation. My view about the asymmetry between 3) and 4) is widely shared. A number of reasons can be advanced to support this. First,
this view is the best explanation for the commonly held view that while there is a duty to avoid bringing
suffering people into existence, there is no duty to bring happy people into being. In other words, the reason why
we think that there is a duty not to bring suffering people into existence is that the
presence of this suffering would be bad (for the sufferers) and the absence of the
suffering is good (even though there is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). In contrast to this, we think that there is no duty to
bring happy people into existence because, while their pleasure would be good, its absence would not be bad (given that there would be nobody who
would be deprived of it).
 2NC Terror Management
Terror management theory gives us uniqueness the fear of death is
a biological imperative that makes endless violence and misery a
structural necessity for the continuation of the human race.
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 126-128, Evan] ***gender modified: note that
I modified a modification to a quote originally was [Man] literally drives himself into; we also
dont defend ableist language in this text
Be that as it may, there is a school of psychology that has us all figured as morbid citizens.
Known as Terror Management Theory (TMT), its principles were inspired by the writings of the Canadian
cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who was one with Zapffe in wondering why a damning surplus of
consciousness had not caused humanity to go extinct during great epidemics of
madness. In his best-known work, The Denial of Death (1973), Becker wrote: I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of
[hu]man[ity]s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right. Zapffe concluded that we kept our heads by artificially limiting the
content of consciousness. Becker stated his identical conclusion as follows: [[hu]Man[ity]] literally drives himself [itself] into a blind obliviousness
with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but
madness all the same. Outlawed truisms. Taboo commonplaces. Synthesizing and expanding Beckers core ideas, three psychology professors
Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynskipresented the concepts of TMT to the psychological community in the mid-1980s. In its
clinical studies and research, TMT
indicates that the mainspring of human behavior is
thanatophobia, and that this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To
subdue our death anxiety, we have trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persistif only symbolically beyond the
breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day, and to perpetuate our sanity we apotheosize it as the
best world in the world. Housing the most cyclopean fabrications are houses of worship where some people go to get a whiff of meaning, which to such
people means only one thingimmortality. In heaven or hell or reincarnated life forms, we must go on
and onus without end. Travesties of immortalism are effected day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn
out a product made in its makers image, a miracle granted by entering into a devils bargain with God, who is glorified with all the credit for giving us a
chance to have our names and genetics projected into a time we will not live to see.4 However, as TMT analyzes this scheme, getting the better of our
we need to know that what we
death anxiety is not as simple as it might appear. If we are to be at peace with our mortality,
leave behind us when we die will survive just as we left it. Those churches cannot be just any churchesthey
must be our churches, whoever we may be. The same holds true of progeny and its stand-ins. In lieu of personal
immortality, we are willing to accept the survival of persons and institutions that
we regard as extensions of usour families, our heroes, our religions, our countries.5 And anyone who
presents a threat to our continuance as a branded society of selves, anyone who does
not look and live as we do, should think twice before treading on our turf, because
from here to eternity it is every self for itself and all its facsimiles. In such a world,
one might extrapolate that the only honest personsfrom the angle of self-delusion, naturallyare
those who brazenly implement genocide against outsiders who impinge upon them and their world. With that riff-raff out of
the way, there will be more room on earth and in eternity for the right sort of people and their fabrications. That said, promulgators of TMT believe that
a universal dispersion of their ideas will make people more tolerant of the alien worldviews of others and not kill them because those worldviews
remind them of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be. The paradox of this belief is that it requires everyone to abandon the very techniques of
terror management by which TMT claims we so far have managed our terror, or some of it. As usual, though, there is an upbeat way out for terror
management theorists in that they argue that the best worldviews are ones that value tolerance of different others, that are flexible and open to
modifications, and that offer paths to self-esteem minimally likely to encourage hurting others (Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed.
Jeff Greenberg et al.). Of course, this
is just another worldview that brandishes itself as the best
worldview in the world, meaning that it would agitate others with a sense of how
ephemeral or unfounded their own may be and cause them to retaliate. But terror management theorists
also have a back-up plan, which is that in the future we will not need terror management and instead will discover that serious confrontations with
mortality can have positive, liberating effects, facilitating real growth and life satisfaction. There is no arguing that humanity may someday reap the
benefits of a serious confrontation with mortality. While waiting for that day, we still have genocide as the ultimate insurance of our worldviews. In
categorical opposition to genocide on an as-needed basis are such individuals as Gloria Beatty. Without making too much of a mess, they quietly shut
the door on a single life, caring not that they leave behind people who are not like them. Most of these antisocial types are only following the logic of
pain to its conclusion. Some plan their last bow to serve the double duty of both delivering them from life and avenging themselves for some wrong, real
or imagined, against them. Also worthy of mention is a clique among the suicidal for whom the meaning of their act is a darker thing. Frustrated as
perpetrators of an all-inclusive extermination, they would kill themselves only because killing it all is closed off to them. They hate having been
delivered into a world only to be told, by and by, This way to the abattoir, Ladies and Gentlemen. They despise the conspiracy of Lies for Life almost
as much as they despise themselves for being a party to it. If they could unmake the world by pushing a
button, they would do so without a second thought. There is no satisfaction in a lonesome suicide. The phenomenon of suicide euphoria aside,
there is only fear, bitterness, or depression beforehand, then the troublesomeness of the method, and nothingness afterward. But to push
that button, to depopulate this earth and arrest its rotation as wellwhat satisfaction,
as of a job prettily done. This would be for the good of all, for even those who know
nothing about the conspiracy against the human race are among its injured
parties.6
 2NC Transcendence
Surrendering to death is vital transcendence to the universe only
comes with submission of the ego.
Chopra 5 (Deepak, M.D. Chairman and co-founder of the chopra center for wellbeing, The
Absolute Break Between Life and Death Is an Illusion, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-
chopra/the-absolute-break-betwee_b_4843.html)
What bothers people about losing the body is that it seems like a terrible break or interruption. This interruption is imagined as going into the void; it is
total personal extinction. Yet that perspective, which arouses huge fears, is limited to the ego. The ego craves continuity; it
wants today to feel like an extension of yesterday. Without that thread to cling to, the journey day to day
would feel disconnected, or so the ego fears. But how traumatized are you by having a new image come to mind, or a new desire? You dip into the field
of infinite possibilities for any new thought, returning with a specific image out of the trillions that could possibly exist. At that moment, you
arent the person you were a second ago. So, you are clinging to an illusion of
continuity. Give it up this moment and you will fulfill St. Pauls dictum to die unto death. You will realize that you have been
discontinuous all along, constantly changing, constantly dipping into the ocean of possibilities to bring forth anything new.
Death can be viewed as a total illusion because you are dead already. When you
think of who you are in terms of I, me, and mine, you are referring to your past, a
time that is dead and gone. Its memories are relics of time passed by. The ego keeps itself intact by repeating what it already
knows. Yet life is actually unknown, as it has to be if you are ever to conceive of new thoughts, desires, and experiences. By
choosing to repeat the past, you are keeping life from renewing itself. Why wait? You can be as alive as you want to be through a process known as
surrender. This is the next step in conquering death. So far the
line between life and death has become so
blurry that it has almost disappeared. Surrender is the act of erasing the line
entirely. When you can see yourself as the total cycle of death within life and the
life within death, you have surrendered the mystics most powerful tool against
materialism. At the threshold of the one reality, the mystic gives up all need for boundaries and plunges directly into existence. The circle
closes, and the mystic experiences himself as the one reality.

The framing for their answers should be as follows: they dont know
what happens after you die, but Wilderson explicitly indicts the use of
western objectivity to persecute alternative spiritual and social
approaches to phenomenon like death. That means any of their
arguments about how transcendence isnt real are lodged in a racist
western episteme that proves the necessity of purging white
supremacy from the planet.

Here is proof of an afterlife of pure love that cannot be refuted by

science in any possible way
Bancarz 2014 (Steven. "Harvard Neurosurgeon Confirms The Afterlife Exists."Spirit Science
and Metaphysics. N.p., 12 June 2014. Web. 11 Mar. 2015. <
http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/harvard-neurosurgeon-confirms-the-afterlife-
exists/>)
Before his experience, he did not believe existence of a non-physical spirit. Trained in
western medical school and surrounded by medical colleagues who are deeply invested in the materialism view of the universe, he thought that the idea
of a soul was outlandish. Like most skeptics, he believed stories of the afterlife to be hallucinations or products of the human imagination. Dr.
Alexander changed his mind after he was in a coma for seven days caused by
severe bacterial meningitis. During his coma he experienced a vivid journey into what he
knew to be the afterlife, visiting both heavenly and not so heavenly realms. After returning to his body and experiencing a
miraculous healing against all odds, and went on to write the NY Times #1 best selling book Proof of Heaven. What Dr. Alexander confirms is that our
life here is just a test help our souls evolve and grow, and that the way we succeed in doing so is to proceed with love and compassion. Here are just a
few other notable points he made: The experience of the afterlife was so real and expansive that the experience of living as a human on Earth
seemed like an artificial dream by comparison. The fabric of the afterlife was pure LOVE. Love
dominated the afterlife to such a huge degree that the overall presence of evil was
infinitesimally small. If you wish to know the Universe, know Love. In the afterlife, all
communication was telepathic. There was no need for spoken words, nor even any separation between the self and everything
else happening around you. All the questions you asked in your mind were immediately
answered to you telepathically as well. When asked what he wants everyone to know about the spiritual realm, he always
answers saying that you are precious and infinitely loved more than you can possibly imagine. You are always safe. You are
never alone. The unconditional and perfect Love of God neglects not one soul. Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. Not
some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows-the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse and our
children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional.
This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or will ever exist,
and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.
Now lets talk credibility for a minute. What makes this experience so much more significant than
another NDE account? Ebens neocortex was completely nonfunctional during the time of
his coma do to his severe bacterial meningitis, so there is no scientific account for why he experienced
this. In fact, he gives refutations to 9 different possible scientific explanations for
his experience in his book.
 AT: Biological
Your authors are hacks Fear is overstated and underutilized in
decision making
Proulx 03 (Travis, University of British Colombia, ABSURDITY AS THE SOURCE OF
EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY A CRITIQUE OF TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY, p.5)
But he remains highly sceptical of The rather bold claim that terror management is the source of all motives. As noted, their arguments on this score are
interesting, sometimes ingenious, but open to dispute and therefore not very convincing. (p50) In a similar critique, psychological theorist Roy
Baumeister (1997) takes issue with TMT's claim that all other motives derive from self-preservation, which they call the 'master motive'. We can readily
There is a large gap between the empirical
agree that some behaviour is oriented toward staying alive. But all?
findings reported by Pyszczynski et al. and their theoretical claims. Their studies, of
which we are both admirers, have shown in many ways that reminding people of death can alter
their behaviour. But these findings fall far short of justifying the sweeping
assertion that all motivation is derived from the fear of death, (p. 37) In yet another TMT critique,
social psychologist Melvin Lerner (1997) finds that The research that Pyszczynski, Solomon and
Greenberg have done, stimulated by their 'Terror Management Theory' (TMT), is unquestionably very impressive. However, the scope
of their integrating theoretical speculations is so encompassing as to be difficult for me, and possibly for others, to
accept, (p. 29) These sentiments are also echoed in social psychologist Brett Pelham's (1997) article "Human Motivation has Multiple Roots"
Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg propose an integrative model of human motivation. Their thesis is that the primary human motives explored in
previous research are all rooted in the more fundamental motive to minimize the existential terror that is brought about by the realization that one will
someday die. Although I applaud both the empirical research on terror management, and the author's theoretical goal of providing an integrative
terror management is that a
theory for understanding human motivation, my interpretation of the existing research on
convincing case has not been made for the author's position. It seems unlikely that
the management of existential terror is the quintessential human motive, (p. 44) There are
two general strategies for attacking TMT's reductionist claims. The first is to point out that until TMT can truly put its money where its mouth is, that is
to say, actually examine the effect of 'mortality salience' on all human behaviour with regard to all meaning systems and all facets of culture, their
reductionist claims shouldn't be made to begin with. As Lerner suggests, A convincing demonstration that
the management of terror is at the top of the hierarchy of human motives would involve a demonstration that mortality salience manipulations have a
more dramatic effect on all kinds of defensive reactions than do any other meaningful kinds of threat. This, of course, is a very tall order, (p.32)

Even if they win this it is not offense if fear is inevitable that just
means we have a better internal link to the Ligotti evidence which
means the desire to preserve the ego will result in endless conflict and
lashout against the other. That makes endless amounts of suffering
inevitable and magnifies the necessity for extinction.
 AT: Choice
The choice DA is over when you concede that life is a conscience trick
suicide is not an option for most people because of social stigma and
neurological hardwiring that makes the gesture nearly impossible.
Doing what is best for people might not be doing what they
immediately want because we have been psychologically conditioned
to lie to ourselves in order to be protected by the horrors of our own
innately painful experience. We have 2 disads to your interpretation
of death:

A) The living dead: giving people a choice doesnt make any sense
in a world where those who suffer most dont have one. People
dying in sweat shops and getting tortured in Gitmo dont have
the option to kill themselves that is something that has to be
managed externally.
B) Echoes of pain: individual suicides make everyone who knew the
person upset which causes even more pain for the family and
friends of that person. Only killing everyone and stopping the
capacity for suffering can create an emotionally painless death.

The precautionary principle is terminal defense nobody suffers in a

world where consciousness has been snuffed out of existence, but
there is only a risk somebody does if we leave people alive, which
means we have terminal defense because even if they win life is good
in general the joy produced now does not exceed the infinite amounts
of pain that will come from the future wars and environmental
destruction that will inevitable befall the human race.

The joy you enable is fortifications of whiteness where lucky rich

debate kids get to go home and play X-Box while we systematically
torture black and brown bodies to death domestically and over-seas.
That turns your impact framing because it enables exploitation for the
few white people with a consistent access to joy.
 AT: Degrees of Suffering
We agree our argument is that there is no joy only differing degrees
of pain. Civil Society is defined by the violent nature of blackness as a
depository for the violence of modernity. That means there is only a
risk things are better with extinction in the picture.

We should stop every degree of pain unilaterally privileging the joys

of the few over the pain of the many is the ultimate act of white
supremacy.
Castronovo 2K (Russ, Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, author of Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom and Necro
Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States and coeditor of
Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Political Necrophilia Boundary 2 27.2 MUSE)

Infanticide not only defeats the slaveholder, who views motherhood as the reproduction of capital; it also thwarts history.
Forcibly releasing her child from the struggles of existence, the slave mother ensures that they will never
accrue historical weight, instead remaining innocent of experience, memory, and trauma. The poet-as-slave mother idealizes
infant purity in an effort to withstand the traffic of worldly context. Death extricates the innocent from an
institutional circulation that leaves the flesh scarred and the spirit marrd. Rescued from physical
existence before the disorderly accumulation of slave experience sets in, the subject of this poetic address achieves emancipation through a severe final
estrangement. Emancipation
occurs when there is no subject left to emancipate. Within the lines of this poem
and within the limits of ideology, freedom
is readily realized because the infants life itself lacks realization.
A morbid politics holds out the promise of returning the subject to an absolute existence; in
psychoanalytic terms, death defines an inorganic state impervious to change where satisfaction is permanent. Freuds idea of the death instinct as the
most universal endeavor of all living substance can be honed to provide insight into the political desire that freights the drive death within
emancipatory rhetoric.24 Whereas Freud offers thanatos as a transcendent key to human behavior, an
understanding of death
as inescapably historical and discursive impedes the naturalization of liberty as a
matter of instinct or choice. Death, as an abstract final category, attracts citizens because it abnegates the
constant struggle to secure freedom as well as the enduring anxiety that this
freedom will vanish. This oscillation expresses fort /da: the dismaying recognition that the source of pleasure is gone (fort ) alternates
with the satisfaction that the source of pleasure is here (da). In death, no need exists to play this fort /da game because
the inorganic state ensures that no source of pleasure will ever disappear , as pleasure itself has been removed beyond
a dynamic world of change and fluctuation. Thanatos so infuses the citizens desire because death makes freedom irrelevant by locating the subject in a
realm beyond striving or contention. Death offers noncontingent political satisfaction by promising
that the subject will not have to enter a material world that historicizes, modifies,
and makes liberty conditional. Death exempts the slave mothers child from the institutional fort /da game he [or she] is
destined to lose; his original freedom suffers no abridgment from the daily demands of masters and overseers. Death secures
absolute repose, ensuring that neither law nor custom will impinge on innate
rights.25 The slave childs freedom never becomes semantic; it never accrues texture or weight, and instead remains
as pure as the sublime heights of Emersons verse. For the slave child, freedom is
uncompromised, but it is necessarily also without substance, purely a question of syntax.
 AT: Death = Evil
Saying death is evil deprives live of valuedeath is key to value
construction and all meaning. This is a new link
Callicott 89 (J. Baird, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Stevens
Point, In Defense of Land Ethics, 1989)
The "shift of values" which results from our "reappraising things unnatural,
tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free" is especially
dramatic when we reflect upon the definitions of good and evil espoused by Bentham and Mill and
uncritically accepted by their contemporary followers. Pain and pleasure seem to have nothing at all to do

with good and evil if our appraisal is taken from the vantage point of ecological
biology. Pain in particular is primarily information. In animals, it informs the central nervous
system of stress, irritation, or trauma in outlying regions of the organism. A certain level of pain under optimal organic circumstances is indeed desirable as an indicator of
exertion--of the degree of exertion needed to maintain fitness, to stay in shape, and of a level of exertion beyond which it would be dangerous to go. An arctic wolf in
pursuit of a caribou may experience pain in her feet or chest because of the rigors of the chase. There is nothing bad or wrong in that. Or, consider a case of injury. Suppose
that a person in the course of a wilderness excursion sprains an ankle. Pain informs him or her of the injury and by its intensity the amount-of further stress the ankle may
endure in the course of getting to safety. Would it be better if pain were not experienced upon injury or, taking advantage of recent technology, anaesthetized? Pleasure
appears to be, for the most part (unfortunately it is not always so) a reward accompanying those activities which contribute to organic maintenance, such as the pleasures
associated with eating, drinking, grooming, and so on, or those which contribute to social solidarity like the pleasures of dancing, conversation, teasing, and so forth, or

The doctrine that life is

those which contribute to the continuation of the species, such as the pleasures of sexual activity and of being parents.

the happier the freer it is from pain and that the happiest life conceivable is one
in which there is continuous pleasure uninterrupted by pain is biologically
preposterous. A living mammal which experienced no pain would be one which
had a lethal dysfunction of the nervous system. The idea that pain is evil and
ought to be minimized or eliminated is as primitive a notion as that of a tyrant
who puts to death messengers bearing bad news on the supposition that thus his
well-being and security is improved. More seriously still, the value commitments of the humane movement seem at bottom to
betray a world-denying or rather a life-loathing philosophy. The natural world as actually constituted is one in which one being lives at the expense of others,as Each
organism, in Darwin's metaphor, struggles to maintain it own organic integrity. The more complex animals seem to experience (judging from our own case, and reasoning
from analogy) appropriate and adaptive psychological accompaniments to organic existence. There is a palpable passion for self-preservation. There are desire, pleasure in

To
the satisfaction of desires, acute agony attending injury, frustration, and chronic dread of death. But these experiences are the psychological substance of living.

live is to be anxious about life, to feel pain and pleasure in a fitting mixture, and
sooner or later to die. That is the way the system works. If nature as a whole is
good, then pain and death are also good. Environmental ethics in general require people to play fair in the natural system.
The neo-Benthamites have in a sense taken the uncourageous approach. People have attempted to exempt themselves from the life/de~ath reciprocities of natural
processes and from ecological limitations in the name of a prophylactic ethic of maximizing rewards (l~leasure) and minimizing unwelcome information (pain). To be fair,
the humane moralists seem to suggest that we should attempt to project the same values into the nonhuman animal world and to widen the charmed circle--no matter that
it would be biologically unrealistic to do so or biologically ruinous if, per impossible, such an environmental ethic were implemented.

Independently death is inevitable and your interpretation binds folks

to suffering by making their end inevitably an evil one. That creates a
hatred of existence that renders life unlivable.
Nuclearism DA
 Overview
The 1acs carnivorous obsession with nuclear holocaust is part and
parcel of a much larger discourse of necropolitical violence that uses
the pornographic spectacles of nuclear holocaust as a tool to subvert
and mystify structural violence and render the masses subservient to
the people with the launch codes we will isolate 2 main
disadvantages to the aff coming out of the Omolade evidence:

( ) Smoke Screening its important to recognize the invisible warfare

going on that plays blueprint to the larger structure of civil society
both in the streets of the hoods in the US and internationally in places
like Gitmo. The aff mystifies that violence with its pornographic
obsession with nuclear conflict. With a lens that focuses our gaze
solely on the spectacular nature of such atrocities, they ignore the
ways in which oppression of non-whites is no longer an exceptional
event, it has been normalized and integrated into everyday society.

( ) White Panic their impact only makes sense from the perspective
of whiteness since nuclear war is being waged now on all non-whites,
thats Omolade and Kato. For all non-whites, nuclear apocalypse has
already happened and continues to happen African countries and
indigenous peoples are having their communities ripped to shreds by
nuclear testing in the Fourth World, Hiroshima and Nagasaki still
haunt over Asia in the form of the US nuclear umbrella. Their speech
act is one that will accept and validate nuclear war only when it poses
a threat to white civils society and are otherwise apathetic to the
global racial genocide that happens with nuclear weapons on the
periphery of society.

That means their impacts are terminally non-unique for people of

color which means your ballot should be centered around
demolishing the epistemological cornerstones of the white
supremacist security apparatus.

Thats the first priority no moral calculus functions with racism in

play
Memmi 2k (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism,
Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165)
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without
remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be
undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not
even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is

To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear,

human.

injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a
possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is,
it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the
ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that ones moral conduit only emerges from a
choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to
conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral
order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of
view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanitys spiritual traditions counsels respect for the

weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and
disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things
considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death . Of course, this is debatable.
There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day,

perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own
death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall. says the Bible, that you were once a stranger in Egypt, which
means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal

, the
indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end

ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society
accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to
live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
 AT: Confronting our Privilege
This is factually incorrect there was no mention of privilege in the
1ac, and talking about it post-hoc reflects a white move to innocence
that is woefully inauthentic and reflects a violent for of cooption that
makes revolutionary politics impossible.

That just means we only have to win a small fragment of a link to

prove you confronted your privilege in a violent way, which means
you vote negative on presumption.
 AT: Privilege Checking Bad
The alternative is worse without questioning privilege debate
becomes an echo-chamber of white supremacist gestures like the aff,
which only refines the space and creates an exclusionary academic
cloister of neocons.
Kato DA
 Overview
Kato is an independent da to the aff the concept of nuclear war
delegitimizes the entire history of nuclear violence against indigenous
nations and disqualifies this violence as a mere rehearsal for the
violence to come, purging the history books of a legacy of domestic
nuclear genocide that serves to normalize indigenous genocide. 2
Impacts:

( ) Genocidal Erasure: the left has turned its back on the indigenous
and abandoned them to a permanent state of exemption whereby
rape, murder, military occupation, and nuclear warfare are all not
only common, but acceptable practices on tribal lands. That
permanent state of suffering is not only normal but constitutive of
indigenous life in the west.

( ) Battle Preparation: we allow the USFG to continue to perfect its

nuclear weapons through continuous testing under the justification
that its just a prelude for the nuclear extinction to come this
makes war inevitable
Hossein-zadeh 6 [Ismael, Prof Econ @ Drake; The Political Economy of Militarism; 96-
97]
Led by the United States, military spending on a global level has risen by 18 percent since
2001. According to a U.S. congressional study, terrorism has risen by 35 percent since then . From the fact that the increase in military

spending has coincided with an increase in terrorism, Brandon J. Snider concludes, "With every dollar, the U.S ., which accounts for 47 percent of the spending,

manufactures new terrorists, which will, in turn, lead to demands for increased defense
spending.39 This positive correlation between military spending, war, and terrorism is not fortuitous. In his classic book on war and militarism, The Military-Industrial Complex, the late Sidney
Lens explained this relationship in these words, "The mere availability of planes and weapons is a temptation to

use them. It may be a temptation which is acceded to in a minority of instances, but its enough to make the preparation for
war an independent factor in creating it. . .Being prepared thus becomes a pressure, a
temptation, for being at war. The merry-go-round never stops."40 This is an essential dynamic of militarism. As discussed in the second chapter of this study, under precapitalist

formations, all the military establishment needed to justify and maintain its apparatus and privileges was the specter of war or the environment of fearnot necessarily the actual, shooting war. Under capitalism,

where production of military hardware is subject to market imperatives, actual wars are needed in order to generate
"sufficient demand for war-dependent industries and their profitability requirements. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this combination of private ownership of the means
of warfare and market imperatives of profitability that drives the war today. It is also this business imperative of war that, more

than any other factor, underlies the U.S. militarists' constant search for enemies,
or new "threats to our national security"communism, rogue states, axis of evil, global terrorism, militant Islam, et cetera. Furthermore, it is this market-driven force behind the war that
underlies, at least partly, the Bush administration's fuzzy and shifting "reasons" for invading Iraq, and the consequent death, destruction, and turbulence in today's world. Despite its apparent complexity, reducing

nations
international acts of terrorism and fostering global peace and stability would not be very difficult in the absence of this perverse dynamics of the business of war. As Brandon J. Snider points out,

like Britain and the U.S. don't really have to do anything to fight terrorism; they only have to
stop doing things that provoke terrorist responses: keep out of the affairs of other nations." 41
( ) Microfascism: the process of allowing the U.S. to superimpose the
image of an always-coming but never arriving nuclear holocaust
naturalizes a model of democratic citizenship founded on forfeiting
individual agency to militaristic elites with launch codes. That makes
neoliberal domination of the planet and the slow eradication of lifes
fundamental value a necessity of preserving the American nuclear
umbrella.

Large-scale threats of future suffering stake a hegemonic claim to

political and moral urgency that makes the bodily violence of
imperialism illegible, endlessly deferring its priority to an awaited
future that will never come. The only response is to interrupt this
temporal blackmail, insisting that the urgent bodies suffering
structural violence across the globe cannot wait any longer.
Olson 15 prof of geography @ UNC Chapel Hill
(Elizabeth, Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency, Progress in Human Geography, vol.
39 no. 4, pp. 517-526)
Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the
body is
increasingly set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale
future events of forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the
large-scale threats of future suffering can distort moral reasoning. iek (2006) lightly
develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning
systems, the
urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to worry
about: What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so
high, that they nec essitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions
are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (iek, 2006) In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the
urgency
to secure the state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales
and new temporal orders of response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012),
many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus requiring management. McDonalds (2013) analysis of three
interconnected discourses of climate security illustrates how bodily urgency in climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse
that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national security, can
encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a
threat (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because
they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering
everywhere in some future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is
echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in
intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell,
2009; Young et al., 2014). As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized, the urgent
body is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson
and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale
emergency is a built-in bias for action (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies.
The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely require another
state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need
to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other,
produces just-in-case preparedness (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, personal ingenuity is
built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom [t]he difference between abjection and bearable
survival (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city. In short,
the urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most
marginalized based on impulse and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies
effectively absorb the deliberative power of urgency into the institutions of
preparedness and risk avoidance. iek references Arendts (2006) analysis of the
banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that
people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a tragic-ethic grandeur (iek, 2006) by
sacrificing their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for
claiming urgency. In
the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency,
the urgent body becomes literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states
and worlds that will always be more urgent. If the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify
that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has
consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a
normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see
Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834)
writes, waiting
produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those
which matter and those which do not. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract
suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the politics of waiting can be repressive, it can also engender
creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired
employment, Jeffery finds that the temporal suffering and sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural
and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial effects (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as
claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency. In other
contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting
can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing the insurrectionary possibilities of
the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is
forever drifting towards infinity (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucus (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities
of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but
also to a disbelief in the possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the
possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is
[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of
rejection or a signal to exclude (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject,
providing temporal processes in and through which political subordination is produced (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor,
2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that secures domination,
as citizens and non-citizens find themselves waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect
surrendering to the authority of others (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123). Waiting can therefore function as a
potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not
only for the purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral
urgency. But there is growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the
elite, and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of containment are currently impenetrable,
arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming urgency for
the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee
camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily
urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013;
Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnans (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and Shewlys (2013) discussion of the enclave
between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of
larger scale politics. Similarly, Tylers (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes to expose their
humanness and suffering in the Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for recognition are not
just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot
wait. The continued existence of places like Yarls Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the
challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily
hidden from view, and also reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative
dimensions and the political and social conditions of struggle. In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively
describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of
urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished and risked by incorporating urgency more overtly and
deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical
consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be
productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in
reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and
representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure
differentiated experiences of being human, dividing up those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives
and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all (Butler, 2009: 50). But when
the urgent body is
rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is just as easily cast as impulsive,
disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory insists that the urgent
body, whose encounters of violence are usually framed as private, apolitical and
mundane (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other forms
of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which
cannot wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the
political, public and exceptional scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist
on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and
social care. In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic
research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-scale
futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of
the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material
landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral,
even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic
bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that
moral reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against
subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims
to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still
should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost
and this requires a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of
these concerns by reviewing how feelings of urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and
ethical reasoning. I conclude, however, by pulling together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were
not engaging the truly urgent questions (1972: 101) such as racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global
environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes
of our contemporary problems. Since Whites writing, our moral reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the
more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body topics and concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will
provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the
temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in
creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our
large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and
emerging revolutions and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political
processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to
obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile
ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.
 2NC Localization First
Localization has to frame the impact debate: the neutral western
observer locates their points of study strictly within the already-
fetishized objects of white history. The ominous spectre of the nuclear
bomb is just the newest object in a western phantasy of security that
allows for the expansion of the military apparatus across the globe.
Only situating knowledge within the framing of its inherent biases can
produce a model of debate that is reflexive and accommodating to
different interpretations of the world.

Independently that process of detached war making is parasitic on the

eradication of colonial bodies as the phantasy of a rising threat
creates a social demand for bloody and poorly-restrained conflicts
sustained by western military overstretch
Buchanan 5 Ian Buchanan, foundation Chair of Communication and Cultural Studies at
Charles Darwin University, War in the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent
government 2005, Research Online, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts
The 2004 US election must have caused hearts to sink everywhere in the Third World. The bloody insurgency in Iraq only strengthened the position of the 'War President', giving him greater license to continue his campaign of terror. At the time of the election the
death toll of US soldiers was nearing a thousand with the number injured seven times that. To which toll one must add the haunting fact that of the 500 000 plus US servicemen and women who served in the First Gulf War some 325 000 are now on disability
pensions suffering a variety of acute maladies generally attributed to the toxic cocktail of radiation and other pollutant chemicals from the hundreds of oil fires they were exposed to during their tour of duty. Those who fight in Iraq today can scarcely look forward to
a healthier future given that it is effectively twice as irradiated now as it was in 1991.1 Yet still the minority who vote voted in the main for the man who put these soldiers in harm's way; but then it isn't as though John Kerry was promising to bring the troops home.
As important as Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? is as explanation of conservatism in the heartland of the USA, it doesn't answer this que stion - why did the war on terror fail to ignite anti-Bush sentiment?2 More to the point, why was it impossible to
vote against the war? This is militarism at its peak - you cannot decide between going to war or not, only which is the most desired (least worst?) way of handling the conduct of the war. Problem: Is today's militarism really new? Militarism has always been with us,
like a dark shadow, but its history is not continuous. The idea that war should be considered a logical and necessary extension of politics was given expression by Clausewitz, but he was merely putting into philosophical form what was already accepted thinking in
government: arms are a legitimate means of achieving political goals. Militarism is not always as unabashed about its existence, not to say its intentions, as it is now when - as Debord so presciently put it - it has its own inconceivable foe, terrorism to bedazzle a
frightened, confused, and misinformed public.3 But out of the limelight does not mean out of the picture; militarism has not been officially questioned since the end of the first world war when disarmament had its last genuine hurrah. World War Two, which caught
the US and the UK, in particular, underarmed and underprepared for conflict, eliminated in a stroke the very concept of disarmament - strategic arms limitation and force reduction are essentially fiscal notions, decisions made in the interest in preserving a militarist

posture in the face of rising costs, not disarmament. Neither should we delude ourselves that anti-war is anti-
militarism. As we shall see, the very opposite is true . In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it is generally thought that a paradigm shift in the nature of militarism has occurred, and as
the violence in the Middle East continues with no sign of abatement in sight (the running-sore that is the Israel/Palestine conflict, the smouldering fires of Iraq and Afghanistan and the gathering storm in Iran all forebode ill for a peaceful future) any doubt that a
new era of 'hot' war has been ushered in tends to vanish. What is less certain, however, at least from a philosophical perspective, is the conceptual nature of the change. Those who demur that the present era is substantially different enough to warrant the label 'new'
do so on the grounds that what we are seeing today is merely the continuation of an older struggle, or struggles, as it might be better to say given the tangled mess of multiple rivalries and resentments on both sides. Obviously, many of the struggles fuelling the
present war are legacies of the Second World War, the Yalta summit in particular (many of course predate that by hundreds of years).4 On this score, I am persuaded by Immanuel Wallerstein's thesis that the first and second world wars should be treated as a single

thirty year struggle for global hegemony between Germany and the USA, but it seems to me the militarism we are faced with today is different to the one spawned in 1945 in the aftermath of victory; the militarism of today
no longer thinks in terms of winning and losing - it has another agenda.5 So even if the origins of the present crisis are to be found in the wash-up of WWII, as
Wallerstein and many others have rightly argued, the nature of the response to this crisis is not similarly located there. Historians generally agree that the Vietnam War put paid to that 'victorious' mode of militarism the US knew following WWII when it was briefly
the lone nuclear power.6 Following its demoralising defeat at the hands of a comparatively puny third world country, however, even the idea that it was a superpower was questioned. Amongst the decisionmakers in Washington there took hold a moribund and risk-
averse mentality that came to be called the 'Vietnam Syndrome'. This syndrome allegedly explains the US's failure to act on a number of occasions when it might have been prudent - or, as perhaps would have been the case in Cambodia, humanitarian to do so -
culminating in the embarrassing mishandling of the Teheran Embassy siege in the last days of Jimmy Carter's administration. It also explains the tactics used on those occasions when the US has acted, as in Clinton's decision to initially restrict the engagement in the
Balkans to airpower alone and use aerial bombardment where deft geopolitical negotiation was needed. On this occasion, as has now become routine, an alleged ethical imperative combined powerfully with a rhetoric of 'surgical strikes' and 'smart bombs' to stall
protest and garner support from even those who ought to have known better.7 Taken at face value, this would seem to confirm the existence of the 'Vietnam Syndrome', but when in political analysis is it sensible to accept something at face value? I would argue the
'Vietnam Syndrome' is a convenient cover story not a genuine explanation of US foreign policy. What makes anyone think, for instance, that a peaceful settlement to the Israel/Palestine conflict (as much a potential Vietnam as Iraq ) is on the US agenda? Countless
commentators have pointed out that the US backing of Israel can but inflame the Middle East situation as though this was news to the ones responsible, or, more to the point, as though winning or losing, peace or war, are the only options open to US foreign policy.
Isn't the answer staring us right in the face: perpetual unrest is the solution that present action is achieving. The 'Vietnam Syndrome' is an optical illusion, a wish-fulfilment on the part of those who would like to see an end to US imperialism.8 In philosophical terms,

the 'Vietnam Syndrome' was the negative needed by militarism to resurrect itself. What the
military realised in Vietnam is that the US public will not tolerate a high casualty rate amongst its own troops unless there is a pressing need. While saving freedom might be construed as a pressing need, stopping communism in a country most people hadn't heard
of before the war started couldn't. Lacking ideological support, the US military publicly adopted a zero-casualty approach to its 'elective wars' (to continue with the surgical trope) and banked on technology to achieve it. The anti-war sentiment ignited by the Vietnam

The US showed it was anti-war only to the

conflict played a large part in securing public acceptance for this strategy in spite of the escalating costs it entailed.

extent that war put its people in harm's way, but had no strong opinion on the
matter when it was merely a question of unloading deadly ordinance from a high
altitude on faceless peoples far from the homeland. Whatever the eventual cost, and the figures for military expenditure are always astronomical (consider the 2004 budget of $400 billion a year to wage
war in Iraq), technology was to become the solution to what is essentially an ideological problem, the US population isn't willing to commit its body to the US's military causes.9 After Vietnam, no administration of the future could afford to be soft on military
spending (if they lost spending $30 billion a year, they could hardly afford to spend less in the future is the presiding logic).10 The spin-doctoring that has gone into talking up the capabilities of the new class of so-called 'smart' weapons is worthy of Madison
Avenue.11 Its effect has been to persuade the American people that technology has made them invulnerable. Thus war has entered the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent government.12 In any case, the present conflict proves beyond any shadow of a doubt
that the US will not hesitate to embroil itself in a potentially Vietnam-like conflict if the conditions are ripe. I have read reports that US soldiers based in Iraq are writing 'Is this Vietnam yet?' on their helmets, sadly they're not asking the right question. Given the
admission that the insurgency problem may never be resolved it plainly is another Vietnam. If this isn't the view of the Hawks in Washington who orchestrated the war, and I don't believe for a second that it is, then it begs the question: what makes the present
conflict not another Vietnam in the eyes of its architects? What are the conditions under which the US will engage in a potentially protracted foreign war? To answer this we have to ask what were the lessons of Vietnam? Behind the smokescreen of the 'Vietnam

US has taken on board two hard lessons learned

Syndrome', the in Vietnam which shape its foreign policy: (1) It can win
battles, but it can't pay for wars
can't necessarily win wars; (2) It can afford battles, but it . Both of these lessons were heeded by Bush the elder who pointedly decided not to take Baghdad though
it was there for the taking precisely because he didn't want an expensive quagmire.13 It is tempting to think Bush the younger is simply Bush the dumber and that's the reason why he felt emboldened to go where his daddy dare not, but I believe there is an even more
sinister explanation. Whereas daddy figured out how to get someone else to pay for the battles that needed to be fought to dislodge Saddam's forces from Kuwait, he didn't solve the problem of how to pay for a long war so he avoided it. Neither did the son, but he
figured out how to get the loser to line the pockets of the victor and transform a costly war into a privateer's mother lode.14 The father's expensive quagmire is the son's reconstruction goldmine. Reconstruction is the surplus value of war. If, as Chalmers Johnson

suggests the US military has gone Hollywood, then war has gone Wall St. 15 Profit is put before everything.16 But we still haven't articulated what turned out to be the greatest change to militarism. This occurred in the
late stages of the Vietnam War, past the point when anyone - not even the President of the United States - could say there was any worthwhile military reason to continue the fight, apart from the need to defend the credibility of the fighting forces. The last years of
the war saw the first outing of what has now become standard procedure, the use of airpower as a substitute for diplomacy. At the time it was narrated as being a necessary complement to diplomacy to insure proper attention at the bargaining table, but its effect was
to make the North Vietnamese dig their heels in harder. And yet the US persisted in spite of its obvious failure as a tactic, convinced no doubt that there had to be a limit to the willingness of the people of North Vietnam to endure the terrible toll of death its B52s
were able to lay upon them. Ho Chi Minh's bravado claim that Vietnam had struggled against China for a thousand years before winning its freedom, and had carried the fight to the French for one hundred and fifty years, and therefore felt unthreatened by the US
who had only been on their soil a mere fifteen years plainly fell on deaf ears in Washington. The cost in lives of this tactic has never been officially toted up, but doubtless it was not inconsiderable. It is generally assessed as a military and diplomatic failure, but this is
where I think history is being a little hasty. The determination that it was the credibility of the fighting forces that was at stake in the final years of the war is no doubt correct, but as with all political manoeuvres it shouldn't be taken at face value. For Wallers tein, the
Vietnam War represented a rejection by the Third World of the ' Yalta accord', the less than gentlemanly agreement between the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, to divide the planet into spheres of interest (the USA grabbing two-thirds and the USSR a
third). He treats America's willingness to invest all its military strength into the struggle and more or less bankrupt itself in the process as testament to the felt geopolitical significance of the conflict. And yet, as he puts it, they were still defeated. While I accept the
first part of his thesis, I disagree with his conclusion because I think the very premise on which it rests lost its validity in the course of the war. A pragmatically conceived intervention designed to stop the spread of revolutionary communism became the US military's
own equivalent of a 'cultural revolution' as it underwent a profound rethinking of its mode of acting in the world.17 I do not mean to claim as military revisionists have done that Vietnam was actually a victory for the USA (the right wing rhetoric on this, so resonant
of the early days of the Nazi party, is that the government and the people back home betrayed the soldiers on the front line and didn't allow them to win).18 With Baudrillard, I want to argue that there occurred a paradigm shift during the course of that protracted
and bitter struggle which resulted in the concepts of victory and defeat losing their meaning. Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA ) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary

strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place.19 Baudrillard's answer to this question is that war ceased to

became instead 'simulation', a pure spectacle no less

be real, it ceased to be determined in terms of winning and losing and

terrifying or deadly for its lack of reality. The consequences of this metaphysical adjustment are shocking and go a long way towards explaining the rise of terrorism in recent

it is not only the superpowers like the US that have relinquished the
years. As Andrew Bacevich writes,

concept of victory. It is as though war itself has jettisoned it as so much extra baggage. The typical armed conflict today no longer pits
like against like - field army v. field army or battle fleet v. battle fleet - and there usually is no longer even the theoretical prospect of a decisive outcome. In asymmetric conflicts, combatants employ violence indirectly. The aim is not to defeat but to intimidate and
terrorise, with women a favoured target and sexual assault often the weapon of choice.20 The B52 pilot unloading bombs on an unseen enemy below knows just as well as the suicide bomber in Iraq that his actions will not lead directly to a decisive change, that in a
sense the gesture is futile; but, he also knows, as does the suicide bomber, that his actions will help create an atmosphere of fear that, it is hoped, will one day lead to change. Deprived of teleology, war thrives in an eternal present. Terror is not merely the weapon of
the weak, it is the new condition of war, and no power can claim exception status. For Clausewitz and his spiritual tutor Machiavelli the only rational reason to wage war is to win where winning means achieving a predetermined and clearly prescribed goal. Britain's
colonial wars are an obvious case in point. The self-serving claim that Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence owes its sense to the fact that it never set out to gain its eventually quite considerable empire (it was at least geographically true, albeit not historically
true, that the sun never set on the British Empire, encompassing as it did territories in virtually every region of the world) all at once as Hitler and Hirohito were later to do, but built it one territory at a time over a two century-long period. Through a sequence of
limited wars it was able to deploy its limited means to obtain colossal riches. The first world war essentially started out in the same way. Germany's goal was to secure a European empire before it was too late, but the machine-gun put paid to that ambition and
instead of a quick war returning a specific prize there irrupted a global conflagration that was to consume the wealth and youth of Europe. As Wallerstein argues, the true victor of the first world war wasn't Britain or France, but American industry, and by extension
the true loser wasn't Germany and its allies but Europe itself. Eric Hobsbawm has defined the twentieth century as the age wh en wars of limited means and limited aims gave way to wars of limited means and unlimited aims.21 The twenty-first century appears to be

wars of unlimited means and no precise aim. This

the age of , according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the point at
which Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed. When total war - i.e., war which not only places the annihilation of the enemy's army at its centre
but its entire population and economy too - becomes the object of the State-appropriated war machine, then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction. In the first

the more successful

instance, the war machine unleashed by the State in pursuit of its object, total war, remains subordinate to the State and merely realises the maximal conditions 22 of its aims. Paradoxically, though,

it is in realising the State's aims, the less controllable by the State it becomes. As the State's aims
grow on the back of the success of its war machine, so the restrictions on the war machine's object shrink until - scorpion like - it effectively subsumes the State, making it just one of its many moving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for the failure of the war

machine precisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Its inability to adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, but in effect its sovereignty too. Since then the State has been a
puppet of a war machine global in scope and ambition. This is the status of militarism today and no-one has described its characteristics more
chillingly than Deleuze and Guattari: This worldwide war machine, which in a way 'reissues' from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is only a rough
sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war is surpassed,
toward a form of peace more terrifying still.23 It is undoubtedly Chalmers Johnson who has done the most to bring to our attention the specific make-up of what Deleuze and Guattari call here the worldwide war machine.24 His description of a global 'empire of
bases' is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari's uptake of Paul Virilio's concept of the 'fleet in being'. This is the paradoxical transformation of the striated space of organisation into a new kind of 'reimparted' smooth space which outflanks all gridding and invents a
neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States.25 Bases do not by themselves secure territory, but as is the case with a battle fleet their mobility and their firepower mean they can exert an uncontestable claim over territory that

amounts to control. This smooth space surrounding the earth is, to put it back into Baudrillard's terms, the space of simulation. The empire of bases is a virtual construct
with real capability . Fittingly enough, it was Jean Baudrillard who first detected that a structural change in post-WWII militarism had taken place. In Simulacra and Simulation he argues that the Vietnam War was a
demonstration of a new kind of will to war, one that no longer thought in terms of winning or losing, but defined itself instead in terms of perseverance.26 It demonstrated to the US's enemies, clients and allies alike its willingness to continue the fight even wh en
defeat was certain, or had in a sense already been acknowledged (the US strategy of 'Vietnamising' the war which commenced shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968, and become official policy under Nixon, was patently an admission that the war couldn't be won - in
the short term it was Johnson's way of putting off admitting defeat until after the election so as to give Hubert Humphrey so me chance of victory; in the longer term it was a way of buying time for a diplomatic solution).27 It was a demonstration of the US's reach, of

its ability to inflict destruction even when its troops were withdrawing and peace talks (however futile) were under way. It also demonstrated to the American people that the fight could be continued
as the troops were withdrawn, a factor that as I've already pointed out would become decisive in re-
shaping militarism as an incorporeal system. It was also a demonstration to the American domestic population that the country's leaders were willing to continue to

The view, that Nixon wanted to end the war sooner but was unable
sacrifice lives to prove this point.28 contrary to do

would mean
so because domestic politics didn't allow it, in no way contradicts this thesis. If anything it confirms it because if true it , as Deleuze and Guattari have said of fascism, at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, the

people wanted Vietnam

American , and, as they add, it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.29 While there can be no doubt Vietnam was an unpopular war that was
eventually brought to a halt by popular pressure, it is a sobering thought to remind oneself that it was a war that lasted so me 10 years. If one takes 1967 as the decisive turning point in popular opinion, the moment when protest against the war became the prevailing
view and support for it dwindled into a minority murmur, then one still has to take stock of the fact that it took a further 6 years for US troops to be fully withdrawn.30 The kind of sustained popular pressure that brought the Vietnam War to a close has not yet even
begun to build in the US in spite of the fact that the death toll has passed 1500 (as of March 2005). Wars are spectacles in the traditional sense of being events staged to convey a specific message, but also in the more radical or postmodern sense that

spectacle is the final form of war, the form war takes when it takes peace as its
object. Hence the military's facilitation of the media (this backfired to a large degree in Vietnam, but the lessons learned then are put to good use today). Ultimately, though, as Baudrillard rightly argues, the media and official news services are only
there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts.31 Chomsky's analyses of current trends in US imperialism confirm this thesis. As he argues, 'preventive' wars are only fought against the ba sically defenceless.32
Chomsky adds two further conditions that chime with what we have already adduced: there must be something in it for the aggressor, i.e., a fungible return not an intangible moral reward, and the opponent must be susceptible to a portr ayal of them as 'evil', allowing
the victory to be claimed in the name of a higher moral purpose and the actual venal purpose to be obscured.33 At first glance, waging war to prevent war appears to be as farcical as fucking for virginity, but that is only if we assume that the aim of the war is to
prevent one potential aggressor from striking first. Or, rather, given that it is alleged that the putative enemy, Al Qaeda and its supposed supporters, took first blood (the Rambo reference is of course deliberate), we are asked to believe the current war is being fought
to prevent a second, more damaging strike. The obsessive and suitably grave references to Weapons of Mass Destruction by the various mouthpieces of the Bush regime (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, but also Blair and Howard) is plainly calculated to compel us to
accept that any such second strike will be of biblical, or worse, Hollywood proportions. As one joke put it, the Americans could be certain that Iraq had at least some Weapons of Mass Destruction because they had the receipts to prove it. The grain of truth in this joke
reveals the true purpose of the war - it was a demonstration to all of America's clients that it wouldn't tolerate 'price-gouging'. Obviously I am speaking metaphorically here, but the fact is that Iraq is a client of the US, it purchases arms and consumer goods and sells
oil at a carefully controlled price. Why this arrangement suddenly became so unsatisfactory is subject to a great deal of speculation which centre on two basic theories: (1) when Iraq switched from the dollar to the euro it posed an intolerable threat to the stability of
the US currency; (2) the US is positioning itself to monopolise oil ahead of growing Chinese demand. Either way, if one wants a metaphor to descri be US imperialism it wouldn't it wouldn't be MacDonald's, a comparatively benign operator, but the predatory retail
giant Wal-Mart.34 In other words, today's wars are fought to demonstrate will. The age of gunboat diplomacy has given way to the age of gunboat commerce.35 When war changed its object it was able to change its aim too and it is this more than anything that has

- the US isn't
saved 'real' war from itself. Baudrillard's later work on the spectacle of war misses this point: through becoming spectacles the fact that real wars (i.e., territorial wars) are no longer possible has not diminished their utility

strong enough to take and hold Iraq, but it can use its force to demonstrate to other small nations that it can inflict massive
damage and lasting pain on anyone who would dare defy it. Baudrillard's lament that the real Gulf War never took place can only be
understood from this viewpoint - although he doesn't put it in these words, his insight is essentially that war in its Idealised form is much more terrifying than peace. Again, although Baudrillard himself doesn't put it this way, the conclusion one might draw from the

This shift is
paradigm shift in war's rationalisation enumerated above - from pragmatic object (defeating North Vietnam) to symbolic object (defending the credibility of the fight forces) -is that war has become 'postmodern'.36

what enables the US to ideologically justify war in the absence of a proper object
and indeed in the absence of a known enemy. The Bush regime's 'War on Terror' is the apotheosis of this change: the symbolic (terror) has been made to appear
instrumental (terrorism), or more precisely the symbolic is now able to generate the instrumental according to its own needs.
 2NC Environment Impact
The 1acs aversion to catastrophe propagates a regime of resilient
living that promises extended survival in exchange for the eradication
of difference turns case and makes environmental destruction
inevitable.
Evans and Reid 14, Brad *Senior Lecturer in International Studies at the University of
Bristol, ** and Julian Reid, Professor of International Relations, Faculty of Social Science,
University of Lapland, The Art of Living Dangerously, 161-5
[p. 161] Fundamental to the writing of apocalypse was this consciousness, this confidence, this absolute certitude of possession of the power to be able to confront the disaster.
Today, in the context of the widespread and deep-seated belief in the inescapably catastrophic nature of the world, both economically and ecologically understood, such a
consciousness and confidence in the abilities to confront it is liable to be diagnosed as a form of, what we moderns call, madness. But perhaps that is the point. The apparent
extremity of not just belief, but confidence and even certainty in the possibility of apocalyptic division between [p. 162] worlds and between times, of present and future, is a sign
of how detached we have become from this particular mode of truth-telling. We cannot agree with Benjamin Noys, for this reason, when he argues that the main problem facing
the Left today is the excess of its apocalyptic tone.30 In effect the opposite is the case. For the question is not about some messianic totalitarianism; it is how to save and
reconstitute the power of a more confident vision in the context of our widespread political submission to the ecologization of the political on which neoliberalism thrives and the
discourse of catastrophe has grown.31 The world we live in is a world of radical contingency, in which the future is uncertain and impossible to calculate. Nevertheless, as human

climate science
beings we are capable of investing our futures with profound beliefs and senses of certainty as to what may and can happen. Indeed what does

express other than a longing for a sense of certainty; claims to truth which can be said to be beyond doubt? The scientific imaginary
out of which the belief in the incontestable nature of climate change emerged, the necessity and reality of its occurrence, the impossibility of arguing with or over its reality, is an

expression of that longing. Such a longing is for a realm of certainty beyond the radical contingency of the world ; a radical
contingency that many branches of science itself now understand as the real. Climate science is constituted by a subject who is dependent for its reproduction on the belief in the
existence of, as well as our abilities to see and speak of, such a world beyond the real. In other words, it is structured by the very same ontology of time that structures Christian
Science and literature. And when we look at debates within climate science, and claims to knowledge as to the coming of the Sixth Extinction, we are looking at a world

populated by prophets that operate within regimes of truth deeply similar to those occupied by the prophets of Christianity. Climate science is a religion. [p. 163] Our
intention here is not to contest the truth claims of climate science and the ideologues of climate change
on the basis of their non-approximation to reality. It is to point at the conditions of
possibility for such claims; conditions of possibility that are structurally similar to
those that underpin prophesy in its Christian form. Further, our intent is to point out that a political discourse which posits the possibility of
welcoming the coming of another world and another life beyond that which is diagnosed as at risk of extinction in climate science, the world and life of catastrophe as we
experience it today, may have no less truth to it. Climate scientists say that there is no way of escape from the dreadful and fearful realities of climate change; while economists
say that there is no alternative to the further extension of the market in mitigation of the catastrophic effects of climate change. The Left meanwhile castigates humanity for not
having recognized and respected the parametric conditions on which our existence depends. All such claims reproduce a prophetic mode of truth-telling tied into a
parrhesiastic mode of truthtelling which predicts a future which is awful and diagnoses the faults and crimes of human beings on account of which they must change their ways

What is precisely missing here is a different vocabulary through which to

of living.

articulate the necessity and reality of climate change, while being able to welcome
this inevitable event as the process of passage to a new world and new life beyond that which we have known
up until now. It is to welcome the departure of that which has conditioned our experience as a form of species life to date. Who ultimately knows what the future for life is
beyond the Holocene? Not one of us. The Anthropocene is only just beginning. What we can know is that life will take different forms. There will be, as there is always assumed
to be in irreducible thought, a division between present and future, and within that a division between life forms. Not between the saved and the damned, but between the life
forms that will die off with the end of the Holocene and [p. 164] those that will emerge with whatever comes into existence after that time. Consider, for example, the
phenomenon of the Grolar bear; the cross between a Polar and Grizzly bear born of the sexual encounter consequent upon the catastrophe effects of climate change,

What is it about a civilization or a culture that manages to

specifically the breaking up of the Arctic sea ice.

turn the wondrous phenomenon of the emergence of new forms of life, consequent upon these
dramatic changes in a milieu, into a problematic of insecurity and threat? A team of ecologists led by Brendan Kelly of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory,
in Alaska, argues that with this phenomenon of the cross-breed, so endangered, native species such as the Polar Bear, from which the Grolar Bear is emerging, will soon
disappear. Furthermore the speeding up of evolutionary pressures, the forcing of animals into rapid adaptive modes, may not produce biologically favorable outcomes. Quoting
Kelly, from an interview with Live Science: This change is happening so rapidly that it doesnt bode well for adaptive responses.32 This cult of mourning for the coming death of
existing species life, consequent upon the movement of the earth, and fear for the nature of the new forms of life to come, expresses perfectly the ways in which the ancient fear

Pure and
for the coming catastrophe is now coupled with a modern biopoliticized fear of the transformative effects of lifes movement upon existing species.

native forms thus become threatened by the emergence of impure, foreign,

maladapted ones. Rather than simply accept the injunction to fear processes of imminent global ecological catastrophe, as well as accept claims as to the
moral culpability of humanity for this catastrophe, there is a need to recognize the ways in which our understanding of this phenomenon are shaped for us by prophetic and
parrhesiastic modes of veridiction. From this more or less ancient combination of modes of veridiction follows the injunction that the human must change itself in order to save
itself and its world. In these senses, the truths we tell ourselves concerning the [p. 165] problematic of finitude remain embedded within modes of veridiction as old and

Submitting to the blackmail of global ecological catastrophe is to

moralizing as Christianity itself.

submit to a combination of the very same modes of veridiction that functioned in the
Middle Ages to subject human beings to absurd ideas such as the Kingdom of the Last Day and the Final Judgment. The modernity of prophesy and
parrhesia concerned with global ecological catastrophe owes to the different ways in which they pose the problem of finitude. While in the Middle Ages the legitimacy of
theocratic rule depended on an offer of security to humans from the costs of their finitude through the promise of eternal life, peace and security in Heaven, today the offer is one
of successful adaptation to the costs of our having failed to understand the full nature of the problem of finitude, in mitigation of the reality that as humans we have only just
 The promise held
come to understand that we have no preordained right to the earth, no providential history, or guarantee of security and development.

out to us should we be willing to submit to this new problematization of the truth of finitude, and accept the need to adapt, is not one of eternal
life, nor even necessarily better life, but simply a little more life for our species and those that we exist
interdependently with. This is why, rather than submitting to the blackmail of the coming catastrophe, we argue for the need to develop an alternative and more poetic
vocabulary by which to articulate a politics of the welcome in order for us to confront the reality of what Paul Virilio names rightly the finitude of (human) progress.33 Why is it

the debasements of
we fear that which is fundamental to the course of the world as well as of ourselves? And what is to fear of an end? Fighting

human potentiality, and moving beyond the impasses which political Lefts and
Rights have reached today, requires the development of a new regime of truth
(discursively, sensually, aesthetically and atmospherically) through which to articulate the possibility of the

coming catastrophe while being able to welcome this event as the [p. 166] process of
passage to a new world and life beyond that which we have known up until now. A
regime of truth that does not demand of us that we learn to fear more the course of
the world and its transformative effects, with a view to being able to sustain ourselves for longer in the forms and ways that we have
come to know and depend on, but which instils in us the confidence and courage to encounter and desire of it the very transformations it renders possible of ourselves.
 AT: Indigenous Reforms
That doesnt matter because your reform evidence is not specific to
nuclear testing the use of urban ghettos and tribal lands as
unapproved testing and dumping grounds for both private companies
and the military proves the indigenous are still subject to a nuclear
holocaust on the fringes of society.

We will impact turn those reforms they maintain the cruel binary
between inside and outside white supremacy that sanitizes violence
and makes genocide inevitable.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 13 University of South Africa Archie Mafeje Research Institute head
and professor [Sabelo J., D.Phil in African Historical Studies from University of Zimbabwe,
Perhaps Decoloniality is the Answer? Critical Reflections on Development from a Decolonial
Epistemic Perspective, Africanus, 43(2), 2013, accessed 8-30-15]
The articles constituting this volume of Africanus are diverse but they all emphasize the need for decoloniality as another perspective from which development could be
interrogated and understood as discourse. What the majority of authors argue for is decolonization of the discourse of development through indigenization of the concept. An
un-decolonized discourse of development presents Africans as objects rather than subjects of development. African people feature in development discourse as a problem to be
solved. A humanitarian perspective has always permeated development discourse in the process hiding the structural causes of lack of development in Africa. A decolonial
perspective is grounded in world-systems approach. It maintains that the modern world system that emerged in 1492 has remained racially hierarchized, Euro-American-
centric, sexist, hetero-normative, Christiancentric, Western-centric, capitalist and colonial in orientation (Grosfoguel 2007). Africa and other parts of the Global South have
remained peripheral and subaltern. This is why decolonial thinkers understand development as involving the decolonization of the modern world system. Decoloniality cascades
from the context in which the humanity of black people is doubted and their subjectivity is articulated in terms of lacks and deficits (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a; Ndlovu-Gatsheni
2013b). Lacking development is constitutive of a Western articulation of African subjectivity. This point is well articulated by Ramon Grosfoguel, a leading Latin American
thinker and theorist who understood the articulation on subjectivity of non-Western people as unfolding in this way: We went from the sixteenth century characterization of
people without writing to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of people without history, to the twentieth century characterization of people without
development and more recently, to the early twenty first century of people without democracy (Grosfoguel 2007: 214). During the same period, those in the Zone of Being
were systematically gaining more and more fruits of modernity from sixteenth century rights of people, to eighteenth century rights of man, and to the late twentieth century
human rights (Grosfoguel 2007: 214). Decoloniality is against all vestiges of colonialism and realities of coloniality. It is a redemptive epistemology which inaugurates and
legitimates the telling the story of the modern world from the experiences of colonial difference. Decoloniality materialized at the very moment in which imperialism and
colonialism arrived in Africa. Decoloniality struggles to bring into intervening existence an-other interpretation that bring forward, on the one hand, a silenced view of the event
and, on the other, shows the limits of imperial ideology disguised as the true (total) interpretation of the events in the making of the modern world (Mignolo 1995: 33).
Decoloniality is both an epistemic and a political project seeking liberation and freedom for those people who experienced colonialism and who are today subsisting and living
under the boulder of global coloniality. Development is linked to liberation and freedom from domination and exploitation. This is why decoloniality is distinguished from the
imperial version of history through its push for shifting of a geography of reason from the West as the epistemic locale from which the world is described, conceptualized and
ranked to the ex-colonised epistemic sites as legitimate points of departure in describing the construction of the modern world order (Mignolo 1995: 35). Decoloniality identifies
coloniality as a key hindrance to development in Africa. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, a leading philosopher in decolonial thought, grapples with the meaning of coloniality and this

Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and

is how he defined it:

economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such a nation an empire. Coloniality,

instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism,

but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the
strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is
maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other
aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day (Maldonado- Torres 2007: 243). Decolonial thinkers

Coloniality is a name for the darker side of modernity that

understand the Global South as that epistemic site that received the negatives of modernity.

needs to be unmasked because it exists as an embedded logic that enforces control,

domination, and exploitation disguised in the language of salvation, progress ,
modernization, and being good for everyone (Mignolo 1995: 6). Walter D. Mignolo argued that Coloniality names the experiences and views of the world and history of those
whom Fanon called les damnes de la terre (the wretched of the earth, those who have been, and continue to be, subjected to the standard of modernity) (Mignolo 1995: 8). He
elaborated on the meaning of the wretched of the earth in this way: The wretched are defined by the colonial wound, and the colonial wound, physical and/or psychological, is a
consequence of racism, the hegemonic discourse that questions the humanity of all those who do not belong to the locus of enunciation (and the geo-politics of knowledge) of
those who assign the standard of classification and assign to themselves the right to classify (Mignolo 1995: 8). Unlike coloniality, decoloniality names a cocktail of
insurrectionist-liberatory projects and critical thoughts emerging from the ex-colonised sites such as Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. It seeks to make
sense of the position of ex-colonised peoples within the Euro- America-centric, Christian-centric, patriarchal, capitalist, hetero-normative, racially hierarchized, and modern
world-system that came into being in the fifteenth century (Mignolo 2000; Grosfoguel 2007). Decoloniality seeks to unmask, unveil, and reveal coloniality as an underside of
modernity that coexisted with the rhetoric of progress, equality, fraternity, and liberty. It is a particular kind of critical intellectual theory as well as political project that seeks to
disentangle ex-colonised parts of the world from global coloniality (Mignolo 2011). What distinguishes decoloniality from other existing critical social theories is its locus of
enunciations and its genealogy which is outside Europe. Decoloniality can be best understood as a pluriversal epistemology of the future a redemptive and liberatory
epistemology that seeks to delink from the tyranny of abstract universals (Mignolo 2007: 159). Decoloniality informs the ongoing struggles against inhumanity of the Cartesian
subject, the irrationality of the rational, the despotic residues of modernity (Mignolo 2011: 93). As a critical social theory, decoloniality is constituted by three main concepts.
The first is coloniality of power. It is a useful concept, which delves deeper into the roots of the present asymmetrical global power relations and how the present modern world
order was constituted. It boldly enables a correct naming of the current global political present as a racially hierarchized, Euro-American-centric, Christian-centric, patriarchal,
sexist, capitalist, hetero-normative, hegemonic, and modern power structure that emerged in 1492. At the centre of the construction of this power structure was the bifurcation
of the world into Zone of Being and Zone of None-Being maintained by invisible abyssal lines (Gordon 2005; Santos 2007). The Portuguese sociologist and leading decolonial
thinker had this to say about the making of the Zone of Being and the Zone of Non- Being: Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It consists of a system of visible
and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into
two realms, the realm of this side of the line and the realm of the other side of the line. The division is such that the other side of the line vanishes as reality, becomes
nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. Nonexistent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensive way of being. Whatever is produced as nonexistent is
radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal
thinking is thus the impossibility of the copresence of the two sides of the line (Santos 2007: 45). To the Zone of Being (Euro-American world) modernity deposited its fruits of
progress, civilization, modernization, industrialization, development, democracy and human rights while at the same time imposing the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism
and apartheid into Africa (the Zone of None-Being). The second concept is that of coloniality of knowledge. Epistemology and methodology are inextricably intertwined with
imperial power. This is why Claude Ake wrote about social science as imperialism that enabled development in Europe and America while disabling development in Africa (Ake
1979). Research into development cannot ignore delving into epistemological issues, into the politics of knowledge generation, and the fundamental question of who generates
which knowledge and for what purposes. How knowledge has been used to assist imperialism and colonialism and to inscribe Euro- American-centric epistemology that
consistently appropriated what was considered progressive, and displacing what was considered repugnant aspects of endogenous and indigenous knowledges remains a fertile
area of research. The same is true of the important question of relevance and irrelevance of knowledge, particularly how some knowledges disempowered communities and
peoples, and how others empowered individuals and communities. The point that emerges poignantly from decoloniality is that current knowledges, epistemologies and
methodologies are for equilibrium rather than transformation. They are for the status quo rather than for change. The fundamental challenge facing Africa is how knowledges,
epistemologies and methodologies of equilibrium can be expected to enable development in Africa. Decoloniality speaks to this quandary. The third concept is that of coloniality
of being, which was articulated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007). This concepts enables us to delve deeper into the pertinent questions of the making of modern
subjectivities, into issues of humanism, and into questions of the role played by philosophers such as Rene Descartes and the long-term implications of his motto, Cogito ergo
sum/I think, therefore, I am) on conceptions of subjectivity. What is evident is that modernity endowed whiteness with ontological density far above blackness as identities.
This happened as the notions of I think, therefore, I am were mutating into I conquer, therefore, I am and its production of colonizer and colonized articulation of subjectivity
and being (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a). From these imperial and colonial articulations of African humanity, there was a permanent questioning of the humanity of black people and
this attitude and practice culminated in processes of objectification / thingification / commodification of Africans as slaves (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013b). Therefore, the response
to the question of why decoloniality in the 21stcentury, the answer is simply that coloniality is still operative and active and needs to be decolonized. The post-1945 juridical

be
decolonization did not succeed to decolonize the modern world order that was formed since 1492. This is why Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argued that: What Africans must

vigilant against is the trap of ending up normalizing and universalizing coloniality as a natural state
of the world. It must be unmasked, resisted and destroyed because it produced a
world order that can only be sustained through a combination of violence, deceit,
hypocrisy and lies (Ndlovu- Gatsheni 2013b: 10). It is a question that Ramon Grosfoguel gave a more comprehensive response: One of the
most powerful myths of the twentieth century was the notion that the elimination
of colonial administrations amounted to the decolonization of the world. This led to
the myth of a postcolonial world. The heterogeneous and multiple global
structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical-
political decolonization of the periphery over the past 50 years. We continue to live under the same
colonial power matrix. With juridical-political decolonization we moved from a
period of global colonialism to the current period of global coloniality. Although colonial administrations have been almost entirely
eradicated and the majority of the periphery is politically organized into independent states, non-European people are still living under crude European/Euro- American
exploitation and domination. The old colonial hierarchies of European versus non-Europeans remain in place and are entangled with the international division of labour and

The celebration of juridical-political

accumulation of capital at a world-scale (Grosfoguel 2007: 219).

decolonization obscures the continuities between the colonial

past and coloniality it leads to illusions of possibilities of enjoyment
of independence and freedom, national sovereignty and national identity, as well as national development and
progress. Decoloniality pushes for transcendence over narrow conceptions of being decolonized and consistently gestures towards liberation from coloniality as

a complex matrix of knowledge, power, and being. Decoloniality consistently reminds decolonial thinkers of the unfinished and incomplete twentieth century dream of
decolonization (Grosfoguel 2007: 221). Decoloniality announces the the decolonial turn as a long existing turn standing in opposition to the colonizing turn underpinning
Western thought (Maldonado-Torres 2011: 1). Decoloniality announces the broad decolonial turn that involves the task of the very decolonization of knowledge, power and
being, including institutions such as the university (Maldonado-Torres 2011: 1). Maldonado-Torres elaborated on the essence of decolonial turn: The decolonial turn (different
from the linguistic or the pragmatic turns) refers to the decisive recognition and propagation of decolonization as an ethical, political, and epistemic project in the twentieth
century. The project reflects changes in historical consciousness, agency, and knowledge, and it also involves a method or series of methods that facilitate the task of
decolonization at the material and epistemic levels (Maldonado-Torres 2006: 114). For Maldonado, By decoloniality it is meant here the dismantling of relations of power and
conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of racial, gender, and geo-political hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful forms of expression
in the modern/colonial world (Maldonado-Torres 2006: 117). Like all critical social theories of society, the decolonial epistemic perspective aims to critique and possibly
overcome the epistemological injustices put in place by imperial global designs, and questions and challenges the longstanding claims of Euro-American epistemology to be
universal, neutral, objective, disembodied, as well as being the only mode of knowing. It is an-other thought that seeks to inaugurate an-other logic, an-other language, and
an-other thinking that has the potential to liberate ex-colonised peoples minds from Euro-American hegemony (Mignolo 2005: 56). Decoloniality helps in unveiling epistemic
silences, conspiracies, and epistemic violence hidden within Euro-American epistemology and affirms the epistemic rights of the African people that enable them to transcend
global imperial designs. Decoloniality is re-emerging during the current age of epistemic break. The term epistemic break is drawn from the French theorist Michel Foucault.
It refers to a historical rupture which occurs when one epistemic system breaks down and another begins to take its place (Mills 1997: 145). It is a very relevant concept that
captures the epistemic crisis haunting the modern world order today and encapsulates the enormity of the crisis of Euro-American epistemologies unleashed on the world by
modernity. This epistemic rupture is well captured by Immanuel Wallerstein who argued that: It is quite normal for scholars and scientists to rethink issues. When important
new evidence undermines old theories and predictions do not hold, we are pressed to rethink our premises. In that sense, much of nineteenth-century social science, in the form
of specific hypotheses, is constantly being rethought. But, in addition to rethinking, which is normal, I believe we need to unthink nineteenth-century social science, because
many of its presumptionswhich, in my view, are misleading and constrictive still have far too strong a hold on our mentalities. These presumptions, once considered
liberating of the spirit, serve today as the central intellectual barrier to useful analysis of the social world (Wallerstein 1991: 1). The key point is that Euro-American
epistemologies predicated on fundamentalist rationalism are in a deep crisis. In his recent book titled The end of conceit: western rationality after postcolonialism, Patrick
Chabal admitted that whenever Europeans try to make sense of the current problems facing Europe it becomes clear that the instruments we use are no longer fit for the job.
The instruments that is, the social sciences we employ to explain what is happening domestically and overseas are both historically and conceptually out of date (Chabal
2012: viii). The whole world is at an epistemological crossroads characterised by the end of Euro-American conceit that created some form of epistemological certainty. As
argued by Chabal (2012: 3), Western societies are no longer sure of how to see themselves. This uncertainty opens the way for projection of decoloniality as the first humanistic-
oriented philosophy of liberation gesturing towards another world that is pluriversal, another logic that is freed from racism and the birth of a new humanism. This volume of
Africanus is inspired by this new utopic-decolonial momentum gesturing towards deeper structural decolonization and pluriversalism freed from racial hierarchization of human
beings. The first article is by the language specialist Finex Ndhlovu and is focused on the important question of African regional integration and pan-African unity. He deploys
decoloniality to argue the crossborder languages that have been promoted as vehicles for African economic and political integration are actually carrying dominant ideologies of
Westphalian statism and the Berlin consensus that are not easily amenable to regional integration. He challenges the conventional view of the African Academy of Languages
(Acalan) of projecting vehicular cross-border languages as a means by which such problems as disunity could be resolved. Ndhlovu argues that One of the biggest challenges
that come with these developments is that of cultivating intercultural communication, cross-linguistic understanding and social cohesion among the hitherto linguistically and
culturally multiverse peoples of the African continent. He goes further to note that vehicular cross-border languages (those languages that are common to two or more states
and domains straddling various usages) suffer from the same limitations as those currently besetting national languages because they are conceived as isomorphic, monolithic
and countable entities that do not accommodate other language forms and their cross-border status is defined in terms of existing nation-state boundaries that they purport to
transcend. Ndhlovus intervention begins to reveal coloniality hidden in some of the celebrated mechanism chosen as levers for achieving regional integration and pan-African
unity. This critical thinking is very important as it enable Africans to avoid another false start that is not informed by genuine decoloniality. What epistemologies and
knowledges underpin mainstream development discourse? This question is directly addressed by Seth Opong from Ghana who argues for indigenizing knowledges as the first
step towards attainment of endogenous development. He defines endogenous knowledge as knowledge about the people, by the people and for the people. This definition is
important as it distinguishes those knowledges imposed on Africa from outside those knowledges generated by Africans. Opongs contribution proposes that the African scholar
should adopt a problem-oriented approach in conducting research as opposed to the current method-oriented approach that prevent the African from examining pertinent
African problems. Opong correctly notes that contextually relevant knowledge is the basis for national development. His article is therefore a most relevant intervention on the
level of epistemology, pedagogy and methodology as they impinge on the question of development in Africa. Morgan Ndlovus article on the pertinent theme of production and
consumption of cultural villages in South Africa addresses the question of coloniality that is hidden within the tourism industry. He begins with questioning whether those who
fought against colonialism really understood the complexity of the structure of power they were fighting against and the character of the modern world system that enabled
colonialism. This becomes a pertinent question when one considers that today decolonization exists as myth and an illusion. The reality is that of coloniality on a global scale.
His core argument is the concept of cultural villages in South Africa cannot be understood outside the broader global experiences of museumification of identity and
culturalization of politics. Morgan Ndlovus article takes us to the tourist industry as a component of development in Africa and consistently reveals how staging culture is shot
through by coloniality, which makes it impossible for Africans to reap any tangible developmental dividends. This is why he concludes that The manner in which the
establishment of cultural village is produced and consumed in South Africa microcosmically represents the general picture of how cultural identity and the political economy are
hierarchical ordered in the non-existent post-apartheid dispensation. Sarah Chiumbus contribution targets the media as another domain of coloniality that needs
decolonization. When decolonial thinkers use the term decolonization they do not confine it to decolonial issues of juridical-political independence. They extend it to issues of
power, knowledge and being. This is why Chiumbus specific focus is no media reform in southern Africa that continues to generate animated debates between agents of neo-

Coloniality of power is causing a lot of confusion in the

liberalism and those of African liberation is very important.

with the neo-liberal paradigm continuing to work towards

debates on media reform and democracy,

obscuring the workings of power and disguising its ideological underpinnings.

Chiumbu correctly notes that This masking does not leave room to problematize global structures

directing knowledge production and media policy reforms.

 2NR Kato
EXTEND THE KATO DA their fear of a nuclear war to come
legitimizes the ongoing nuclear apocalypse in the form of nuclear
testing causing massive damage to indigenous people and native
lands. Two reasons

FIRST is THE VIOLENCE TO COME by framing nuclear war as an

abstract threat that we have to pre-empt ourselves against, existing
only in the future, they confine the threat of nuclear catastrophe to
something out there in the future, flat out masking that nuclear
violence happens every day

SECOND is DISQUALIFICATION their arguments about how a

nuclear war would cause extinction of the entire human race
delegitimizes the nuclear violence happening now as a mere
rehearsal for the much bigger, more important violence to come,
because of course nuclear catastrophe doesnt matter when it affects
EVERY MINORITY GROUP but it does matter when it goes global
because, hey, then us whites will all get killed too cant have that,
can we? This is the true motive for their global nuclear war
scenario; it serves to legitimize black death they obscure the nuclear
violence happening now we control the ONLY real nuke war impact

The external impact is RACISM, but independently this TURNS CASE

thats Hossein-Zadeh legitimizing nuclear testing allows the
government to continue to test and build up its nuclear arsenal, which
makes nuclear war inevitable we invest in things like the Defense
Industrial Base to the point where we literally cant stop testing and
improving our nuke arsenal without collapsing the economy we
literally have to manufacture enemies to generate demand for more
weapons, which means at some point nukes will have to be used just
to keep the US afloat
2NC Tricks
 2NC Bomb Shelters
Bomb Shelter DA they force us to internalize constant fear of
nuclear annihilation this ends all that makes life worth living
Borg 1 [Mark, PhD, Clinical Psychology & Interpersonal Psychoanalysis; Supervisor, William
Alanson White Institute, 2003, Psychoanalytic Pure War: Interactions with the Post-
Apocalyptic Unconscious," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 8]
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer's concept of "pure war" refers to the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely (12). We as psychoanalysts canand / increasingly mustexplore the impact of this concept
on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a patient's worst fears in

catastrophic events not only threaten friends, family, and

actual catastrophic events has / always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however,

become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, television, and Internet. 3
neighbors; they also

Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the analyst treating
patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface
of our cultural veneer? At the end of the First World War, the first "total war," Walter Benjamin observed that "nothing [after the war] remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of
force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body"(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our contemporary situation, "The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that
horror...can rage absolutely" (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of World War I that "war is
too serious to be confined to the military (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15). Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war" to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world

it is not the technological capacity for destruction

where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it,

(that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war
psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least
unconsciously) to escape inevitable destructionit requires a way outbut this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in the

external possibilityat least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposes pure war becomes an internal
condition, a perpetual state of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and
cultural death. The tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York City has given us a bitter but important opportunity to study the effects of / the pure war condition on individuals. It allows us to look
at how this all-encompassing state appears in psychoanalytic treatment and to observe its influence through the analysis of transference/countertransference dynamics. The pure war condition has been brought
grimly to consciousness. In this paper, I will explore how it manifests itself in society, in character, and most specifically in the psychoanalytic treatment of one patient whose dynamics highlight significant aspects
of the pure war state. How does treatment happen when, at some level, we perceive ourselves as already dead? Whatever our individual differences, our visions of the psychoanalytic endeavor arise out of the social
defense of the culture within which we live and work (I have referred to this as "community character," cf. Borg 350). And whatever our individual differences, in a pure war situation the primary task is simply to
sustain the dream of psychic survival. The case of Joyce, who saw the first explosion at the World Trade Center as she rode down Fifth Avenue in a bus after her session with me, exemplifies this task. [End Page
57] The Pure Warrior The philosophy (or practice) of "pure warriors," that is, of people who are preoccupied with the pure war condition of their society, is based on the perpetual failure within them of the
dissociation and repression that allow others to function in a situation that is otherwise completely overwhelming. Joyce was one of those who lived on the border of life and death; she could not escape awareness
of that dread dichotomy that most of us are at great pains to dissociate. She manifested the state of perpetual preparation that is the hallmark of pure war culture and of the insufficiently defended pure warrior,
and also a constant awareness of the nearness of death in all its various forms. She understood quite well, for instance, that when people are institutionalized (as she had been on numerous occasions), "society is
defining them as socially dead, [and that at that point] the essential task to be carried out is to help inmates to make their transition from social death to physical death" (Miller and Gwynne 74). Against this
backdrop, Joyce sought psychoanalysis as a "new world," the place where she would break free from the deathly institutionalized aspects of her self, and begin her life anew. Her search for a "new world" included
the possibility of a world that was not a / pure war worlda prelapsarian Eden. Virilio and Lotringer state that "war exists in its preparation" (53). And Sun Tsu, who wrote over 2400 years ago and yet is often
considered the originator of modern warfare, said in The Art of War, "Preparation everywhere means lack everywhere" (44). This means that when the members of a culture must be on guard on all fronts, the

The more defenses are induced and enacted, the more

resources of that culture are necessarily scattered and taxed.

psychologically impoverished a culture (or a person) will be. In war-torn nations,

resources like food, clothing, and materials for shelter may be scarce in the general population because they are shunted
off to the military. Similarly, the hoarding of psychological resources and the constant alert status of the
defense system are outcomes of existence in a pure war culture. We can see / this scattering and scarcity of resources occurring already in
the United States as billions of dollars are shunted from social services to war efforts and homeland / security. In pure war culturesthat is, in cultures that enact a perpetual preparation for warthe notion of
peace is itself a defensive fantasy, although to survive psychically we distract ourselves from such frightening stimuli as widespread terrorist activities and other events that / demonstrate our pure war status.

Pure war obliterates the distinction between soldier and citizen. We have all been
drafted. According to Virilio and Lotringer, "All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing
it...War happens everywhere, but we no longer have the means of recognizing it" (42).
some of us do, though, / and Joyce was one of those. And even the rest of us occasionally catch a glimpse of the pure war condition in the dark light of such acute traumatic events as aircraft hijackings, race riots,
"ethnic cleansings," the World Trade Center Disaster, and suicide bombings. As precise psychoanalytic / interpretations illuminate well-entrenched personal psychological defenses, so acute traumas and disasters

massive insecurities that lie beneath the surface of an otherwise well-

may highlight the

protected cultural exterior. Origins of the Psychoanalytic Study of Pure War A

precursor to the notion of pure war can be seen in a comment made by Freud in
the aftermath of the First World War: The primitive fear of death is still strong
within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation Most likely,
our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his
survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him. (242) That is,
through the constant preparation for war demanded by the pure war condition
and the / enactments that such preparation entails, we "share" our lives with the
dead.
 2NC Threat Con
Dont be fooled by catastrophism threats are constructed to solidify
white supremacy.
Jackson 12 Richard Jackson, Director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies,
the University of Otago. Former. Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University,
8/5, The Great Con of National Security,
http://richardjacksonterrorismblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/the-great-con-of-national-
security/
It may have once been the case that being attacked by another country was a major threat to the lives of ordinary people. It may also be true that there
most of what
are still some pretty serious dangers out there associated with the spread of nuclear weapons. For the most part, however,
youve been told about national security and all the big threats which can supposedly kill you is
one big con designed to distract you from the things that can really hurt you, such as the
poverty, inequality and structural violence of capitalism, global warming, and the manufacture and proliferation of
weapons among others. The facts are simple and irrefutable: youre far more likely to die from lack of health care provision than you are from
terrorism; from stress and overwork than Iranian or North Korean nuclear missiles; from lack of road safety than from illegal immigrants; from mental
illness and suicide than from computer hackers; from domestic violence than from asylum seekers; from the misuse of legal medicines and alcohol
abuse than from international drug lords. And yet, politicians and the servile media
spend most of their time talking
about the threats posed by terrorism, immigration, asylum seekers, the international drug trade, the nuclear programmes of Iran
and North Korea, computer hackers, animal rights activism, the threat of China, and a host of other issues
which are all about as equally unlikely to affect the health and well-being of you and your family. Along with this obsessive and perennial discussion of
so-called national security issues,
the state spends truly vast sums on security measures which
have virtually no impact on the actual risk of dying from these threats, and then engages in massive displays
of security theatre designed to show just how seriously the state takes these threats such as the x-ray machines and security measures in every public
building, surveillance cameras everywhere, missile launchers in urban areas, drones in Afghanistan, armed police in airports, and a thousand other
rulers of society
things. This display is meant to convince you that these threats are really, really serious. And while all this is going on, the
are hoping that you wont notice that increasing social and economic inequality in society leads to increased
ill health for a growing underclass; that suicide and crime always rise when unemployment rises; that workplaces remain highly dangerous and kill and
domestic
maim hundreds of people per year; that there are preventable diseases which plague the poorer sections of society; that
violence kills and injures thousands of women and children annually; and that globally, poverty
and preventable disease kills tens of millions of people needlessly every year. In other words,
they are hoping that you wont notice how much structural violence there is in the
world. More than this, they are hoping that you wont notice that while literally trillions of
dollars are spent on military weapons, foreign wars and security theatre (which also arguably do nothing to
make any us any safer, and may even make us marginally less safe), that domestic violence programmes struggle to provide even
minimal support for women and children at risk of serious harm from their partners; that underfunded mental health programmes mean long waiting
lists to receive basic care for at-risk individuals; that drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes lack the funding to match the demand for help; that
welfare measures aimed at reducing inequality have been inadequate for decades; that health and safety measures at many workplaces remain
insufficiently resourced; and that measures to tackle global warming and developing alternative energy remain hopelessly inadequate. Of course, none
of this is surprising. Politicians are a part of the system; they dont want to change it. For them, all the insecurity, death and ill-health caused by
capitalist inequality are a price worth paying to keep the basic social structures as they are. A more egalitarian society based on equality, solidarity, and
other non-materialist values would not suit their interests, or the special interests of the lobby groups they are indebted to. It is also true that dealing
with economic and social inequality, improving public health, changing international structures of inequality, restructuring the military-industrial
complex, and making the necessary economic and political changes to deal with global warming will be extremely difficult and will require long-term
commitment and determination. For politicians looking towards the next election, it is clearly much easier to paint immigrants as a threat to social
order or pontificate about the ongoing danger of terrorists. It is also more exciting for the media than stories about how poor people and people of
colour are discriminated against and suffer worse health as a consequence. Viewed from this vantage point, national
security is one
massive confidence trick misdirection on an epic scale. Its primary function is to
distract you from the structures and inequalities in society which are the real threat to the
health and wellbeing of you and your family, and to convince you to be permanently afraid so that you
will acquiesce to all the security measures which keep you under state control and
keep the military-industrial complex ticking along. Keep this in mind next time you hear a politician talking about the threat of uncontrolled
immigration, the risk posed by asylum seekers or the threat of Iran, or the need to expand counter-terrorism powers. The question is: when politicians
are talking about national security, what is that they dont want you to think and talk about? What exactly is the misdirection they are engaged in? The
truth is, if you think that terrorists or immigrants or asylum seekers or Iran are a greater threat to your safety than the capitalist system, you have been
well and truly conned, my friend. Dont believe the hype: youre much more likely to die from any one of several forms of structural violence in society
than you are from immigrants or terrorism. Somehow, we need to challenge the politicians on this fact.
 2NC Predictions K
Prediction markets replace reality with an ordered, controlled
simulation of it this impulse to restrain chaos is the root cause of
modern violence state actors will ignore results and translate
knowledge of the future into increasingly violent interventionism
Aitken 11 [Rob Aitken, University of Alberta, Canada, Financializing security: Political
prediction markets and the commodification of uncertainty, Security Dialogue April 2011 vol.
42 no. 2 123-141]
It is perhaps most baldly articulated by Abramowicz, who, as we noted above, was not too bothered about the superiority of information markets'
those who would seek to exercise freedom,
predictions, so long, it transpires, as they could still help discipline
either in their own name or that of others, since the predictions of well
functioning information markets are objective (2003, Executive Summary). The objective here has a curious
relation to the real, a revealing problematic which perhaps indicates much of what is fundamentally at stake here. For the objective is not so much the
actually existing, rather it is that which can be ascertained without objection. Consider as particular exemplification of this point the following.
Abramowizc, in suggesting ever more arcane ways to ensure that only fundamental traders hold sway in the final analysis of a market's arbitration,
posits the possibility of a two stage information market. In the first players effectively bet on the outcome of a second, with the second open only briefly,
after the close of the first, with only the payouts of the second dependent upon the verification (or not) of some future event. For Abramowizc one virtue
of such a device is that there will no longer be risk associated with real world
randomness(note 156)! It is thus not reality itself and the randomness it entails that
concerns those that seek solace in prediction markets but rather certainty and
reduction; a reality perhaps, but like the freedom we encountered above, only that reality which has been suitably reformulated. Made single,
indisputable, and dead; not manifold, contestable and lived. Such a singular representation of reality can only
be a simulation, in the most pejorative of senses, that which will always be by
passed, confounded and exceeded by practical experience (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 155). For
there is always irruption of that minimum of reversibility which exists in every
irreversible process (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161), requiring our endless human intervention to
secure it, to keep its mask in place and to maintain the illusion that it is outside of
us and that we are not required for its maintenance. Indeed, one could go further. Our endless defence, our securing of our simulated worlds, against
the ceaseless encroachment of the entropy from which they are formed is, according to Baudrillard, that which gives them their purchase upon us. They
ordered production and
are only made interesting by this interminable maintenance requirement. The attractiveness of
prediction (see also, Cooper, 2005) is thus ironically provided by its potential to fall back into
disorder, which secretly ruins and dismantles it while simultaneously ensuring that a minimal continuity of pleasure traverses it, without
which it would be nothing (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161). And for Baudrillard this means that the seduction through which all our attempts to stabilize the
real world are undone doesn't belong to the order of the real but rather surrounds it, providing the background against which our small victories over
chaos are able to shine, just as derivatives markets surround those in their underlying assets. [S]eduction envelops the whole real process of power, as
well as the whole real order of production, with endless reversibility and disaccumulation without which neither power nor production [nor indeed
prediction] would exist (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 159, original emphases). This continual disintegration of order and manufactured form is the very
ground that production, prediction and power require for their perpetuation. It is what makes these latter processes seductive. The
lack of
real prediction associated with PAM and similar systems is made abundantly clear by Mason Richey (2005).
Here PAM is indicted not for the reasons we have encountered above in the media furore surrounding its announcement but rather on more
philosophical terms, entirely consonant with the line of argument we have been developing. Richey follows the logic of PAM to its selfdefeating
terminal conclusion. Traders purchase a contract on PAM if they think its underlying event is more likely than its current price would suggest. En
masse such trading will raise the price of that contract. But PAM is an information and prediction market. Its raison d'tre is to provide a signal to those
who are interested in the occurrence, or rather the prevention, of the events that underlie traded contracts. Thus a
rise in prices is
likely to instigate a response from those for whom the market was created as
signalling mechanism. In turn this thus reduces the likelihood of the occurrence of
the event. I bet, you see I bet, you act, I lose. Or as Richey (2005, p. 10) puts it: The idea that government authorities employ the market to foresee
events that they will prevent would, a priori, mute the signal. But this is not the most fundamental of the flaws. It merely reflects one of a deeper level.
And it is precisely why Hanson seems so misguided in his rendering of existing instruments as being in need of supplementation if they are to deliver
prediction of a precise enough nature. For in the act of specification of the possible future, the job that the signalling market of derivatives is intended
to achieve is already done. In the case of PAM, again in Richey's (2005, p. 10) words: [T]he derivatives of maximal predictive interest, the impetus for
the system's design, terrorism derivatives, must be explicitly articulated in order to be offered. But if the market designers can list a specific terrorist
event, then they have already defined, determined, and predicted the very event that the market is designed to identify. If the market designers know
which terrorist derivatives to offer, then they have already done the work of the market. For Richey (2005, p. 10) then: The system does
both too little and too much. This combination of inadequacy and excess is intimately tied to PAM's curious relation to a
simulated future of an ordered, predicted, singular real. Our reading of Dillon (2004, 2006, forthcoming) suggests that such
fetishization of fixation is increasingly anathema to key strands of, themselves
increasingly dominant, thinking within the strategic centres of our Western
security apparatus. As he pithily puts it, the contingent has become a new order of the
real[17]. This contingent is the strategic thinking that both we, and any securing
agency, actually need to engender in a world in which human being is
increasingly relativised in space and time through technologies of communication and information (Cooper, 2005, p. 10); a world
exemplified by PAM and its derivatives. What we, and they, certainly do not need to engage in is evergreater emplacement. For in a world ever more
clearly revealed by the congenitally failing securing action of such technologies as an inexhaustible informational remainder which, strangely, appears
only to disappear (Cooper, 2005, p. 22), such yearning for the objective, for a singular real in which to find and found ourselves is futile in the extreme.
Indeed, one could go further it
is in the desire for and the violent imposition of a singular truth
that most contemporary conflict is rooted. It is only a manifold real that has sufficient play of space and space of play
to prevent the horrors attendant upon crusades for the truth. So where do we end up? We began by invoking the range of different readings of PAM's
demise and worked through the differences and similarities between them. At the same time we considered the differences and similarities between
PAM and other markets. What was revealed by both of these comparisons was the tension between instrumental representation and the prior
simulation upon which it depends, a tension embodied perhaps most quintessentially by markets themselves. Markets are able to reconcile the
reversible imminence of simulation through endless deferral both between different markets and their derivatives and indeed between the present
and the future, so long as the latter always remains deferred and can never definitively be reached. In doing so they encompass both effectcause and
causeeffect. As such they are able to sustain manifold reality so long as the world keeps turning and money keeps making it go round. But what they
cannot do, except in nave and impoverished accounts, such as those of many of the protagonists we considered, is be simply resolved to one, singular
reality that would arbitrate the truth, particularly the truth of a prediction. PAM's attempt to capture effect in order to enable intervention at the level of
cause is forever undone by the ways in which such effect is both overly prefigured and by the ways in which such prefiguring, when coupled with the
informative role the market is intended to perform for interventionists, acts to ensure that its signals are suppressed. Despite their myriad other
disagreements, the extraction of a singular reality from the manifold is what most of our commentators seem desperate to achieve. However the
divergence in their views does not thus reveal some underlying neutral core of truth from which each raps out a different line. Rather, we witness the
opposite. A manifold, polyphonous world that endlessly resists and undoes any singular articulation of its nature or trajectory. Such a world allows each
to tell a different story of its benefits and costs. We thus happily join in celebrating the cessation of PAM's singular call. But we would equally revel in
the silencing, or rather the drowning out via cacophony, of those other monologues that brought about its end.
Framework
 2NC Antonio
The liberal program has proliferated far beyond military
interventionism and now finds coherence in the academic will to
truth, a plateau of panoptic violence where all otherness is subsumed
by Cartesian rationalism.
Antonio 95 (Robert, July 1995, Nietzsches antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of
History, American Journal of Sociology, Volume 101, No. 1) //AMM
Treating words as mirrors of reality provides a comforting illusion of "certainty." This tendency obscures the social bases of
language, reifies social conventions, and weakens capacities to imagine and create alternative conditions. Linguistic
"abbreviations" cement obligatory social ties where "mutual agreement" about "feelings" is absent and the tendency to "let go" must
be stemmed. Nietzsche held that language serves social selection of the herd, keeping experiences, desires,
impulses, and actions of weak persons within boundaries, inscribing strong individuals as collective
enemies, and redirecting ressentiment into regimentation. Accordingly, cultural rationalization makes this process of
liquidating particularity more effective and universal (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 100102, 21617; 19686, pp. 357-58,
380). Since Nietzsche was himself a master writer, his polemics about words per se are hyperbolic.11 The real target is Socratic
culture's exceptionally abstract languages, rampant conceptual reifications, and impoverished aesthetic sensibilities. Nietzsche
believed that the obsession with rational representation makes the body an inert
target of disciplinary control. Adoration of concepts, theory, and reason makes the abstract signifier the ultimate
object of knowledge. Purely formal concepts are treated as the "highest," "real," and "true"
things, while sense experience is relegated to the degraded status of "appearance."
Platonic ideas, Chris- tian soul, Kantian things-in-themselves, and Newtonian atoms and time are all foundational reifications that
"dehistoricize" the corporeal world and erect illusions of firm "grounds" for those who cannot face life without God and tradition or
bear the weight of its connective choices and its "great dice game" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 287-90; 19686, p. 549; 19686, pp. 35-37).
Destroying Socratic culture's "objective" foundations (i.e., God and Truth), the latest phase of cultural rationalization greatly
amplifies feel- ings of uncertainty. The consequent desperate searching and clinging produces
frenetic reification; fanatical new prejudices, religions, and politics appear alongside the most sterile intellectual
formalisms. Mass culture's hastily formulated languages blur all difference and ambiguity (e.g., parties "transform their principles
into great at fresco stupidities"). The proliferation of abstract signifiers, arising from diverse locations and detached from any sense
of stable referents, contribute to increasingly mechanical, diffuse, and mindless regimentation. In this fashion, Nietzsche severed the
links that modern theorists saw between rationalization and enhanced communication, social integration, and legitimate authority
(Nietzsche 1983, p. 215; 1986, pp. 161-62; 1966, pp. 216-17; 19686, pp. 357-58, 380-81). According to Nietzsche, the "subject" is
Socratic culture's most central, durable foundation. This prototypic expression of ressentiment,
master reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass
discipline "separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . . free to express strength
or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is
merely a fiction added to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's
"objective" foundations makes its "subjective" features all the more important. For
example, the subject is a central focus of the new human sciences, appearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints,
motives as causes, and selves as entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and targets of care(Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 47-
54). Arguing that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a "remarkable antithesis between an
interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to correspond to any
interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78-79, 83). The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He
considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close
personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists
saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male
professionals) in specialized occupations over identify with their positions and engage
in gross fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of
others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly
absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything
but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating
inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent
"inwardness." Integrity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure
are undone by paralyzing over concern about possible
causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think,
expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate
"masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and
superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that
it is hard to tell the
which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that
copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p.
136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory
scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for
the long term or participate in enduring networks of interdependence; such a person is neither willing
nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid
subjectivized landscape. Nietzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal
while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than
Living in a constant chase after gain
nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . .
compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and
overreaching and anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of
ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity).
The most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche
respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to
render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these
impostors amplify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, exploitative,
fodder for the "great man
scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances. " Social selves are
of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command, the more
urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god,
prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly
combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled
ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant.
 2NC Gilbert
The reliance on the government as an extension of sovereignty is
violently depoliticizing and plays into a myth of reflexivity that only
extends the violence of the neoliberal state.
Gilbert 2009 (Jeremy, "Deleuzian Politics? A survey and Some Suggestions)
Taking this further, I would argue that if any mode of self-government
emerges as implicitly desirable from the
perspective developed by Deleuze and Guattari, then it would clearly be one which was both democratic and pluralistic without
being
subject to the existing limitations of representative liberal democracy. Deleuzes earlier work may occasionally be
characterised by a Nietzschean aristocratic tone. However, where he expresses anti-democratic sentiments in his work with Guattari, these only ever
seem to spring from a commitment to that Marxian tradition which understands liberal democratic forms to be deeply imbricated
with
processes of capitalist exploitation. When weighing up the legacy of this tradition today, it is worth reflecting that the
degradation of actually existing democracy under neoliberal conditions in recent decades,
especially in the years since the fall of the Berlin wall, has lent much weight to the hypothesis that a democratic politics which has no anti-capitalist
dimension can only ultimately fail, as the individualisation of the social sphere and the corporate
control of politics
progressively undermine the effectiveness of public institutions. 83 82 From such a perspective,
the problems with existing forms of representative democracy are several. Firstly, in ceding legislative sovereignty to
elected bodies for several years at a time, they rely on the artificial stabilisation of majorities
of opinion along party lines which do not actually express the complexity of
popular desires in any meaningful way. While it is clearly true that democracy as such necessarily demands the temporary organisation of
molarities for the purpose of taking collective decisions, the existing set of relationships between individuals and parties does not enable these
molarities to emerge with sufficient intensity to effect major change: for example, despite the vehemence of anti-war opinion in the UK in 2003, the
government was effectively at liberty to pursue the invasion of Iraq, safe in the knowledge that this intensity would disperse before the next general
election. At the same time, these relationships do not enable the emergence of sites of
engagement and deliberation which would enable new ideas and practices to emerge, simply
delegating political engagement to a class of professional politicians, journalists, and policy-specialists whose job is not to
innovate, invent and transform existing relations of power, but to maintain them, and the arrangements which express them. Most crucially, they do
not enable the new forms of collective becoming which a more participatory,
decentralised, molecular democracy would facilitate, preventing any meaningful
institutional expression of those new forms of dynamic, mobile, cosmopolitan collectivity which globalisation makes possible.
Instead they seek to actualise that potential only in the politically ineffectual forms of a universalised liberalism or banal forms of multiculturalism, two
complementary grids which are imposed upon global flows within the parameters of either the nation state or legalistic supra-national institutions.
The drive to find new forms of participative democracy which characterises the leading-edge of contemporary socialist practice,
85 84 and which has informed not only the politics of the social forum movement 86 but more broadly the entire history of radical
democratic demands (including, for example, the Chartists demand for annual parliaments, or the Bolshevik cry for all power to the
soviets), surely expresses just this desire for democratic forms not stymied by the
apparatuses of majority and individualisation.
 2NC Mourad
Framework relies on an understanding of education which frames
subjects as units of rationality to be bettered through civilizing
practices. This form of dispassionate subject construction eliminates
care and dooms millions to suffering and death.
Mourad 2001 (Roger Jr., Director of Institutional Research at Washtenaw College and teaches at the University of Michigan.
His academic credentials include a Ph.D. in Higher Education, M.A. in Philosophy of Education, and J.D. in Law, all from the
University of Michigan. He is the author of Postmodern Philosophical Critique and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Higher Education
~Westport: Greenwood, 1997! and several recent journal publications on epistemological, ethical, and legal issues pertaining to the
nature and structure of institutionally organized education and its relation to the social good, Education After Foucault: The
Question of Civility Teachers College Record Volume 103, Number 5, October 2001, pp. 739759)

EDUCATION FOR IMPROVEMENT, OR KICKING THE DOG Too many lost names too many rules to the game Better find a focus or youre out of
the picture.48 The idea that the fundamental issue of the just civil state is to find the right balance between preserving individual freedom and
constraining individual threat has served as a tacit foundation within which belief and debate about educational philosophy, policy, and practice
develop. This statement is not intended to suggest that there is some direct and specific historical connection that can be unequivocally demonstrated
to exist between foundational political theory and mainstream educational theories and practices. However, I want to propose that there is a
compatibility between them that has important consequences for a new critique of organized formal education. In the remainder of this paper, my aim
is to argue that the tenor of the theories that I have summarized is endemic in the ordinary ways that we think about and engage in organized
education. How is the idea of the basic human being that is posed as the fundamental social, political, and pedagogic problem for modern civilization,
The
this human being that must be managed in order to keep it from harming itself and others, played out in educational presuppositions?
tacit, unchallenged belief is that through education, the human being must be
made into something better than it was or would be absent a formal education.
There are all kinds of versions of this subject and of what it should become: potential
achiever, qualified professional, good citizen, leader, independent actor, critical
thinker, change agent, knowledgeable person. In all cases, the subject before
education is viewed to be, like the subject before civilization, something in need of
being made competentand safein the mind of the educator. From this vantage point, the
pedagogic relationship between teacher and student, between competent adult and incompetent child ~or adult!, contains within it a possibility that it
seeks to overcome, namely, a rejection of the socialization program of the former by the latter. There is an implicit conflict between individuals as soon
It must
as the student walks into the school or college classroom door from outside the civility that the teacher would have that student become.
be resolved, or contained in some way; and this is done immediately by rendering
the student a rule follower a follower of the social order, both in and out of the classroom. Or the student must be rendered a
challenger of the social order, in favor of an order that overcomes oppressionto become a competent comrade. The individual must be taught how to
be an individual in accordance with this balance. Being an individual means being freeit means being self-determined, it means competing, and it
means obeying the law. This is the case, even if the teaching is done with kindness and sensitivity. The responsibility for dealing with suffering and
limitation lies almost solely with this individual, not the state. In fact, if suffering is viewed at all, it tends to be viewed as something that is good for
the individual to endure or to fight in order to overcome it. Limitation is not acknowledged, unless the individual is deemed disadvantaged in some
way, and the remedy tends to be to provide the person with an opportunity to become competent. Is it any wonder that parents of children with
disabilities, aided by many educators, often must fight for educational and other services? This situation simply reflects that the basic logic of
organized formal education and, more generally, the state, is not predicated upon a recognition that the human being is susceptible to suffering or that
the states reason for being should be to care for people. If caring for its inhabitants were the basic purpose of the civil state, then there would be no
need to fight for this recognition. Is it any wonder that the education of the ordinary child is mainly training for a far-off, abstract future that is destined
We talk about equipping children
to be better than life at present? Why must school be about overcoming anything?
and adults to solve problems. Yet, problems do not fall from the sky; they do not exist as
such until a human being gives them a name. In contrast, the concept of contention suggests that the practical role of reason should be used to
understand the human being as subject to suffering and to act accordingly as moral agents. That is very different from an educational philosophy,
policy, and practice that views reason as an instrument by which to overcome obstacles and to conform to the social order. It may be argued that
modern education is about reason, about how to think and live reasonably and, therefore, how to live well and to care for oneself and for others. Yet it
is commonly expressed that we live in a complex world and that children and adults must learn how to learn, in order to succeed in a world of
rapid change. The question that needs to be asked is: Why should a person have to? In effect, education expects the human being to have an
unlimited ability to think and act with reason sufficient to cope with increasingly complex situations that require individual intellect to adequately
recognize, evaluate, and prioritize alternative courses of action, consider their consequences, and make good decisions. For the most part, the
increasing complexity of civil society and the multiplicity of factors that intellect is expected to deal with in different situations are not questioned in
education. Is this what education is rightly about? Education is as much about the use of intelligence to avoid suffering and feelings of limitation and
about fending off feelings of fear as it is about learning. It is about acting upon other people and upon the civil order to deal with perceived threats.
One must be an active learner or else. Why? The individual must be acted upon
and rendered into an entity that engages reality in the ways that are deemed just
by many educators, lawmakers, and others with a stake in the perpetuation of the
given social order. Thus, the individual is exhorted to do your best, make an effort, earn a grade, be motivated, work hard,
overcome obstacles, achieve. Why should education be about any of these things? Unfortunately, the culture of scholarship is thoroughly
consistent with these precepts. When we question them, we challenge the ends that they serve but not the ideas themselves. We believe that education
is rightly about improvement. This philosophy of improvement is not necessarily consistent with enhancement of living. It often has the opposite
effect. How is this result justified? Certainly, it can feel good to accomplish something or to overcome obstacles. Does that mean that adversity should
be a positive value of the civil state? The modern idea, beginning with Descartes and established through Lockean empiricism ~and made pedagogic
by Rousseaus Emile!, that anyone can be rational leads quickly to the idea that everyone is responsible for being wholly rational, as that word is
perpetuation of the given social order in education as
understood according to the social order. The
elsewhere is about gaining advantage and retaining power. It is about cultural
politics and about marginalization of various groups and about class and about socializing
children to believe in capitalism as if it is a natural law. Yet under the analysis that I have made here, these major problems are symptoms of something
more basic. The more basic problem that I have emphasized here is inextricable from the problem of the just civil state. It is about the intense
pressures on people to think and act in ways that serve broader interests that are not at all concerned with their well-being in a variety of contexts
including psychological, social, economic, political, and cultural. It is no answer to ground pedagogy in the notion of building community. The idea
that something must be built implies that something must be made better in order for it to be tolerated. Moreover, community carries with it the
prerequisite that one be made competent to be a member again, the presumption that something must be done to the person to make it better in
some way. I do not mean to say that educators have bad intent. I do mean that this ethos of betterment through
competency will inevitably fail to fulfill the dreams of reformers and revolutionaries. It does not consider the human being as
an entity to care for but rather as something to be equipped with skills and knowledge in order to improve itself. This failure is not only
because there are millions of children and adults that live in poverty in the
wealthiest countries in human history. It is because the state of mind that can
tolerate such suffering is the same state that advances and maintains the ethos of
civility as betterment, rather than civility as caring for people because they are subject to suffering. The alternative that I have only
introduced in a very abbreviated way under the rubric that I called contention is intended to be pragmatic in the ways that Foucault and Richard
Rorty are pragmatic in their respective approaches to the subject of the state.49 It is intended to address an unacceptable state of contemporary
Western civilization, namely, its repetitive and even escalating incidence of disregard for suffering and harm in many forms, despite intellectual, social,
medical, legal, educational, scientific, and technological progress. We have had two hundred years of modern educational principles, and two
hundred years of profound suffering along with them. The problem of the individual calls for a new formulation and for a proper responseone that
cares for the individual rather than makes it competent. The modern project of betterment through competency and opportunity must be challenged
and replaced by an emotionally intelligent ethos that expressly and fundamentally acknowledges suffering and limitation in philosophy, policy, and
practice.
 AT: Bryant
They do not meet Bryants test for a worthwhile strategy the 1ac is
nothing but: step 1 vote aff, step two question mark, step 3 solves
extinction.

We solve anti-fiat modes of debate allow for activist stances that

have material ways of resolving real world issues.

The division between theory and praxis only serves to solidify

neocolonial violence basing politics in the ontological incoherence
of the western political project is vital to any long term peace.
Spanos 8 (William V Spanos, distinguished professor of English at Binghamton University,
PhD from the University of Wisconsin, 2008, American Exceptionalism in the Age of
Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, pp 26-31, modified)
I will return later in this book to Saids provocative retrieval of empires spectral Othershis bringing of this marginalized figure out of the shadows of
imperialisms periphery to center stage, as it were. It will suffice here to suggest that by thus assuming the exilic perspective of the Abgeschiedene in
addressing the question of global colonialism, it should now be clear that my intervention has not been intended to mimic the by now commonplace
critical imperative of a certain postcolonial discourse, usually identified with Salmon Rushdie and Malek Alloula, in which the Empire writes back
to the imperial center.32 This critical initiative, perhaps needless to say, has contributed significantly, especially by way of identifying the colonial
project with cultural, specifically literary, production, to the inauguration of an anticolonial discourse that would be commensurate to the complex and
multisituated operations of American (neo)colonialism in the postimperial age of globalization, above all, in that phase that has been represented by
its intellectual deputies as the end of history and is now bearing witness to Americas unilateral imposition of capitalist democracy on rogue states
that threaten the American Peace. But, as I have suggested, it remains inadequate to this most difficult of tasks, not impossible. This inadequacy is
not simply the result of this criticisms vestigial adherence to the kind of imperial thinking it would interrogate (i.e., its not being postcolonial exilic
or, rather, a-partenough).33 It is also, and primarily, the result of a paradoxically limited historical sense. Despite its insistent appeal to history
against theory, thispraxis-oriented postcolonial criticism, like the genealogical criticism of Foucault and even Said,
from which it ultimately derives, is not historical enough. In keeping with its indifference to, if not its antitheoretical bias against
theory, it has, in fact, reduced the critical potential of this resonant motif of
resistance by restricting the genealogy of imperialism by and large to the modern erafrom the age of exploration in the fifteenth century to
the age of imperialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In overlooking its own origins in the exilic theory that emerged in response to
the decisive self-destruction of the imperial (onto)logic of the discourse of the Occident in the middle of the twentieth century, this
postcolonial discourse, in other words, has also lost sight of an earlier, deeper,
and polyvalent structural origin of the colonial project. I mean the very epochal moment of the founding
of the idea of the Occidental polis in late Greek and especially (imperial) Roman antiquity. This was the moment that bore witness to the Wests self-
conscious inscription of metaphysicsof thinking the transitory and singular (contingent or always incomplete) event from the exclusionary or
accommodational providential/ panoptic vantage point of its (preconceived) completionas the truth of being and history at large.34 As a
forgetting of the provenance of imperialism in the Roman transformation of the errant thinking of the Greeks into a
consequence of this
correct (and, in Fukuyamas term, directional) thinking, the discourse of postcolonialism has
delimited its genealogy of
Western imperialism to the Enlightenment and after and thus the ideological parameters of imperialism to the practice of empire,
that is, to the site of cultural geopolitics. Despite its suggestive spontaneous probings beyond it (mostly in the form of its inadequately thought
reiteration of the relay of white metaphorscenter/periphery; light/darkness; plantation/wilderness; settler/nomad, development
(improvement)/underdevelopment that systematically informs the truth discourse of metaphysics), they therefore remain vestigially and
disablingly [stultifyingly] disciplinary. In other words, this privileged version ofpostcolonialist discourse is determined by a
problematic that restricts itself to an idea of the imperial that remains indifferent to or, more accurately , overlooks the inaugural
ontological ground on which the developing structure of the West as the West
restsa ground that, as I have shown, visibly reasserts itself in the neo-Hegelianism of the post-Cold War end-of-history discourse. As such, it is a
critical discourse that addresses an imperialism that has been rendered anachronistic, if not exactly obsolete, by the triumphant cultures
representation of the end of the Cold War as the end of history and the annunciation of this good news as the advent of the New World Order. I mean,
to retrieve and reconstellate into the present historical occasion the forgotten and decisively important ideological function of the ruse of the Pax
Romana, the peace of what I have been calling the Pax Americana. On the other hand, I do not want to suggest that the theoretical perspective of
Heideggers Abgeschiedene as such (or, for that matter, its poststructuralist allotropes) is entirely adequate to this task of resistance either, since the
consequences of his (and, in a different way, of those he influenced) failure to adequately think the political imperatives of his interrogation of Western
ontology are now painfully clear. We must, rather, think the Abgeschiedenethe ghostly
ontological exile evolving a way of errant thinking that would be able to resist
the global imperialism of Occidental/technological logicwith, say, Saids political Deleuzian nomad: the
displaced political emigr evolving, by way of his or her refusal to be answerable to the Truth of the Occident, a politics capable of
resisting the polyvalent global neo-imperialism of Occidental political power. The Abgeschiedene, the displaced
thinker, and the migrant, the displaced political person, are not incommensurable entities; they are two indissolubly related, however uneven,
manifestations of the same world-historical event. The political Left of the 1980s, which inaugurated the momentum against theory, was entirely
justified in accusing the theoretical discourse of the 1970s of an ontological and/or textual focus that, in its obsessive systematics, rendered it, in
Saids word, unworldlyindifferent to the imperial politics of historically specific Western history. But it can be seen now, in the wake of the
representation of the global triumph of liberal democratic capitalism in the 1990s as the end of history, or, at any rate, of Americas arrogant will to
impose capitalist-style democracy on different, destabilizing cultures, that this Lefts focus on historically specific politics betrays a disabling
[stultifying] indifference to the polyvalent imperial politics of ontological representation. It thus repeats in reverse the essential failure of the
theoretically oriented discourse it has displaced. This alleged praxis-oriented discourse, that is, tendseven as it
unconsciously employs in its critique the ontologically produced white metaphorics and rhetoric informing the practices it opposesto
separate praxis from and to privilege it over theory, the political over the
ontological. Which is to say, it continues, in tendency, to understand being in the
arbitraryand disabling [stultifying] disciplinary terms endemic to and demanded by
the very panoptic classificatory logic of modern technological thinking, the
advanced metaphysical logic that perfected, if it did not exactly enable, the colonial
project proper.35 In so doing, this praxis-oriented discourse fails to perceive that being, however it is represented, constitutes a continuum,
which, though unevenly developed at any historically specific moment, nevertheless traverses its indissolubly related sites from being as such and the
epistemological subject through the ecos, culture (including family, class, gender, and race), to sociopolitics (including the nation and the international
or global sphere). As a necessary result, it fails to perceive the emancipatory political potential inhering in the relay of differences released
(decolonized) by an interrogation of the dominant Western cultures disciplinary representation of being. By this relay of positively potential differences
I do not simply mean the nothing (das Nichts) or the ontological difference (Heidegger), existence (Sartre), the absolutely other (Levinas), the
differance or trace (Derrida), the differend (Lyotard), the invisible or absent cause (Althusser) that belong contradictorily to and haunt
white/totalitarian metaphysical thinking.36 I also mean the pariah (Arendt), the nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), the hybrid or the minus in the
origin (Bhabha), the nonbeings (Dussel), the subaltern (Guha), the emigr (Said), the denizen (Hammar), the refugee (Agamben), the queer
(Sedgwick, Butler, Warner), the multitude (Negri and Hardt),37 and, to point to the otherwise unlikely affiliation of these international postcolonial
thinkers with a certain strain of postmodern black American literature, the darkness (Morrison) that belong contradictorily to and haunt
white/imperial culture politics: The images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and
consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under
complete control, these images of blinding [totalizing] whiteness seem to function as both antidote for meditation on the shadow that is the companion
to this whitenessa dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing. This haunting, a darkness
from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory situation in which American writers found
themselves during the formative years of the nations literature.38 In this chapter, I have overdetermined the ontological perspective of the
Abgeschiedene, the errant thinker in the interregnum who would think the spectral nothing that a triumphant empirical science wishes to know
nothing about,39 not simply, however, for the sake of rethinking the question of being as such, but also to instigate a rethinking of the uneven relay of
to make visible and
practical historical imperatives precipitated by the post-Cold War occasion. My purpose, in other words, has been
operational the substantial and increasingly complex practical role that
ontological representation has played and continues to play in the Wests
perennial global imperial project, a historical role rendered disablingly [stultifyingly] invisible as a consequence of the
oversight inherent in the vestigially disciplinary problematics of the privileged oppositional praxis-oriented discourses, including that of all too many
New Americanists. In accordance with this need to reintegrate theory and practicethe ontological and the sociopolitical,
thinking and doingand to accommodate the present uneven balance of this relationship to the actual conditions established by the total colonization
the virtually
of thinking in the age of the world picture, I would suggest, in a prologemenal way, the inordinate urgency of resuming
abandoned destructive genealogy of the truth discourse of the post-Enlightenment
Occident, now, however, reconstellated into the post-Cold War conjuncture. I mean specifically, the conjuncture that, according to Fukuyama
(and the strategically less explicit Straussian neoconservatives that have risen to power in America after 9/11), has borne apocalyptic witness to the
will show that
global triumph of liberal capitalist democracy and the end of history. Such a reconstellated genealogy, as I have suggested,
this triumphant post-Cold War American polity constitutes the fulfillment (end)
of the last (anthropological) phase of a continuous, historically produced, three part ontological/cultural/sociopolitical Western history: what
Heidegger, to demarcate its historical itinerary (Greco-Roman, Medieval/Protestant Christian, and Enlightenment liberal humanist), has called the
ontotheological tradition. It will also show that this long and various history, which the neoconservatives would obliterate, has
been from its origins imperial in essence. I am referring to the repeatedly reconstructed history inaugurated by the late or post- Socratic Greeks or, far
more decisively, by the Romans, when they reduced the pre-Socratic truth as a-letheia (unconcealment) to veritas (the adequation of mind and thing),
when, that is, they reified (essentialized) the tentative disclosures of a still originative Platonic and Aristotelian thinking and harnessed them as
finalized, derivative conceptional categories to the ideological project of legitimizing, extending, and efficiently administering the Roman Empire in the
name of the Pax Romana. To be more specific, this reconstellated destructive genealogy will show that the reality of the triumphant American
democratic/capitalist polity rests on a fabricated ontological base that privileges the hierarchically structured binarist principle of principlesthat
identity is the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way aroundand that, therefore, this polity is imperial in essence as well as in
its multisituated political practices. It will show, in other words, that, in representing being meta ta physica (from after or above beings temporal
disseminations), this ontological base generates a truth discourse that, far from being transparently objective, open to the
empirical event, is actually re-presentational, pan-optic, and retro-spective and, as such, utterly metaphorical and ideological. To
retrieve the now virtually forgotten, but extraordinarily resonant phrase Derrida coined to identify this truth discourse with European origins and
interests, it will show that the alleged disinterested truth discourse of the West is, in fact, a binarist white mythology.40 It will
show that its truth structuralizes or, more telling in the proximity of its sublimated metaphorics of temporal closure to the operations of colonization,
spatializes or territorializes the differential dynamics of temporality around a polyvalent (Eurocentric) Logos. I mean by this Logos a Transcendental
Signified or Principle of Presence invariably represented in Western history since the Romans codification of the domiciled colonus
(farmer/settler) as the binary opposite of the nomadic sylvestris (savage, literally, of the woods) in the form of a combination of indissolubly
related, hierarchically structured binary tropes of resolution or accommodationmost notably and enablingly, the centered circle, the panoptic eye
(and its light), and, not least, the maturation process (the clearing of the wilderness and the planting and cultivation of the original seed). It is, for
example, this relay of imperial tropes emanating from and circulating around the presiding Logos that informs Hegels imperial Philosophy of History,
epitomized by the incantatory repetition of World History) in the following famous passage on Enlightenment: The History of the World travels
from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. The History of the World has an East kat exochen (the term East in
itself is entirely relative), for although the Earth forms a sphere, History performs no circle round it, but has on the contrary a determinate East, viz.,
Asia. Here rises the outward physical Sun, and in the West it sinks down: here consentaneously rises the Sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a
nobler brilliance. The History of the World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and
conferring subjective freedom.41 And, I will show in chapter 6, it is this relay of imperial tropes, subsumed to the Hegelian paradigm by Fukuyama, that
has pervaded the unexceptionalist discourse of American exceptionalism from the Puritan jeremiad in behalf of the errand in the wilderness, through
the discourse of the frontier in behalf of the fulfillment of Americas Manifest Destiny, to that of the post-9/11 effort to recuperate the American
national identity in the wake of the Vietnam War. More immediately, the reconstellation of destructive genealogy into the post-Cold War occasion will
show that the relay of binarist white metaphors informing the truth discourse of the triumphant post- Enlightenment democratic/capitalist society
constitutes a naturalized diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.42 Contrary to the representation of the reigning disciplinary
power is operative simultaneously, however unevenly
interpretation of being, this hegemonic diagram of
at any particular historical specific occasion, throughout the continuum of being, from the representation of being
and the subject as such, through gender and race, to culture, economics, and the national and international polity. It is, in short, polyvalent in its
imperial applications.
 AT: Cede the Political
The political is a metaphysical wasteland for black and brown bodies.
The politics of respectability and the necessity of whiteness as a
grammar for engaging politics make the ontological nature of black
violence absolutely antagonistic to civils society.

Their attempt to unite us together in a collective celebration of the

state is one that overlooks the death of democracy and simulates
enemies resulting in escalatory violence to preempt threats to
Western identity
Abbinnett 12 (Ross, Ph.D., Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of
Birmingham, England, Machiavellis Double: Power, Simulation, and Hyper-Sovereignty
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-abbinnett.html)
This reshaping of the geopolitical imagination requires a massive deployment of the resources of simulation, and, for Baudrillard, it
is in America that the definitive formation of Western hyper-sovereignty takes place. This is anticipated in the remarks Baudrillard
made in 1986 on the astral trajectory of American culture, in which the immanence and material transcription of all values has
been reduced to the expansive regime of the hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1993: 28).Thus, once the events of 9/11 have been determined as
politics in America
the beginning of a War on Terror that the West must win at all costs, a process begins in which
becomes the performance of a national unity that is without schism or fracture;
the pure self-determination of one nation happy and free under God. In a state
that has become increasingly void of normative authority, and which has been
pared down to the punitive functions that orbital capital demands of it, the sense
of symbolic community is restored through the simulation of the natural enemy.
The logic of this process, as it has taken pace in America since 9/11, is significant because it is not simply the exchange of the menace
of the Soviet Union for the threat of Islam. The imagination of the enemy has been completely transformed: Islamic
fundamentalism becomes a simulacrum that is simultaneously identical with particular states (Iran, Iraq, Pakistan etc)
and with the cellular networks of al Qaeda, it combines the fanaticism of non-Christian religion with the technological skill of the
terrorist, and as such it
is devoid of the basic values of honour and integrity that once allowed it
to be an enemy in the Western sense of the term (Schmitt, 1996: 27-37). The Soviets at least were adversaries against
whom it was possible to conduct a proper war (albeit a cold one); Islamic fundamentalism, on the other hand, has become an evil
cipher that is without determinate form or limit. The representation of Islam that takes hold in the US therefore
excludes the possibility of ethical conflict, and it is this exclusion that has transformed politics in America
since 9/11. For Baudrillard, those developing nations who have pledged themselves to the hyper-accumulative model of capitalism
(China, India, Japan etc) enter into an unstable relationship of attraction and repulsion with the West, while those who retain a
theocratic structure (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan etc) are the ones that are destined to refuse the fatal promise to be better mimics of
Western culture. It is this refusal to participate in the cycle of pornographic disclosure to which Enlightenment has been reduced
that has determined the cosmopolitical interventions of the US. For given that America
has now virtually
abandoned a democratic process based on opposition and dialogue, and that
elections are little more than a contestation of idols and personalities, politics in the US has become a
brutal enforcement of power that takes place both at home and abroad. The election of George W. Bush as
President and of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California represents the complete
exchangeability of simulation and politics: both have made reputations as strongmen who are able to cut
through the complexities of democratic representation (including human rights and the electoral process itself), and to destroy those
who threaten the American way of life (Baudrillard, 2010: p. 19). With the parodic figures of Bush and Schwarzenegger therefore, we
have reached the point at which simulation has overwhelmed the order of political power: the relationship between existential force
of character, political judgement, and military skill that is the essence of Machiavellis prince is dissolved, and we are left with
more stupid and
ciphers who can only perform the rhetoric of power and chastisement they symbolize. Indeed, the
violent the response (the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 for example), the more chance there is it
will succeed in persuading the masses to support the action. And so the US becomes the global defender of
hyper-consumption, obscenity, and indifference: the punisher of those who refuse subscription to the most disenchanted models
(Baudrillard, 2010: 24). At the end of the previous section I suggested that the question that is raised by the doubling of
Machiavellis political aesthetics, is essentially related to the fate of sovereign violence after Auschwitz. For Adorno, the stark truth
that the death camps reveal to us is the violence that persists within the rational organization of modernity. And so we, as the
inheritors of the Holocaust, are placed under an obligation to keep watch over the technological processes of representation and
erasure through which reified society reproduces itself. The doubling of Machiavellian sovereignty is a ruse of simulation, through
which the immediate demands of the state (for safety, happiness, and unity) can present themselves as absolutely unquestionable.
military excursions made by
From the first Gulf War onwards, Baudrillard has made it clear that, for him, the
America and the Western Alliance into the Middle East have not been wars, which
are marked by a roughly equal distribution of risk, but rather technological strikes
whose outcome has been decided before the first missile is launched (Baudrillard, 2001). In the first Gulf War in 1991, for example, a
survey commissioned by the American Air Force estimated that over twenty thousand Iraqi combatants were killed in the combined
air and ground campaigns, compared with two hundred and ninety four Americans (Thomas and Cohen, 1993). Thus, the
Machiavellian imperative to pre-empt the danger posed by rogue states, and to
inflict the maximum possible damage with the smallest possible losses, becomes a
largely technological operation: it is a spectacle of remote destruction in which the risk of death lies almost entirely on
one side. Thus, in both The Intelligence of Evil and Carnival and Cannibal, Baudrillard presents the reduction to absurdity that is
implicit in this enactment of sovereignty; for as the symbolic threat posed by Islamic states is increased exponentially by the use
diplomacy is fatally diminished by the spectacle of
military force, so the communicative potential of
shock and awe (Baudrillard, 2005: 159-164; Baudrillard, 2010: 22-28). There is something profoundly disturbing in
Baudrillards account of the parodic sovereignties that have emerged since 9/11. For it discloses a redoubling of evil that takes place
through the connivance of each side, and the apparent lapsing of Enlightenment into the dream of pure utility. Thus, the feeling that
crystallizes in Baudrillards thought is the same one that haunts Adornos work; that the concepts which define the autonomous
subject (reflection, judgement, recognition), have been lost to the representational processes through which being returns to
dominate the life of the nation. The logic of sovereignty therefore becomes a matter of escalatory
violence, in which the antagonistic powers of East and West, Christianity and Islam, contrive to overwhelm every conciliatory
possibility that might arise from the regime of simulation. My own position on this follows a rather more qualified account of the
power of representation, which is close to the position Derrida expounds in Envoi. His argument is that it is the aesthetic figuration
of the real can never be technologically hermetic, for the envoi of being, its representative, has always been menaced by divisibility
and dissension (Derrida, 2007: 122). The image, in other words, always carries within it the trace of what, or who, it cannot
represent, and the possibility of events that exceed its encoding of the real (Abbinnett, 2008: 79-87). So, for example, we might look
to the difficulties America had in justifying the second Gulf War to what George W. Bush referred to as Old Europe, and in
constituting a new Western coalition.However, this is not to say that Baudrillards concept of the simulacrum, as the form in which
the image has virtually disposed of its difference from the real, does not menace the politics of hospitality that Derrida expounded in
his later work. And so in my concluding remarks I will look briefly at the transformation of hegemony that has taken place with the
rise of the Chinese economy, and the impact this has had on the dynamics of sovereignty in the globalized world.
 AT: Condo
Counter Interpretation negative gets 2 conditional advocacies
solves your offense.

Best policy option-many ideas must be compared to the aff in order to

find the best policy option, which is the point of the round

Reciprocity- The fact that the aff can perm and advocate multiple
perms means that the neg can run multiple conditional counterplans

Neg flex The aff has intrinsic advantages in terms of framing the
debate, giving both the first and last speeches, and win/loss
percentages prove. The neg needs a variety of approaches to answer
the aff.

Harder debate is better for debate-forces us to work harder, learn

more and make debate a more productive activity. It doesnt matter if
it is infinitely regressive or not.

We arent a moving target because we will have to pick one and

because the status quo is always an option. All arguments are
conditional. The aff will kick advantages and we can concede disads.
We can kick a CP

Skew Inevitable without a K or a CP wed just read 4 more DAs and 3

T violations. The 2AC is hard no matter what.

Reject the Arg not the team make them prove abuse in round.
 AT: Empiricism
The 1acs allegiance to empiricism is aligned with the interests of the
far right and serves to fundamentally suture the innate chaos of being
turns the aff.
Schroeder 8 (Jeanne, Prof of Law @ Cardozo Law School, The Four Lacanian
Discourses: Or Turning Law Inside-Out, Birkbeck Law Press, page 53-55) We dont endorse
gendered language.
S2 now occupies the position formally held by S1, a occupies the position formally held by S2, etc. Consequently, the agent of this
discourse is S2he who has knowledge.2 In this context, knowledge is not merely implicit (i.e. savoir faire), but is expressly claimed
(expertise). The
university's discourse is meritocracyrule by experts who (are
supposed to) deserve their position by virtue of their superior knowledge 3 like the
Scarecrow who becomes Steward of Oz because of his superior brain after the Wizard, outed as a barred subject, returns to Omaha.4
The university's discourse is spoken not only by professors in universities but by
all who claim expertise necessary to set policy. It is spoken by the governor, not when she acts as an
"official" recognizing positive law, but when she seeks to justify her rule. A judicial opinion that explains the judge's verdict also falls
within the realm of university's discourse. Why does the master's discourse generate the university's? Because of the impetus that
drives Lon Fuller to insist on law's moral content, Ronald Dworkin to demand that law be interpreted so that it best "fits,"5 and
judges to write elaborate opinions. That is, the fact that positive law's status as law is logically contentless makes it unsatisfactory
even from the internal viewpoint. Every law has content as an empirical matter. The legislators enacting positive law presumably
have some purpose in mind. Even the official who believes that he should obey law just because it is law nevertheless also wants to
be a moral agent who does the right thinghe wants to obey the law because it is just. Being excluded from the law, "morality" (i.e.
purpose, content) serves as its desire. The subject desires to be moral rather than merely legal. The agent of the university's
discourse addresses the a6that which stands in for what is lacking in the master's discourse produced by exclusion.7 In the context
of law, the little a is the specific purpose, substantive, or moralistic content of positive law that Lon Fuller invokes, but H.L.A. Hart
refuses to recognize in their Harvard debate. It is social policy. If
the master's discourse merely identifies
the primary rules that must be obeyed, the university's discourse justifies the
primary rules with respect to its substantive content. The truth, hidden in the lower left, is S1, the
master signifier8power. The discourse that claims to explain and rationalize the
aims of society always ends up justifying existing ordereither the status quo, or a
substitute one.9 Rather than seeking morality per se the university's discourse imposes social policies (moralisms) as its little
a. In Fink's words, the university "has always served the master, has always placed itself in the service of rationalizing and propping
up the master's discourse, as has the worst kind of science."10 Consequently, the university's discourse is a discourse of power.
Lacan suggests a historical relationship between the master's and university's discourses, the latter being a "sort of legitimation or
rationalization of the master's will."11 The
university makes a master's claims to brute power
more palatable through veiling. Lacan suggests that the university's discourse has largely superseded the master's
as the dominant discourse of modernity. As the persistence of positivism shows, however, Lacan is partly wrong. The university does
not supersede the master, but rules as Steward, preserving the master's place.12 The product in the lower right position in the
quadripode is the alienated barred subject herself.13 The university's discourse that scientizes and explains the subject's desire has
no room for the individual subject and her suffering.14 The expert seeks to maximize the desideratum of society generally, and
subjects all subjects to this goal. By making society's object cause of desire into a subject of study, this discourse splits the individual
subject from her subjective desire. This is the violence of this discourse of power.15 Of course, in actual universities the most obvious
subject identified by Lacan as split and alienated from himself is the student himself. 16 Lacan calls this the university's discourse
not because it should be spoken in the university, but because it is too often spoken there. Lacan believes that when one speaks the
university's discourse one is indifferent to whether the speaker or the person addressed actually achieves a true understanding.17
Professors (perhaps unconsciously) frequently care more about their prestige in academia and in society; students are merely a
means to that end. Consequently, students become alienated from the enterprise, parroting
what their teachers say rather than seeking to create their own knowledge. Of course, I write this not as a outsider, but as a
participant in this system. Lacan
universalizes this analysis, arguing that the university's
discourse (rule by experts) dominates modern society policy. Experts do not address the
subjects subjected to law directly to ask what their subjective desires are. The expert's concern is "objective" he addresses the
collective goals ("little a") of society as a whole. In the name of a free society, policy science fundamentally mistrusts the
individualistic freedom of its members who might interfere with its grand plans. In the preceding chapter I damn the master's
discourse of Hartian positivism with the faint praise that it is a necessary but inadequate aspect of a legal system. It necessarily leads
to the university's discourse that addresses itself precisely to the substantive content that positive law refuses to acknowledge.
Although I acknowledge that the university's discourse is also a necessary aspect of any legal system, this chapter is a polemic
proclaiming it not merely inadequate but hegemonic. As the second power discourse the university's discourse
despises individual freedom as much as the master's discourse. It is more subtle and potentially more dangerous. If the master
merely asserts that he must be obeyed, the university insists that it deserves to be obeyed. This means that despite the fact that the
university addresses itself to the law's substantive content, and occasionally critiques the content of specific laws, it is not in a
position to critique the power of law per se. Rather, its function
is to provide justifications and
rationalizations for the status quo and, by suggesting incremental improvements,
to assure that the status quo is more effective in imposing its power over others.
 AT: Fairness
Fairness skew is structurally inevitable and self-correcting through
community norms.

Predictability and fairness are slave values and cause ressentiment

affirm unpredictability as master morality
Hatab 95 (Lawrence J. Prof of Philosophy at Old Dominion University, A Nietzschean
Defense of Democracy: An Experiemnt in Postmodern politics, Open Court Publishing
Company; Peru: Illinois. P 26-28)
According to slave morality, anything that opposes, destroys, or conquers is evil and should be eliminated from human intercourse.
In master morality, however, strife, opposition, and danger are necessary for the sense of
power and accomplishment that are essential for goodness. Harmlessness and security, which are good for the slave, are an
embarrassment and encumbrance for the master. Slave morality reverses master morality and recommends humility, selflessness,
and kindness as the measure for all human beings-but only out of a condition of weakness and as a strategy for self-protection and
self-enhancement. Slave
morality seeks the simultaneous exaltation of the weak and
incapacitation of the strong; but in doing so, slave types find enhancement not through their own agency but
through the debilitation of others. Nietzsche's target here is generally the Judeo-Christian ethic. The stories and exemplars
embodying this moral outlook have promoted the ideal of supplanting worldly power with justice and love. In the context of
a disguised form of power, in that it is meant to
cultural history, however, Nietzsche sees in this ideal
protect and preserve a certain type of life; even more, the images depicting divine punishment of the wicked
suggest to Nietzsche that the slave type has simply deferred its own interest in conquest {GM I,15). Both master and slave moralities,
therefore, are expressions of will to power. A current distinction in the literature draws from Nietzsche's differentiation of aktive and
reaktive attitudes (GM II, 11), and stipulates that the master
expresses active will to power, while the
slave expresses reactive will to power.5 The slave has no genuine agency and
therefore can compensate only by reacting to an external threat and attempting to annul it.
For Nietzsche, slave morality is not immediately an affirmation of a good, but a denial of something dangerous and fearful, and he
grounds this evaluation-by-negation in the psychological category of resentments.6 The slave revolt in morality begins when
ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that arc denied the true reaction, that of
deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble
morality develops From a
triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is
outside, what is different, what is not itself; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-
positing eyethis need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneselfis of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist,
slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at allits
action is fundamentally reaction. (GM I,10) For Nietzsche, the difference between active and reactive will to power, between
affirmation and resentment, is a fundamental issue that bears on all intellectual and cultural topics. The general question is the
ability or inability to affirm a finite world of limits, losses, conflicts, and dangers (see Z II,20 and TI 2,1); but the social arena is a
particularly important subject for our study. In effect, Nietzsche is trying to subvert longstanding social values that are animated by
notions of universality, equality, harmony, comfort, protection, and the likeseemingly positive
notions that Nietzsche insists are connivances of negative attitudes: fear of danger and difference, hatred of suffering,
resentment of, and revenge against, excellence, superiority, and domination. In the ascendancy of the slave mentality, Nietzsche sees
three lower types of life-the oppressed, the mediocre, and the discontentedretaliating against and subduing three successful
types of lifethe ruling class, exceptional individuals, and the highspirited (WP 215). Moral judgments and condemnations
constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limitedalso a sort of compensation for having been ill-
favored by nature. (BGE 219)7 With literal slavery disappearing,8 Nietzsche tends to designate this condition of weakness and its
slave attitude as the herd instinct, which is continually seeking to exercise its
voluntary perpetuation of the
own mode of power by enforcing conformity and comfort. In so doing it protects the self-
esteem of ordinary humans by neutralizing differences and denigrating excellence.
In this light, we can better understand Nietzsche's attack on democratic egalitarianism.
 AT: Individual Focus
Individual focus is uniquely violent the reformist narratives of the
1ac obfuscate a larger structural understanding of political violence.
Dean Spade, 2011, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the
Limits of the Law, P.20-21
Social movements engaged in resistance have given us a very different portrayal of the United States than what is taught in most
elementary school classrooms and textbooks. The patriotic narrative delivered at school tells us a few key
lies about US law and politics: that the United States is a democracy in which law and policy derive from what a
majority of people think is best, that the United States used to be racist and sexist but is now
fair and neutral thanks to changes in the law, and that if particular groups
experience harm, they can appeal to the law for protection. Social movements have
challenged this narrative, identifying the United States as a settler colony and a racial project, founded and built
through genocide and enslavement.3 They have shown that the United States has always had laws
that arrange people through categories of indigeneity, race, gender, ability, and national origin to produce
populations with different levels of vulnerability to economic exploitation, violence, and
poverty. These counter narratives have challenged the notion that violence is a result of private individuals with bad ideas and that
the state is where we should look for protection from such violence. Conversely, resistant political theorists and social movements
have helped us understand the concept of state
violence, which has been essential for exposing the
central harms faced by native people, women, people of color, people with
disabilities, and immigrants. They have exposed that state programs and law enforcement
are not the arbiters of justice, protection, and safety but are instead sponsors and
sites of violence. Additionally, this work has developed the understanding that power is decentralized and
that certain practices, ways of knowing, norms, and technologies of power are
distributed in myriad ways rather than only from a single person or institution. It has cautioned us against an overly
narrow, simplified vision of power that sees power as a possession primarily held by government officials.4 This perspective
eliminates the false notion that we could win the change people need simply by using the electoral process to vote in certain
representatives or pass certain laws. It helps us investigate how the norms that produce conditions of disparity and violence emerge
from multiple, interwoven locations, and recognize possibilities for resistance as similarly dispersed.
 AT: Infiltration
This process is a joke the ontological nature of black violence makes
the process of rising through the ranks structurally impossible
Ate, 15 -- One Web For All co-founder [Faruk, designer, developer, and activist, "The
Professional Gap Of Privilege," 1-16-15, https://the-pastry-box-project.net/faruk-ates/2015-
january-16, accessed 1-19-15]
One common counter-argument often made against things like diversity quotas or efforts is that we should
just hire for the best skills and talents, not attributes. But how do you hone your skills? You
practice them. You make things, you try out new things, and you learn new things in the process and you get better, more
skilled. There are only 24 hours to a day for each and every one of us. So if you have to dedicate
time each and every day to fight for your right to exist in a space or industry, or spend time
fighting off harassment or threats and reporting them, then that is time you
cannot spend on honing your skills . That is time you cannot spend asking
your mentors for advice or trying out a new programming language. This is how the system is rigged :
by making it harder for the disenfranchised to rise up and join the privileged on an
equal level, it actively tries to maintain and widen the gap between the demographics. Youre not as good a programmer? Well,
practice some more, then. Youre getting abuse and threats sent to you? Sorry to hear that, cant help. Wait, why arent you
practicing programming? I guess you just arent that into programming after all. One question job interviews never ask is: How
much time do you spend each day fighting for your right to be here and receive basic human respect from others? It may seem like a
strange question, but if that answer is zero for you it may come as a surprise to hear that it can be as high as most of the day for
that gap that can naturally widen if we do not take corrective measure as a whole that
others. It is
bothers me, but it is a symptom, not a cause. The
cause is people not being equipped with the right
knowledge and tools and awareness , and thats generally not their fault.
 AT: Law/State Inevitable
The law and the state are inevitable in form not content just because
some structure might exist to manage people in general does not
mean the legal institutions of white supremacy are inevitable.

The alternative generates uniqueness orienting ourselves towards

the absolute destruction of white society makes the demolition of the
structures of white supremacy, like the law or the state inevitable.
 AT: Legal Education
The body of legal scholarship has been hyperrealized the activist
posture of the 1ac is trapped in within the regime of legalistic
thinking. The law is not a body, but instead a spectre that haunts and
sculpts social relations around the dominant order.
Schlag 9 [Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research,
University of Colorado Law School, ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law,
and the Rank Anxiety of Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art), March, 2009,
Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo. L.J. 803]
G. WHY THINGS WILL GET WORSE Two things: Personnel and Institutionalization. Personnel. Well, enough on that subject.
Institutionalization. Ironically, it is at
this very moment--the moment when legal scholarship
seems so thoroughly compromised--that law schools have decided, seemingly en masse, to
intensify the monitoring of scholarly quality and quantity as well as to enforce
scholarly output maximization strategies. Law faculties and administration are all increasingly heavily
invested in mentoring, career positioning, SSRN download rates, citation indices, article placement strategies, blog announcements,
and glossy scholarship advertising. It's all a kind of massive "no law professor left behind" scheme.
All these techniques and strategies are ways in which law professors and law schools can all watch each other with great ease and in
great detail. The important part is not so much the watching, but rather that we all know we are being watched. It's
as if we,
who are responsible for all this (and this would seem to be nearly all of us), had
read Foucault's account of the
panopticon and [*831] decided it was way cool and that we should institute our own
version as soon as possible. The upshot sadly is that, at the very moment (1) that some terribly unenlightening paradigms are
holding sway over legal scholarship, we also have (2) a radical intensification of quantity and quality control mechanisms. For my
part, I believe it would vastly improve matters if at least one of those two things were not happening. Things will get worse. On the
cheery side, one can always count on (1) the contributions of exogenous forces and (2) the fact that Malthus was and still is wrong.
I'm a reasonable person (as well as a law professor) so all I came back with was one really tiny insight. Not only is it tiny, but it's not
even very original. And it begins like this: There is something pervasively neurotic about the structures of contemporary life. The
excruciating intricacies of everyday demands, the symbolic overinvestment of
meaning in the trivial, the obsessive monitoring of everything to within an inch of its life, the constant piling on of little
local meta- and infra-layers of thought--all these things are, from the [*832] perspective of the river,
pervasively neurotic. n64 Contemporary life ensnares us in all sorts of little maze-games that seem to matter
tremendously and yet ultimately do not--except in the negative sense that they distract our attention from what does or at least could
matter. Now, lots of people have had this sort of insight--the most famous perhaps being Heidegger (the "fallenness" thing). n65 But
my insight, and it really isn't much of an insight at all, is about legal scholarship. I think the practices and institutions of
legal scholarship (spam jurisprudence, case law journalism, rank anxiety, nothing happening, etc.) are
contemporary
extremely intense versions of this generalized neurotic structure. It's as if we were all
working really hard on an imaginary bus schedule. Someone writes an article saying we need to optimize the number of buses.
Another person can't resist pointing out that it might be preferable to start by optimizing the number of bus stops instead. Soon
someone writes that we should reconstruct the entire schedule. Someone else will suggest that we should split the schedule along
eight different parts. Someone says, the eight parts are really sixteen. Some truly original thinker says there are ten. And then, some
ranker comes along and starts ranking whose law school has the best bus scheduling program going. And somebody else decides to
hold a symposium on bus schedule rankings. (Remember the traveling show on Bush v. Gore?) n66 And then fifty years from now,
someone will write a book: How Should the Bus Schedules of 2000-Whatever Have Been Decided? n67 Pretty soon, we've got a
collective imaginary going and we're pushing buses and bus stops all across pages of the Yale Law Journal and it all feels kind of real
and pretty important. And it's not hard to believe that it's important. For one thing people are getting real rewards--prestige jobs,
chairs, program funding--for [*833] imaginary bus schedule breakthroughs. And adding to the increasing reality of the thing is the
we can't just dismiss buses or bus schedules as unreal. (If everything
undeniable fact that
else fails, by the way, this is your takeaway: Buses are real.) But the thing of it is, our legal
academic bus schedule remains imaginary. Even if it looks a lot like the real thing, it's still imaginary.
When we put out our bus schedule, no buses run. Word. And no Rapid Transit District (RTD) that I
know of is going to change its schedule just because some new bus stop entries have been introduced in the pages of the Yale Law
Journal or wherever. Not going to happen. So here we are, legal academics working on our collective imaginary bus schedule. And
one of the things that troubles me about this is that the imaginary bus schedule is in some important ways not at all like the RTD's
bus schedule. The RTD faces real stakes. We legal academics don't. Our reality principle--to the extent we have one at all--is
decidedly indeterminate: get tenure/avoid showing cause. So if we want to construct a bus schedule with stops every ten yards (all in
the name of rigor or precision) then we can have at it. And realize, please, that I'm not being extreme here. It's not like this hasn't
been done. Over and over again. n68 And then there's the normativity thing. I once read an article that purported to elaborate about
what the Constitution should be. Now what struck me as odd was that the author really did want to free himself (and his reader)
from any official pronouncements of what the Constitution is. This struck me as incredibly weird. What an odd thing to do. If the
question "What should the Constitution be?" is not anchored in what the Constitution is (whatever that might be), then why not go
for broke: I say let's have a constitution that guarantees universal health care, tastes a lot like Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and is laugh-
out-loud funny. You leave it to me? I say: Go big. Is this flip? Well, of course, it is. But hey, I'm not the one who invented this practice
of normative legal thought. I'm just pointing it out. In fact, that's what I do these days. Check that: It's what I used to do. I used to
have a pretty good job as a satirist. Good working conditions. Not much competition. I'm out of business now: Legal thought
satirizes itself. For me now, it's all just point and shoot. There's something gratuitous about legal scholarship. No one, of course,
what is it that precludes anyone
writes that the constitution should be like Ben & Jerry's ice cream. But just
from suggesting that the Constitution should guarantee universal health care. (I'd be
in favor--I really would.) The answer: [*834] there are constraints on what we argue. Sure there
are. n69 And who generates . . . the constraints? Well, in part, we do: n70 So what we
have is an imaginary legal thought shaped by imaginary collective constraints, one of
which is the injunction that we should follow those constraints with great rigor. My question: Is this a neurotic structure? Yes, it is.
Straight out--full-flower. It has to be because without the neurosis, there would be nothing there. No constraints at all. Now please
understand: As a matter of form, I have nothing against collective imaginaries. My only problem is this: if
we law
professors have to work so hard (and so painfully) on our collective imaginaries, couldn't
we pick something more interesting, or important, or aesthetically enlivening, or morally salient, or politically
relevant than bus schedules? I mean, couldn't we? Uh, no. Which raises perhaps my final point. It's not very nice, but someone's got
to say it, and apparently it's going to be me. As mentioned earlier, our people are not cognitively challenged. They are, bell curve and
all, very intelligent. It is easy then for people like you and I, when we look at the extreme intricacy of the work produced by these
very intelligent people, to associate the intricacy of their work with their manifest intelligence. Indeed, we are likely to think of the
relation in reciprocal terms: Because they are intelligent, their work is intricate, and because their work is intricate, it shows great
intelligence. n71 But the thing I want to suggest as a possibility here is that all this intricacy of legal scholarship is less a function of
intelligence than it is a manifestation of neurosis in the face of intractable conflicts. What conflicts? Consider the prototypical needs
of the legal academic: A need to display great intelligence in a discourse (law) that will ultimately not bear it. A need to contribute to
disciplinary knowledge in a discourse which is not really about knowledge or truth in any profound sense of those terms. A
need
to say something intellectually respectable within a disciplinary paradigm that we know, on some level, is
intellectually compromised. [*835] A need to display control over social, political, and economic transactions that
are in important senses not subject to control. A need to activate moral and political virtue in a discourse that uses both largely as
window dressing. A need to make one's thought seem real and consequential in a discourse that is neither. I want to suggest then,
and this is perhaps the unkindest cut of all, that within the dominant paradigm of legal scholarship, it may be that there is very little
of enduring value to be said. In the main it's the rehearsal of a form, a genre--and not a self-evidently good one. n72 I have a cheery
ending and a not so cheery ending The cheery ending is that it has
not always been like this. And, maybe it
doesn't have to be like this now. The non-cheery ending goes like this: It's going to get worse in many ways. The forces are
in play--the rankings, the administrators who want to enhance the reps of their schools, the status insecurities of young (and old)
faculty members, the pervasive triumph of porno (ahem, ahem, told you so) n73--all these forces will converge to produce ever more
spam jurisprudence. And then something else will happen.
 AT: Moots 1AC
The 1ac was 8 minutes of offense this argument is silly and you
should gut check negative. If you cant actively justify the arguments
you read you should not be reading them.

This argument is silly if we win an epistemological or ontological

indict of the 1ac you should disregard the whole thing
HSI 13 (Hsimpact.com, Website about high school debate, Epistemology- Defending Your
House, 10/16/13, http://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/epistemology-defending-your-
house)
When negatives introduce a K of epistemology the responses of most affirmatives
are incoherent. Epistemology arguments call into question how you know the
things you presented in your 1AC are accurate/true. At its most basic level a bias argument is a k of
epistemology- your authors let their ideology get in the way of their reporting and therefore your evidence is suspect. At a more
complicated level epistemology
ks indict schools of thought or branches of the academy
and the way they produce knowledge. Those air quotes are important: most affirmatives who dont
understand K arguments think something like this our 1AC is a series of facts about the world, my partner and I serve as
intermediaries relating these facts to the judge. A crucial postmodern insight is that observation
is not a passive
exercise but an active attempt to impose order on the world. Your 1AC didnt come
into being naturally- you picked evidence and put it together to make a certain set
of arguments. Your authors underwent a similar process. Even if there are factual
claims in your 1AC (in a sense of as close as we can get to facts) the conclusions and arguments
made based on those facts are not truth in any meaningful sense of the world. Lets
look at a simple example from the recent space topic. Many affirmatives argued in favor of space militarization based on the idea
that the PRC was in the process of militarizing space in order to counter US capabilities. Now affirmative authors and negative
authors stipulate to a certain set of facts: that the PRC tested an ASAT capable weapon in 2007, that the Chinese and American
militaries have had a less than rosy relationship in the last decade, that Chinas growth puts it in a position of power similar to that of
the US etc (not all authors agree on all obvi). What the China threat K is saying is not china did not test a weapon but instead that
the way the affirmative deduces motive and based on that motive a foreign policy objective and ascribes it to the PRC is problematic.
It assumes a benevolent US space presence that is under threat from China instead of assuming that China is defending its own
legitimate space interests from US attack for example. So what the epistemology K is saying here is not
no truth , but instead that the affirmatives version of the truth is not NEUTRAL
and OBJECTIVE. These words neutral and objective generally mean that some kind of information is not influenced by
ideology or politics-which the affirmatives China advantage almost certainly is. Now, when faced with such an
argument the affirmative usually responds with some or all of the following 1. Well
we should get to weigh our aff- this is total nonsense and not an argument. If you find
yourself saying this in a debate slap yourself in the face three times. This is not a framework, this is not a
form of impact calculus, it is the argumentative equivalent of a null set . Imagine this: Aff:
AQ threatening terrorist attacks with aliens on American Flag stores- fox news 13 Neg: well fox news is not a credible source Aff:
Well we should get to weigh our aff Neg: Yes you do get to weigh your aff, unfortunately your aff is
a steaming pile of crap so .00001 percent of the dip cap DA outweighs it Aff: But its our
aff and we would like to weight it Judge: I vote neg on the Dip Cap DA for the first time ever Weighing your aff
presupposes that your aff has some value, and epistemology Ks call that weight
into question. This is the K concept of logically prior- before you can weigh
something you have to decide how much it weighs/how to assign it weight. Instead
of arguing you GET to weigh things you need to be arguing that they have weight.
 AT: Policy Education
You definitely dont access policy debate good offense form matters
Hester 13. This is a note posted to the CEDA Forums. The note is from Mike Hester, an extremely successful and influential
policy debate coach at University of West Georgia. I have had a lot of respect for him through the years. -Alfred Snider, editor
November 22, 2013, 01:27:03 AM. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5407.msg11974.html#msg11974
To whom it may concern, CEDA-NDT Debate is a hot mess right now. There are so many things wrong, it
can sometimes seem like they're all related. Maybe they are (reference Homer Simpson's "one big ball of lies" explanation to Marge),
but a delineation may still provide some guidance as to what we can change, what we may have to accept, and where (if anywhere)
we may go from here... the foundation We no longer have one, and haven't for more than two decades. Fewer and fewer debate
coaches are communication scholars, which is fine because Communication Departments don't consider us anything more than the
bastard cousins who show up at the family reunion piss-drunk and demanding more potato salad. Our activity long ago
(40 years?) lost any resemblance to a public speaking event attracting outside audiences.
The problem is we vacated that academic space without being able to find a home anywhere else. Despite the
pious assumptions of some with "policy" in mind, we are not a legitimate "research" community of
scholars. The "portable skills" we currently engrain in our students via practice are: all sources are equivalent,
no need for qualifications; "quoting" a source simply means underlining ANY words found ANYWHERE
in the document, context and intent are irrelevant; and we are the only group
outside of Faux News that believes one's argument is improved by taking every
point of logic to its most absurd extreme. Simply put, 99.9% of the speech docs
produced in debates would receive no better than a C (more likely F) in any upper division
undergraduate research-based class. Comically, we are the public speaking research activity that is
atrocious at oral persuasion and woefully in violation of any standard research
practices. But this letter is not intended to bury Debate, even though it's hard to praise it in its current state. Before any peace
treaty ending the Paradigm Wars can be signed and ratified, an honest appraisal of where Debate fits in the Academy is necessary.
 AT: Prove Aff Bad
The entire kritik is a reason the aff is bad. If we win you continue neo-
slave-like conditions and cause lashout that is a material consequence
of the 1ac.
 AT: Roleplaying
Focus on largescale politics absolves us of personal responsibility
triggers violence
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Prof @ Al-Akhawayn U, The Will to Violence: The Politics of
Personal Behavior, p. 10-11)
'We are the war' does not mean that
the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely
by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and
profiteers or, as, Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of' collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible
for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equival- ent of a universal
acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their
diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of
power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to
hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective
'assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas
of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence,
our own power and our own responsibility - leading to the well-known illusion of
our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political
disillusionment. Single citizens - even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in
their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia
and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia - since the decisions for such events are always made
elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general
or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no
responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the respons- ibility we do have
within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between
our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own
personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized irresponsibility', upholding the
apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually or- ganized separate
competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major
powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say, about a war,
because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where
the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to
engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'What would I do if I were the
general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since
we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly
effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any
question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative
insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I
obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more
prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention', 'I want to stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral
revolution. 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in co-called peace talks, namely as
Drakulic says, in
our non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own
thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of
prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our
'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't'- our readiness, in
other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others.' We share in
the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside
us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according: to the structures and the values of war and
violence. So if we move beyond the usual frame of violence, towards the structures of thought employed in decisions to act, this
also means making an analysis of action. This seems all the more urgent as action seems barely to be perceived
any longer. There is talk of the govern- ment doing 'nothing', of its 'inaction', of the need for
action, the time for action, the need for strategies, our inability to act as well as our desire to become 'active' again. We seem to
deem ourselves in a kind of action vacuum which, like the cosmic black hole, tends to consume any renewed effort only to increase
its size. Hence this is also an attempt to shift the focus again to the fact that we are continually acting and doing, and that there is no
such thing as not acting or doing nothing. Rather, the binary opposition of 'action' and 'no action'
seems to serve the simple evaluation of the good and the bad. We speak of being 'active' or wanting to be active again, where
being active in its simple vacuity is 'good', 'doing nothing' is rather bad, and where the quality of the action
seems secondary to the fact of action as such. Quite the reverse, however, if we analyse the past: there,
having 'done' anything bears the danger of it having been bad, since the results are available for analysis. Consequently, analyses of
the past tend to feature an abundance of victims, who as victims cannot by definition have done anything, and therefore cannot
either be 'guilty'. While descriptions of our future actions are thus distinguished by their vacuity - saying nothing about the kind of
activity and explaining nothing about its purpose - the past on the contrary seems to cry out for the writing of histories that explain
everything. In these rewritings of history asjustification, the mark of distinction for personal identity is no longer to have 'been
active', but on the contrary, to have been the passive victim - if not of actual deeds by others, at least of circumstances. In other
words, in the past we tend to have been passive, while in the future "we may become active. The present, however, is the eternal
present in which we inhabit states of being, our identity.
 AT: Scenario Planning
Gut check you are not scenario planning. Your evidence is not
specific to debate, but it is about college students doing peer-reviewed
research papers. Gluing cards together to make extinction impacts
does not meet that academic standard.

The normative heuristic you espouse solidifies an idealized rational

political subject antithetical to black life.
Mbembe 3 Achille Mbembe, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic
Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15(1): pg.13
edited for gendered language *
The aim of this essay is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of the Jews or to hold it up by way of example.6 I start
from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereigntyand therefore of the biopolitical.
Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged
normative theories of
democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important
elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty.7 From this perspective, the ultimate
expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of
free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-
consciousness, and self-representation. Politics, therefore, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of
agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war.8 In
other words, it ison the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-
modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the
subjector, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the process, to become a
fully moral agent. Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the
exercise of reason in the public sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a key element for
individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master
and the controlling author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-
institution and self-limitation (fixing ones own limits for oneself). The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in
societys capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and
imaginary significations.9 This strongly normative reading of the politics of sovereignty has been the object of numerous critiques,
which I will not rehearse here.10 My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is
not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human
existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations. Such
figures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigious insanity or an expression of a rupture between the impulses and
interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitute the nomos
of the political space in which we still live. Furthermore, contemporary experiences of human destruction suggest that it
is possible to develop a reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject different from the one we inherited from the philosophical
discourse of modernity. Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundational categories that
are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death. Significant for such a project is Hegels discussion of the relation between
death and the becoming subject. Hegels account of death centers on a bipartite concept of negativity. First, the human negates
nature (a negation exteriorized in the humans effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs); and second, he or she transforms the
negated element through work and struggle. In transforming nature, the human being creates a world; but in the process, he or she
also is exposed to his or her own negativity. Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary. It is the result of
risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the animal that constitutes the human subjects
natural being is defeated. In other words, the human being truly becomes a subjectthat is, separated from the animalin the
struggle and the work through which They* confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity). It is through this
confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history. Becoming
subject therefore
supposes upholding the work of death. To uphold the work of death is precisely how Hegel defines the life of
the Spirit. The life of the Spirit, he says, is not that life which is frightened of death, and spares itself destruction, but that life which
assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment.11 Politics
is
therefore death that lives a human life. Such, too, is the definition of absolute
knowledge and sovereignty: risking the entirety of ones life.