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*****Healthcare-SpecificDebate GoodPortable SkillsDebate helps student be articulate about health care policy that will affect them and those around themMirchandani 09 Srishti, undergraduate at Washington University St. Louis, “Why Students Should Care About Healthcare.” Student Life: The Independent Newspaper of Washington Unviersity in St. Louis, October 26, we like it or not, as we are college-age students, the outcome of this current health care policy debate is going to determine a great part of the rest of our lives and our future family’s lives more than any other age cohort. The issues that have been discussed in this article are not simply just part of another drawn-out, overly politicized and meaningless debacle in Washington. Instead, they are real challenges that affect millions of people everyday and whose solutions, whether meaningful or not, have the power to perpetuate or alleviate class divisions and exacerbate or provide answers to the disturbing deterioration of health in our nation. The issue of health care in our society is urgent, but it is also deeply affects our and our society’s long-term future. It is not up to our parents or our grandparents to fix. We are the ones that will be here for that future, and thus action, from us, must be reactive, loud, critical and, most importantly, heard.Solves ConservativesIntellectual debate helps defeat conservative deception on health care policyHempstead 7/27/17 Katherine, senior advisor for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as quoted in “What’s Missing in the U.S. Health Care Policy Debate,” Knowledge@Wharton, called for an informed debate similar to the “intellectual investment” the Obama administration made in selling the ACA to Congress and the American people. “This Republican effort is so not about policy and about the merit; it’s about … finding the right combination that will spring the lock open and let this sail through,” she said.Solves CritiquesDebates on health care policy spill over to other issues, including philosophy, and affect personal opinionKronenfeld, Parmet and Zezza 12 Drs. Jennie, Wendy, and Mark, Profs of Sociology at Arizona State U, Law at Northeastern U, and Senior Policy Analyst at the Commonwealth Fund, Description of Debates on U.S. Health Care, debates about the best solutions to health care in America have perennially erupted among politicians, scholars of public policy, medical professionals, and the general public. The fight over the Health Care Reform Act of 2010 brought to light a multitude of fears, challenges, obstacles, and passions that often had the effect of complicating rather than clarifying the debate. The discourse has never been more heated. The complex issues that animate the health care debate have forced the American public to grapple with the exigencies of the present system with regard to economic, fiscal, and monetary policy, especially as they relate to philosophical, often ideologically driven approaches to the problem. Americans have also had to examine their ideas about the relationship of the individual to and interaction with the state and the varied social and cultural beliefs about what an American solution to the problem of health care looks like.Solves EducationStudies prove that debate on health care reform result in active learning and critical thinking. Even among novices.Nguyen and Hirsch 11 Drs. Vu Q. C. and Mark A., Residency Program Director and Research Scientist of the Dept of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Carolinas Medical Center, “Use of a Policy Debate to Teach Residents About Health Care Reform.” Journal of Graduate Medical Education, September, pp. 376-378, Resident education involves didactics and pedagogic strategies using a variety of tools and technologies in order to improve critical thinking skills. Debating is used in educational settings to improve critical thinking skills, but there have been no reports of its use in residency education. The present paper describes the use of debate to teach resident physicians about health care reform. Objective We aimed to describe the method of using a debate in graduate medical education. Methods Second-year through fourth-year physical medicine and rehabilitation residents participated in a moderated policy debate in which they deliberated whether the United States has one of the “best health care system(s) in the world.” Following the debate, the participants completed an unvalidated open-ended questionnaire about health care reform. Results Although residents expressed initial concerns about participating in a public debate on health care reform, all faculty and residents expressed that the debate was robust, animated, and enjoyed by all. Components of holding a successful debate on health care reform were noted to be: (1) getting “buy-in” from the resident physicians; (2) preparing the debate; and (3) follow-up. Conclusion The debate facilitated the study of a large, complex topic like health care reform. It created an active learning process. It encouraged learners to keenly attend to an opposing perspective while enthusiastically defending their position. We conclude that the use of debates as a teaching tool in resident education is valuable and should be explored further.Debate clarifies opinions for those lacking informationWaldman 6/29/17 Paul, senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post, “The Great Health-Care Debate of 2017 Has Been Immensely Clarifying.” The Week, debate has been clarifying in a number of ways, not least of which is that we now have a better idea than ever about what Americans actually believe when it comes to health care. They may not be all that well-informed as a group — particularly since this is a complex topic where even the most educated and informed consumers can get confused — but they understand more than they did a year ago, and their preferences have become pretty clear.Solves Health LiteracyDetailed information exchange, research, debate, and info-processing of health care policy is key to an informed citizenry that affect governmental processes and public health. Zarcadoolas et al. 5 (Christina Zarcadoolas, Andrew Pleasant, David S. Greer; “Understanding health literacy: an expanded model,” Health Promot Int (2005) 20 (2), p. 195-196)Our definition of health literacy leads directly to a multi-dimensional model for understanding and improving the public's health literacy. The model we propose in this article is characterized by four central domains—fundamental literacy, science literacy, civic literacy and cultural literacy. Fundamental literacy refers to the skills and strategies involved in reading, speaking, writing and interpreting numbers (numeracy). Science literacy refers to levels of competence with science and technology, including some awareness of the process of science. We specifically include: knowledge of fundamental scientific concepts, ability to comprehend technical complexity, an understanding of technology and an understanding of scientific uncertainty and that rapid change in the accepted science is possible. Civic literacy refers to abilities that enable citizens to become aware of public issues and to become involved in the decision-making process. Categories in this domain of health literacy include: media literacy skills, knowledge of civic and governmental processes and an awareness that individual health decisions can impact public health. Cultural literacy refers to the ability to recognize and use collective beliefs, customs, world-view and social identity in order to interpret and act on health information. This domain includes a recognition and skill on the communicator's part to frame health information to accommodate powerful cultural understandings of health information, science and individual and collective action (Kreps and Kunimoto, 1994).The university has a unique role in sparking social and political change in health care. Civic engagement empowers students to resolve society’s most pressing health issues and alleviate injustices.Freedman et al. 9 (Darcy A. Freedman, PhD, MPH, Kimberly D. Bess, PhD, Holly A. Tucker, PhD, David L. Boyd, PhD, Arleen M. Tuchman, PhD, Kenneth A. Wallston, PhD; “Public Health Literacy Defined,” American journal of preventive medicine, June 2009, p. 448-450)Three dimensions of public health literacy are identified: conceptual foundations, critical skills, and civic orientation. Each dimension has corresponding competencies. Public health literacy is socially, spatially, and temporally located. It consists of various types of knowledge and skills, including experience and oral traditions, as well as reading, writing, arithmetic, and higher education. Public health literacy is as much citizenbased as it is expert-driven, and it can take multiple forms, from voting to organizing grass-roots initiatives to establishing healthy policies and structures. The target population for promoting public health literacy is the entire public, not just public health and medical officials. The competencies within each dimension are not hierarchic, but rather summative: The greater the number of competencies, the higher the level of public health literacy and the greater the capacity to improve public health outcomes. Dimension 1: Conceptual Foundations The conceptual foundations dimension includes the basic knowledge and information needed to understand and take action on public health concerns. An individual or group demonstrating public health literacy at a conceptual level is able to define and discuss: ● core public health concepts such as primary prevention, health promotion, and population health; ● public health constructs such as prevalence, risk factors, probability, and ORs, and the relationship of each of these to morbidity and mortality; and ● ecologic perspectives and the multiple pathways through which disease is transmitted and health is promoted. Conceptual foundations of public health literacy call for a different kind of knowledge than that needed to promote individual health— knowledge that may be gained from sources ranging from classroom sessions to folklore. Such knowledge may or may not be technical in nature, but in all cases it is focused on health promotion and disease prevention at the population level. People or groups with high levels of public health literacy would focus on prevention rather than treatment and would take into account the multiple factors affecting health, including the role of community settings and structures, as well as individual behaviors and lifestyles. Dimension 2: Critical Skills The critical skills dimension relates to the skills necessary to obtain, process, evaluate, and act upon information needed to make public health decisions that benefit the community. An individual or group demonstrating public health literacy on this dimension is able to: ● obtain, evaluate, and utilize public health information from a variety of sources (e.g., health practitioners, media, social networks); ● identify public health aspects of personal and community concerns (e.g., urban planning, agricultural practices, violence); ● communicate information about health conditions and actions (e.g., smoking, obesity, handwashing) not only as a personal concern but also as a problem affecting the larger community; and ● assess who is naming and framing public health problems and solutions and describe the ways in which such framing is biographically, culturally, spatially, temporally, and institutionally bounded. Critical skills focus on promoting the health of the community rather than the health of individuals. In doing so, citizens are able to understand public health aspects of personal and community concerns. In addition, people or groups with high levels of public health literacy have the skills to communicate personal health conditions in terms of problems affecting the broader community and to shift conversations and actions about public health concerns from individual-level to community-level change. These skills tend to refocus discourse about public health problems as well as corresponding actions to reveal the biographic, cultural, spatial, temporal, and institutional constraints on understandings of public health. Dimension 3: Civic Orientation The civic orientation dimension ensures that “the public” remains at the center of public health literacy and includes the skills and resources necessary to address health concerns through civic engagement. An individual or group demonstrating public health literacy from a civic perspective is able to: ● articulate that the burdens and benefits of society are not fairly distributed; ● evaluate who benefits and who is harmed by public health efforts or lack thereof; ● communicate that current public health problems are not inevitable and can be changed through civic action; and ● address public health problems through civic action, leadership, and dialogue. Civic engagement calls for awareness of the ways that public goods, resources, burdens, and benefits are distributed; it is the first step toward civic action to advocate on behalf of the public’s health. Creating a population that is public health literate is critical, and the potential pathways for achieving this goal are numerous. First, efforts ought to focus on formal educational systems, including elementary and high schools, junior colleges, and 4-year colleges and universities. This type of training would be aimed at preparing people to become not necessarily public health professionals but rather more informed members of the public, and would thus prepare students to effectively address public health concerns from myriad perspectives (e.g., at work, as a voter, as a parent). Examples of this type of approach are already being developed.38,39 Second, there is a need to increase levels of public health literacy among the public at large. This increase may occur through the media (e.g., newspapers, magazines, television, radio, websites), along with communitybased or work-based initiatives. Recent efforts related to the 2008 PBS TV documentary series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? () are exemplary of this type of training. This seven-part series has been used by government agencies, communitybased organizations, faith-based groups, and others to explore racial and socioeconomic inequities in health and inspire groups to take action in an effort to redress these injustices. Finally, targeted training may be needed for professionals not formally trained in public health but whose work influences the health of the public. Efforts may target a specific health concern, such as childhood obesity, and then work to ensure relative stakeholders (e.g., school administrators, grocery store owners, legislators, media) are provided with opportunities to become more public health literate. An Agenda for the Future Public health literacy is important, and the challenge is to identify effective strategies for increasing it. A fivepart agenda for future public health literacy research and action is proposed. First, as advocated by Gazmararian et al.,29 measures of public health literacy should be developed. The three dimensions outlined above may be useful in the development of effective assessment instruments that would identify the extent to which individuals and groups are public health literate. Research would also explore the relationship between individual-level health literacy and public health literacy. Second, investigators should explore the full impact of low levels of public health literacy on both society and the decisions of various stakeholders in the healthcare system— consumers, providers, advocates, educators, administrators, policymakers, and elected officials. Third, efforts should be made to promote the incorporation of public health literacy into health literacy programs, formal educational systems, and informal educational networks. Interventions aimed at helping the public become more public health literate should be developed, implemented, and evaluated. Fourth, individuals and groups need to be empowered to translate increased public health literacy competencies into actions that will help resolve some of society’s more pressing health issues and alleviate social injustices. Finally, a broader model of health literacy should be put into practice. This expanded model would emphasize the interconnections between individual-level and societal-level constructs and highlight the ways that these constructs combine to influence the health and well-being of individuals and communities. This interactive model would enlarge the set of tools for devising short- and long-term health solutions for both individuals and the public.Health Literacy Good – Solves Personal AutonomyKnowledge of the intricacies of health and health care promotes social change and results in healthier people. S?rensen et al. 12 (Kristine S?rensen, Stephan Van den Broucke, James Fullam, Gerardine Doyle, Jürgen Pelikan, Zofia Slonska, Helmut Brand, Consortium Health Literacy Project European, “Health literacy and public health: A systematic review and integration of definitions and models,” BMC Public Health 12:80, p. 7-8)Apart from the dimensions of health literacy, the conceptual models summarized in Table 3 also give the main antecedents and consequences of health literacy outlined in the literature. For the antecedents, most authors refer to demographic, psychosocial, and cultural factors, as well as to more proximal factors such as general literacy, individual characteristics and prior experience with illness and the healthcare system. Among the demographic and social factors which impact on health literacy one notes socioeconomic status, occupation, employment, income, social support, culture and language [40], environmental and political forces [35], and media use [50]. In addition, peer and parental influences may impact on the health literacy of adolescents. In terms of personal characteristics, health literacy is predicted by age, race, gender and cultural background [50]; as well as by competences such as vision, hearing, verbal ability, memory and reasoning [40], physical abilities and social skills [50], and meta-cognitive skills associated with reading, comprehension, and numeracy [4, 48, 50]. The latter refers to the level of overall literacy, defined as the capacity to use printed and written information to function in society, achieve one's goals, and develop one's knowledge and potential. Finally, Nutbeam [36] points out that health literacy is also a result of health promotion actions such as education, social mobilization and advocacy. In terms of the consequences, a number of researchers pointed out that health literacy leads to improved self-reported health status, lower healthcare costs, increased health knowledge, shorter hospitalization, and less frequent use of healthcare services [43, 48, 50, 53]. According to Baker [49], these better health outcomes are caused by the acquisition of new knowledge, more positive attitudes, greater self-efficacy, and positive health behaviors associated with higher health literacy. Paashe-Orlow and Wolf [40] posit that health literacy influences three main factors which in turn have an impact on health outcomes: (1) navigation skills, self-efficacy and perceived barriers influence the access and utilization of healthcare; (2) knowledge, beliefs and participation in decision-making influence patient/provider interactions; and (3) motivation, problem-solving, self-efficacy, and knowledge and skills influence self care. The relationship of health literacy to health outcomes according to these authors must be conceived as a step function with a threshold effect, rather than in a simple linear fashion. People generally exist within a web of social relationships; and below a certain level of function, much of the day-to-day detail of chronic disease management often needs to be facilitated by others. While the interaction between health literacy and social support is likely to have complicated and subtle implications, the health impact of social effects has not been fully elucidated in the context of health literacy [54]. Nutbeam [36] distinguishes between individual and community or social benefits of health literacy. In terms of individual benefits, functional health literacy leads to an improved knowledge of risks and health services, and compliance with prescribed actions; interactive health literacy to an improved capacity to act independently, an improved motivation and more self-confidence; and critical health literacy to improved individual resilience to social and economic adversity. In terms of community and social benefits, functional health literacy increases the participation in population health programs; interactive health literacy enhances the capacity to influence social norms and interact with social groups; and critical health literacy improves community empowerment and enhances the capacity to act on social and economic determinants of health. Nutbeam's conceptual framework has been applied in case studies focusing on topics of diarrhea [55], self-management in diabetes [56] and health promoting schools [57]. Ratzan [58] links health literacy in the community to the concept of social capital, arguing that health literate people live longer and have stronger incentives to invest in developing their own and their children's knowledge and skills. Healthier populations tend to have higher labor market productivity contributing to, rather than withdrawing from, pension schemes. Similarly, healthier people use the health system less, and coupled with education and cognitive function, appropriately demand fewer health services.Health literacy skills foster greater personal autonomy and promote actions that overcome institutional barriers to health.S?rensen et al. 12 (Kristine S?rensen, Stephan Van den Broucke, James Fullam, Gerardine Doyle, Jürgen Pelikan, Zofia Slonska, Helmut Brand, Consortium Health Literacy Project European, “Health literacy and public health: A systematic review and integration of definitions and models,” BMC Public Health 12:80, p. 8-10)Whereas a number of conceptual models of health literacy have been presented in the literature, none of these can be regarded as sufficiently comprehensive to line up with the evolving health literacy definitions and with the competencies they imply [59]. This is probably due to the fact that attempts to conceptualize health literacy have thus far failed to integrate the existing knowledge encompassing different perspectives on health literacy. Firstly, most of the existing conceptual models are not sufficiently grounded in theory in terms of the notions and concepts included. Secondly, very few models have integrated the components included in "medical" and "public health" literacy models. The only models which explicitly try to bridge the difference between both views are Nutbeam's [36] and Manganello's [50], whose dimension of functional literacy corresponds with the cognitive skills of medical health literacy. Thirdly, while acknowledging that health literacy entails different dimensions, the majority of the existing models are rather static and do not explicitly account for the fact that health literacy is also a process, which involves the consecutive steps of accessing, understanding, processing and communicating information. Fourthly, while most conceptual models identify the factors that influence health literacy and mention its impact on health service use, health costs and health outcomes, the pathways linking health literacy to its antecedents and consequences are not very clear. Researchers could link conceptual models of health literacy more explicitly to established health promotion theories and models [59]. Finally, very few conceptual models of health literacy have been empirically validated. To address these shortcomings, we propose an integrated model of health literacy which captures the main dimensions of the existing conceptual models reviewed above (Figure 1). The model combines the qualities of a conceptual model outlining the main dimensions of health literacy (represented in the concentric oval shape in the middle of Figure 1), and of a logical model showing the proximal and distal factors which impact on health literacy, as well as the pathways linking health literacy to health outcomes. The core of the model shows the competencies related to the process of accessing, understanding, appraising and applying health-related information. According to the 'all inclusive' definition this process requires four types of competencies: (1) Access refers to the ability to seek, find and obtain health information; (2) Understand refers to the ability to comprehend the health information that is accessed; (3) Appraise describes the ability to interpret, filter, judge and evaluate the health information that has been accessed; and (4) Apply refers to the ability to communicate and use the information to make a decision to maintain and improve health. Each of these competences represents a crucial dimension of health literacy, requires specific cognitive qualities and depends on the quality of the information provided [60]: obtaining and accessing health information depends on understanding, timing and trustworthiness; understanding the information depends on expectations, perceived utility, individualization of outcomes, and interpretation of causalities; processing and appraisal of the information depends on the complexity, jargon and partial understandings of the information; and effective communication depends on comprehension. The competences also incorporate the qualities of functional, interactive and critical health literacy as proposed by Nutbeam [36]. This process generates knowledge and skills which enable a person to navigate three domains of the health continuum: being ill or as a patient in the healthcare setting, as a person at risk of disease in the disease prevention system, and as a citizen in relation to the health promotion efforts in the community, the work place, the educational system, the political arena and the market place. Going through the steps of the health literacy process in each of these three domains equips people to take control over their health by applying their general literacy and numerical skills as well as their specific health literacy skills to acquire the necessary information, understanding this information, critically analyzing and appraising it, and acting independently to engage in actions overcoming personal, structural, social and economical barriers to health. As contextual demands change over time, and the capacity to navigate the health system depends on cognitive and psychosocial development as well as on previous and current experiences, the skills and competencies of health literacy develop during the life course and are linked to life long learning. The frameworks associated with the three domains represent a progression from an individual towards a population perspective. As such, the model integrates the "medical" conceptualization of health literacy with the broader "public health" perspective. Placing greater emphasis on heath literacy outside of healthcare settings has the potential to impact on preventative health and reduce pressures on health systems. The combination of the four dimensions referring to health information processing with the three levels of domains yields a matrix with 12 dimensions of health literacy as illustrated in Table 4. Four dimensions of health literacy in the domain of healthcare, i.e., the ability to access information on medical or clinical issues, to understand medical information, to interpret and evaluate medical information, and to make informed decisions on medical issues and comply with medical advice. Four dimensions of health literacy in the domain of disease prevention, notably the ability to access information on risk factors for health, to understand information on risk factors and derive meaning, to interpret and evaluate information on risk factors, and to make informed decisions on risk factors for health. Four dimensions in the domain of health promotion, notably the ability to regularly update oneself on determinants of health in the social and physical environment, to comprehend information on determinants of health in the social and physical environment and derive meaning, to interpret and evaluate information on determinants, of health in the social and physical environment, and the ability to make informed decisions on health determinants in the social and physical environment. Health literacy is in our understanding regarded an asset for improving people's empowerment within the domains of healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion. In addition to the components of health literacy proper, the model in Figure 1 also shows the main antecedents and consequences of health literacy. Among the factors which impact on health literacy, a distinction is made between more distal factors, including societal and environmental determinants (e.g., demographic situation, culture, language, political forces, societal systems), and proximal factors, which are more concerned with personal determinants (e.g., age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, education, occupation, employment, income, literacy) and situational determinants (e.g. social support, family and peer influences, media use and physical environment). Health literacy is strongly associated with educational attainment [50], as well as with overall literacy [34, 38, 39]. Fundamental literacy affects a wide range of cognitive, behavioral, and societal skills and abilities. It should be distinguished from other specific literacy, such as science literacy (i.e., the ability to comprehend technical complexity, understanding of common technology, and an understanding that scientific uncertainty is to be expected), cultural literacy (i.e., recognizing and using collective beliefs, customs, world-views, and social identity relationships) and civic literacy (i.e., knowledge about sources of information and about agendas and how to interpret them, enabling citizens to engage in dialogue and decision-making). According to Mancuso [43], an individual must have certain skills and abilities to obtain competence in health literacy, and identifies six dimensions that are considered as necessary antecedents of health literacy, namely operational, interactive, autonomous, informational, contextual, and cultural competence. Health literacy in turn influences health behavior and the use of health services, and thereby will also impact on health outcomes and on the health costs in society. At an individual level, ineffective communication due to poor health literacy will result in errors, poor quality, and risks to patient safety of the healthcare services [61]. At a population level, health literate persons are able to participate in the ongoing public and private dialogues about health, medicine, scientific knowledge and cultural beliefs. Thus, the benefits of health literacy impact the full range of life's activities--home, work, society and culture [34, 38, 39]. Advancing health literacy will progressively allow for greater autonomy and personal empowerment, and the process of health literacy can be seen as a part of an individual's development towards improved quality of life. In the population, it may also lead to more equity and sustainability of changes in public health. Consequently, low health literacy can be addressed by educating persons to become more resourceful (i.e., increasing their personal health literacy), and by making the task or situation less demanding, (i.e., improving the "readability of the system").Health Literacy Good – Solves PoliticizationRestoring health literacy is key to repoliticization of educational spheres and its impact on social change. Nutbeam 2000 (Don Nutbeam, “Health literacy as a public health goal: a challenge for contemporary health education and communication strategies into the 21st century,” Health Promot Int (2000) 15 (3), p. 265-267)Health literacy is a concept that is both new and old. In essence it involves some repackaging of established ideas concerning the relationship between education and empowerment. Education for health directed towards interactive and critical health literacy is not new, and has formed part of social mobilization programs for many years. There are many contemporary examples of education being used as a powerful tool for social mobilization with disadvantaged groups in both developed and developing countries. Indeed those in developed countries may do well to retrace the roots of contemporary health education in community development programs, and learn from their current application in health development projects in developing countries. Disappointingly, the potential of education as a tool for social change, and for political action has been somewhat lost in contemporary health promotion. Close attention to the impact of public policy decisions on health, and the need to create supportive environments for health may have had the unintended consequence of leading to structural interventions ‘on behalf’ of people —health promotion which is done ‘on’ or ‘to’ people, rather than ‘by’ or ‘with’ people. In turn, health education has been limited to interpersonal communication and media campaigns directed towards individual behavioural outcomes and health services use. If achieving health literacy as defined by WHO is to be a goal, some rediscovery of the importance of health education needs to occur, together with a significant widening of the content and methods used. This poses a real challenge for contemporary health education and the type of information/education/communication programs which are widely supported by development and donor agencies—many of which are directed only towards achieving functional health literacy as described above. Pursuing the goal of improved health literacy will also require more overt alliances between health and education sectors in pursuing the goal of improved literacy levels in the population. This applies at local, national and international levels—emphasizing, e.g. the need for improved alliances between WHO and UNESCO, at an international level, and clearer understanding between agencies at the most local level (St Leger and Nutbeam, 2000). Improving health literacy in a population involves more than the transmission of health information, although that remains a fundamental task. Helping people to develop confidence to act on that knowledge and the ability to work with and support others will best be achieved through more personal forms of communication, and through community-based educational outreach. If we are to achieve the ultimate goal that is reflected in that definition of health literacy—trying to promote greater independence and empowerment among the individuals and communities we work with—we will need to acknowledge and understand the political aspects to education, focused on overcoming structural barriers to health.Health literacy is necessary to socio-cultural and political change – educators have a unique role in facilitating its development. S?rensen et al. 12 (Kristine S?rensen, Stephan Van den Broucke, James Fullam, Gerardine Doyle, Jürgen Pelikan, Zofia Slonska, Helmut Brand, Consortium Health Literacy Project European, “Health literacy and public health: A systematic review and integration of definitions and models,” BMC Public Health 12:80, p. 1-2)Health literacy is a term introduced in the 1970s [1] and of increasing importance in public health and healthcare. It is concerned with the capacities of people to meet the complex demands of health in a modern society [2]. Health literate means placing one's own health and that of one's family and community into context, understanding which factors are influencing it, and knowing how to address them. An individual with an adequate level of health literacy has the ability to take responsibility for one's own health as well as one's family health and community health [3]. It is important to distinguish health literacy from literacy in general. According to the United Nation Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO) during its history in English, the word 'literate' mostly meant to be 'familiar with literature' or in general terms 'well educated, learned'. While maintaining its broader meaning of being knowledgeable or educated in a particular area, during the late nineteenth century it has also come to refer to the abilities to read and write text. In recent years four understandings of literacy have appeared from the debate of the notion: 1) Literacy as an autonomous set of skills; 2) literacy as applied, practiced and situated; 3) literacy as a learning process; and 4) literacy as text. The focus is furthermore broadening so that literacy is not only referring to individual transformation, but also to contextual and societal transformation in terms of linking health literacy to economic growth and socio-cultural and political change [4]. The same development can be traced in the realm of health literacy. For some time most emphasis was given to health literacy as the ability to handle words and numbers in a medical context, and in recent years the concept is broadening to also understanding health literacy as involving the simultaneous use of a more complex and interconnected set of abilities, such as reading and acting upon written health information, communicating needs to health professionals, and understanding health instructions [5]. American studies in the 1990s linked literacy to health, showing an association between low literacy and decreased medication adherence, knowledge of disease and self-care management skills [6]. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which measured the English literacy of American adults (people age 16 and older) included questions related to health, and revealed the consequences of limited literacy on health and healthcare [7]. A report from the Institute of Medicine indicates that nearly half of the American adult population may have difficulties in acting on health information [8]. This finding has been referred to as the "health literacy epidemic" [9]. In response, measures have been taken to ensure better health communication through establishing health literacy guidelines [10], and a trans-disciplinary approach has been encouraged to improve health literacy [11]. To support this approach, the American Medical Association recommends four areas for research: health literacy screening; improving communication with low-literacy patients; costs and outcomes of poor health literacy; and causal pathways of how poor health literacy influences health [12, 13]. The research literature on health literacy has expanded exponentially, with nearly 5,000 PubMed-listed publications to date (Primo November 2011), the majority of which have been published since 2005 [5, 14] and is evident that health literacy is being explored within different disciplines and with different approaches, e.g. looking at the role of health educators in promoting health literacy [15]; public health literacy for lawyers [16], health communication [17], the prevalence of limited health literacy [18], and health literacy as an empowerment tool for low-income mothers [19]. While until recently the interest in health literacy was mainly concentrated in the United States and Canada, it has become more internationalized over the past decade [20]. Research on health literacy has taken place in e.g. Australia [21, 22], Korea [23], Japan [24], the UK [25], the Netherlands [26], and Switzerland [27]. Although the EU produced less than a third of the global research on health literacy between 1991 and 2005 [28, 29], the importance of the issue is increasingly recognized in European health policies. As a case in point, health literacy is explicitly mentioned as an area of priority action in the European Commission's Health Strategy 2008-2013 [30]. It is linked to the core value of citizen empowerment, and the priority actions proposed by the European Commission include the promotion of health literacy programs for different age groups. However, with the proliferation of health literacy research and policy measures, it becomes clear that there is no unanimously accepted definition of the concept. Moreover, the constituent dimensions of health literacy remain disputed, and attempts to operationalize the concept vary widely in scope, method and quality. As a result, it is very difficult to compare findings with regard to health literacy emerging from research in different countries. The current article aims to address this issue by offering a systematic review of existing definitions and concepts of health literacy as reported in the international literature, by identifying the central health literacy dimensions, the target group as well as antecedents and consequences if explained. in order to develop an integrated definition and conceptual model capturing the most comprehensive evidence-based dimensions of health literacy.Health Literacy Good – Solves Social CritiquesIndividualist approaches are insufficient for societal-level changes in public health – broader civic engagement is paramount.Freedman et al. 9 (Darcy A. Freedman, PhD, MPH, Kimberly D. Bess, PhD, Holly A. Tucker, PhD, David L. Boyd, PhD, Arleen M. Tuchman, PhD, Kenneth A. Wallston, PhD; “Public Health Literacy Defined,” American journal of preventive medicine, June 2009, p. 447-448)It is proposed that health literacy be reconceptualized to include two broad components: individual-level health literacy, which is already well developed, and public health literacy, as defined in this paper. The definition of public health literacy, as well as the corresponding dimensions and competencies, emerged through an inductive analytic process conducted in 2007 by a multidisciplinary research team. Building on the principles of Rudolf Virchow, a nineteenth-century German physician and public health official who understood disease to be fundamentally a social problem,30 –32 the team first evaluated concepts from the health literacy movement through the lenses of public health, social determinants of health, and population health. These three terms were operationalized to refine the scope of the analytic process. Public health was defined as: the practice of preventing disease and promoting good health within groups of people, from small communities to entire countries.33 The social determinants of health are defined as: the “causes of the causes”—the fundamental structures of social hierarchy and the socially determined conditions these structures create in which people grow, live, work, and age.34 Population health is defined as: the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within a group.22 After reviewing the health literacy literature, the research team developed a preliminary definition of public health literacy and its dimensions and competencies. Two expert-panel sessions were convened to assess the consensual validity of the preliminary definition. The experts included public health officials, global health researchers, biologists, virologists, advanced practice nurses, community health workers, and physicians. Existing scholarship broadens the concept of health literacy to account for the social, environmental, and systemic forces affecting the health of individuals and the public. Zarcadoolas et al.,6 for example, speak of civic literacy as the “skills and abilities that enable citizens to become aware of public issues, participate in critical dialogue about them, and become involved in decision making processes.” Nutbeam5 defines critical health literacy as the “cognitive and skills development outcomes which are oriented towards supporting effective social and political action, as well as individual action.” Gazmararian et al.29 have drawn attention to the concept of public health literacy and have called for a more precise definition of “what it means to be public health literate.” They present public health literacy as an ethical imperative and suggest that people who are public health literate will be better able to appreciate the ways that health issues “affect themselves, their community, and society at large.”29 More recently, Pleasant and Kuruvilla15 have emphasized that health literacy should include knowledge of public health concepts. Unfortunately, this clear academic shift in focus from the individual to the public has not taken hold in research initiatives, clinical interactions, or public messages related to health concerns. The dominance of the biomedical model may be a barrier to the adoption of broader conceptualizations of health literacy, situating disease and illness within individual bodies and focusing on treatment of acute conditions rather than on strategies of prevention.35,36 An additional barrier may be the term “public.” Public health literacy is often interpreted as health literacy for the public (or the mass distribution of individual-level health literacy) rather than literacy about public health. An example is May 2009 Am J Prev Med 2009;36(5) 447 the American Medical Association’s commentary on the recent call for improving public health literacy in America, which responded to the call by underscoring the need for better communication mechanisms between patients and providers.37 Notwithstanding the importance of promoting individual-level health literacy at the population level, this strategy alone is too narrow. Public health literacy is defined here as the degree to which individuals and groups can obtain, process, understand, evaluate, and act upon information needed to make public health decisions that benefit the community. Although it parallels the IOM’s definition of health literacy, the definition of public health literacy differs in the following ways: ● An emphasis on evaluation underscores the importance of being able to judge or determine the significance, worth, or quality of information related to the health of the public. ● The addition of action assumes that individuals and groups have agency and thus the power to organize activities to accomplish public health goals and objectives through civic engagement. ● An emphasis on public health decisions goes beyond the set of health literacy skills related to accessing, interpreting, and using health information for individual health purposes. These individual-level skills contribute to, but are insufficient for, the societal level perspective public health literacy requires. ● An emphasis on community acknowledges that individuals are embedded in environmental and social contexts. This emphasis differs from the conceptualization of individual-level health literacy, which most often treats individuals, and even their families, as decontextualized units. In this definition, public health literacy is purported to be distinct from, but related to, individual-level health literacy. Together, the two types of literacy form an expanded framework for health literacy. Table 1 depicts health literacy as a broader concept inclusive of two unique types of literacy that converge to achieve the broader goal of promoting health and reducing health disparities among individuals, families, communities, and societies.Debate BadStandards of EvidenceReal world debate turns on personal narratives, not policy detailsHarrington 17 Craig, Economic Policy Program Director at Media Matters for America. He joined the organization in May 2013. He holds a Master of Arts in Global History jointly-conferred from Georgetown University and King's College London. “CNN Town Hall Shows That The Health Care Debate is About Life and Death.” Media Matter for America, May 16, Town Hall Shows That The Health Care Debate is About Life and Death. Audiences Need To Hear More Stories From People Like Kati McFarland. Viewers of CNN’s prime-time town hall event with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) witnessed personal stories from Americans across the political spectrum concerned about their country’s future. One person’s struggles, in particular, highlighted the life and death stakes of the Republican Party’s plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and set a standard for contextualizing the human costs of this political debate that other news outlets should follow.Real world debates about health care are passionate and personalCalderón 10 Sara Inés, bilingual and bicultural Latina journalist, blogger and writer originally from Los Angeles; a software engineer, writer and speaker based in Austin. “Facebook: A Key Venue for Health Care Policy Debate.” AdWeek, April 6, it’s not surprise that the site has become a key way for people with feelings about the politics of health care to voice their opinions using the service. Hundreds of official and unofficial Facebook Pages and groups figured prominently in both sides of the debate — those in favor of reform and those vehemently against it — becoming places where passionate conversations took place on Walls, in comments and visually with photos and videos.Politics GoodMovements SolveHealth social movements are successful insofar as they engage the political sphere. Brown and Zavestoski 4 (Phil Brown, PhD; Stephen Zavestoski, PhD; “Social movements in health: an introduction,” Sociology of Health and Illness, Volume 26, Issue 6 September 2004, p. 691-692)Studying health social movements offers insight into an innovative and powerful form of political action aimed at transforming the health care system, modifying people's experience of illness and addressing broader social determinants of health and disease of diverse communities. Health social movements challenge state, institutional and cultural authorities in order to enhance public participation in social policy and regulation, and to democratise the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge in medical science and public health research. In order to achieve their goals, HSMs deploy an array of strategies and are nimble in the way they shift arenas of struggle. The inter-sectoral nature of HSMs strengthens their capacity to impact on scientific and policy realms as they forge strategic alliances with movements targeting other sectors, such as the environmental movement. Finally, HSMs utilise a broad range of tactics: they engage in the legal realm, shape public health research, employ cultural resources such as popular gender norms, promote new approaches to medical science, employ creative media tactics to highlight the need for structural social change and true disease prevention and engage within the policy arena to enhance public power to monitor and regulate industrial production. HSM activism in scientific knowledge production may also introduce potential contradictions. Although engaging in scientific endeavours is important, this process can also sap energy and staff time that might otherwise be directed toward political and community organising. Engaging in scientific activities may cause dissension among movement groups, especially if those working on collaborations with academic researchers begin to attain far more resources and institutional access than other groups. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that as activists begin to take science into their own hands, they must grapple directly with some of the same polemical issues and contradictions that they had previously criticised. For example, some health movement groups have major disagreements over whether to take corporate funding to support their work. This issue has been particularly controversial for the environmental breast cancer movement, where groups have debated whether to accept funding from major pharmaceutical firms. Some activists have argued that accepting such corporate funding can create a real or perceived conflict of interest and undermine the credibility of an organisation reliably to analyse and disseminate scientific information, especially data regarding clinical trials for new drug protocols. Other groups must address ethical quandaries, such as Native American groups that work with scientists to analyse the presence of persistent contaminants in human breast milk. In carrying out this research, activists have sought to develop informed consent procedures that address the needs of the community and not just individual community members, and they must negotiate appropriate ways to report individual and collective study results to the community (Schell and Tarbell 1998). Despite these challenges, HSMs have successfully leveraged their embodied experience of illness and forged a new path for how social movements can effectively engage in scientific knowledge production. Thus, HSMs serve as a critical counter-authority aimed at democratising and reshaping social policy and regulation in a way that transforms the socioeconomic and political conditions that underlie distributions of health and disease among populations.Repoliticizing Health Care SolvesPoliticization is a means of reclaiming agency and ending medicalization – depoliticization of health care feeds into a system of neoliberalism and medical biopower.Bambra et al. 5 (Clare Bambra, PhD; Debbie Fox and Alex Scott-Samuel; Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Sheffield Hallam University and Department of Public Health, University of Liverpool; “Towards a politics of health,” Health Promotion International, Vol. 20 No. 2, Oxford University Press, p. 191)The conceptualization of health as non-political is also in part due to medicalization—the transfer of power over and responsibility for health from individuals, the public and therefore political life, to powerful elites, namely the medical and health professions and the multinational pharmaceutical companies. When we conceive of ill-health as episodes of disease manageable by the delivery of healthcare, we are . . . transferring the responsibility for health from society as a whole to an elite possessing what we define as the necessary professional and technical expertise for the management of disease (ScottSamuel, 1979). However, unlike the impression given in the above quote, this transfer of responsibility is not always voluntary. Drug companies and the medical profession have taken the power and responsibility for health for themselves (Illich, 1977). They have thus been able to determine what health is and therefore, how political it is (or, more usually, is not). Their historic power over the definition and management of health has contributed substantially to its depoliticization: health is something that doctors are responsible for, they are the providers, and we are the recipients. Their authority and responsibility over health has further emphasized its commodity status—when ill, an individual visits a doctor and/or purchases drugs (commodity) to regain health (another, albeit less obvious commodity). Ill-health is a transient state caused by the presence of disease. It can be ended by the appropriate application of medical technology. This depoliticization of health, via the transfer of power and responsibility to these professional and/or commercial groups, means that we do not acknowledge our power over our own health or our autonomy over our own bodies.Right to Health Care SolvesThe shortcomings of health care are only solved through political action – power is exercised over it as part of a wider bureaucratic and economic system. Bambra et al. 5 (Clare Bambra, PhD; Debbie Fox and Alex Scott-Samuel; Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Sheffield Hallam University and Department of Public Health, University of Liverpool; “Towards a politics of health,” Health Promotion International, Vol. 20 No. 2, Oxford University Press, p. 187-188)It is time that the implicit, and sometimes explicit but unstated politics within and surrounding health were more widely acknowledged. Health, like almost all other aspects of human life, is political in numerous ways: Health is political because, like any other resource or commodity under a neo-liberal economic system, some social groups have more of it than others. Health is political because its social determinants are amenable to political interventions and are thereby dependent on political action (or more usually, inaction). Health is political because the right to ‘a standard of living adequate for health and well-being’ (United Nations, 1948) is, or should be, an aspect of citizenship and a human right. Ultimately, health is political because power is exercised over it as part of a wider economic, social and political system. Changing this system requires political awareness and political struggle. Health inequalities Evidence that the most powerful determinants of health in modern populations are social, economic and cultural (Doyal and Pennell, 1979; Townsend and Davidson, 1992; Whitehead, 1992; Blane et al., 1996; Acheson, 1998) comes from a wide range of sources and is also, to some extent, acknowledged by governments and international agencies (Townsend and Davidson, 1992; Acheson, 1998; Department of Health, 1998; Social Exclusion Unit, 1998). Yet inequalities in health continue, within countries (on the basis of socio-economic class, gender or ethnicity) and between them (in terms of wealth and resources) (Davey Smith et al., 2002; Donkn et al., 2002). How these inequalities in health are approached by society is highly political: are health inequalities to be accepted as ‘natural’ and inevitable results of individual differences both in respect of genetics and the silent hand of the economic market, or are they social and economic abhorrences that need to be tackled by a modern state and a humane society (Adams et al., 2002)? Underpinning these different approaches to health inequalities are not only divergent views of what is scientifically or economically possible, but also differing political and ideological opinions about what is desirable. Health determinants Causes of, and genetic predispositions to ill-health are becoming increasingly well understood. However, it is evident that in most cases, environmental triggers are equally if not more important and that the major determinants of health or ill-health are inextricably linked to social and economic context (Acheson, 1998; Marmot and Wilkinson, 2001). Factors such as housing, income and employment—indeed many of the issues that dominate political life—are key determinants of our health and well-being. Similarly, many of the major determinants of health inequalities lie outside the health sector and therefore require non-health sector policies to tackle them (Townsend and Davidson, 1992; Acheson, 1998; Whitehead et al., 2000). Recent acknowledgements of the importance of the social determinants of health are welcome but fail to seriously address the underlying political determinants of health and health inequity. Citizenship Citizenship is ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed’ (Marshall, 1963). There are three types of citizenship rights: civil, political and social. Health, or the ‘right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being’ (United Nations, 1948; International Forum for the Defense of the Health of People, 2002), is an important social citizenship right. These citizenship rights were only gained as a result of extensive political and social struggle during Western industrialization and the development of capitalism (Marshall, 1963). However, despite their parallel development (see Figure 1), the relationship between capitalism and citizenship is not an easy or ‘natural’ one (Marshall, 1963). Health is a strong example of this tense relationship as under a capitalist economic system health is, like everything else, commodified. Commodification is ‘the process whereby everything becomes identifiable and valued according to its relative desirability within the economic market (of production and consumption)’ (de Viggiani, 1997). Health became extensively commodified during the industrial revolution as workers became entirely dependent upon the market for their survival (Esping-Andersen, 1990). In the 20th century, the introduction of social citizenship, which entailed an entitlement to health and social welfare, brought about a ‘loosening’ of the pure commodity status of health. The welfare state decommodified health because certain health services and a certain standard of living became a right of citizenship. In short, capitalism and citizenship represent very different values: the former, inequality and the latter, equality. This tension means that the implementation of the right to health, despite its position in social citizenship and in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, will for the foreseeable future require continuing political struggle.The fate of universal healthcare will not be determined by the courts but ultimately by boots on the ground political advocacy – prerequisite to any legal action or else it failsZietlow 11 [Rebecca E. Zietlow; Professor of Law; “Democratic Constitutionalism and the Affordable Care Act”; 72 OHIO STATE LAW JOURNAL 1367 (2011); University of Toledo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2012-07; BPM] If health care is widely considered to be a fundamental right that is protected by the federal government, that protection will stabilize and become more robust. If anything, there is likely to be more popular pressure for the federal government to expand access and affordability of health care. Perhaps this is why the House Republican budget in 2011 would do away with Medicare and Medicaid altogether, replacing those popular health benefits programs with ineffective block grants.282 The Republican budget, championed by House Budget Chair Paul Ryan, challenges the premise of the ACA that health care is a fundamental right. Ryan‘s proposal may require health care reform advocates to go to the mat and take a stand on behalf of a fundamental right to health care. The fate of the ACA in federal courts is far from clear. However, even if the Supreme Court overturns the ACA, it is likely that the people will pressure Congress to adopt other measures to protect the fundamental right to health care. Obviously, this will only happen if there continues to be a consensus that health care is a fundamental human right. The ultimate future of the ACA in particular and the right to health care in general depends not on the courts, but on the boots on the ground and the effectiveness of political advocacy.Socializing Health Care SolvesAll apolitical leftist criticisms of the health care system rely on a flawed neoliberal definition of politics – only collective state engagement can overcome its inequalities. Bambra et al. 5 (Clare Bambra, PhD; Debbie Fox and Alex Scott-Samuel; Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Sheffield Hallam University and Department of Public Health, University of Liverpool; “Towards a politics of health,” Health Promotion International, Vol. 20 No. 2, Oxford University Press, p. 189-190)Health is often reduced and misrepresented as health care (or in the UK, as the National Health Service). Consequently, the politics of health becomes significantly misconstructed as the politics of health care—see for example Freeman (Freeman, 2000). As an illustration, the majority of popular UK political discussions about health concern issues such as the ‘State or the market?’ debate about National Health Service (NHS) funding, organization and delivery, or the demographic pressures on the future provision of healthcare facilities (Rhodes, 1997). The same applies in most other—especially ‘developed’—countries. The limited, one-dimensional (Carpenter, 1980) nature of this political discourse surrounding health can be traced back to two ideological issues: the definition of health and the definition of politics. The definition of health that has conventionally been operationalized under Western capitalism has two interrelated aspects to it: health is both considered as the absence of disease (biomedical definition) and as a commodity (economic definition). These both focus on individuals, as opposed to society, as the basis of health: health is seen as a product of individual factors such as genetic heritage or lifestyle choices, and as a commodity that individuals can access either via the market or the health system (Scott-Samuel, 1979). This remains the case despite our sophisticated understanding of health promotion—as is evident if one ignores the rhetoric of the governments of ‘developed’ nations and looks instead at their health policies. Health in this sense is an individualized commodity that is produced and delivered by the market or the health service. Inequalities in the distribution of health are therefore either a result of the failings of individuals through, for example, their lifestyle choices; or of the way in which health care products are produced, distributed and delivered. In order to tackle these inequalities, political attention is directed towards the variable that is most amenable to manipulation—the healthcare system. It is important to note that this limiting, one-dimensional view of health is common across the ideological spectrum, with left-wing versus right-wing health debates usually consisting of a more versus less state intervention dichotomy. Orthodox UK left-wing politics is guilty of placing health care and the NHS at the centre of its discussions and struggles about health. This ‘NHS illusion’ has resulted in the naive perspective amongst health activists that societal ill-health can be cured by more and better NHS services. At best, this perspective is slowly changing, as is shown by the enthusiasm of some in the UK for New Labour's emphasis on tackling health inequalities through the NHS—while it simultaneously widens them through its neo-liberal macroeconomic, trade and foreign policies (Bambra et al., 2003).Politics BadGovernment BadGovernment sources lie about policy details when debatingBookman 7/22/17 Jay, columnist who writes about government and politics, “Opinion: Health Care is Now a Right.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, you still doubt that health care is a right, look at the debate over Obamacare. Don’t look merely at the outcome, look at how the debate was conducted. When Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, he did so by promising that he had a plan that would provide even better care to even more people at even lower costs with even lower deductibles. Tom Price, the conservative Georgia congressman turned secretary of Health and Human Services, condemned Obamacare as a failure by citing the millions of Americans whom it left without coverage, suggesting that his plan would correct that problem. Ask Price whether a right to health care exists and he won’t answer. Ask Trump and he might say yes, but in truth he neither knows nor cares. However, the arguments that they deployed took it as a given that a right to health care exists. With their own words, they acknowledged and even reinforced the notion that a plan that extends coverage to millions of Americans is much better than a plan that strips coverage from millions of Americans. And once Trump, Price and others finally had to unveil their plans, once it became clear that their pro-coverage rhetoric had been a cynical disguise for policies that stripped insurance from 20 or 30 million Americans and that did not treat health care as a right, the American public rose up to reject their approach.Medical-industrial complex info power. It makes detailed policy debate impossible for ordinary peopleCard 6/1/17 Jean, writer and communications consultant with expertise in public policy and small business issues. She is a former speechwriter for the U.S. secretaries of Labor and Treasury as well as the attorney general, “Health Care Helplessness.” US News, shared fear and ignorance puts us, the patients, at a perpetual disadvantage when health care policy is debated. Which means that even when the big money interests are divided, they will wield more influence. They speak the language; we don't. They made the system; we just shuttle through it like packages. Divided or not, the cronies will continue to dominate health care policy – Obamacare, Trumpcare and otherwise. We should think about dumping the cronies in favor of fruits, vegetables, long walks and health-savings accounts. Only when our money is back in our own pockets will we have a real say in these matters.Critique GoodDebate should be philosophically critical. Issues of social justice must come before details of policy analysisMathis 07 Rick, senior manager, Medical Policy Research and Development, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee in Chattanooga. “Health Care and Philosophy: Adding Justice to the Debate.” Health Affairs, vol 26, no 1, p. 291, is frequently in the background of debates about health care access, financing, and delivery in the United States and elsewhere. Is it just to have as many uninsured citizens as we do? Are disparities in health care access between ethnic and social groups fair? Does an employer-based approach to health insurance qualify as just when not everyone works for an employer that provides it? These are just a few of the fundamental questions that can be, and are, asked of health care in the United States. Although often implicit, the idea of what a just approach to health care looks like isn’t often explicitly discussed. Perhaps this is because the focus tends to be upon single issues, such as the uninsured, rather than looking at U.S. health care in its entirety. Another impediment is that the concept of justice itself is open to debate. Conservative, liberal, libertarian, and utilitarian views of justice continue to be advanced and refined by philosophers and social thinkers. Even so, continuing increases in medical costs and the number of uninsured people, along with growing concerns about disparities in access to treatment, might bring justice to the fore in the health care debate. Waiting to be determined is whether health care is a fundamental right and what allocation of this presumably limited resource is socially just. A good starting point for this consideration is Social Justice, which argues for a liberal theory of social justice and applies it to public health and health policy.Western Medicine GoodAlternative Medicine = PrivateDon’t abandon western medicine in the public sphere; alternative medicine should be administered via individual choice, not marketed to the public as able to replicate cures that it can’tBabuschkin 17 David, works in R&D at Micron Semiconductor Ltd. He mainly writes about science and the philosophy of science. studied physics at undergraduate and Master's level at the University of Sussex. “Don’t Cry Wolfe: New Age Con-Artistry And Anti-Intellectualism.” Comment section, May 23. is self-correcting, and many actions that seem conspiratorial can be explained otherwise. We indeed need to question all information presented to us, however it often so happens that we are less critical of information which agrees with our beliefs. If we think the worlds problems can be ascribed to a group of ill-intentioned people, then we’ll see evidence for conspiracies everywhere – call it selective skepticism. My point is that most criticisms of western medicine are valid, however subjecting alternative cures to the same skepticism yields significantly worse results. Western, peer reviewed medicine is the best we’ve got, whilst alternative medicine can and should continue being used in private circles, by individuals … not marketed and sold with claims it can magically replace a cure which has been demonstrated to work.Capitalism DefenseProfit-taking in western medicine is not a reason to abandon its practiceBabuschkin 16 David, works in R&D at Micron Semiconductor Ltd. He mainly writes about science and the philosophy of science. studied physics at undergraduate and Master's level at the University of Sussex. “Beyond the Woo—Why David Wolfe & Co. Are Detrimental to Society.” Comment section, August 15. ’m not against alternative medicines, and like Terri already pointed it is the failures of our western medicine that drive people to seek alternatives-not stupidity. I believe we should all do whatever we think is right to treat ourselves. If we find a treatment- for example acupuncture- to work for a given condition (a friend of mine uses it to treat her epilepsy because conventional treatments prescribed had too many negative side effects) then it would be ridiculous to stop, based on the fact that some study has found it to be ineffective. She might even tell her friends suffering from various ailments to try it out, since it worked so well for her. This does not entitle her to advise against conventional treatments for other people, based purely on the fact that they haven’t worked in her case. She understands that science (especially medicine) works on a statistical basis, meaning that things we ‘prove’ to be effective are in fact effective only MOST of the time (meaning not ALL of the time) since every individual is different. This means that it’s no surprise that conventional treatments sometimes do not work, and in those cases it makes so much sense to look for other treatments. If Wolfe & Co choose to go against conventional treatments that is fine, and they can write books about how well its worked for them- possibly encouraging others to try them IN THE CASE THAT CONVENTIONAL TREATMENT DOES NOT WORK. This is very different from discouraging people from treatments in the first place, and making money off their vulnerability. Furthermore In my article I appear to hype up western medicine a lot more than it deserves credit. I know there are huge problems with our medicine- for example our cancer ‘treatments’ are really shit- relying on killing cells indiscriminately, and hoping the cancer dies quicker than the person. I don’t claim this to be efficient, all I’m saying that that many studies have found it to be better than doing nothing against your cancer. The same cannot be said for any alternative treatments. If people want to ingest cannabis oil as a treatment, again, that is completely fine. If they want to stop their chemo because their cannabis treatment is seemingly working that’s also fine. But again it’s a different matter entirely to campaign against chemo just because something different has worked for you and a few friends- that’s not how medicine works. I’m aware there’s a huge problem in the way that pharmaceutical companies make money by selling expensive treatments to sick people, and also by selling anything else to healthy people. And that is something we desperately need to address. This problem is independent of the Woo though. I would like to point out though that at least these companies are making such profits off things that have been shown to be effective- as opposed to Wolfe & Co which make money out of things that haven’t even been shown to be effective.Chinese MedicineChinese medicine shares epistemology with western medicine. It does not have potential to rupture.Kavoussi 07 Ben, Physician Assistant Specialist in Sacramento, California. “Chinese Medicine: A Cognitive and Epistemological Review.” Evidence Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine, September, Vol 4(3), 293-298, 293, spite of the common belief that Chinese natural philosophy and medicine have a unique frame of reference completely foreign to the West, this article argues that they in fact have significant cognitive and epistemic similarities with certain esoteric health beliefs of pre-Christian Europe. From the standpoint of Cognitive Science, Chinese Medicine appears as a proto-scientific system of health observances and practices based on a symptomological classification of disease using two elementary dynamical-processes pattern categorization schemas: a hierarchical and combinatorial inhibiting–activating model (Yin-Yang), and a non-hierarchical and associative five-parameter semantic network (5-Elements/Agents). The concept-map of the five-parameter model amounts to a pentagram, a commonly found geomantic and spell casting sigil in a number of pre-Christian health and safety beliefs in Europe, to include the Pythagorean cult of Hygieia, and the Old Religion of Northern Europe. This non-hierarchical pattern-recognition archetype/prototype was hypothetically added to the pre-existing hierarchical one to form a hybrid nosology that can accommodate for a change in disease perceptions. The selection of five parameters rather than another number might be due to a numerological association between the integer five, the golden ratio, the geometry of the pentagram and the belief in health and wholeness arising from cosmic or divine harmony. In any case, this body of purely empirical knowledge is nowadays widely flourishing in the US and in Europe as an alternative to Western Medicine and with the claim of being a unique, independent and comprehensive medical system, when in reality it is structurally—and perhaps historically—related to the health and safety beliefs of pre-Christian Europe; and without the prospect for an epistemological rupture, it will remain built upon rudimentary cognitive modalities, ancient metaphysics, and a symptomological view of disease.Chinese example shows indigenous agency in contact with western medicineShermo 11 Connie A., assistant professor of history at SUNY-Plattsburgh, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872-1937, books., pp. 8-9.This book also treats the introduction of Western medicine to China as a complex and contested process. Kang's and Shi's medical work offers insight into how aspects of Western biomedicine were adapted and changed in China, in particular in their participation in the development of a female nursing profession. Throughout this book, my intention has been similar to that of Bridie Andrews in her work on germ theory in China, in which she seeks to avoid "explanations that emphasize either the supposed truth-value of western medicine or the imposition of western imperialist hegemony and indigenous resistance or collaboration."42 I do not assume that the treatments that missionary physicians offered were necessarily better than those of their various competitors, although I argue that they brought some new technologies that patients found beneficial in many circumstances. Nor would it be accurate to view Kang and Shi as imposing Western medicine on an unwilling populace. Except for certain periods and circumstances, i.e., some treaty port cities in the wake of the Boxer Uprising, no foreign country had the power to impose medical treatment on the Chinese population that, for example, the British possessed in India or the United States government had in the Philippines.Indigenous KnowledgeWestern pharmacology relies on indigenous knowledgeBabuschkin 16 David, works in R&D at Micron Semiconductor Ltd. He mainly writes about science and the philosophy of science. studied physics at undergraduate and Master's level at the University of Sussex. “Beyond the Woo—Why David Wolfe & Co. Are Detrimental to Society.” Comment section, August 15. even though it’s true that there isn’t much money in Goji berries, or marijuana.. most of our western medicine is derived from plants. Many of the medicines we use today were developed by learning what plants indigenous people’ across the world used to treat certain ailments, isolating the beneficial compounds, and re- working them into more effective medicines. In that way all of our medicine is based on natural remedies. This also means that there IS money to be made off pretty much anything, even cannabis- by isolating the cannaboids, synthesising a pill containing these, and BAM you can sell it for extortionate amounts of money. I’m not saying this is a good thing by any means- I just see it as an argument against the notion that natural remedies are being suppressed by Big Pharma.Native people seek both Western medicine and indigenous healingNative Health News 14 Publication of Washington State University Partnerships for Native Health, January 7, , many Native people seek care from traditional healers and use traditional healing practices in their daily lives. Many also use Western medicine in conjunction with indigenous healing. As a result, these two approaches can work together, rather than against each other. The effectiveness of Western medicine for many health conditions is widely recognized.Permutation solves – Angola provesMatheson 09 Donna, member of the College of Occupational Therapists of Ontario, Ontario Society of Occupational Therapists and a member of the Canadian Hand Therapy Interest Group. “A right to health: Medicine as Western cultural imperialism?” Journal of Disability and Rehabilitation, Vol. 31, issue 14, pp. 1191-1204, , Western medicine is intrinsically tied with modern Western culture, and as such is foreign to many African cultures. Relying on personal observations from working in Angola as a physiotherapist as well as secondary research, the author explores the divide between Angolan culture and medical practices which are deeply rooted in scientific research. Most strikingly, the author finds that concepts of evidence-based medicine as well as individual human or patients' rights contain aspects foreign to Angolan culture. Illustrative examples are given of differences in attitudes towards finances and religion in relation to medicine. Finally, the author proposes that factors such as poverty and illiteracy can play an important role in differences in practices and customs commonly seen as being strictly tied to culture. Although medicine does carry with it components of Western culture, there may be positive components of medicine that non-Westerners would like to adopt. This article suggests that Westerners and Angolans can combine beneficial aspects of Angolan culture with medicine to improve health care for the people of Angola.Neocolonialism DefenseRejecting western medicine and science turns the impact of neocolonialismNovella 16 Dr. Steven, academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, “Science is Not Colonialism.” Neurologica blog, October 14, , with their “guns, germs and steel,” and a massively racist outlook on the world, did some pretty horrible things to indigenous people in the name of colonization. This did include imposing Western culture onto colonized populations. I also have no problem with reasserting indigenous culture, which can be considered decolonization. That’s all fine. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Science is simply different than art, religion, and music, despite what the radical postmodernists would have you believe. Science is transcultural. Science is, I would argue, anti-culture, it is inherently, therefore, anti-colonial. That is because the very essence of science is to seek objective truth that is separate from the assumptions of any particular culture. Science is about breaking cultural assumptions, dethroning authority and tradition, and using a transparent and egalitarian process to figure out what is really true. If science is working correctly, then a lab in Japan should get the same result as a lab in Sweden. There is an international community of scientists collaborating and working together to push collective knowledge forward. Science, therefore, belongs to humanity, not to any one culture. Of course the history of science is full of failures to achieve this ideal, because science is a human endeavor. The process of science has been subverted in order to pursue cultural and ideological ends, trying to prove that one race or one gender is superior to another, for example. Science is subverted when it is used in an attempt to prove that a religious belief is factual, or to write history in a way that is pleasing to one cultural group. The speaker’s summary of our knowledge of gravity is simply wrong. This was not one white guy imposing his beliefs on the world through Western colonialism. Understanding the nature of gravity, and of mechanics, was the result of a process of discovery and experimentation. Not only that, Newton was later overturned (in a way) by Einstein. His description of gravity was correct, but incomplete, and had to be revised by general relativity. Our understanding of gravity is not imposed by authority, but is questioned, tested, and challenged. We provisionally accept it now because it has withstood dedicated attempts to disprove it. The irony is, by advocating for the abolition of “Western” science in favor of “African” science they are promoting a cultural and colonial view of science. They are arguing that science does not belong to humanity, and that African scientists would come up with different answers than other scientists. What they clearly really want is for science to authenticate their cultural beliefs, so they are making the same mistake as creationists, deniers, and revisionists. This would be a massive disservice to Africa and Africans. This would, again ironically, be magnifying the harm that colonialism did to the continent, by motivating them to separate themselves from the collective human journey of science, to reject the principles of science itself, and to enslave themselves to the traditions of their past. In fact, part of racism is to deprive indigenous people of the opportunity to participate in science. Arguing that Africa should rid itself of science is therefore playing into the hands of horrible racism. The witchcraft that the speaker apparently wants to preserve from the discriminating eye of science is not a good thing. Belief in witchcraft victimizes children, and albinos, and women. It deprives Africans of effective medical care, and has greatly magnified the HIV epidemic in that part of the world. This problem, of perceiving science as Western colonialism and advocating for indigenous science, is not unique to Africa. Unfortunately it has significant ideological support from well-meaning people who are appropriately horrified by racism and exploitation. Attacking science is just misguided, and will achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents hope.Permutation SolvencyComplementary and Alternative Medicine used in combination with western medicineNerurkar 13 Dr. Aditi, Assistant Medical Director at the Cheng and Tsui Center for Integrative Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, as quoted in Leigh Page, “What to do When a Patient Wants ‘Alternative’ Medicine, Medscape, June 12, predicts that as physicians become more aware of alternative therapies, they will become more tolerant. In 2011, she led a study that found that nearly 1 in 30 Americans (2.9% of survey respondents), representing 6.36 million Americans, reported using "mind/body therapies" (MBTs) in the prior 12 months because their provider recommended that they do so (compared with 15.5% who self-referred for such therapies). Deep-breathing exercises were the most commonly used provider-recommended MBT (84.4%), followed by meditation (49.3%), yoga (22.6%), progressive muscle relaxation (19.9%), and guided imagery (13.9%); similar trends were seen in the self-referred MBT group. (The total percentage exceeded 100% because some respondents used more than 1 MBT modality.)[13] "We didn't expect to see provider referral rates that were quite so high," she observes. "It makes us wonder whether referring patients for these therapies earlier in the treatment process could lead to less use of the healthcare system, and possibly better outcomes."Presuming for western medicine does not entail a total rejection of alternative medicinesBabuschkin 16 David, works in R&D at Micron Semiconductor Ltd. He mainly writes about science and the philosophy of science. studied physics at undergraduate and Master's level at the University of Sussex. “Beyond the Woo—Why David Wolfe & Co. Are Detrimental to Society.” Comment section, August 13. ’m in no way advocating that western medicine has all the answers, or that it is flawless-absolutely not. My message is that when someone is advocating any sort of treatment to other people, that treatment has to have been shown to be effective through clinical studies. I’m not saying we should ban Goji berries or anything else people want to eat to treat their ailment, but it is wrong to promote or try to sell treatments to others that have not been shown to be effective. Despite the many problems our (the western) medical system has--statistically speaking we’re still much much better off with it than without it, even taking into account all the errors made by physicians. The same cannot be said for Woo treatments. If an individual believes that eating ginger cured their cancer, then thats great and they can go on believing that. but it is wrong to tell other people to rely on it, and even wronger (yes, I’ve made that a word now) to make money off their vulnerable condition.Medical syncretism can bring indigenous and Western health practices togetherWaldron 10 Ingrid, Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Women's Health and Urban Life, Vol 9 (1), pg. 50-68, , pp. 66-67In an era of increasing globalization, transnational migration, cultural diversity and blurred cultural divisions, it is crucial that the health system take a more prominent role in forging links between African indigenous health and Western medicine in ways that do not compromise either faction. It is crucial that the health care system create more opportunities for oppositional and subordinated knowledges and Western medicine to co-exist by re-defining the discourses, structures, processes and practices through which these knowledges are produced, validated and disseminated. Thus far, medical syncretism has merely meant the appropriation of indigenous health remedies, knowledge, and methods by Western medicine, which denies indigenous health approaches legitimate status in the healthcare system. If true syncretism is to be achieved, professionals working within both health traditions must begin to critically reconcile their differences with respect to the epistemologies upon which health beliefs and practices are premised, as well as the practices that are informed by these epistemologies. Only then will professional working within both traditions be able to transcend those differences, embrace those instances where they do share common ground and begin to develop meaningful partnerships that allow them to strategize on how to better enhance and strengthen each other’s practice and improve health outcomes for racially and culturally diverse groups.Peer Review KeyPeer review of medical practice favors western medicineBabuschkin 17 David, works in R&D at Micron Semiconductor Ltd. He mainly writes about science and the philosophy of science. studied physics at undergraduate and Master's level at the University of Sussex. “Don’t Cry Wolfe: New Age Con-Artistry And Anti-Intellectualism.” Comment section, May 23. am well aware of the many problems western medicine is facing, its imperfect methods, and the enormous problem of the way business agendas are tied up in the industry. However, my argument is that on a rational basis, peer reviewed medicine is the only one we should legally be able to advocate when we’re in a position of power, whether our name is David Wolfe, Donald Trump, or anyone in a position of power. Personal experiences of course, can’t be neglected. If someone uses healing crystals to treat their diabetes and it works, then fair game.. amazing! However, it is still irresponsible for that person to try to convince other people to stop conventional treatments, and instead buy some of your healing crystals .. see the distinction I’m trying to make? Medicine works on a statistical basis – if something works for one person, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for another. Peer reviewed medicine has been shown to work in a large sample of a given population, whilst alternative cures only reportedly work on individuals and not in a significant portion of the population when subjected to blind studies.MiscPublic Opinion <3 Health CarePublic Opinion Is In Favor Of Government Intervention In Healthcare, Especially Disadvantaged Groups. Bialik 17 (Researcher for Pew Research Center. The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank which is based in Washington, D.C. It provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. “More Americans say government should ensure health care coverage” January 13, 2017.) Currently, 60% of Americans say the government should be responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, compared with 38% who say this should not be the government’s responsibility. The share saying it is the government’s responsibility has increased from 51% last year and now stands at its highest point in nearly a decade. The survey also finds continued differences on this question by race and ethnicity as well as income. A large majority of blacks and Hispanics (85% and 84%, respectively) say the government should be responsible for coverage, while non-Hispanic whites are split on the issue (49% agree, 49% disagree). And while about three-quarters of those with family incomes of less than $30,000 per year (74%) say the government should ensure coverage, only about half (53%) of those with incomes of $75,000 or higher say the same. Currently, 52% of Republicans with family incomes below $30,000 say the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage for all, up from just 31% last year. There also has been a 20-percentage-point increase among Republicans with incomes of $30,000-$74,999 (34% now, 14% last year). But there has been no significant change among those with incomes of $75,000 or more (18% now, 16% then). Big Government Good. American Public Demands Big Government At Times Of Economic Downturn or Crisis, Meaning That It Is Never Forced. Amy 12 (Douglas J. Amy is Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College and author of Government is Good: An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution. “The Real Reason for Big Government” August 8, 2012.) The debate over the size of government has been one the major defining issues of our time, with Republicans continuing to call for dramatic cuts in most federal programs. But in this argument over big government, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of why government has grown so large in the U.S. in the first place. Why do we have big government? The answer may surprise some Americans. There are two main theories. Most Republicans argue that it is in government’s nature to grow continuously and uncontrollably — like some kind of institutional cancer. They see politicians and bureaucrats as having a strong self-interest to increase their own power, and the best way to do that is to increase the size and scope of government programs. So for conservatives, this perpetual public sector growth is illegitimate and needs to be drastically reined in. Trouble is, this theory does not correspond to what we know about the growth of the federal government. A chronicle of government growth over the last 100 years shows that most of the increase in federal programs took place in only two decades: the 1930s and the 1960s. And the last 40 years have seen little significant growth in our national government. In 1970, 2.9 million civilians worked for the federal government; in 2008, that figure was 2.8 million. In 1970, federal bureaucrats made up 3.8 percent of total U.S. workers, while in 2008 they made up a mere 1.9 percent. Hardly evidence of continuous or uncontrollable growth. The other theory of the cause of big government is much more consistent with the history of the federal government. In this view, we have come to have big government largely because this is what the American public has demanded. Consider this: the two periods that account for most of the growth in federal programs — the 1930s and 1960s — were also times of extraordinary political unrest and citizen activism. People wanted big new government programs to deal with the pressing issues of those times. In the ‘30s, Americans wanted the government to address the widespread economic suffering, and we ended up with programs like Social Security, welfare, bank regulation, etc. The ‘60s saw significant political movements demanding government action to address environmental pollution, racial discrimination, workplace and consumer safety, poverty, and lack of health care for the elderly. In other words, big government is not something that has been forced on Americans by liberal elitists and power-hungry bureaucrats. We have it because we ourselves have demanded big government to deal with the many big problems we have faced in our society. We have called for big government programs when it has been obvious that there are serious problems that cannot be solved through individual effort or by the natural workings of the free market. And by and large, most Americans continue to support these big government programs. Polls consistently show that between 60 and 70 percent of Americans want to see increased federal government activity around issues of the environment, education, crime, Social Security, and health care. Importantly, such large majorities supporting big government programs cannot simply be made up of liberals; they must also include a lot of moderates and conservatives as well. So when it comes to the issue of big government, it may actually be the Republicans who are the elitists — who are trying to impose their view of minimal government on a public that has demanded and still supports most big government programs. Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections would do well to make that one of their campaign messages.Libertarian AsidesACA Increases the Problem of Healthcare. Why We Need Reform. Antos et al 15 (Joseph Antos is the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his research focuses on the economics of health policy — including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, the uninsured, and the overall reform of the health care system and its financing. He also studies the impact of health care expenditures on federal budget policy. Before joining AEI, Antos was assistant director for health and human resources at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE. The Institute does not perform contract research and does not accept government grants. Its research agenda is determined by its president in consultation with its trustees, scholars and fellows, and academic advisers; the substance and conclusions of its research and publications are determined by the individuals conducting the research. AEI operates at the intersection of scholarship and politics, aiming to elevate political debate and improve the substance of government policy. “Improving Health and Health Care.” December 2015) Despite, and in a sense because of, the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, US health care is still badly in need of reform and revitalization. Instead of more federal regulation and subsidies, what US health care needs is adoption of market principles, starting with broad empowerment of the patient-consumer. The proposals advanced in this volume would replace many counterproductive and outdated federal policies with practical, market-based reforms that aim to provide all Americans with access to high-quality health care at affordable prices. Medicaid has experienced rapid cost growth over many years, even as the services it provides to lower income households are far from adequate. A fundamental problem is the split financial responsibility for the program. The federal government pays for about 60 percent of all state Medicaid spending, with no upper limit on total cost. The federal government points to its financial stake in the program as a rationale for imposing an extensive web of rules on the states. At the same time, states find it easier to maximize federal Medicaid funding rather than implement difficult measures to improve the cost-effectiveness of the program. The struggle between the two competing visions for US health care has been a fairly one-sided affair. The proponents of more federal control and regulation have won most of the battles, most recently with the passage of the ACA. The result has been a steady, decades-long march toward more consolidated federal control over all aspects of financing and the consumption of health care services. But this steady increase of federally centered control has not successfully addressed the basic problem of the inefficiency of American health care and therefore its unsustainable cost. The fundamental problem with reliance on centralized control over a sector of the economy as complex and vast as health care is that no person or bureaucracy could possess the requisite knowledge to properly set the dials of control to achieve the best balance of cost and quality. Moreover, what is understood about effective medical care is changing far too rapidly for a governmental bureaucracy to keep up. The Obama administration and other supporters of the ACA frequently argue that the ACA is not government-run health care because it was built on a market-oriented framework of consumer choice and private plan competition. There is, of course, an element of truth to this argument. The ACA exchanges allow for some consumer choice among competing private insurance options. The law does not involve forcing physicians into a position of employment in a government-run insurance model, such as is the case in the United Kingdom. But as a matter of direction, it clearly involves a significant move toward greater federal government control. The law moves to the federal government massive amounts of power over both insurance markets and the manner by which health services are provided to patients from employers, states, hospitals, physician groups, and individuals. The starting point for renewing American health care must be replacement of the ACA with a genuine, consumer-driven approach to expanding health insurance coverage. The ACA moved power and authority over the direction of US health care from consumers, employers, and the states to the federal government. A replacement plan must be built on a more decentralized approach, with consumers given the ability to make choices for themselves and authority returned to the states to oversee health care markets. Placing the citizen at the center of decision making in health care is the proper starting point for reform. It ensures that decision making about what constitutes high-value health services is placed in the hands of those that are directly affected and in the best position to make intelligent judgments over a sustained period of time. It also ensures that citizens are ultimately calling the shots over the matters that are central to their individual ability to have full and productive lives. Medicare is pivotal to an effective reform of US health care because of its dominant regulatory role. Medicare’s rules for paying hospitals, physicians, and other service providers heavily influence how care is delivered to all patients, not just Medicare enrollees. The program would improve if there were fewer regulations and more emphasis on market-based reforms. The starting point should be conversion of the program, on a prospective basis, to a premium support model. Beneficiaries would be entitled to a fixed level of federal support for their insurance and would be given the opportunity to pick from a number competing insurance options, including the traditional program and private insurance plans. HSAs should be a central component of health care in the United States. The accounts provide strong incentives for their owners to seek the best value for their health care purchases, and they provide a ready vehicle for providing additional protection against high medical expenses. Existing rules should be modified to allow all Americans to make annual contributions to an HSA, and a new, onetime federal tax credit would provide a strong incentive for those without accounts to establish them. HSAs should also be fully integrated into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.Healthcare Is Not A Right and The Government Should Stay Out.Montauk 04 (Lance Montauk, MD Assistant Clinical Professor Emergency Medicine UCSF Attending Physician Emergency Department Alta Bates Medical Center. “Why the US Government Should Not Adopt a Universal Health Coverage Program” 2004)Our Founding Fathers have already spoken on this subject. Our country was founded on the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” rights such as the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, etc. Frustratingly, in California, state prisoners have more rights to—and probably receive better—health care, than many of our nonincarcerated inhabitants, because of court holdings that failure to provide comprehensive health care in prison is equivalent to cruel and unusual punishment! Thus we have examples of felons in prison receiving $2,000,000 heart transplants (which failed)—a good example of how the so-called “right” to comprehensive health care goes awry. Or consider our national dialysis policy.... I accept that access to basic health care is an important human need, and major steps towards realizing these health care needs include provision of: 1) sanitary sewer/potable water systems; 2) adequate nutrition; 3) vaccinations/immunizations; 4) contraception and sexually transmissible disease control; 5) prenatal and childbirth care. These essential public health matters remain far more cost effective than the boutique “comprehensive health care” most California doctors provide and the JAMA article belabors us about. The elitist creation of “comprehensive health care” “rights” The California Journal of Emergency Medicine V:3, Jul-Sep 2004 Page 63 in the USA while millions die of malaria/malnutrition/ AIDS/etc. in the rest of the world due to lack of basic health care access, represents the kind of elitist isolationism conservatives like myself disdain. Virtually all Americans agree we have less “right” to “comprehensive health care” than to comprehensive education. While all residents—including illegals— have rights to some education, our school system stands out for its degree of local independence and plethora of choice. Public, religious, and private profit and non-profit educational choices abound at all levels, and no one claims that the Federal Government should take over our schools. No one thinks everyone can attend Harvard, but we all desire non-prejudicial opportunity to compete for admission. Likewise, not everyone needs admission to the Mayo Clinic, but all can compete for the best care available to themNational Single-Payer System lowers Costs, But Drives Doctors and Insurance Companies Away. Book 09 (Robert A. Book, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Health Economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation. 2009.)Many physicians, quite reasonably frustrated by the cost and hassle of dealing with billing multiple insurance companies-not to mention the time lost appealing seemingly arbitrary denials of payment-often conclude that the solution lies in a "single-payer" system along the lines of a "Medicare for all" concept. A single payer-a government agency-would at a minimum eliminate the duplication of effort associated with signing on and maintaining relationships with multiple private insurance companies. It would standardize billing processes and coverage rules and perhaps even establish clearly defined rules to reduce the frequency of apparently arbitrary "downcoding" and denials of payment. What many fail to appreciate, however, is the extent to which the existence of multiple, competing payers prevents government payers such as Medicare from reducing their payment levels to much lower levels than prevail now. As it stands, a reduction in Medicare payment rates can induce physicians to drop Medicare patients and try to make their living from a higher percentage of (or even only) privately insured patients. This would inevitably result in reduced access to care for Medicare patients-and thus political pressure from those patients for increased Medicare payments to improve access. The Medicare Model If Medicare or something like it were the "single payer"-the sole purchaser of health care-no such pressure would exist. If the single payer established lower payment rates, by definition physicians could not drop out and make their living from other patients, because there wouldn't be any other patients.[3] The only alternative for a physician would be to cease the practice of medicine and either retire or find another profession. While this would certainly happen to some degree, a large percentage of physicians-who have invested many dollars and years of training in their practices-would be unable to find an alternative profession that is nearly as satisfying or as remunerative. The inevitable result would be much lower payment rates and lower income for physicians.[4] Patients would suffer as well, especially in the long run. Because fewer highly talented people would be willing to undergo the years of training (under difficult working conditions and low pay) to become physicians, patients would suffer decreased access to health care and longer wait times. Lower payments would mean that physicians would invest less in advanced medical equipment and would likely spend less time with each patient. In addition, with fewer people undergoing the training necessary to conduct medical research, new treatments and cures would be developed at a slower rate, costing many lives. Medicare Payment Levels Medicare determines the level of its payments to physicians based on a complex formula involving crude estimates of the relative costs of providing different services,[5] annual adjustments based on estimates of demand for services, and growth in the Medicare population and the overall economy. The annual adjustment process is expressed in the "Sustainable Growth Rate" (SGR) rule HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn6" \o "" [6] which attempts to constrain the growth in Medicare spending and "make up" for the differences between previous years' estimated and actual utilization. Each year since 1999, the SGR calculation has called for a reduction in the Medicare payment levels (a "negative update") for physician services, because actual use outstripped previous forecasts, and forecasted future utilization outstripped the growth rate of the Medicare population and gross domestic product (GDP). And each year, physicians' representatives have gone to Congress to argue that reducing payments will cause some physicians to drop out of the Medicare program, reducing elderly Americans' access to health care. Negative updates were allowed to go into effect in only three of the last 11 years-in the other eight years, after intensive lobbying from physician groups, Congress has intervened and passed legislation either freezing payments or providing a positive update. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn7" \o "" [7] Competition Among Buyers The basis for the physicians' now-annual argument to Congress is that reducing Medicare payments will cause more physicians to drop Medicare patients and make their living from privately insured and self-paying patients only. Indeed, anecdotal evidence indicates that some physicians have already done so, HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn8" \o "" [8] as Medicare payments are already significantly below those of private insurance by almost 20 percent for physician services overall and by 12 percent for primary care. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn9" \o "" [9] As if to demonstrate the effects of lower payments, in most states Medicaid payments are even lower than Medicare's, and far fewer physicians participate in Medicaid. Not surprisingly, states with relatively lower Medicaid payments compared to other states have lower rates of physician participation in Medicaid. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn10" \o "" [10] Access Issues Physician advocacy groups make the reasonable-and believable-argument that every reduction in the Medicare payment rates will result in a further reduction in the number of physicians who find it worthwhile to take Medicare patients and instead try to make their living from patients with private payers. A survey found that in response to a proposed 10 percent cut in Medicare rates, 28 percent of physicians would stop accepting new Medicare patients, 8 percent would stop treating Medicare patients already under their care, and much higher percentages would discontinue nursing home visits, reduce available hours, or defer investment in medical and health IT equipment. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn11" \o "" [11] Obviously, this would not affect physicians in all specialties equally. Most pediatricians have very few if any Medicare patients HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn12" \o "" [12] and would hardly be affected at all, but cardiologists and oncologists, for example, would be hit hard, since a large percentage of their potential patients are over age 65. The impact on nephrologists would be especially severe, because anyone with end-state renal disease is covered by Medicare regardless of age. Yet for every reduction in the payment level, a few more physicians would find it better to drop Medicare than to stay in. The absence of other payers would give the "single payer" the freedom to reduce payments far more than Medicare can in the presence of a large percentage of privately insured patients. The result would be substantially lower payments-the "single payer" would be a "stingy payer." Physicians' income would be substantially reduced. Indeed, in countries with single-payer health systems, the average income of physicians is substantially lower than in the United States. For example, physicians in the Britain and Canada have incomes more than 30 percent lower than their U.S. counterparts. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn13" \o "" [13] The existence of multiple private payers limits not only the ability of Medicare but also that of private payers themselves to reduce payment levels. Although physicians usually face "take it or leave it" contracts from insurance companies, and most physicians have little ability to actually negotiate, a health plan that sets payment rates too low will find that many physicians choose to "leave it." When enough physicians leave, patients have difficulty obtaining access to care and eventually leave the health plan. In order to continue to sell the health plan (either to individuals or to employers), the insurance company will have to increase payments to induce physicians to join. While this process is slow and imperfect compared to market mechanisms in other industries, it does limit the ability of plans to set arbitrarily low payment rates. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn14" \o "" [14] "Stingy Payer" Damages Future Generations as Well The establishment of a "single payer" health care system would inevitably result in lower payments for physician and other health care providers. The immediate effect of having a single ("stingy") payer would be lower incomes for physicians and a reduction in the supply of active physicians, thereby impairing access to health care for all patients. However, the result of "single/stingy payer" health care will not only be lower incomes for physicians now but reduced access and lower quality health care for future generations as well.Overreaching Government Control Raises Healthcare Prices, We Should Involve The Consumer Instead. Herzlinger 02 (Regina E. Herzlinger is an American businessperson and academic. She is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School where she teaches on the Master of Business Administration programme. “Let’s Put Consumers in Charge of Health Care” 2002.) About 20 years ago, managed care was widely viewed as the silver bullet that would curb cost increases while ensuring patients good and convenient treatment. But managed care has been a bust. The original HMO models—vertically integrated systems for managing care or those that use gatekeepers to impose stringent controls on care—were resisted by patients and physicians. In response, the managed care organizations began relaxing their controls, allowing patients more freedom to see specialists and out-of-network doctors. Costs began to climb again, yet patients and providers continued to feel constrained. Now, no one’s happy—not the insurers, not the patients, not the doctors and nurses, not the hospitals, and certainly not the companies that are footing the bill. When consumers apply pressure on an industry, whether it’s retailing or banking, cars or computers, it invariably produces a surge of innovation that increases productivity, reduces prices, improves quality, and expands choices. The essential problem with the health care industry is that it has been shielded from consumer control—by employers, insurers, and the government. As a result, costs have exploded as choices have narrowed. Today, approximately 40% of all employers and 92% of small ones offer employees only a single health insurance plan. And even when companies offer three or four options, precious little distinguishes them—most managed-care plans provide the same benefits, insure virtually identical levels of expenses, reimburse providers in similar ways for a limited array of traditional services, and last for only one year. In essence, managed care comes in just two flavors: plans that place constraints on access to physicians and hospitals for a lower price, and plans that offer readier access for a higher price. The lack of choice and control ensures that many consumers’ and providers’ needs go unmet and that industry inefficiency goes unchecked. A similar consumerist revolution can take place with health care benefits—if companies are willing to give their employees substantially enhanced choice among health plans, much greater control over how much they spend for various health care needs, and much more information to help them make the right choices. Just as we saw with the securities industry, entrepreneurs will respond to the unleashing of consumer demands with clearly differentiated products featuring various combinations of benefits, levels of insurance coverage, payment systems for providers, lengths of policies, and sources of information. The competition among the new products, in turn, will control costs while improving the overall quality of coverage and care.The Government Already Cannot Handle The Nations Finances Effectively, So Why Would We Allow Them To Intrude Further Into Healthcare? Miron 10 (Mercatus Center. George Mason University. Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Harvard University Senior Fellow, Cato Institute. “The Negative Consequences of Government Expenditure” August 2010.) To understand and evaluate the impact of government expenditure on the economy, it is useful to review basic principles and definitions related to this expenditure. The first principle is that expenditure requires taxation. This can occur simultaneously with the expenditure, or in future if governments borrow and run deficits. Alternatively, governments can print money to pay for expenditure; this generates future ―taxes‖ in the form of inflation. The second principle is that taxation does more than transfer purchasing power from taxpayers to the government; it also distorts the economic decisions of consumers and firms. Regardless of any efficiency benefits from subsidizing health insurance, government provision generates efficiency negatives. Medicare encourages early retirement and discourages saving for medical expenses. Medicaid, like any transfer program conditioned on low income, discourages work effort. By spurring excessive demand for health care, Medicare and Medicaid generate other distortions. Innovation in health care technology continually provides better but more expensive medicines, devices, treatments, and techniques. If these new products are subsidized by insurance, utilization is high and prices increase, so government expenditure increases faster than inflation. As government expenditure mounts, the budgetary pressure leads to price controls and rationing, which generates further distortions in health care markets. Even worse, the price controls reduce the incentive for innovation in new medicines, devices, surgical procedures, and treatments. In fact, large chunks of current expenditure are counterproductive and fail to accomplish reasonable policy goals. Determining the ideal level of government expenditure is difficult, but just a few decades ago the U.S. was a productive economy with far lower expenditure. In the 1960s, for example, federal government expenditure was below 20 percent of GDP, and state and local expenditure was below 12 percent; this contrasts with roughly 25 percent and 15 percent now. The discussion here suggests returning expenditure to at least its pre-1970 level.*****Policy GoodShells – update for topic-specificFramework 1NC - Substance1NC TheoryInterpretation - The affirmative should be required to read a topical policy proposal and defend its implementation. The affirmative can only weigh advantages that stem from the implementation of the plan. Violation – The affirmative didn’t read a topical policy proposal, or doesn’t defend its implementation. They leverage advantages based off of the endorsement of the discourse or theoretical content of the 1AC, not the plan.Impact - Framework should be a procedural voting issue for reasons of fairness and topic specific education.1NC LantisPolicy debate is good for education, engagement, and empathy. Clear rules, a stable topic, institutional role playing and simulation are integral to the process. Lantis 8 (Jeffrey S. Lantis is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Chair of the International Relations Program at The College of Wooster, “The State of the Active Teaching and Learning Literature”, )Simulations, games, and role-play represent a third important set of active teaching and learning approaches. Educational objectives include deepening conceptual understandings of a particular phenomenon, sets of interactions, or socio-political processes by using student interaction to bring abstract concepts to life. They provide students with a real or imaginary environment within which to act out a given situation (Crookall 1995; Kaarbo and Lantis 1997; Kaufman 1998; Jefferson 1999; Flynn 2000; Newmann and Twigg 2000; Thomas 2002; Shellman and Turan 2003; Hobbs and Moreno 2004; Wheeler 2006; Kanner 2007; Raymond and Sorensen 2008). The aim is to enable students to actively experience, rather than read or hear about, the “constraints and motivations for action (or inaction) experienced by real players” (Smith and Boyer 1996:691), or to think about what they might do in a particular situation that the instructor has dramatized for them. As Sutcliffe (2002:3) emphasizes, “Remote theoretical concepts can be given life by placing them in a situation with which students are familiar.” Such exercises capitalize on the strengths of active learning techniques: creating memorable experiential learning events that tap into multiple senses and emotions by utilizing visual and verbal stimuli. Early examples of simulations scholarship include works by Harold Guetzkow and colleagues, who created the Inter-Nation Simulation (INS) in the 1950s. This work sparked wider interest in political simulations as teaching and research tools. By the 1980s, scholars had accumulated a number of sophisticated simulations of international politics, with names like “Crisis,” “Grand Strategy,” “ICONS,” and “SALT III.” More recent literature on simulations stresses opportunities to reflect dynamics faced in the real world by individual decision makers, by small groups like the US National Security Council, or even global summits organized around international issues, and provides for a focus on contemporary global problems (Lantis et al. 2000; Boyer 2000). Some of the most popular simulations involve modeling international organizations, in particular United Nations and European Union simulations (Van Dyke et al. 2000; McIntosh 2001; Dunn 2002; Zeff 2003; Switky 2004; Chasek 2005). Simulations may be employed in one class meeting, through one week, or even over an entire semester. Alternatively, they may be designed to take place outside of the classroom in local, national, or international competitions. The scholarship on the use of games in international studies sets these approaches apart slightly from simulations. For example, Van Ments (1989:14) argues that games are structured systems of competitive play with specific defined endpoints or solutions that incorporate the material to be learnt. They are similar to simulations, but contain specific structures or rules that dictate what it means to “win” the simulated interactions. Games place the participants in positions to make choices that 10 affect outcomes, but do not require that they take on the persona of a real world actor. Examples range from interactive prisoner dilemma exercises to the use of board games in international studies classes (Hart and Simon 1988; Marks 1998; Brauer and Delemeester 2001; Ender 2004; Asal 2005; Ehrhardt 2008) A final subset of this type of approach is the role-play. Like simulations, roleplay places students within a structured environment and asks them to take on a specific role. Role-plays differ from simulations in that rather than having their actions prescribed by a set of well-defined preferences or objectives, role-plays provide more leeway for students to think about how they might act when placed in the position of their slightly less well-defined persona (Sutcliffe 2002). Role-play allows students to create their own interpretation of the roles because of role-play’s less “goal oriented” focus. The primary aim of the role-play is to dramatize for the students the relative positions of the actors involved and/or the challenges facing them (Andrianoff and Levine 2002). This dramatization can be very simple (such as roleplaying a two-person conversation) or complex (such as role-playing numerous actors interconnected within a network). The reality of the scenario and its proximity to a student’s personal experience is also flexible. While few examples of effective roleplay that are clearly distinguished from simulations or games have been published, some recent work has laid out some very useful role-play exercises with clear procedures for use in the international studies classroom (Syler et al. 1997; Alden 1999; Johnston 2003; Krain and Shadle 2006; Williams 2006; Belloni 2008). Taken as a whole, the applications and procedures for simulations, games, and role-play are well detailed in the active teaching and learning literature. Experts recommend a set of core considerations that should be taken into account when designing effective simulations (Winham 1991; Smith and Boyer 1996; Lantis 1998; Shaw 2004; 2006; Asal and Blake 2006; Ellington et al. 2006). These include building the simulation design around specific educational objectives, carefully selecting the situation or topic to be addressed, establishing the needed roles to be played by both students and instructor, providing clear rules, specific instructions and background material, and having debriefing and assessment plans in place in advance. There are also an increasing number of simulation designs published and disseminated in the discipline, whose procedures can be adopted (or adapted for use) depending upon an instructor’s educational objectives (Beriker and Druckman 1996; Lantis 1996; 1998; Lowry 1999; Boyer 2000; Kille 2002; Shaw 2004; Switky and Aviles 2007; Tessman 2007; Kelle 2008). Finally, there is growing attention in this literature to assessment. Scholars have found that these methods are particularly effective in bridging the gap between academic knowledge and everyday life. Such exercises also lead to enhanced student interest in the topic, the development of empathy, and acquisition and retention of knowledge.1NC ChandlerRefusal to engage in institutional reform reduces inquiry to narcissism. There is a direct tradeoff with productive discussion and research.Chandler 9 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 81-2)Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world affairs. This becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have moved a long way from Hedley Bull’s (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead. The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our reflectivity – the awareness of our own ethics and values – than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics. Politics has become a religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our ‘political’ acts. What matters is the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalisation theory – the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organisation. 1NC MouffeOnly debates about engaging institutions can produce social change. Disengagement from politics fractures coalitions and reinforces conservatism.Mouffe 2009(Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics. They see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem. Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics. 1NC KerbelConservative forces always exist, only policy discussions can persuade them to support change.Kerbel – no date(Susan G. Kerbel is a clinical psychologist and coufounder of Cognitive Policy Works, “From the Couch to the Culture: How Psychological Analysis Can Strengthen the Progressive Agenda”, Cognitive Policy Works, )The psychology of change: This is one of the great hidden powers of clinical psychological thinking that the progressive movement would do well to understand. Clinical practice is all about creating change, in individuals, couples, families, and groups of people; organizational change is sometimes a part of the equation as well. In all these instances, there is a dynamic at work that is essential to understanding the nature of changing the beliefs and choices of other people. There are the forces that seek change, and those that fear and resist it. Both elements are always present. There is a constant interplay between those aspects of the individual, or group, or society, that desire to do things differently, and those that do not. In our political lives, we often act as if this is not the case, or wish that to be so, but it never is. Both impulses are always at work, and both must be addressed before forward motion can occur. Being able to recognize and anticipate the presence of resistance to change is at the heart of the psychological change process, and a tremendous strategic advantage if one can understand it and work with it. This is part and parcel of the work of any competent clinician. If you know where and how resistance will play out in response to a given initiative for change, one can plan for it, address it, and harness the power of resistance to eventually join the forces of change, if addressed effectively enough. At the very least, resistant forces can be minimized or neutralized so that forward motion is not impeded. Progressives seem to have much to learn about this. As a political body, we seem to be in a constant state of surprise when the forces of resistance to change emerge, and often seem unprepared to respond to it. There is a predictable arc to the process of creating change that is apparent once one knows how to read the signs of resistance. For activists who are interested in generating social change, or in persuading others to consider a new viewpoint or policy proposal, understanding the psychodynamics of creating change can and should be an essential tool. Once one can understand the change process from a dynamic psychological perspective, one can act to harness the inevitable drag of resistance, and minimize its impact on moving the agenda forward. 1NC Shell - StandardInterpretation: The aff should defend the hypothetical enactment of a topical plan“United States Federal Government should” means the debate is solely about the outcome of a policy established by governmental meansEricson, California Polytechnic Dean Emeritus, 03 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose. Prefer our interpretation:Ground: allowing un-topical affs kills ground, all neg ground is based off of a policy happening. Absent a stable locus for links and competition, debate is shallow, killing educationPredictable limits: government action is key to create a limit on the topic, allowing different methods or framings to be the 1ac explodes neg research burden and kills core generics. Prefer our limits because they are predictably based off of the resolutionTopic education: the topic is about the effects of US policies about greenhouse gas emissions. A discussion of policies accesses a knowledge of politics, which is the largest portable impact to debateAff conditionality: without the plan text as a stable source of the offense the aff can shift their advocacy to get out of offense which discourages research and clash. Voting issueSwitch side debate solves their offense – critiquing the topic on the neg produces the same discussion.Framework is a voting issue for the reasons above Roleplaying is good and key to in-depth political knowledge – the process of debating politics and counterplans is keyZwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters’ student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning” accessed: 7/5/13 EYS]The first trend to emerge concerns how debate fosters in-depth political knowledge. Immediately, every resolution calls for analysis of United States federal government action. Given that each debater may debate in over a hundred different unique rounds, there is a competitive incentive thoroughly research as many credible, viable, and in-depth strategies as possible. Moreover, the requirement to debate both affirmative and negative sides of the topic injects a creative necessity to defend viable arguments from a multitude of perspectives. As a result, the depth of knowledge spans questions not only of what, if anything, should be done in response to a policy question, but also questions of who, when, where, and why. This opens the door to evaluating intricacies of government branch, committee, agency, and even specific persons who may yield different cost-benefit outcomes to conducting policy action. Consider the following responses: I think debate helped me understand how Congress works and policies actually happen which is different than what government classes teach you. Process counterplans are huge - reading and understanding how delegation works means you understand that it is not just congress passes a bill and the president signs. You understand that policies can happen in different methods. Executive orders, congress, and courts counterplans have all helped me understand that policies don’t just happen the way we learn in government. There are huge chunks of processes that you don't learn about in government that you do learn about in debate. Similarly, Debate has certainly aided [my political knowledge]. The nature of policy-making requires you to be knowledgeable of the political process because process does effect the outcome. Solvency questions, agent counterplans, and politics are tied to process questions. When addressing the overall higher level of awareness of agency interaction and ability to identify pros and cons of various committee, agency, or branch activity, most respondents traced this knowledge to the politics research spanning from their affirmative cases, solvency debates, counterplan ideas, and political disadvantages. One of the recurring topics concerns congressional vs. executive vs. court action and how all of that works. To be good at debate you really do need to have a good grasp of that. There is really something to be said for high school debate - because without debate I wouldn’t have gone to the library to read a book about how the Supreme Court works, read it, and be interested in it. Maybe I would’ve been a lawyer anyway and I would’ve learned some of that but I can’t imagine at 16 or 17 I would’ve had that desire and have gone to the law library at a local campus to track down a law review that might be important for a case. That aspect of debate in unparalleled - the competitive drive pushes you to find new materials. Similarly, I think [my political knowledge] comes from the politics research that we have to do. You read a lot of names name-dropped in articles. You know who has influence in different parts of congress. You know how different leaders would feel about different policies and how much clout they have. This comes from links and internal links. Overall, competitive debaters must have a depth of political knowledge on hand to respond to and formulate numerous arguments. It appears debaters then internalize both the information itself and the motivation to learn more. This aids the PEP value of intellectual pluralism as debaters seek not only an oversimplified ‘both’ sides of an issue, but multiple angles of many arguments. Debaters uniquely approach arguments from a multitude of perspectives – often challenging traditional conventions of argument. With knowledge of multiple perspectives, debaters often acknowledge their relative dismay with television news and traditional outlets of news media as superficial outlets for information.That turns the aff – focusing on the details and inner-workings of government policy-making is productive – critical approaches can’t resolve real world problems like poverty, racism and war McClean, Mollow College Philosophy Professor, 01 [David E., Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Molloy College, New York, 2001 “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” Presented at the 2001 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Available Online at archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm, JMP, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."2AC Shell - ShivelyInterpretation: The role of the ballot is to decide between a topical plan and the status quo or a competitive policy alternative. Prefer our interpretation:Limits: tons of unpredictable K frameworks, weighing our advantages is key to informed decisionsGround: They can leverage framework to moot the 1AC, structural advantages like the block makes preserving aff ground a priorityTopic education: their framework encourages generic Ks that get rehashed every year. We change the topic to learn about new things. Solves their offense – they can read their K as a DA or offer a policy alternative to the plan that resolves the harms outlined in the K. Limits are good- Agreement on what is being debated is a prior question that must be resolved first – it is a pre-condition for debate to occurShively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K — [Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 “Partisan Politics and Political Theory,” p. 181-2, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony. 2NC Overviews2NC Lantis – OverviewExtend the Lantis evidence. The rules and norms of policy debate produce education, engagement, and empathy. It is specifically the practices that they claim to criticize that are what is productive about policy debate.Prefer this evidence, it is specific to the study of pedagogy and educational practice. They can’t dismiss this evidence as just a debate hack, it is from a study in constructing a course curriculum, and determined that rules, switch side advocacy, discussing plans, all the things we do in debate are good.Three impacts to this – First is education. Lantis says that limits and rules increase the capacity of students to absorb the subject material.Second is Engagement. They say that debate makes us disingenuous and disengaged. Lantis says that classroom studies demonstrate just the opposite. Debate makes students want to make the world a better place. And, prefer an education scholar to their ideologues.Last is empathy. They’ll inevitably collapse to the argument that policy debate makes us fascists or bad people. Lantis says that classroom studies showed that the things we do in debate actually make us more empathetic and better-intentioned.2NC Chandler – OverviewExtend the Chandler evidence. Think of it as the narcissism DA. The retreat into self-referential critical theory causes students to moralize about the world, rather than attempting to understand how institutions function. “Me-search not research”.The Chandler evidence also says that there is a direct tradeoff between the two. Every time you vote for framework, you make the world a better place. They’ve already done their “me-search” so there is no value to voting aff. The only risk is that affirming their moralizing destroys the incentive to learn about institutions.This evidence also answers all of their criticisms of institutions. First, it says that framing real-world problem-solving as inherently conservative is unproductive. It leads to an insular and narcissistic academia that ignores politics and reality.Specifically, this evidence also answers their claims that reality is socially constructed. Chandler says that student adherence to constructivist theories trade off with their capacity to make informed decisions to promote social change.The impact to the narcissism DA is that it turns the case. Voting aff allows them to feel good about themselves, rather than learning how to produce real world change. This guarantees that the exclusionary uses of institutions will increase.2NC Mouffe – OverviewExtend the Mouffe evidence. Their mode of “critique as withdrawal” from institutions is counterproductive. Their refusal to engage with what they interpret as hegemonic structures of institutional power means that there can be no effective counterhegemonic discourse. This enables destructive discourses of the status quo to continue unchecked, and prevents meaningful counterhegemonic coalitions from forming. Politics is not the enemy of heterogeneity and resistance.2NC - Kerbel2NC - Kerbel – OverviewExtend the Kerbel evidence. It’s the persuasion DA to the aff. Political psychology indicates that there are always people opposed to change, only framing the discussion in terms that resonate with opposition can persuade people to change their opinions. The aff frames discussion in self-referential terms that only relate to people who agree with them, which makes persuasion impossible.They’re wrong about institutional politics. The Kerbel evidence says that conservatives can be persuaded, and turned into allies for change, if the discussion is framed properly. Their pessimism about political change is a product of their framework, not politics.The institutional disengagement DA is unique. Political psychology means that every question of social change is about overcoming conservative opposition via persuasion, which makes every vote for framework important.Default to specificity. They need evidence about political psychology to answer this argument. Moral denunciations of politics aren’t good enough, and prove our arguments about the link to the narcissism and disengagement disads.2NC - Kerbel - Policy Debate KeyWe must respect authority and engage in disciplined political discussion to have any chance to engage conservatives in discussions of social change.Brewer 10(Joe Brewer, Founder of Cognitive Policy Works and a consultant in political phsychology, “Why You Need to Understand Political Psychology”, Cognitive Policy Works, April 1, )What would happen if more Americans knew about insights like these? First off, we would likely become sensitive to our own tendencies to misunderstand those who are different. We would also be more aware of the ways we treat others as less than ourselves. And we would have deeper insights into why it has been so hard to have constructive dialogue about important political issues like health care and climate change when the people involved operate under fundamentally different assumptions and beliefs. This suggests a strategy for bringing about real and lasting change: The Mindful Politics Strategy Approach political discourse through the lens of political psychology. Look for key differences in group understandings and seek common ground through shared aspects of culture. Build trust by earnestly seeking to know the other. And aspire toward new coalitions based on core concerns that unite culturally distinct communities across the nation around the fundamental human condition we all share. This is a worthy strategy. It is based on an understanding of how the mind actually works, rather than commonplace assumptions that all-too-often reflect prejudices and misconceptions. And it is grounded in the foundational desire to build trust among people who see the world through a different lens than us. Some readers will think this is naive and simplistic. After all, many conservatives have already decided that we are “the enemy” and therefore less-than-human. I am quite aware of the difference between conservatives and progressives – something I researched extensively during my time as a fellow of George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute. And I know that there is a world of difference between the Tea Party Movement and . But I also realize that many of our problems stem from basic ignorance about how our own minds work. This is our opportunity to learn more about ourselves and become astute participants in the political process. We neglect the workings of the political mind at our peril. Note About Moral Foundations Theory Jonathan Haidt has done an exceptional job identifying the five moral foundations for the human condition. He has put together a popular survey to help people see how much of their personal make-up is grounded in each one of these foundations. Where his method falters is in the frames that shape key questions used to determine the moral foundations of political liberals and conservatives. He inadvertantly frames liberal ideals through a conservative lens, resulting in the misplaced observation that liberals lack a “purity” response. What he actually measures is the absence of conservative notions of purity in liberal responses through the way he words his questions. This minor flaw in his methodology leads to the skewed perception that liberals lack a moral response that is common in conservatives. What is actually happening is that liberals and conservatives have very different moral worldviews and their reactions around purity and disgust are expressed in different ways. As an example, liberals have a strong purity response to human rights abuses. This has to do with the prominence of human dignity in the progressive worldview. The inherent goodness of people is violated by acts of torture, child abuse, chronic neglect of the homeless, etc. This violation of moral purity evokes a strong disgust response in liberals. Conservatives have a different moral worldview based on authority and discipline that lacks the notion of human dignity. As such, they are likely to experience a lower disgust response to human rights abuses. At the same time, their reactions to different notions of purity – such as the inherent goodness of their authority figures – leads to a strong disgust response when the sources they consider authoritative are violated. This can take the form of not questioning political leaders during times of war (but only if those leaders are seen as “good conservatives”) or reacting strongly to doctrines of faith in conservative religious communities. Haidt’s theory would be improved greatly by incorporating moral worldviews into the interpretation of moral foundations. 2NC – Kerbel – Rules/Limits KeyRespect for the rules and the authority of the community are a precondition to challenging conservative political views – the rejection of rules and norms means that even if they attempt to engage the political, they will be unpersuasive.Haidt 8(Jonathan Haidt is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, September 9, )In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at .) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment. In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping. Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers. The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap. A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights? The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity. The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual "deviance," but it can also be harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals might be more effective when supplemented with hints of purity/sanctity. The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to "question authority" and assert that "dissent is patriotic," Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be "soft on crime" has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who "work hard and play by the rules." But if you don't do it at all—if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers -- then you are committing a kind of sacrilege. If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom. Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so. 2NC – Kerbel – BacklashDemands for unlimited freedom only cause resistance – politics must be built on structure to be persuasive.Jacobs 9(Tom Jacobs, “Morals Authority”, Miller-McCune, April 27, )Jonathan Haidt is hardly a road-rage kind of guy, but he does get irritated by self-righteous bumper stickers. The soft-spoken psychologist is acutely annoyed by certain smug slogans that adorn the cars of fellow liberals: “Support our troops: Bring them home” and “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” “No conservative reads those bumper stickers and thinks, ‘Hmm — so liberals are patriotic!’” he says, in a sarcastic tone of voice that jarringly contrasts with his usual subdued sincerity. “We liberals are universalists and humanists; it’s not part of our morality to highly value nations. So to claim dissent is patriotic — or that we’re supporting the troops, when in fact we’re opposing the war — is disingenuous. “It just pisses people off.” The University of Virginia scholar views such slogans as clumsy attempts to insist we all share the same values. In his view, these catch phrases are not only insincere — they’re also fundamentally wrong. Liberals and conservatives, he insists, inhabit different moral universes. There is some overlap in belief systems, but huge differences in emphasis. In a creative attempt to move beyond red-state/blue-state clichés, Haidt has created a framework that codifies mankind’s multiplicity of moralities. His outline is simultaneously startling and reassuring — startling in its stark depiction of our differences, and reassuring in that it brings welcome clarity to an arena where murkiness of motivation often breeds contention. He views the demonization that has marred American political debate in recent decades as a massive failure in moral imagination. We assume everyone’s ethical compass points in the same direction and label those whose views don’t align with our sense of right and wrong as either misguided or evil. In fact, he argues, there are multiple due norths. “I think of liberals as colorblind,” he says in a hushed tone that conveys the quiet intensity of a low-key crusader. “We have finely tuned sensors for harm and injustice but are blind to other moral dimensions. Look at the way the word ‘wall’ is used in liberal discourse. It’s almost always related to the idea that we have to knock them down. “Well, if we knock down all the walls, we’re sitting out in the rain and cold! We need some structure.” 2NC – Kerbel - PortabilityFramework matters – key to real world policy change and portable skillsKerbel – no date(Susan G. Kerbel is a clinical psychologist and coufounder of Cognitive Policy Works, “From the Couch to the Culture: How Psychological Analysis Can Strengthen the Progressive Agenda”, Cognitive Policy Works, )One of the defining skill sets that allows clinicians to influence the choices of clients is knowing how to find just the right words to attain certain effects. Some of this comes from training, but much of it is developed via trial and error, during years of listening to clients. Eventually, one can develop an intimate understanding of the workings of language, and how to use it with directness, subtlety, and intention. Moreover, an extensive body of research in psychology has examined the variety of factors that impact the effectiveness of communication, such as choice of words, timing, inflection, credibility of the messenger, medium of presentation, characteristics of the listener, etc. Taken together, there is much that psychological practice and research can do to inform the use of language in political contexts. Successful progressive campaigns – policy or political – depend on the crafting of effective messages. From interpreting focus group and survey data, to choosing which words will best persuade, helping progressives better articulate their values to the public and to policy makers by applying a psychologically informed perspective is one of the primary missions of CPW. 2NC – Fairness Affect DAFairness Key to EmpathyEmpathy is modulated by concepts of fairness – unfair play prevents empathic response to sufferingSinger et al 6(Tania Singer, Ben Seymour, and Chris Frith, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College of London and Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, “Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others”, Nature, January 26, )The neural processes underlying empathy are a subject of intense interest within the social neurosciences1-3. However, very little is known about how brain empathic responses are modulated by the affective link between individuals. We show here that empathic responses are modulated by learned preferences, a result consistent with economic models of social preferences 4-7. We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas (fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices) towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. We conclude that in men (at least) empathic responses are shaped by valuation of other people's social behaviour, such that they empathize with fair opponents while favouring the physical punishment of unfair opponents, a finding that echoes recent evidence for altruistic punishment.Cheating Destroys AffectPlaying unfairly destroys the empathetic response of observers to suffering. Neuroscience proves that people develop weaker affective bonds to those who violate the rules, and actively desensitize themselves to their pain. Also, punishing those who play unfairly is intrinsically pleasurable.Singer et al 6(Tania Singer, Ben Seymour, and Chris Frith, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College of London and Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, “Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others”, Nature, January 26, )Empathy enables us to share the emotion, pain and sensation of others. The perception–action model of empathy states that the observation or imagination of another person in a particular emotional state automatically activates a representation of that state in the observer 1. Recent imaging studies provide evidence for common activation elicited when experiencing disgust8, touch9 or pain10-12 in oneself, and when perceiving the same feelings in others. For example, studies on empathy for pain have found that the activation observed in anterior insula/fronto-insular cortex (AI/FI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to pain in oneself is also seen when observing pain in someone else10,12. These results suggest that our ability to empathize relies on neuronal systems that underpin our own bodily and emotional states 1,2,10,13. However, it is unclear whether or how these responses are modulated by the social relations between individuals.? To address this question, we measured brain responses when individuals empathized with the pain of someone they liked or disliked. We used an economic game model to induce liking or disliking of two confederate actors, previously unknown to our experimental subjects. The confederates played fair or unfair strategies in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game (PDG) with the subjects. As illustrated in Fig. 1a, in this game the subject was always ‘first mover’ and could either trust the other player by sending his/her money to him/her or mistrust him/her by keeping it. The confederates were always ‘second mover’ and could choose between a fair or an unfair response by returning high or low amounts of money (Supplementary Information). On the basis of previous findings 14, we expected that subjects would come to like fair players and dislike unfair players.? As Fig. 1b illustrates, subjects perceived the confederates as being fair and unfair according to their game-playing strategy. Post-scan behavioural ratings confirmed that both male and female subjects rated the fair player as being significantly more fair, more agreeable, more likeable and more attractive than the unfair player (range of scale ρ2 to 22; P , 0.001; Supplementary Table S1).? In the second part of the experiment we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the liking or disliking acquired during the preceding game modulated empathic responses for pain. One actor sat on each side of the scanner, enabling the scanned volunteer to observe the hands of the fair and unfair player as well as his/her own hand. Painful stimulation was applied through electrodes to the hands of all three participants. As shown in Fig. 1c, cues (coloured arrows) were presented in random order indicating whether she/he (self condition), the fair player (fair condition) or the unfair player (unfair condition) would get low stimulation (no pain condition) or high stimulation (pain condition).? We predicted that pain-related empathic responses in AI/FI and ACC would be elicited when observing a fair person in pain but that this activity would be reduced or absent when observing pain in a person who had previously played unfairly. In view of recent economic models of social preferences4-7 and altruistic punishment 15-17 we further expected that the reduction of empathy for an unfair person might be accompanied by an increase in activity in brain areas known to have a key function in reward processing, such as ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens and orbito-frontal cortex18-20. It has been shown that people reward others for cooperative behaviour but punish violations of social fairness even at a personal cost 15,16, an effect likely to be mediated by neural mechanisms that provide intrinsic motivation (that is, satisfaction) from punishing violators 21.? The comparison of brain activity associated with painful and non-painful trials in the ‘self’ condition for men and women revealed an expected increase in the ‘pain network’, including activity in AI and ACC (Supplementary Tables 2 and 3). Moreover, we observed pain-related empathic responses in both genders in bilateral AI extending into FI and brainstem when seeing an unfamiliar but likeable person in pain (Fig. 2a, b). The activation in ACC was significant in women ([9, 18, 27]; P , 0.001 uncorrected, P , 0.05 whole-brain corrected) but was borderline in men ([29, 39, 27]; P 1/4 0.001 uncorrected; Supplementary Tables 4 and 5; coordinates refer to the peak of activations in MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) space). Furthermore, we extended previous findings10 by showing that men, as well as women, who scored higher on standard empathy scales22 had higher empathy-related brain activity in ACC and AI/FI (Supplementary Fig. 2).? To investigate whether empathic responses are modulated as a function of the perceived fairness of others we identified, for men and women, peak voxels of activation in bilateral FI observed when pain was applied to self and to fair players from the analysis described above (see Fig. 2a, b). Figure 2c, d illustrates the average activation (parameter estimates) for painful–non-painful stimulation in these voxels when subjects observed either fair or unfair players in receipt of pain. This analysis revealed that less empathic activity was elicited by the knowledge that an unfair player was in pain. However, there was also a marked difference between the sexes. In women this reduction in activity was very small, whereas in men the knowledge that an unfair player was in receipt of pain elicited no increase in empathic activity in FI. And indeed, formal analysis revealed no significant difference for women when comparing painful trials for fair versus unfair players in empathy-related pain regions. However, men showed significantly enhanced activation in bilateral FI when observing fair compared with unfair players in pain (Supplementary Tables 8 and 11). Consistent with this finding, supplementary analysis showed that women but not men displayed significant activation in bilateral AI/FI and ACC in all three conditions (Supplementary Tables 7 and 10).Fairness = Empathy/AffectFairness is experimentally proven to increase empathetic and affective response, while unfairness increases desire for revenge and decreases empathy.Singer et al 6(Tania Singer, Ben Seymour, and Chris Frith, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College of London and Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, “Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others”, Nature, January 26, )We next sought evidence of increases in brain activity in regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens and orbito-frontal cortex) when observing an unfair player receiving painful stimulation. As shown in Fig. 3a, we observed increased activation in left ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens for men, but not for women, in the comparison of painful trials in the unfair and the fair condition (pain in unfair–pain in fair) as well as in the interaction ((pain–no pain) unfair–(pain–no pain) fair). This latter comparison also revealed increased activation in left orbito-frontal cortex (Supplementary Table 11). As illustrated in Fig. 3b, the direct gender comparison for painful trials in the unfair and the fair condition ((pain in unfair–pain in fair) men–(pain in unfair–pain in fair) women) revealed that men showed significantly higher activation than women in left nucleus accumbens (in the same peak as identified in the former analysis).? To explore the role of nucleus accumbens and orbito-frontal cortex further, we assessed whether individual differences in an expressed desire for revenge covaried with brain activity in these regions. We derived a ‘revenge’ composite score from post-experiment questionnaires measuring a subjectively expressed desire for revenge (see Methods and Supplementary Information). Figure 3c shows that men expressed a stronger desire for revenge than women (t(30) 1/4 2.40, P , 0.05; Supplementary Fig. 3). As illustrated in Fig. 3d, regression analysis confirmed that men, but not women, who expressed a stronger desire for revenge showed greater activation in nucleus accumbens when they perceived an unfair player receiving painful stimuli than when they perceived a fair player in pain (Supplementary Fig. 4).? Our data provide neurobiological evidence on how fairness in social interactions shapes the nature of the affective link between people. Our findings indicate that cooperation nourishes this link, but selfish behaviour that is detrimental to others effectively compromises this link (at least with males), such that empathic responses in the brain are diminished or abolished.? These findings complement those of a previous imaging study that reported enhanced activation in dorsal striatum (caudate nucleus) when individuals punished defectors (by delivering ‘punishment points’) in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game. In the present study we observed activation correlated with revenge in ventral striatum. This difference in evoked activity in dorsal and ventral regions of the striatum is likely to reflect the different nature of the tasks used. In the previous study21 subjects were required to select an action to administer punishment, whereas in the present study subjects passively observed a cue indicating that a defector was receiving pain. These findings are consistent with the different functions associated with distinct regions of the striatum: afferent projections to dorsal striatum are thought to be crucial for learning correct actions so as to maximize reward, whereas projections to ventral striatum, including nucleus accumbens, have a key function in reward prediction and pavlovian learning18-20,23,24. The findings of enhanced activation in ventral striatum to a signal indicating that a defector is receiving pain are in agreement with the hypothesis that humans derive satisfaction simply from seeing justice administered 15,21, even if the instrument of punishment is out of their control.? Our results suggest a neural foundation for theories of social preferences. These theories 4,7 suggest that people value the gains of others positively if they are perceived to behave fairly, but value others' gains negatively if they behave unfairly. This pattern of preferences implies that people like cooperating with fair opponents but also like punishing unfair opponents. Our corresponding neurobiological observations were more prominent in men, although further experiments are needed to confirm the gender specificity of the effect. It is possible that our experimental design favoured men because the modality of punishment was related to physical threat, as opposed to psychological or financial threat. Alternatively, these findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment of norm violation in human societies.Definitions2nc – Federal government“Federal Government” means the central government in Washington D.C.Encarta ‘2K (Online Encyclopedia, )“The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC” 2nc – Resolved Resolved” requires a vote on a formal resolution American Heritage Dictionary 11 (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ?2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company., “resolved” 2011, , accessed July 6, 2013, QDKM) re·solve (r?-z?lv)v. re·solved, re·solv·ing, re·solvesv.tr.1.a. To make a firm decision about: resolved that I would do better next time. See Synonyms at decide.b. To decide or express by formal vote: The legislature resolved that the official should be impeached.2. A formal resolution made by a deliberative body.A resolution requires not only a formal vote, but a formal proposition that was submitted to those voting upon it. Black’s Law Dictionary ‘9(The Law Dictionary Featuring Black's Law Dictionary Free Online Legal Dictionary “What is RESOLUTION? definition of RESOLUTION “ October 23, 2009, , accessed July 7, 2013, QDKM) A motion or formal proposition offered for adoption by such a body. In legislative practice. The term is usually employed to denote the adoption of a motion, the subject-matter of which would not properly constitute a statute; such as a mere expression of opinion; an alteration of the rules ; a vote of thanks or of censure, “Resolved” means to enact a resolution Merriam-Webster 13 (“resolve”, Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 2013, , accessed July 7, 2013, QDKM) re·solve verb \ri-?z?lv, -?zo?lv also -?z?v or -?zo?v\re·solvedre·solv·ing Definition of RESOLVE3: to cause resolution of (a pathological state)2nc – Should “Should” requires we perform the actions of the following verb, it’s a necessity Cambridge Dictionary 13 (published by Cambridge University Press, “Should” [American Version], 2013, , accessed July 6, 2013, QDKM) shouldmodal verb (DUTY) /??d, ??d/ Definition? used to express that it is necessary, desirable, or important to perform the action of the following verb“Should” is mandatory, in legal context it must be obeyed Oxford English Dictionary 13 (“Shall- should”[American-Business Version], Oxford University Press, Copyright ? 2013, Press.;, accessed July 6, 2013, QDKM) II. Followed by an infinitive (without to).Except for a few instances of shall will, shall may (mowe), shall conne in the 15th c., the infinitive after shall is always either that of a principal verb or of have or be.2. In general statements of what is right or becoming: = ‘ought’. Obs. (Superseded by the pa. subjunctive should: see sense 18)In Old English the subjunctive present sometimes occurs in this use (e.g. c888 in A. 4).c. In conditional clause, accompanying the statement of a necessary condition: = ‘is to’.4. Indicating what is appointed or settled to take place = the modern ‘is to’, ‘am to’, etc. Obs. 5. In commands or instructions.“Should” requires a mandate, implies that the action will be followed through Merriam-Webster Dictionary 13 (“Should”, Merriam-Webster Incorporated, 2013, , accessed July 7, 2013, QDKM) should verbal auxiliary \sh?d, ?shu?d\Definition of SHOULD 1—used in auxiliary function to express condition <if he should leave his father, his father would die — Genesis 44:22(Revised Standard Version)>2—used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency <'tis commanded I should do so — Shakespeare> <this is as it should be — H. L. Savage> <you should brush your teeth after each meal>2NC Extensions2nc – Stasis DAStasis – the resolution orients debate around a clear and specific controversial point of government action which creates argumentative stasis – the aff promotes a model of debate with much less equal footing. The best mechanism to facilitate debate is the resolutionZwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters’ student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning” accessed: 7/5/13 EYS]Galloway (2007) also advances an argument concerning the privileging of the resolution as a basis for debating. Galloway (2007) cites three pedagogical advantages to seeing the resolution and the first affirmative constructive as an invitation to dialogue. “First, all teams have equal access to the resolution. Second, teams spend the entire year preparing approaches for and against the resolution. Finally, the resolution represents a community consensus of worthwhile and equitably debatable topics rooted in a collective history and experience of debate” (p. 13). An important starting point for conversation, the resolution helps frame political conversations humanely. It preserves basic means for equality of access to base research and argumentation. Having a year-long stable resolution invites depth of argument and continuously rewards adaptive research once various topics have surfaced through practice or at debate tournaments.Agreement on what is being debated is a prior question that must be resolved first – it is a pre-condition for debate to occurShively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K — [Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 “Partisan Politics and Political Theory,” p. 181-2, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony. This is a d-rule – impossible to be negative without prior agreement on the terms of the resolutionShively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K — [Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 “Partisan Politics and Political Theory,” p. 182-3, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further contest. It may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion. Yet difficulties remain. For and then proceed to debate without attention to further agreements. For debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two people are having an argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing about it; what facts are being contested, and so on. They must also agree—and they do so simply by entering into debate—that they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation. Clash is key to productive debate and effective change.Freeley, John Caroll University, and Steinberg, University of Miami, 8[Austin L. and David L., 2/13/2008, “Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making”, 12th edition, , p. 43-44, accessed 7/4/13, ALT]Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion? or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement? on a fact or value or policy, there is no need for debate; the matter can be settled by? unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate? “Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy? about this statement. Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no? clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate.? In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of? a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur? about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the? United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our? economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do? they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social? services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of? employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers?? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration? pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American? workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk? due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and? businesses? How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and? philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a? wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens?? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation? about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to? be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the? controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated? clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions,? frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States? Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007.Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated,? socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a terrible? job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject? areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in? their classrooms.” That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues,? might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as “We ought to do something about? this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with.” Groups of concerned? citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express? their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but? without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of? education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session? would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up? simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more? judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements “Resolved: That the? federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher? program” more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems? in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.2nc – Switch Side Debate Solves K OffenseOur argument doesn’t preclude revolutionary conceptions of the resolution –grounding radical activism in the rules of political contest is the only truly subversive act Shively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K — [Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 “Partisan Politics and Political Theory,” p. 180, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]Thus far, I have argued that if the ambiguists mean to be subversive about anything, they need to be conservative about some things. They need to be steadfast supporters of the structures of openness and democracy: willing to say "no" to certain forms of contest; willing to set up certain clear limitations about acceptable behavior. To this, finally, I would add that if the ambiguists mean to stretch the boundaries of behavior—if they want to be revolutionary and disruptive in their skepticism and iconoclasm—they need first to be firm believers in something. Which is to say, again, they need to set clear limits about what they will and will not support, what they do and do not believe to be best. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the true revolutionary has always willed something "definite and limited." For example, "The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against..." He "desired the freedoms of democracy." He "wished to have votes and not to have titles . . ." But "because the new rebel is a skeptic"—because he cannot bring himself to will something definite and limited— "he cannot be a revolutionary." For "the fact that he wants to doubt everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything" (Chesterton 1959,41). Thus, the most radical skepticism ends in the most radical conservatism. In other words, a refusal to judge among ideas and activities is, in the end, an endorsement of the status quo. To embrace everything is to be unable to embrace a particular plan of action, for to embrace a particular plan of action is to reject all others, at least for that moment. Moreover, as observed in our discussion of openness, to embrace everything is to embrace self-contradiction: to hold to both one's purposes and to that which defeats one's purposes—to tolerance and intolerance, open-mindedness and close-mindedness, democracy and tyranny. In the same manner, then, the ambiguists' refusals to will something "definite and limited" undermines their revolutionary impulses. In their refusal to say what they will not celebrate and what they will not rebel against, they deny themselves (and everyone else in their political world) a particular plan or ground to work from. By refusing to deny incivility, they deny themselves a civil public space from which to speak. They cannot say "no" to the terrorist who would silence dissent. They cannot turn their backs on the bullying of the white supremacist. And, as such, in refusing to bar the tactics of the anti-democrat, they refuse to support the tactics of the democrat. In short, then, to be a true ambiguist, there must be some limit to what is ambiguous. To fully support political contest, one must fully support some uncontested rules and reasons. To generally reject the silencing or exclusion of others, one must sometimes silence or exclude those who reject civility and democracy.2nc – LimitsLimits – their model of debate disincentives in depth debate and pre round prep – it’s impossible to prepare for the infinite number of possible advocacies which means the aff is always ahead because they can develop issue-specific tricks to beat generics – they spent a bunch of time researching, practicing, and refining the 1ac – this means novices quit the activity – someone who has no experience can’t have a debate about debate Rowland, Kansas University communications professor, 84 – (Robert C., Baylor U., “Topic Selection in Debate”, American Forensics in Perspective. Ed. Parson, p. 53-4)The first major problem identified by the work group as relating to topic selection is the decline in participation in the National Debate Tournament (NDT) policy debate. As Boman notes: There is a growing dissatisfaction with academic debate that utilizes a policy proposition. Programs which are oriented toward debating the national policy debate proposition, so-called “NDT” programs, are diminishing in scope and size.4 This decline in policy debate is tied, many in the work group believe, to excessively broad topics. The most obvious characteristic of some recent policy debate topics is extreme breath. A resolution calling for regulation of land use literally and figuratively covers a lot of ground. Naitonal debate topics have not always been so broad. Before the late 1960s the topic often specified a particular policy change.5 The move from narrow to broad topics has had, according to some, the effect of limiting the number of students who participate in policy debate. First, the breadth of the topics has all but destroyed novice debate. Paul Gaske argues that because the stock issues of policy debate are clearly defined, it is superior to value debate as a means of introducing students to the debate process.6 Despite this advantage of policy debate, Gaske belives that NDT debate is not the best vehicle for teaching beginners. The problem is that broad policy topics terrify novice debaters, especially those who lack high school debate experience. They are unable to cope with the breadth of the topic and experience “negophobia,”7 the fear of debating negative. As a consequence, the educational advantages associated with teaching novices through policy debate are lost: “Yet all of these benefits fly out the window as rookies in their formative stage quickly experience humiliation at being caugh without evidence or substantive awareness of the issues that confront them at a tournament.”8 The ultimate result is that fewer novices participate in NDT, thus lessening the educational value of the activity and limiting the number of debaters or eventually participate in more advanced divisions of policy debate. In addition to noting the effect on novices, participants argued that broad topics also discourage experienced debaters from continued participation in policy debate. Here, the claim is that it takes so much times and effort to be competitive on a broad topic that students who are concerned with doing more than just debate are forced out of the activity.9 Gaske notes, that “broad topics discourage participation because of insufficient time to do requisite research.”10 The final effect may be that entire programs either cease functioning or shift to value debate as a way to avoid unreasonable research burdens. Boman supports this point: “It is this expanding necessity of evidence, and thereby research, which has created a competitive imbalance between institutions that participate in academic debate.”11 In this view, it is the competitive imbalance resulting from the use of broad topics that has led some small schools to cancel their programs. That turns education – the education in debate doesn’t come from the other team lecturing you it comes from the discussion that occurs within the round – if we win they make that discussion impossible that’s a reason they can’t solve any of their offense –otherwise result in the same authoritative exclusion that they critiqueMorson, Northwestern Prof, 4 (Greg, Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning, 317-23)Sarah Freedman and Arnetha Ball describe learning as a dialogic process. It is not merely a transmission of knowledge, but an activity in which whole selves are formed and acquire new capacities for development. We live in a world of enormous cultural diversity, and the various languages and points of view – ideologies in Bakhtin’s sense – of students have become a fact that cannot be ignored. Teachers need to enter into a dialogue with those points of view and to help students do the same. For difference may best be understood not as an obstacle but as an opportunity. ? The range of “authoritative” and “innerly persuasive discourses” in our classrooms appears to be growing along with our cultural diversity. Freedman and Ball observe: “This rich and complex ‘contact zone’ inside the classroom yields plentiful opportunity for students to decide what will be internally persuasive for them, and consequently for them to develop their ideologies. This diversity presents both challenges and opportunities as teachers seek to guide their students on this developmental journey” (pp. 8– 9, this volume). The journey they have in mind does not so much lead to a particular goal as establish an ever-enriching process of learning. ? Freedman and Ball’s approach grows out of Bakhtin’s key concepts, especially one that has been largely neglected in research on him: “ideological becoming” (see Chapter 1, this volume). The implications of the essays in this volume therefore extend well beyond educational theory and practice to the humanities and social sciences generally. How does a thinking person– and we are all thinking people – develop? What happens when ideas, embodied in specific people with particular voices, come into dialogic contact? What factors guide the creation of a point of view on the world? The specific problematic of pedagogy serves as a lens to make the broader implications of such questions clearer.? 318? Authority and testing ? How does a person develop a point of view on the world, a set of attitudes for interpreting and evaluating it ? How systematic is that point of view? Is our fundamental take on the world a philosophy with implicit doctrines or is it more like a set of inclinations and a way of probing? Perhaps it is not one, but a collection of ways of probing, a panoply of skills and habits, which a person tries out one after another the way in which one may, in performing a physical task, reach for one tool after another? What does our point of view have to do with our sense of ourselves, whether as individuals or as members of groups? What role does formal education play in acquiring and shaping it? What happens when contrary evidence confronts us or when the radical uncertainty of the world impinges on us? Whatever that “point of view” is, how does it change over time ? ? In any given culture or subculture, there tends to be what Bakhtin would call an “authoritative” perspective. However, the role of that perspective is not necessarily authoritarian. Despite Bakhtin’s experience as a Soviet citizen, where the right perspective on just about all publicly identified perspectives was held to be already known and certain, he was well aware that outside that circle of presumed certainty life was still governed by opinion. It is not just that rival ideologies – Christian, liberal, and many others – were still present; beyond that, each individual’s experiences led to half-formed but strongly held beliefs that enjoyed no formal expression. Totalitarianism was surely an aspiration of the Soviet and other such regimes, but it could never realize its ideal of uniformity–“the new Soviet man” who was all of a piece – for some of the same reasons it could not make a centrally planned economy work. There is always too much contingent, unexpected, particular, local, and idiosyncratic, with a historical or personal background that does not fit. ? Bakhtin may be viewed as the great philosopher of all that does not fit. He saw the world as irreducibly messy, unsystematizable, and contingent, and he regarded it as all the better for that. For life to have meaning, it must possess what he called “surprisingness.” If individual people are to act morally, they cannot displace their responsibility onto some systematic ideology, whether Marxist, Christian, or any other. What I do now is not reducible to any ethical, political, or metaphysical system; and I – each “I”– must take responsibility for his or her acts at this moment. As Bakhtin liked to say, there is “no alibi.” ? Authoritative words in their fully expressed form purport to offer an alibi. They say, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: we speak the truth and you need not question, only obey, for your conscience to be at rest. Yet, every authoritative word is spoken or heard in a milieu of difference. It may try to insulate itself from dialogue with reverential tones, a special script, and all the other signs of the authority fused to it, but at the margins? 319? dialogue waits with a challenge: you may be right, but you have to convince me. Once the authoritative word responds to that challenge, it ceases to be fully authoritative. To be sure, it may still command considerable deference by virtue of its past, its moral aura, and its omnipresence. But it has ceased to be free from dialogue and its authority has changed from unquestioned to dialogically tested. Every educator crosses this line when he or she gives reasons for a truth. ? My daughter once had a math teacher who, when asked why a certain procedure was used to solve an equation, would reply, “because some old, dead guy said so.” Of course, no answer could be further from the spirit of mathematics, where logic counts for everything and authority for nothing. Nobody proves the Pythagorean theorem by saying Pythagoras said so. Compare this reply with actually showing the logic of a procedure so the student understands the “why.” In that case, one immediately admits that there must be a good reason for proceeding in a certain way, and that it needs to be shown. The procedure does not end up as less sure because of this questioning; quite the contrary. Rather, questioning is seen as intrinsic to mathematics itself, which enjoys its authority precisely because it has survived such questioning. ? Even in fields that do not admit of mathematical proof, an authoritative word does not necessarily lose all authority when questioning enters into it. We can give no mathematically sure reason why democracy is preferable to dictatorship or market economies are generally more productive than command economies. But we can give reasons, which admit the possibilities of challenges we had not foreseen and may have to think about. Education and all inquiry are fundamentally different when the need for reasons is acknowledged and when questioning becomes part of the process of learning. Truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable. ? In short, authoritative words may or may not be authoritarian. In the Soviet Union, authoritarian words were the norm and questioning was seen as suspect. One no more questioned Marxism-Leninism than one questioned the law of gravity (a common comparison, suggesting that each was equally sure). What the Party said was right because it was the outcome of sure historical laws guaranteeing the correctness of its rulings. Education reflected this spirit. Bakhtin’s embrace of dialogue, then, challenged not so much the economic or historical theories the regime propounded, but its very concept of truth and the language of truth it embraced. Dialogue by its very nature invites questioning, thrives on it, demands it. ? It follows from Bakhtin’s argument that nonauthoritarian authoritative words are not necessarily weaker than authoritarian ones. After all, one may believe something all the more because one has questioned it, provided that defenders have been willing to answer and have been more or less cogent in their defense. They need not answer all objections perfectly – we are often convinced with qualifications, with a “just in case,” with “loopholes.”? 320? However, they must demonstrate that the authority is based on generally sound reasons. Morever, for many, enormous persuasive power lies in the very fact that the authoritative belief is so widely held. Everyone speaks it, even if with ironizing quotation marks. ? An authoritative word of this nonauthoritarian kind functions not as a voice speaking the Truth, but as a voice speaking the one point of view that must be attended to. It may be contested, rejected, or modified, the way in which church dogmas are modified over time by believers, but it cannot be ignored. Think of Huck Finn (discussed by Mark Dressman, this volume). Even when he cannot bring himself to turn in Jim as a runaway slave, he accepts the authority of the social voice telling him that such an action would be right. He does not question that voice, just realizes he will not follow it and will do “wrong.” Much of the moral complexity of this book lies in Huck’s self-questioning, as he does what we believe to be right but what he thinks of as wrong; and if we read this book sensitively, we may ask ourselves how much of our own behavior is Huckish in this respect. Perhaps our failure to live up to our ideals bespeaks our intuition without overt expression that there is something wrong with those ideals. What Huck demonstrates is that there may be a wisdom, even a belief system, in behavior itself: we always know more than we know, and our moral sensitivity may be different from, and wiser than, our professed beliefs. ? our own authoritative words ? The basic power of an authoritative voice comes from its status as the one that everyone hears. Everyone has heard that democracy is good and apartheid is bad, that the environment needs preserving, that church must not be merged with state; and people who spend their lives in an academic environment may add many more to the list. In our academic subculture, we are, almost all of us, persuaded of the rightness of greater economic equality, of plans for inclusion and affirmative action, of abortion rights, of peace, of greater efforts to reach out to all the people in the world in all their amazing diversity. These are our authoritative voices, and , too, we may accept either because they are simply not to be questioned or because we have sought out intelligent opponents who have questioned them and have thought about, if not ultimately accepted, their answers. Again, educators know the moment when a student from a background different from ours questions one of our beliefs and we experience the temptation to reply like that math teacher. Thinking of ourselves as oppositional, we often forget that we, too, have our own authoritative discourse and must work to remember that, in a world of difference, authority may not extend to those unlike us. ? The testable authoritative voice: we hear it always, and though some may disagree with it, they cannot ignore it. Its nonauthoritarian power is based? 321? above all on its ubiquity. In a society that is relatively open to diverse values, that minimal, but still significant, function of an authoritative voice is the most important one. It demands not adherence but attention. And such a voice is likely to survive far longer than an authoritarian voice whose rejection is necessarily its destruction. We have all these accounts of Soviet dissidents – say, Solzhenitsyn – who tell their story as a “narrative of rethinking” (to use Christian Knoeller’s phrase): they once believed in Communist ideology, but events caused them to raise some questions that by their nature could not be publicly voiced, and that silence itself proved most telling. You can hear silence if it follows a pistol shot. If silence does not succeed in ending private questioning, the word that silence defends is decisively weakened. The story of Soviet dissidents is typically one in which, at some point, questioning moved from a private, furtive activity accompanied by guilt to the opposite extreme, a clear rejection in which the authoritative voice lost all hold altogether. Vulnerability accompanies too much power. ? But in more open societies, and in healthier kinds of individual development, an authoritative voice of the whole society, or of a particular community (like our own academic community), still sounds, still speaks to us in our minds. In fact, we commonly see that people who have questioned and rejected an authoritative voice find that it survives within them as a possible alternative, like the minority opinion in a court decision. When they are older, they discover that experience has vindicated some part of what they had summarily rejected. Perhaps the authoritative voice had more to it than we thought when young? Now that we are teachers, perhaps we see some of the reasons for practices we objected to? Can we, then, combine in a new practice both the practices of our teachers and the new insights we have had? When we do, a flexible authoritative word emerges, one that has become to a great extent an innerly persuasive one. By a lengthy process, the word has, with many changes, become our own, and our own word has in the process acquired the intonations of authority. ? In much the same way, we react to the advice of our parents. At some point it may seem dated, no more than what an earlier generation unfortunately thought, or we may greet it with the sign of regret that our parents have forgotten what they experienced when our age. However, the dialogue goes on. At a later point, we may say, you know, there was wisdom in what our parents said, only why did they express it so badly? If only I had known! We may even come to the point where we express some modified form of parental wisdom in a convincing voice. We translate it into our own idiolect, confident that we will not make the mistakes of our parents when we talk to our children. Then our children listen, and find our own idiolect, to which we have devoted such painful ideological and verbal work, hopelessly dated, and the process may start again. ? It is always a difficult moment when we realize that our own voice is now the authority, especially because we have made it different, persuasive in its? 322? own terms, not like our parents’ voice. When we reflect on how our children see us, we may even realize that our parents’ authoritative words may not have been the product of blind acceptance, but the result of a process much like our own. They may have done the same thing we did – question, reject, adapt, arrive at a new version – and that rigid voice of authority we heard from them was partly in our own ears. Can we somehow convey to our students our own words so they do not sound so rigid? We all think we can. But so did our parents (and other authorities).? Dialogue, Laughter, And Surprise ? Bakhtin viewed the whole process of “ideological” (in the sense of ideas and values, however unsystematic) development as an endless dialogue. As teachers, we find it difficult to avoid a voice of authority, however much we may think of ours as the rebel’s voice, because our rebelliousness against society at large speaks in the authoritative voice of our subculture. We speak the language and thoughts of academic educators, even when we imagine we are speaking in no jargon at all, and that jargon, inaudible to us, sounds with all the overtones of authority to our students. We are so prone to think of ourselves as fighting oppression that it takes some work to realize that we ourselves may be felt as oppressive and overbearing, and that our own voice may provoke the same reactions that we feel when we hear an authoritative voice with which we disagree. ? So it is often helpful to think back on the great authoritative oppressors and reconstruct their self-image: helpful, but often painful. I remember, many years ago, when, as a recent student rebel and activist, I taught a course on “The Theme of the Rebel” and discovered, to my considerable chagrin, that many of the great rebels of history were the very same people as the great oppressors. There is a famous exchange between Erasmus and Luther, who hoped to bring the great Dutch humanist over to the Reformation, but Erasmus kept asking Luther how he could be so certain of so many doctrinal points. We must accept a few things to be Christians at all, Erasmus wrote, but surely beyond that there must be room for us highly fallible beings to disagree. Luther would have none of such tentativeness. He knew, he was sure. The Protestant rebels were, for a while, far more intolerant than their orthodox opponents. Often enough, the oppressors are the ones who present themselves and really think of themselves as liberators. Certainty that one knows the root cause of evil: isn’t that itself often the root cause? ? We know from Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s letters denouncing Prince Kurbsky, a general who escaped to Poland, that Ivan saw himself as someone who had been oppressed by noblemen as a child and pictured himself as the great rebel against traditional authority when he killed masses of people or destroyed whole towns. There is something in the nature of maximal rebellion against authority that produces ever greater intolerance, unless one is very careful. ? 323? For the skills of fighting or refuting an oppressive power are not those of openness, self-skepticism, or real dialogue. In preparing for my course, I remember my dismay at reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf and discovering that his self-consciousness was precisely that of the rebel speaking in the name of oppressed Germans, and that much of his amazing appeal – otherwise so inexplicable – was to the German sense that they were rebelling victims. In our time, the Serbian Communist and nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic exploited much the same appeal. Bakhtin surely knew that Communist totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the unprecedented censorship were constructed by rebels who had come to power. His favorite writer, Dostoevsky, used to emphasize that the worst oppression comes from those who, with the rebellious psychology of “the insulted and humiliated,” have seized power – unless they have somehow cultivated the value of dialogue, as Lenin surely had not, but which Eva, in the essay by Knoeller about teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X, surely had. ? Rebels often make the worst tyrants because their word, the voice they hear in their consciousness, has borrowed something crucial from the authoritative word it opposed, and perhaps exaggerated it: the aura of righteous authority. If one’s ideological becoming is understood as a struggle in which one has at last achieved the truth, one is likely to want to impose that truth with maximal authority; and rebels of the next generation may proceed in much the same way, in an ongoing spiral of intolerance. By contrast, if one’s rebellion against an authoritative word is truly dialogic, that is unlikely to happen, or to be subject to more of a self-check if it does. Then one questions one’s own certainties and invites skepticism, lest one become what one has opposed. One may even step back and laugh at oneself. ? Laughter at oneself invites the perspective of the other. Laughter is implicitly pluralist. Instead of looking at one’s opponents as the unconditionally wrong, one imagines how one sounds to them. Regarding earlier authorities, one thinks: that voice of authority, it is not my voice, but perhaps it has something to say, however wrongly put. It comes from a specific experience, which I must understand. I will correct it, but to do that I must measure it, test it, against my own experience. Dialogue is a process of real testing, and one of the characteristics of a genuine test is that the result is not guaranteed. It may turn out that sometimes the voice of earlier authority turns out to be right on some point. Well, we will incorporate that much into our own “innerly persuasive voice.” Once one has done this, once one has allowed one’s own evolving convictions to be tested by experience and by other convictions Debate doesn’t need to avoid being creative, but they still have to have a specific focus.Freeley, John Caroll University, and Steinberg, University of Miami, 8[Austin L. and David L., 2/13/2008, “Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making”, 12th edition, , p. 45, accessed 7/4/13, ALT]To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument? should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about “homelessness” or “abortion”? or “crime” or “global warming” we are likely to have an interesting discussion? but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement? “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable, yet fails to? provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean? that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes,? we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem.? It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument.? What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does “effectiveness”? mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question? might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as “Resolved: That the? United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.”? Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely? avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact,? these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference,? which will be outlined in the following discussion.2nc – Predictability Predictability – Diversion from topic focus unfairly gives shifts ground — hurts debateGalloway, Samford University communications professor, 07 — [Ryan Galloway, professor of communications at Samford University (“Dinner And Conversation At The Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate As An Argumentative Dialogue”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007), ebsco)][SP]Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.That makes research impossible and destroys educationHangh?j, University of Bristol Author, 08 — [Thorkild Hangh?j, author affiliated with Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, research the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education, 2008 (“PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming,” University of Southern Denmark, p. 50-51 Available Online at , Accessed on July 7, 2013)][SP]Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate within a domain-specific game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between “gaming” and “teaching” that tends to dominate discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and games represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all forms of communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981). A centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear” (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going negotiation of “truths” between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election scenario of The Power Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and outcomes of the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure. Similarly, the open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and create virtually endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting, debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues. Consequently, the actual process of enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation between these centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’ game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations) and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game facilitation requires a balance between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin, the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between “monological” and “dialogical” forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns anything new from the students, despite Socrates’ ideological claims to the contrary (Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when “someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error”, where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a: 81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that are able to expand upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of “truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term “dialogic” is both a descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an ideal to be worked for against the forces of “monologism” (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the same time, I agree with Wegerif that “one of the goals of education, perhaps the most important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself” (Wegerif, 2006: 61). 2nc – Debate About Government Key Discussion of state policy is key to skill development and breaking down of preconceived notions Esberg and Sagan, special assistant to the director at New York University's and Professor at Stanford, Center 12 (Jane Esberg is special assistant to the director at New York University's Center on. International Cooperation. She was the winner of 2009 Firestone Medal, AND Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation “NEGOTIATING NONPROLIFERATION: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Nuclear Weapons Policy,” The Nonproliferation Review, 19:1, 95-108 accessed 5-7-13, RRRThese government or quasi-government think tank simulations often provide very similar lessons for high-level players as are learned by students in educational simulations. Government participants learn about the importance of understanding foreign perspectives, the need to practice internal coordination, and the necessity to compromise and coordinate with other governments in negotiations and crises. During the Cold War, political scientist Robert Mandel noted how crisis exercises and war games forced government officials to overcome “bureaucratic myopia,” moving beyond their normal organizational roles and thinking more creatively about how others might react in a crisis or conflict.6 The skills of imagination and the subsequent ability to predict foreign interests and reactions remain critical for real-world foreign policy makers. For example, simulations of the Iranian nuclear crisis—held in 2009 and 2010 at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center and at Harvard University's Belfer Center, and involving former US senior officials and regional experts—highlighted the dangers of misunderstanding foreign governments’ preferences and misinterpreting their subsequent behavior. In both simulations, the primary criticism of the US negotiating team lay in a failure to predict accurately how other states, both allies and adversaries, would behave in response to US policy initiatives.7By university age, students often have a pre-defined view of international affairs, and the literature on simulations in education has long emphasized how such exercises force students to challenge their assumptions about how other governments behave and how their own government works.8 Since simulations became more common as a teaching tool in the late 1950s, educational literature has expounded on their benefits, from encouraging engagement by breaking from the typical lecture format, to improving communication skills, to promoting teamwork.9 More broadly, simulations can deepen understanding by asking students to link fact and theory, providing a context for facts while bringing theory into the realm of practice.10 These exercises are particularly valuable in teaching international affairs for many of the same reasons they are useful for policy makers: they force participants to “grapple with the issues arising from a world in flux.”11 Simulations have been used successfully to teach students about such disparate topics as European politics, the Kashmir crisis, and US response to the mass killings in Darfur.12 Role-playing exercises certainly encourage students to learn political and technical facts—but they learn them in a more active style. Rather than sitting in a classroom and merely receiving knowledge, students actively research “their” government's positions and actively argue, brief, and negotiate with others.13 Facts can change quickly; simulations teach students how to contextualize and act on information.2nc – Plans Solve SpectatorshipKritiks need policy in order to solve- spectatorship.McClean Rutgers Philosophy Professor 1 [David E., Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope”, ]Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action."Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain.Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."Social philosophies need to be moved away from just cultural critics in order to affect real change.McClean Rutgers Philosophy Professor 1 [David E., Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope”, ]Is it really possible to philosophize by holding Foucault in one hand and the Code of Federal Regulation or the Congressional Record in the other? Given that whatever it has meant to be a philosopher has been under siege at various levels, I see no reason why referring to the way things are actually done in the actual world (I mean really done, not done as we might imagine) as we think through issues of public morality and social issues of justice shouldn't be considered a viable alternative to the way philosophy has proceeded in the past. Instead of replacing epistemology with hermeneutics or God knows what else as the foundation of philosophical practice, we should move social philosophers in the direction of becoming more like social and cultural auditors rather than further in the direction of mere culture critics. We might be able to recast philosophers who take-up questions of social justice in a serious way as the ones in society able to traverse not only disciplines but the distances between the towers of the academy and the bastions of bureaucracies seeking to honestly and sometimes dishonestly assess both their failings and achievements. This we can do with a special advantage over economists, social scientists and policy specialists who are apt to take the narrow view of most issues. We do have examples of such persons. John Dewey and Karl Popper come to mind as but two examples, but in neither case was there enough grasp of the actual workings of social institutions that I believe will be called for in order to properly minister to a nation in need of helpful philosophical insights in policy formation. Or it may just be that the real work will be performed by philosophically grounded and socially engaged practitioners rather than academics. People like George Soros come to mind here.But there are few people like George Soros around, and I think that the improbability of philosophers emerging as a special class of social auditor also marks the limits of social hope, inasmuch as philosophers are the class most likely to see the places at which bridges of true understanding can be built not only between an inimical Right and Left, but between public policy and the deep and relevant reflections upon our humanity in which philosophers routinely engage. If philosophers seek to remain what the public thinks we are anyway, a class of persons of whom it can be said, as Orwell put it,One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool, then I do not know from what other class of persons to turn to navigate the complicated intellectual and emotional obstacles that prevent us from the achievement of our country. For I do not see how policy wonks, political hacks, politicians, religious ideologues and special interests will do the work that needs to be done to achieve the kind of civic consensus envisioned in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Without a courageous new breed of public intellectual, one that is able to help articulate new visions for community and social well being without fear of reaching out to others that may not share the narrow views of the Cultural Left and Cultural Right, I do not see how America moves beyond a mere land of toleration and oligarchy.2nc – Decisionmaking Skills outweighDebate is most valuable for the attained skills, decision making is a prerequisite.Strait, George Mason University, and Wallace, George Washington University Communications Professors, 7 [L. Paul and Brett, “The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making”, , p. A-5, accessed 7/6/13, ALT]Negative claims that excluding critical alternatives is detrimental to education fail to be persuasive when decision-making logic is taken into account. Critical intellectuals and policymakers both take into account the probability that their actions will be successful. Fiating that individuals alter their method of thinking circumvents these questions of probability and thus not only destroys education about policymaking, but offers a flawed approach to activism (or any other purview of action/ philosophy the negative is advocating). Intellectuals and activists have many important considerations relating to resources, press coverage, political clout and method. These questions all are directly related to who is taking action. Alternative debates thus often become frustrating because they do a poor job of explaining who the subject is. Consider the popular Nietzschean alternative, ‘do nothing.” Who is it that the negative wants to do nothing? Does the USFG de nothing? Is it the debaters? Is it the judge who does nothing? Is it every individual, or just individuals in Africa that have to do with the affirmative harm area? All of these questions directly implicate the desirability of the alternative, and thus the education that we can receive from this mode of debate. Alternatives like “vote negative to reject capitalism,” “detach truth from power.” or ‘embrace an infinite responsibility to the other" fall prey to similar concerns. This inability to pin the negative down to a course of action allows them to be shifty in their second rebuttal, and sculpt their alternative in a way that avoids the affirmative’s offense. Rather than increasing education, critical frameworks are often a ruse that allows the negative to inflate their importance and ignore crucial decision-making considerations. Several other offensive arguments can be leveraged by the affirmative in order to insulate them from negative claims that critical debate is a unique and important type of education that the affirmative excludes. The first is discussed above, that the most important benefit to participation in policy debate is not the content of our arguments, but the skills we learn from debating. As was just explained, since the ability to make decisions is a skill activists and intellectuals must use as well, decision- making is a prerequisite to effective education about any subject. The strength of this argument is enhanced when we realize that debate is a game. Since debaters are forced to switch sides they go into each debate knowing that a non-personal mindset will be necessary at some point because they will inevitably be forced to argue against their own convictions. Members of the activity are all smart enough to realize that a vote for an argument in a debate does not reflect an absolute truth, but merely that a team making that argument did the better debating. When it comes to education about content, the number of times someone will change their personal convictions because of something that happens in a debate round is extremely low, because everyone knows it is a game. On the other hand with cognitive skills like the decision-making process which is taught through argument and debate, repetition is vital .The best way to strengthen decision-making’s cognitive thinking skills is to have students practice them in social settings like debate rounds. Moreover, a lot of the decision-making process happens in strategy sessions and during research periods — debaters hear about a particular affirmative plan and are tasked with developing the best response. If they are conditioned to believe that alternate agent counterplans or utopian philosophical alternatives are legitimate responses, a vital teaching opportunity will have been lost.Policy debate has value not only in the role of speech, but rather education in critical thinking and prioritizing.Lundberg University of North Carolina Communications Professor 10 [Christian 0., January 2010, “ The Allred Initiative and Debate Across the Curriculum: Reinventing the Tradition of Debate at North Carolina”, , p. 311, accessed 7/5/13, ALT]The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modern political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change, outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry’s capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Dewey in The Public and Its Problems place such a high premium on deducation (Dewey 1988, 63, 154). Debate provides an indispensable form of education in the modern articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them.Specifically, critically thinking is key to ethical decision making.Freeley, John Caroll University, and Steinberg, University of Miami, 8[Austin L. and David L., 2/13/2008, “Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making”, 12th edition, , p. 17, accessed 7/4/13, ALT]Debate offers the ideal tool for examining the ethical implications of any? decision, and critical thinking should also be ethical thinking.? How do we reach a decision on any matters of importance? We are under? constant pressure to make unreasoned decisions, and we often make decisions? carelessly. But which method is most likely to lead to wise decisions? To make? wise judgments, we should rely on critical thinking. In many situations argumentation’s emphasis on reasoned considerations and debate’s confrontation of opposing sides give us our best, and perhaps only, opportunity to reach reasoned? conclusions. In any case it is in the public interest to promote debate, and it is? in our own intelligent self-interest to know the principles of argumentation and? to be able to apply critical thinking in debate.2nc – Solves K OffensePolicy debate has value not only in the role of speech, but rather education in critical thinking and prioritizing.Lundberg University of North Carolina Communications Professor 10 [Christian 0., January 2010, “ The Allred Initiative and Debate Across the Curriculum: Reinventing the Tradition of Debate at North Carolina”, , p. 311, accessed 7/5/13, ALT]The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modern political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change, outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry’s capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Dewey in The Public and Its Problems place such a high premium on deducation (Dewey 1988, 63, 154). Debate provides an indispensable form of education in the modern articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them.2nc – Warming impactThere’s an external warming impact – Switch-side debate inculcates skills that empirically improve climate policy outcomesMitchell, University of Pittsburgh communication professor, 10 [Gordon R., “Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs; Spring 2010, Vol. 13 Issue 1, p95-120,]The watchwords for the intelligence community’s debating initiative— collaboration, critical thinking, collective awareness—resonate with key terms anchoring the study of deliberative democracy. In a major new text, John Gastil defines deliberation as a process whereby people “carefully examine a problem and arrive at a well-reasoned solution aft er a period of inclusive, respectful consideration of diverse points of view.”40 Gastil and his colleagues in organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation are pursuing a research program that foregrounds the democratic telos of deliberative processes. Work in this area features a blend of concrete interventions and studies of citizen empowerment.41 Notably, a key theme in much of this literature concerns the relationship between deliberation and debate, with the latter term often loaded with pejorative baggage and working as a negative foil to highlight the positive qualities of deliberation.42 “Most political discussions, however, are debates. Stories in the media turn politics into a never-ending series of contests. People get swept into taking sides; their energy goes into figuring out who or what they’re for or against,” says Kettering president David Mathews and coauthor Noelle McAfee. “Deliberation is different. It is neither a partisan argument where opposing sides try to win nor a casual conversation conducted with polite civility. Public deliberation is a means by which citizens make tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country. It is a way of reasoning and talking together.”43 Mathews and McAfee’s distrust of the debate process is almost paradigmatic amongst theorists and practitioners of Kettering-style deliberative democracy.One conceptual mechanism for reinforcing this debate-deliberation opposition is characterization of debate as a process inimical to deliberative aims, with debaters adopting dogmatic and fixed positions that frustrate the deliberative objective of “choice work.” In this register, Emily Robertson observes, “unlike deliberators, debaters are typically not open to the possibility of being shown wrong. . . . Debaters are not trying to find the best solution by keeping an open mind about the opponent’s point of view.”44 Similarly, founding documents from the University of Houston–Downtown’s Center for Public Deliberation state, “Public deliberation is about choice work, which is different from a dialogue or a debate. In dialogue, people oft en look to relate to each other, to understand each other, and to talk about more informal issues. In debate, there are generally two positions and people are generally looking to ‘win’ their side.”45 Debate, cast here as the theoretical scapegoat, provides a convenient, low-water benchmark for explaining how other forms of deliberative interaction better promote cooperative “choice work.” The Kettering-inspired framework receives support from perversions of the debate process such as vapid presidential debates and verbal pyrotechnics found on Crossfire-style television shows.46 In contrast, the intelligence community’s debating initiative stands as a nettlesome anomaly for these theoretical frameworks, with debate serving, rather than frustrating, the ends of deliberation. The presence of such an anomaly would seem to point to the wisdom of fashioning a theoretical orientation that frames the debate-deliberation connection in contingent, rather than static terms, with the relationship between the categories shift ing along with the various contexts in which they manifest in practice.47 Such an approach gestures toward the importance of rhetorically informed critical work on multiple levels. First, the contingency of situated practice invites analysis geared to assess, in particular cases, the extent to which debate practices enable and/ or constrain deliberative objectives. Regarding the intelligence community’s debating initiative, such an analytical perspective highlights, for example, the tight connection between the deliberative goals established by intelligence officials and the cultural technology manifest in the bridge project’s online debating applications such as Hot Grinds. An additional dimension of nuance emerging from this avenue of analysis pertains to the precise nature of the deliberative goals set by bridge. Program descriptions notably eschew Kettering-style references to democratic citizen empowerment, yet feature deliberation prominently as a key ingredient of strong intelligence tradecraft . Th is caveat is especially salient to consider when it comes to the second category of rhetorically informed critical work invited by the contingent aspect of specific debate initiatives. To grasp this layer it is useful to appreciate how the name of the bridge project constitutes an invitation for those outside the intelligence community to participate in the analytic outreach eff ort. According to Doney, bridge “provides an environment for Analytic Outreach—a place where IC analysts can reach out to expertise elsewhere in federal, state, and local government, in academia, and industry. New communities of interest can form quickly in bridge through the ‘web of trust’ access control model—access to minds outside the intelligence community creates an analytic force multiplier.”48 This presents a moment of choice for academic scholars in a position to respond to Doney’s invitation; it is an opportunity to convert scholarly expertise into an “analytic force multiplier.” In reflexively pondering this invitation, it may be valuable for scholars to read Greene and Hicks’s proposition that switch-side debating should be viewed as a cultural technology in light of Langdon Winner’s maxim that “technological artifacts have politics.”49 In the case of bridge, politics are informed by the history of intelligence community policies and practices. Commenter Th omas Lord puts this point in high relief in a post off ered in response to a news story on the topic: “[W]hy should this thing (‘bridge’) be? . . . [Th e intelligence community] on the one hand sometimes provides useful information to the military or to the civilian branches and on the other hand it is a dangerous, out of control, relic that by all external appearances is not the slightest bit reformed, other than superficially, from such excesses as became exposed in the cointelpro and mkultra hearings of the 1970s.”50 A debate scholar need not agree with Lord’s full-throated criticism of the intelligence community (he goes on to observe that it bears an alarming resemblance to organized crime) to understand that participation in the community’s Analytic Outreach program may serve the ends of deliberation, but not necessarily democracy, or even a defensible politics. Demand-driven rhetoric of science necessarily raises questions about what’s driving the demand, questions that scholars with relevant expertise would do well to ponder carefully before embracing invitations to contribute their argumentative expertise to deliberative projects. By the same token, it would be prudent to bear in mind that the technological determinism about switch-side debate endorsed by Greene and Hicks may tend to flatten reflexive assessments regarding the wisdom of supporting a given debate initiative—as the next section illustrates, manifest differences among initiatives warrant context-sensitive judgments regarding the normative political dimensions featured in each case. Public Debates in the EPA Policy Process The preceding analysis of U.S. intelligence community debating initiatives highlighted how analysts are challenged to navigate discursively the heteroglossia of vast amounts of diff erent kinds of data flowing through intelligence streams. Public policy planners are tested in like manner when they attempt to stitch together institutional arguments from various and sundry inputs ranging from expert testimony, to historical precedent, to public comment. Just as intelligence managers find that algorithmic, formal methods of analysis often don’t work when it comes to the task of interpreting and synthesizing copious amounts of disparate data, public-policy planners encounter similar challenges. In fact, the argumentative turn in public-policy planning elaborates an approach to public-policy analysis that foregrounds deliberative interchange and critical thinking as alternatives to “decisionism,” the formulaic application of “objective” decision algorithms to the public policy process. Stating the matter plainly, Majone suggests, “whether in written or oral form, argument is central in all stages of the policy process.” Accordingly, he notes, “we miss a great deal if we try to understand policy-making solely in terms of power, influence, and bargaining, to the exclusion of debate and argument.”51 One can see similar rationales driving Goodwin and Davis’s EPA debating project, where debaters are invited to conduct on-site public debates covering resolutions craft ed to reflect key points of stasis in the EPA decision-making process. For example, in the 2008 Water Wars debates held at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., resolutions were craft ed to focus attention on the topic of water pollution, with one resolution focusing on downstream states’ authority to control upstream states’ discharges and sources of pollutants, and a second resolution exploring the policy merits of bottled water and toilet paper taxes as revenue sources to fund water infrastructure projects. In the first debate on interstate river pollution, the team of Seth Gannon and Seungwon Chung from Wake Forest University argued in favor of downstream state control, with the Michigan State University team of Carly Wunderlich and Garrett Abelkop providing opposition. In the second debate on taxation policy, Kevin Kallmyer and Matthew Struth from University of Mary Washington defended taxes on bottled water and toilet paper, while their opponents from Howard University, Dominique Scott and Jarred McKee, argued against this proposal. Reflecting on the project, Goodwin noted how the intercollegiate Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 107 debaters’ ability to act as “honest brokers” in the policy arguments contributed positively to internal EPA deliberation on both issues.52 Davis observed that since the invited debaters “didn’t have a dog in the fight,” they were able to give voice to previously buried arguments that some EPA subject matter experts felt reticent to elucidate because of their institutional affiliations.53 Such findings are consistent with the views of policy analysts advocating the argumentative turn in policy planning. As Majone claims, “Dialectical confrontation between generalists and experts often succeeds in bringing out unstated assumptions, conflicting interpretations of the facts, and the risks posed by new projects.”54 Frank Fischer goes even further in this context, explicitly appropriating rhetorical scholar Charles Willard’s concept of argumentative “epistemics” to flesh out his vision for policy studies: Uncovering the epistemic dynamics of public controversies would allow for a more enlightened understanding of what is at stake in a particular dispute, making possible a sophisticated evaluation of the various viewpoints and merits of diff erent policy options. In so doing, the diff ering, oft en tacitly held contextual perspectives and values could be juxtaposed; the viewpoints and demands of experts, special interest groups, and the wider public could be directly compared; and the dynamics among the participants could be scrutizined. This would by no means sideline or even exclude scientific assessment; it would only situate it within the framework of a more comprehensive evaluation.55 As Davis notes, institutional constraints present within the EPA communicative milieu can complicate eff orts to provide a full airing of all relevant arguments pertaining to a given regulatory issue. Thus, intercollegiate debaters can play key roles in retrieving and amplifying positions that might otherwise remain sedimented in the policy process. Th e dynamics entailed in this symbiotic relationship are underscored by deliberative planner John Forester, who observes, “If planners and public administrators are to make democratic political debate and argument possible, they will need strategically located allies to avoid being fully thwarted by the characteristic self-protecting behaviors of the planning organizations and bureaucracies within which they work.”56 Here, an institution’s need for “strategically located allies” to support deliberative practice constitutes the demand for rhetorically informed expertise, setting up what can be considered a demand-driven rhetoric of science. As an instance of rhetoric of science scholarship, this type of “switch-side public 108 Rhetoric & Public Affairs debate” diff ers both from insular contest tournament debating, where the main focus is on the pedagogical benefit for student participants, and first-generation rhetoric of science scholarship, where critics concentrated on unmasking the rhetoricity of scientific artifacts circulating in what many perceived to be purely technical spheres of knowledge production.58 As a form of demand-driven rhetoric of science, switch-side debating connects directly with the communication field’s performative tradition of argumentative engagement in public controversy—a different route of theoretical grounding than rhetorical criticism’s tendency to locate its foundations in the English field’s tradition of literary criticism and textual analysis.59 Given this genealogy, it is not surprising to learn how Davis’s response to the EPA’s institutional need for rhetorical expertise took the form of a public debate proposal, shaped by Davis’s dual background as a practitioner and historian of intercollegiate debate. Davis competed as an undergraduate policy debater for Howard University in the 1970s, and then went on to enjoy substantial success as coach of the Howard team in the new millennium. In an essay reviewing the broad sweep of debating history, Davis notes, “Academic debate began at least 2,400 years ago when the scholar Protagoras of Abdera (481–411 bc), known as the father of debate, conducted debates among his students in Athens.”60 As John Poulakos points out, “older” Sophists such as Protagoras taught Greek students the value of dissoi logoi, or pulling apart complex questions by debating two sides of an issue.61 Th e few surviving fragments of Protagoras’s work suggest that his notion of dissoi logoi stood for the principle that “two accounts [logoi] are present about every ‘thing,’ opposed to each other,” and further, that humans could “measure” the relative soundness of knowledge claims by engaging in give-and-take where parties would make the “weaker argument stronger” to activate the generative aspect of rhetorical practice, a key element of the Sophistical tradition.62 Following in Protagoras’s wake, Isocrates would complement this centrifugal push with the pull of synerchesthe, a centripetal exercise of “coming together” deliberatively to listen, respond, and form common social bonds.63 Isocrates incorporated Protagorean dissoi logoi into synerchesthe, a broader concept that he used flexibly to express interlocking senses of (1) inquiry, as in groups convening to search for answers to common questions through discussion;64 (2) deliberation, with interlocutors gathering in a political setting to deliberate about proposed courses of action;65 and (3) alliance formation, a form of collective action typical at festivals,66 or in the exchange of pledges that deepen social ties.67 Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 109 Returning once again to the Kettering-informed sharp distinction between debate and deliberation, one sees in Isocratic synerchesthe, as well as in the EPA debating initiative, a fusion of debate with deliberative functions. Echoing a theme raised in this essay’s earlier discussion of intelligence tradecraft , such a fusion troubles categorical attempts to classify debate and deliberation as fundamentally opposed activities. Th e significance of such a finding is amplified by the frequency of attempts in the deliberative democracy literature to insist on the theoretical bifurcation of debate and deliberation as an article of theoretical faith. Tandem analysis of the EPA and intelligence community debating initiatives also brings to light dimensions of contrast at the third level of Isocratic synerchesthe, alliance formation. The intelligence community’s Analytic Outreach initiative invites largely one-way communication flowing from outside experts into the black box of classified intelligence analysis. On the contrary, the EPA debating program gestures toward a more expansive project of deliberative alliance building. In this vein, Howard University’s participation in the 2008 EPA Water Wars debates can be seen as the harbinger of a trend by historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) to catalyze their debate programs in a strategy that evinces Davis’s dual-focus vision. On the one hand, Davis aims to recuperate Wiley College’s tradition of competitive excellence in intercollegiate debate, depicted so powerfully in the feature film The Great Debaters, by starting a wave of new debate programs housed in hbcus across the nation.68 On the other hand, Davis sees potential for these new programs to complement their competitive debate programming with participation in the EPA’s public debating initiative. This dual-focus vision recalls Douglas Ehninger’s and Wayne Brockriede’s vision of “total” debate programs that blend switch-side intercollegiate tournament debating with forms of public debate designed to contribute to wider communities beyond the tournament setting.69 Whereas the political telos animating Davis’s dual-focus vision certainly embraces background assumptions that Greene and Hicks would find disconcerting—notions of liberal political agency, the idea of debate using “words as weapons”70—there is little doubt that the project of pursuing environmental protection by tapping the creative energy of hbcu-leveraged dissoi logoi diff ers significantly from the intelligence community’s eff ort to improve its tradecraft through online digital debate programming. Such diff erence is especially evident in light of the EPA’s commitment to extend debates to public realms, with the attendant possible benefits unpacked by Jane Munksgaard and Damien Pfister: 110 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Having a public debater argue against their convictions, or confess their indecision on a subject and subsequent embrace of argument as a way to seek clarity, could shake up the prevailing view of debate as a war of words. Public uptake of the possibility of switch-sides debate may help lessen the polarization of issues inherent in prevailing debate formats because students are no longer seen as wedded to their arguments. This could transform public debate from a tussle between advocates, with each public debater trying to convince the audience in a Manichean struggle about the truth of their side, to a more inviting exchange focused on the content of the other’s argumentation and the process of deliberative exchange.71 Reflection on the EPA debating initiative reveals a striking convergence among (1) the expressed need for dissoi logoi by government agency officials wrestling with the challenges of inverted rhetorical situations, (2) theoretical claims by scholars regarding the centrality of argumentation in the public policy process, and (3) the practical wherewithal of intercollegiate debaters to tailor public switch-side debating performances in specific ways requested by agency collaborators. These points of convergence both underscore previously articulated theoretical assertions regarding the relationship of debate to deliberation, as well as deepen understanding of the political role of deliberation in institutional decision making. But they also suggest how decisions by rhetorical scholars about whether to contribute switch-side debating acumen to meet demand-driven rhetoric of science initiatives ought to involve careful reflection. Such an approach mirrors the way policy planning in the “argumentative turn” is designed to respond to the weaknesses of formal, decisionistic paradigms of policy planning with situated, contingent judgments informed by reflective deliberation. Conclusion Dilip Gaonkar’s criticism of first-generation rhetoric of science scholarship rests on a key claim regarding what he sees as the inherent “thinness” of the ancient Greek rhetorical lexicon.72 That lexicon, by virtue of the fact that it was invented primarily to teach rhetorical performance, is ill equipped in his view to support the kind of nuanced discriminations required for eff ective interpretation and critique of rhetorical texts. Although Gaonkar isolates rhetoric of science as a main target of this critique, his choice of subject matter Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 111 positions him to toggle back and forth between specific engagement with rhetoric of science scholarship and discussion of broader themes touching on the metatheoretical controversy over rhetoric’s proper scope as a field of inquiry (the so-called big vs. little rhetoric dispute).73 Gaonkar’s familiar refrain in both contexts is a warning about the dangers of “universalizing” or “globalizing” rhetorical inquiry, especially in attempts that “stretch” the classical Greek rhetorical vocabulary into a hermeneutic metadiscourse, one pressed into service as a master key for interpretation of any and all types of communicative artifacts. In other words, Gaonkar warns against the dangers of rhetoricians pursuing what might be called supply-side epistemology, rhetoric’s project of pushing for greater disciplinary relevance by attempting to extend its reach into far-flung areas of inquiry such as the hard sciences. Yet this essay highlights how rhetorical scholarship’s relevance can be credibly established by outsiders, who seek access to the creative energy flowing from the classical Greek rhetorical lexicon in its native mode, that is, as a tool of invention designed to spur and hone rhetorical performance. Analysis of the intelligence community and EPA debating initiatives shows how this is the case, with government agencies calling for assistance to animate rhetorical processes such as dissoi logoi (debating different sides) and synerchesthe (the performative task of coming together deliberately for the purpose of joint inquiry, collective choice-making, and renewal of communicative bonds).74 Th is demand-driven epistemology is different in kind from the globalization project so roundly criticized by Gaonkar. Rather than rhetoric venturing out from its own academic home to proselytize about its epistemological universality for all knowers, instead here we have actors not formally trained in the rhetorical tradition articulating how their own deliberative objectives call for incorporation of rhetorical practice and even recruitment of “strategically located allies”75 to assist in the process. Since the productivist content in the classical Greek vocabulary serves as a critical resource for joint collaboration in this regard, demand-driven rhetoric of science turns Gaonkar’s original critique on its head. In fairness to Gaonkar, it should be stipulated that his 1993 intervention challenged the way rhetoric of science had been done to date, not the universe of ways rhetoric of science might be done in the future. And to his partial credit, Gaonkar did acknowledge the promise of a performance-oriented rhetoric of science, especially one informed by classical thinkers other than Aristotle.76 In his Ph.D. dissertation on “Aspects of Sophistic Pedagogy,” Gaonkar documents how the ancient sophists were “the greatest champions” 112 Rhetoric & Public Affairs of “socially useful” science,77 and also how the sophists essentially practiced the art of rhetoric in a translational, performative register: Th e sophists could not blithely go about their business of making science useful, while science itself stood still due to lack of communal support and recognition. Besides, sophistic pedagogy was becoming increasingly dependent on the findings of contemporary speculation in philosophy and science. Take for instance, the eminently practical art of rhetoric. As taught by the best of the sophists, it was not simply a handbook of recipes which anyone could mechanically employ to his advantage. On the contrary, the strength and vitality of sophistic rhetoric came from their ability to incorporate the relevant information obtained from the on-going research in other fields.78 Of course, deep trans-historical differences make uncritical appropriation of classical Greek rhetoric for contemporary use a fool’s errand. But to gauge from Robert Hariman’s recent reflections on the enduring salience of Isocrates, “timely, suitable, and eloquent appropriations” can help us postmoderns “forge a new political language” suitable for addressing the complex raft of intertwined problems facing global society. Such retrospection is long overdue, says Hariman, as “the history, literature, philosophy, oratory, art, and political thought of Greece and Rome have never been more accessible or less appreciated.”79 This essay has explored ways that some of the most venerable elements of the ancient Greek rhetorical tradition—those dealing with debate and deliberation—can be retrieved and adapted to answer calls in the contemporary milieu for cultural technologies capable of dealing with one of our time’s most daunting challenges. This challenge involves finding meaning in inverted rhetorical situations characterized by an endemic surplus of heterogeneous content. 2nc – Dogmatism impactOur framework forces debates on both sides of a social issue which stimulates critical thinking and helps students understand the complexities of policy dilemmas – this is critical to check dogmatismKeller, University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration Professor, et. al, 01 – [Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago (Thomas E., James K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago, professor of Social Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, 2001 (“Student debates in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge through active learning,” Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001, EBSCOhost, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]SOCIAL WORKERS HAVE a professional responsibility to shape social policy and legislation (National Association of Social Workers, 1996). In recent decades, the concept of policy practice has encouraged social workers to consider the ways in which their work can be advanced through active participation in the policy arena (Jansson, 1984, 1994; Wyers, 1991). The emergence of the policy practice framework has focused greater attention on the competencies required for social workers to influence social policy and placed greater emphasis on preparing social work students for policy intervention (Dear & Patti, 1981; Jansson, 1984, 1994; Mahaffey & Hanks, 1982; McInnis-Dittrich, 1994). The curriculum standards of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) require the teaching of knowledge and skills in the political process (CSWE, 1994). With this formal expectation of policy education in schools of social work, the best instructional methods must be employed to ensure students acquire the requisite policy practice skills and perspectives. The authors believe that structured student debates have great potential for promoting competence in policy practice and in-depth knowledge of substantive topics relevant to social policy. Like other interactive assignments designed to more closely resemble "real-world" activities, issue-oriented debates actively engage students in course content. Debates also allow students to develop and exercise skills that may translate to political activities, such as testifying before legislative committees. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, debates may help to stimulate critical thinking by shaking students free from established opinions and helping them to appreciate the complexities involved in policy dilemmas. Relationships between Policy Practice Skills, Critical Thinking, and Learning Policy practice encompasses social workers' "efforts to influence the development, enactment, implementation, or assessment of social policies" (Jansson, 1994, p. 8). Effective policy practice involves analytic activities, such as defining issues, gathering data, conducting research, identifying and prioritizing policy options, and creating policy proposals (Jansson, 1994). It also involves persuasive activities intended to influence opinions and outcomes, such as discussing and debating issues, organizing coalitions and task forces, and providing testimony. According to Jansson (1984,pp. 57-58), social workers rely upon five fundamental skills when pursuing policy practice activities: value-clarification skills for identifying and assessing the underlying values inherent in policy positions; conceptual skills for identifying and evaluating the relative merits of different policy options; interactional skills for interpreting the values and positions of others and conveying one's own point of view in a convincing manner; political skills for developing coalitions and developing effective strategies; and position-taking skills for recommending, advocating, and defending a particular policy. These policy practice skills reflect the hallmarks of critical thinking (see Brookfield, 1987; Gambrill, 1997). The central activities of critical thinking are identifying and challenging underlying assumptions, exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting, and arriving at commitments after a period of questioning, analysis, and reflection (Brookfield, 1987). Significant parallels exist with the policy-making process--identifying the values underlying policy choices, recognizing and evaluating multiple alternatives, and taking a position and advocating for its adoption. Developing policy practice skills seems to share much in common with developing capacities for critical thinking. R.W. Paul (as cited in Gambrill, 1997) states that critical thinkers acknowledge the imperative to argue from opposing points of view and to seek to identify weakness and limitations in one's own position. Critical thinkers are aware that there are many legitimate points of view, each of which (when thought through) may yield some level of insight. (p. 126) John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer, suggested that the initial advance in the development of reflective thought occurs in the transition from holding fixed, static ideas to an attitude of doubt and questioning engendered by exposure to alternative views in social discourse (Baker, 1955, pp. 36-40). Doubt, confusion, and conflict resulting from discussion of diverse perspectives "force comparison, selection, and reformulation of ideas and meanings" (Baker, 1955, p. 45). Subsequent educational theorists have contended that learning requires openness to divergent ideas in combination with the ability to synthesize disparate views into a purposeful resolution (Kolb, 1984; Perry, 1970). On the one hand, clinging to the certainty of one's beliefs risks dogmatism, rigidity, and the inability to learn from new experiences. On the other hand, if one's opinion is altered by every new experience, the result is insecurity, paralysis, and the inability to take effective action. The educator's role is to help students develop the capacity to incorporate new and sometimes conflicting ideas and experiences into a coherent cognitive framework. Kolb suggests that, "if the education process begins by bringing out the learner's beliefs and theories, examining and testing them, and then integrating the new, more refined ideas in the person's belief systems, the learning process will be facilitated" (p. 28). The authors believe that involving students in substantive debates challenges them to learn and grow in the fashion described by Dewey and Kolb. Participation in a debate stimulates clarification and critical evaluation of the evidence, logic, and values underlying one's own policy position. In addition, to debate effectively students must understand and accurately evaluate the opposing perspective. The ensuing tension between two distinct but legitimate views is designed to yield a reevaluation and reconstruction of knowledge and beliefs pertaining to the issue. 2NC – Democracy ImpactPolitical discourse is key to effective democracies—empirics prove.Levasseur, West Chester University Prof, & Carlin, U of Kansas Prof, 1 [David G. & Diana B., professors of communication studies, Fall 2001, “Egocentric Argument and the Public Sphere: Citizen Deliberations on Public Policy and Policymakers,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol 3, n. 4, p. 407, , accessed 7/7/13, MC] Democracies are built on discourse. As Harold Lasswell expressed several decades ago, "Democracy depends on talk, [and] the methods of talk need to aid in the discovery of sound public policy." 1 Because talk matters, contemporary scholarship has lavished great attention upon civic discourse. The majority of this attention has focused upon diagnosing and rejuvenating the ailing public sphere. While this sphere is defined somewhat differently by individual scholars, in a broad sense this sphere involves "citizens deliberating about common affairs, as distinct from personal or private concerns." Within the expansive literature on the ailing public sphere, theoretical writings far outnumber empirical ones. However, the public sphere is not only a "normative" construct, but it is also a dialogic process subject to "empirical" examination. Gerard A. Hauser has advocated taking an "empirical attitude" to the study of this discursive realm, and he argues that such an empirical "framework draws its inferences about publics, public spheres, and public opinions from actual social practices of discourse." Focusing upon the empirical nature of the public sphere promises to yield valuable insights; just as an ailing patient is best diagnosed by an actual examination, assessing and improving the health of the public sphere is best accomplished through an actual examination of the discourse within this communicative space. Discourse by the people instead of the elites is the best way to improve democracy.Levasseur, West Chester University Prof, & Carlin, U of Kansas Prof, 1 [David G. & Diana B., professors of communication studies, Fall 2001, “Egocentric Argument and the Public Sphere: Citizen Deliberations on Public Policy and Policymakers,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol 3, n. 4, p. 408, , accessed 7/7/13, MC] Such empirical examinations should pay particular attention to ordinary citizens' deliberative discourse. After all, democracy is built upon the discursive acts of ordinary people in ordinary conversation. 5 Yet scholars have paid little attention to such ordinary citizens, who, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe." 6 Consequently, our knowledge of the public sphere would benefit from a shift in focus: shifting our attention from the discourse of elites to the discourse of the larger citizenry. 7While few studies have examined the conversations of ordinary citizens, some scholars have breached this veiled communicative space. Scholars have used citizen focus groups to explore the relationship between political discussion and television programs, 8 the construction of political action frames, 9 citizen reactions to political debates, 10 and political choices during presidential campaigns. 11 Scholars also observed citizen discussions during the National Issues Forum in 1996. 12 While all of these studies have enhanced our understanding of citizens' public policy deliberations, none of these studies has examined citizen dialogue within the rich scholarly tradition of the public sphere. However, Thomas W. Benson explored the public sphere as constituted in citizens' political discussions on Internet bulletin boards. 13 His study's significant empirical insights were limited by the distinct sample population (Internet political newsgroup members) and by the limited communicative medium (e-mail messaging) used by these members. Mitchell S. McKinney's dissertation used citizen focus group data to examine voter anger and alienation. 14 His study was grounded in public sphere literature to develop recommendations for improving the state of civic discourse.Debate is essential—gives us access to effective methods of discourse, improving understanding of the public sphere.Levasseur, West Chester University Prof, & Carlin, U of Kansas Prof, 1 [David G. & Diana B., professors of communication studies, Fall 2001, “Egocentric Argument and the Public Sphere: Citizen Deliberations on Public Policy and Policymakers,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol 3, n. 4, p. 425, , accessed 7/7/13, MC] The problem of polling also points to the importance of examining citizen discourse in an effort to understand the public sphere. Citizen discourse must be examined because it differs in important ways from the elite discourse that commonly pervades studies of the public sphere. Studies centered on such elite discourse have lamented the growth of a rhetoric of polls in our political process. 60 While such rhetoric certainly plays a prominent role in politician and media discourse, it played very little role in our citizen discussion groups; citizens simply did not refer to polls to advance their policy arguments. Studying citizen groups also presents a different picture with regard to the fourth commonly cited ailment confronting the public sphere: the rise of a rhetoric of technical expertise. Writers ranging from Dryzek to Habermas have complained about a "lifeworld" colonized by the discourse of expert cultures. 61 The lifeworld represented within our group deliberations did not reveal such colonization. Discourse deferring to technical expertise was largely absent from these discussions. On the other hand, the discourse of personal expertise substantiated through personal narratives dominated these discussions. In fact, these citizen conversations might have benefitted from some expert discourse that would have helped participants frame their experiences within a broader context of knowledge.Overviews*Aff1AR OverviewExtend the interpretation – they must allow us to weigh the impact of our aff and must defend USFG action – they do neither, and that’s a reason to reject the teamThey kill plan focus, and it’s the only way to have predictable limits – all debates need a starting locus for educational clashK Ground is too large – they give us unpredictable and generic ground that is only tangentially related to the planWe’re key to topic-specific education – they can run “state bad” every year, but we won’t learn anything new – education is the central mission of debate – it’s the only thing we take away from debate after we leave the activityExtend the Rorty evidence – their K is impotent and it allows the structures it criticizes to stay in placeIt actually strengthens those structures by giving the elites a power vaccum to seize – this is an external impactBoggs 2k (CARL, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 00, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1)JFSBut it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo. Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible. The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action. If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”. Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare. A belief that totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises. Oakeshott’s minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people’s lives. Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege. Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration. Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system. In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories. *Neg2NC Overview3 key arguments in this debate1. Switch-Side debate solves all of the affirmative’s offense – all of your reasons why your kritik is good can be ran while you are negative without a blatant violation of the resolution2. Shively – this precedes all other questions – we cannot even debate until we know the conditions, subjects, and limits of this debate – you can’t evaluate the content of their claims until rules have been set up3. Boggs – we are the only ones with an external impact – if we fail to engage politics, then elites fill the vacuum who push forth imperialist, oppressive agendas**Interpretation Debate2NC Interpretation Extension(IF THEY READ A PLAN TEXT) Our interpretation is that the affirmative must defend the hypothetical world in which their plan is passed by the USfg – this is reasonable interp because all we ask is that the affirmative defend something they already advocate – and this argument is the most predictable given the wording of the resolution because – A. Resolved means to enact by law B. The USfg is the government in Washington, we are not the government, so the affirmative changes the actor of the resolution(IF THEY DON’T)Our interpretation is that the affirmative must defend the resolution – this is fair because the debate community agreed on a resolution and the affirmative needs to abide by that – they don’t enact a governmental policy – their failure to do so proves them non-topical because A. Resolved means to enact by law B. The USfg is the government in Washington, we are not the government, so the affirmative changes the actor of the resolution2NC AT: Counter-InterpretationThe affirmative claims that they are a form of politics – 1. They don’t meet – they still fail to defend a hypothetical implementation of the plan by the United States federal government 2. Their form of thinking is bad – regardless of whether “thinking is good”, a failure to engage in governmental reforms causes a takeover by imperialist elites – that’s Boggs3. This interpretation is arbitrary and unlimiting – in their view, anything can count as politics, which justifies all counter interpretations, impacted by Lutz 4. Switch-Side debate solves this – all conceptions of politics can be run on the negative2NC AT: Your Interpretation is Exclusionary 1. Exclusion is inevitable – win/losses, elim rounds, speech times – everything about debate excludes certain things2. Switch-side debate solves – anything outside of the resolution can be ran on the negative 3. Excluding certain things is good for education and fairness – our Lutz evidence says that theorizing about politics is unproductive and lazy unless we consider its realistic relevance to real-world politics4. Limits are necessary to sustain nonviolent debate Graham 99 (Philip School of Communication Queensland University of Technology, Heidegger’s Hippies Sep 15 )Politics has historically been about how people can best live together. Today’s politics is not about that. If we allow public institutions, public consciousness, and, therefore, society itself to be manipulated by undemocratic organisations, such as media behemoths and multilateral and transnational organisations, then democracy is doomed to an undemocratic death. If democracy is doomed, then the potential for real equality (as opposed to empty gestures of equivalence) is doomed. If this is destroyed, then politics is dead. Healthy politics is a necessarily violent space (Bewes 1997). But we can choose between different sorts of violence. We can have violent dialectical debate, or violent war. We can have a violent clash of ideas or a violent clash with weapons. Humans speak. They speak about the realities they inhabit. They will not remain silent about them. If they are temporarily silenced - whether by violence, threats, or intellectual confusion - they will eventually make themselves heard. History show us that this is so. Somewhere, someone must make a choice about when, whether, and how the current political space can be opened up to the public before it is prised open, once again, by mass annihilations.2NC AT: We Meet – We Affirm the Rez as “X”This does not meet our interpretation 1. You do not defend an implementation by the USfg – that is the vital internal link to all of our offense2. This is the death of fairness – you can affirm the topic as a metaphor, doorknob, dance, rap, dream, or literally anything you want – Lutz impacts this 3. Our definitions of Resolved and the USfg prove that this argument is false – affirming the resolution is a governmental action – they do not do this**Fairness Debate2NC Fairness ExtensionExtend our fairness claim – if the aff doesn’t have to defend a policy action they can defend an action that is:A. Non-falsifiable – they can run affirmatives that have no proof and means we cannot have arguments against themB. Unpredicable – they can run something we have never heard of, the resolution sticks them to the scope of a pre-determined stasis for debate – impacted by ShivelyC. Totalizing – the aff can say that rape is bad and we have no arguments against itD. Personal Claims – they can tell a story, recount a dream, or any number of things that only have happened to them, and we cannot be ready for themimpacted by Shively – fair limits and rules are a precursor to debateTurns the aff – their movement is more successful in a world of fairness because all people have equal opportunities to access its benefits2NC AT: Nazis Wanted FairnessThis argument is absurd1. I’m sure the Jews wanted fairness too…2. We aren’t Nazis…3. The Nazis did a lot of things, just because the Nazis wore pants and so did we doesn’t mean we are Nazis2NC AT: Your Conception of Fairness is BadThey say our conception of fairness is bad -1. Shively precludes this argument – we agree to a conception of fairness prior to the round by selecting the resolution – this concept of fairness is agreed on as a point of stasis – it is not arbitrary 2. Your conception of fairness is worse – it argues that people can do whatever they want and ignore rules – that justifies endless violence and the worst excesses of humans2NC AT: Education Precedes FairnessThey say education precedes fairness – 1. We access a better internal to education – A. Because fairness is key to clash, which means better education about both sides of any issue B. Because learning about the implementation of the plan is key to understanding governmental procedure C. Because resolutional education means we learn new things every year2. Fairness precedes education A. Education is inevitable, if we sit around and debate for an hour, we will learn something – it’s a question of balanced argumentsB. The best education is research – if we research for the topic and can’t use it because you run a kritik aff, then we don’t learn how to implement our information and analyze information 3. Education is inevitable – it’s a question of policy vs. kritikal education2NC AT: Fairness is ArbitraryThey say fairness is arbitrary1. Shively precludes this argument – we agree to a conception of fairness prior to the round by selecting the resolution – this concept of fairness is agreed on as a point of stasis – it is not arbitrarily conceived of by us2. And, the affirmative is more arbitrary – they run arguments that are not even tangentially related to the resolution – 3. No impact – even if it is arbitrary, we’re proving it’s the best model for debate2NC AT: Fairness is UtopianThey say we can never have fair debates1. This isn’t true – sticking to a prior point of stasis allows for predictable arguments that can be met with clash2. Even if fairness if impossible, we should strive towards it – fairness is a question of degree, not yes/no – even if we are not 100% fair, being more fair is a good thing**Switch-Side Debate2NC Switch-Side ExtensionThree arguments on the Switch Side debate1. Spending aff and neg rounds theorizing about the failure of the IR system is a waste – only considering both sides of an issue allows for true education about it 2. Voting affirmative is not key – you can vote negative to endorse their project – in fact, their focus on the ballot is flawed – they still focus on winning, which means their project is not truly revolutionary – 3. They can run their kritik when they are negative while still preserving fairness by being topicalNo offense – even though debate might be flawed, switch-side checks all offenseMuir 93 (Department of Communications at George Mason, Star, “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26(4), Gale Academic)JFS Contemporary debate, even in the context of a vigorous defense, does have its drawbacks. It tends to overemphasize logic and tactics and to downplay personal feelings; it is by nature competitive, and therefore susceptible to competitive impulses and techniques (such as rapid speaking and a multiplicity of arguments); and it can desensitize debaters to real human problems and needs through continual labeling and discussion of abstract issues on paper. These problems, however, are more than matched by the conceptual flexibility, empathy, and familiarity with significant issues provided by switch-side debate. The values of tolerance and fairness, implicit in the metaphor of debate as game, are idealistic in nature. They have a much greater chance of success, however, in an activity that requires students to examine and understand both sides of an issue. In his description of debating societies, Robert Louis Stevenson questions the prevalence of unreasoned opinion, and summarizes the judgment furthered in this work: Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely, the case as it stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard! How many new difficulties take form before your eyes! how many superannuated arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced eclecticism! . . . It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature petrifactions into living and impressionable soul that we insist on their utility.2NC AT: Switch-Side Kills AdvocacyThey say switch-side kills real advocacy 1. Switch side is key to true advocacy – before we make up our mind about what we believe in, we must consider both positions2. Debate is not a forum for advocacy – speech times, judging, competition2NC AT: Switch-Side Causes RelativismThey claim switch-side debating causes relativism – 1. Switch-side debate doesn't encourage relativism – it fosters tolerance without committing students to active moral irresponsibilityMuir 93 (Department of Communications at George Mason, Star, “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26(4), Gale Academic)JFS A final indictment of values clarification education is that it encourages relativism, Stewart, for example, sees value clarification as individualistic, personal, and situational.^' He also characterizes values clarification as possessing a hidden set of values (an "absolute relativism") that includes purposefulness, strong beliefs, and thoughtfulness, among others. This "hidden curriculum" of values clarification formulates responses to situations while decrying such pre-judgment. In obvious ways, switch-side debate illustrates the same dilemma: No one value is seen as correct and unassailable, yet certain values get placed above others as a matter of procedure. Both features need to be explicitly addressed since both reflect directly on debate as a tool of moral pedagogy. The first response to the charge of relativism is that switch-side debate respects the existence of divergent beliefs, but focuses attention on assessing the validity of opposing belief systems. Scriven argues that the "confusion of pluralism, of the proper tolerance for diversity of ideas, with relativism—the doctrine that there are no right and wrong answers in ethics or religion—is perhaps the most serious ideological barrier to the implementation of moral education today. "^ The process of ethical inquiry is central to such moral education, but the allowance of just any position is not. Here is where cognitive-development diverges from the formal aims of values clarification. Where clarification ostensibly allows any value position, cognitive-development progresses from individualism to social conformity to social contract theory to universal ethical principles. A pluralistic pedagogy does not imply that all views are acceptable: It is morally and pedagogically correct to teach about ethics, and the skills of moral analysis rather than doctrine, and to set out the arguments for and against tolerance and pluralism. All of this is undone if you also imply that all the various incompatible views about abortion or pornography or war are equally right, or likely to be right, or deserving of respect. Pluralism requires respecting the right to hold divergent beliefs; it implies neither tolerance of actions based on those beliefs nor respecting the content of the beliefs. The role of switch-side debate is especially important in the oral defense of arguments that foster tolerance without accruing the moral complications of acting on such beliefs. The forum is therefore unique in providing debaters with attitudes of tolerance without committing them to active moral irresponsibility. As Freeley notes, debaters are indeed exposed to a multivalued world, both within and between the sides of a given topic. Yet this exposure hardly commits them to such "mistaken" values. In this view, the divorce of the game from the "real world" can be seen as a means of gaining perspective without obligating students to validate their hypothetical value structure through immoral actions.2. Relativism is good – it allows us to adapt and understand context – the affirmative tries to posit universal truths which are false – preemptive killing may be bad, but killing in self-defense might not, understanding these distinctions is key to true ethics**Shively Debate2NC Shively ExtensionExtend our Shively argument – The question of what we are debating about takes precedence over all other claims – we must establish what we are debating about before we do itThis is a d-rule –?impossible to be negative without itShively 2k (Ruth Lessl, Assoc Prof Polisci at Texas A&M, Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 182-3)The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further contest. It may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion.Yet difficulties remain. For and then proceed to debate without attention to further agreements. For debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two people are having an argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing about it; what facts are being contested, and so on. They must also agree—and they do so simply by entering into debate—that they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation. ?Grounding their movement in the context of the resolution is even more subversiveShively 2k (Ruth Lessl Assoc Prof Polisci at Texas A&M, Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 180)'Thus far, I have argued that if the ambiguists mean to be subversive about anything, they need to be conservative about some things. They need to be steadfast supporters of the structures of openness and democracy: willing to say "no" to certain forms of contest; willing to set up certain clear limitations about acceptable behavior. To this, finally, I would add that if the ambiguists mean to stretch the boundaries of behavior—if they want to be revolutionary and disruptive in their skepticism and iconoclasm—they need first to be firm believers in something. Which is to say, again, they need to set clear limits about what they will and will not support, what they do and do not believe to be best. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the true revolutionary has always willed something "definite and limited." For example, "The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against..." He "desired the freedoms of democracy." He "wished to have votes and not to have titles . . ." But "because the new rebel is a skeptic"—because he cannot bring himself to will something definite and limited— "he cannot be a revolutionary." For "the fact that he wants to doubt everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything" (Chesterton 1959,41). Thus, the most radical skepticism ends in the most radical conservatism. In other words, a refusal to judge among ideas and activities is, in the end, an endorsement of the status quo. To embrace everything is to be unable to embrace a particular plan of action, for to embrace a particular plan of action is to reject all others, at least for that moment. Moreover, as observed in our discussion of openness, to embrace everything is to embrace self-contradiction: to hold to both one's purposes and to that which defeats one's purposes—to tolerance and intolerance, open-mindedness and close-mindedness, democracy and tyranny. In the same manner, then, the ambiguists' refusals to will something "definite and limited" undermines their revolutionary impulses. In their refusal to say what they will not celebrate and what they will not rebel against, they deny themselves (and everyone else in their political world) a particular plan or ground to work from. By refusing to deny incivility, they deny themselves a civil public space from which to speak. They cannot say "no" to the terrorist who would silence dissent. They cannot turn their backs on the bullying of the white supremacist. And, as such, in refusing to bar the tactics of the anti-democrat, they refuse to support the tactics of the democrat. In short, then, to be a true ambiguist, there must be some limit to what is ambiguous. To fully support political contest, one must fully support some uncontested rules and reasons. To generally reject the silencing or exclusion of others, one must sometimes silence or exclude those who reject civility and democracy.**Lutz Debate2NC Lutz Extension Extend the Lutz evidence – there are an infinite number of frameworks between degrees – there are two opposite extremes, and everything in between, the aff could pick any of these frameworks, jacking predictability – and Lutz says anyone can idealize about a perfect world, but our duty as debaters is to prescribe pragmatic policies that can actually have real change**Boggs Debate2NC Boggs ExtensionExtend the Boggs card – a failure to engage politics leaves a vacuum for elites to fill with racist, imperialist, warmongering policies – critiques of the state fail and lead to more authoritarianism Exposing the flaws of the system does nothing – real change must start with the stateJohnston 5 (Adrian, Dept of Philosophy, New Mexico University, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Vol. 1)JFSHowever, the absence of this type of Lacan-underwritten argument in ?i?ek’s socio- political thought indicates something important. Following Lacan, ?i?ek describes instances of the tactic of “lying in the guise of truth” and points to late-capitalist cynicism as a key example of this (here, cynically knowing the truth that “the System” is a vacuous sham produces no real change in behavior, no decision to stop acting “as if” this big Other is something with genuine substantiality).149 ?i?ek proclaims that, “the starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth.”150 Although the Lacanian blurring of the boundary between theoretical thinking and practical action might very well be completely true, accepting it as true inevitably risks strengthening a convenient alibi—the creation of this alibi has long been a fait accompli for which Lacan alone could hardly be held responsible—for the worst sort of intellectualized avoidance of praxis. Academics can convincingly reassure themselves that their inaccessible, abstract musings, the publications of which are perused only by their tiny self-enclosed circle of “ivory tower” colleagues, aren’t irrelevant obscurities made possible by tacit complicity with a certain socio-economic status quo, but, rather, radical political interventions that promise sweeping changes of the predominating situation. If working on signifiers is the same as working in the streets, then why dirty one’s hands bothering with the latter? Debate empowers democratic decision-makers and preserves the process of democratic deliberation. Hill 8 (Sara, Afterschool Matters: Creative Programs That Connect Youth Development and Student Achievement, MEd from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her EdD from Peabody College, Vanderbilt University)JFSCivic education, or what we are calling democracy skill-building experiences, can help to empower youth to become engaged learners, critical thinkers, and active citizens, as well as to be more academically prepared. At a time when the civic participation of young people is becoming less frequent, out-of-school time and youth development programs, such as an urban debate club, offers a possible model for using the out-of-school time hours to foster civic participation, democracy skill building, and learning. This chapter describes an urban youth debate league and how this type of program can be a part of the vision of a more informed and active youth citizenry. This chapter discusses these questions: What might “democracy in action” look like in out-of-school time and youth development programs, and how does it relate to learning? How does urban debate serves as an example of democracy skill building during the out-of-school time hours? What are the program and policy supports needed to support a civic engagement and democracy skill-building role for out-of-school time hours? The chapter concludes with information important for youth program providers, policy makers, and other individuals and organizations seeking to foster youth democracy development and participation during out-of-school time hours. There is consensus that to preserve a democracy requires the development of democratic citizens. How we think about the formation of democratic citizens depends on the specific conception of democracy we hold, whether it is a set of skills, level of participation, civic discourse, community mobilization, or exercise of certain rights and responsibilities (Galston, 2001). Educators and government leaders agree on the importance of democratic education because of society’s reliance on the people to make deliberate choices about the direction of their collective lives (Battistoni, 1985). Yet there is a range of terms used in the language to describe democratic development or civic engagement. 2NC AT: Debate Social MovementsThey say debate can be used for social movements – 1. This isn’t true – debate is a contest to see who can make better arguments – its competitive nature makes it non-receptive to movement2. Debate is a bad place for movements – nobody pays attention to debates besides debaters – there will be less overall change in a debate movement3. The aff is a pointless cultural criticism – they only affect the people in this room – vote neg to prevent debate from becoming an underground irrelevancyMann 95 (Paul, Pomona College, Dept. of English, Post-Modern Culture 5(3), )JFSApocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries, espionage network trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers, derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and more... Why this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds? What is it about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos and recycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incredible noise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit? Why submit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit? Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic, untenable a class of cultural objects? Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where, sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural criticism? No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. [2] Then if one must persist in investigating these epi-epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some critical fashion (no doubt already out of vogue), perhaps merely out of an interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupid underground back to all the old undergrounds, back to the most familiar histories? Why not cast it as nothing more than another and another and another stillborn incarnation of an avant-garde that wallows in but doesn't quite believe its own obituaries, and that one has already wasted years considering? Why not just settle for mapping it according to the old topography of center and margin, or some other arthritic dichotomy that, for all their alleged postness, the discourses we are about to breach always manage to drag along behind them? Why not simply accede to the mock-heroic rhetoric of cultural opposition (subversion, resistance, etc.) that, after a generation of deconstructions, we still don't have the strength to shake; or to the nouveau rhetoric of multiplicity (plurality, diversity, etc.), as if all one needed was to add a few more disparate topic headings to break the hold of a One that, in truth, one still manages to project in the very act of superceding it? Nothing will prevent us—indeed, nothing can save us--from ransoming ourselves again and again to the exhausted mastery of these arrangements; nothing will keep us from orienting ourselves toward every difference by means of the most tattered maps. But at the same time we must entertain--doubtless the right word--the sheer possibility that what we encounter here is not just one more margin or one more avant-garde, however impossible it will be to avoid all the orders and terms attendant upon those venerable and ruined cultural edifices. We must remain open to the possibility that this stupid underground poses all the old questions but a few more as well, that it might suggest another set of cultural arrangements, other topographies and other mappings, however unlikely that might be. In any case, whatever vicarious attractions the stupid underground offers the bored intellectual groping for a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever else we might encounter here, it is important to insist that you will not find these maps laid out for your inspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy and charm. No claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, no one offered up on the critical auction block as the other of the month. There is nothing here to choose; all the choices have already been made. One can only hope, in what will surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural space for a moment or two, 2NC Apolitical Theorizing Does NothingApolitical theorizing exists only in the ivory tower and fails to persuade anyone or change anythingLepgold and Nincic 1 (Joesph, associate professor of Government at Georgetown and Miroslav professor of Poly Sci at UC-Davis, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance pg. 2-4)JFSFor many reasons, connections between scholarly ideas and policymakers’ thinking in international relations are less common today, and the gap may grow unless we rethink carefully our approach to policy relevance. Deep, often ritualized rivalry among theoretical schools makes it unlikely that fu- ture officials will leave their university training in this subject with a clear, well-formed worldview. Such intellectual competition, of course, could be stimulating and useful, especially if it led officials to question their basic causal assumptions or consider rival explanations of the cases they face. More commonly, officials seem to remember the repetitive, often strident theo- retical debates as unproductive and tiresome. Not only is much international relations scholarship tedious, in their view; it is often technically quite dif- ficult. Partly for this reason, much of it is so substantively arid that even many scholarly specialists avoid trying to penetrate it. From a practitioner’s perspective, it often seems as if university scholars are increasingly “with- drawing . . . behind a curtain of theory and models” that only insiders can penetrate. In addition, for many observers, the end of the cold war has made it harder to find models providing a compelling link between the international environment and manipulable policy instruments. One exception to this growing split between scholars of international relations and policymakers is the work on the inter-democratic peace, which we discuss in chapter 5. This work, as we will show, has deeply influenced many contemporary policymakers. But, for the most part, it remains the exception; the profes- sional gap between academics and practitioners has widened in recent years. Many scholars no longer try to reach beyond the Ivory Tower, and officials seem increasingly content to ignore it. According to much conventional wisdom, this situation is unsurprising. International relations scholars and practitioners have different professional priorities and reflect different cultures. Not only is it often assumed that good theory must sacrifice policy relevance; but also those seeking guidance in diagnosing policy situations and making policy choices, it is often thought, must look for help in places other than contemporary social science research. This book challenges much of the conventional wisdom on these issues. It argues that IR theorists and foreign policy practitioners have important needs in common as well as needs that are different. Social science theory seeks to identify and explain the significant regularities in human affairs. Because people’s ability to process information is limited, they must perceive the world selectively in order to operate effectively in it; constructing and using theories in a self-conscious way helps to inject some rigor into these processes.6 For these reasons, both theorists and practitioners seek a clear and powerful understanding of cause and effect about policy issues, in order to help them diagnose situations, define the range of possibilities they con- front, and evaluate the likely consequences of given courses of action. At the same time, a deep and continuing concern for the substance and stakes involved in real-world issues can help prevent theorists’ research agendas from becoming arid or trivial. This book therefore has two objectives: to elaborate and justify the reasoning that leads to these conclusions, and to illustrate how scholarship on international relations and foreign policy can be useful beyond the Ivory Tower.2NC Apolitical Theorizing Does NothingTheorizing about epistemology, ontology, and methodology is useless – only policy discussions will have an impact outside of this debateLepgold and Nincic 1? (Joesph, associate professor of Government at Georgetown and Miroslav professor of Poly Sci at UC-Davis, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance pg. 6-7)JFSUnlike literature, pure mathematics, or formal logic, the study of inter- national relations may be valued largely for its practical implications and insights. SIR, like the major social-science disciplines, initially gained a firm foundation in academia on the assumption that it contributes to improved policy.9 It is part of what August Comte believed would constitute a new, “positive” science of society, one that would supersede the older tradition of metaphysical speculation about humanity and the social world. Progress toward this end has been incomplete as well as uneven across the social sciences. But, in virtually all of these fields, it has been driven by more than just curiosity as an end in itself. Tightening our grip on key social processes via improved understanding has always been a major incentive for new knowledge in the social sciences, especially in the study of international relations. This broad purpose covers a lot of specific ground. Policymakers want to know what range of effective choice they have, the likely international and domestic consequences of various policy decisions, and perhaps whether, in terms of more general interests and values, contemplated policy objectives are really desirable, should they be achievable. But the practical implications of international issues hardly end there. How wars start and end, the causes and implications of economic interdependence, and what leverage individ- ual states might have on trans-state problems greatly affects ordinary citizens’ physical safety, prosperity, and collective identity. Today, it is hard to think of any major public-policy issue that is not affected by a state’s or society’s relationships with other international actors. Because the United States looms so large within the international system, its citizens are sometimes unaware of the range and impact of international events and processes on their condition. It may take an experience such as the long gas lines in the 1970s or the foreign-inspired terrorist bombings in the 1990s to remind them how powerfully the outside world now impinges upon them. As Karl Deutsch observed, even the smallest states can no longer effectively isolate themselves, and even the largest ones face limits on their ability to change others’ behavior or values.11 In a broad sense, globalization means that events in many places will affect people’s investment opportu- nities, the value of their money, whether they feel that their values are safe or under attack, and perhaps whether they will be safe from attack by weap- ons of mass destruction or terrorism. These points can be illustrated by observing university undergraduates, who constitute one of the broadest categories of people who are potentially curious about IR. Unlike doctoral students, they care much less about po- litical science than about the substance of politics. What they seem to un- derstand is that the subject matter of SIR, regardless of the level of theoretical abstraction at which it is discussed, inherently has practical implications. One might argue that whatever our purpose in analyzing IR might be, we can have little confidence in our knowledge absent tightly developed theory and rigorous research. One might then infer that a concern with the practical implications of our knowledge is premature until the field of SIR is better developed on its own terms. But if one assumes that SIR inherently has significant real-world implications, one could also conclude that the balance in contemporary scholarship has veered too far from substance and too close to scholasticism. As in other fields driven by a concern with real-world developments, SIR research has been motivated by both internally- and externally-driven con- cerns. The former are conceptual, epistemological, and methodological mat- ters that scholars believe they need to confront to do their intellectual work: Which research programs are most apt to resolve the field’s core puzzles? What is the meaning of contested concepts? Which empirical evidence or methods are especially useful, convincing, or weak in this field? The latter consist of issues relevant to policy practitioners and citizens: How can people prepare to deal with an uncertain future? More specifically, how can they anticipate future international developments to which they might need to adapt, assess the likely consequences of measures to deal with that future, or at least think about such matters intelligently?12 While the best scholarly work tends to have important ramifications for both types of concerns, the academic emphasis has shifted too far toward work with little relevance out- side academia. This balance must be redressed if SIR is to resonate outside the Ivory Tower.2NC Policy Debate Can Influence PolicymakersTheory can impact policymakers, but only if it focuses on practical policy issuesLepgold and Nincic 1? (Joesph, associate professor of Government at Georgetown and Miroslav professor of Poly Sci at UC-Davis, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance pg. 11-12)JFSIn some areas, foreign-policymakers have been deeply influenced by the theoretical literature in International Relations. Aside from the work the work on the interdemocratic peace discussed in chapter 5, and, to a lesser extent, some of the literature on international institutions examined in chap- ter 6, strategic studies has been most important in this respect. Such concepts as “escalation dominance” as well as the more general notion of the pris- oners’ dilemma were conceived by academics but have become part of the daily vocabulary of many practitioners. Work on deterrence, nuclear prolif- eration, arms control, and the use of coercive force has influenced a host of U.S. weapons-acquisition and force-management issues.24 At one time, such an impact on official thinking was not unusual. Concerns about effective public policy have traditionally been part of the academic study of politics; the American Political Science Association (APSA), for example, was founded in part to “bring political science to a position of authority as regards practical politics.”25 By moving professional scholars away from externally- driven issues, the professionalization of political science has molded the kind of work by which they earn professional prestige, making them less able or willing to communicate with policymakers. From the perspective of many officials, SIR scholars are comfortable on their side of the gap, free of any obligation to address practical issues.26 As a result, the public intellectuals who address current foreign policy issues now tend to have few or weak connections to universities, while the prominent scholars in this field tend to write almost exclusively for their own colleagues.2NC Theory Trades Off With PoliticsTheorizing is a direct trade-off with political action – that causes a resurgence of the genocidal atrocities of the 20th centuryWolin 4 ?(Richard, distinguished professor of intellectual history at Graduate Center, City University of New York, The Seduction of Unreason: the intellectual romance with fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, pg. 8-9)JFSThe Seduction of Unreason is an exercise in intellectual genealogy. It seeks to shed light on the uncanny affinities between the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism. As such, it may also be read as an archaeology of postmodern theory. During the 1970s and 1980s a panoply of texts by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard were translated into English, provoking a far-reaching shift in American intellectual life. Many of these texts were inspired by Nietzsche’s anticivilizational animus: the conviction that our highest ideals of beauty, morality, and truth were intrinsically nihilistic. Such views found favor among a generation of academics disillusioned by the political failures of the 1960s. Understandably, in despondent times Nietzsche’s iconoclastic recommendation that one should “philosophize with a hammer”—that if something is falling, one should give it a final push—found a ready echo. Yet, too often, those who rushed to mount the Nietzschean bandwagon downplayed or ignored the illiberal implications of his positions. Moreover, in retrospect, it seems clear that this same generation, many of whose representatives were comfortably ensconced in university careers, had merely exchanged radical politics for textual politics: unmasking “binary oppositions” replaced an ethos of active political engagement. In the last analysis it seems that the seductions of “theory” helped redirect formerly robust political energies along the lines of acceptable academic career tracks. As commentators have often pointed out, during the 1980s, while Republicans were commandeering the nation’s political apparatus, partisans of “theory” were storming the ramparts of the Modern Language Association and the local English Department. Ironically, during the same period, the French paradigms that American academics were so busy assimilating were undergoing an eclipse across the Atlantic. In France they were perceived as expressions of an obsolete political temperament: gauchisme (“leftism”) or “French philosophy of the 1960s.”21 By the mid-1980s French intellectuals had passed through the acid bath of antitotalitarianism. Under the influence of Solzhenitsyn’s pathbreaking study of the Gulag as well as the timely, if slick, anticommunist polemics of the “New Philosophers” such as André Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Lévy, who were appalled by the “killing fields” of Pol Pot’s Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge leader had been educated in Paris during the 1950s) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, French intellectuals began returning to the indigenous tradition of democratic republicanism—thereby leaving the 1960s leftists holding the bag of an outmoded philosophical anarchism. The tyrannical excesses of Third Worldism—China’s Cultural Revolution, Castro’s Cuba, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Mobutu’s Zaire, Duvalier’s Haiti—finally put paid to the delusion that the “wretched of the earth” were the bearers of a future socialist utopia. Suddenly, the nostrums of Western humanism, which the poststructuralists had emphatically denounced, seemed to merit a second look.2NC Engaging Politics Solves TotalitarianismA revitalized public sphere solves totalitarianism and includes all people Lakeland 93 (Paul, Fairfield Religious Studies Professor, “Preserving The Lifeworld, Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education” )JFSHow did we get from a democratic society in which the citizens--no matter how small a minority of the total community they constituted--truly felt they owned it, to one in which so many are alienated from the political process? One reason is that in the earlier years the expansion of citizenship and the subsequent increase in educational opportunities did not lead to the admission of these newly educated classes into the dialogue. Educational reform and improvement in the standard of living took place within European societies whose class, gender, and race-based social constraints underwent no serious change; a little learning did not a gentleman make. Another, more recent reason is that democratization was accompanied by capitalization, so that the passive consumption of culture and commodities with its attendant apolitical sociability was the path preferred by, or at least open to, the vast majority. In other words, there are just a lot more citizens; but many of these citizens are the victims of structural oppression, and all are lured by the blandishments of material ease. Again, to return to Habermas's forms of expression, all this amounts to the progressive colonization of the lifeworld by the system. If, in the past two hundred years, the public sphere has so completely failed to fulfill its promise as a market-place for the discourse of a free society, the project must be to restore it through the revival of true communicative action, that is, to persuade people to talk to one another with respect, to listen fairly, to argue cleanly, and to move towards consensus on norms for action. That way lies a democratic future. Any other way leads to one or another form of totalitarianism, including the totalitarianism of mass consumption culture whose victims are so easily persuaded to pursue its spurious salvation and ersatz heaven. However, the character of our modern world requires that steps taken to transform the public sphere respect and reflect the complexity of modern society. We are not just so many individuals sorted into different social classes. We are rather members of a number of sub-groups, perhaps defined by race, class, gender or religion, as well as members of the larger body politic. What will be needed is a confluence of these autonomous publics or distinct interest groups coming together in common concern for the preservation of democratic life. The public sphere will have to include many more voices than it did in the time of Samuel Johnson, and the consensus on social goods may seem even more elusive; but the dynamics of the process, so argues Habermas, will help ensure the preservation of a human society. 2NC Policy Debate Fractures MovementsUsing the debate space for social change creates backlash and fractures coalitions. The neg becomes a scapegoat for the movement Atchison and Panetta 9 (Jarrod, PhD. In Speech Communication.? Edward, Ph.D. in Communication. “Intercollegiate Debate Speech Communication: Historical Developments and Issues for the Future”; The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Pg. 28-9)JFSThe larger problem with locating the "debate as activism" perspective within the competitive framework is that it overlooks the communal nature of the community problem. If each individual debate is a decision about how the debate community should approach a problem, then the losing debaters become collateral damage in the activist strategy dedicated toward creating community change. One frustrating example of this type of argument might include a judge voting for an activist team in an effort to help them reach elimination rounds to generate a community discussion about the problem. Under this scenario, the losing team serves as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of community change. Downplaying the important role of competition and treating opponents as scapegoats for the failures of the community may increase the profile of the winning team and the community problem, but it does little to generate the critical coalitions necessary to address the community problem, because the competitive focus encourages teams to concentrate on how to beat the strategy with little regard for addressing the community problem. There is no role for competition when a judge decides that it is important to accentuate the publicity of a community problem. An extreme example might include a team arguing that their opponents' academic institution had a legacy of civil rights abuses and that the judge should not vote for them because that would be a community endorsement of a problematic institution. This scenario is a bit more outlandish but not unreasonable if one assumes that each debate should be about what is best for promoting solutions to diversity problems in the debate community. If the debate community is serious about generating community change, then it is more likely to occur outside a traditional competitive debate. When a team loses a debate because the judge decides that it is better for the community for the other team to win, then they have sacrificed two potential advocates for change within the community. Creating change through wins generates backlash through losses. Some proponents are comfortable with generating backlash and argue that the reaction is evidence that the issue is being discussed. From our perspective, the discussion that results from these hostile situations is not a productive one where participants seek to work together for a common goal. Instead of giving up on hope for change and agitating for wins regardless of who is left behind, it seems more reasonable that the debate community should try the method of public argument that we teach in an effort to generate a discussion of necessary community changes. Simply put, debate competitions do not represent the best environment for community change because it is a competition for a win and only one team can win any given debate, whereas addressing systemic century-long community problems requires a tremendous effort by a great number of people.They preclude community cooperation to make debate more open to solving community problemsAtchison and Panetta 9 (Jarrod Atchison, PhD. In Speech Communication.? Edward Panetta, Ph.D. in Communication. “Intercollegiate Debate Speech Communication: Historical Developments and Issues for the Future”; The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Pg. 28)JFSThe final problem with an individual debate round focus is the role of competition. Creating community change through individual debate rounds sacrifices the "community" portion of the change. Many teams that promote activist strategies in debates profess that they are more interested in creating change than winning debates. What is clear, however, is that the vast majority of teams that are not promoting community change are very interested in winning debates. The tension that is generated from the clash of these opposing forces is tremendous. Unfortunately, this is rarely a productive tension. Forcing teams to consider their purpose in debating, their style in debates, and their approach to evidence are all critical aspects of being participants in the community. However, the dismissal of the proposed resolution that the debaters have spent countless hours preparing for, in the name of a community problem that the debaters often have little control over, does little to engender coalitions of the willing. Should a debate team lose because its director or coach has been ineffective at recruiting minority participants? Should a debate team lose because its coach or director holds political positions that are in opposition to the activist program? Competition has been a critical component of the interest in intercollegiate debate from the beginning, and it does not help further the goals of the debate community to dismiss competition in the name of community change.2NC No SpilloverIndividual debates can’t create change—no audience and forgetfulnessAtchison and Panetta 9 (Jarrod Atchison, PhD. In Speech Communication.? Edward Panetta, Ph.D. in Communication. “Intercollegiate Debate Speech Communication: Historical Developments and Issues for the Future”; The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Pg. 27)JFSThe first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to generate community change. Although any debate has the potential to create problems for the community (videotapes of objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely does any one debate have the power to create communitywide change. We attribute this ineffectiveness to the structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective forgetfulness of the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format that has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in preliminary debates in rooms that are rarely populated by anyone other than the judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the best debating, but the ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tabulation room. Given the limited number of debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little documentation of what actually transpired during the debate round. During the period when judges interact with the debaters, there are often external pressures (filing evidence, preparing for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyone outside the debate to pay attention to the judges' justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much better audience because debates still occur simultaneously, and travel schedules dictate that most of the participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that asking a judge to vote to solve a community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is the best strategy for addressing important problems. In addition to the structural problems, the collective forgetfulness of the debate community reduces the impact that individual debates have on the community. The debate community is largely made up of participants who debate and then move on to successful careers. The coaches and directors that make up the backbone of the community are the people with the longest cultural memory, but they are also a small minority of the community when considering the number of debaters involved in the activity. This is not meant to suggest that the activity is reinvented every year—certainly there are conventions that are passed down from coaches to debaters and from debaters to debaters. However, the basic fact remains that there are virtually no transcriptions available for the community to read, and, therefore, it is difficult to substantiate the claim that the debate community can remember any one individual debate over the course of several generations of debaters. Additionally, given the focus on competition and individual skill, the community is more likely to remember the accomplishments and talents of debaters rather than a specific winning argument. The debate community does not have the necessary components in place for a strong collective memory of individual debates. The combination of the structures of debate and the collective forgetfulness means that any strategy for creating community change that is premised on winning individual debates is less effective than seeking a larger community dialogue that is recorded and/or transcribed. **Answers ToAT: MitchellHe changed his mind – debate as a political safe space is key to true political experimentationMitchell 2 (Gordon, debate coach at Pittsburgh, Nov 09, )JFSPolitically I have moved quite a bit since 1998, when I wrote that debate institutions should pay more attention to argumentative agency, i.e. cultivation of skills that facilitate translation of critical thinking, public speaking, and research acumen into concrete exemplars of democratic empowerment. Back then I was highly skeptical of the "laboratory model" of "preparatory pedagogy," where students were kept, by fiat, in the proverbial pedagogical bullpen. Now I respect much more the value of a protected space where young people can experiment politically by taking imaginary positions, driving the heuristic process by arguing against their convictions. In fact, the integrity of this space could be compromised by "activist turn" initiatives designed to bridge contest round advocacy with political activism. These days I have much more confidence in the importance and necessity of switch-side debating, and the heuristic value for debaters of arguing against their convictions. I think fashioning competitive debate contest rounds as isolated and politically protected safe spaces for communicative experimentation makes sense. However, I worry that a narrow diet of competitive contest round debating could starve students of opportunities to experience the rich political valence of their debating activities.AT: SpanosSpanos misconceptualizes the dialogic student-teacher relationship Devyne 96 (John, NYU Ed School, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner City Schools, p. 191)JFSI argue that Spanos’ epistemology should be challenged on two essential points. First, in reconceptializes ideal education along the lines of Paulo Freire, Spanos conflates the dialogic aspect of teaching with the totality of the student-teacher relationship. Teacher and student, we are told, should enter into a “reciprocal deconstructive learning process, one in which the oppositional teacher becomes a student and the interested student a teacher” (1993, 202), the teacher now experiencing what it feels like to be subjected to the disciplinary gaze. Such an educational philosophy has delusions of omnipotence: it wishes to extend its valid insights to encompass all aspects of teaching and learning, to become a totalizing vision. To accept the concept that not all knowledge is immediately generated through the dialogic relationship does not, however, equal an “oppressor ideology” or “the absolutizing of ignorance”. It simply represents a recognition that the student needs to be aware of what things or concepts mean for other people outside the context of the immediate dialogic relationship. In other words, while knowledge constructed through dialogue is to be valued as essential to the pedagogic process, it is also true that not all knowledge is or should be so conceptualized. Constructivism is splendid, but it has limits.AT: KulynychKulynych concludes aff – the aff is performative politicsKulynych 97 (Jessica, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter, n2 p315(32)JFSWhen we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. AT: Karl Rove Was A DebaterNot an argument – and there are many examples the other wayWhitmore 9 (Whit, Assistant Debate Coach at the University of Michigan, The 3NR, )JFSI hear this Karl Rove example all the time, and it seems like the dumbest thing ever. First, I don't know where he debated or when. He went to college at the University of Utah. I've personally never heard of a debate team from that school, but whatever. (EDIT: just looked it up --- some NPR article says, "In high school, Rove was a skilled debater and was elected president of the Student Council." ... so I guess student council presidents are the devil also) I've just heard it asserted by teams that like to make the debate bad argument. Second, an anecdote is not an argument. Karl Rove was a debater therefore debaters are evil is just an asinine statement. Third, there are plenty of counter anecdotes of pretty sweet people who debated and are now awesome: Neal Katyal - Defended Gore in Bush v. Gore, and defended the Detainees from Gitmo in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld - Debated for Dartmouth Laurence Tribe - one of the foremost constitutional scholars of our time, has argued before the supreme court over 30 times - Debated for HarvardAT: Hicks & GreeneFramework doesn’t cause U.S. exceptionalism – It solves itStannard 6 (Matt, U of Wyoming, .)If it is indeed true that debate inevitably produces other-oriented deliberative discourse at the expense of students’ confidence in their first-order convictions, this would indeed be a trade-off worth criticizing. In all fairness, Hicks and Greene do not overclaim their critique, and they take care to acknowledge the important ethical and cognitive virtues of deliberative debating. When represented as anything other than a political-ethical concern, however, Hicks and Greene’s critique has several problems: First, as J.P. Lacy once pointed out, it seems a tremendous causal (or even rhetorical) stretch to go from “debating both sides of an issue creates civic responsibility essential to liberal democracy” to “this civic responsibility upholds the worst forms of American exceptionalism.” Second, Hicks and Greene do not make any comparison of the potentially bad power of debate to any alternative. Their implied alternative, however, is a form of forensic speech that privileges personal conviction. The idea that students should be able to preserve their personal convictions at all costs seems far more immediately tyrannical, far more immediately damaging to either liberal or participatory democracy, than the ritualized requirements that students occasionally take the opposite side of what they believe. Third, as I have suggested and will continue to suggest, while a debate project requiring participants to understand and often “speak for” opposing points of view may carry a great deal of liberal baggage, it is at its core a project more ethically deliberative than institutionally liberal. Where Hicks and Greene see debate producing “the liberal citizen-subject,” I see debate at least having the potential to produce “the deliberative human being.” The fact that some academic debaters are recruited by the CSIS and the CIA does not undermine this thesis. Absent healthy debate programs, these think-tanks and government agencies would still recruit what they saw as the best and brightest students. And absent a debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal rhetoric, those students would have little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas.The historical basis for their exceptionalism claims is backwardHarrigan 8 (Casey, M.A. Wake, .)However, the arguments in “Lost Convictions” alone should not be read as a sweeping indictment of SSD for two reasons. First, Greene and Hicks make a specific and context-dependent claim about the Cold War that cannot be easily applied to contemporary discussion of the merits of SSD. 1954 was a time of McCarthyism and anti-Communist witch-hunts. It was quite possible then that one justification for debating both sides was a re-affirmation of liberalism against the communists. Now, in the midst of the “war on terrorism,” widespread restrictions on civil liberties, and President Bush’s mantra of “with us or against us,” it seems like the opposite is truer. Fidelity to the American cause is performed through the willing silence of its citizens. Dissent is quelled and the public is encouraged to view the world through the singular lens of “freedom” against the forces of terrorism. Debating both sides—and lacking immediate conviction—is a sign of weakness and waffling in the face of imminent threats to national security. Thus, in the contemporary context, to reject SSD and promote argument only through conviction is far more conducive to supporting American exceptionalism than debating multiple sides is as a liberal democratic justification.Experience proves that their exceptionalism argument is backwardEnglish 7 (Eric, M.A. Pitt, .)JFS It is our position, however, that rather than acting as a cultural technology expanding American exceptionalism, switch-side debating originates from a civic attitude that serves as a bulwark against fundamentalism of all stripes. Several prominent voices reshaping the national dialogue on homeland security have come from the academic debate community and draw on its animating spirit of critical inquiry. For example, Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal served as lead plaintiff’s counsel in Hamdan, which challenged post-9/11 enemy combat definitions.12 The foundation for Katyal’s winning argument in Hamdan was laid some four years before, when he collaborated with former intercollegiate debate champion Laurence Tribe on an influential Yale Law Journal addressing a similar topic.13 Tribe won the National Debate Tournament in 1961 while competing as an undergraduate debater for Harvard University. Thirty years later, Katyal represented Dartmouth College at the same tournament and finished third. The imprint of this debate training is evident in Tribe and Katyal’s contemporary public interventions, which are characterized by meticulous research, sound argumentation, and a staunch commitment to democratic principles. Katyal’s reflection on his early days of debating at Loyola High School in Chicago’s North Shore provides a vivid illustration. “I came in as a shy freshman with dreams of going to medical school. Then Loyola’s debate team opened my eyes to a different world: one of argumentation and policy.” As Katyal recounts, “the most important preparation for my career came from my experiences as a member of Loyola’s debate team.”14 The success of former debaters like Katyal, Tribe, and others in challenging the dominant dialogue on homeland security points to the efficacy of academic debate as a training ground for future advocates of progressive change. Moreover, a robust understanding of the switch-side technique and the classical liberalism which underpins it would help prevent misappropriation of the technique to bolster suspect homeland security policies. For buried within an inner-city debater’s files is a secret threat to absolutism: the refusal to be classified as “with us or against us,” the embracing of intellectual experimentation in an age of orthodoxy, and reflexivity in the face of fundamentalism. But by now, the irony of our story should be [end page 224] apparent—the more effectively academic debating practice can be focused toward these ends, the greater the proclivity of McCarthy’s ideological heirs to brand the activity as a “weapon of mass destruction.”AT: You Exclude CritiquesFalse – you just need to make your critique relevant to policy action – this is better for educationWalt ’91 (Stephen, Professor – U Chicago, International Studies Quarterly, 35)JFSA second norm is relevance, a belief that even highly abstract lines of inquiry should be guided by the goal of solving real-world problems. Because the value of a given approach may not be apparent at the beginning-game theory is an obvious example-we cannot insist that a new approach be immediately applicable to a specific research puzzle. On the whole, however, the belief that scholarship in security affairs should be linked to real-world issues has prevented the field from degenerating into self-indulgent intellectualizing. And from the Golden Age to the present, security studies has probably had more real-world impact, for good or ill, than most areas of social science. Finally, the renaissance of security studies has been guided by a commitment to democratic discourse. Rather than confining discussion of security issues to an elite group of the best and brightest, scholars in the renaissance have generally welcomed a more fully informed debate. To paraphrase Clemenceau, issues of war and peace are too important to be left solely to insiders with a vested interest in the outcome. The growth of security studies within universities is one sign of broader participation, along with increased availability of information and more accessible publications for interested citizens. Although this view is by no means universal, the renaissance of security studies has been shaped by the belief that a well-informed debate is the best way to avoid the disasters that are likely when national policy is monopolized by a few self-interested parties. And- their version of “critiques” is educationally devastating, it creates outcomes where teams can learn nothing about the topics. ?Our version forces them to learn about criticism and policyThis is offense – scholars have a responsibility to be policy relevantJentleson 2 ?(Bruce, Director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University, International Security 26.4 (2002) 169-183, projectmuse)JFSTo be sure, political science and international relations have produced and continue to produce scholarly work that does bring important policy insights. Still it is hard to deny that contemporary political science and international relations as a discipline put limited value on policy relevance—too little, in my view, and the discipline suffers for it. 1 The problem is not just the gap between theory and policy but its chasmlike widening in recent years and the limited valuation of efforts, in Alexander George's phrase, at "bridging the gap." 2 The [End Page 169] events of September 11 drive home the need to bring policy relevance back in to the discipline, to seek greater praxis between theory and practice. This is not to say that scholars should take up the agendas of think tanks, journalists, activists, or fast fax operations. The academy's agenda is and should be principally a more scholarly one. But theory can be valued without policy relevance being so undervalued. Dichotomization along the lines of "we" do theory and "they" do policy consigns international relations scholars almost exclusively to an intradisciplinary dialogue and purpose, with conversations and knowledge building that while highly intellectual are excessively insular and disconnected from the empirical realities that are the discipline's raison d'être. This stunts the contributions that universities, one of society's most essential institutions, can make in dealing with the profound problems and challenges society faces. It also is counterproductive to the academy's own interests. Research and scholarship are bettered by pushing analysis and logic beyond just offering up a few paragraphs on implications for policy at the end of a forty-page article, as if a "ritualistic addendum." 3 Teaching is enhanced when students' interest in "real world" issues is engaged in ways that reinforce the argument that theory really is relevant, and CNN is not enough. There also are gains to be made for the scholarly community's standing as perceived by those outside the academic world, constituencies and colleagues whose opinions too often are self-servingly denigrated and defensively disregarded. It thus is both for the health of the discipline and to fulfill its broader societal responsibilities that greater praxis is to be pursued.<read a space good card>AT: Debate Produces Bad PolicymakersWe can influence policy with debate – we choose whether to be good or bad policymakersWalt ’91 (Stephen, Professor – U Chicago, International Studies Quarterly, 35)JFSA second norm is relevance, a belief that even highly abstract lines of inquiry should be guided by the goal of solving real-world problems. Because the value of a given approach may not be apparent at the beginning-game theory is an obvious example-we cannot insist that a new approach be immediately applicable to a specific research puzzle. On the whole, however, the belief that scholarship in security affairs should be linked to real-world issues has prevented the field from degenerating into self-indulgent intellectualizing. And from the Golden Age to the present, security studies has probably had more real-world impact, for good or ill, than most areas of social science. Finally, the renaissance of security studies has been guided by a commitment to democratic discourse. Rather than confining discussion of security issues to an elite group of the best and brightest, scholars in the renaissance have generally welcomed a more fully informed debate. To paraphrase Clemenceau, issues of war and peace are too important to be left solely to insiders with a vested interest in the outcome. The growth of security studies within universities is one sign of broader participation, along with increased availability of information and more accessible publications for interested citizens. Although this view is by no means universal, the renaissance of security studies has been shaped by the belief that a well-informed debate is the best way to avoid the disasters that are likely when national policy is monopolized by a few self-interested parties. Can’t always be true – people choose their arguments – debate does not force people to be bad policymakersAcademics’ role in policy is key to check warWalt ’91 (Stephen, Professor – U Chicago, International Studies Quarterly, 35)JFSA recurring theme of this essay has been the twin dangers of separating the study of security affairs from the academic world or of shifting the focus of academic scholarship too far from real-world issues. The danger of war will be with us for some time to come, and states will continue to acquire military forces for a variety of purposes. Unless one believes that ignorance is preferable to expertise, the value of independent national security scholars should be apparent. Indeed, history suggests that countries that suppress debate on national security matters are more likely to blunder into disaster, because misguided policies cannot be evaluated and stopped in time. As in other areas of public policy, academic experts in security studies can help in several ways. In the short term, academics are well place to evaluate current programs, because they face less pressure to support official policy. The long-term effects of academic involvement may be even more significant: academic research can help states learn from past mistakes and can provide the theoretical innovations that produce better policy choices in the future. Furthermore, their role in training the new generation of experts gives academics an additional avenue of influence. Assuming they perform these tasks responsibly, academics will have a positive-albeit gradual-impact on how states deal with the problem of war in the future.AT: You Create Spectators1. No uniqueness – people are complacent now towards politics – only a risk we increase involvement2. Policy debate is good – it solves the spectator phenomenon and increases both critical and policy educationJoyner 99 (Christopher Professor of International Law in the Government Department at Georgetown University, Spring, [5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377]Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team. These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policy- making, students realize that United States actions do not always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case. The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense. A debate exercise is particularly suited to an examination of United States foreign policy, which in political science courses is usually studied from a theoretical, often heavily realpolitik perspective. In such courses, international legal considerations are usually given short shrift, if discussed at all. As a result, students may come to believe that international law plays no role in United States foreign policy-making. In fact, serious consideration is usually paid by government officials to international law in the formulation of United States policy, albeit sometimes ex post facto as a justification for policy, rather than as a bona fide prior constraint on consideration of policy options. In addition, lawyers are prominent advisers at many levels of the foreign-policy-making process. Students should appreciate the relevance of international law for past and current US actions, such as the invasion of Grenada or the refusal of the United States to sign the law of the sea treaty and landmines convention, as well as for ?[*387] ?hypothetical (though subject to public discussion) United States policy options such as hunting down and arresting war criminals in Bosnia, withdrawing from the United Nations, or assassinating Saddam Hussein.AT: K Precedes Theoretical ArgumentsSwitch-side solves – run this K on the negative and you access all of its benefits without violating the resolutionExtend Lutz – tying abstract ideals down to things like fairness and limits is the only productive form of politicsPolitical perfectionism is easy – the only productive philosophy is realistic policyIgnatieff 4 (Michael, Lesser Evils, Carr professor of human rights at Harvard, p. 20-1)As for moral perfectionism, this would be the doctrine that a liberal state should never have truck with dubious moral means and should spare its officials the hazard of having to decide between lesser and greater evils. A moral perfectionist position also holds that states can spare their officials this hazard simply by adhering to the universal moral standards set out in human rights conventions and the laws of war. There are two problems with a perfectionist stance, leaving aside the question of whether it is realistic. The first is that articulating nonrevocable, nonderogable moral standards is relatively easy. The problem is deciding how to apply them in specific cases. What is the line between interrogation and torture, between targeted killing and unlawful assassination, between preemption and aggression? Even when legal and moral distinctions between these are clear in the abstract, abstractions are less than helpful when political leaders have to choose between them in practice. Furthermore, the problem with perfectionist standards is that they contradict each other. The same person who shudders, rightly, at the prospect of torturing a suspect might be prepared to kill the same suspect in a preemptive attack on a terrorist base. Equally, the perfectionist commitment to the right to life might preclude such attacks altogether and restrict our response to judicial pursuit of offenders through process of law. Judicial responses to the problem of terror have their place, but they are no substitute for military operations when terrorists possess bases, training camps, and heavy weapons. To stick to a perfectionist commitment to the right to life when under terrorist attack might achieve moral consistency at the price of leaving us defenseless in the face of evildoers. Security, moreover, is a human right, and thus respect for one right might lead us to betray another.AT: Rules Are ViolentRules inevitable – speech times, win/losses, and aff/negTurn – rules check human excesses of violence – link turn outweighs linkDietz 2k (Mary, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 123-4)JFSHabermas's distinction between "pure" communicative action and strategic action raises many difficulties, not the least of which is its adherence to an idealized model of communication that, as Habermas himself acknowledges, does not fit a great deal of everyday social interaction (McCarthy 1991,132). Machiavelli's famous riposte to those thinkers who "have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality" (Machiavelli 1950, 56) seems pertinent here, for the idealized model that Habermas imagines and the distinction that supports it appear boldly to deny the Machiavellian insight that "how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation" (56). I will return to this point as it relates to politics later. For now, it is important to underscore that Habermas relies upon the communicative-strategic distinction to do at least two things: first, to show that on the level of linguistics, communicative action enjoys an "originary" priority over strategic and all other modes of linguistic usage, which are themselves "parasitic" (Rasmussen 1990, 38) or "derivative" (McCarthy 1991, 133) upon the former.12 Second, on the level of political theory, Habermas introduces the distinction in order to limit the exercise of threats and coercion (or strategic action) by enumerating a formal-pragmatic system of discursive accountability (or communicative action) that is geared toward human agreement and mutuality. Despite its thoroughly modern accouterments, communicative action aims at something like the twentieth-century discourse-equivalent of the chivalric codes of the late Middle Ages; as a normative system it articulates the conventions of fair and honorable engagement between interlocutors. To be sure, Habermas's concept of communicative action is neither as refined nor as situationally embedded as were the protocols that governed honorable combat across European cultural and territorial boundaries and between Christian knights; but it is nonetheless a (cross-cultural) protocol for all that. The entire framework that Habermas establishes is an attempt to limit human violence by elaborating a code of communicative conduct that is designed to hold power in check by channeling it into persuasion, or the "unforced" force of the better argument (Habermas 1993b, 160).^AT: Minority Participation 1. No uniqueness – Beacon and Millard South were both successful at the TOC last year and minority debaters are successful in traditional debate as well2. Your argument is racist – the notion that we need to change debate for minorities assumes that they cannot compete in the existing debate structure – this is essentializing and constructs minorities as inferior – turns your impactsAT: Resolved Is Before The Colon1. ?The resolution still includes the federal government, meaning that individuals have to be “resolved” that the federal government should act2. ?Resolved is designed for political discussion in the context of policy debateParcher 1 (Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, )JFS(1) Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into constituent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in orginal) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at *Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Frimness of purpose; resolution. 2. A determination or decision. ?(2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question. American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statemnt of a deciion, as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly inconcievable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction. They focus on issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desireablility of that resolution. That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic committee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution adopted by a body - it's the prelimanary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy debate. Resolved comes from the adoption of resolutions by legislative bodies. A resolution is either adopted or it is not. It's a question before a legislative body. Should this statement be adopted or not. (5) The very terms 'affirmative' and 'negative' support my view. One affirms a resolution. Affirmative and negative are the equivalents of 'yes' or 'no' - which, of course, are answers to a question.Everything after the colon is keyWebster’s Guide to Grammar and Writing 2k ()Use of a colon before a list or an explanation that is preceded by a clause that can stand by itself. Think of the colon as a gate, inviting one to go on… If the introductory phrase preceding the colon is very brief and the clause following the colon represents the real business of the sentence, begin the clause after the colon with a capital letter.And, our interpretation is good–we have no evidence about the stance of individuals which hurts predictability – if we win that policy education is good, our interp is preferableAnd, our ground and education arguments outweigh this–even if their grammar claims are correct, they still destroy debateAT: Words Lack Determinate MeaningFirst, even if words mean different things to different people, we can still create some consensus –if I speak English, everyone understands me ?And, they should lose in this world – their words have no meaning and have not formed an argument – vote on presumptionIntersubjective consensus solves this argFerguson and Mansbausch 2 (Yale, Prof of IR at Rutgers, Richard, Prof of IR at Iowa State, International Relations and the “Third Debate,” ed. Jarvis)JFSAlthough there may be no such thing as “absolute truth” (Hollis, 1994:240-247; Fernandez-Armesto, 1997:chap.6), there is often a sufficient amount of intersubjective consensus to make for a useful conversation. ?That conversation may not lead to proofs that satisfy the philosophical nit-pickers, but it can be educational and illuminating. ?We gain a degree of apparently useful “understanding” about the things we need (or prefer) to “know.”Their arg leads to the linguistic masking of atrocities like the HolocaustHexham 99 (Irving, in Mission and the State, ed. Ulrich van der Hayden, 2000,?)JFSDeborah Lipstadt warns historians about the dangers of adopting fashionable theories like deconstruction without solidly grounding their work in an accurate representation of source materials [1994]. She makes a passionate plea for historical accuracy while demonstrating the real dangers that occur when people distort the facts. The techniques used by Holocaust deniers, who use history to propagate their views, are not isolated to rogue historians. The basic arguments used by the deniers are not as absurd as most decent people, who instinctively reject such claims, think. In fact, they are increasingly common in popular scholarship. As Lipstadt points out "It is important to understand that the deniers do not work in a vacuum." [Lipstadt 1984:17]. Rather, holocaust "denial can be traced to an intellectual climate that has made its mark in the scholarly world during the past two decades. The deniers are plying their trade at a time when history seems to be up for grabs and attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have become commonplace." [Lipstadt 1994:17]. She continues: "This tendency can be traced, at least in part, to intellectual currents that began in the late 1960's. Various scholars began to assert that texts had no fixed meaning. The reader's interpretation, not the author's intention, determined meaning." [Lipstadt 1984:18] The danger here is not that established scholars are likely to become converts to holocaust denial, although in places like France this is a clear possibility, rather it is the effect such techniques have on students. As Lipstadt observes: "The scholars who supported this deconstructionist approach were neither deniers themselves nor sympathetic to the deniers' attitudes; most had no trouble identifying Holocaust denial as disingenuous." But, "when students had to confront the issue. Far too many of them found it impossible to recognize Holocaust denial as a movement with no scholarly, intellectual, or rational validity" [Lipstadt 1984:18]. At the end of her work she warns again that some "historians are not crypto-deniers, but the results of their work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction and between persecuted and persecutor [Lipstadt 1994:215]. Further Lipstadt correctly observes that "If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history." She is right. As scholars it is our duty to defend history based upon the accurate and the objectivity of scholarship. No doubt some people will bristle at the suggestion that we ought to strive for objectivity. Such critics regard the discovery of bias as something totally new without realizing that the hermeneutics of suspicion existed long before Foucault or Deridda [Spencer 1874] History and the deconstruction of Afrikaner Ideology With Lipstad's warning in mind let us turn to the study of South Africa history. During the 1980's various writers used history to deconstruct the claims of Afrikaner Nationalism [Hexham 1981; du Toit and Giliomee 1983; du Toit 1983; Elphick and Giliomee 1988]. These works made an impact among Afrikaners because they exposed the inconsistencies of the historical claims used to legitimate the ideology of apartheid. This delegitimation was possible because these studies were based on the same historical sources as those used by Afrikaner Nationalists used to justify apartheid. By demonstrating that the sources themselves did not support Nationalist claims these authors struck a body blow at the intellectual edifice that maintained the self-confidence of Afrikaner Nationalist intellectuals. At the same time other authors, such as Charles Villa-Vicencio and James Cochran, joined the fray. But, these latter writers were not trained historians. Rather they were theologians who used history as a tool in the "as a basis for ecclesial renewal" and to "understand the character of the church in South Africa and identify its social function" [Villa-Vicenciio 1988:1]. Worthy as these goals were these theologians appropriated historical evidence rather like fundamentalist Christians use proof texts from the Bible to support their arguments. Thus the historical record was forced into preconceived neo-Marxist ideological frameworks for the purpose of undermining support for apartheid. The problem with this approach was that it often distorted and misrepresented the source documents [Cf. Hexham 1989; 1993]. At this point, it is necessary to add that whenever one talks about the "distortion" or “misrepresentation” of sources it is important to recognize that everyone makes the occasional mistake. It is also true that in many cases legitimate questions of interpretation may arise when various scholars see the significance of the same piece of evidence differently. Therefore, what I am objecting to is not the occasional mistake, questionable usage, or issues of genuine interpretation. Rather, it is the systematic use or misuse of source texts to support a grand theory without regard to the context and clear intent of the original sources. Such practices ignore historical methods for the purpose of promoting an ideology [Himmelfarb 1987; Elton 1967 and 1991] The problem, of course, is that once these techniques are generally accepted the choice of ideology can change. Today they are used to promote democracy and tolerance. Tomorrow they may be used to promote totalitarianism and racism.**Policymaking/Roleplaying2NC Oasis Wall[note: the ‘oasis’ argument is that debate should be an isolated oasis of political discussion, as opposed to a place for activism]Specialized frameworks good – keep debate pureRoston 2 (Michael, Whitman coach, January 30, )JFSI grew up in West Rogers Park on the north side of Chicago, and up and down California Ave there are men of all ages going in and out of yeshivas where they study the torah and the talmud. many of their theological discussions occur (in hebrew) at a rapid pace, employing highly technical and difficult forms of argumentation, relying on arcane examples and evidence, some of which reaches back into previous millenia. one could even say that when they are praying, they bob back and forth in a way that many of us would instantly recognize from many of our debate rounds. I would say that even among the more conservative wings of my family, few of us can really understand what they do. I never learned Hebrew, and can't their discussions. Yet I'm certain that if their first priority were always accessibility and transparency, the whole of Jewish religion and culture would have no rmation overload destroys decision-making abilities are key – oasis debate teaches these skillsCoverstone 95 (Alan, BRILLIANT DEBATE THEORIST, "An Inward Glance: A Response To Mitchell's Outward Activist Turn," DRG, URL: )JFSMitchell's argument underestimates the nature of academic debate in three ways. First, debate trains students in the very skills required for navigation in the public sphere of the information age. In the past, political discourse was controlled by those elements who controlled access to information. While this basic reality will continue in the future, its essential features will change. No longer will mere possession of information determine control of political life. Information is widely available. For the first time in human history we face the prospect of an entirely new threat. The risk of an information overload is already shifting control of political discourse to superior information managers. It is no longer possible to control political discourse by limiting access to information. Instead, control belongs to those who are capable of identifying and delivering bits of information to a thirsty public. Mitchell calls this the "desertification of the public sphere." The public senses a deep desire for the ability to manage the information around them. Yet, they are unsure how to process and make sense of it all. In this environment, snake charmers and charlatans abound. The popularity of the evening news wanes as more and more information becomes available. People realize that these half hour glimpses at the news do not even come close to covering all available information. They desperately want to select information for themselves. So they watch CNN until they fall asleep. Gavel to gavel coverage of political events assumes top spots on the Nielsen charts. Desperate to decide for themselves, the public of the twenty-first century drinks deeply from the well of information. When they are finished, they find they are no more able to decide. Those who make decisions are envied and glorified. Debate teaches individual decision-making for the information age. No other academic activity available today teaches people more about information gathering, assessment, selection, and delivery. Most importantly, debate teaches individuals how to make and defend their own decisions. Debate is the only academic activity that moves at the speed of the information age. Time is required for individuals to achieve escape velocity. Academic debate holds tremendous value as a space for training. Mitchell's reflections are necessarily more accurate in his own situation. Over a decade of debate has well positioned him to participate actively and directly in the political process. Yet the skills he has did not develop overnight. Proper training requires time. While there is a tremendous variation in the amount of training required for effective navigation of the public sphere, the relative isolation of academic debate is one of its virtues. Instead of turning students of debate immediately outward, we should be encouraging more to enter the oasis. A thirsty public, drunk on the product of anyone who claims a decision, needs to drink from the pool of decision-making skills. Teaching these skills is our virtue.Non-activist debate key to true testing of political theories – solves political activism betterCoverstone 95 (Alan, BRILLIANT DEBATE THEORIST, "An Inward Glance: A Response To Mitchell's Outward Activist Turn," DRG, URL: )JFSAs we enter the twenty-first century, let us take pride in the unique activity in which we engage. Debaters, more than any other segment of American society, are capable of functioning effectively in the political world. Debaters acquire superior skills in information management and decision-making. Because our activity is non-political, students receive the space they need to test ideas, opinions, and beliefs. This testing process is put at risk by an outward activist turn. Yet, even more dangerous is the potential for new forms of domination within our academic oasis. We must be careful not to replace domination by media/government elites with domination with our community elite. Mitchell's call for activism, as well as his examples of thriving participation should raise our awareness of both our responsibilities and opportunities. Individuals who have learned to make and defend their own political decisions will continue to move easily into political life. Let us do nothing to lessen that impact. Let us encourage greater involvement in debate. Such involvement holds greater potential for reinvigoration of political discourse than direct mass activism. Let us not stoop to the level of modem political discourse, but elevate that discourse to our own level of deliberation.Politicization of the debate community is horrible – laundry listCoverstone 95 (Alan, BRILLIANT DEBATE THEORIST, "An Inward Glance: A Response To Mitchell's Outward Activist Turn," DRG, URL: )JFSMy third, and final reaction to Mitchell's proposal, targets his desire for mass action. The danger is that we will replace mass control of the media/government elite with a mass control of our own elite. The greatest virtue of academic debate is its ability to teach people that they can and must make their own decisions. An outward turn, organized along the lines of mass action, threatens to homogenize the individual members of the debate community. Such an outcome will, at best, politicize and fracture our community. At worst, it will coerce people to participate before making their own decisions. Debate trains people to make decisions by investigating the subtle nuances of public policies. We are at our best when we teach students to tear apart the broad themes around which traditional political activity is organized. As a result, we experience a wide array of political views within academic debate. Even people who support the same proposals or candidates do so for different and inconsistent reasons. Only in academic debate will two supporters of political views argue vehemently against each other. As a group, this reality means that mass political action is doomed to fail. Debaters do not focus on the broad themes that enable mass unity. The only theme that unites debaters is the realization that we are all free to make our own decisions. Debaters learn to agree or disagree with opponents with respect. Yet unity around this theme is not easily translated into unity on a partisan political issue. Still worse, Mitchell's proposal undermines the one unifying principle. Mitchell must be looking for more. He is looking for a community wide value set that discourages inaction. This means that an activist turn necessarily will compel political action from many who are not yet prepared. The greatest danger in this proposal is the likelihood that the control of the media/government elite will be replaced by control of our own debate elite. Emphasizing mass action tends to discourage individual political action. Some will decide that they do not need to get involved, but this is by far the lesser of two evils. Most will decide that they must be involved whether or not they feel strongly committed to the issue. Mitchell places the cart before the horse. Rather than letting ideas and opinions drive action as they do now, he encourages an environment where action drives ideas for many people. Young debaters are particularly vulnerable. They are likely to join in political action out of a desire to "fit in." This cannot be what Mitchell desires. Political discourse is a dessert now because there are more people trying to "fit in" that there are people trying to break out.Policy Framework Good – InevitablePolicy involvement is inevitable- we need to proactively engage in the language of policy making for movements to be effectiveMakani 2k Themba-Nixon, Executive Director of The Praxis Project, Former California Staffer, ?Colorlines. Oakland: Jul 31, 2000.Vol.3, Iss. 2; pg. 12The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so.Policy Framework Good – Decision-MakingWe have a responsibility as scholars to evaluate the policy debate- we shape decision makingEdkins and Zehfussi 5 (Review of International Studies (2005),31,p. 454-5)What we are attempting in this article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It seems to us that this has become important in the present circumstances. The focus on security and the dilemma of security versus freedom that is set out in debates immediately after September 11th presents an apparent choice as the focus for dissent, while concealing the extent to which thinking is thereby confined to a specific agenda. Our argument will be that this approach relies on a particular picture of the political world that has been reflected within the discipline of international relations, a picture of a world of sovereign states. We have a responsibility as scholars; we are not insulated from the policy world. What we discuss may not, and indeed does not, have a direct impact on what happens in the policy world, this is clear, but our writings and our teaching do have an input in terms of the creation and reproduction of pictures of the world that inform policy and set the contours of policy debates.21 Moreover, the discipline within which we are situated is one which depends itself on a particular view of the world – a view that sees the international as a realm of politics distinct from the domestic – the same view of the world as the one that underpins thinking on security and defence in the US administration.22 In this article then we develop an analysis of the ways in which thinking in terms of international relations and a system of states forecloses certain possibilities from the start, and how it might look to think about politics and the international differently.Policy Framework Good – International LawOur education arguments outweigh all of their critical nonsense – we must train future policymakers in rules and procedure to prevent human extinction – this concern comes prior to all attempts to change world orderBeres 3 (Louis Rene, Prof. of International Law at Purdue, Journal and Courier, June 5)JFSThe truth is often disturbing. Our impressive American victories against terrorism and rogue states, although proper and indispensable, are inevitably limited. The words of the great Irish poet Yeats reveal, prophetically, where our entire planet is now clearly heading. Watching violence escalate and expand in parts of Europe and Russia, in Northern Ireland, in Africa, in Southwest Asia, in Latin America, and of course in the Middle East, we discover with certainty that "... the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed/and everywhere The Ceremony of innocence is drowned." ? Our response, even after Operation Iraqi Freedom, lacks conviction. Still pretending that "things will get better," we Americans proceed diligently with our day-to-day affairs, content that, somehow, the worst can never really happen. Although it is true that we must go on with our normal lives, it is also true that "normal" has now become a quaint and delusionary state. We want to be sure that a "new" normal falls within the boundaries of human tolerance, but we can't nurture such a response without an informed appreciation of what is still possible. ?For us, other rude awakenings are unavoidable, some of which could easily overshadow the horrors of Sept. 11. There can be little doubt that, within a few short years, expanding tribalism will produce several new genocides and proliferating nuclear weapons will generate one or more regional nuclear wars. Paralyzed by fear and restrained by impotence, various governments will try, desperately, to deflect our attention, but it will be a vain effort. Caught up in a vast chaos from which no real escape is possible, we will learn too late that there is no durable safety in arms, no ultimate rescue by authority, no genuine remedy in science or technology. ?What shall we do? For a start, we must all begin to look carefully behind the news. Rejecting superficial analyses of day-to-day events in favor of penetrating assessments of world affairs, we must learn quickly to distinguish what is truly important from what is merely entertainment. With such learning, we Americans could prepare for growing worldwide anarchy not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered planet. ?Nowhere is it written that we people of Earth are forever, that humankind must thwart the long-prevailing trend among all planetary life-forms (more than 99 percent) of ending in extinction. Aware of this, we may yet survive, at least for a while, but only if our collective suppression of purposeful fear is augmented by a complementary wisdom; that is, that our personal mortality is undeniable and that the harms done by one tribal state or terror group against "others" will never confer immortality. This is, admittedly, a difficult concept to understand, but the longer we humans are shielded from such difficult concepts the shorter will be our time remaining. We must also look closely at higher education in the United States, not from the shortsighted stance of improving test scores, but from the urgent perspective of confronting extraordinary threats to human survival. For the moment, some college students are exposed to an occasional course in what is fashionably described as "global awareness," but such exposure usually sidesteps the overriding issues: We now face a deteriorating world system that cannot be mended through sensitivity alone; our leaders are dangerously unprepared to deal with catastrophic deterioration; our schools are altogether incapable of transmitting the indispensable visions of planetary restructuring. ?To institute productive student confrontations with survival imperatives, colleges and universities must soon take great risks, detaching themselves from a time-dishonored preoccupation with "facts" in favor of grappling with true life-or-death questions. In raising these questions, it will not be enough to send some students to study in Paris or Madrid or Amsterdam ("study abroad" is not what is meant by serious global awareness). Rather, all students must be made aware - as a primary objective of the curriculum - of where we are heading, as a species, and where our limited survival alternatives may yet be discovered. ?There are, of course, many particular ways in which colleges and universities could operationalize real global awareness, but one way, long-neglected, would be best. I refer to the study of international law. For a country that celebrates the rule of law at all levels, and which explicitly makes international law part of the law of the United States - the "supreme law of the land" according to the Constitution and certain Supreme Court decisions - this should be easy enough to understand. Anarchy, after all, is the absence of law, and knowledge of international law is necessarily prior to adequate measures of world order reform. ?Before international law can be taken seriously, and before "the blood-dimmed tide" can be halted, America's future leaders must at least have some informed acquaintance with pertinent rules and procedures. Otherwise we shall surely witness the birth of a fully ungovernable world order, an unheralded and sinister arrival in which only a shadowy legion of gravediggers would wield the forceps.Roleplaying Good – EducationSimulation of different roles through fiat encourages learning and empowermentInnes and Booher 99 (Judith, Director – Institute of Urban and Regional Development and Professor at UC Berkeley and David, Visiting Scholar at the Institute, Journal of the American Planning Association, Winter, Vol. 65, Iss. 1)Our observation and practice of consensus building suggests that the analogy to role-playing games will help to illuminate the dynamic of effective consensus processes. Even when the dispute seems intractable, role playing in consensus building allows players to let go of actual or assumed constraints and to develop ideas for creating new conditions and possibilities. Drama and suspension of reality allows competing, even bitterly opposed interests to collaborate, and engages individual players emotionally over many months. Scenario building and storytelling can make collective sense of complexity, of predicting possibilities in an uncertain world, and can allow the playful imagination, which people normally suppress, to go to work. In the course of engaging in various roles, participants develop identities for themselves and others and become more effective participants, representing their stakeholders' interests more clearly. In many of their most productive moments, participants in consensus building engage not only in playing out scenarios, but also in a kind of collective, speculative tinkering, or bricolage, similar in principle to what game participants do. That is, they play with heterogeneous concepts, strategies, and actions with which various individuals in the group have experience, and try combining them until they create a new scenario that they collectively believe will work. This bricolage, discussed further below, is a type of reasoning and collective creativity fundamentally different from the more familiar types, argumentation and tradeoffs.[sup11] The latter modes of problem solving or dispute resolution typically allow zero sum allocation of resources among participants or finding the actions acceptable to everyone. Bricolage, however, produces, rather than a solution to a known problem, a new way of framing the situation and of developing unanticipated combinations of actions that are qualitatively different from the options on the table at the outset. The result of this collective tinkering with new scenarios is, most importantly, learning and change among the players, and growth in their sophistication about each other, about the issues, and about the futures they could seek. Both consensus building and roleplaying games center on learning, innovation, and change, in a process that is entertaining and-when conducted effectively-in some fundamental sense empowers individuals.Roleplaying Good – Devil’s AdvocateRoleplaying lets us learn about other’s opinions – this refines our strategy – Malcolm X provesBranham 95 (Robert, Professor Rhetoric at Bates College, Argumentation and Advocacy, "`I Was Gone On Debating': Malcolm X's Prison Debates And Public Confrontations," Winter, vol. 31, no. 3, p.117)JFSAs Malcolm X sought new outlets for his heightened political consciousness, he turned to the weekly formal debates sponsored by the inmate team. "My reading had my mind like steam under pressure," he recounted; "Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face. I decided to do this by putting my name down to debate" (1965b, p. 184). Malcolm X's prison debate experience allowed him to bring his newly acquired historical knowledge and critical ideology to bear on a wide variety of social issues. "Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I'd track down and study everything I could find on it," wrote Malcolm X. "I'd put myself in my opponent's place and decide how I'd try to win if I had the other side; and then I'd figure out a way to knock down those points" (1965b, p. 184). Preparation for each debate included four or five practice sessions.Roleplaying Good – EmpowermentRole-playing is key to democratic decision-making and empowers individualsRawls 99 (John, Professor Emeritus – Harvard University, The Law of Peoples, p. 54-7)Developing the Law of Peoples within a liberal conception of justice, we work out the ideals and principles of the foreign policy of a reasonably just liberal people. I distinguish between the public reason of liberal peoples and the public reason of the Society of Peoples. The first is the public reason of equal citizens of domestic society debating the constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice concerning their own government; the second is the public reason of free and equal liberal peoples debating their mutual relations as peoples. The Law of Peoples with its political concepts and principles, ideals and criteria, is the content of this latter public reason. Although these two public reasons do not have the same content, the role of public reason among free and equal peoples is analogous to its role in a constitutional democratic regime among free and equal citizens. Political liberalism proposes that, in a constitutional democratic regime, comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right are to be replaced in public reason by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. Here note the parallel: public reason is invoked by members of the Society of Peoples, and its principles are addressed to peoples as peoples. They are not expressed in terms of comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right, which may hold sway in this or that society, but in terms that can be shared by different peoples. 6.2. Ideal of Public Reason. Distinct from the idea of public reason is the ideal of public reason. In domestic society this ideal is realized, or satisfied, whenever judges, legislators, chief executives, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the idea of public reason and explain to other citizens their reasons for supporting fundamental political questions in terms of the political conception of justice that they regard as the most reasonable. In this way they fulfill what I shall call their duty of civility to one another and to other citizens. Hence whether judges, legislators, and chief executives act from and follow public reason is continually shown in their speech and conduct. How is the ideal of public reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative government, citizens vote for representatives-chief executives, legislators, and the like-not for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote di?rectly on referenda questions, which are not usually fundamental ques?tions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally, citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact.7l When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech.Roleplaying Good – PoliticsRole-playing solves political apathy and reinvigorates personal politics – turns the KMitchell 2k (Gordon, Director of Debate and Professor of Communication – U. Pittsburgh, Argumentation & Advocacy, Vol. 36, No. 3, Winter)JFSWhen we assume the posture of the other in dramatic performance, we tap into who we are as persons, since our interpretation of others is deeply colored by our own senses of selfhood. By encouraging experimentation in identity construction, role-play "helps students discover divergent viewpoints and overcome stereotypes as they examine subjects from multiple perspectives..." (Moore, p. 190). Kincheloe points to the importance of this sort of reflexive critical awareness as an essential feature of educational practice in postmodern times. "Applying the notion of the postmodern analysis of the self, we come to see that hyperreality invites a heteroglossia of being," Kincheloe explains; "Drawing upon a multiplicity of voices, individuals live out a variety of possibilities, refusing to suppress particular voices. As men and women appropriate the various forms of expression, they are empowered to uncover new dimensions of existence that were previously hidden" (1993, p. 96). This process is particularly crucial in the public argument context, since a key guarantor of inequality and exploitation in contemporary society is the widespread and uncritical acceptance by citizens of politically inert self-identities. The problems of political alienation, apathy and withdrawal have received lavish treatment as perennial topics of scholarly analysis (see e.g. Fishkin 1997; Grossberg 1992; Hart 1998; Loeb 1994). Unfortunately, comparatively less energy has been devoted to the development of pedagogical strategies for countering this alarming political trend. However, some scholars have taken up the task of theorizing emancipatory and critical pedagogies, and argumentation scholars interested in expanding the learning potential of debate would do well to note their work (see e.g. Apple 1995, 1988, 1979; Britzman 1991; Giroux 1997, 1988, 1987; Greene 1978; McLaren 1993, 1989; Simon 1992; Weis and Fine 1993). In this area of educational scholarship, the curriculum theory of currere, a method of teaching pioneered by Pinar and Grumet (1976), speaks directly to many of the issues already discussed in this essay. As the Latin root of the word "curriculum," currere translates roughly as the investigation of public life (see Kincheloe 1993, p. 146). According to Pinar, "the method of currere is one way to work to liberate one from the web of political, cultural, and economic influences that are perhaps buried from conscious view but nonetheless comprise the living web that is a person's biographic situation" (Pinar 1994, p. 108). The objectives of role-play pedagogy resonate with the currere method. By opening discursive spaces for students to explore their identities as public actors, simulated public arguments provide occasions for students to survey and appraise submerged aspects of their political identities. Since many aspects of cultural and political life work currently to reinforce political passivity, critical argumentation pedagogies that highlight this component of students' self-identities carry significant emancipatory potential.Roleplaying Good – Solves ExclusionPretending to fill the role of policymakers is key to prevent exclusion and fight political passivityKulynych 97 (Jessica, Winthrop University, Polity, Winter, p. 344-5)JFSUnfortunately, it is precisely these elements of citizen action that cannot be explained by a theory of communicative action. ?It is here that a performative conception of political action implicitly informs Hager’s discussion. ?From a performative perspective, the goal of action is not only to secure a realm for deliberative politics, but to disrupt and resist the norms and identities that structure such a realm and its participants. ?While Habermas theorizes that political solutions will emerge from dialogue, a performative understanding of participation highlights the limits of dialogue and the creative and often uncontrollable effect of unpremeditated action on the very foundations of communication. ?When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. ?Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. ?The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. ?Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients.Roleplaying Good – DemocracyInstrumental affirmation of a policy through role-playing is a prerequisite to liberal democratic participation – key to peaceRawls 99 (John, bad-ass, also prof @ harvard The Law of Peoples, p. 56-57)JFSTo answer this question, we say that, ideally, citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact. When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech. Similarly, the ideal of the public reason of free and equal peoples is realized, or satisfied, whenever chief executives and legislators, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the principles of the Law of Peoples and explain to other peoples their reasons for pursuing or revising a people’s foreign policy and affairs of state that involve other societies. As for private citizens, we say, as before, that ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were executives and legislators and ask themselves what foreign policy supported by what considerations they would think it most reasonable to advance. Once again, when firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal executives and legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate the public reason of free and equal peoples, is part of the political and social basis of peace and understanding among peoples.A2: Roleplaying UtopianUtopianism good – key to changeStreeten 99 (Paul, Development, v. 42 n.2 ingenta)JFSFirst, Utopian thinking can be useful as a framework for analysis. Just as physicists assume an atmospheric vacuum for some purposes, so policy analysts can assume a political vacuum from which they can start afresh. The physicists’ assumption plainly would not be useful for the design of parachutes, but can serve other purposes well. Similarly, when thinking of tomorrow’s problems, Utopianism is not helpful. But for long-term strategic purposes it is essential. Second, the Utopian vision gives a sense of direction, which can get lost in approaches that are preoccupied with the feasible. In a world that is regarded as the second-best of all feasible worlds, everything becomes a necessary constraint. All vision is lost. Third, excessive concern with the feasible tends to reinforce the status quo. In negotiations, it strengthens the hand of those opposed to any reform. Unless the case for change can be represented in the same detail as the case for no change, it tends to be lost. Fourth, it is sometimes the case that the conjuncture of circumstances changes quite suddenly and that the constellation of forces, unexpectedly, turns out to be favourable to even radical innovation. Unless we are prepared with a carefully worked out, detailed plan, that yesterday could have appeared utterly Utopian, the reformers will lose out by default. Only a few years ago nobody would have expected the end of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the marketization of China, the end of apartheid in South Africa. And the handshake on the White House lawn between Mr Peres and Mr Arafat. Fifth, the Utopian reformers themselves can constitute a pressure group, countervailing the self interested pressures of the obstructionist groups. Ideas thought to be Utopian have become realistic at moments in history when large numbers of people support them, and those in power have to yield to their demands. The demand for ending slavery is a historical example. It is for these five reasons that Utopians should not be discouraged from formulating their proposals and from thinking the unthinkable, unencumbered by the inhibitions and obstacles of political constraints. They should elaborate them in the same detail that the defenders of the status quo devote to its elaboration and celebration. Utopianism and idealism will then turn out to be the most realistic vision. It is well known that there are three types of economists: those who can count and those who can’t. But being able to count up to two, I want to distinguish between two types of people. Let us call them, for want of a better name, the Pedants and the Utopians. The names are due to Peter Berger, who uses them in a different context. The Pedants or technicians are those who know all the details about the way things are and work, and they have acquired an emotional vested interest in keeping them this way. I have come across them in the British civil service, in the bureaucracy ofthe World Bank, and elsewhere. They are admirable people but they are conservative, and no good companions for reform. On the other hand, there are the Utopians, the idealists, the visionaries who dare think the unthinkable. They are also admirable, many of them young people. But they lack the attention to detail that the Pedants have. When the day of the revolution comes, they will have entered it on the wrong date in their diaries and fail to turn up, or, if they do turn up, they will be on the wrong side of the barricades. What we need is a marriage between the Pedants and the Utopians, between the technicians who pay attention to the details and the idealists who have the vision of a better future. There will be tensions in combining the two, but they will be creative tensions. We need Pedantic Utopian Pedants who will work out in considerable detail the ideal world and ways of getting to it, and promote the good cause with informed fantasy. Otherwise, when the opportunity arises, we shall miss it for lack of preparedness and lose out to the opponents of reform, to those who want to preserve the status quo.**ConsequentialismPolicymaking Requires ConsequentialismEven if their values are good, policymaking necessitates consequentialismBrock 87? [Dan W. Brock, Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical Ethics, and Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics at Brown University, Ethics, Vol. 97, No. 4, (Jul., 1987), pp. 786-791, JSTOR]JFSWhen philosophers become more or less direct participants in the policy-making process and so are no longer academics just hoping that an occasional policymaker might read their scholarly journal articles, this scholarly virtue of the unconstrained search for the truth-all assumptions open to question and follow the arguments wherever they lead-comes under a variety of related pressures. What arises is an intellectual variant of the political problem of "dirty hands" that those who hold political power often face. I emphasize that I do not conceive of the problem as one of pure, untainted philosophers being corrupted by the dirty business of politics. My point is rather that the different goals of academic scholarship and public policy call in turn for different virtues and behavior in their practitioners. Philosophers who steadfastly maintain their academic ways in the public policy setting are not to be admired as islands of integrity in a sea of messy political compromise and corruption. Instead, I believe that if philosophers maintain the academic virtues there they will not only find themselves often ineffective but will as well often fail in their responsibilities and act wrongly. Why is this so? The central point of conflict is that the first concern of those responsible for public policy is, and ought to be, the consequences of their actions for public policy and the persons that those policies affect. This is not to say that they should not be concerned with the moral evaluation of those consequences-they should; nor that they must be moral consequentialists in the evaluation of the policy, and in turn human, consequences of their actions-whether some form of consequentialism is an adequate moral theory is another matter. But it is to say that persons who directly participate in the formation of public policy would be irresponsible if they did not focus their concern on how their actions will affect policy and how that policy will in turn affect people. The virtues of academic research and scholarship that consist in an unconstrained search for truth, whatever the consequences, reflect not only the different goals of scholarly work but also the fact that the effects of the scholarly endeavor on the public are less direct, and are mediated more by other institutions and events, than are those of the public policy process. It is in part the very impotence in terms of major, direct effects on people's lives of most academic scholarship that makes it morally acceptable not to worry much about the social consequences of that scholarship. When philosophers move into the policy domain, they must shift their primary commitment from knowledge and truth to the policy consequences of what they do. And if they are not prepared to do this, why did they enter the policy domain? What are they doing there?Policymaking Requires ConsequentialismEven if deontology is right, states must act as consequentialistsStelzig 98?[Tim Stelzig, B.A. 1990, West Virginia University; M.A. 1995, University of Illinois at Chicago; J.D. Candidate 1998, University of Pennsylvania, 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. 901, March, 1998, L/N]JFSThis Comment seeks to dissipate the tension Blackstone broached when he stated that the "eternal boundaries" provided by our "indelible rights" sometimes must be "modified" or "narrowed" by the "local or occasional necessities of the state."(n269) Rights, as trumps against the world, ostensibly ought not to be things that may be cast aside. Yet, it is intuitively obvious that the state justifiably acts in ways impermissible for individuals as it collects taxes, punishes wrongdoers, and the like. Others have offered explanations for why coercive state action is morally justified. This Comment adds another. This Comment began by adopting deontology as a foundational theoretic assumption and briefly describing how deontology was to be understood herein. I then examined the characteristics of two leading theories of rights--Dworkin's theory of legal rights and Thomson's theory of moral rights. Although neither Dworkin nor Thomson is an absolutist with respect to rights, neither account explains why the state, but not individuals, may act in ways seemingly justifiable only on consequentialist grounds: that is, why the state may override the trumping effect of rights. In attempting to provide an answer to this question, I first noted that deontology does not exhaust moral discourse. The deontologist is forced to recognize that rights cannot capture everything of moral importance. I then provided several examples of distinctions recognized in the philosophical literature that delimit areas in which deontology does not apply, focusing in particular on the Trolley Problem and the distributive exemption from deontological norms that the Trolley Problem illustrates. The deontological exemption was examined fairly closely in order to enumerate the criteria that trigger the exemption and understand the principles that guide its application. By applying the distributive exemption to the state, I accomplished two things. First, I was able to provide a new justification for the existence of the coercive state, both when premised on the traditional assumptions of social contractarians, and when premised on a more realistic understanding of the modern state. Second, I was able to sketch the relationship between the constraints of rights and the demands of policy, justifying a state that provides for the general welfare without violating rights in a way objectionable to liberals. Libertarians have argued that such a state violates deontologicalnorms, that governmental intervention going beyond what is minimally necessary to preserve social order is not justified. Deontology does not require such a timid state and, moreover, finds desirable a state which promotes the general welfare to the fullest extent possible, even if in so doing it acts in ways deontologically objectionable for anyone other than one filling the government's unique role in society. More specifically, I argued that the government must consequentially justify its policy choices. The elegance of this particular rationale for the contours of permissible governmental action is that it remains a deontological justification at base. One of the worries of full-blown consequentialism is that it requires too much, that any putative right may be set aside if doing so would produce greater good. The justification offered here does not suffer that flaw. The distributive exemption does not permit that any one be sacrificed for the betterment of others; rather, it only permits a redistribution of inevitable harms, a diversion of an existing threatened harm to many such that it results in harm to fewer individuals. Consequentialism Good – Lesser EvilWe must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must be made to limit further atrocities against civilizationIssac 2 (Prof of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)JFSWHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.Consequentialism Good – Not CalculationNo turns – consequentialism is more than pure calculationOrd 5 (Toby, Thesis Paper for Oxford in Philosophy, )JFSConsequentialism is often charged with being self-defeating, for if a person attempts to apply it, she may quite predictably produce worse outcomes than if she applied some other moral theory. Many consequentialists have replied that this criticism rests on a false assumption, confusing consequentialism’s criterion of the rightness of an act with its position on decision procedures. Consequentialism, on this view, does not dictate that we should be always calculating which of the available acts leads to the most good, but instead advises us to decide what to do in whichever manner it is that will lead to the best outcome. Whilst it is typically afforded only a small note in any text on consequentialism, this reply has deep implications for the practical application of consequentialism, perhaps entailing that a consequentialist should eschew calculation altogether.Consequentialism Good – MoralsConsequentialism is compatible with morals – moralists do things based on whether they will have moral consequencesFrank 2 (Robert, Cornell University, “The Status of Moral Emotions in Consequentialist Moral Reasoning”, )JFSThe philosopher Bernard Williams describes an example in which a botanist wanders into a village in the jungle where ten innocent people are about to be shot. He is told that nine of them will be spared if he himself will shoot the tenth. What should the botanist do? Although most people would prefer to see only one innocent person die rather than ten, Williams argues that it would be wrong as a matter of principle for the botanist to shoot the innocent villager.2 And most people seem to agree. The force of the example is its appeal to a widely shared moral intuition. Yet some philosophers counter that it is the presumed validity of moral intuitions that such examples call into question (Singer, 2002). These consequentialists insist that whether an action is morally right depends only on its consequences. The right choice, they argue, is always the one that leads to the best overall consequences. I will argue that consequentialists make a persuasive case that moral intuitions are best ignored in at least some specific cases. But many consequentialists appear to take the stronger position that moral intuitions should play no role in moral choice. I will argue against that position on the grounds that should appeal to their way of thinking. As I will attempt to explain, ignoring moral intuitions would lead to undesirable consequences. My broader aim is to expand the consequentialist framework to take explicit account of moral sentiments.Morality Bad – International ViolenceMorality cannot address international violence – we must make sacrificesIssac 2 (Prof of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)JFSAs a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.**UtilitarianismUtilitarianism Good – Public SphereUtil can be used in the public sphere, and deontology in the private sphereGoodin 95 (Robert E., Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, Google Books)JFSMy concern in this book, true to the thrust of this introduction, is with utilitarianism as a public philosophy. My main concern is with the ways in which utilitarianism can be a good guide to public policies without necessarily being a good guide to private conduct. Nonetheless, in adducing many of its most important implication for public policy it is important to see at leas in broad outline how it would set about shaping private conduct. Utilitarians, and consequentialists more generally, are outcome-oriented. In sharp contrast to Ten Commandment-style deontological approaches, which specify certain actions to be done as a matter of duty, utilitarian theories assign people responsibility for producing certain results, leaving the individuals concerned broad discretion about how to achieve those results. The same basic difference in the two theories' approaches to assigning moral jobs reappears across all levels of moral agency, from private agency, from private individuals to collective (especially state) actors. The distinctively utilitarian approach, thus conceived, to international protection of the ozone layer is to assign states responsibility for producing certain effects, leaving them broad discretion in how they accomplish it (Chapter 18). The distinctively utilitarian approach, thus conceived, to the ethical defense of nationalism is couched in terms of delimiting state boundaries in such a way as to assign particular organization (Chapter 16). And, at a more domestic level of analysis, the distinctively utilitarian approach to the allocation of legal liabilities is to assign them to whomsoever can best discharge them (Chapters 5 through 7). The great advantage of utilitarianism as a guide to public conduct is that it avoids gratuitous sacrifices, it ensures we are able to ensure in the uncertain world of public policy-making that politics are sensitive to people's interests or desires or preferences. The great failing of more deontological theories, applied to those realism, is that they fixate upon duties done for the sake of duty rather than for the sake of any good that is done by doing one's duty. Perhaps it is permissible (perhaps it is even proper) for private individuals in the course of their personal affairs to fetishize duties done for their own sake. It would be a mistake for public officials to do likewise, not least because it is impossible. The fixation of motives makes absolutely no sense in the public realm, and might make precious little sense in the private one even, as Chapter 3 shows. The reason public action is required at all arises form the inability of uncoordinated individual action to achieve certain orally desirable ends. Individuals are rightly excused from pursuing those ends. The inability is real; the excuses, perfectly valid. But libertarians are right in their diagnosis, wrong in their prescription. That is the message of Chapter 2. The same thing that makes those excuses valid at the individual level the same thing that relives individuals of responsibility - makes it morally incumber upon individuals to organize themselves into collective units that are capable of acting where they as isolated individuals are not. When they organize themselves into these collective units, those collective deliberations inevitably take place under very different forms. Individuals are morally required to operate in that collective manner, in certain crucial respects. But they are practically circumscribed in how they can operate, in their collective mode. and those special constraints characterizing the public sphere of decision-making give rise to the special circumstances that make utilitarianism peculiarly apt for public policy-making, in ways set out more fully in Chapter 4. Government house utilitarianism thus understood is, I would argue, a uniquely defensible public philosophy.Utilitarianism Good - InevitableUtilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworksGreen 2 (Asst Prof Department of Psychology Harvard University Joshua, November 2002, 314) JFSSome people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If that’s what we mean by 302 “balancing rights,” then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting to solve moral problems using a complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same. However, it’s likely that when some people talk about “balancing competing rights and obligations” they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language. Once again, what deontological language does best is express the thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!”19 That is why angry protesters say things like, “Animals Have Rights, Too!” rather than, “Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity of the issue and absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks, for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the “rights” of those children. One finds oneself balancing the “rights” on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day one’s underlying thought is as thoroughly consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are “rights,” etc. Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.Utilitarianism Good – MoralThe advent of the nuclear age necessitates utilitarianism – absolutist ethics are self-contradictory Nye 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 18-19) JFSThe significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34 Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions. Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists' nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now that it may be literally possible in the nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.Survival Outweighs MoralityThe recent possibility of extinction requires assessment of all risks despite probability Yudkowsky 8 (Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, “Circular Altruism”)JFSOverly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X is not an existential risk and you don't need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species. "We don't need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time as an active shield is developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will persist indefinitely." Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our probability estimates of security, as well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly detailed risk scenarios. More generally, people tend to overestimate conjunctive probabilities and underestimate disjunctive probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1974.) That is, people tend to overestimate the probability that, e.g., seven events of 90% probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to underestimate the probability that at least one of seven events of 10% probability will occur. Someone judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup, must evaluate the probability that many individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers will want the product) while also considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses a loan, the biggest project fails, the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44% of entrepreneurial ventures3 survive after 4 years. (Knaup 2005.) Dawes (1988) observes: 'In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions ("either this or that or the other could have occurred, all of which would lead to the same conclusion") in favor of conjunctions. Rationally, of course, disjunctions are much more probable than are conjunctions.' The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks discussed in this book - or some other cause which none of us fore saw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy. Survival comes first – there is no point in preserving morality if we all dieNye 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 45-46)JFSIs there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the species? Is not all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we are required to undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not survivors to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral disarmament that forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"?74 How one judges the issue of ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks "what is worth a billion lives (or the survival of the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, "is it possible to imagine any threat to our civilization and values that would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten thousand to one in a thousand for a specific period?" Then there are several plausible answers, including a democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival. When we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little else. Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a justifiable topic of both prudential and moral reasoning. AT: Calculation BadYour authors misunderstand utilitarianism – link turn – utilitarianism is against calculationChappell 5 (Richard, PhD in Philosophy from Princeton, Philosophy, Et Cetera, )JFSUtilitarianism is a much maligned moral theory, in part because it's so easily abused. It's easy for people to misunderstand the theory, and use it, for example, to argue for totalitarianism. But of course utilitarianism properly understood recommends no such thing. In fact, it tends to support our common-sense moral intuitions. Strange as it may seem, utilitarianism recommends that we do not base our everyday moral decision-making on calculations of utility. Why is this? Well, utilitarianism says that we ought to do whatever would maximize utility. But attempting to reason in a utilitarian fashion tends to have disastrous consequences, and fails miserably to maximize utility. Therefore, we ought not to reason in a utilitarian manner. Instead, we should try to inculcate those dispositions and attitudes, and abide by those principles, that would tend to promote utility. That is, we should be honest, compassionate, loyal, trustworthy, averse to harming others, partial towards loved ones, and so forth. We should, in other words, be virtuous rather than scheming. J.L. Mackie (p.91) offers six utilitarian reasons for opposing "the direct use of utilitarian calculation as a practical working morality": 1. Shortage of time and energy will in general preclude such calculations. 2. Even if time and energy are available, the relevant information commonly is not. 3. An agent's judgment on particular issues is likely to be distorted by his own interests and special affections. 4. Even if he were intellectually able to determine the right choice, weakness of will would be likely to impair his putting of it into effect. 5. Even decisions that are right in themselves and actions based on them are liable to be misused as precedents, so that they will encourage and seem to legitimate wrong actions that are superficially similar to them. 6. And, human nature being what it is, a practical working morality must not be too demanding: it is worse than useless to set standards so high that there is no real chance that actions will even approximate to them.**ExtinctionExtinction Outweighs – Laundry ListExtinction outweighs – no coping mechanisms, no experience, no trial-and-error, future generationsBostrom 2 (Nick Professor of Philosophy and Global Studies at Yale.. volume9/risks.html.)JFSRisks in this sixth category are a recent phenomenon. This is part of the reason why it is useful to distinguish them from other risks. We have not evolved mechanisms, either biologically or culturally, for managing such risks. Our intuitions and coping strategies have been shaped by our long experience with risks such as dangerous animals, hostile individuals or tribes, poisonous foods, automobile accidents, Chernobyl, Bhopal, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, draughts, World War I, World War II, epidemics of influenza, smallpox, black plague, and AIDS. These types of disasters have occurred many times and our cultural attitudes towards risk have been shaped by trial-and-error in managing such hazards. But tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things – from the perspective of humankind as a whole – even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life. They haven’t significantly affected the total amount of human suffering or happiness or determined the long-term fate of our species. With the exception of a species-destroying comet or asteroid impact (an extremely rare occurrence), there were probably no significant existential risks in human history until the mid-twentieth century, and certainly none that it was within our power to do something about. The first manmade existential risk was the inaugural detonation of an atomic bomb. At the time, there was some concern that the explosion might start a runaway chain-reaction by “igniting” the atmosphere. Although we now know that such an outcome was physically impossible, it qualifies as an existential risk that was present at the time. For there to be a risk, given the knowledge and understanding available, it suffices that there is some?subjective probability?of an adverse outcome, even if it later turns out that objectively there was no chance of something bad happening.?If we don’t know whether something is objectively risky or not, then it is risky in the subjective sense. The subjective sense is of course what we must base our decisions on. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn2" [2]At any given time we must use?our best current subjective estimate?of what the objective risk factors are. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn3" [3]A much greater existential risk emerged with the build-up of nuclear arsenals in the US and the USSR. An all-out nuclear war was a possibility with both a substantial probability and with consequences that?mighthave been persistent enough to qualify as global and terminal. There was a real worry among those best acquainted with the information available at the time that a nuclear Armageddon would occur and that it might annihilate our species or permanently destroy human civilization. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn4" [4]? Russia and the US retain large nuclear arsenals that could be used in a future confrontation, either accidentally or deliberately. There is also a risk that other states may one day build up large nuclear arsenals. Note however that a smaller nuclear exchange, between India and Pakistan for instance, is not an existential risk, since it would not destroy or thwart humankind’s potential permanently. Such a war might however be a local terminal risk for the cities most likely to be targeted. Unfortunately, we shall see that nuclear Armageddon and comet or asteroid strikes are mere preludes to the existential risks that we will encounter in the 21st?century. The special nature of the challenges posed by existential risks is illustrated by the following points: Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach – see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience – is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires?foresight?to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive?preventive action?and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions. We cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, social attitudes or national security policies that developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Existential risks are a different kind of beast. We might find it hard to take them as seriously as we should simply because we have never yet witnessed such disasters. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn5" [5]?Our collective fear-response is likely ill calibrated to the magnitude of threat. Reductions in existential risks are?global public goods?[13]?and may therefore be undersupplied by the market [14]. Existential risks are a menace for everybody and may require acting on the international plane. Respect for national sovereignty is not a legitimate excuse for failing to take countermeasures against a major existential risk. If we take into account the welfare of future generations, the harm done by existential risks is multiplied by another factor, the size of which depends on whether and how much we discount future benefits [15,16]. In view of its undeniable importance, it is surprising how little systematic work has been done in this area. Part of the explanation may be that many of the gravest risks stem (as we shall see) from anticipated future technologies that we have only recently begun to understand. Another part of the explanation may be the unavoidably interdisciplinary and speculative nature of the subject. And in part the neglect may also be attributable to an aversion against thinking seriously about a depressing topic. The point, however, is not to wallow in gloom and doom but simply to take a sober look at what could go wrong so we can create responsible strategies for improving our chances of survival. In order to do that, we need to know where to focus our efforts.Extinction Outweighs – Discussion KeyDiscussing existential risks is key to prevent neglectful attitudes toward themBostrom 2 (Nick Professor of Philosophy and Global Studies at Yale.. volume9/risks.html.)JFSExistential risks have a cluster of features that make it useful to identify them as a special category: the extreme magnitude of the harm that would come from an existential disaster; the futility of the trial-and-error approach; the lack of evolved biological and cultural coping methods; the fact that existential risk dilution is a global public good; the shared stakeholdership of all future generations; the international nature of many of the required countermeasures; the necessarily highly speculative and multidisciplinary nature of the topic; the subtle and diverse methodological problems involved in assessing the probability of existential risks; and the comparative neglect of the whole area. From our survey of the most important existential risks and their key attributes, we can extract tentative recommendations for ethics and policy: We need more research into existential risks – detailed studies of particular aspects of specific risks as well as more general investigations of associated ethical, methodological, security and policy issues. Public awareness should also be built up so that constructive political debate about possible countermeasures becomes possible. Now, it’s a commonplace that researchers always conclude that more research needs to be done in their field. But in this instance it is?really?true. There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks. Since existential risk reduction is a global public good, there should ideally be an institutional framework such that the cost and responsibility for providing such goods could be shared fairly by all people. Even if the costs can’t be shared fairly, some system that leads to the provision of existential risk reduction in something approaching optimal amounts should be attempted. The necessity for international action goes beyond the desirability of cost-sharing, however. Many existential risks simply cannot be substantially reduced by actions that are internal to one or even most countries. For example, even if a majority of countries pass and enforce national laws against the creation of some specific destructive version of nanotechnology, will we really have gained safety if some less scrupulous countries decide to forge ahead regardless? And strategic bargaining could make it infeasible to bribe all the irresponsible parties into subscribing to a treaty, even if everybody would be better off if everybody subscribed [14,42].Extinction Outweighs – General It is our duty to support policy that counters extinctionBostrom 2 (Nick Professor of Philosophy and Global Studies at Yale.. volume9/risks.html.)JFSSome of the lesser existential risks can be countered fairly cheaply. For example, there are organizations devoted to mapping potentially threatening near-Earth objects (e.g. NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Program, and the Space Guard Foundation). These could be given additional funding. To reduce the probability of a “physics disaster”, a public watchdog could be appointed with authority to commission advance peer-review of potentially hazardous experiments. This is currently done on an ad hoc basis and often in a way that relies on the integrity of researchers who have a personal stake in the experiments going forth. The existential risks of naturally occurring or genetically engineered pandemics would be reduced by the same measures that would help prevent and contain more limited epidemics. Thus, efforts in counter-terrorism, civil defense, epidemiological monitoring and reporting, developing and stockpiling antidotes, rehearsing emergency quarantine procedures, etc. could be intensified. Even abstracting from existential risks, it would probably be cost-effective to increase the fraction of defense budgets devoted to such programs. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn23" [23] Reducing the risk of a nuclear Armageddon, whether accidental or intentional, is a well-recognized priority. There is a vast literature on the related strategic and political issues to which I have nothing to add here. The longer-term dangers of nanotech proliferation or arms race between nanotechnic powers, as well as the whimper risk of “evolution into oblivion”, may necessitate, even more than nuclear weapons, the creation and implementation of a coordinated global strategy. Recognizing these existential risks suggests that it is advisable to gradually shift the focus of security policy from seeking national security through unilateral strength to creating an integrated international security system that can prevent arms races and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Which particular policies have the best chance of attaining this long-term goal is a question beyond the scope of this paper.Extinction outweighs all other threats – life is a prerequisite Ochs 2 [Richard Ochs, “BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS MUST BE ABOLISHED IMMEDIATELY,” Free From Terror, ?]JFSAgainst this tendency can be posed a rational alternative policy. To preclude possibilities of human extinction, "patriotism" needs to be redefined to make humanity’s survival primary and absolute. Even if we lose our cherished freedom, our sovereignty, our government or our Constitution, where there is life, there is hope. What good is anything else if humanity is extinguished? This concept should be promoted to the center of national debate. For example, for sake of argument, suppose the ancient Israelites developed defensive bioweapons of mass destruction when they were enslaved by Egypt. Then suppose these weapons were released by design or accident and wiped everybody out? As bad as slavery is, extinction is worse. Our generation, our century, our epoch needs to take the long view. We truly hold in our hands the precious gift of all future life. Empires may come and go, but who are the honored custodians of life on earth? Temporal politicians? Corporate competitors? Strategic brinksmen? Military gamers? Inflated egos dripping with testosterone??How can any sane person believe that national sovereignty is more important than survival of the species? Now that extinction is possible, our slogan should be "Where there is life, there is hope." No government, no economic system, no national pride, no religion, no political system can be placed above human survival. The egos of leaders must not blind us. The adrenaline and vengeance of a fight must not blind us. The game is over. If patriotism would extinguish humanity, then patriotism is the highest of all crimes. There are many people who believe it is their God-given right to do whatever is deemed necessary to secure their homeland, their religion and their birthright. Moslems, Jews, Hindus, ultra-patriots (and fundamentalist Christians who believe that Armageddon is God’s prophesy) all have access to the doomsday vials at Fort Detrick and other labs. Fort Detrick and Dugway employees are US citizens but may also have other loyalties. One or more of them might have sent the anthrax letters to the media and Congress last year. Are we willing to trust our security, NO -- trust human survival to people like this? Human frailty, duplicity, greed, zealotry, insanity, intolerance and ignorance, not to speak of ultra-patriotism, will always be with us. The mere existence of these doomsday weapons is a risk too great for rational people to tolerate. Unless guards do body crevice searches of lab employees every day, smuggling out a few grams will be a piece of cake. Basically, THERE CAN BE NO SECURITY. Humanity is at great risk as we speak. All biological weapons must be destroyed immediately. All genetic engineering of new diseases must be halted. All bioweapons labs must be dismantled. Fort Detrick and Dugway labs must be decommissioned and torn down. Those who continue this research are potential war criminals of the highest order. Secret bioweapons research must be outlawed.Extinction Outweighs – General Extinction will be the greatest moment of suffering in history – abject fear of it is self-defeating – rational attempts to prevent it are bestEpstein?and Zhao?9? (Richard?J.?and?Y. Laboratory of Computational Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Perspectives?in?Biology?and?Medicine?Volume?52,?Number?1,?Winter?2009,?Muse)JFSHuman extinction is 100% certain—the only uncertainties are when and how. Like the men and women of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, our species is but one of many players making entrances and exits on the evolutionary stage. That we generally deny that such exits for our own species are possible is to be expected, given the brutish selection pressures on our biology. Death, which is merely a biological description of evolutionary selection, is fundamental to life as we know it. Similarly, death occurring at the level of a species—extinction—is as basic to biology as is the death of individual organisms or cells. Hence, to regard extinction as catastrophic—which implies that it may somehow never occur, provided that we are all well behaved—is not only specious, but self-defeating. Man is both blessed and cursed by the highest level of self-awareness of any life-form on Earth. This suggests that the process of human extinction is likely to be accompanied by more suffering than that associated with any previous species extinction event. Such suffering may only be eased by the getting of wis- dom: the same kind of wisdom that could, if applied sufficiently early, postpone extinction. But the tragedy of our species is that evolution does not select for such foresight. Man’s dreams of being an immortal species in an eternal paradise are unachievable not because of original sin—the doomsday scenario for which we choose to blame our “free will,” thereby perpetuating our creationist illusion of being at the center of the universe—but rather, in reductionist terms, because paradise is incompatible with evolution. More scientific effort in propounding this central truth of our species’ mortality, rather than seeking spiritual comfort in escapist fantasies, could pay dividends in minimizing the eventual cumulative burden of human suffering.Extinction Outweighs – OntologyExtinction precedes ontology – existence is a prerequisite for the self Wapner 3 [Paul Wapner is associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University, DISSENT / Winter 2003]JFSAll attempts to listen to nature are, indeed, social constructions, except one. Even the most radical postmodernist acknowledges the distinction between physical existence and nonexistence. As mentioned, postmodernists assume that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world, even if they argue about its different meanings. This substratum is essential for allowing entities to speak or express themselves. That which doesn't exist, doesn't speak. That which doesn't exist, manifests no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And everyone should be wary about those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including when environmentalists and students of global environmental politics do so). But we should not doubt the simple-minded notion that a prerequisite of expression is existence. That which doesn't exist can never express itself. And this in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation.**PragmatismPragmatism 2AC – RortyOnly pragmatic philosophy can evade the logical harms of the K and still take action against great atrocities – We’re not committed to their slippery slope link argsRorty 2 (Richard, U Minn, )JFSThe most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark: Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are. This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions. A post-philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, position was only a halfway stage in the development of such a culture-the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God. For positivism preserved a god in its notion of Science (and in its notion of “scientific philosophy”), the notion of a portion of culture where we touched something not ourselves, where we found Truth naked, relative to no description. The culture of positivism thus produced endless swings of the pendulum between the view that “values are merely ‘relative’ (or ‘emotive,’ or ‘subjective’)” and the view that bringing the “scientific method” to bear on questions of political and moral choice was the solution to all our problems. Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature-or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more “relative” or “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings. The question of what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what narratives to listen to and comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or about what we should want). No. The question of whether the pragmatist view of truth-that it is t a profitable topic-is itself true is thus a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for. It is not a question about what the word “true” means, nor about the requirements of an adequate philosophy of language, nor about whether the world “exists independently of our minds,” nor about whether the intuitions of our culture are captured in the pragmatists’ slogans. There is no way in which the issue between the pragmatist and his opponent can be tightened up and resolved according to criteria agreed to by both sides. This is one of those issues which puts everything up for grabs at once -where there is no point in trying to find agreement about “the data” or about what would count as deciding the question. But the messiness of the issue is not a reason for setting it aside. The issue between religion and secularism was no less messy, but it was important that it got decided as it did.Cede The Political 1NC – KetelsThe critique’s methodology causes cynical withdrawal from action which ensures apathy toward atrocitiesKetels ‘96 [Violet. Prof of English @ Temple. “Havel to the Castle!” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 548, No 1. Nov 1996]JFSIntellectuals can choose their roles, but cannot not choose, nor can we evade the full weight of the consequences attendant on our choices. "It is always the intellectuals, however we may shrink from the chilling sound of that word ... who must bear the full weight of moral responsibility."55 Humanist intellectuals can aspire to be judged by more specifically ex-acting criteria: as those whose work is worthwhile because it has human uses; survives the test of reality; corresponds to history; represses rationalizing in favor of fact; challenges the veracity of rulers; refuses the safety of abstraction; recognizes words as forms of action, as likely to be lethal as to be liberating; scruples to heal the rupture between words and things, between things and ideas; re-mains incorruptibly opposed to the service of ideological ends pursued by unnecessary violence or inhumane means; and, finally, takes risks for the sake of true witness to events, to the truth even of unpopular ideas or to the lies in popular ones. Above all, intellectuals can resist the dreary relativism that neutralizes good and evil as if in defense of the theoretical pseudo-notion that distinguishing between them is not possible. The hour is too late, the situation too grave for such pettifoggery. Bearing witness is not enough, but it is something. At the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Elie Wiesel spoke. "We must bear witness," he said. "What have we learned? ... We are all responsible. We must do some-thing to stop the bloodshed in Yugoslavia." He told a story of a woman from the Carpathian Mountains who asked of the Warsaw Uprising, "Why don't they just wait quietly until after the war?" In one year she was packed into a cattle car with her whole family on the way to Auschwitz. "That woman was my mother," Wiesel said. Viclav Havel, the humanist intellectual from Bohemia, spoke too: of the Holocaust as a memory of democratic appeasement, live memory of indifference to the danger of Hitler's coming to power, of indifference to the Munich betrayal of Prague. "Our Jews went to concentration camps. . . . Later we lost our freedom." We have lost our metaphysical certainties, our sense of responsibility for what comes in the future. For we are all responsible, humanly responsible for what happens in the world. Do we have the right to interfere in internal conflict? Not just the right but the duty. Remember the Holocaust. To avoid war, we watched-silently and, so, complicitly, unleashing darker, deadlier demons. What should we have done about Yugoslavia? Something. Much earlier. We must vigilantly listen for the early warning signs of threats to freedoms and lives everywhere. We must keep the clamorous opposition to oppression and violence around the world incessant and loud. Cry out! Cry havoc! Call murderers murderers. Do not avoid violence when avoidance begets more violence. There are some things worth dying for. Do not legitimize the bloodletting in Bosnia or anywhere by negotiating with the criminals who plotted the carnage. Do not join the temporizers. Take stands publicly: in words; in universities and boardrooms; in other corridors of power; and at local polling places. Take stands prefer-ably in written words, which have a longer shelf life, are likelier to stimu-late debate, and may have a lasting effect on the consciousnesses of some among us.ExtinctionKetels ‘96 [Violet. Prof of English @ Temple. “Havel to the Castle!” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 548, No 1. Nov 1996]JFSCharacteristically, Havel raises lo-cal experience to universal relevance. "If today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival," he begins, "that hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit." He continues: If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go desperately hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in the global greenhouse we are heating up for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we cannot survive; if, in short, we don't wish any of this to happen, then we must-as humanity, as people, as conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility-somehow come to our senses. Somehow we must come together in "a kind of general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason." The Prague Spring was "the inevitable consequence of a long drama originally played out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and the con-science of society," a process triggered and sustained "by individuals willing to live in truth even when things were at their worst." The process was hidden in "the invisible realm of social consciousness," conscience, and the subconscious. It was indirect, long-term, and hard to measure. So, too, its continuation that exploded into the Velvet Revolution, the magic moment when 800,000 citizens, jamming Wenceslas Square in Prague, jingled their house keys like church bells and changed from shouting 'Truth will prevail to chanting" Havel to the castle."Cede The Political 1NC – RortyThis failure to engage the political process turns the affirmative into spectators who are powerless to produce real change.Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, “achieving our country”, Pg. 7-9)JFSSuch people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transformation would be needed because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2 Failure to engage in the political process will result in the takeover by the extreme right, leading to discrimination and war worldwide.Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, “achieving our country” pg. 89-94)JFSMany writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers-them- selves desperately afraid of being downsized-are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger" and "kike" will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of "individualism versus communitarianism." Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies "the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order. "9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been "inadequately theorized," you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan's impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by "problematizing familiar concepts." Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly "subversive" books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors "theorize" is often something very concrete and near at hand-a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal-they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook."10AT: We Can Never Change PoliticsThis argument is how the state suppresses individual politicsDean 8 (Joan, Politics Without Politics, political theorist, )JFSIn Disagreement (published in French in 1995; English 1999), Ranciere attends to some of these specificities. He claims that “the state today legitimizes itself by declaring that politics is impossible” (110). The present is thus marked by more than politics’ paradoxical essence— the suppression of the political. It is characterized by the explicit acknowledgement of depoliticization as the contemporary state’s legitimizing ideal. Accordingly, Ranciere identifies several elements of contemporary post-politics as they confirm the impossibility of politics and hence legitimize the state: the spread of law, the generalization of expertise, and the practice of polling for opinion (112). Polling, for example, renders the people as “identical to the sum of its parts” (105). “Their count is always even and with nothing left over,” he writes, “And this people absolutely equal to itself can always be broken down into its reality: its socioprofessional categories and its age brackets,” (105). It is worth nothing that Ranciere’s emphasis on law repeats the “juridification” thesis Habermas offered already in the nineteen eighties. For Habermas, the problem was law’s encroachment on the lifeworld. Excess regulation risked supplanting the communicative engagement of participants in socio-political interaction. For Ranciere, the problem is a legal resolution of conflict that forecloses the possibility of politicization.RaceAntiblacknessHomogenization DAThe totalizing interpretation of anti-blackness imposes a uniformity on black people that prevents meaningful discussions of difference and the pursuit of solutions to political and ethical problems.Glaude 1(Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, “Pragmatism and Black Identity: An Alternative Approach”, Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 295-316, Muse)My reading of Exodus extends a basic insight made over twenty years ago. The editors of the anthology Black Nationalism in America wrote that the simplest expression of black nationalism was racial solidarity. “It generally has no ideological or programmatic implications beyond the desire that black people organize themselves on the basis of their common color and oppressed condition to move in some way to alleviate their situation” (Bracey,Meier ,and Rudwick 1970,xxv). This form of solidarity,they maintained,is essential to all forms of black nationalism,and its earliest expression is found in the formation of mutual aid societies and separate black churches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was a simple idea: black people caught in the violence of a racist culture, struggling to find and generate meaning for themselves, turn to religious narrative to make sense of the absurdity of their condition,to cultivate solidarity with similarly situated selves,and to develop a self-consciousness essential for problem-solving activity. No grand ideological or programmatic pronouncements, simply the conviction that African Americans must take the responsibility for liberating themselves. Of course,this is not that simple. The critical issue remains of what exactly constitutes a group acting-for-itself. Moreover,the organization of black people on the basis of a common condition and color presents three worrisome problems. First,many have concluded that African Americans’ acting-for-themselves must translate,if such actions are to be described as nationalist,into efforts to form a black nation-state. This view maintains that the desire for the bureaucratic state stands as the basis for black nationalism. As such,a black nation-state’s absolute control of a specific geographical territory,its ability to defend that territory militarily,and its capacity to sustain its citizenry economically become the main goals. Second, the idea of a common condition has led many to elide the differences within black communities. Class and gender differences,for example,are subordinated to what are perceived as our common interests (interests that grow out of our common condition). Third, the idea of common color often, though not necessarily,assumes a biological basis to the nation rooted in race. Race binds us to one another and grounds the archeological work of cultural recovery. Such a view adds force to the proposition,often attributed to black nationalists,that we are or ought to be members of a single moral and political community,that our ethical lives are reducible to the single explanatory principle of blackness. The first two problems can be dispensed with rather easily. I take it that a number of different political positions with very different aims assume the need for African Americans to take responsibility for their liberation. The students in the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) presented this very argument to black folk in the rural South as they urged them to register to vote. And I take it that Justice Clarence Thomas’s urgings to end all forms of racial preferences stem from what he sees as the necessity of black folk acting-for-themselves (however misguided such a view may be). The fact that the notion of racial solidarity leaves unspecified how we ought to organize ourselves evades the trappings of certain ideological formations. To be sure,the plurality of voices within African American communities has led and will continue to lead to a plurality of responses as to what acting-for-ourselves will entail. The idea of a common condition,and by extension a common interest,is,however ,another concern. A common problem may present itself as a shared one for black individuals. We may all agree that slavery is wrong or that lynching is evil. But that fact does not lead to the conclusion that we have identical interests or that we will agree on a course of action. Some may pursue a moral or a legal means to end both practices: they may appeal to a broader moral law or simply to the stated principles of U.S. democracy. Others may pursue a more violent course of action: they may call for insurrection or even outright revolution. In either case,the desired aims could very well be different. Proponents of moral argument alone or some form of legal redress might have as their goal the wholesale inclusion of African Americans in U.S. society. Those pursuing violent means to end the practices of slavery and lynching might want a complete separation of whites and blacks. The issue here is not common interests or an agreed upon course of action. Rather,it is the common problem that necessitates conjoint action, actions that may vary, given different conceptions of the good that animate them, but actions that are nevertheless connected by efforts to respond to a palpably shared problem. The goal of defining what the interests of African Americans are seems to me impossible. What matters here, again, is the force of some meddlesome circumstance or problematic—the need “to move in some way to alleviate [the] situation.” I amreminded of DuBois’s famous account of race (1994,153): If you want to know the meaning of race look in the back of a Jim Crow car. This account does not define the interests of those who experienced Jim Crow as identical,nor does it demand that all those who can experience Jim Crow pursue the same course of action. Rather, it simply isolates a problem that confronts some of us in such a way as to lead to a subordination of some values and the superordination of others (choosing to speak at that moment to the issue of race as opposed to that of gender or class . . . ). The aim here is to allow for a plurality of action and to build forms of overlapping consensus that begin with an eye toward problem solving activity and not with the view that there is but one conception of the good to be recognized by all black people,precisely because they are black.Universalizing the fact of blackness homogenizes the black community, prevents political and moral discernment, and leads to an unproductive interpretation of racial identity.Glaude 1(Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, “Pragmatism and Black Identity: An Alternative Approach”, Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 295-316, Muse)So let us call this view the archeological approach. Here black identity is about discovery, an archeological project in which we uncover our true selves and infer from that discovery what we must do. Racial identity is interpreted in terms of reality and appearance. There is a real way of being black and a false way. On this view, something out there is essentially black and when we lose our way—as some of us have as a result of white supremacy—we need only find “it” and all will be well. I should not be too glib. The impulse for this approach has its roots in the devastating effects of white supremacy. Frantz Fanon (1963,210),writing in the context of colonial struggles, described this strategy as “passionate research directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and others.” The psychological need for archeological projects that construct monumental histories, then, is a part of that effort to respond to collective humiliation; it is a response, like the bent twig of Schiller’s theory,a lashing back and a refusal to accept certain conditions of living. It so happens that the conception of the self informing these projects is fixed and unchanging as a reference for deliberation. With this in mind, it is not really possible to have genuine conflict or uncertainty about how one should act as a black person. The distinction is made beforehand. Either one acts like a true black person—one who understands who he or she is—or one doesn’t. The conflict is only apparent. The problem arises when one single factor—the racial self—is postulated as an explanation of the moral lives of black people. The moral complexity and uncertainty that is often a part of political decision making in particular is reduced to a simple conflict between showing fidelity to one’s cultural inheritance or not or, better, being authentically black or being an UncleTom. Such a way of rendering complex moral situations in which race is actually involved only indicates the loss of the capacity of discrimination, of an ability to make delicate distinctions. Under such conditions,no matter what the problems may involve (such as issues of gender,class,sexuality , religious preference,geographic difference,etc.),all problematic situations can be resolved by an appeal to the good and to the notions of obligation that flow from an authentic way of being black in the world. The moral choices of African Americans are narrowed in such a way that the actual uncertainty and conflict that is characteristic of any situation properly called moral is obscured. The fact that we are often ignorant of the end and of good consequences,of the right and just approach, of the direction of virtuous conduct when we address the complicated issues of race and racism in this country is lost. Moreover, our individuality is compromised when this idea of racial identity,as Anthony Appiah (1996,103) rightly worries,“goes imperial” and implicates itself in cases where judgments and choices have to be made in light of the particular forces that impinge on us at the time. A typical response to this view has been to deconstruct race, claim that the notion is an arbitrary social construct,and problematize the way we think about racial identity. By now we have become quite familiar with some of the arguments that follow from such a position ,including: (1)We should focus on real forces like the operations of capital and not on ideological notions like race; (2) Goods and services should be distributed on the basis of merit not on the basis of racial identity; and,perhaps the most widely held,(3) Our belief in race is a necessary condition for the existence of racism and getting rid of race-language will help us end racism once and for all (Paul Taylor 1997). In short,in admirable efforts to break loose from the stranglehold of bad ways of thinking about black identity,many critics simply swing the pendulum in the opposite direction and have never quite provided us,at least to my mind,with an adequate argument for such a drastic move. To avoid “knee-jerk” reactions of this kind we must realize that black identity has been and can be thought about in ways different from those of a certain kind of black nationalist,that our moral lives as black individuals are not reducible to one single explanatory principle and, most importantly,that race-language and racial identities are,at bottom, suggestions about the terms in which deliberations about particular moral questions are best conducted.Viewing politics as dictated by an antecedent and static interpretation of identity creates homogeneity, rather than differenceGooding-Williams 4(Robert Gooding-Williams is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, “Politics, Racial Solidarity, Exodus!”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18, Number2, 2004, )As Douglass presents it, then, African American plantation politics gave? rise to a race-conscious political solidarity because he and his fellows interpreted? the purposes around which they affiliated as demanding the formation of? a racially exclusive political cohort. It should be stressed, of course, that they? might have interpreted their purposes differently: e.g., they could have judged? that racial exclusivity was not so very important, or that it was important for a? different reason—not, say, because blacks alone could be trusted, but because? blacks are subject to stereotyping that can best be met by demonstrating their? capacity for self-help. In any case, the general point is that African American? politics, as Douglass portrays it, may take many directions, with each giving a? different significance to the condition of being black or, to adapt Glaude’s? idiom, with each relating that condition to a different account of the problems confronting blacks. In sum, there can exist manifold forms of race-conscious? African American political solidarity characterized by diverse purposes and by? diverse understandings of the significance of being black. As in Bonnie Honig’s? feminist reading of Hannah Arendt, the key idea here is that politics, rather than? deriving from one identity, may produce many identities. According to Honig, Arendt’s politics is agonistic because it always resists the attractions of expressivism, for the sake of her view of identity as a performative production? …. The strategy here is to proliferate difference… and the result might be? the empowering discovery or insistence that there are many ways to do one’s? gender. The homogenizing impulse of some (so-called) private identities would? be weakened and that would allow for greater differentiation and contestability? within the frame of these identities themselves” (Honig 1992, 226–32). In a? similar vein, Douglass’s depiction of plantation politics suggests that there may? be multiple and mutually contestable ways of “doing” or “forging” race-conscious? political solidarities among African Americans. Resisting the attractions? of expressivism, Douglass, like Arendt, suggests a model of political action that? would articulate difference without having its aims dictated by an antecedently? given identity or problem.”9Afro-Pragmatism GoodAfro-pessimism is not the only way to relate to the idea of blackness, Afro-pragmatism allows debates about race to resonate with different groups. This is the only way to recreate a progressive politics regarding racial issues.Glaude 1(Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, “Pragmatism and Black Identity: An Alternative Approach”, Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 295-316, Muse)Race-language “works”4 in another, more positive, sense as well. It invokes narratives, stories of a community’s sojourn. I would personally find? it difficult to tell the story of the horrors of lynching or the triumphs of the? civil rights movement without the language of race. Indeed, the word singles? out some events, places, and personalities that are constitutive of what can? be called “black” communities. I am well aware of the potential negative consequences of narratives about community. Romantic reconstructions of? an African past that are misogynist and heterosexist are just one example? among many of the pernicious ways communal narratives can police our? individual identities. But I remain convinced that the quality of individuality depends on the types of communities in which we live, which in turn depends on the kinds of stories we tell.5 Charles Taylor (1991,39) talks about this issue more generally in terms of a horizon of important questions.? Taylor recognizes that the ideal of individuality and the notion of self-choice? so central to it suppose “that there are other issues of significance beyond? self-choice.” These other issues form the background of things that matter? and help define the significance of the formation of our identities. The? point I am trying to make is that race-language invokes the specific pain? and suffering,joy and triumph that is definitive of our experiences as a? community in the United States; discarding that language would remove? our capacity to tell that story. To use Taylor’s language,it would,in effect,? bracket out a background of things that matter.? I could imagine a number of counters to such an argument (if you? want to call it that). One in particular might go something like this: Some? may claim that phlogiston,a hypothetical principle of fire propounded in? the seventeenth century,is absolutely essential to any history of chemistry.? But no chemist today would argue that phlogiston is real,because phlogiston? doesn’t exist. Earlier chemists were simply mistaken. So too with race.? Of course,race-language is absolutely essential to any account of African American history. But races do not exist; they are merely fictions. We are simply mistaken. But some argument needs to be given for what constitutes? the real here. Although such an account would go well beyond the? scope of this essay,I want to suggest,following John Dewey,that there? are different reals of experience,and that race should be viewed in terms of? Dewey’s pragmatic instrumentalism,“which holds that objects,real objects,? are nothing but the things it pays us to have names for in certain schemes of? interactions” (Paul Taylor 1997). On this view,races are as real as football? fields,dollar bills,or head-Negroes-in-charge. And if they are proven to? rest on bad science,like phlogiston,it doesn’t make them any less real. As? Dewey (1997,230–35) notes,“The experience has changed; that is the thing? experienced has changed—not that an unreality has given place to a reality,? nor that some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has changed,not that? truth has changed,but just and only the concrete reality experienced has? changed.”6 The point is simply that race-language cannot be escorted offstage? because of some unargued-for conception of the real that presupposes? some notion of the really Real.? But even this somewhat quick defense of race and,by extension,? the particular view of black identity I am commending, requires something? else: that,for me,these ideas are live options. That is,they appeal to me as? real possibilities. For example,if I ask you to believe that, under certain circumstances,? racial solidarity is absolutely essential to the flourishing of black? individuals and that notion “makes no electric connection,” as William? James (1956,2–3) puts it,and “it refuses to scintillate with any credibility? at all,” then the idea is completely dead for you. The fact that the idea? can be live for some and dead for others,however ,shows that its deadness? or liveness are not intrinsic properties,but rather issues of our individual? temperaments. They are measured by our willingness to act and,in some? cases,to act irrevocably. This view holds off,I believe,the complaint that? race-talk ends up as a form of conscription,drafting reluctant individuals? into its fold or labeling those who refuse to join or those who choose to leave? as either race-dodgers or AWOL.? The pragmatic view of black identity,then,rests on two nodal? points. First,race-language and racial identities are descriptions of certain? schemes of interaction that help us get into satisfactory relation with other? parts of our experience. They are tools used in our problem-solving activity.? For example,race-language is the best way of describing a certain form of? policing that singles out black individuals for a particular kind of treatment.? To my mind,there is no better way to describe racial profiling,and unless? certain folk are willing to give up the ability to describe such practices they? have to concede that race-language must remain in our conceptual toolbox.? But,in myview,this does notmeanthat all discussions of problems involving African Americans are best conducted with the term race.We must cultivate our ability to see that some problems are best described otherwise. Failure? to do so narrows our political options and,more importantly,suggests a? hardening of our capacity of discrimination. Second,black identity is,in? part,a consequence of the kinds of stories we tell about our beliefs,choices,? and actions in the context of problem-solving activity. When we decide that? the use of race-language is appropriate to describe a particular event—like? racial profiling—that event is made sense of against the background of other? events that matter,like the historic tensions between police departments? and black communities. This background of things that matter shapes our? characters and informs our conduct; it amounts to a reservoir of experiences? that is indispensable to any effort to successfully invade the future.? This way of thinking about black identity shifts the discussion in? at least two ways: (1) we move from the idea that notions of obligation and? good are based in a conception of a fixed racial self to the idea of solidarity in? the face of particular problems (a solidarity that is constantly remade giving? the shifting nature of problems) and (2) we evade the rather narrow debates? about whether races are real or not. For those of us who struggle to imagine? a race-based politics in the aftermath of the sixties revolution because race? and the idea of black identity remain live hypotheses, it is necessary that? we think about these issues more clearly (taking our cue from those early nineteenth- century debates about the role of race in our politics). Once we? do this perhaps we can get on with the business of finding better ways of? talking about the complexities of black lives and of responding intelligently? to the actual problems we face.Afro-Pragmatism – Soul Craft PoliticsWe can use the ideals of American democracy to reframe the legacy of the racist past – soul craft politics creates racial solidarity while identifying with AmericaGooding-Williams 4(Robert Gooding-Williams is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, “Politics, Racial Solidarity, Exodus!”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18, Number2, 2004, )In contrast to insurrectionary politics, soul craft politics is founded on a moral identification with the American nation. Importantly, this identification is not with the racist practices of the American nation so much as it is with the ideals? of that nation as interpreted by the agents of soul craft politics. I say, as interpreted, because soul craft politics typically involves a contestation of often? hegemonic interpretations of American ideals, or, in Glaude’s language, a? reimagining, or recasting, of those ideals, the point of which is to insist that? racist practices, though perhaps consistent with American ideals as hegemonically? interpreted, contradict those ideals as reinterpreted.2 Like insurrectionary politics,? soul craft politics satisfies the IC concept of racial solidarity, but is essentially? a morally inspired struggle to reform, or to reconstitute, the spiritual core? and “internal arrangements” of American society (Ex., 111). For Glaude, black? American soul craft politics is an “Exodus politics” that “simultaneously accents? the idea of racial solidarity and identifies with America.” (Ex., 111, 167).3Afro-Pragmatism - EssentialismA universal interpretation of the black experience denies lived difference in the black community and the validity of debates about antiblack racism. Only a pragmatic interpretation of race that recognizes the need for political action can conceptualize racial solidarity without essentialism.Gooding-Williams 4(Robert Gooding-Williams is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, “Politics, Racial Solidarity, Exodus!”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18, Number2, 2004, )In a sense, the difficulty is that Glaude’s pragmatist articulation of an Exodus politics is not, finally, pragmatist enough. We can begin to see the limits of his articulation by recalling his contention that the common problems sustaining racial solidarity in Exodus politics are palpably shared” (Ex., 12, my? emphasis). Glaude’s appeal here to the palpable, or the obvious, is not convincing,? because it is not plausible. Consider, for example, that most African Americans? (71%) believe that they have less opportunity to live a middle class life? than European Americans. Yet close to a third do not believe this! (Patterson? 1997, 57). Moreover, some blacks believe that even if racial discrimination still? exists, it has ceased to be a serious impediment to racial mobility (Berkeley? linguist John McWhorter, is a case in point). My point here is that, especially in? our post–Jim Crow or post–Civil Rights era, we should not take for granted,? and will find it ever more dubious to take for granted, that there are problems? that an overwhelming majority of (let alone all) blacks see as palpably present? and that an overwhelming majority (let alone all) see as palpably demanding? collective political mobilization. More and more, blacks will disagree about the? existence, nature, significance and scope of antiblack racism, and their disagreements? will be complicated and intensified by conflicting, intragroup class interests? and by disputes relating to such issues as black feminism, the legitimacy of? homosexual unions, and the appropriateness of interracial intimacies.5 More? and more, then, racial solidarity will have to be forged in the crucible of politics:? that is, through collective actions and debates about needs-interpretations by? which African Americans persuade one another to see themselves as sharing? certain race-related problems. In short, the idea that racial solidarity stems from? or expresses “common problems” that clearly and plainly manifest themselves? prior to the pragmatic engagements of politics will seem increasingly incredible.? Rather racial solidarity will be more plausibly interpreted as a function of? politics, where the political speech and action of African Americans moves African? Americans to embrace the belief that they share certain problems (which? belief they might not otherwise share) and to act accordingly. In keeping with? the spirit, if not the letter, of Glaude’s pragmatism, this will be another way of? conceptualizing racial solidarity in nonessentialist terms.Afro-Pragmatism – Mutually ExclusiveThe pragmatist interpretation of racial solidarity is mutually exclusive with the cultural nationalism of antiblackness scholarshipGooding-Williams 4(Robert Gooding-Williams is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, “Politics, Racial Solidarity, Exodus!”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18, Number2, 2004, )I begin with the distinction between cultural nationalist and pragmatist ideas of? racial solidarity. According to Glaude, the cultural nationalist holds that there? is a specific form of life that binds black people to one another in the United? States and throughout the world (Ex., 12). While some cultural nationalists? tend to take the position that this form of life manifests a biologically inherited? racial essence, others insist simply that it is “deep-rooted, if not biologically? grounded” (Ex., 13). For the cultural nationalist, the form of life that unites all? black people is an expressive totality (a phrase Althusser made famous with his? criticism of Hegel), a many-faceted culture (defined by common memories,? beliefs, forms of art and religion, and so forth) that expresses in each of its? facets the same underlying organic, racial specificity. On this view, which is a? racialized version of political expressivism,1 black political solidarity stems from? black peoples embeddedness in the culture they share in common (Ex., 12–13).? Mutatis mutandis, one can easily imagine similarly expressivist forms of chauvinistic,? ethnic nationalism, where the idea of an organic, ethnic specificity serves? the same political theoretical function as that of an organic, racial specificity.? The pragmatist notion of racial solidarity eschews the cultural nationalist? belief that there is something deep-rooted and organic that binds black people? together. For the pragmatist, black political solidarity is a function of the common? problems faced by similarly situated African Americans. Endorsing the? pragmatist view, Glaude argues that “it is the common problem that necessitates? conjoint action, actions that may vary, given the different conceptions of the? good that animate them, but are nevertheless connected by their efforts to respond? to a palpably shared problem” (Ex., 12).? Glaude relates the pragmatist conception of black political solidarity to? two important theses. The first is the Dewey-inspired idea that we should think? of black publics, including, for example, black churches, as associations that? address common problems, or ills,in an effort to avoid some consequences? and secure others” (Ex., 12, 110). For Glaude, black publics have been critical? to the formation of African American racial solidarities. The second thesis is? that biblical narrative, particularly the typological rhetoric of the Exodus story,? provided much of the vocabulary by which African Americans organized a national? public in the early nineteenth century, thus cultivating among themselves? a sense of racial solidarity and “peoplehood” that, in a version of “soul craft? politics,” pressured American society to “live up to its ideals.” (Ex., chap. 3,? 111–112)Afro-Optimism > PessimismAfro-Optimism is a better solution than Afro-Pessimism to the problematic legacy of chattel slavery. The focus on social death prevents an affirmation of “stolen life” and the black radical tradition. Interrogating Afro-Pessimism is key to a meaningful debate about the fungibility of the black body and the political afterlife of slavery.Marshall 12(Stephen H. Marshall is Associate Professor of political theory in The Departments of American Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, “The Political Life of Fungibility”, Theory & Event , Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012, muse)Lingering with slavery as social and political formation, Saidiya Hartman explains that the juridical structure of slavery is founded not in the exploitation of slave labor but rather in the fungibility and ease of accumulation of the slave’s body as a commodity. As she notes, the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity makes the black body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others feelings, ideas, desires, and values, inaugurating a political and libidinal economy of black subjection and vulnerability.11 Carefully tracking the myriad ways in which the fungibility of black bodies augment slave masters’ wealth, enable abolitionist imaginaries, and facilitate the constitution of the Jim Crow regime, Hartman not only fleshes out politically Toni Morrison’s insights about the “figurative capacities” of the “Africanist presence in American literature,” she invites us to conceive the fungibility of black bodies and hence black vulnerability as both a libidinal economy of enjoyment and a structure of political antagonism.? Libidinal economy of enjoyment refers to Hartman’s account of the systemic circulation of the “desire to don, occupy, or possess [blackness] as a sentimental resource” and the “comfort, consolation, pleasure,… and ease” which accompany its “use and possession”. 12 By structure of political antagonism, I refer to fungibility as a system of political cleavage, one which persists and remains occluded if and precisely when we examine black vulnerability through the liberal conceptual lens of injustice, the Marxist lens of exploitation, and even the more expansive if generic lens of domination.13 For Hartman, relations of chattel slavery inaugurate a distinctive structure of violence and vulnerability and the task for political thought is to try to think with and from the subject position it engenders.? Within black studies, Hartman’s work has engendered a lively debate between scholars who describe themselves as afro-pessimists and those I will describe as afro-optimists.14 Because of space requirements I will only preface the main line of the dispute. On the one side are Fanonian inspired writers like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton who argue that the vulnerability of black life is best grasped through a reformulation of Orlando Patterson’s theory of slavery as social death. “The application of slave law among the free,” Sexton writes, has outlived in the post-emancipation world a certain form of its prior operations,” however “the reconfiguration of its operations” reconstitutes anti-blackness “from slavery to mass imprisonment.”15 Highlighting Patterson’s insistence that slavery is a social death constituted essentially by subjection to dishonor, violence, and alienation rather than coerced labor, these writers contend that the fungibility of black bodies continues as a decisive structure of antagonism and argue that liberation from social death requires a politics of destruction in the service of heretofore unthinkable possibilities. “The world is unethical due to its subsumption by the slave relation,” Wilderson writes, a relation “not between the worker and the boss but between the Human and the Black.16 For the black to become human, relationality itself, as defined and constituted by the march of Modernity, would have to be destroyed.”17? If afro-pessimism engages black vulnerability by tracking the proliferation of death throughout black social life, afro-optimism engages it by mining the discordant sounds of racial injury for traces of life stolen away.18 Skeptical about what he takes to be an implicit pathologization of black life that circulates in afro-pessimist accounts of social death, Fred Moten advances the notion of “stolen life” to describe and embrace blackness as a “fugitive movement” of “the stolen” in and out of the law of slavery and indeed “every enclosure”. Characterized by an “originally criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping [and] taking and keeping” as well as a “reluctance that disrupts” these practices, Moten explains, stolen life grounds the black radical tradition and the cultural production of the black avant guarde.19 Rather than contesting the criminal alterity of blackness, Moten embraces it “as a cause for optimism” and aligns fugitive movement with freedom’s possibility.? Despite their quarrel, there are three crucial moments of convergence between afro-pessimism and afro-optimism. Both positions affirm black vulnerability as an effect of fungibility. Each claim that vulnerability and fungibility are achievements won through the reconstitution of slave law. And, both positions strive to formulate, in theoretical terms, the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of fungibility as a structure of political antagonism. We might ask a further question: how might the subjective and intersubjective experience of fungibility articulate itself if formulated in the ordinary language of lived experience?? To make articulate the experiential registers of fungibility, Cornel West has described the conditions of black self-making as a crisis of invisibility and namelessness. According to West, this crisis is “a fundamental condition” produced by “America’s unrelenting assault on black humanity.” 20 It is a condition which, according to West, produced “the guttural cry and wrenching moan as both a cry for recognition and [an] ur-text of black culture,” and fostered the development of disciplines “aimed at warding off madness and discrediting suicide as creditable options.” West’s exegesis of “cries” and “moans” as the ordinary language of fungibility illuminates the peculiar eloquence of Trayvon Martin’s last appeal. West’s elucidation of discipline as therapy of namelessness helps to shed light on the extraordinary comportment of Martin’s parents.? As important as the reflexive criminalization of Martin by his shooter and law enforcement is as a register of fungibility, a more revealing one may be the ease with which Martin’s cries and moans were appropriated from him and gifted to his shooter. If not the most important register, the ease of this appropriation reveals at least as much as the continuing commodification of Martin’s death by the news and entertainment industries and the articulation of Martin’s death as a test for measuring whether American legal institutions can deliver justice.? The discipline of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin managed to wrench Trayvon’s cries back from Zimmerman, but when we call it a response to and therapy against fungibility, we are making a further claim. An important dimension of Fulton and Martin’s discipline is the labor required of both parents to contain their grief within the boundaries of respectability and articulate their grievance as a claim for legal justice. The restraint exercised by both is nothing less than heroic and ought to elicit our admiration as a model of liberal civic virtue. Still, respectability is a discipline that frames black abjection for sympathetic engagement by non-blacks. It is a filter that subtracts racialized excess and mutes the “guttural cries” and “wrenching moans” which constitute the ordinary language of fungibility. Hence, the very parameters which constitute grief’s conditions of legibility all but ensure that Fulton and Martin’s grief will never get a genuine public hearing.? To arrest fear and transform despair, Baldwin counseled his nephew to conceive black birth as an interruption of racial violence and oppose this conception to knowledge of his country’s intentions. Your “countrymen caused you to be born under conditions” which gave your parents “every reason to be heavy hearted,” Baldwin explains of his nephew’s birth, and “yet they were not.”21 Construing black natality as an opportunity for recirculation of love acts and conceiving this recirculation as an interruption to racial violence, Baldwin identifies a space of “stolen life” expansive enough to engender optimism about the future. Nine years later, both grieving loved ones and the death of the political project outlined in Fire, and meditating on political assassinations and escalating violence of the US racial state, Baldwin jettisons talk of natality and lingers with social death. “To be born Black in America is an immediate mortal challenge,”22 Baldwin writes in No Name in the Street, for “blacks are the despised children of the great western house—nameless and unnamable bastards.”23 Fugitive too, has become futurity for Baldwin, when he indicates that what formerly appeared to him as the destructive intentionality of disavowed racial injury now appears to be a “massive and hostile incomprehension that increases the danger in which all black people live.” Here Baldwin labors in anger and sorrow to communicate how escalations of racial terror and expansions in the carceral operations of the US racial state make a mockery of the quest to redeem white supremacist violence. How then, are we to understand this equivocation? Does Baldwin indicate a fundamental revision of his thinking or simply mark a crucial ambivalence within his thought?? In an important sense, it doesn’t matter what Baldwin’s final position is. If Baldwin revises his position in a way favoring afro-pessimism, we would still interrogate him and afro-pessimism with a view to establishing the persuasive force of their respective arguments. However, interpreting Baldwin’s equivocation as a marker of ambivalence opens a door to other interpretive possibilities. Baldwin’s ambivalence may be taken as the mirror of an intramural debate on the margins of the academy in the same way the shooting of Trayvon Martin may be dismissed as a malfunction of the liberal political order. Alternatively, Baldwin’s ambivalence may be taken as an invitation to political theorists to engage the political afterlife of slavery in roughly the same way the Sanford atrocity may be taken as a provocation to engage the antagonism of black fungibility as a genuine political crisis. The remaining question, then, is whether we theorists are prepared to look squarely into this abyss and able to faithfully describe what we see?Engagement GoodNo Solve – Need Concrete ActionRitualized denunciations of racism fail to erode support for racism. We need concrete state action and civic engagement to oppose white supremacy, otherwise the movement fails.Flood 1997(Christopher Flood, University of Surrey, “Pierre-André Taguieff and the Dilemmas of Antiracism”, L'Esprit Createur, Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 68-78, muse)Taguieff's own response to the problem has several strands. He maintains that racism and social exclusionism cannot be fought directly or by one single technique. Equally, integration cannot be seen as a single process, but one which crosses a whole range of fields. Part of the answer is to refute the FN's arguments in a far more detailed, systematic way than has been done hitherto. In place of ritualized ideological denunciations which have little purchase on the FN's audience, a strategy of factual demonstration and rational persuasion must be pursued at the national and local levels, addressing all classes of people in a non-patronizing way. But words are not enough. There is a desperate need to confront the basic social, economic and cultural problems and fears which lead people to turn to the FN by feeding xenophobia and anxiety. That means attacking structural unemployment, casualization, and the ever-increasing wealth gap, for example. It would seek to reinforce institutions and practices of social and cultural integration. Attacking racism or promoting integration must be pursued through the cumulative effects of many concrete acts. This would not be by the agency of the state alone: integration could also be promoted through grass-roots civic action. However, Taguieff is concerned that civic action should itself be protected from being turned into spectacle by the media (and by the associations themselves in competition to assert their importance). (Note, the FN is the National Front, a French racist/hypernationalist group)No Solve – Racism of DifferenceAdvocacies that oppose racism must offer pragmatic solutions and rational choices. Reducing debate to the opposition to antiblackness allows racist ideologies, thoughts, and actions to reassert themselves in the guise of condoning difference.Flood 1997(Christopher Flood, University of Surrey, “Pierre-André Taguieff and the Dilemmas of Antiracism”, L'Esprit Createur, Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 68-78, muse)As the Appel and Droit's article suggested, the other controversial position adopted by Taguieff related to the ongoing debates over how best to fight against the apparent rise of racism in France and how to reverse the trend of increasing support for the FN. The culmination of Taguieff's extensive writings on the subject thus far has been the monumental work, Les Fins de Tantiracisme, but more recently he has given a broad-ranging interview to the philosopher-journalist Philippe Petit, published as a short book under the title La R??publique menace.7 Taguieff shares the desire to see the rise of the FN halted. To that extent his thinking coincides with the diffuse ideological currents which go under the names of antifascism and antiracism. However, he has argued that the theoretical dimension of antiracism has been incoherent and that most of the practical strategies developed so far have been misconceived, however honourable their intention. He has become a vociferous critic of groups such as SOS Racisme. He has also been scathing on the subject of Bernard-Henri Levy and other antiracist publicists whom he accuses of renouncing rational argument in favour of pietistic moralism and polemic—Philippe Petit's interview with Taguieff offers him the wonderfully leading question: "Qu'est-ce qui vous irrite le plus dans l'intervention de Bernard-Henri Levy?" (Republique, 48). Like many intellectuals, Taguieff is not averse to the posture of the solitary, embattled defender of truth, surrounded on all sides by ignorance and misunderstanding. His stance in the introduction of Les Fins de l'antiracisme is a case in point. There is an element of pedagogical arrogance in its claim to superior understanding of the errors of those who have previously addressed the problem. He anticipates that he will be attacked as a heretic by the complacent dogmatists whom he seeks to correct, but he purports to reform the antiracist movement by supplying it with a real conceptual basis and preparing the way for a more sophisticated and effective programme of action. In fact, the failures of antiracism provide ideal targets for Taguieff's analytical rigour. The philosophical argument is intended to support the practical as Taguieff contends that it is impossible to pursue an effective struggle against racism if neither racism nor antiracism is clearly defined and understood: Trop d'antiracistes aujourd'hui sont assures de voir et tenir la solution autant que l'explication alors meme qu'ils n'ont ni pos ni vu le probleme. Il est temps de suspendre methodiquement nos assurances et nos certitudes "antiracistes", de reveiller la raison antiraciste longtemps assoupie, bercee par le concert de la vulgate et du spectacle. Reconnatre qu'il y a probl?¨me: il faut savoir ce qu'on condamne, et pourquoi on le condamne. (Fins, 123) In Les Fins de l'antiracisme, building on arguments previously developed in La Force du prejuge, it is emphasized that racist attitudes, racist behaviour and racist ideology are analytically and practically independent of each other, even though they often appear in combination. In each of these spheres there are multiple variants produced by different sets of determinants. For example, in the ideological field, racism has historically been intertwined with liberal-progressive ideas deriving from the Enlightenment, but also with reactionary traditionalism, with socialism, with nationalism, with colonialism and imperialism (Taguieff distinguishes the two) and with eugenicism. Taguieff further argues the complexity of identifying contemporary racism, which does not necessarily take the forms which it did in the past. It does not always involve an explicit assertion of biological inequality. There are other forms, notably cultural differentialism which enables its advocates to claim that they are not racists but defenders of the integrity of all ethnic cultures. Thus, racism can be articulated in praise of difference and otherness. Taguieff constructs a typology of ideological racisms, which correlates with a symmetrical typology of antiracisms. He explores the variants in terms of their historical development, their ramifications and their interrelationships. He equally shows how antiracisms can too easily slide into racisms and more generally how incoherent, internally heterogeneous, and even mutually contradictory, antiracist discourses are. Moreover, Taguieff, who considers himself a realist in such matters, has little sympathy for the antiraciste's Utopian, historicist visions of the march of progress towards the inevitable unification of mankind, conceived by some as the abolition of all differences, but by others as the egalitarian sanctification of all differences. As he waspishly observes, the theoretical incoherence of antiracism is matched only by the dogmatism of its leading exponents, and the ideological poverty of the movement makes it particularly susceptible to manipulation by politicians for party political purposes or to exploitation by the media as a spectacle. Although he draws attention to the breadth and diversity of racism, Taguieff shares the widespread preoccupation with the influence of the FN in particular. In the long perspective, he sees the emergence of the FN as a symptom of public reaction to the effects of the present chaotic transition towards economic globalization and cultural homogenization, which is affecting France among other countries. Globalization has produced a localist reaction. Instead of erasing national attachment it has reinforced it as a focus of the fundamental need to belong. Among the reasons for the failure of antiracism, according to Taguieff, is the fact that it has become antinational, thereby rejecting what most people cherish in their attachments to national independence, national community, and the traditional role of the state. AT: State BadThe state is not bad in this context, the state allows the formation of a tolerant national identity that can combat racism, failure to engage the state means that the racists win the hearts and minds of the people.Flood 1997(Christopher Flood, University of Surrey, “Pierre-André Taguieff and the Dilemmas of Antiracism”, L'Esprit Createur, Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 68-78, muse)Taguieff points to the need for a coherent set of goals to reinvigorate the French left so that it can begin to win back the many people whose sense of being abandoned by the mainstream parties has led them to embrace the rival false solutions offered by the FN or by Islamic fundamentalism in the case of Moslems. By recreating a distinctive ideology and a range of policies to address the concerns of ordinary people, the left should produce a clear alternative to the positions of the mainstream right, rather than allowing the FN to profile itself as the sole voice of real opposition. More specifically, what Taguieff has in mind is a revival of social republican ideals, which he believes capable of again becoming an inspiration for heroism, sacrifice, and the reassertion of national solidarity. The Republic should again become a focus for loyalty to shared values and institutions, with tolerance a particular virtue, alongside acceptance of diversity of opinions, even when those opinions are obnoxious. It should reassert universal aspirations in the public sphere but acceptance of difference in the private sphere. The state can be a force for inclusion, not exclusion. Failure to engage the nation-state political framework guarantees that only the negative portions of the state are used. And identity politics creates an immigration policy based on exclusion, rather than acceptance.Flood 1997(Christopher Flood, University of Surrey, “Pierre-André Taguieff and the Dilemmas of Antiracism”, L'Esprit Createur, Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 68-78, muse)Taguieff is an old-fashioned nationalist of the left-republican variety. In his eyes, only the nation-state breaks through the dialectic of globalization versus indefinite ethno-religious subdivision of societies. The Republic must therefore reclaim the idea of the nation which has been hijacked by the radical right and abandoned by the European-integrationist, globalist, multi-culturalist left. Despite the widespread sense of national decline since the loss of the colonial empire, Taguieff sees plentiful evidence of the survival of French national identity and of the desire to resist the effects of global homogenization. He argues that French identity for many people still means the Republic and the myth of the Revolution as builder of a strong, centralized state which forged the unity of the nation. The objective can be summed up as "Ie social avec le national contre le nationalisme xenophobe et antisocial du Front national" (Republique, 59). The republican nation-state is the sole basis for justice under the law. Thus, the answer is: "Redefinir et surtout reaffirmer clairement la legitimite du cadre national ? la republicaine, replacer l'ideal de la laicite au coeur du civisme, faire enfin de la citoyennete francaise un motif de fierte" (Republique, 56). However, he emphasizes that the ideal of the Republic was to be open to the world, universalistic and non-exclusive. It does not entail a narrow, xenophobic conception of citizenship. It does not approach immigration from a position of suspicion of foreigners. It means integration, not expulsion. But it is hostile to cultural communitarianism where groups draw in on themselves around their differences. Immigrants must have the courage to assimilate by undergoing rites of passage, including learning the French language and accepting French culture. Minority cultures should be practised in the private sphere but not in the public. Politics Good - RacismFailure to engage in political solutions to the problem of racism allow the right to reappropriate racist rhetoric into new policies of racial exclusion. Their denunciation of racism and insistence on the priority of race over politics guarantees continued racism.Winant 2006(Howard, Temple University, "Race and Racism: Towards a Global Future." Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol.? 29, no. 5 (September 2006), pp. 986-1003. )These contradictions are indications of the uncertainties of the current moment in racial politics. The necessarily brief review presented here suggests that a new racial hegemony has by no means been secured. There are fundamental instabilities in the ideologies of colorblindness, racial "differentialism," and "nonracialism." Racial biologism is prospering; is it still a "backdoor to eugenics" (Duster 2003 [1990])? Race/gender/class "intersectionality" denotes the instability in practice -- both at "micro-social" and at "macro-social" levels -- not only of race and racism, but also of other axes of oppression. The link between racism and empire was wrongly considered terminated; instead it has been reinvented, principally through US neoconservatism. In fact none of the "posts-" -- post-civil rights, post-apartheid, post-coloniality -- is sufficiently "post"; none denotes a full break with the conditions their very names contain; all necessitate uneasy and continuous adjustments, both on the level of policy and politics, and on that of personal experience and identity, to the ongoing operation of racial conflicts. 17 So what is the meaning of these racial contradictions for the future? What do they suggest about the development of a new racial justice agenda, both globally and locally? Although the intellectual endeavor required to rethink global racial conditions is rather daunting, the political and personal commitments we "movement scholars" have undertaken do not permit us to desist from trying to make sense of the current world racial situation and of our role within it. Neither do they allow us to "stop thinking about tomorrow," as the popular song would have it. Simply reasserting the continuing significance of race, while not mistaken, nevertheless has serious limits. Such an approach is insufficiently pragmatist, as well as deficient in its democratic commitments. As we learn from racial formation theory and critical race theory, race is a flexible concept that is constantly being reshaped in practical political activity. That the civil rights movement and the racial nationalisms of the 1960s were absorbed and rearticulated in a new racial hegemony was not only a contradictory outcome, one that combined some real achievements with some painful defeats; it was also a valuable lesson about racial politics. Highlighting the USFG as a source of racial injustice and calling for rejection is a failing movement. We must discuss political solutions, rather than radical rejection, to explain contemporary racial dynamics.Winant 2006(Howard, Temple University, "Race and Racism: Towards a Global Future." Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol.? 29, no. 5 (September 2006), pp. 986-1003. )Question: what happened to the civil rights movement ideal of a colorblind society? Answer: it morphed under the pressure of neoconservative politics into an abstract concept of equality, becoming available to the respectable racial right. Ironic, isn't it -- downright annoying in fact -- that the rearticulation of "colorblind" racial ideology served to shore up the inequality and structural racism 18 of US society. This was after all the same phenomenon that movement advocacy of nonracialism had originally aimed at overturning! Similar pitfalls awaited "nationalist" concepts of racial emancipation. Originally developed under conditions of colonial (or quasi-colonial) rule as the effort to restore democracy and "self-determination," nationalist movements have proved susceptible to autocracy and caudillismo of various types: plagued by corruption, religious authoritarianism, and sexism, dependent upon charismatic leaders, they are often incapable of fulfilling in practice the democratic and emancipatory ideals that originally inspired them (Gilroy 2000). Such is post-civil rights, postcolonial, post-apartheid racial hegemony. But is that the end of the story? Is this the end of the trajectory of racial politics? After the emancipatory insights of a movement have been absorbed and reinterpreted, after its radicalism has been so to speak bleached away, then what happens? What happens to a dream deferred? By way of answer -- for space here is limited -- it is worth noting how unstable and problematic the ideas of colorblindness, nonracialism, differentialism, and postcolonialism are proving to be. Of course there is a significant movement critique of these supposedly post-racial positions, one that insists on the fulfillment of the still-incomplete agenda of the earlier post-WWII decades; demonstrates the continuity and depth of US racial injustice (Bonilla- Silva 2003; Brown et al 2003); and notes the links between globalization and racism (Macedo and Gounari, eds. 2005). But this critique, for all its merits, has not yet developed a theoretical account capable of resolving the various 19 contradictions of 21st-century racial dynamics -- nonracialism, intersectionality, etc. -- that are the central subjects here. Politics Good - IdentityThe state creates the conditions that influence identity and community, debates that ignore the political process are uselessMeyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)2. Politics and Identity.We need to link notions of identity to an analysis of the political process. This need is particularly evident in the apparently dichotomous character of paradigms emphasizing the political process and those emphasizing “collective identity” or “culture” (Jasper and Goodwin 1999; Koopmans 1999; Rochon 1998). Both deductive logic, however, and close examination of cases point to the necessary relationship between identity and state processes (Clemens 1997; Stevens 1999). If we can move beyond the crudest biological determinism, we recognize that the process of turning physical features or social practices into “identities” is forged from the interaction between people and that state. By forcing some people to sit in the back of the bus, wear a yellow star, or hide their sexual orientations, states create the conditions in which particular identities develop. States can create identities by endorsing or prohibiting religious or sexual practices, by regulating access to social goods, and by setting rules of interaction between groups and individuals. Within these parameters, activists choose how to define themselves, by alliances, claims, and tactics, as Mary Bernstein shows in her chapter about gay and lesbian politics in Vermont (also see Bernstein 1997).Politics Good – Agency ImpactRefusal to accept the capacity of demands on the state to be productive creates a passive view of activism that denies agency and prevents effective actionMeyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)As noted, of the scholars studying social protest, some look at movements from the outside in, that is, starting with the grievances, resources, and opportunities provided by forces outside the social movement; and some look at movements from the inside out, that is, starting with the self-conscious decisions and values of those within movements and their lives prior to and through social movement participation. A broader perspective will help us understand the process and politics of social protest and will reveal the meaningful realities of social protest. You cannot understand the reality, genesis, and outcome of a movement without a broader picture, and even if the focus is on one level, we need to fill in the background. We need to avoid false dichotomies of culture and structure to see the interaction of factors exogenous to a social movement and the choices made within it. Activists choose issues, tactics, and allies, but not in the circumstances they please. They can subsequently be trapped in particular positions, wed to odd tactics, or caught in uncomfortable alliances. The issues they express reflect what they think is most promising, important, or urgent—given the constraints of how they see themselves. Unlike the pigeons in Skinner boxes, people who make movements are moral and instrumental actors, if not always narrowly “rational” calculators. They do what they think they can do. Claims are defined not only by what activists want but also by what they think is possible. The nature of the state and the content of public policy define both urgency and possibility. In Eastern Europe during the cold war, for example, dissidents agreed to press for democratic rights of political participation as a foundation for making any other claims. This was true even for dissidents who were generally no friends of democracy. Now that the states they face are more open, we find they agree on much less. Now think about the state and identity. In this case, the state makes “dissidents,” creating common cause and thus an identity. To ignore government policy in creating causes and constituencies is to essentialize identity and ignore the importance of possibility and human agency. Only by understanding structure and constraints can we have a meaningful—and ultimately empowering—understanding of agency. In the case of East European dissidents, the state, by limiting democratic means of participation, turns everyone with a grievance into a democracy activist—at least for a time.? Conversely, states can create narrow constituencies and have done so in familiar ways: by pinning yellow stars on some people; excluding some colors of people from full participation in social, political, or economic life, or finding some hue in skin tone that defines rights; by criminalizing some sexual behaviors. In other words, the action of the state creates these collective identities and sets the boundaries of a dissident collective. Movements are bound neither by narrow issues nor by particular tactics. Although some individuals or groups habitually use the same years to pursue their goals, for example, firebombing, demonstrations, boycotts, or electioneering, most choose strategies they think most likely to be effective, given their perceptions of resources, opportunities, and constraints, including organizational limits and self-imposed moral commitments.? The Women’s Pentagon Action provides a clear example of the mix of pragmatic calculations and moral imperatives that shapes collective action. The WPA staged large demonstrations and civil disobedience actions outside the Pentagon in the early 1980s, linking the nuclear arms race to broader social injustices, including violence against women, poverty, and other violations of human rights (Epstein 1991). The Pentagon actions included expressions of mourning for societal injustice, and anger at the perpetrators of injustice and ended with participants symbolically “exorcising” the evil spirits of the Pentagon by weaving a “web of life” around the building, simultaneously trying to shut the building down. These symbols reprised decades-old, self-consciously dramatic tactics. Activists combined direct political action with spiritual rituals they claimed drew on the strength of goddesses and other sources of women’s power (Spretnak 1982). We can’t begin to understand this, location and frame, without reference to the ideology of the group, the political culture it emerged from, and the political climate of the 1980s, which made the Pentagon a likely site for protest.? As the political landscape changes, activists reconsider their choices of issues and tactics. After the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated the first strategic arms agreement (SALT) and the antiballistic missile treaty in 1972, there was no large and visible peace activism during the following decade (Meyer 1993). Activists, however, continued their efforts, choosing other challenges. Many women shifted their efforts to reproductive rights, either through advocacy or service provision (Staggenborg 1991). Women from the liberal wing of the feminist movement worked through more conventional political institutions, participating in party politics and electoral campaigns, and winning some victories. Finally, women not ostensibly engaged with the feminist movement in the 1970s nonetheless carried its values through what Katzenstein (1998) calls “unobtrusive mobilization” within mainstream institutions and professions. The boundaries between movement activism and more conventional political and social engagement are easily blurred. It might seem that one movement reemerged just as the other faded. Rather, the interplay between the collective identity asserted by dissident claimants and the authorities they challenge is expressed through claims, conduct, and coalitions. The outside configuration of issues and alliances suggests certain claims and tactics as most promising or urgent to challengers at any given time. As states alter the costs and benefits of collective action and develop new techniques for controlling collective action, they allow, encourage, provoke, or discourage movements’ particular changing strategies of influence. A cyclic pattern emerges, as states respond to movement challenges and alter the opportunities available to contemporary and subsequent movements (Tarrow 1989a). The early 1980s, for example, offered a resistant cultural and political climate for women’s rights activists (see Faludi 1991) just as dissenting elites encouraged and supported public mobilization on peace issues. No wonder, then, that many women’s movement activists chose peace issues as the most promising means of advancing political claims (Meyer and Whittier 1994; Sawyers and Meyer 1999).Politics Good – Oppression/IntersectionalityOnly a pragmatic focus on changing practices can unite intersectional opposition to oppressionWinant 2006(Howard, Temple University, "Race and Racism: Towards a Global Future." Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol.29, no. 5 (September 2006), pp. 986-1003. )Race/gender/class "intersectionality" (Crenshaw 1994; Collins 1998) is the name we now give to the complex of deep attachments and conflicts among anti-racist/anticolonial movements, women's movements, and labor-based/anti-poverty movements. In the US (Hine, ed. 2005; Zinn and Dill, eds., 1994; Davis 1981; Lerner, ed. 1972), in Britain (McClintock 1995; Ware 1992; Rowbotham 1992), France (Guillaumin 1995), and elsewhere these linkages have connected struggles for racial justice, women's rights, and labor rights for nearly two centuries. Today these intersections cross the whole racial spectrum. In postconiality approaches, notably in the "subaltern studies" school, feminism has come to play a central role (Spivak 1987), not only in relation to colonial and postcolonial South Asia, but in regard to Latin America (Franco 12 2001; Beverley 1999) and Africa (Seidman 1993; Urdang 1989; Amadiume 2000). The explanatory framework for intersectionality studies, however, remains elusive. Unquestionably a general parallel exists between racial and genderbased oppressions and emancipatory claims. De Beauvoir explicitly modeled her pioneering account in feminist theory, The Second Sex (1989 [1953]) on workingclass and anticolonial struggles for emancipation. The key parallels she stressed, along with many others, included: rule through chattelization, the assignment of political status based on corporeal characteristics, "isolation effects" and alienation, and the internalization of domination. Numerous other common experiences link these axes of power and resistance. Yet race-based, gender-based, and labor-based movements have always teetered between convergence and divergence, both in the US and elsewhere. That's at the macro-social, institutional level. At the micro-social or experiential level a similar uncertainty operates: involvement in "multiple oppressions," for example, often forces women of color to "choose their battles." They confront competing demands for solidarity, often across race-, class-, or gender-lines. White women too, must often choose between gender, race , and class solidarity. Rather than lamenting these dilemmas, we should learn from them about pragmatism and the instability in practice of the race-concept. Theorizing intersectionality requires a hefty dose of pragmatism, a strong recognition that "self-reflective action" shapes the production and transformation of both individual and collective identities.7 This 13 phenomenon -- of situatedness and strategic reflection in practice -- is not necessarily problematic for emancipatory purposes; it may indeed be unavoidable, a prerequisite, for all efforts (men's as well as women's) to create an emancipatory political framework. State/Law/Politics KeyFocusing on legal and political solutions is key to highlighting problems with the state and preventing a parochialized decentralization of issues of exclusionVarsanyi 2008(Monica W. Varsanyi is a professor of Government at John Jay College, City University of New York, “Rescaling the “Alien,” Rescaling Personhood: Neoliberalism, Immigration, and the State”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 98, Number 1, March 2008, )Through an analysis of relevant legislation and court cases (in other words, statutory and case law) this article brings attention to the legal production of scale and the way in which law plays a prominent role in the rescaling processes associated with neoliberalization. Contemporary critical geographic scholarship on scale productively highlights a politics and political economy of scale (Agnew 1993; Smith 1995; Delaney and Leitner 1997; Swyngedouw 1997a, 1997b; Marston 2000; Brenner 2001, 2004; Marston and Smith 2001; Peck 2002; Mansfield 2005), but geographers have given little attention to the ways in which law plays an important role in both the production of scale and neoliberal rescaling processes (although see Mitchell 2002). By engaging with law, this article admittedly remains focused on the realm of “politics with a capital P” and formal state structures, as opposed to exploring, for instance, the ways in which political contestation between different societal and political actors plays a role in producing scale (Agnew 1997; Delaney and Leitner 1997; Leitner 1997; Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2006). As Don Mitchell has forcefully argued, however, “law matters” (2003, 6), as laws have significant and real impacts on people’s lives. Legal geographic scholarship has played a crucial role in illuminating the ways in which law and legal processes produce sociospatial opportunities and limitations, particularly along the axes of race, gender, and social class (Kobayashi 1990; Blomley 1994; Mitchell 1994, 2003; Delaney 1998; Forest 2001). This article aims to contribute to that discussion by engaging legal geography with geographic research on scale and rescaling. In what follows, I first place this case study—the devolution of membership policy—into a broader theoretical context regarding neoliberalism and the process of neoliberalization, the changing relationship between the state and noncitizen, and the contemporary rescaling of national membership. I next trace the statutory and case law that “fixed” the relationship between scale and membership from the latter decades of the nineteenth century through the mid-1990s.2 I discuss the contemporary “scalar flux” (Brenner 2000, 373) of membership policy that began in the mid-1990s, focusing specifically on the partial devolution, from the federal government to cities and states, of welfare policy and immigration policing. I conclude by highlighting the instabilities and tensions emerging from these contemporary rescaling processes, which provides further evidence to support the idea that “all is not well with the neoliberal state” (Harvey 2005, 78). Incrementalism Good - RaceIncremental change is a necessary precondition to improving equality and citizenship, their criticism of our incrementalism removes a valuable tactical tool against inequalityLindberg 13(Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of its task force on the Virtues of a Free Society, “Left 3.0”, Policy Review, February 1, )If classical liberalism emerged in part as a rebellion against hereditary privilege, modern American liberalism is foremost a rebellion against the privileges of wealth. The most important innovation of the Left, a principle held fast from the time of the French Revolution onward, has been its insistence that political rights could only be meaningful if accompanied by a degree of economic equality that systems based on political rights alone would not automatically create or protect. Thus, the Left finds the most important element on its agenda: the achievement of a greater degree of economic equality by means of politics. It’s an agenda that has proven adaptable over time to various levels of intensity in the passion for equality. Some have insisted that nothing less than a global proletarian revolution will suffice. Others have advocated socialism or social democracy. The mildest iteration (that of Left 3.0) centers on redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on the rich and the provision of public benefits for all, combined with the diminution of dynastic wealth through inheritance taxes.? Implementation of the animating passion for equality requires the power of government. The Left shares the suspicion of government power at the heart of classical liberalism, but only up to a point. Individuals need rights to protect them from overweening government intrusion, true, but government power in the proper hands can do good, and indeed the proper hands must wield the power of government in order to do the good of pursuing equality. The proper hands are the Left’s, it hardly needs saying.? Republicans sometimes complain that Democrats tolerate conduct by Democratic administrations that they would never tolerate from Republican administrations. This is true, but it assumes a neutral standard of judgment should apply. The Left understands perfectly well that it must advance its agenda against resistance, often considerable. It follows, therefore, that progress may be halting, or indeed impossible — beyond the control of the people pursuing it. What matters in that case is precisely the character of those people. They can and must and do prove their virtue in other ways.? One can, of course, be rich and Left: Once again, it’s a matter of attitude — what you are for and what you are against. In the view of the Left, rich conservatives are conservative because they want to defend the privileges of wealth; they are therefore solely self-interested. Rich men and women of the Left, on the other hand, want to ensure that all people have health insurance regardless of their means; once this and other basic egalitarian imperatives have been fulfilled through political action, the rich are free to use their money as they please (including by finding themselves the best doctors).? The Left’s passion for equality begins with the pursuit of greater economic equality, but it doesn’t end there. The Left has also long been in pursuit of equality in the matter of identity. “Identity” is a concept that substantially modifies the principle that individuals have rights. An identity is something one has in common with others. Identity puts people in groups, and societies have long assigned status on the basis of identity — in many instances, in the view of the Left, improperly so. Some statuses have been improperly privileged, for example, white males in racist and sexist societies. And some statuses have been improperly denigrated, for example, gay men in homophobic societies. The Left has long sought to bring down the status of the privileged and elevate the status of the denigrated. This, too, is the pursuit of equality.? The pursuit of greater equality of identity is very much a matter of the particular circumstances of a society. The Left, from its earliest days, has had a knack for knowing where to press. Suffrage in the United States was once limited, de facto and de jure, to white adult male property owners. The requirement of property went first; then the franchise was extended formally to blacks; then to women; then in fact to blacks, with the civil rights movement; then to eighteen year-olds. In the United States, it’s hard to see how that sequence could have been rearranged. Similarly, for generations, gays remained closeted and underground to avoid persecution. Then came the successful demand for an end to enforcement of and repeal of laws prohibiting homosexual (and certain heterosexual) acts; then the (largely) successful demand for respect for uncloseted homosexuality; then the demand for “domestic partner” rights equivalent to those enjoyed by married couples; then the demand for gay marriage, or marriage equality, per se.? The Left has often styled itself as “progressive,” which implies not only improvement over time, but a progression: Correct the perceived injustice most immediately at hand, then move on to the next one. In some cases, the next injustice comes into focus only once a previous injustice has been removed. During the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, generally regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement, it seems doubtful that participants had the goal of marriage equality in mind. The community had more immediate needs that, once satisfied, would in turn reveal its next-most immediate needs.? It’s noteworthy just how “conservative” the statements of progressives of the past often sound today. Sometimes the progressive cause has been served by progressives specifically repudiating in advance positions that progressive successor generations will openly embrace. If a conservative critic of gay rights in the 1970s claimed that codifying protection for gays would one day lead to a demand that gays be allowed to marry, no doubt many gay rights advocates at the time would have scoffed at the alarmism and foresworn any such possibility.Democracy GoodDemocracy is PreconditionRecognition of the value of a group as citizens is key to eliminating racist and sexist forms of exclusionGould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )The inclusiveness required by this new conception arises in the first place from the connection of democracy to citizenship. It has increasingly been recognised that the issue of who counts as a member of a political community is as central as their degree of participation in the governance of the resulting polity. The inclusiveness required here turns on the idea that all those resident in a given territory need to be recognised as citizens, with rights of democratic participation. Racist exclusions or denigrations are eliminated on this view. Certainly, full civil, social, and economic rights for immigrants are implied here, while for illegal immigrants a range of hard issues would centre on whether one could show them to be residents within the polity. Yet, the question of fully open borders is not touched by this account. It seems evident that the inclusiveness of the community does not necessarily entail a community with no borders or one that extends worldwide. The issue of the scope of political communities and of borders remains a real one; and we need also to accommodate the possibility of overlapping communities. But these questions go beyond the scope of this paper. Democracy is PreconditionDemocracy is a precondition to the elimination of discrimination. Joint participation produces reciprocity.Gould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )A cautionary note in the appeal to economic democracy here is provided by the somewhat analogous critique that has been offered concerning reducing women’s issues to economic ones — in this case, that there is an autonomy to racism (or sexism) that transcends merely economic factors and makes use of them. Thus it is clear that a commitment to equality in social relations and the elimination of racial discrimination remains central, including the development of communication and other tools to overcome nefarious distinctions and the exertion of power by some over others. Yet, as suggested, if democracy is interpreted in a fuller sense as not only majority vote but as involving opportunities for widespread participation in spheres beyond the political, the hypothesis here is that it might well contribute to the melioration of this discrimination. Whereas it is usually claimed that the elimination of discrimination is a condition for democratic participation, here the reverse is also held to apply. In this process, the ‘democratic personality’, as discussed, with its qualities of agency, receptivity, flexibility, and openness to differences, would play a role, as would the greater degree of economic egalitarianism potentially entailed by certain systems of economic democratisation. Additionally, the fact that majority rule does not necessarily protect minorities even when they are represented, as Guinier and others have pointed out (see Guinier, 1994, especially Chapters 3 and 4), points to the need for this conception of democracy to be interpreted along deliberative and discussionbased lines. In this way, developing common interests and building shared concerns in various contexts of social life take centre stage. Democracy beyond the political thus takes on new significance. In such an approach, which is clearly in need of considerably more theoretical attention, participation in democratic decision-making in a variety of associations, including the relatively nonvoluntary but central context of firms and workplaces, can contribute to changing participants’ understandings and expectations of each other’s differences. Joint participation in decision-making fosters reciprocity. Democracy Good - InclusionAdvocacy of democracy facilitates opposition to forms of exclusion like racism and sexism. Democracy creates a position of positive freedom and equal access that exposes exclusion as unjust.Gould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )The first point to note — of great importance, if perhaps obvious — is the intrinsic and deep connection between the critique of racism (and sexism) and the requirement for democracy. In my view, the idea of equal positive freedom, or more generally a conception of equal agency, is the basis for both the critique of discrimination and the justification of democratic participation. In the first case, equal positive freedom as prima facie equal rights to the conditions for individuals’ self-development, entails (negative) freedom from discrimination and domination — both institutional and personal — inasmuch as these conditions limit or curtail such ?flourishing, as well as the (positive) availability of social and economic conditions for this self-development. Hence it excludes both racism and sexism, and entails an affirmative requirement for reciprocal recognition, as well as some equalisation of social and economic resources. At the same time, this very principle of equal positive freedom serves as the justification for equal rights of democratic participation in all contexts of what I have called common activity. Since participation in such common activities is among the conditions for self-development, and since in order to be an expression of agency these common activities need to be under the control of those engaged in them, it follows that individuals have equal rights to co-determine these activities or to participate in decision-making concerning them (the longer version of this argument is in Gould, 1988, Chapter 1). Democratic decision-making thus emerges as the institutional analogue to relations of reciprocity in face-to-face interactions. In particular, the connection is to that type of reciprocity that may be called social reciprocity, or reciprocity of respect, rather than to lesser forms such as instrumental reciprocity — colloquially, the reciprocity of ‘tit for tat’, or return for benefit given. The conceptual connection between the critique of racism and the requirement of democracy is as follows, then, mediated through the principle of equal positive freedom: the critique of systemic discrimination entails an emphasis on equal access to conditions of self- development, which also implies the requirement for equal rights of participation in decision-making concerning common activities. On this view, the conception of self-development, originally presented by Marx and Mill, and subsequently by Macpherson and others, and which in turn is seen to support the requirement for democratic participation, is not so much to be opposed to consumerism and acquisitiveness, as it primarily was for Macpherson (1973), although it does indeed contrast with that. Rather, the main opposition is with the control by some over the conditions needed by others for their self- development, i.e., domination, or in lesser modes, discrimination, and one of whose manifestations (though a unique one in various ways) is racism. Equal agency, in the richer sense of the equal right of individuals to be free from domination and free to develop their capacities, gives rise both to an egalitarian critique of racism and other forms of oppression, and to the conception of widely equal rights of participation in democratic decisionmaking. Of course, the question of the scope of such decision-making, and correctly delimiting those who have rights to participate in varying contexts, remains a difficult and important question for democratic theory, which is not yet addressed by noting this conceptual connection. Democracy Good – Positive RightsAffirmation of positive rights through democratic processes helps unite the struggle for democracy with the struggle against racism.Gould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )Based on this analysis of socially constructed racial and cultural identities, we may return to the original set of issues and ask: if democracy, with its equal rights, is antithetical to racism, why does racism persist within it? Abstracting from the central empirical issues here, and focussing on this only from the side of the concept of democracy, we may answer that partly it is due to existing limitations in the understanding of democracy. I want to disagree, then, with Charles Mills’ normative approach, while appreciating his powerful critique of racism as a system of accumulated entrenched privilege, or differential racial privilege that is institutionalised and global (or practically so). Mills suggests that the normative requirement in dealing with this system of white supremacy is to base democratic political organisation on a true understanding of social contract and natural or human rights (see Mills, 1997, p. 129), and to bring these Enlightenment ideals to full realisation. But I think that more is required, and specifically a rethinking of democracy along several dimensions. The problems with contemporary democracies have already been well analysed in terms of their formality and proceduralism, and their disregard of social and economic inequalities that set limits to participation. I would add, too, the factor of their delimitation to the political realm alone. At the basis of this traditional understanding of democracy is a conception of what I have called abstractly universal norms of negative freedom and formal equality, with a social ontology of individuals whose relations to each other are external (see Gould, 1988, Chapters 1–3, and 1978, especially Chapters 1 and 2). An alternative view would adopt these very norms while reinterpreting them, and would also reconceive democracy in relation to a notion of concrete universality, understood as having both empirical and normative aspects. Democracy Good - GovernmentalityInstitutional commitments and governmentality are essential to building a democracy that produces reciprocal ethical and political relationships. Avoidance of politics and law can at best produce toleration, not empathy.Gould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )This redefinition of democracy sees such an inclusive democratic community as the framework for political life. But what does the notion of such a community involve? Normatively, it connotes an openness to, and acceptance of, the whole person on the part of others, where these persons are taken in their embodied and diverse complexity. In this sense, it is a community of differentiated whole persons. There is no exclusive concern with cognitivity in the constitution of this as a community, nor with any given criteria of ethnicity or objective bodily characteristics. There is also no requirement for agreement on some comprehensive doctrine — moral, religious, or philosophical — for there to be a community (contrast Rawls, 1993, p. 40, footnote 43). The existing community that serves as the basis for a political society can be considered democratic to the degree that it involves opportunities for participation in decision-making for all its members. This entails engagement with other concrete individuals in face-to-face interactions (e.g., in committees, small groups, or the occasional community-wide meeting; or in interactions among individuals in governmental or deliberative bodies); as well as mediated forms of representation. The embodied political relations among persons in such a community are characterised by what we might call receptivity. Ideally, this involves an openness and responsiveness to others in terms of their individual differences and needs, as well as their cultural differences. It is an attunement to the whole person as this concrete embodied individual. Receptivity is therefore a felt understanding of otherness in its individuated modes, rather than in terms of types or general categories. This characteristic is familiar to us in personal terms as sensitivity to, and as empathy with, particular others. But what would be its import for politics? Here, receptivity cannot be taken to imply an absence of general principles or laws, which would render it inapplicable in a domain where fair treatment of large groups of people is central. Rather, it would entail a competence in the application of laws and principles to particular cases, which is sensitive to differences in people’s needs and interests, such as those that may be associated with racial or gender identities. In this sense, it requires the casuistic art of interpreting the general for particular cases, and endorses a ?flexibility in dealing with special or exceptional circumstances, including ones relating to race or culture. Beyond the administration of law, however, the quality of receptivity can also manifest itself in policy-making that anticipates the need for differential applications of policies to individuals in order to achieve equal treatment. The potential of this sort of policy-making for the elimination of residual racial discrimination is apparent. As noted, such receptivity has application more widely in politics, in the form of respect and tolerance for individual and group differences, as well as concrete forms of support for cultural ‘otherness’. And, as feminist theory has recently emphasised, what is required in these various contexts, even at the relatively remote level of administration and policy, may be more than simply the cognitive or cerebral comprehension of differentiated needs, but sometimes an affective responsiveness to others’ pains and concerns. In this embodied politics, this quality of receptivity is an aspect of what I have elsewhere called the democratic personality (Gould, 1988, Chapter 11). It is the complement to initiative and agency in democratic processes, but is not to be taken as a passive response to the other. Rather, it signifies an affective engagement with the other as an embodied whole person, which enjoins a reciprocal responsiveness on the part of the other. In the context under consideration here, it is expressed positively in openness to the variety of cultural group differences that characterise most contemporary societies, and to new cultural directions that may be introduced. As suggested, this does not mean mere toleration for diverse cultures, but efforts to support their selfinterpreted distinctiveness and their interaction with other cultures, including in the public domain. In this way, the inclusive democratic community just sketched would also be multi- and inter-cultural, in the sense discussed above. Democracy Good – Solves RacismWe need to focus on our commonality in democratic processes to deal with racism. The preoccupation with difference is divisive.Gould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )In conclusion, it may be useful to observe that although recognition of differences — of individuals and cultural groups — and support for these differences is crucial, perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far towards difference in democratic theory. There is a need to discern shared commonalities and experiences, and set common goals, in addition to drawing on others’ different cultural experiences, appropriating them in new ways. Here, it is not the imposition of common goals but the mutual determination and choosing of them through deliberation that may in turn help to diminish racial divisiveness. In a variety of ways, then, democratic participation in a wide array of contexts presents itself as a significant part of an approach to dealing with racism. Perm SolvesThe concept of democracy combines with antiracism to produce a truly inclusive model of civil society, the permutation solves the link to the racial kritik of democracy.Gould 2000(Carol, Stevens Institute of Technology, “Racism and Democracy Reconsidered”, Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 4, 2000, )When conceived in relation to the idea of multiple and interactive cultural identities that I posed as the prospective counterpart to historically developed racial identities, what then does such a conception of concrete universality entail? The answer is threefold, I think: democracy needs to be understood as multicultural in a specific sense, it has to be connected to citizenship on a certain interpretation, and it requires a substantive interpretation in terms of democratic community. These admittedly rather demanding requirements can be summed up in the idea of an inclusive multicultural democracy. It seems to me that democracy can make its own contribution to countering racism when it is reconceived in this way, providing certain suggestions for practical changes along these lines. The additional impact of economic democratisation for counteracting racism will be considered later, in the final part. It may be helpful to analyse the ingredients for this reinterpretation of democracy, namely, multiculturalism, inclusiveness, and democratic community, before attempting a summary characterisation of the overall idea. The term multiculturalism has been used in importantly ambiguous ways, meaning different things to different people; and by now it has some unfortunate connotations. Still, the word itself, suggesting the multiplicity of cultures, retains its utility. (‘Pluriculturalism’ would capture the same notion, but it too has been used in very different contexts.) We may in fact distinguish between two uses of the term: in one use, multiculturalism designates an aggregate or collection of different and relatively separate cultures, together with an awareness within an older dominant culture of these differences and of the contributions of the cultures of oppressed groups — paradigmatically, the recognition of the contributions of African-American, Latino, and other minority cultures in the United States —or an awareness of non-Western cultures beyond the dominant Eurocentric canon. In this aggregative sense, too, it has sometimes come to be unfortunately used in a denigrating and racist way to refer to generalised, unspecified racial demands by African-Americans and other racial minorities on white people. The term multiculturalism can also be used, in a second sense, to designate a newer interactive model of culture, where cultural (and racial) identity itself is open to plural definition and where there may be cultural creation through the appropriation of diverse cultural influences. Here, the concept becomes more one of being multi-cultured or multiply-cultured (and analogously, perhaps, multi- racial). A noteworthy and often-cited example of this interactive cultural creation is American jazz. There have been more recent forms of this as well, for example, in graffiti art, in the influence of various sorts of ethnic dance on the forms of modern dance, in hip-hop music, and more generally in the phenomenon of ‘fusion’ styles of art, music and even cuisine. Yet, this does not necessarily entail a homogenisation of cultural strains and it is also a continuation of the historically common phenomenon of cultural diffusion. But we may say that such multi- cultural creation has become a more intensely dynamic phenomenon than it was in the past, due in part to the powerful contemporary technologies of global communication. On the normative side, such developments contribute to the possibilities of cultural choice and change, and accord with the social constructivist conception of racial/ cultural identity presented earlier. It is evident that this conception of multiculturalism adds an important element not only of self- definition but also the appropriation of diverse cultures to the more passive traditional characterisation of races, and of cultures too, as matters of birth or ascription. When connected to democracy, the requirement of multiculturalism implies that the political community not only tolerate diverse cultural groups, but find ways of supporting them, compatible with basic principles of equal treatment. It would need to eliminate the favouritism of civic life toward one leading set of cultural characteristics — that of the majority (in the US, still white Protestant), and permit the development of new forms of such civic life reflective of the polity’s fuller cultural variety. Some degree of public support of diverse cultures is possible, with the proviso that individuals must be understood to be capable of belonging to more than one culture. And particularly where there is a dominant majority and a clearly articulated set of minority cultures, certain group rights for these cultural minorities may also need to be protected (for some of the dif?culties here, see Kymlicka, 1995). Such a multicultural democracy attempts to go beyond the model of a neutral and universalist public sphere, where all particularity is supposedly relegated to a private domain in which particular cultural identities are allowed to ?flourish. Rather, this view suggests that some cultural diversification can actually be supported within the public sphere itself, compatible with fairness and human rights, and where there is an ongoing and open dialogue about emergent civic traditions.Liberalism/Englightenment GoodEnlightenment Good - RacismEnlightenment values key to challenging racist assumptions – the link turn outweighs the linkBronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 33-4)Enlightenment thinkers could not jump out of their historical skin. Many of them exhibited elitist and racist traits: Africa was given little respect and anti-Semitism was common. But such prejudices were contradicted by the universal principles predicated on reciprocity—and the view of nature—in which the philosophes believed. Eurocentrism did not define the Enlightenment. Its sensibility was not that of the later imperialists or the conquistadors, supported by the Catholic Church, who slaughtered the Aztecs and the Incas. Its new global vision instead challenged both existing religious beliefs and, ironically, what might now be termed “western” prejudices. Enlightenment thinkers knew that history evidenced a plurality of sophisticated exotic cultures and their ideal presentations of them provided utopian images with which to criticize the status quo: China was idolized during the Enlightenment, its repressive characteristics ignored by Voltaire and his friends, while the image of the Persian and the American Indian and the Tropical Islander—unspoiled by western religion and “civilization”— achieved enormous popularity through the writings of various philosophes. Less revealing indeed is the knowledge of these cultures than the interest they aroused and the good will extended to them by Diderot, Leibniz, Voltaire, and the rest: it was assumed that “simplicity, honesty, generosity, and natural morality seemed to be the general character of all the extra- European and non-Christian peoples.”45 Just as new geographic explorations and scientific investigations contested the prevalent understanding of space, the new interest awakened in nonwestern cultures transformed the sense of time. The archaeological discoveries concerning classical antiquity by figures like Johann Winckelmann helped place feudalism in historical perspective. It fostered both a sense of decline regarding the ancient regime and a desire for rebirth—a feeling for progress— that would prove of ideological significance for the European interest in the American Colonies and their War of Independence. The delight in the discovery of diverse cultures helped create a feeling that things could be different and, in turn, this undermined belief in the divine right of kings and a static aristocratic order whose origins were shrouded in the mists of time. That the world can be changed, and that individuals have the right to change it, is the challenge posed by the idea of progress. It is the minimal prerequisite for any attempt by the victims of modernity—women, religious minorities, people of color, and other oppressed groups—to challenge the restrictions placed upon them. This new perspective on transformation, on progress, is an essential part of the Enlightenment heritage.Enlightenment Good - InclusionEnlightenment values key to challenging exclusion and prejudiceBronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 34-5)Innovation and change became words of praise rather than abuse during the Enlightenment.46 Their advocates freed history from theological presup- positions, secularized the notion of causation, and opened new territories of inquiry.47 Partisans of these ideas may not have been able to reconcile the citizen and the bourgeois in their honest attempt to realize “the good life on earth.”48 But their belief in progress enabled the philosophes to view themselves as reformers intent upon furthering education, fostering a cosmopolitan spirit of civility and toleration, while abolishing censorship, the debtor’s prison, the galley, the stake, slavery, torture, and the Inquisition. Wealth, gender, race, and birth might continue to play a role in social life. But the Enlightenment provided a new political framework for attacking these expressions of prejudice and privilege. The constitutions introduced in the United States and elsewhere during the age of democratic revolution— whatever their limitations—left room for revision, for reform, for progress. And that was no small achievement. The Enlightenment generated an ideal of social justice and citizenship that already spoke to an international civil society, contested national prejudices, and the political concerns of exploited classes and groups. Its thinkers basically agreed that the “natural” capacities of the individual were capable of realization only in society. Once differences were understood in sociological rather than religious or racial terms, moreover, they believed it possible to better the lot of the most victimized.Key to AgencyAnti-Rationalist claims destroy agency, lead to a demobilizing fatalism, and guarantee reactionary and conservative politics.Furedi 2009 (Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury, “What Happened to Radical Humanism?”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 30-32)We need to retrace our steps to the time before there was a Left and Right – to recover the progressive legacy of the past. We do this not because we want to escape from politics but because we live in pre-political times that require the recovery of ideas through which a challenge to fatalism can be mounted. They demand that we let go of the categories that helped illuminate political life in the last century. The line of division that matters today is between those who subscribe to the conformist embrace of the present and those who want to mobilise the past experience of humanity to influence the future. In particular we need to challenge the prevailing interpretation of change that assigns human beings a passive role in the making of history. Human beings are viewed as extraneous to the process of change and therefore are seen to exercise little influence over their destiny. Back in the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant recognised that it was the emergence of the condition where individuals could pursue their destiny unimpeded that constituted the point of departure of the Enlightenment. Experimentation and the pursuit of knowledge are not simply good in and of themselves, they give freedom and democracy real content. Kant (1784) claimed that the ‘enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’. By immaturity he meant ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another’. According to Kant this immaturity was self-imposed and its ‘cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another’. And confronting his reader with what he characterised as the motto of the Enlightenment – Sapere Aude or Dare to Know – he challenged them to use their understanding. Today, when the Precautionary Principle constantly communicates the prejudice that science threatens to run ahead of society and that those mounting experiments are ‘playing God’, daring to know is often represented as an act of irresponsibility. Kant would have been perplexed by contemporary society’s uneasy relation with science and knowledge. Of course our ambiguous relationship with knowledge and reason is not due to the failure of individual character but the outcome of a more deep-seated process of cultural disorientation. Unfortunately What Happened to Radical Humanism? 31 Kant’s diagnosis of self-imposed immaturity is more pertinent to contemporary times than to the circumstances he faced. At a time when the claims of knowledge and science are regarded with mistrust and cynicism the motto Sapere Aude goes against the grain of contemporary cultural sensibility. Contemporary cultural norms even in their radical form are highly sceptical of the ideal of individual autonomy. To be sure, even at the best of times, individual autonomy is an ideal that can at best be realised inconsistently. People live in a world not of their own making and in circumstances that often elude their aspiration to determine their affairs. The exercise of autonomy has always come up against external constraints – natural obstacles, economic exigencies, wars and conflict and social dislocation. Today it also faces a cultural climate that is deeply suspicious of the aspiration for autonomous behaviour. It also has few friends among those who call themselves radical. Human action often results in unexpected outcomes, some of which are uncomfortable to live with. Nevertheless the pursuit of the ideal of autonomy offers people the promise of choices and frequently results in progress. It is precisely because some individuals have taken this ideal seriously that they successfully challenged repressive institutions and the use of arbitrary powers that sought to thwart their ambition. An enlightened society needs to harness the ideal of individual autonomy to create the optimum conditions for human development. Societies that fail to valorise this ideal end up dominated by a culture of fatalism and risk collapsing into a state of stasis. The Enlightenment ideal of individual autonomy insists that society and the state must recognise the independence of each individual. As Bronner (2004: 136) argues, ‘autonomy originally implied the right for each to have his or her faith’. Such a perspective puts into question the right of the state to promote a particular faith – be it in the form of a traditional religion or the lifestyle crusades associated with the current policy of behaviour modification. Recognition of the ideal of individual autonomy – an important component of the legacy of the Enlightenment – represents the foundation for choice-making, moral and political decision-making and political action. Popular suspicion towards the exercise of human agency means that the ideal of individual autonomy is frequently dismissed as an illusion fostered by apologists for the free market. It is argued that in a society which is dominated by the media, big corporations and forces unleashed by globalisation, individuals lack the capacity for autonomous action. Moreover, as diminished or vulnerable subjects, people do not so much 32 Frank Furedi choose their faith as have it foisted on them. That is why the Enlightenment model of the autonomous and responsible citizen is displaced by a more passive disoriented individual who requires the ‘support’ of public institutions. What we are left with is a regression to the condition of the immature self of the pre-Enlightenment era. The mood of cultural pessimism does not leave society untouched. It has a profound impact on how people see themselves. It is difficult to Dare to Know when our culture continually transmits the signal that risk-taking is irresponsible and that caution and safety are the principal virtues of our time. Such signals serve as an invitation to people to constrain their aspirations and limit their actions. If people are repeatedly told that not much is expected of them and that indeed they are vulnerable individuals in need of support – they will frequently begin to play the part that is assigned to them. Today the promise of individual autonomy is contradicted by the reality of a culture that is uncomfortable with its exercise. As a result, individual existence is experienced not so much through the prism of autonomy but through that of isolation. The lack of validation accorded to the ideal of autonomy goes hand in hand with a lack of respect for democracy. Powerful anti-democratic sentiments have been institutionalised by public bodies that are devoted to treating adults like children. Public policy is frequently inspired by the belief that the electorate cannot be relied on to figure out what is in its best interest. The politics of fear provides one instrument for ‘raising the awareness’ of people about what’s good for them. In the twenty-first century it is not politically correct to refer to people as ‘mentally children or barbarians’. Nevertheless the representation of grown-up citizens as ‘vulnerable’ people fuels the profound anti-democratic ethos that we discussed previously. Their orientation interacts and reinforces the feeble sense of personhood that prevails today. It is this pre-Enlightenment story of personhood that constitutes the first and arguably principal obstacle to the restoration of political life. Key to agency, a humane sense of personhood, and progressive politics.Furedi 2009 (Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury, “What Happened to Radical Humanism?”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 32-4)The version of personhood that is most consistent with the ideals of autonomy, the exercise of choice and history-making, is that given by the legacy of the Enlightenment. Risk-taking, experimentation, the exercise of critical judgement and reason are some of the important attributes of historical thinking and agency. The exercise of these attributes is the precondition for the reconstitution of public life. Through such human activities people develop an understanding of how purposeful public activity may lead to positive results in the future. Without a sense of agency personhood lacks the imagination one associates with political engagement. Humanising personhood requires challenging the prevailing paradigm of vulnerability and gaining acceptance for the humanist concept of personhood. The humanist and vulnerability paradigms of personhood (Figure 2.1) never exist in a pure form. Since the rise of the modern era every culture has internalised elements of both. But nevertheless cultures discriminate when they communicate stories about which forms of behaviour they value and which ones they don’t. For example, throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the ideals of self-help and self-sufficiency enjoyed cultural affirmation. Today, it is help-seeking that benefits from cultural validation. In contrast to the celebration of the risk-taking in former times, society today has turned safety into a veritable religion. The ideal of experimentation has been displaced by the conformist embrace of caution, which has been institutionalised through the precautionary principle. The values associated with the humanist paradigm of personhood are not entirely absent, but they have become subordinate to ones that promote the sensibility of vulnerability. Fortunately, human society can never entirely accept the fatalistic dogma of ‘There is No Alternative’. Nor can it frame its ideal of personhood entirely based on the paradigm of vulnerability. That is why sections of society continue to look for a more positive version of personhood. Conflicting ideas about the paradigm of personhood are today the equivalent of past clashes of ideologies and political alternatives.1 They touch upon such fundamental questions as what it means to be human, the meaning of human nature and the relationship between the individual and public institutions. Ideas about the paradigm of personhood constitute the point of departure for the formulation of policy and the creation of norms – informal and formal – that regulate people’s relationship and individual behaviour. The meaning of personhood has important implications for how we view the relationship of people to history and the potential for changing and altering circumstances. Our attitude towards personhood informs how we make sense of the exercise of choice and of individual responsibility, our capacity to know, to reason and gain insights into the truth. Ultimately different ideas about personhood lead to conflicting ideas about public life. Whether people are perceived as the problem, or as the solvers of problems, depends on which paradigm one subscribes to. In our era of political exhaustion the challenges that face us are characteristically pre-political ones. It makes little sense to develop an ambitious political philosophy when the sense of human subjectivity exists in a diminished form. Politics represents the negation of fate and its existence depends on the prevalence of the belief that what people do can make a difference. That is why today the challenge facing those interested in the reconstitution of public life is not the discovery of a Big Idea or the invention of a new political doctrine or philosophy. In the absence of a more robust sense of human agency that can act on such ideas, such doctrine would have a formal and platitudinous character. Does that not mean abandoning any hope of re-engaging with political life? Not at all. For the most immediate task facing those interested in the recovery of the Enlightenment sensibility towards the future is to contribute to the promotion of the humanist version of personhood. Before politics can be reconstituted we need to foster an intellectual climate that is hospitable to sentiments that directly challenge the prevailing paradigm of vulnerability. Humanising personhood is the most pressing issue and practical question facing those concerned with challenging the prevailing culture of fatalism. AT – Dead White GuysNo kidding, old Europeans were racist. Judge the Enlightenment by the content of its ideas and their application in the current context.Bronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 12-13)There weren’t many saints among the philosophes. Even the most anticipatory form of philosophy retains residues, reactionary assumptions, and prejudices, from its historical context. Some figures of the Enlightenment look better than others with references to the stupidities of their time. But there is no comparing the views on women, religious minorities, and civil liberties of the philosophes with representatives of the Counter- Enlightenment who opposed every progressive measure to improve the condition of women, sought to keep Jews in the ghetto, and feared democracy and social reform like the plague. Usually ignored is the question concerning what it was reasonable to expect from these intellectuals in their own historical context. It is impossible to excuse Voltaire for his anti-Semitism, but that is because other of his contemporaries, like Lessing or Montesquieu, held more egalitarian and sophisticated views. Rousseau and Kant can be condemned for their support of the death penalty precisely because others like Beccaria and Voltaire understood its barbarity. But it is foolish simply to introduce an abstract standard of what is currently considered politically correct. Indeed, by reducing ideas to the prejudices of their usually white, male, and western authors, many supposedly progressive historical interrogations of the past actually wind up tossing the historical context by the wayside. Confronting such biases in progressive terms is furthermore possible only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment with its liberal and socialist inheritance. There is little of organizational or ethical importance that the Counter-Enlightenment or the present assortment of “post-enlightenment” philosophies has to offer the struggle of the excluded and exploited. Viewing the Enlightenment as irremediably tainted by anachronistic prejudices only casts a plague on all houses. No need exists to compare the views of the philosophes and the fanatics: both are prejudiced with regard to race or sex or sexual practice and that is that. Forgotten is that the former can be held to their own ethical standards of progress while the latter cannot because they rejected those standards in the first place. This little volume seeks to illuminate not simply the “differences,” but the qualitative differences between essentially progressive movements that embraced the political implications of the Enlightenment and essentially reactionary movements that resisted it.AT – Modernity BadThe criticism of modernity is self-contradictory and counter-productive, and engages in a massive overgeneralization. Only embracing modernity and its commitment to competing ideas can make critique liberatory. Bronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 26-8)Many on the radical left were thus led to conclude that the “revolution” should no longer be directed merely against capitalism or an authoritarian form of government but rather against an “alienated” totality and a “reified” set of social relations. It was no longer a question of instituting a more humane economic system with a republican regime and new secular modes of thinking. It was instead a matter of turning the historical “revolution into an anthropological apocalypse. The transformative act thereby became burdened with ever more utopian goals ranging from the abolition of money and the division of labor to the elimination of the family and the creation of democratic “soviets” or workers’ councils. Such utopian hopes were raised during the “heroic period” of the Russian Revolution from 1918–23. With its passing, however, they were dashed. Exaggerated optimism made way for an equally exaggerated pessimism. Progress seemed invalidated by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the costs of two world wars, and a failed revolution. It made sense to suggest that: “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.”25 No longer would the idea of progress be understood from the material standpoint of policies, movements, and institutions. It would instead speak to securing the individuality threatened by mass society and a notion of freedom now seen only in the tension between subjectivity and the system intent upon eliminating it.26 The point of progress for the new radicals was to foster “resistance” with no purpose other than the existential affirmation of subjectivity in terms of aesthetic experience, metaphysical speculation, or the utopian “longing for the totally other.”27 Increasing the choices available to individuals now meant nothing more than reinforcing a “totally administered society;”28 insisting upon “tolerance” would produce only a false sense of autonomy; mass education could, by definition, only prove “mass deception;” while greater affluence merely strengthened the “happy consciousness.” The positive manifestation of progress thereby became identified with furthering the extension of un-freedom, the practice of exploitation and imperialism, or—more dramatically—what might be understood as the connection between “the sling-shot and the atom bomb.”29 Critical theory identified genuine progress with resisting the worst evil: it became a matter of plugging holes in a shoddy dike against an ever more violent flood. What should be preserved remained unclear, however, and what should be supported even less so. But this was only logical. The interpretation had become completely contradictory: progress required resistance against the existing society yet political action necessarily involved the use of instrumental reason. The only possible move was to turn resistance into a metaphysical or aesthetic stance. In turn, however, this stripped progress of its political rationale, its moral appeal, and its critical character. What remained was a hope more wistful than militant: “Too little of what is good has power in the world for progress to be expressed in a predicative judgment about the world, but there can be no good, not a trace of it, without progress.”30 The next step was inevitable: the critics of meta-narrative, perhaps the best definition of postmodernism,31 would create a meta-narrative of their own. Progress would no longer merely be “cursed” with regression but instead become identified with regression tout court: modernity with its reliance on scientific reason and “totalizing ideologies” would now be seen as the source of the holocaust.32 The new subjectivists—fashionable purveyors of a metaphysical version of critical theory, “postcolonial” thinkers, poststructuralists, philosophers of identity—would thus find themselves increasingly incapable of recognizing that modernity “affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends upon the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.”33AT - EurocentrismCriticizing enlightenment values for Eurocentrism is racist, it ignores the continuity and commonality of reason in premodern and non-western thought.Bronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 31-2)The belief that enlightenment values are somehow intrinsically “western” is surely parochial and most likely racist. Just as money, the division of labor, and class conflict can be found in precapitalist cultures like Egypt, Greece, and Rome, so is it the case that liberal and cosmopolitan values usually identified with western thinking in general and the Enlightenment in particular were expressed in any number of nonwestern societies—including the three great civilizations of India, China, and Islam40—by religious figures like Mohammed and the Buddha; political leaders from Cyrus the Great, who allowed each nation to choose its religion and keep its customs, to the sixteenth-century leader Akbar who condemned slavery and the immolation of widows; and philosophers like Plotinus, Avicenna, Averroes, who highlighted the cosmological elements of the classical heritage and generated a tradition that extended from Giordano Bruno over Spinoza and Leibniz to Ernst Bloch. Amid the civil wars and religious conflicts of the premodern world, enough reflective people of compassion, appalled by religious fanaticism and the devastation of war insisted upon fairness and the rule of law, and highlighted the sanctity of the individual conscience and the plight of the lowly and the insulted. In a fine essay,41 Amartya Sen has made western intellectuals aware of what we should have been more aware of from the beginning: nonwestern and premodern thinkers had also emphasized the “pursuit of reason” rather than “the reliance on tradition.” The idea of progress, of making the solutions to conflict more civilized, is not simply a western idea. This does not mean that all regions and nations embraced the idea of progress—along with its liberal, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan implications— or that all will ever do so to the same degree. This is not the venue in which to examine the complex reasons why capitalism and the modern notion of progress were generated in the West. But it is necessary to emphasize that progress and enlightenment values are not the preserve of a geographic entity. 42 Intellectual tendencies that seek to promote such an understanding of progress have existed within diverse cultures and manifold traditions, and these have something to offer for the vision of a liberated society. It would be the height of arrogance, for example, to suggest that a Chinese tradition harking back three thousand years is somehow invalidated by the philosophical efforts of a small minority of European intellectuals writing between 1650 and 1800 or to deny that Gandhi could justify his vision of a multi-ethnic, democratic order from within his own religious understanding. The belief that achieving a genuine consensus on moral issues calls upon all participants in the discourse to think through arguments in the same way is absurd. The quest for humanitarian values has taken many paths in the past and it will do so, again, in the future. Pessimism BadPessimism and disengagement is a losing strategy, we need to affirm the positive values of political engagement and democratic citizenship. The cosmopolitan legacy of Enlightenment liberalism is overall a positive force for inclusion.Bronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. ix-xiii)What follows is an attempt to reclaim the Enlightenment, with its peculiar tradition of theory and practice. Of course, the twenty-first century is not the eighteenth: there is clearly no exact symmetry between past and present. The analog it might provide for engaged intellectuals, no less than its ethical model for resisting oppressive structures of power, needs reinterpretation to meet new conditions. Rigid notions of progress have fallen by the wayside; no group or party can any longer claim to incarnate the ideals of humanity, and the intellectual too often identifies the university with the world. Images from television and film rather than words on the page now shape the public sphere. Liberal regimes have often been corrupted by imperialist ambitions and parasitical elites. Both the left and the right have championed totalitarianism. The new global expansion of capitalism, the rise of the bureaucratic state, media consolidation, thoughtless consumerism, disregard for the environment, and cultural relativism have all undermined the ideals of cosmopolitan tolerance, economic justice, democratic accountability, and the idea of the “good society” generally associated with the Enlightenment. But, if the progressive intellectual can no longer guarantee the realization of reason’s promise, it is still the liberal rule of law with its explicit privileging of civil liberty, the interventionist state as an agent of social justice, and cosmopolitan movements intent on demanding recognition of the “other,” that serve as the precondition—the condition sine qua non—for bettering the lives of individuals, enabling them to expand the range of their experiences, which is the most basic meaning of progress. Current forms of engagement probably seem more pedestrian: perhaps that is the case. But political engagement is no less important than in earlier times. Universal interests remain real. It is only that the engaged intellectual can no longer indulge in the old romantic expectations of “changing the world” in one fell swoop. Enlightenment intellectuals may have laced their political engagement with drama, but they never fell into the trap of demanding all or nothing. To view them as either utopians or totalitarians is philosophically untenable and historically absurd. They took the world as it was, and sought to deal with the problems that it presented in a pragmatic and principled way. But the world has changed. There is no longer an “agent” capable of realizing the emancipatory values of the Enlightenment. Neither “humanity” nor the proletariat nor the once colonized peoples can any longer be identified with what Hegel termed “the world spirit.” There is also no longer a “republic of letters.” But these changes are, too often, employed as an excuse for passivity. There is an even more diverse cosmopolitan community of critical intellectuals and there exists an even greater variety than heretofore of progressive organizations that deal—and often deal positively—with crucial issues ranging from world hunger to the protection of individual liberties to animal rights. Specifying an ‘agent” of change or creating a hierarchy of causes is neither possible nor necessary. Teleology has fallen by the wayside and realizing freedom lacks any historical guarantee. The issue is no longer what party or social movement or interest group is joined; rather the issue concerns the initial decision to engage political reality and the choice of an ethical stance capable of fostering solidarity between organizations. That, indeed, is where the Enlightenment legacy still has a role to play. Solidarity should not simply be assumed: the landscape of the left is still littered by ideological turf-wars inherited from the 1960s. Enlightenment political values are important not only because they contest narrow organizational ambitions that interfere with cooperative action, but also because they provide a historical and speculative orientation for progressive activists and intellectuals. That orientation virtually vanished following the fragmentation of the civil rights and poor peoples movements and the new popularity accorded the variants of postmodernism and—what perhaps lies at the root of them all—the “late” brand of critical theory associated with Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In keeping with the decline of radical political parties, and the identification of resistance with the expression of subjectivity, the Enlightenment has been subjected to a new metaphysical form of “immanent” critique. Its political legacy has thus become a secondary concern. The preoccupations of the philosophes with social and institutional reform , and what Max Weber termed the “elective affinity” between their values and progressive agents for change, now seem to receive scant attention. This is all the more unfortunate since new transnational movements have come into existence, often confused in terms of how they should respond to “globalization,” along with functioning transnational political institutions that still suffer from a deficit of loyalty. New communications technologies are providing new organizational possibilities for political resistance, expanding the range of available experiences, and opening the way for new understandings of the most diverse cultures. New forms of solidarity, reflected in the popular concern with “human rights,” have challenged imperialist wars, outdated cultural norms, and authoritarian politics. The objective conditions for realizing the unrealized hopes associated with internationalism, liberal democracy, and social justice are already there; only the ideological willingness to embrace the assumptions underpinning these values is lacking. That is what provides the Enlightenment with a new salience for our time. Humanity is not in the past, but rather in the making. Conservatism may have set the agenda since the last quarter of the twentieth century. But that does not justify the resignation and increasingly debilitating pessimism associated with so many current forms of “radical” thought. Genuinely progressive changes have occurred: dictators have fallen and more citizens of the world have been enfranchised; battles for economic justice have been won; racism and sexism are on the defensive; and there has been poetry— good poetry—after Auschwitz. Easy to downplay the gains, suggest that they have now been “absorbed”; and embrace a new version of the old and tired attitude known as “cultural pessimism.” Cynicism always comes cheap. The real challenge lies in recognizing how the “system,” which was never as “totally administered” as many would like to think has been changed for the better through social action inspired by Enlightenment ideals. The closed society has become more open and—against the provincial, religious, exploitative, and authoritarian sources of opposition—it has the potential of becoming more open still. Deciding to enter the fray, however, becomes more difficult when relying on philosophical perspectives that leave their supporters wandering about lost in Hegel’s night in which all cows are black. It is necessary to distinguish between traditions not by making reference to metaphysics, but rather by looking at the political and ideological conflicts between actual movements. Again, the radical democratic and egalitarian aspects of the Enlightenment have been betrayed often enough. But this recognition presupposes that there was indeed something to betray. Which promises made by the Enlightenment have been broken becomes apparent not from the standpoint of “negative dialectics,” communitarian convictions, “pragmatism,” or ethical relativism, but rather by taking seriously its universal understanding of liberty and progress. To be sure: universalism can be found in western imperialist propaganda and notions like “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” In reality, however, such universalism is not universal at all: it lacks reciprocity, an open discourse, and a concern with protecting the individual from the arbitrary exercise of power: That is what differentiates Enlightenment universalism from its imitators, provides it with a self-critical quality, and enables it to contest Euro-centrism and the prevalent belief in a “clash of civilizations.” Let there be no mistake: it has no use for misguided tolerance. Refusals to entertain “western” criticisms can easily be used to insulate repressive non-western traditions from criticism if only because non-western elites can also be authoritarian. Enlightenment political theory was never willing to justify tradition simply because it exists. Its best representatives argued for tolerance over prejudice, innovation over stasis, the rights of the minority over the enthusiasms of the majority, and the moral autonomy of the individual over the revealed claims of religious authority. The radical moment of the Enlightenment lies in its universal assault on privilege and prejudice. Its reflexive and critical character enables its most distinctive political theory to call for constraining the arbitrary exercise of institutional power and expand the possibilities of individual experience in both western and nonwestern societies. Enlightenment intellectuals provide an analogy for what contemporary intellectuals should strive to accomplish and a model of how to combat oppressive institutions, unjustifiable privileges, and anachronistic cultural practices. Viewing their political theory as the source of bureaucratic conformism or totalitarianism is a profound mistake. Their insistence upon demonstrating a plausible—not a perfect, but a plausible—connection between means and ends with respect to political action and social change was not merely to be directed against the ruling elites but against those who would resist them. They anticipated how the collapse of this connection would historically work against the interests of the lowly and the insulted. They sensed that it would turn individuals into a means for political ends and let them be seen as nothing more than economic “costs of production.” Resisting this state of affairs is the most radical purpose of the two most important political products of the Enlightenment: liberalism and socialism. Both inspired progressive mass movements and, for good reasons, inspire them still. The point of their intersection has become the intellectual point of departure for any genuinely progressive politics. Identification with the disenfranchised and the exploited from a cosmopolitan standpoint is the necessary implication of this position. Such is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Making good on it, however, calls for privileging the satisfactions and benefits of political interpretation over the esoteric and metaphysical vagaries of fashionable pseudo-political philosophical currents. If philosophy really has been an expression of what Novalis termed “transcendental homelessness,” which I doubt, then perhaps it is time to confront the philosophical with the political and, finally, for the prodigal to return home.AT – Liberalism = CapitalismLiberalism does not intrinsically lead to capitalism, it creates the conditions to challenge its excesses and to criticize its operationsBronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 41-3)Liberalism was the philosophical expression for the age of democratic revolution and the principal political theory of the Enlightenment. Its method was the critical deployment of “reason” and its goal was bettering the conditions of social life and expanding “freedom.”1 No less than the Enlightenment itself, however, the liberal heritage is both underestimated and taken for granted. Often seen merely as an ideological veil for capitalist exploitation, this new political worldview legitimated the idea of “resistance” against established authority—which was already implicit within the scientific revolution initiated by Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes—and it gave members of what would become the “third estate” a new sense of their rights and their dignity. Liberalism always posed a threat to religion, not merely because its partisans insisted on the separation of church and state, but also because it suggested that injustices—and their remedies—were products of social action. Enlightenment thinkers, indeed, were the first to recognize the ways in which ideology and exploitation are rooted in social and political institutions. Its advocates were always preoccupied with the injustices suffered by the outsider, who admittedly often then became an insider, and with the rational adjudication of grievances over the use of force. The liberal emphasis upon universal principles, the rule of law, and a reciprocal understanding of the rights and obligations of citizens, also offered a standard for contesting the discriminatory values and practices embedded within existing institutions, laws, and customs. Excluded groups like women and people of color would build upon these values no less than socialists concerned with the rights of working people. And this only makes sense. For, in short, the new liberal theory was intent upon constraining the arbitrary exercise of power. It is thus simply misleading to claim: “liberal theory is true as an idea. It contains the image of a society in which irrational anger no longer exists and seeks for outlets. But since the liberal theory assumes that unity among men is already in principle established, it serves as an apologia for existing circumstances.”2 The new political outlook was embedded in a burgeoning capitalism: this led to an underestimation of the potential for exploitation, an overestimation of the possibilities for reform, and a certain na?ve sense that the unqualified pursuit of self-interest would somehow soften the worst passions. But there is something mechanical and impoverished in the belief that liberalism constitutes nothing more than a reflex of economic class interests and just another manipulative expression of bourgeois ideology. The idea of “interest” originally meant something more than economic gain.3 As the Enlightenment wore on, moreover, many became wary of egoism and its consequences: Adam Smith became concerned with moral sentiments, David Hume embraced tradition, Rousseau sought to introduce the “general will,” Voltaire became ever more occupied with the sufferings of ordinary people, while Kant and his friends highlighted the role of moral philosophy. In truth, the general interest was never absent from enlightenment political thinking because it was never the stolid and conservative philosophy of a ruling class, but instead that of a class on the rise in need of coalitional support. 4 An inner tension between the practical imperatives of capitalism and the moral claims of liberalism was there from the beginning. It should therefore not be surprising that concrete economic questions concerning the accumulation of capital were less in the forefront than the political role a new bourgeoisie might play in undermining feudal notions of military glory, religious prejudices, and outworn superstitions.AT: Kills SubjectivityBronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 22-3)Critical theorists and postmodernists miss the point when they view Enlightenment intellectuals in general and scientists in particular as simple apostles of reification. They actually constituted its most consistent enemy. The philosophes may not have grasped the commodity form, but they empowered people by challenging superstitions and dogmas that left them mute and helpless against the whims of nature and the injunctions of tradition. Enlightenment thinkers were justified in understanding knowledge as inherently improving humanity. Infused with a sense of furthering the public good, liberating the individual from the clutches of the invisible and inexplicable, the Enlightenment idea of progress required what the young Marx later termed “the ruthless critique of everything existing.” This regulative notion of progress was never inimical to subjectivity. Quite the contrary: progress became meaningful only with reference to real living individuals. Enlightenment thinking did not mechanically identify progress with the chronological passing of time or, usually, mere technological development. It was instead always seen as entailing a moral commitment to expanding self-awareness and the possibilities for exercising judgment. This was as true for Immanuel Kant, who viewed progress from the standpoint of the species, as for Moses Mendelssohn, who identified it with the increasing capacities for self-reflection by the individual. Both saw the root of progress in the growing possibilities for criticism and the development of human capacities. Progress thus became the rallying cry for attacking the privileges and dogma associated with the status quo. It was undoubtedly what led Diderot to exclaim that freedom would only be realized when the last aristocrat had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The outburst was revealing but so were the words of Tom Paine who probably best expressed the general position of the philosophes when he noted in 1795 that “the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man, neither has one generation a property in the generations that are to follow.” To be sure, from the beginning, “progress” was open to perversion. It was capable of being projected back into the past, thereby justifying the exploitation of those considered lower on the evolutionary scale, and it could be identified with an escalator that moves society ever upward. The idea was always in danger of becoming regimented and stripped of its critical character. But it is absurd to doubt the fundamentally liberating vision with which the notion of progress should remain associated. It always projected a world perhaps best described in The Future of Progress by Condorcet who so avidly hoped that one day: . . . the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason: when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments, will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses; and to learn how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear amongst us. AT: Progress and Determinism – Political Engagement GoodBronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 35-8)This insight concerning the impact of society on individuals was rendered more concrete by Hegel, who noted that the subject is socialized by the particular interaction of institutions like the family, civil society, and the state as well as a culture primarily defined by religion, art, and philosophy. Interrogating the legitimacy of the traditions associated with each of these spheres, which itself requires the exercise of liberty, alone makes further progress possible. Progress will therefore exhibit itself differently in different realms of theory and practice. Scientific progress, for example, is irreversible: discoveries cannot be retracted and, in the information age, they cannot even remain concealed. Cultural progress or “civilization”, by contrast, is reversible: barbarism can obviously follow a period of cultural flowering or democratic development. In the realm of aesthetics, moreover, progress need not exist at all: there is no reason to believe, for example, that Shakespeare is “better” than Sophocles. “Progress” in one arena can be accompanied by regression in another. The lack of fit between different spheres of theory and practice is what renders contingency, or the historical expression of freedom, concrete: history thereby resists the imperatives of both functionalism and reductionism. Nevertheless, this same lack of fit between spheres of activity creates a disharmony within society that, when internalized by the individual, can be understood as alienation. Progress is nonsynchronous.50 Equating it with harmony, or some allencompassing category, militates against its concrete character. Hegel was always aware of that. He identified progress with the ability to differentiate between phenomena and the corresponding ability of the mind to provide an increasingly complex set of categories to make sense of an increasingly complex reality. Each moment of the totality was seen as retaining its own unique dynamic (Eigendynamik). Hegel also knew better than anyone that the “end of history,” which he identified with a form of “multiplicity in unity,” would produce neither peace nor fulfillment. War would remain on the horizon as would solitude, illness, and the contradiction between the finality of individual existence and the infinite character of social development. The great philosopher sensed that the harmonious conclusion of history, the unity of subject and object, would never take place: he knew that the dark cloud of alienation would never dissolve into a bright blue sky. With the division of labor, the lack of fit between different spheres of social life, history could only be understood as working behind the back of individuals: thus the limit of the enlightenment notion of progress is reached. That the actions of individuals are reconfigured by society, that consequences turn against intentions, was already apparent in the medieval idea of the “hidden hand” which, when not applied to the supposedly nefarious activities of the Jews,51 was seen as providing the unseen harmony underly- ing the apparent discord of the world. This view anticipated the famous “invisible hand” of Adam Smith and Mandeville, which seemed to assure market equilibrium between supply and demand, but which actually pointed to the basic moral problem of capitalist society: how can private selfishness be transformed into public virtue?52 Hegel and Marx provided their own solutions to the problem. Envisioning the proletariat as the subject-object of history, however, was as illusory as pointing to the “cunning of reason” employed by the World Spirit. Harmony will never exist between humanity and its works: the relation between them can only prove asymptotic. Introducing the “invisible hand” already suggested that the “individual” and unmitigated self-interest, while the starting point for the classical liberal understanding of the market, are insufficient for explaining its actual functioning. The same can be said of “society”: introducing social processes, while philosophically excluding the individuals that sustain them, only reinforces alienation from a different perspective. Thus, while romantic thinkers of the counter-enlightenment like Carlyle would focus on the “heroic” individual— who manipulates history through the sheer power of his will—positivists would abolish subjectivity by reducing ideas and lived lives to particular social interests or processes. Will, subjectivity, and particularity thereby squared off against the determinism, objectivity, and universality. In reality, however, they are flip sides of the same coin. Just as rigidly deterministic forms of system building obviate the need for political intervention by real individuals, from the opposite perspective, privileging experiential freedom and the will undermines the importance of thinking about social processes and institutional constraints. Progress requires situating the individual within a context and fostering the ability to discriminate between those constraints that are necessary and those that are not: the implicit injunction to contest atavistic restraints on personal freedom is precisely what renders progress “political.” The question whether judgment and resistance are legitimate helped produce the great divide between the Enlightenment and its critics who bemoaned the hubris of those without cultural “niveau” and the manner in which the organic community and its “fine draperies of life” were being torn asunder. Not the advocates of reason, individualism, and equality, but their critics deserve to be charged with elitism. The philosophes were far less concerned with protecting the cultural inheritance of an aristocratic past than contesting prejudices, insisting upon reforms, envisioning new institutions, and sometimes even promulgating revolutions. AT: Liberalism/Enlightenment is TotalitarianBronner 4(Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 39-40)Enlightenment thinkers were not utopians with totalitarian inclinations, but realists who understood the costs of progress. Their optimism was tempered by their pessimism concerning the ability of the powerful to exercise power prudently: this indeed led them to insist upon the separation of powers, checks and balances, institutional accountability, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law. Their concern with furthering human happiness was informed by the difficulty, the intractability, of society with its vested interests. But this very insight enabled them to shift the cause of human misery from the classical notion of fate or the religious notion of original sin to society and the impact of ignorance, prejudice, authoritarianism, and inequality.55 It also led the most sober among them to reject teleological sophistries and insist upon the need for political actors to offer a plausible connection between means and ends. The Enlightenment was left only with the modest comfort that knowledge of the past—of the way in which power was exercised, the institutions through which it was exercised, and the norms that justified its exercise—would put people in a better position to judge the present. This indeed was what Lord Bolingbroke meant when, anticipating Hegel and Santayana, he wrote that: “history is philosophy teaching by example.” Easy enough to criticize the pretensions of “progress,” but without it the prospect for determining any liberating notion of social change vanishes.56 Walter Benjamin was surely correct when he noted that there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism. But this only begs the question: what is the degree to which any such document expresses the civilized in contrast to the barbaric and how is it possible to distinguish the one from that of another. Progress enables us to differentiate between ideologies and policies, expose the limits of each, and illuminate the interests they serve. It need not become enmeshed in utopian dogma or condone what Kierkegaard termed the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” But it must reject the romantic yearning for simplicity, the organic, and the traditional. Progress shows its value when confronting the new existential and practical problems that history presents. It receives expression in the refinement of human sentiments: the disgust caused by cruelty to the infirm, to animals, to the weak, and the downtrodden. Progress appears in the growing recognition that there is something wrong with the arbitrary exercise of power and that there is something legitimate about contesting it. The Enlightenment showed how progress can both foster critique and serve a productive function. That is perhaps its greatest legacy. 57 The Enlightenment idea of progress militated against closure and perfection. It existed as a possibility, never a certainty, and—until Hegel—it lacked ontological foundations. Progress was always coupled with an attack on the refusal to judge change in terms of the freedom it might provide. That change is endless and that freedom can never be fully achieved does not invalidate progress. Quite the contrary: it renders the idea more important than ever.Policy GoodNeoliberalismPolicy Debate Good - NeoliberalismParticipating in policy debates is the only way to effectively challenge neoliberalism. Alternatives to policy debate will degenerate into reactionary backlash.Massey 2009 (Doreen Massey is Professor of Geography at the Open University, “Invention and Hard Work”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pp. 136-7)Writing now, at the end of the first decade of a new millennium, it is difficult for those of us who lived through it not to think back to another decade when much of what is now crashing to the ground was first established in its dominance. The 1980s, that epochal decade, of Thatcherism and Ronald Reagan, of the establishment of a new dispensation in which individualism and competition, finance and financialisation, privatisation and commercialisation were hammered home as the only possible ways of being in a ‘modern’ economy and society. There are many reasons, now, to ponder that earlier moment. A first is to appreciate the profundity and complexity of the changes it involved. This was not just the establishment as dominant of a new way of running an economy (‘neo-liberalism’, as it has come to be known in short), but the intimate colonising of society by a new common sense. This was, as we can see now, the establishment of a new hegemony and the whole nature of hegemonies is that they come to dominate in such a way that they infiltrate our brains and our imaginations, structure our intuitive understandings of the world, so that we fail to see that there might indeed be ‘alternatives’. A second reason, then, to recall the 1980s is that, precisely because of how deep it goes, we can easily forget just how brief and recent has been the dominance of what popular discourse now takes to be natural. This self-evident common sense is only thirty years old. Moreover, and a third reason to remember, the establishment of what now seems natural did not take place without the fiercest of fights (from battles over the governance of cities, to the miners’ strike in the UK, from Chile to Nicaragua . . .). So it is a relatively short-lived phenomenon, this neo-liberal hegemony, and it was not set in place without a struggle. All this should give us hope. Moreover, the ‘victory’ was never complete. Both within its heartlands, in the USA and the UK, and elsewhere around the globe, there have continued to be resistances to its terms, the imagination of alternatives and concrete demonstrations of other ways of living in a society. And now, quite suddenly, that settlement is dislocated and on the defensive; economically the whole house of cards is tumbling down.We are now witness to the (potential) implosion, in some senses, of the era which that moment of the 1980s inaugurated. The financial system is facing collapse, the wider economy is facing recession and probably depression and slump. For a host of different proximate reasons (and yet which are connected) people are out on the streets protesting, across Europe and beyond. As I write, there are strikes and mobilisations in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Could it be that this is another epochal moment? At best, it is only potentially so. One question, one task, maybe one definition, of radical politics today, is how we can help and enable the release of this potential. This is a necessary task. If it is not addressed then the danger is that we shall return to the situation as before; that nothing fundamental will be changed. That there will be no challenge to the credit culture, or to the mechanisms that produce such inequality both within countries and between them, or to the mode of environmentally costly growth, or to the nature of ‘growth’ itself and the assumption that, whatever form it takes, growth is necessarily a good thing. Worse, the sufferings and discontents inflicted upon different groups and communities, and the protests in which they result, could all too easily degenerate into (and indeed be pushed into degenerating into) a reactionary backlash of parochialism and mutual antagonism, in which the voices saying ‘no’ end up only in fighting each other. One thing that can be done, certainly, to avoid such dismal outcomes, is to contribute actively and positively to the ‘policy’ debate within our own political constituencies and geographical areas. Although it is difficult to learn about them from the usual establishment debates and media outlets, there is in fact a huge plethora of proposals for alternative ways out of this crisis. Just within the UK and European-wide debates there is, for instance, the Green New Deal (New Economics Foundation, 2008), the alternative plan for agriculture coming out through the Soil Association, the arguments against secrecy and (corporate and personal) tax-avoidance, and the proposals for new rules and new geographies of tax, from the Tax Justice Campaign, and the proposals for a different kind of European economy put forward by the EuroMemorandum Group. There are many more. And indeed one thing that is immediately necessary is a conversation between them. They are all carefully thought-through and utterly ‘practical’. What they lack is popular currency and political voice. State Good – NeoliberalismPowerlessness is not a static concept. Policy debate can allow us to reframe the state to become a force to challenge neoliberalism.Sassen 2009 (Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, “The Potential for a Progressive State?”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 263-4)Accepting that my argument may seem uncomfortable for many of those who call themselves ‘radical’, in this chapter I argue for the importance of the state as a potentially positive force for change.1 I start with some preliminary remarks on the nature of ‘power’, as this is naturally important for debates in radical politics today. Power is made, and hence can be unmade. The work of making power varies across time and space. And so does the success, effectiveness and durability of this work of making. This means also that powerlessness is constructed. Powerlessness is not simply the absence of power or mere victimhood, as is so often believed. Hence it is variable rather than fixed. From there, then, comes the possibility that powerlessness can range from elementary to complex. This variability does not simply depend on the characteristics of individuals: the settings also matter. For instance, the powerlessness of a specific undocumented immigrant will be quite elementary in the context of a California commercial farm but can become complex in a city like New York or Los Angeles. In that complexity of powerlessness lies the possibility of a politics. Here I examine one particular aspect of a larger project that seeks to recode power and powerlessness (Sassen, 2008a, 2008b). It is the fact that corporate economic globalisation is far more dependent on national states and national spaces than the typical arguments in the globalisation scholarship allow for. This is one way of researching the limits of power, in this case, corporate global power. The work of national states has been far more important than is usually recognised. Much has been said about the USA and the UK as the key states producing the design for the new standards and legalities needed to ensure protections and guarantees for global firms and markets.2 But here it is important to emphasise that the imposed ‘consensus’ in the community of states to further globalisation is not merely a political decision: it entails specific types of work by a large number of distinct state institutions in each of the 150 plus countries that have joined (willingly or not) the global economy. Legislative items, executive orders, adherence to new technical standards, and so on, will have to be produced through the particular institutional and political structures of each state. All these states worked at it, and in that process installed global logics deep inside their national institution. Precisely because of this, I see a possible radical politics in using state capacities for a politics not only of resistance, but of remaking without the violence of armed conflict, without war. I argue that neo-liberal globalisation has, ironically, forced specific state institutions to learn how to do global work and has produced a particular type of state authority and power, one geared to global projects. States have historically been nationalist. One challenge for a radical politics today is to get states to redeploy that learning and that particular type of power towards the pursuit of alternative global projects – towards an alternative globalisation. We need to push states to use that learning and emergent global power for projects aiming at social justice and human security in its many different settings. It will take political action to get states to reorient their international work away from the corporate global economy and from war. These global agendas include eliminating economic violence, strengthening human rights, protecting the environment, fighting racisms and intolerance. None of these is likely to be achieved fully. But we can do better with our massive resources. The world need not be this grim. Any working state is a complex organisation with major capacities to handle an enormous variety of challenges and disparate political alignments. Not even the richest corporation is as complex a capability as a working state. Pity that just about most states are in the hand of regressive forces when it comes to the larger agendas that would humanise the world. If we add to this organisational complexity the fact that states have shown a willingness to be more internationalist, albeit on the wrong terrain, it becomes clear that states are key actors to address our global challenges, from the environment to socially just economic development. We cannot give up on this type of capability. We need to reorient these vast organisations within each country towards addressing these urgent challenges, some of which can only be addressed through collaborations and concerted action among a majority of states. AT: Neoliberalism K (Inclusion vs Exclusion)Using the state to advocate inclusionary practices is key to undermining neoliberalism. Their analysis of neoliberalism as independent of the state is wrong.Colás and Edwards 2009 (Alejandro Colás and Jason Edwards teach International Relations and Political Science at the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London, and “Democracy, the State and Capitalism Today”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 251-3)The fundamental error of Third Way progressives was to conceive of international markets as being decoupled from state institutions and political will. Increased capital flows, operating out of the reach of states, were regarded as the driver of global social and political change. What the advocates of the Third Way failed to understand – or at least failed to appreciate the full implications of – was that it was the most powerful states that primed ‘globalisation’ and then pressed the trigger. It was states, firstly under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and then Ronald Reagan in the USA, who unleashed globalisation by deregulating financial and labour markets. Globalisation was promoted through the international financial institutions of the Bretton Woods system – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – whose executives came to be dominated by state appointees versed in the shibboleths of free-market economics. At bottom, globalisation was a political phenomenon driven by the most powerful states in the international system, and principally by the USA. Like all previous expansions of trade and commerce in the modern world, it was led by the projection of domestic state power onto the international system. Colonialism and imperialism may not be exactly the right words to express the spread of neo-liberalism, but they are not too far away. The second model of Leftist politics in recent times (though ‘model’ might be too strong) involves the often nebulous movements and ideas that have been seen to fall under the umbrella of ‘alter-globalisation’. In general, alter-globalisation thinkers have been right to reject the notion that neo-liberal globalisation represents the Holy Grail of the end of history, and tend to view it as a political project crafted and implemented by powerful political and economic elites. Yet like proponents of the Third Way, many supporters of alter-globalisation have tended to grossly exaggerate the extent to which transnational agencies and processes have weakened state power. In the work of authors like Naomi Klein (2008), states appear as the instruments of powerful multinational corporations. Politics is reduced to the interests of corporations, and political activism to focalised resistance to corporations and their political allies. The result is a moral fable, in which the global bad guys – the currency speculators, hedge-fund gamblers, corporate profiteers and venal politicians – hijack the state and use it in their own material interests. But while it is undoubtedly true that the interests of finance and business have exercised disproportionate leverage over governments, this is nothing particularly new. It does not follow from this leverage, as many anti-corporate, antiglobalisers seem to believe, that the most powerful states are simply in hock to the multinationals. If we want to explain what has made neoliberal globalisation possible over the past thirty years, we must look to the economic and ideological changes in states and the international system rather than assuming that what has taken place is just another corporate takeover. Real changes in the economic structure of Western states – the relative decline of Fordist heavy industry, the emergence of new, smaller but more complex manufacturing industries requiring flexible specialisation and high levels of technological investment, and an increasingly open and competitive international economy – made national economic management less viable and successful. At the same time policy-makers in advanced states, both on the Right and the Left, came to embrace the argument put forward by economists like Milton Friedman that the free market was both a more efficient and equitable means of wealth production and resource allocation. Some alter-globalisation theorists have indeed attempted to construct an analysis of the economic and ideological underpinnings of neoliberal globalisation and how it might be transformed. Probably the most famous of these efforts is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2001) book Empire. In the world today, ‘Empire’ represents a new form of decentred and deterritorialised sovereignty corresponding in turn to the widening and deepening of market influence in politics and society. Hardt and Negri famously argue that ‘There is No More Outside’ to Empire. By this they mean that social cleavages of race, gender and sexuality have become more fluid and indeterminate under Empire, undermining forms of exclusion to a specific space (the ghetto, the household or the ‘scene’), and replacing them with a ‘differential inclusion’ across different places. But Hardt and Negri assume, rather than demonstrate, this ‘flattening out’ of global social relations, thereby paradoxically mirroring the neoliberal utopia of a placeless, unmediated capitalist market. At the same time, their claim that Empire creates its own grave-diggers in the form of an amorphous and elusive ‘Multitude’ is pure fantasy. It speaks little to the practical political strategies that the progressive Left will need to implement at the level of states and the international system if it is to expand and deepen radical democracy in the future. The Third Way and the discourse and ideology of alter-globalisation are inextricably linked to the fortunes of the neo-liberal project. They will likely share in its failure. What models of radical politics might we look to, then, to consider how progressives can shape the world in the wake of the current crisis of capitalism? The biggest threat and obstacle to radical democracy today is not the state per se but the ‘self-regulating’ international markets that the most powerful states have supported over the last thirty years. These markets have privatised public space and have further empowered unaccountable economic and political elites. The most radical expressions of progressive politics today are those that seek to challenge these elites through the democratic (re)appropriation of public space and political and economic decision-making. CapitalismState Good – Cap KUnderstanding state trade policies is essential to understanding global capitalism. To ignore the state misses its role in promoting global capital.Sassen 2009 (Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, “The Potential for a Progressive State?”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 265)The most common interpretation in the literature on globalisation is that citizens and states have lost power confronted with global firms and global finance.3 But in my work I have researched the multiple ways in which even the most powerful global firms and financial exchanges actually need particular agencies and capacities of states in order to develop, implement and guarantee a range of conditions and protections (Sassen, 2008a: chapter 5). You would not know that when reading most of the globalisation texts. Rarely do those texts mention, for instance, that there is no such legal persona as a global firm; there is not even a legal entity such as a European firm, even though the EU is well-positioned to develop such a persona. Yet we know there are firms that conduct themselves as if such a legal persona existed. What enables this? It is the hard and politically contentious work of state after state around the world to make a space for foreign firms inside each nation state where these firms can conduct themselves as if they were global. One way of describing this state work is as an active denationalising of particular institutional settings – by which I mean not a privatising but literally a denationalising of what has historically been constructed as national, a condition that cannot simply be subsumed under the global. Providing such a denationalised space for foreign firms is often at the cost of destroying their national firms and markets. I am interested in capturing this dependence of powerful firms on state work so as to mark the limits of their power, the new kinds of power that accrue to the national state, and, importantly, that states have learnt to act together internationally, without much negotiating, towards a single aim. Thus I argue that particular parts of the state have actually gained power because of globalisation (Sassen, 2008a: chapter 4). This goes against the prevalent notion that states have lost power; certain components of national states have lost much ground, notably legislatures and state agencies linked to the social wage and broad welfare functions benefiting the working and middle classes. But for the possibility of the kind of radical politics I am positing here, it is important to emphasise the growing power of ministries of finance, central banks and the executive (and, in some cases, judiciary) branch of government: these have done the state work necessary to secure a global capital market, a global trading system, the needed competition policies, and so on. State Good - CapitalismAbandoning the state makes it impossible to challenge capitalism. The permutation allows a combination of strategies against capital, which is more effective than a shallow celebration of movement politics.Colás and Edwards 2009 (Alejandro Colás and Jason Edwards teach International Relations and Political Science at the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London, and “Democracy, the State and Capitalism Today”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 254-5)Clearly, such tidy distinctions between industrial and agricultural, urban and rural, temporal and spatial contexts do not obtain in reality. Many contemporary forms of progressive radicalism – from the protests against the privatisation of water and other basic utilities in Andean Latin America, to the campaigns for free and direct access to anti-retroviral drugs in southern Africa – straddle the terrain between town and country, or the primary and other economic sectors. Indeed, one of the ambitions of progressive radicalism is surely to minimise the power differentials between centre and periphery, town and country or the formal and informal economy in any given territory. The point is, rather, that radical politics today requires thinking about and articulating the spatial and temporal dimensions of democratic power. Specifically, this means harnessing the public and democratic authority invested in various branches of the sovereign territorial state to facilitate the development of democratic forms of social and economic governance as the alternative to rule by the market and unaccountable public and private bureaucracies. This is arguably what has been getting underway – not without its own serious flaws and contradictions – in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution over the past decade. Two final provisos obtain in this formulation of radical politics today. First, such public and democratic authority must always have an explicitly internationalist component. Progressive radicalism cannot afford to uncritically celebrate political community or cultural identity – these are powerful mobilising structures but they are neither natural nor immutable, and can, as already noted, readily be instrumentalised by conservative and reactionary forces. Moreover, any viable radicalism must always carry with it an implicit universalism – a sense, as conveyed by the foreign policy of revolutionary states through the centuries, that democratic solidarity never stops at the borders of a given polity. Second, and following on from this, different political communities will identify different political priorities in their struggles for substantive democracy. A radical universalism can thus also ill afford the artificial homogenisation of political programmes in different parts of the world. Capitalist markets, no less than other social structures, have given specific character to inequality, injustice, oppression and violence in different parts of the world. It is therefore always up to those at the point of struggles for radical democracy to collectively decide which specific combination of political objectives and organisational form best responds to their political predicament at any given time. State Good – Agencies/Policymaking Solves Neolib/CapWe need to advocate using specific government agencies and policies in order to challenge the interest of global capital. Incremental action can begin now, we shouldn’t wait for the alternative.Sassen 2009 (Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, “The Potential for a Progressive State?”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 265-6)Secondly, in detecting this type of ‘internationalist’ state work to set up a global corporate economy, and by inference the possibility of regearing state work towards higher order goals for the common good, I am also arguing against the prevalent notion in globalisation texts that the global and the national are mutually exclusive. Even if many components of each, the national and the global, are separate and mutually exclusive, I argue that this still leaves a specific set of conditions or components that deborders this dualism. One key implication of the fact that the concerted action of national states to enable the growth of a global corporate economy has taken place through particular parts of national states, is that developing novel, more enlightened forms of state internationalism can begin through the work of specific state parts, such as environment and development agencies and legislatures and courts; having an enlightened president or prime minister can help enormously, given the vast structural power increase of the executive branch of government over the last twenty years. But the main point I am trying to make is that this political project can start through the work of specific parts of the state; it is not dependent on first reorienting state work in toto, which would seem an almost impossible task without a French, American or Russian style classical revolution. We can start working on it now. Thirdly, one key implication is that this new type of internationalist power of national states can become a structural bridge for citizens, who are today still largely confined to the national for maximising their rights and powers, to do global politics from inside the national. A critical point in the larger project (Sassen, 2008a: chapters 6–8) is that citizens can fight for an alternative globalisation using national instruments (besides existing international instruments, such as the International Criminal Court, global civil society organisations, and so on). To do global politics they need not wait for some putative global state – an unlikely development – nor are they confined to work through the supranational system where states are the dominant actors and much of the agenda is regressive (e.g. WTO and IMF policy goals). But this option to do global politics from inside the national requires active making, including reorienting the work of states and the making of new types of global jurisdictions. Critical to the type of radical politics I think is possible using the capacities of states is whether this specific type of state power that has emerged can in fact extend to global domains beyond the global corporate economy – such as the environment, human rights, socially just economic development – and be used to contain rather than promote the powers of global economic corporate actors. AT: State BadTheir claim that the state is always bad prevents us from using the power of the state for positive global agendas. If we don’t engage the state, it will only promote global capitalism.Sassen 2009 (Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, “The Potential for a Progressive State?”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 269-70)These post-1980s trends towards a greater interaction of national and global dynamics are not part of some unidirectional historical progression. There have been times in the past when they may have been as strong in certain aspects as they are today (Sassen, 2008a: chapter 3). But the current positioning of national states is distinctive precisely because the national state has become the most powerful complex organisational entity in the world, and because it is a resource that citizens, confined largely to the national, can aim at governing and using to develop novel political agendas. It is this mix of the national and the global that is so full of potential. The national state is one particular form of state: at the other end of this variable the state can be conceived of as a technical administrative capability that could escape the historic bounds of narrow nationalisms that have marked the state historically, or colonialism as the only form of internationalism that states have enacted. Stripping the state of the particularity of this historical legacy gives me more analytic freedom in conceptualising these processes and opens up the possibility of the denationalised state. As particular components of national states become the institutional home for the operation of some of the dynamics that are central to globalisation they undergo change that is difficult to register or name. In my own work I have found useful the notion of an incipient denationalising of specific components of national states, i.e. components that function as such institutional homes. The question for research then becomes what is actually ‘national’ in some of the institutional components of states linked to the implementation and regulation of economic globalisation. The hypothesis here would be that some components of national institutions, even though formally national, are not national in the sense in which we have constructed the meaning of that term over the last hundred years. This partial, often highly specialised or at least particularised, denationalisation can also take place in domains other than that of economic globalisation, notably the more recent developments in the human rights regime which allow national courts to sue foreign firms and dictators, or which grant undocumented immigrants certain rights. Denationalisation is, thus, multivalent: it endogenises global agendas of many different types of actors, not only corporate firms and financial markets, but also human rights and environmental objectives. Those confined to the national can use national state institutions as a bridge into global politics. This is one kind of radical politics, and only one kind, that would use the capacities of hopefully increasingly denationalised states. The existence and the strengthening of global civil society organisations becomes strategic in this context. In all of this lie the possibilities of moving towards new types of joint global action by denationalised states – coalitions of the willing focused not on war but on environmental and social justice projects. Perm Solves Cap K (AT: Every Instance)Their claim about rejecting capitalism in every instance prevents the development of effective challenges to capitalism. The permutation is the best option.Soja 2009 (Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Resistance after the Spatial Turn”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 71-2)There are many continuities with the past that can be found in the restructuring-generated crises that began in the late 1980s, multiplied in the 1990s anti-globalisation riots, exploded in frustration on 11 September 2001 and crashed contagiously in 2008, but the main point I am making here is that the accumulated differences have become much greater than the continuities today. One might have understood a great deal of what was happening in the world thirty years ago by recalling Marx’s inspiring critiques of capitalism and insightful explanations of why capitalism globalises, but to depend heavily upon them today would be much less helpful and potentially misleading. This magnifies the need for innovative new forms of radical politics. Developing these new forms needs to begin with a depolarisation of radical theories and practices, especially those that revolve around an absolute or categorical choice, such as that between capitalism and socialism. More than ever before, this is not a simple either/or choice, but is increasingly a matter of combining both and demanding something more. Expressed differently, the primary focus of radical politics today is to make capitalism as socialist as we can rather than demanding pure socialism or, for that matter, pure capitalism (neither of which is ever likely to work). Pushing radical politics further in this combinatorial direction is the demand that the mixture of socialist capitalism creates new hybrid forms that even more vigorously promote social, economic, and, as I will explain below, spatial justice and democracy. Depolarisation also opens up the possibility if not the necessity of being only partially Marxist in one’s political perspective. To insist on either 100 per cent allegiance or total rejection of Marxism is to strangle nearly all possibilities for radical change today. AT: Orthodox MarxismOrthodox Marxism does not adequately explain the current economic crisis, we need to be open to new strategies beyond the simple rejection of capitalism.Soja 2009 (Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Resistance after the Spatial Turn”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 69-70)Radical politics changed dramatically in 2009. No matter what Barack Obama does in office, his election removed the easy target supplied by the arrogant imperialism and neo-conservative excesses of the Bush- Cheney regime, while the global financial meltdown that helped Obama win provided a new easy target, the possibility that the end of capitalism, or at the very least of its neo-liberal variant, is near. Whatever happens in the aftermath of these epochal events, radical politics today is shifting its focus, moving away from an all-embracing anti-neo-liberalism towards a renewed hope that radical change is possible. Although they have been around a long time, two diverging streams of radical political thought are becoming more clearly defined in these changing times. One tends to see the events of 2008 as a confirmation of core Marxist theories of the anarchy of capitalist production, the destructive consequences of greed-driven competitive behaviour, and the almost inevitable tendency for crises to emerge after long periods of expansive and super-exploitative growth. Believing that these persistent continuities with the past significantly outweigh all that is new and different in the present, the resurgent traditionalists see radical anti-capitalist politics as usual, modified perhaps to give greater emphasis to environmental and a few other issues, as the obvious and necessary response. Reinforcing this reaction is an undercurrent of I-told-you-so confidence. A different political stream, one that I will follow more closely here, calls for greater flexibility, openness to diverse views, and cautious optimism. For this group, the events of 2008 do not affirm traditional Marxist arguments as much as they demand innovative departures, a search for new modes of radical political action that can more effectively take advantage of the opportunities the current situation provides. Continuities with the past persist, but the contemporary capitalist world economy is so different from what it was just twenty years ago that to react as if conditions are the same as they were is not likely to lead to significant results. Backing this view is the unusual nature and timing of the current financial crisis. It is not the familiar crisis of capitalism that follows a long period of expansionary boom, as happened in the Great Depression and after the series of urban, oil, and other crises in the 1960s and early 1970s. It is much more like the period of intense instability and unpredictable change that have marked the end of a prolonged period of restructuring and reconfiguration. Over-accumulation, under-consumption, or simple falling rate of profit models do not get us very far into what is happening today. The crisis now is a product of a very different kind of capitalism than existed thirty years ago, a new variant of capitalism that has taken shape from the accelerated globalisation of capital, labour, and urban industrial culture; and the new technology-fed transition from Fordist mass production and mass consumerism to more flexible, post-Fordist, and information-intensive economic systems. This suggests that radical politics, rather than smugly speaking of some culminating last stage of capitalist development, needs to build upon a deeper understanding of the current restructuring-generated crisis and its distinctive and different dynamics and contradictions, many of which do not fit powerful Marxist orthodoxies. Particularly unusual today is the behaviour of finance capital. Throughout the history of urban industrial capitalism, finance capital working with the state has served a disciplinary and regulatory function, reacting to problems of over-production, under-consumption and inefficiency. Over the past thirty years, with the rise of neo-liberal states and policies, it has not just lost much of its traditional regulatory function, it has formed itself into a propulsive and profitable centre. Cap K - Policy Understanding KeyNeoliberal reforms were driven by economists better persuaded policymakers. Democracy advocates need to learn to speak to political authorities.Spence 4(Matthew Spence, Political Science at Yale and PhD in International Relations from Oxford, “Policy Coherence and Incoherence: The Domestic Politics of American Democracy Promotion”, Workshop on Democracy Promotion at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, October 4-5, 2004, )The final shared belief, for both the Clinton and first Bush administrations, identified a causal mechanism: markets build democracy. It is ironic that some claim Russia as an example of the failure of simultaneous economic and political transition, because American policymakers thought that economic reforms had to come first. Take the makeup of U.S. assistance spending. One quarter of U.S. obligations to the former U.S.SR went to private sector development, economic restructuring, and market reform, five times than that spent on democracy assistance programs. U.S. diplomats reported that energy on the ground followed the money. More striking was how many U.S. policymakers seemed to consider U.S. influence on economic reforms more “legitimate” than offering advice about an equivalent “political shock therapy.” To be sure, America’s brand of economic reforms reflected a clear ideological bent: downsize labor, cut government budgets, and rollback government services. But, compared to democracy promotion, U.S. policymakers instead acted as if their economic advice was less about pushing American national interests than about merely explaining a scientific reality, like the laws of physics. Why did U.S. policymakers emphasize economic reform in this way? There were several reasons. First, many U.S. policymakers held the prevailing assumption that markets were a precondition for democracy. The “end of history” embrace of “market democracy” reigned in the 1990s, and the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan, and China’s economic success over the Soviet Union only appeared to give empirical support to the proposition economic change had to come beofre political change. 15 As several U.S. policymakers later reflected, it was an ironically Marxist logic. Second, compared to those favoring political change first, articulate economists who favored shock therapy in the U.S. government offered a purportedly tested plan to put to work immediately. 16 Knowledge gave the economists policymaking power. In part due to this claim of expertise over economics, the Treasury Department was also the U.S. government’s gatekeeper to the biggest pot of resources in democracy promotion—billions of dollars in IMF and World Bank loans. Third, key Russians seemed to want economic change first. Yeltsin’s advisors both publicly introduced plans for major economic change first, and American diplomats in Moscow in the early 1990s recalled that the Russians asked for advice about economic reforms far more than about any political restructuring. Finally, emphasizing economic transformation helped build domestic political support for U.S. assistance, in that liberalizing post-Soviet markets promised opportunities for American business and helped persuade Congress to pony up money for assistance programs. Those who pushed for alternative policies – either for a stronger social safety net to accompany economic reform, or “political shock therapy” of quickly strengthening democratic institutions – did not have the same bureaucratic power as those stressing economic change first. 17 GenderPolitics Good – Gender, Cap, DemocracyFocus on democratic politics is key to building a feminist understanding of citizenship and community. Failure to embrace politics cedes the debate about citizenship and democracy to a non-democratic, capitalist and masculinist interpretation of the state.Dietz 87 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )Like Offred in The Handmaid's Tale, we Americans live in reduced circumstances, politically speaking. How we understand ourselves as citizens has little to do with the democratic norms and values I have just defended, and it is probably fair to say that most Americans do not think of citizenship in this way at all. We seem hypnotized by a liberal conception of citizenship as rights, an unremitting consumerism that we confuse with freedom, and a capitalist ethic that we take as our collective identity.36 Sheldon Wolin has noted that in the American political tradition there exist two "bodies" within the historic "body of the people" - a collectivity informed by democratic practices on the one hand and a collectivity informed by an antidemocratic political economy on the other.37 The latter is a "liberal capitalist citizenship" that has emerged triumphant today. Truly democratic practices have nearly ceased to be a part of politics in the United States. They exist only on the margins. More disturbing still, I think, even the memory of these practices seems to elude our collective imagination. As Hannah Arendt puts it, citizenship is the "lost treasure" of American political life. What I want to argue is that we may yet recover the treasure. We may be able to breathe new life into the peoples' other "body"- into our democratic "selves." This prospect brings us back to feminism, which I think is a potential source for our political resuscitation. Feminism has been more than a social cause; it has been a political movement with distinctive attributes. Throughout its second wave in America, the movement has been informed by democratic organization and practice -by spontaneous gatherings and marches, diverse and multitudinous action groups, face-to-face assemblies, consensus decision making, nonhierarchical power structures, open speech and debate.38 That is, embodied within the immediate political past of feminism in this country are forms of freedom that are far more compatible with the "democratic body" of the American experience than with the liberal-capitalist one.39 These particular feminist forms are, potentially at least, compatible with the idea of collective, democratic citizenship on a wider scale. I say "potentially" because feminists must first transform their own democratic practices into a more comprehensive theory of citizenship before they can arrive at an alternative to the nondemocratic liberal theory. Feminist political practice will not in some automatic way become an inspiration for a new citizenship. Instead, feminists must become self-conscious political thinkers- defenders of democracy- in a land of liberalism. To be sure, this task is neither easy nor short-term, but it is possible for feminists to undertake it in earnest because the foundation is already set in the movement's own experiences, in its persistent attention to issues of power, structure, and democracy, and in the historical precedent of women acting as citizens in the United States.40 A warning is in order, however. What a feminist defense of democracy must at all costs avoid is the temptation of "womanism." To turn to "women of the republic" and to feminist organization for inspiration in articulating democratic values is one thing; it is quite another to conclude that therein lies evidence of women's "superior democratic nature" or of their "more mature" political voice. A truly democratic defense of citizenship cannot afford to launch its appeal from a position of gender opposition and women's superiority. Such a premise would posit as a starting point precisely what a democratic attitude must deny- that one group of citizens' voices is generally better, more deserving of attention, more worthy of emulation, more moral, than another's. A feminist democrat cannot give way to this sort of temptation, lest democracy itself lose its meaning, and citizenship its special nature. With this in mind, feminists would be well advised to secure the political defense of their theory of democratic citizenship not only in their own territory but also in the diversity of other democratic territories historical and contemporary, male and female. We might include the townships and councils of revolutionary America, the populist National Farmers Alliance, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the soviets of the Russian Revolution, the French political clubs of 1789, the Spanish anarchist affinity groups, the KOR (Workers' Defense Com mittee) in Poland, the "mothers of the disappeared ones" in Argentina, and so on. In short, the aim of this political feminism is to remember and bring to light the many examples of democratic practices already in existence and to use these examples as inspiration for a form of political life that would challenge the dominant liberal one.41 What this aim requires is not only a feminist determination to avoid "womanism" while remaining attentive to women but also a commitment to the activity of citizenship, which includes and requires the participation of men. AT: Democracy = Liberal ExclusionWe need engagement with the state to develop a mode of feminist citizenship – rejecting democracy only entrenches exclusionDietz 87 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )My basic point is a straightforward one: for a vision of citizenship, feminists should turn to the virtues, relations, and practices that are expressly political and, more exactly, participatory and democratic. What this requires, among other things, is a willingness to perceive politics in a way neither liberals nor maternalists do: as a human activity that is not necessarily or historically reducible to representative government or "the arrogant, male, public realm." By accepting such judgments, the feminist stands in danger of missing a valuable alternative conception of politics that is historically concrete and very much a part of women's lives. That conception is perhaps best called the democratic one, and it takes politics to be the collective and participatory engagement of citizens in the determination of the affairs of their community. The community may be the neighborhood, the city, the state, the region, or the nation itself. What counts is that all matters relating to the community are undertaken as "the people's affair." From a slightly different angle, we might understand democracy as the form of politics that brings people together as citizens. Indeed, the power of democracy rests in its capacity to transform the individual as teacher, trader, corporate executive, child, sibling, worker, artist, friend, or mother into a special sort of political being, a citizen among other citizens. Thus, democracy offers us an identity that neither liberalism, with its propensity to view the citizen as an individual bearer of rights, nor maternalism, with its attentiveness to mothering, provides. Democracy gives us a conception of ourselves as "speakers of words and doers of deeds" mutually participating in the public realm. To put this another way, the democratic vision does not legitimize the pursuit of every separate, individual interest or the transformation of private into public virtues. Insofar as it derives its meaning from the collective and public engagement of peers, it sees citizens neither as wary strangers (as the liberal marketplace would have it) nor as "loving intimates" (as the maternalist family imagines). To return to my earlier point, democratic citizenship is a practice unlike any other; it has a distinctive set of relations, virtues, and principles all its own. Its relation is that of civic peers; its guiding virtue is mutual respect; its primary principle is the "positive liberty" of democracy and self-government, not simply the "negative liberty" of noninterference. To assume, then, that the relations that accompany the capitalist marketplace or the virtues that emerge from the intimate experience of mothering are the models for the practice of citizenship is to misperceive the distinctive characteristics of democratic political life and to misconstrue its special relations, virtues, and principles. Policy Goals Key to FeminismDietz 87 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )By this I do not mean to suggest that feminists who proceed from the question of access are doing something unhelpful or unimportant. On the contrary, by using gender as a unit of analysis, feminist scholars have revealed the inegalitarianism behind the myth of equal opportunity and made us aware of how such presumptions deny the social reality of unequal treatment, sexual discrimination, cultural stereotypes, and women's subordination both at home and in the marketplace. To the extent that this sort of gender analysis leads to positive political programs -the extension of pregnancy leaves, affirmative action plans, child-care facilities, comparable-worth wages, sexual harassment laws, health care benefits - feminists give indispensable assistance to liberal practice. Feminism – Alts to Politics FailDietz 87 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )Of course, few feminist theorists would find these remarks startling or new. Indeed, much of recent feminist thought (liberal feminism notwithstanding) has been directed toward revealing the problems a liberal political theory poses for a vision of women's liberation and human emancipation. A variety of arguments and approaches has been articulated. Some have focused on the epistemological and ontological roots of liberalism, others on its implications for an ethical understanding of personhood, still others on the assumptions that underlie its methodology.18 On the political side and with regard to the liberal theory of freedom, the role of the state, the public and the private, and capitalism and democracy, feminist critics seem to fall into two camps - the Marxists and what I will call the maternalists.19 These two camps are of primary concern in this essay because they address issues of "the good life" and, more precisely, the nature of political community. A brief look at each should suffice to bring us up to date on the feminist alternatives to the liberal conception of the citizen - alternatives that are, as I shall go on to argue, not fully satisfactory counters to the liberal view, although they provide suggestive and thought-provoking contributions to the political debate.Feminism Requires Politics, Not RejectionDietz 87 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )What are we to make of this vision of feminist citizenship? There is, I think, much to be gained from the maternalist approach, especially if we consider it within the context of the liberal and Marxist-feminist views. First, the maternalists are almost alone among other "feminisms" in their concern with the meaning of citizenship and political consciousness. Although we may disagree with their formulations, they deserve appreciation for making citizenship a matter of concern in a movement that (at least on its academic side) is too often caught up in the psychological, the literary, and the social rather than in problems of political theory that feminists must face. Second, the maternalists remind us of the inadequacy and limitations of a rights-based conception of the individual and a view of social justice as equal access. They would have us understand the dimensions of political morality in other ways and politics itself as potentially virtuous. Third, in an era when politics has on all sides become something like a swear word, the maternal feminists would have us rehumanize the way we think about political participation and recognize how, as interrelated "selves," we can strive for a more humane, relational, and shared community than our current political circumstances allow. Despite these contributions, however, much is troubling about the maternalists' conception of citizenship. It has the same problems as do all theories that hold one side of an opposition to be superior to the other. For the maternalists, women are more moral than men because they are, or can be, or are raised by, mothers and because mothering itself is necessarily and universally an affective, caring, loving activity. Leaving aside what should be the obvious and problematic logical and sociological character of these claims, suffice it to say that the maternalists stand in danger of committing precisely the same mistake they find in the liberal view. They threaten to turn historically distinctive women into ahistorical, universalized entities.32 Even more serious is the conviction of the maternalists that feminists must choose between two worlds - the masculinist, competitive, statist public and the maternal, loving, virtuous private. To choose the public world, they argue, is to fall prey to both a politics and an ethic that recapitulates the dehumanizing features of the liberal-capitalist state. To choose the private world, however, is not only to reassert the value of a "women's realm" but also to adopt a maternal ethic potentially appropriate for citizenship, a deeply moral alternative to the liberal, statist one.33 When we look to mothering for a vision of feminist citizenship, however, we look in the wrong place - or, in the language of the maternalists, to the wrong "world." At the center of the mothering activity is not the distinctive political bond among equal citizens but the intimate bond between mother and child. But the maternalist would offer us no choice in the matter: we must turn to the "intimate private" because the "statist public" is corrupt. This choice is a specious one, however. Indeed, by equating the public with statist politics and the private with the virtue of intimacy, maternalist feminism reveals itself to be closer to the liberal view than we might at first suppose. Thus it is open to much the same charge as liberalism: its conception of citizenship is informed by a flawed conception of politics as impersonal, representative government. That liberalism is content to maintain such a conception and that maternalist feminism wants to replace it with a set of prescriptions drawn from the private is not the real issue. The problem for a feminist conception is that neither of the above will do, because both leave us with a one-sided view of politics and therefore of citizenship. What we need is an entirely different conception.Process Key to FeminismDietz 87 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )The key idea here is that citizenship must be conceived of as a continuous activity and a good in itself, not as a momentary engagement (or a socialist revolution) with an eye to a final goal or a societal arrangement. This does not mean, of course, that democratic citizens do not pursue specific social and economic ends. Politics is about such things, after all, and the debates and discussions of civic peers will necessarily center on issues of social, political, and economic concern to the community. But at the same time the democratic vision is, and feminist citizenship must be, more than this. Perhaps it is best to say that this is a vision fixed not on an end but rather inspired by a principle – freedom - and by a political activity - positive liberty. That activity is a demanding process that never ends, for it means engaging in public debate and sharing responsibility for self-government. What I am pressing for, in both theory and practice, is a feminist revitalization of this activity. The reader who has followed me this far is perhaps now wondering whether I have not simply reduced feminist political conscious ness to democratic consciousness, leaving nothing in this vision of feminist citizenship for feminism itself. In concluding these reflections, let me suggest why I think the revitalization of democratic citizenship is an especially appropriate task for feminists to undertake. Although the argument can be made more generally, I will direct my remarks to feminism in the United States. State Good2nc – turns the affYes the government has flawed components but challenging our understanding of government is important and valuable through discussion of federal policies--- Learning that language allows us to confront and challenge those institutions outside of this round and resolves a lot of the impacts they discuss Hoppe, Twente University policy professor, 99[Robbert, Professor of Policy and knowledge in the Faculty of Management and Governance at Twente University “Argumentative Turn,” Science and Public Policy, volume 26, number 3, June 1999, pages 201–210]ACCORDING TO LASSWELL (1971), policy science is about the production and application of knowledge of and in policy. Policy-makers who desire to tackle problems on the political agenda successfully, should be able to mobilise the best available knowledge. This requires high-quality knowledge in policy. Policy-makers and, in a democracy, citizens, also need to know how policy processes really evolve. This demands precise knowledge of policy. There is an obvious link between the two: the more and better the knowledge of policy, the easier it is to mobilise knowledge in policy. Lasswell expresses this interdependence by defining the policy scientist's operational task as eliciting the maximum rational judgement of all those involved in policy-making. For the applied policy scientist or policy analyst this implies the development of two skills. First, for the sake of mobilising the best available knowledge in policy, he/she should be able to mediate between different scientific disciplines. Second, to optimise the interdependence between science in and of policy, she/he should be able to mediate between science and politics. Hence Dunn's (1994, page 84) formal definition of policy analysis as an applied social science discipline that uses multiple research methods in a context of argumentation, public debate [and political struggle] to create, evaluate critically, and communicate policy-relevant knowledge. Historically, the differentiation and successful institutionalisation of policy science can be interpreted as the spread of the functions of knowledge organisation, storage, dissemination and application in the knowledge system (Dunn and Holzner, 1988; van de Graaf and Hoppe, 1989, page 29). Moreover, this scientification of hitherto 'unscientised' functions, by including science of policy explicitly, aimed to gear them to the political system. In that sense, Lerner and Lasswell's (1951) call for policy sciences anticipated, and probably helped bring about, the scientification of politics. Peter Weingart (1999) sees the development of the science-policy nexus as a dialectical process of the scientification of politics/policy and the politicisation of science. Numerous studies of political controversies indeed show that science advisors behave like any other self-interested actor (Nelkin, 1995). Yet science somehow managed to maintain its functional cognitive authority in politics. This may be because of its changing shape, which has been characterised as the emergence of a post-parliamentary and post-national network democracy (Andersen and Burns, 1996, pages 227-251). National political developments are put in the background by ideas about uncontrollable, but apparently inevitable, international developments; in Europe, national state authority and power in public policy-making is leaking away to a new political and administrative elite, situated in the institutional ensemble of the European Union. National representation is in the hands of political parties which no longer control ideological debate. The authority and policy-making power of national governments is also leaking away towards increasingly powerful policy-issue networks, dominated by functional representation by interest groups and practical experts. In this situation, public debate has become even more fragile than it was. It has become diluted by the predominance of purely pragmatic, managerial and administrative argument, and under-articulated as a result of an explosion of new political schemata that crowd out the more conventional ideologies. The new schemata do feed on the ideologies; but in larger part they consist of a random and unarticulated 'mish-mash' of attitudes and images derived from ethnic, local-cultural, professional, religious, social movement and personal political experiences. The market-place of political ideas and arguments is thriving; but on the other hand, politicians and citizens are at a loss to judge its nature and quality. Neither political parties, nor public officials, interest groups, nor social movements and citizen groups, nor even the public media show any inclination, let alone competency, in ordering this inchoate field. In such conditions, scientific debate provides a much needed minimal amount of order and articulation of concepts, arguments and ideas. Although frequently more in rhetoric than substance, reference to scientific 'validation' does provide politicians, public officials and citizens alike with some sort of compass in an ideological universe in disarray. For policy analysis to have any political impact under such conditions, it should be able somehow to continue 'speaking truth' to political elites who are ideologically uprooted, but cling to power; to the elites of administrators, managers, professionals and experts who vie for power in the jungle of organisations populating the functional policy domains of post-parliamentary democracy; and to a broader audience of an ideologically disoriented and politically disenchanted citizenry.2nc – advocacy skills impactOur framework is socially productive – forcing students to assert policy solutions has tremendous research and education benefits and encourages them to become advocates for change rather than mere spectatorsJoyner, Georgetown University International Law in the Government Department Professor, 99 – [Professor of International Law in the Government Department at Georgetown University, 1999 (Christopher C., Spring, 199, 5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377, Accessed on July 5, 2013)][SP]Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team. These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policy- making, students realize that United States actions do not always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case. The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.2nc – state keyThe aff can’t alter society without confronting the state Subotnik Professor of Law, Touro College ’98 (Subotnik, Professor of Law, College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, 7 Cornell J. L. & Pub. Pol'y, 1998, QDKM)Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the strands' effect on the relationships of CRATs with each other and with outsiders. As the foregoing material suggests, the central CRT message is not simply that minorities are being treated unfairly, or even that individuals out there are in pain - assertions for which there are data to serve as grist for the academic mill - but that the minority scholar himself or herself hurts and hurts badly. An important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes into focus. What can an academic trained to [*694] question and to doubt n72 possibly say to Patricia Williams when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73 "No, you don't hurt"? "You shouldn't hurt"? "Other people hurt too"? Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly - "What do you expect when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority were perceived as having the well- being of minority groups in mind, these responses might be acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead to real conversation. But, writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned within the invisible privileges of race and power... to incorporate a sense of precarious connection as a part of our lives is... ultimately obliterating." n74 "Precarious." "Obliterating." These words will clearly invite responses only from fools and sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding objection, disconcert and disunite others. "I hurt," in academic discourse, has three broad though interrelated effects. First, it demands priority from the reader's conscience. It is for this reason that law review editors, waiving usual standards, have privileged a long trail of undisciplined - even silly n75 - destructive and, above all, self-destructive arti cles. n76 Second, by emphasizing the emotional bond between those who hurt in a similar way, "I hurt" discourages fellow sufferers from abstracting themselves from their pain in order to gain perspective on their condition. n77 [*696] Last, as we have seen, it precludes the possibility of open and structured conversation with others. n78 [*697] It is because of this conversation-stopping effect of what they insensitively call "first-person agony stories" that Farber and Sherry deplore their use. "The norms of academic civility hamper readers from challenging the accuracy of the researcher's account; it would be rather difficult, for example, to criticize a law review article by questioning the author's emotional stability or veracity." n79 Perhaps, a better practice would be to put the scholar's experience on the table, along with other relevant material, but to subject that experience to the same level of scrutiny. If through the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in limiting academic debate, why do they not have greater influence on public policy? Discouraging white legal scholars from entering the national conversation about race, n80 I suggest, has generated a kind of cynicism in white audiences which, in turn, has had precisely the reverse effect of that ostensibly desired by CRATs. It drives the American public to the right and ensures that anything CRT offers is reflexively rejected. In the absence of scholarly work by white males in the area of race, of course, it is difficult to be sure what reasons they would give for not having rallied behind CRT. Two things, however, are certain. First, the kinds of issues raised by Williams are too important in their implications [*698] for American life to be confined to communities of color. If the lives of minorities are heavily constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts and actions of the majority elements in society, it would seem to be of great importance that white thinkers and doers participate in open discourse to bring about change. Second, given the lack of engagement of CRT by the community of legal scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking place at the highest scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and, more generally, the streets and the airwaves.Radical PoliticsPolicy Debate Good – Radical PoliticsDebate about political proposals and democratic engagement is key to building alliances and support for radical politicsMassey 2009 (Doreen Massey is Professor of Geography at the Open University, “Invention and Hard Work”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pp. 138-9)Participating in building such alliances is one way of practising radical politics today. And that also emphasises a broader point. And that is the necessity to engage. If an alternative way out of this crisis is to be created, one that is radically different from what led to it, then it is necessary to catch people’s imaginations. (We desperately need more forums for discussion, more spaces of engagement.) And that in turn means listening, considering seriously why people hold what might seem to be counter-intuitive, even reactionary responses, it means tapping into those trains of thought and feeling that have been developed in the context of the common sense of the last thirty years. The means of doing this can be (must be?) manifold, from serious to fun, from painstaking argument to evocations of the absurd. But to ignore the necessity of doing it would be, quite apart from anything else, undemocratic. (And indeed, the multiplication of forms of democratic engagement must be high on the agenda.) This kind of politics, however, has to be set within a wider reimagination. The crises that the current system has run into are economic and environmental, the two being intimately linked. What faces us now, on the Left, is the question of how to turn this immense upheaval into one that is also political. How to turn it into a moment that also calls into question that cultural common sense on which it has so firmly depended (and which, to make matters more difficult, includes the bizarre notion that the economic is not, itself, a cultural formation)? You’d think this might be our moment, with banks collapsing and being ‘nationalised’, with protests erupting in a host of places. It is what we have been waiting for; it’s what we have predicted. And yet, this implosion of the system is being addressed, largely, within a narrative of the Right. For the most part, ‘they’ still have hold of the story. And thus, too, of the possible alternatives available for a way out. State Good – Radical PoliticsWe need to affirm the power of the state in order to build a radical democracy and guarantee that the transition away from neoliberal capitalism is survivable. The alternative results in fascism, exploitative forms of capitalism, and transition wars.Colás and Edwards 2009 (Alejandro Colás and Jason Edwards teach International Relations and Political Science at the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London, and “Democracy, the State and Capitalism Today”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 249-50)The second political structure which is central to the realisation of radical democracy is the state. This may at first sight appear paradoxical. Agents and institutions of the modern state have after all been responsible for some of the most heinous forms of oppression and violence in modern times. Progressive radicalism can quickly degenerate into authoritarianism and dictatorship if the state becomes the sole vehicle for defending and mobilising substantive democracy. Yet equally, without the powerful resources of the modern state – its capacity to collect and reinvest revenue; to regulate the economy and redistribute wealth; to provide for or coordinate the delivery of the necessary infrastructure in securing basic human needs – struggles for radical democracy can get stuck in the debilitating treadmill of constant protest, perpetual mobilisation and ubiquitous antagonism. This latter understanding of radical politics as ‘pure movement’ misses the critical point that the greatest contemporary obstacle to substantive democracy – capitalism – itself thrives on constant movement, on the uninterrupted process of exchange and the destabilisation of community. In contrast, the creation of an inclusive substantive democracy requires a large degree of institutional stability and continuity. The logic of capital is a fundamentally temporal one: capitalist profit derives from exchanging labour-time for a money wage; in generating future returns on current investments; in anticipating sharp movements in the money markets. The logic of radical democracy on the other hand is essentially spatial: it requires access to and redistribution of wealth generated within delimited spaces; it involves the territorial definition of a specific political community (the ‘demos’, the people); above all, it necessitates the territorial authority of the state when protecting democracy from the footloose logic of the market, or at the very least democratically harnessing the dynamics of the international capitalist market to the needs and interests of the majority of citizens in any given political community. The crisis in international financial markets that started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 highlights this fundamental tension between democratic stability and capitalist mobility. It moreover demonstrates the centrality of the state to contemporary politics and society. Capitalism has, not for the first, and probably not for the last time, been saved by the economic resources and political power of the state. And it’s already becoming evident (we write in October 2008) that the kind of capitalism emerging out of this crisis is likely to be a very different beast than that we have become used to over the last thirty years. We may therefore well be witnessing the death of neo-liberalism. Its demise presents new opportunities but also great dangers. The extent of these dangers rests largely on the severity of the economic downturn that will now inevitably follow the financial crisis. The Great Depression brought in its wake the ascendancy of extreme nationalism and fascism. The democracy of citizens and civility gave way to the democracy of blood and land. Economic protectionism, now as then, can all too readily lend itself to the promotion of national, ethnic and racial enmities. Factor into a severe economic depression conflict between states over energy resources, land and water in an era of dangerous and unpredictable climate change, and we are presented with a potentially bleak picture of the future. Of course, it may well be the case that the world escapes with a relatively minor recession. But even if so, it seems unlikely that neo-liberal voices claiming it all to be a blip will carry the day. The current crisis was a direct product of the liberalisation of international financial markets that has taken place over the last thirty years. The warning signs for the West were clearly there in the shape of the Asian crisis of 1997 and the collapse of the Argentinian economy in 2002. The Asian and Argentinian economies were bailed out by the IMF, subject to the stringencies of neoliberal structural adjustment policies. But the IMF has nothing like the resources to rescue the financial institutions of the West, and there is now no appetite in Western governments for the further deregulation of money markets demanded by the IMF in its interventions. Any governing party proposing to extend the life of the neo-liberal project after September 2008 is likely to be routed at the polls. Whether what lies ahead is minor recession, major depression, or something in between, the international political landscape is clearly changing. The progressive Left will need to figure out in the next few years where it fits into this transformed terrain. It cannot hope to learn much from itself in the last thirty years. Whether that period in its history proves to be farce or tragedy is yet to be determined. But what is now starting to stand out in relief is that the two main models of progressive politics that have come to dominate in recent years are destined to share the fate of neo-liberalism, in large measure because of their own uncritical privileging of global movement over the territorial polity in the formulation of their radicalism. Radical Politics = NVTL, ExtinctionEmancipatory politics must be methodical, incremental, and committed to process. Failure to do so in favor of a radical politics destroys value to life and risks extinction.Dietz 94 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “’THE SLOW BORING OF HARD BOARDS’: METHODICAL THINKING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 December 1994, )We do disservice to these moments of Arendtian action, however (and hence to politics itself) if we stake acting together solely on "sheer momentum" or the "spontaneity" of rare movements that burst out against the dark backdrop of modernity. To render as truly political only events that are public, spontane- ous, and momentous is to underestimate the full complexity (and sometimes the brutality)30 of human conduct in such events themselves-to see them, as Vaclev Havel puts it, "from the outside" and perhaps "chiefly from the vantage point of the system and its power structure" (1985, 49). Charter 77 "came as a surprise" and appeared as a "bolt out of the blue", but, as Havel reminds us, it was neither a bolt out of the blue nor the result of a spontaneous political event. Its initial impetus was a small protest against the impending trial of the rock group The Plastic People of the Universe, whose music displeased the communist authorities. The protest began with a campaign planned in detail and with "modest, internal steps" that culminated in the signing of a petition by 70 people (Havel 1990, 130-38). The action group Charter 77 eventually emerged out of the opposition circles that the campaign for The Plastics had informally organized. As a document, the charter took form slowly during the late months of 1976, not in the merciless glare of the public but in what Havel calls "that semi-darkness where things are difficult to chart or analyse" (1985, 49). Its history has as much to do with the laborious organization of meetings, the meticulous crafting of language, the arduous collection of signatories, and the repeated drafting of copies of the original document as with the "explosion" that followed its release in the public realm. Even then, as Havel understands it, the charter was neither a "one-shot manifesto" nor by any means a prepolitical act of legislation but rather a commitment "to participate in ongoing work" (1990, 139). Like Havel and in the spirit of Arendt's instruction that we must "think what we are doing," I have been thinking about what it means to consider politics as a kind of ongoing, methodical work in the world. I raise the example of Charter 77 not to diminish the beauty of an Arendtian politics of spontaneity but in order to propose a public realm theory that is better able to coordinate political action as purposeful and hence open to a broader range of significance "in the whole way of life" (Weber 1946, 77). In thinking about the same sort of things, Havel warns that the global automatism of technological civilization poses a "planetary challenge" to the position of human beings in the world (1985, 90). If he is right, then those of us who take the project of emancipation seriously must do no less than face the challenge with all the means at our disposal and endeavor, in Simone Weil's words, "to introduce a little play into the cogs of the machine that is grinding us down" (1973, 121). As citizens, in other words, we must think methodically about what is to be done. Value to LifeWe need an intellectual struggle against the idealism of the kritik to affirm value to life. Only focusing on real political solutions facilitate solutions to the problems highlighted by the kritik.Chandler 2009 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 83-4)I have two suggestions. Firstly, that there is a pressing need for an intellectual struggle against the idealism of global ethics. The point needs to be emphasised that our freedom to engage in politics, to choose our identities and political campaigns, as well as governments’ freedom to choose their ethical campaigns and wars of choice, reflects a lack of social ties and social engagement. There is no global political struggle between ‘Empire’ and its ‘Radical Discontents’; the Foucauldian temptation to see power and resistance everywhere is a product of wishful or lazy thinking dominated by the social categories of the past. The stakes are not in the global stratosphere but much closer to home. Politics appears to have gone global because there is a breakdown of genuine community and the construction of fantasy communities and fantasy connections in global space. Unless we bring politics back down to earth from heaven, our critical, social and intellectual lives will continue to be diminished ones. Secondly, on the basis that the political freedom of our social atomisation leads us into increasingly idealised approaches to the world we live in, we should take more seriously Hedley Bull’s (1995) injunction to pursue the question, or in Alain Badiou’s (2004: 237–8) words subordinate ourselves to the ‘discipline of the real’. Subordination to the world outside us is a powerful factor that can bind those interested in critical research, whereas the turn away from the world and the focus on our personal values can ultimately only be divisive. To facilitate external engagement and external judgement, I suggest we experiment with ways to build up social bonds with our peers that can limit our freedoms and develop our sense of responsibility and accountability to others. We may have to construct these social connections artificially but their value and instrumentality will have to be proven through our ability to engage with, understand, critique and ultimately overcome the practices and subjectivities of our time. Whatever your K impact is, debating about plans is the only way to solve it. Refusal to engage in the methodical politics of democratic citizenship by debating about plans makes every K impact inevitable.Dietz 94 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “’THE SLOW BORING OF HARD BOARDS’: METHODICAL THINKING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 December 1994, )Earlier, in considering the means-end category in politics, I suggested that everything hinges upon the action context within which this mode of thinking takes place. I now want to suggest that there is a richer conceptual context-beyond utilitarian objectification, rational capitalist accumulation, and/or Leninism-within which to think about the category of means and ends. Weil offers this alternative in her account of methodical thinking as (1) problem- oriented, (2) directed toward enacting a plan or method (solutions) in response to problems identified, (3) attuned to intelligent mastery (not domination), and (4) purposeful but not driven by a single end or success. Although Weil did not even come close to doing this herself, we might derive from her account of methodical thinking an action concept of politics. Methodical politics is equally opposed to the ideological politics Hannah Arendt deplores, but it is also distinct in important respects from the theatrical politics she defends. Identifying a problem-or what the philosopher David Wiggins calls "the search for the best specification of what would honor or answer to relevant concerns" (1978, 145)-is where methodical politics begins.26 It continues (to extrapolate from Weil's image of the methodical builders) in the determination of a means-end sequel, or method, directed toward a political aim. It reaches its full realization in the actual undertaking of the plan of action, or method, itself. To read any of these action aspects as falling under technical rules or blueprints (as Arendt tends to do when dealing with means and ends) is to confuse problem solving with object making and something methodical with something ideological. By designating a problem orientation to political activity, methodical politics assigns value to the activity of constantly deploying "knowing and doing" on new situations or on new understandings of old ones. This is neither an ideological exercise in repetition nor the insistent redeployment of the same pattern onto shifting circumstances and events. The problem orientation that defines methodical politics rests upon a recognition of the political domain as a matrix of obstacles where it is impossible to secure an ideological fix or a single focus. In general, then, methodical politics is best under- stood from the perspective of "the fisherman battling 880 American Political Science Review Vol. 88, No. 4 against wind and waves in his little boat" (Weil 1973, 101) or perhaps as Michael Oakeshott puts it: "In political activity . . . men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor ap- pointed destination" (1962, 127).27 Neither Weil's nor Oakeshott's is the perspective of the Platonist, who values chiefly the modeller who constructs his ship after pre-existing Forms or the pilot-philosopher who steers his craft to port by the light of immutable Forms fixed in a starry night. In both of the Platonic images (where the polis is either an artifact for use or a conveyance to safe harbor), a single and predictable end is already to hand. Neither Weil's nor Oakeshott's images admit any equivalent finality. The same is true of methodical politics, where political phenomena present to citizens-as the high sea presents to the sailor-challenges to be identified, demands to be met, and a context of circumstances to be engaged (without blueprints). Neither the assurance of finality nor the security of certainty attends this worldly activity. In his adamantly instrumental reading of politics in the ancient world, M.I. Finley makes a similar point and distinguishes between a problem orientation and patterned predictability by remarking upon the "iron compulsion" the Greeks and Romans were under "to be continuously inventive, as new and often unantic- ipated problems or difficulties arose that had to be resolved without the aid of precedents or models" (1983, 53). With this in mind, we might appreciate methodical politics as a mode of action oriented toward problems and solutions within a context of adventure and unfamiliarity. In this sense, it is compatible with Arendt's emancipatory concept of natality (or "new beginnings") and her appreciation of openness and unpredictability in the realm of human affairs. There are other neighborly affinities between methodical and theatrical politics as well. Both share a view of political actors as finite and fragile creatures who face an infinite range of possibilities, with only limited powers of control and imagination over the situations in which they are called upon to act. From both a methodical and a theatrical vantage point, this perpetual struggle that is politics, whatever its indeterminacy and flux, acquires meaning only when "knowing what to do and doing it" are united in the same performance (Arendt, 1958a, 223). Freedom, in other words, is realized when Plato's brilliant and devious conceptual maneuver is outwitted by a politics that opposes "the escape from action into rule" and reasserts human self-realization as the unification of thought-action in the world (pp. 223-25). In theatrical politics, however, the actual action content of citizen "knowing and doing" is upstaged by the spectacular appearance of personal identities courageously revealed in the public realm. Thus Plato's maneuver is outwitted in a bounded space where knowing what to do and doing it are disclosed in speech acts and deeds of self-revelation in the company of one's-fellow citizens. In contrast, methodical politics doggedly reminds us that purposes themselves are what matter in the end, and that citizen action is as much about obstinately pursuing them as it is about the courage to speak in performance. So, in methodical politics, the Platonic split between knowing and doing is overcome in a kind of boundless navigation that is realized in purposeful acts of collective self-determination. Spaces of appearances are indispensable in this context, but these spaces are not exactly akin to "islands in a sea or as oases in a desert" (Arendt 1970, 279). The parameters of methodical politics are more fluid than this, set less by identifiable boundaries than by the very activity through which citizens "let realities work upon" them with "inner concentration and calmness" (Weber 1946, 115). In this respect, methodical politics is not a context wherein courage takes eloquent respite from the face of life, danger (the sea, the desert), or death: it is a daily confrontation wherein obstacles or dangers (including the ultimate danger of death) are transformed into prob- lems, problems are rendered amenable to possible action, and action is undertaken with an aim toward solution. Indeed, in these very activities, or what Arendt sometimes pejoratively calls the in order to, we might find the perpetuation of what she praises as the for the sake of which, or the perpetuation of politics itself (1958a, 154). To appreciate the emancipatory dimension of this action concept of politics as methodical, we might now briefly return to the problem that Arendt and Weil think most vexes the modern world-the deformation of human beings and human affairs by forces of automatism. This is the complex manipulation of modern life that Havel describes as the situation in which everything "must be cossetted together as firmly as possible, predetermined, regulated and controlled" and "every aberration from the prescribed course of life is treated as error, license and anarchy" (1985, 83). Constructed against this symbolic animal laborans, Arendt's space of appearances is the agonistic opposite of the distorted counterfeit reality of automatism. The space of appearances is where individuality and personal identity are snatched from the jaws of automatic processes and recuperated in "the merciless glare" of the public realm (Arendt 1969, 86). Refigured in this fashion, Arendtian citizens counter reductive technological complexes in acts of individual speech revelation that powerfully proclaim, in collective effect, "This is who we are!" A politics in this key does indeed dramatically defy the objectifying processes of modern life-and perhaps even narratively transcends them by delivering up what is necessary for the reification of human remembrance in the "storybook of mankind" (Arendt 1958a, 95). But these are also its limits. For whatever else it involves, Arendtian politics cannot entail the practical confrontation of the situation that threatens the human condition most. Within the space of appearances, Arendt's citizens can neither search for the best specification of the problem before them nor, it seems, pursue solutions to the problem once it is identified, for such activities involve "the pursuit of a definite aim which can be set by practical considerations," and that is homo faber's prerogative and so in the province of "fabrication," well outside the space of appearances where means and ends are left behind (pp. 170-71). Consequently, automatism can be conceptualized as a "danger sign" in Arendt's theory, but it cannot be designated as a problem in Arendt's politics, a problem that citizens could cognitively counter and purposefully attempt to resolve or transform (p. 322). From the perspective of methodical politics, which begins with a problem orientation, automatism can be specified and encountered within the particular spaces or circumstances (schools, universities, hospitals, factories, corporations, prisons, laboratories, houses of finance, the home, public arenas, public agencies) upon which its technological processes intrude. Surely something like this is what Weil has in mind when she calls for "a sequence of mental efforts" in the drawing up of "an inventory of modern civilization" that begins by "refusing to subordinate one's own destiny to the course of history" (1973, 123-24). Freedom is immanent in such moments of cognitive inventory, in the collective citizen-work of "taking stock"-identifying problems and originating methods-and in the shared pursuit of purposes and objectives. This is simply what it means to think and act methodically in spaces of appearances. Nothing less, as Wiggins puts it, "can rescue and preserve civilization from the mounting irrationality of the public province, . . . from Oppression exercised in the name of Management (to borrow Simone Weil's prescient phrase)" (1978, 146). Instrumentality GoodEthical or non-instrumental approaches to global political questions guarantee bad policy-making and social atomizationChandler 2009 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 77-8)The stakes seem to exist largely at a global level at the same time as what is at stake in domestic politics seems to be increasingly diminished. However, politics is no less important to many of us today. It is just that the nature and practices of this politics are different. We are less likely to engage in the formal politics of representation – of elections and governments – but in post-territorial or global politics, a politics where there is much less division between the private sphere and the public one. This type of politics is on the one hand ‘global’ but, on the other, highly individualised: it is very much the politics of our everyday lives – the sense of meaning we get from thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish out for recycling or cut back on our car use. We might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to Greenpeace and Christian Aid. I want to suggest that when we do politics nowadays it is less the old politics, of self-interest, political parties and concern for governmental power, than the new politics of global ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global approach to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices, than to the forms of our social political engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: (1) global post-territorial politics is no longer concerned with power: the concerns are free-floating and in many ways, existential, about how we live our lives; (2) global politics revolves around practices that are private and individualised: they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; (3) the practice of global politics tends to be non-instrumental: we do not subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties and are more likely to give value to our aspirations, acts or the fact of our awareness of an issue, as an end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or ethicality in the face of an increasingly confusing, problematic and alienating world – our politics in this sense is an expression or voice, in Karl Marx’s (1975: 244) words, of ‘the heart in a heartless world’ or ‘the soul of a soulless condition’. The practice of politics as a form of religiosity may seem radical but could also be understood to be highly conservative. As Marx argued, religion was the ‘opium of the people’ – this is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at the expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I want to argue that global ethical politics reflects and institutionalises our sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in irrational and unaccountable government policy-making. I want to illustrate my points by looking briefly at the practices of global ethics in three spheres: those of radical political activism, government policy-making and academia. Ethics-based or activist approaches allow foreign policy to be manipulated by elites for moral crusades that lead to intervention and conflictChandler 2009 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 80-1)Strange as it may seem, the only people who are keener on global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, ‘healing the scar of Africa’, the war on terror and the ‘war against climate insecurity’. Traditional foreign policy, based on strategic geopolitical interests with a clear framework for policy-making, no longer seems so important. The government is downsizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long term, and provides more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good causes. This shift was clear in the UK’s attempt to develop an ‘ethical foreign policy’ in the 1990s – an approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of Britain’s caring and sharing identity. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-term policy-making. Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top of the political agenda for the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere: namely, the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making, based on a clear political programme, to the ambitious assertion of global causes – saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just ending war but solving the causes of conflict, etc. Of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more responsibility can be shifted to blame the USA or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the civilised world, NATO or the EU are on the line in wars of choice (from the war on terror to the war on global warming) lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of realpolitik than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity. Governments feel the consequences of their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to represent shared interests or coherent political programmes. As Jean Baudrillard (1983) suggests, without a connection to the represented masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the ‘Emperor with no clothes’. It is this lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. Donald Rumsfeld (2003) said that there are no metrics to help assess whether the war on terror is being won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and interests of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible practices and policies. Max Weber (2004) once counter-posed this type of politics – the ethics of conviction – to the ethics of responsibility in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The desire to act on the international scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from the Balkans to Iraq, and to the moralisation of a wide range of issues, from war crimes to EU membership requirements. Rejection Alts BadKills MovementsRejection alternatives undermine movements. The permutation combines pragmatic and radical action which allows movements to become effective.Boyle 2009 (David Boyle is a Fellow of the New Economics Foundation, “Tackling the Supplicant State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 256-8)History has not been kind to radicals. There is something about the powerful radical groups that do manage, against all the odds, to attract support for their different interpretation of the world that is politically unstable. The Populists in the USA at the turn of the century, the campaign that gave us the Wizard of Oz, became white supremacists. The Social Credit movement that rose to political prominence in Canada and New Zealand between the wars had become anti-Semitic by the 1940s (though they are now reborn and are not any more). Something about frustrated radicalism makes it bitterly intolerant. Perhaps that is hardly surprising considering the indifference the mainstream tends to show to radicals. Despite their best efforts, the vast weight of evidence, their sheer common sense, most radical campaigns do not succeed in shifting the world. Perhaps the truth about radicalism is that it has to carry this weight of suspicion and rage simply because it is so hard to break out of the political margins, with any new slant on what is really wrong with the world. This chapter is an attempt to set the problem more clearly, and to suggest a way out – a genuinely radical populism that could break the paradox. The problem for radicals is particularly hard in the UK, where we make pets of our scientific cranks, but we have a particular horror – especially in the establishment – of political cranks, still more of economic cranks, with their plastic bags full of badly printed leaflets. Radical movements worthy of the name have to not just interpret the political problem differently, they have to gather the evidence for it, name the problem, gather around themselves the sense of momentum, chip away successfully at the indifference, and of course this defeats most of them. Worse, they have to pedal their new interpretation of our crisis based on obscure topics that many of their most obvious potential supporters have never considered before: that the problems of the world are based on debt, or the financial system, or business conspiracies, or obscure kinds of pollution. There remains a yearning among people of radical bent for some kind of movement that speaks to ordinary people, and to their lives, which will ignite the anger that radicals believe they share deep down. G. K. Chesterton (1907) talked about ‘the people of England, who never have spoken yet’. They are still yet to speak, and Chesterton’s Distributist campaigns – though they were forerunners of aspects of the anti-globalisation movement – also petered out in strange byways of Roman Catholic conservatism. Given those difficulties, it is extraordinary that radical movements do emerge, often diffuse and diverse. The Jubilee Debt campaign succeeded in getting 70,000 demonstrators onto the streets of Birmingham during the G8 summit in 1998, and created a political opening for change. The anti-globalisation movement stopped the WTO summit in Seattle the following year, and succeeded in galvanising opposition among the negotiators of the developing countries which did largely prevent further global deregulation. The green movement, the corporate responsibility movement, the feminist movement, have all in their different ways risen out of the mush of mass media to change the world, even if it hasn’t been changed very much. But these are successes where radicals and pragmatists find themselves in uneasy alliance, as they nearly always do in successful movements. The corporate responsibility movement has shifted the way business success is measured, launched a flurry of international standards and ethical institutions from FTSE4Good to ETI and GRI, and other bizarre acronyms. But radicals will complain, and rightly, that it never quite addressed the fundamental issues of corporate power. Equally, it could not have succeeded at all were it not for the background noise that radicals were making, that persuaded the corporates to listen to the pragmatists for fear of something worse. The same paradox applies to radical innovations. Healthy Living Centres ushered in a whole new approach to public health outside the NHS, funded by the National Lottery, and were allowed to wither on the vine. The Expert Patient Programme ushered in a new approach to doctor– patient relationships, in the same radical tradition, but without the radical ambition and inside the NHS. That has thrived. The added problem is that radicals and pragmatists often loathe each other, especially when they are tackling the same issue. They often fail to recognise the role of the other in their own success, and they drive a disabling wedge between each other that saps their effectiveness as campaigners and agents of change. Clash and rejoinder in debate, rather than the isolation produced by rejection, are what make radical alternatives possible. If we don’t get to debate the aff, radical politics is reduced to a shallow spectacle.Martin 2009 (James Martin teaches political theory at University of London and is co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, “A Politics of Commitment”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pg. 123-6)But political commitment is not simply a private journey. Promising one’s self to another is a public act that invokes, and usually speaks to, a community of like-minded selves. This is where the seriously committed often differ from those who simply sign up to any cause going. A politics of community is often the flipside of the politics of the self. In giving ourselves to the cause, we give ourselves to a fate shared with others. We make our promises through – and sometimes to – these others. As any activist knows, doing committed politics is often as much about supporting, arguing with and, frankly, tolerating others as it is about the cause itself. In pledging one’s self and in forming a community through which to enact this pledge we enter into a world of choices about who we are and how we relate to others. Whilst our commitments may often seem natural and instinctive, invariably they require us to make decisions concerning how to conduct our relations with others (our friends and families), our values, the things to which we are prepared to listen and respond, with what and to whom we feel some proximity. All commitment involves building a filter through which such things are either brought into view or excluded. And it is in this filtering of our selves through commitment that a danger also arises. For commitments can sometimes seal us off from the choices that we make in order to fulfil them. I do not mean simply that we might ignore our families or fail to be sufficiently attentive to others because we feel the force of our pledges so intensely. Such is the danger of any kind of association. More importantly, commitments can be experienced as though they entail no politics at all, as if the choices we make are incontestable judgements that align us smoothly with ourselves and the communities with which we share common space. Curiously, what is shared by both the flimsy attachments to any cause going and the total commitment of fundamentalism is this sense of the metaphysical ease of being committed. Whilst undoubtedly they differ in the intensity of their commitments, neither is exposed (or not for long) to the troubling undecidability that aligning oneself with a cause necessarily involves. Indeed, making a commitment can often seem like a way of ‘immunising’ oneself from such exposure (Esposito, 2008). Feeling protected by the certainty of our beliefs may feel personally satisfying, deeply motivating and yield a sense of intense solidarity with others but it can also support the most dogmatic forms of enclosure and outward contempt that, in effect, undermine the political dimension of our commitments. Too often, commitment is measured in terms of its intensity, the degree to which we devote ourselves to it, or sacrifice our personal choices for its strictures. The deeper our identification, the more radical and more authentic our commitment is thought to be. But this is a partial sense of the term ‘radical’. For commitment to be deeply rooted (as ‘radical’ implies) is not for it to be so embedded in our daily lives we cannot see where it begins or admit of any part of our lives that escapes it. That, simply, is an entrenched commitment that obscures the decisions we made in order to hold it. But roots also remind us where our limits are; they are not anchors that disappear into the murk, attaching us to some unshakeable earth. However far they reach into our sense of identity, roots also remind us that we are not yet at one with it; that we are ‘rooting around’ for some kind of connection. This latter sense of ‘radical’ demands some awareness of how we remain exposed to others that do not share in our pledge, not an immunising form of commitment that seals us off from them. Not a smooth, contained sense of self, but an incomplete one; not a certainty born of communal identification, but the uncertainty of simultaneously not sharing-with, but still living among, others. The proof of commitment, I am suggesting, lies not in the purity and all-encompassing character of some total experience but, rather, in its capacity to engage in dialogue with those who do not share it; working at its own limits, not at its centre. Commitment is not an interior state whose worth is validated only by intransigent forms of outward display, however important it is from time to time to make a show of principle. Passionate intensity is a phase, not the culmination, of commitment. When engaged with its own limits, commitment accedes to its own politics of self and community, inviting others to question them and call them to account rather than take them as given. To be committed, in this sense, is continually to expose ourselves to the uncertainty of the pledges we make, exploring their boundaries and blind spots as well as their more comforting principles. This does not mean weakening our principles but, rather, acknowledging the weaknesses of the traditions we often inherit and repeat without question. Too often radical politics can succumb to a form of self-congratulation: think of the haughty disdain so many on the Left showed for President Bush and his folksy style of leadership; as though all we had to do was point and laugh and everyone would wake up. It just didn’t happen. If a radical politics is to succeed, it needs a form of commitment that is political and not just self-righteously principled. But how do we do this? What does it entail? As I’ve suggested, it means taking seriously others with whom we disagree. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them or desperately seeking the grounds of a new consensus, but it does mean acknowledging the legitimacy of the differences between us. It calls for a kind of commitment that is rhetorically inclined; that is, open to debate with others, being prepared to illuminate the weaknesses of the other’s position and to concede where we cannot improve our own. This is the politics of persuasion where we seek not only to inform others of our view but, further, to make them desire the same ends. It means treating our opponent like an ‘adversary’, as Chantal Mouffe puts it, rather than an ‘antagonist’ (see Mouffe, 2000). Of course this is something that already occurs in all forms of radical politics (as well as other kinds of politics). But if we are to sustain a radical politics of commitment, we need to make much more of this skill. Radical politics must reach outwards and engage as much as it reaches inward. This is a difficult and humbling task. We have to make our passions into more than declarations of independence, placing us on another shore altogether from those with whom we disagree. A radical political commitment should be a principled, passionate engagement, not a monastic withdrawal. We should be troubled by our beliefs and the seamless affirmation they seem to give us; this calls for us to be responsible for them, to find resolution among others for the rifts they cause, not to hide away from them. On a whole series of topics – from far Right racism, political Islamicism, to carbon emissions, the defence of public services or debates over military interventions across the globe – radical politics needs to improve its engagement with those with whom there is disagreement. This is not easy, of course, and certainly not simply a matter of will. The Left has never had the resources to operate a powerful stake in the media. But in the absence of platforms to debate and argue, it has often been easier to take up a stance of offence (often on behalf of others) than to contest positions rhetorically. In the current age of the global media, this is perhaps irresolvable. But, at the same time, one of the Left’s most powerful weapons has been its capacity to argue and critique, to bring together different voices and make alliances, sometimes solid and sometimes not. It is this tradition of arguing, debating and contesting that ought to be enhanced, if only to stop commitment reducing to a matter of spectacle. Of course, radical politics cannot be reduced to argument alone. But without argument, and without a style of engagement that rouses friends and foes alike to hear and to respond, there is no politics at all. In a plural society, ideologies have become fragmented and fluid. The premises from which, once, we began to debate don’t always end up with the same conclusions; the allies we make are often strange and uncomfortable. The test of commitment in this age is not that of the last century: namely, declaring and demonstrating one’s allegiance to a party or social group. Identification now tends to appear as a way of deliberately not hearing others, or refusing to speak and be accountable for what one says to those who do not identify in the same way. When the authority of the position from which we speak and argue cannot be assured, engagement itself must be the source of radical political commitment. Absent concrete proposals, the alt is just a shallow display of radicalism that accomplishes nothingMartin 2009 (James Martin teaches political theory at University of London and is co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, “A Politics of Commitment”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pg. 120)Radical politics demands commitment. This much seems obvious. All politics, surely, is a commitment to something, to achieve one end or another, and a ‘radical’ politics is a commitment to radical change. But can commitment itself be radical? Do we need to radicalise commitment to make politics radical? In the age of new media, it has become possible to sign up and pledge ourselves to a variety of causes with surprising ease, to attach our names to web petitions, to email our subscriptions, and to blog and paste in our views on numerous issues of the day. But with this proliferation and pluralisation of politics, commitment itself flattens out. To support a radical politics is, for many, more a lifestyle choice in keeping with a consumer identity than a risky personal transformation. Commitments hang on principles, certainly, but if all it takes to show commitment is a demonstration of principle then we lose sight of the politics that commitment is able to engage. Nor is the answer to go to the other extreme and make personal sacrifice the only marker of authentic radical political engagement. I want to underscore the importance of a politics of commitment, as opposed to its mere display. Individual action alternatives are doomed to failure, they create isolation while avoiding responsibility for outcomes. Avoidance of debates about problems and solutions prevents meaningful politics.Chandler 2009 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 78-9)People often argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualised and personal ones – there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society. This is illustrated by the ‘celebration of differences’ at marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people are more concerned with the creation of a sense of community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending poverty or with overthrowing capitalism, political views and political differences would be quite important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons? It would seem important to debate reasons, causes and solutions; it would also seem necessary to give those political differences an organisational expression if there was a serious project of social change. Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a form of social disengagement – expressed in the anti-war marchers’ slogan of ‘Not in My Name’, or the assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in political debate. In fact, it seems that political activism is a practice which isolates individuals who think that demonstrating a personal commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brainwashed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealised sense of social connection from an ever-increasing awareness of themselves and by giving political meaning to every personal action. Global ethics appear to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning, while at the same time giving us the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling us to be free of responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or for success at the ballot-box. While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the lack of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its rejection of any form of social movement or organisation. Spatial Politics Key*********TAGSoja 2009 (Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Resistance after the Spatial Turn”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 73-4)The second influential force affecting the future of radical politics is what some refer to as the ‘spatial turn’, the growing recognition in nearly every field of the usefulness and creative power of a critical spatial perspective. As I see it, the spatial turn and the new spatial politics that is emerging from it represent more than a passing academic fad. Nor can the resurgent interest in spatial thinking be reduced merely to an acknowledgement of what the traditionally spatial disciplines such as geography and architecture have been doing for years. The spatial turn is signalling a sea-change in intellectual and political thought and practice and has the potential to be the driving force behind a new radical politics. Radical politics for the past century or more has been rooted in the triumph of a historicist and socialist materialism that was promulgated by Marx and others against any suggestion of a spatial, geographical or environmental causality shaping human social relations. Nearly every social movement in the past, whether based on class, race, gender or any other axis of discriminatory power, defined itself around taking control over the making of history, based on the belief that the contested differential power relations have been historically constituted or created and therefore need to be similarly redefined. Remaking history has accordingly been the foundational objective for mobilisation and strategic action. Something quite remarkable, however, started to happen in the last decade of the twentieth century. Scholars and others, in a wide variety of fields, began to think seriously and critically about space and the spatiality of human life in much the same way they thought about time and the historical nature of human life. Over the last 150 years, as I just discussed, we have grown accustomed to seeing the world through historical lenses, much more than through a critical spatial perspective. Today, however, the spatial or geographical imagination has been reawakened and has taken on a new significance in making practical and theoretical sense of the present. Just think about how the contemporary economic crisis is dominated by discussion of complex geographical conditions relating to the globalisation of capital, labour and culture; the changing role of the territorial state; the emerging problems of regulating inter-urban and inter-regional as well as international flows of capital investment, credit and currency; and the spreading crisis of territorial governance and regulation at multiple scales, from the global to the local and at every scale in between. As the privileging of time and history (socially transformed time) over space and geography (socially transformed space) is being rethought, a new awareness is developing that we all share to some degree a sense of being negatively affected (exploited, dominated, oppressed) by the spatially unjust geographies which we have constructed and in which we live. This shared consciousness of the geography of injustice and the injustices embedded in our geographies can add significantly not just to the empowerment of particular social movements but even more so to making connections between them. Seeking spatial justice and such related objectives as regional democracy and the right to the city can provide, not as a substitute for but an addition to historical consciousness, a more effective way of connecting radical social movements and building new cross-cutting and inclusive coalitions aimed not just at remaking history but remaking geography as well. Perhaps never before has the spatial organisation of human society, particularly as it takes shape in the modern metropolis, in the regional makeup of the sovereign state, and in the expansive global economy, been as widely recognised as an influential force shaping human behaviour, political action and societal development. A critical spatial perspective has become increasingly relevant to understanding the contemporary condition, whether we are pondering the increasing intervention of electronic media in our daily routines, trying to understand the multiplying geopolitical conflicts around the globe, or seeking ways to act politically to reduce poverty, racism, sexual discrimination and environmental degradation. Misc MethodsAT: Deconstruction/SkepticismDeconstruction can and must be used for political purposes. The epistemology of politics can be experimental, thus compatible with deconstructionWainwright 2009 (Hilary Wainwright is the Research Director of the New Politics Programme of the Transnational Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the International Centre for Participation Studies, “Rethinking Political Organisation”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pg. 88)Closely associated with an understanding of transformative power are the distinctive understandings of knowledge influenced by the movement-based politics of recent decades. In good part as a result of this politics and – not unrelated – developments in the philosophy of science, we are increasingly aware of the plural sources of knowledge: as tacit, practical and experiential as well as scientific. We are working increasingly with complexity, ambivalence and uncertainty. This does not imply a postmodern, relativistic notion that anything goes, that there are no independent grounds for judging arguments. On the contrary, it implies that supposedly postmodern concepts like ‘deconstruction’, and a recognition of the many perspectives from which a single phenomenon can be understood, must be reclaimed as tools for analysing and changing a complex and differentiated real world. These new understandings of knowledge point towards an emphasis on the horizontal sharing and exchange of knowledge and collaborative attempts to build connected alternatives and shared memories. They stress the gaining of knowledge as a process of discovery and therefore see political action, the exercise of transformative power, as itself a source of knowledge, revealing unpredicted problems or opportunities. This implies a self-consciousness of the sense in which actions are also experiments and therefore the need for spaces and times for open reflection and synthesis of different experiences. AT: Spatial PoliticsEven if they are right about the need to reevaluate our relation to spatiality, they are wrong about the method. Spatial politics needs to include discussions of governance and the state. Also, the discussion of politics can include critical spatial theory.Soja 2009 (Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Resistance after the Spatial Turn”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 73-4)The second influential force affecting the future of radical politics is what some refer to as the ‘spatial turn’, the growing recognition in nearly every field of the usefulness and creative power of a critical spatial perspective. As I see it, the spatial turn and the new spatial politics that is emerging from it represent more than a passing academic fad. Nor can the resurgent interest in spatial thinking be reduced merely to an acknowledgement of what the traditionally spatial disciplines such as geography and architecture have been doing for years. The spatial turn is signalling a sea-change in intellectual and political thought and practice and has the potential to be the driving force behind a new radical politics. Radical politics for the past century or more has been rooted in the triumph of a historicist and socialist materialism that was promulgated by Marx and others against any suggestion of a spatial, geographical or environmental causality shaping human social relations. Nearly every social movement in the past, whether based on class, race, gender or any other axis of discriminatory power, defined itself around taking control over the making of history, based on the belief that the contested differential power relations have been historically constituted or created and therefore need to be similarly redefined. Remaking history has accordingly been the foundational objective for mobilisation and strategic action. Something quite remarkable, however, started to happen in the last decade of the twentieth century. Scholars and others, in a wide variety of fields, began to think seriously and critically about space and the spatiality of human life in much the same way they thought about time and the historical nature of human life. Over the last 150 years, as I just discussed, we have grown accustomed to seeing the world through historical lenses, much more than through a critical spatial perspective. Today, however, the spatial or geographical imagination has been reawakened and has taken on a new significance in making practical and theoretical sense of the present. Just think about how the contemporary economic crisis is dominated by discussion of complex geographical conditions relating to the globalisation of capital, labour and culture; the changing role of the territorial state; the emerging problems of regulating inter-urban and inter-regional as well as international flows of capital investment, credit and currency; and the spreading crisis of territorial governance and regulation at multiple scales, from the global to the local and at every scale in between. As the privileging of time and history (socially transformed time) over space and geography (socially transformed space) is being rethought, a new awareness is developing that we all share to some degree a sense of being negatively affected (exploited, dominated, oppressed) by the spatially unjust geographies which we have constructed and in which we live. This shared consciousness of the geography of injustice and the injustices embedded in our geographies can add significantly not just to the empowerment of particular social movements but even more so to making connections between them. Seeking spatial justice and such related objectives as regional democracy and the right to the city can provide, not as a substitute for but an addition to historical consciousness, a more effective way of connecting radical social movements and building new cross-cutting and inclusive coalitions aimed not just at remaking history but remaking geography as well. Perhaps never before has the spatial organisation of human society, particularly as it takes shape in the modern metropolis, in the regional makeup of the sovereign state, and in the expansive global economy, been as widely recognised as an influential force shaping human behaviour, political action and societal development. A critical spatial perspective has become increasingly relevant to understanding the contemporary condition, whether we are pondering the increasing intervention of electronic media in our daily routines, trying to understand the multiplying geopolitical conflicts around the globe, or seeking ways to act politically to reduce poverty, racism, sexual discrimination and environmental degradation. AT: Critical Pedagogy/RhetoricCritical pedagogy and communication theory is compatible with governmental and electoral politicsWainwright 2009 (Hilary Wainwright is the Research Director of the New Politics Programme of the Transnational Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the International Centre for Participation Studies, “Rethinking Political Organisation”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pg. 90-1)As I noted, the shift from political parties is associated with profound shifts in the understanding of knowledge. This is the move away from a hierarchical view, with knowledge being the exclusive privilege of a few, to a capacity of all and therefore to an understanding of diverse and plural sources of knowledge. In other words, our forms of organisation, from the ’68 student movements and the 1970s women’s movement to most of the networks at the Social Forum, are at the same time forms of inter-communication. And self-consciously so. We have created organisational forms and chosen tools of organisation with considerations of communication at the centre of our thinking. From the consciousness raising groups of the women’s movement, through to the networks of the struggles over globalisation, we have built ways of organising in which there is a continuing interconnection between processes of action, struggle and experience and processes of reflection; the continuing generation of knowledge through sharing what knowledge we have: a collaborative and experimental search sharing what we know to reach what is still unknown. The shift is profound; so it is taking time to work its way through. Underlying this shift to means of intercommunication is also the shift we referred to earlier in our understanding of the process of transformation away from the notion of a political actor – party or state – acting on society, as if from the outside, towards a recognition of the transformative capacities of the oppressed and exploited themselves as knowing and creative subjects. In other words, an emphasis on acting to transform the relationships which existing society depends upon. This is another aspect of the break from a narrow, one-way, instrumental idea of communication as mobilisation or persuasion. Instead it implies a close relation between communication and a Paolo Freirean idea of education as empowerment, as enabling people to gain confidence and realise their power and their potential. How do the rapid developments of horizontal, potentially egalitarian forms of communication stimulated by the new information technology impact on electoral politics? It’s too early to see but the experience of , a political networking initiative founded by Howard Dean but then having a major influence on the Obama campaign, opens up new possibilities for movement politics to enter electoral politics without losing its autonomy. Any attempt to engage in electoral politics faces all kinds of pitfalls, but also imposes disciplines and provides the stimuli of translating transformative politics into practical and widely accessible alternatives. The conditions may not be of our choosing. But through a collaborative and engaged rethinking, inspired by a wide range of historical and present-day experiences, we can indeed still make history. AT: Courts/Law LinksCalling on legal institutions for reform is key to radical politicsWatts 2009 (Michael J. Watts is Chair of Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, “Radicalism, Writ Large and Small”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pp. 105-7)All of this took me back two decades and more to E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters and the Black Acts, and to a debate, conducted among and across broad swathes of the British Left, over matters of law, state, power and ideology. At the centre of this dispute stood two great public intellectuals, arguably the finest socialist intellectuals of their generation, quite specifically Perry Anderson’s (1980) ferocious, and ferociously intelligent, engagement with Edward Thompson’s Poverty of Theory (1978) and his account of English Marxism. One thread running across the often heated rhetoric was something called ‘the rule of law’ and whether the judicial sphere was anything more than ‘an instrument of class power tout court’ (Thompson, 1975: 262). Reading now through this magnificent corpus of political writing – drafted, one needs to say, at a moment when talk of ‘proletarian democracy embodying a new and insurgent sovereignty’ would solicit no fear of embarrassment – is a salutary exercise. We can now see clearly with the powers of hindsight that operating behind the backs of those who fought over Marxist rectitude lay an insurgent radical Right, whose long ascent subsequently came to include Mrs Thatcher’s authoritarian populism, the crushing of the miners’ strike, the privatisation of collective assets and the gradual evisceration of the institutions of parliamentary democracy. The long march of what we now call neo-liberalism – from the founding of Friedrich von Hayek’s chummy club of free-market utopians at Mont Pelerin, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall – took about forty years, by way of the Chicago Boys in Chile, the IMF–IBRD–Treasury complex, and the Reagan–Thatcher–Kohl dispensations. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci might have put it, there has been a free-market (Hayekian) ‘passive revolution’ from above. We have witnessed what the Left’s great pessimist Perry Anderson (2002) has dubbed a ‘neoliberal grand slam’: the ‘fluent vision’ of the Right has no equivalent on the Left he concluded, and embedded liberalism (let alone something called socialism) is, we are told, as remote as ‘Arian bishops’. Neo-liberalism rules undivided across the globe and is the most successful ideology in world history. Resistances are like ‘chaff in the wind’, and the Left can only ‘shelter under the skies of infinite justice’. The goonsquads and salesforces of neo-liberalism had taken, one might say, the commanding heights. Well perhaps, or perhaps not. But before I return to Anderson’s account of the irresistible rise of a radical Right – and what this might imply for being radical today – let me dwell for a moment on the law and what the 1970s Marxists had to say about it. Thompson’s (1975) magisterial examination of the Black Acts – an omnibus statute passed over four weeks in 1723 which in defending the rights of the propertied classes contained a criminal code with an unprecedented scope and breadth of capital provision – argued that its very hegemony depended upon the credibility of rules, which in turn imposed limits and restraints on its manipulability by the dominant classes. The dialectics of class and law – there was no simple predetermined relations between the operations of the law and those in and with power – made the juridical sphere a ‘genuine forum within which certain kinds of class conflict were fought out’ (Thompson, 1975: 265), even producing reversals and interruptions in the operations of state power. The rule of law imposed ‘effective inhibitions upon power and the defense of the citizen from power’s all intrusive claims’ (Thompson, 1975: 266). Law provided some sort of defence for those who sought to protect, as commoners, the rights and privileges over the commons – to resist enclosure. Anderson’s (1980) defence was that the rule of law did not perform such work, but rather the popular defence of specific civil liberties as part of a wider set of quite different juridical rules and processes (constitutional and criminal law for example). The procedures for the substantive codes of legal conduct – applied differentially over time and space – were drawn together in common institutions, not the least of which was jury by trial. And it was here in the jury, a custom that predated the feudal epoch in England, that resided, said Thompson, a ‘stubbornly maintained democratic practice . . . a lingering paradigm of an alternative mode of participatory self government, a nucleus around which analogous modes might grow’ (Thompson, 1978; cited in Anderson, 1980: 202). Thompson’s central claim was that ‘the immense capital of human struggles over the previous two centuries’ was, as he put it, ‘passed down as a legacy to the eighteenth century . . . where it gave rise to a vision, in the minds of some men, of an ideal aspiration toward the universal values of law’ (Thompson, 1975: 269). The Chevron case stands surely as part of this inheritance, passed down as the accumulated capital of human struggles over several centuries. The Alien Tort Claims Act – the legal vehicle for bringing transnational corporations to account – was after all signed by George Washington in 1789, now put to the service of addressing the contradictions of making contemporary law congruent with the realities of a gentry, class power and a state that operate with and through a lethal mix of transnational capital flows, ‘poor governance’, privatised security forces, and military neo-liberalism. Construed in this way – that is to say as a bequest which speaks to the positive and popular inheritance of struggles for civil liberties – Chevron v. Bowoto represents a radicalism (for my purposes I shall call it radicalism writ small), which places its feet at the confluence of two streams of political practice. One returns us to the original definition of radical as root invoked by Raymond Williams (1976). It speaks to an enduring sense of civil liberty and the preservation of civil liberties, a longue durée of human struggles now confronting the class prerogatives of a different cast of oligarchs and great gentry: a set of corporate personalities equally ‘content to be subject to the rule of law only because this law was serviceable and afforded to their hegemony the rhetoric of legitimacy’ (Thompson, 1975: 269). The Chevron case represents, at risk of universalising a precedent-setting but nevertheless tightly circumscribed case of human rights violations and torture, an exemplar of a radical politics placing the defence of civil liberties as a bulwark against the relentless march of the commodity in its various guises. AT: Reformism LinksThe link distinction between radicalism and reform is obsoleteGilbert and Littler 2009 (Jeremy Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and Jo Littler is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, “Beyond Gesture, Beyond Pragmatism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, Pg. 128)Within an older paradigm, it might have been possible to differentiate the radical from the non-radical in terms of a relative degree of commitment to revolution. The classic distinction between revolutionary and reformist politics continues to inform much far-Left political discourse to this day. The problems with this distinction are well known. Firstly, many uses of it rely upon a fixed historical narrative according to which revolution is the inevitable destiny of social change if it is not hampered by distracting ‘reform’ (a hypothesis which has absolutely no historical evidence to support it). Even if such a strict conception of history is not in place, the distinction still assumes that it is possible to plot a straight line from a given present to an imagined future which can be determined as being, or not being, revolutionary in nature. Such a perspective makes no sense in the context of an understanding of the social and its processes which accepts the radical unpredictability of complex ecologies of which any human society is an example. It is simply not possible to predict in advance whether a given course of action will or will not tend towards something like a revolution, unless that action is being taken in an obviously pre-revolutionary situation. AT: State/Liberalism BadTheir criticism of democratic institutions is too shallow, we can separate democracy from Enlightenment universalism and absolute rationality. The use of language games to promote a democratic ethos is key to constructing political institutions that can include alterity and prevent exclusion.Mouffe 96 (Chantal Mouffe is the Quintin Hogg Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and a member of the Collège International de Philosophic in Paris, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, questia)Rorty is, I think, most useful when he criticizes the pretensions of Kantian-inspired philosophers like Habermas, who want to find a view-point standing above politics from which one could guarantee the superiority of democracy. Surely he is right to assert: 'We should have to abandon the hopeless task of finding politically neutral premises, premises which can be justified to anybody, from which to infer an obligation to pursue democratic politics.' 2 According to Rorty, we have to acknowledge that our democratic and liberal principles define only one possible language game among others. It is then futile to search for arguments in their favour which would not be 'context-dependent' in order to secure them against other political language games. Against Apel and Habermas, Rorty argues that it is not possible to derive a universalistic moral philosophy from the philosophy of language. There is nothing, for him, in the nature of language that could serve as a basis for justifying to all possible audiences the superiority of liberal democracy. He insists that envisaging democratic advances as if they were linked to progresses in rationality is not helpful, and that we should stop presenting the institutions of liberal Western societies as offering the rational solution to the problem of human coexistence; as the solution that other people will necessarily adopt when they cease being 'irrational'. In his view, what is at stake here has nothing to do with rationality but is a matter of shared beliefs. To call somebody irrational in this context, he states, 'is not to say that she is not making proper use of her mental faculties. It is only to say that she does not seem to share enough beliefs and desires with one to make conversation with her on the disputed point fruitful. So force, rather than persuasion, will have to be used.' 3 Democratic action, in this perspective, does not require a theory of truth and notions like unconditionality and universal validity but rather a variety of practices and pragmatic moves aimed at persuading people to broaden the range of their commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community. For Rorty, it is through sentiment and sympathy, not through rationality and universalistic moral discourse, that democratic advances take place. This is why he considers books like Uncle Tom's Cabin to have played a more important role than philosophical treatises in securing moral progress. This is certainly a more promising way of thinking about democratic politics and I share Rorty's conviction that it is high time to 'peel apart Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism'. 4 It is particularly important in the present conjuncture, characterized as it is by an increasing disaffection towards democracy, to understand how a strong adhesion to democratic values and institutions can be established and that rationalism constitutes an obstacle to such understanding. It is necessary to realize that it is not by offering sophisticated rational arguments nor by making context-transcendent truth claims about the superiority of liberal democracy that democratic values can be fostered. The creation of democratic forms of individuality is a question of identification with democratic values and this is a complex process that takes place through a diversity of practices, discourses and languages games. This is something that Rortyian pragmatism, with the importance it gives to shared vocabularies, can help us to grasp much better than can universalist and rationalist moral theories. By putting an exclusive emphasis on the arguments needed to secure the legitimacy of liberal institutions, recent moral and political philosophy have been asking the wrong question. The real issue is not to find arguments to justify the rationality or universality of liberal democracy that would be acceptable by every rational or reasonable person. Liberal democratic principles can only be defended in a contextualist manner, as being constitutive of our form of life, and we should not try to ground our commitment to them on something supposedly safer. To secure allegiance and adhesion to those principles what is needed is the creation of a democratic ethos. It has to do with the mobilization of passions and sentiments, the multiplication of practices, institutions and languages games that provide the conditions of possibility for democratic subjects and democratic forms of willing. Most liberal theorists are bound to miss the relevance of that kind of reflection because they operate with a metaphysical conception which sees the individual as prior to society, bearer of natural rights, utility maximizer or rational subject-according to the brand of liberalism that they follow-but, in all cases, as abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. Indeed, what is precluded in all those approaches is the crucial question of how is democratic agency possible; what are the conditions of existence of the liberal democratic subject? Against the type of liberalism that searches for universal rational justification and believes that democratic institutions would be more stable if it could be proven that they would be chosen by rational individuals under the veil of ignorance or in a situation of undistorted communication, Rorty's pragmatism reminds us of the limits of the claims of reason. By urging us to think in term of practices, it compels us to confront the real issues that have to be tackled in order to enhance democratic citizenship. AT: BiopoliticsTheir focus on rejection as a tool of challenging biopolitics misses the point. Biopolitics only incorporates the negative aspects of the “disciplinary society”, rather than focusing on using democratic institutions to challenge biopolitics. A pragmatic, Deweyan view of politics and social science solves better than a pessimistic Foucauldian view.Rorty 1999 (Richard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 204-8)The burden of my argument so far has been that if we get rid of traditional notions of "objectivity" and "scientific method" we shall be able to see the social sciences as continuous with literature—as interpreting other people to us, and thus enlarging and deepening our sense of community. We shall see the anthropologists and historians as having made it possible for us—educated, leisured policy-makers of the West—to see any exotic specimen of humanity as also "one of us." We shall see the sociologists as having done the same for the poor (and various other sorts of nearby outsiders), and the psychologists as having done the same for the eccentric and the insane. This is not all that the social sciences have done, but it is perhaps the most important thing. If we emphasize this side of their achievement, then we shall not object to their sharing a narrative and anecdotal style with the novelist and the journalist. We shall not worry about how this style is related to the "Galilean " style which "quantified behavioral science" has tried to emulate. We shall not think either style particulary appropriate or inappropriate to the study of man. For we shall not think that "the study of man" or "the human sciences" have a nature, any more than we think that man does. When the notion of knowledge as representation goes, then the notion of inquiry as split into discrete sectors with discrete subject matters goes. The lines between novels, newspaper articles, and sociological research get blurred. The lines between subject matters are drawn by reference to current practical concerns, rather than putative ontological status. Once this pragmatist line is adopted, however, there are still two ways to go. One can emphasize, as Dewey did, the moral importance of the social sciences—their role in widening and deepening our sense of community and of the possibilities open to this community. Or one can emphasize, as Michel Foucault does, the way in which the social sciences have served as instruments of "the disciplinary society," the connection between knowledge and power rather than that between knowledge and human solidarity. Much present-day concern about the status and the role of the social sciences comes out of the realization that in addition to broadening the sympathies of the educated classes, the social sciences have also helped them manipulate all the other classes (not to mention, so to speak, helping them manipulate themselves). Foucault's is the best account of this dark side of the social sciences. Admirers of Habermas and of Foucault join in thinking of the "interpretive turn" in the social sciences as a turn against their use as "instruments of domination," as tools for what Dewey called "social engineering." This has resulted in a confusing quasi-politicization of what was already a factitious "methodological" issue. In this final section, I want to argue that one should not attribute undue importance to the "Galilean-vs.-hermeneutic" or "explanation-vs.-understanding" contrasts by seeing them as parallel with the contrast between "domination" and "emancipation." We should see Dewey and Foucault as differing not over a theoretical issue, but over what we may hope. Dewey and Foucault make exactly the same criticism of the tradition. They agree, right down the line, about the need to abandon traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, and truth. They are both, so to speak, "beyond method." They agree that rationality is what history and society make it—that there is no overarching ahistorical structure (the Nature of Man, the laws of human behavior, the Moral Law, the Nature of Society) to be discovered. They share the Whewellian and Kuhnian notion of Galilean Science—as exemplifying the power of new vocabularies rather than offering the secret of scientific success. But Dewey emphasizes that this move "beyond method" gives mankind an opportunity to grow up, to be free to make itself, rather than seeking direction from some imagined outside source (one of the ahistorical structures mentioned above). His experimentalism asks us to see knowledge-claims as proposals about what actions to try out next: The elaborate systems of science are born not of reason but of impulses at first slight and flickering; impulses to handle, to move about, to hunt, to uncover, to mix things separated and divide things combined, to talk and to listen. Method is their effectual organization into continuous dispositions of inquiry, development, and testing. . . . Reason, the rational attitude, is the resulting disposition. . . .6 Foucault also moves beyond the traditional ideals of method and rationality as antecedent constraints upon inquiry, but he views this move as the Nietzschean realization that all knowledge-claims arc moves in a power-game. "We are subject to the production of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. "7 Here we have two philosophers saying the same thing but putting a different spin on it. The same phenomenon is found in their respective predecessors. James and Nietzsche (as Arthur Danto has pointed out8 ) developed the same criticisms of traditional notions of truth, and the same "pragmatic" (or "perspectivalist") alternative. James jovially says that "ideas become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience,"9 and Dewey follows this up when he says that "rationality is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse desires."" Nietzsche says that "the criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power"" and that [the] mistake of philosophy is that, instead of seeing logic and the categories of reasons as means for fixing up the world for utilitarian ends . . . one thinks that they give one a criterion of truth about reality.12 Foucault follows this up by saying that "we should not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face . . [we} must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things."13 The arguments which James and Dewey on the one hand, and Nietzsche and Foucault on the other, present for these identical views are as similar as the tone of each is different. Neither pair has any arguments except the usual "idealist" ones, familiar since Kant, against the notion of knowledge as correspondence to nonrepresentations (rather than coherence among representations). These are the arguments in whose direction I gestured in the first section of this paper, when I said that all attempts to cash Galileo's metaphor of Nature's Own Language had failed. Since the cash-value of a philosophical conclusion is the pattern of argument around it, I do not think that we are going to find any theoretical differences which divide these two pairs of philosophers from each other. Is the difference then merely one of tone—an ingenuous Anglo-Saxon pose as opposed to a self-dramatizing Continental one? The difference could be better put in terms of something like "moral outlook." One is reminded of the famous passage in Wittgenstein: If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.14 But again, "good and bad willing," "happy and unhappy" are not right for the opposition we are trying to describe. "Hopeful" and "hopeless" are a bit better. Ian Hacking winds up a discussion of Foucault by saying: "What is man?" asked Kant. "Nothing," says Foucault. "For what then may we hope?" asks Kant. Does Foucault give the same nothing in reply? To think so is to misunderstand Foucault's reply to the question about Man. Foucault said that the concept Man is a fraud, not that you and I are as nothing. Likewise the concept Hope is all wrong. The hopes attributed to Marx and Rousseau are perhaps part of that very concept Man, and they are a sorry basis for optimism. Optimism, pessimism, nihilism and the like are all concepts that make sense only within the idea of a transcendental or enduring subject. Foucault is not in the least incoherent about all this. If we're not satisfied, it should not be because he is pessimistic. It is because he has given no surrogate for whatever it is that springs eternal in the human breast.15 What Foucault doesn't give us is what Dewey wanted to give us—a kind of hope which doesn't need reinforcement from "the idea of a transcendental or enduring subject." Dewey offered ways of using words like "truth," "rationality," "progress," "freedom," "democracy," "culture," "art," and the like which presupposed neither the ability to use the familiar vocabulary of what Foucault calls "the classic age," nor that of the nineteenth-century French intellectuals (the vocabulary of "man and his doubles"). Foucault sees no middle ground, in thinking about the social sciences, between the "classic" Galilean conception of "behavioral sciences" and the French notion of "sciences de l'hornine." It was just such a middle ground that Dewey proposed, and which inspired the social sciences in America before the failure of nerve which turned them "behavioral." More generally, the recent reaction in favor of hermeneutical social sciences which I discussed earlier has taken for granted that if we don't want something like Parsons, we have to tank something like Foucault; i.e., that overcoming the deficiencies in Weberian Zweckrationalit requires going all the way, repudiating the "will to truth." What Dewey suggested was that we keep the will to truth and the optimism that goes with it, but free them from the behaviorist notion that Behaviorese is Nature's Own Language and from the notion of man as "transcendental or enduring subject." For, in Dewey's hands, the will to truth is not the urge to dominate but the urge to create, to "attain working harmony among diverse desires." This may sound too pat, too good to be true. I suggest that the reason we find it so is that we are convinced that liberalism requires the notion of a common human nature, or a common set of moral principles which binds us all, or some other descendent of the Christian notion of the Brotherhood of Man. So we have come to see liberal social hope—such as Dewey's—as inherently self-deceptive and philosophically naive. We think that, once we have freed ourselves from the various illusions which Nietzsche diagnosed, we must find ourselves all alone, without the sense of community which liberalism requires. Perhaps, as Hacking says, Nietzsche and Foucault are not saying that you and I are as nothing, but they do seem to hint that you and I together, as we, aren't much—that human solidarity goes when God and his doubles go. Man as Hegel thought of him, as the Incarnation of the Idea, doubtless does have to go. The proletariat as the Redeemed Form of Man has to go, too. But there seems no particular reason why, after dumping Marx, we have to keep on repeating all the nasty things about bourgeois liberalism which he taught us to say. There is no inferential connection between the disappearance of the transcendental subject—of "man" as something having a nature which society can repress or understand—and the disappearance of human solidarity. Bourgeois liberalism seems to me the best example of this solidarity we have yet achieved, and Deweyan pragmatism the best articulation of it." The burden of my argument here is that we should see Dewey as having already gone the route Foucault is traveling, and as having arrived at the point Foucault is still trying to reach —the point at which we can make philosophical and historical ("genealogical") reflection useful to those, in Foucault's phrase, "whose fight is located in the fine meshes of the webs of power."i' Dewey spent his life trying to lend a hand in these little fights, and in the course of doing so he worked out the vocabulary and rhetoric of American "pluralism." This rhetoric made the first generation of American social scientists think of themselves as apostles of a new form of social life, Foucault does not, as far as I can see, do more than update Dewey by warning that the social scientists have often been, and are always likely to be, co-opted by the bad guys. Reading Foucault reinforces the disillusion which American intellectuals have suffered during the last few decades of watching the "behavioralized" social sciences team up with the state. The reason why it may appear that Foucault has something new and distinctive to add to Dewey is that he is riding the crest of a powerful but vaguely-defined movement which I have elsewhere" described as "textualism" —the movement which suggests, as Foucault puts it at the end of The Order of Things, that "Man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon."18 Another reason is that Foucault is attempting to transform political discourse by seeing "power" as not intrinsically repressive—because, roughly, there is no naturally good self to repress. But Dewey, it seems to me, had already grasped both points. Foucault's vision of discourse as a network of power-relations isn't very different from Dewey's vision of it as instrumental, as one element in the arsenal of tools people use for gratifying, synthesizing, and harmonizing their desires. Dewey had learned from Hegel what Foucault learns from Nietzsche—that there is nothing much to "man" except one more animal, until culture, the meshes of power, begin to shape him into something else. For Dewey too there is nothing Rousseauian to be "repressed"; "repression" and "liberation" are just names for the sides of the structures of power we like and the sides we don't like. Once "power" is freed from its connotation of "repression," then Foucault's "structures of power" will not seem much different from Dewey's "structures of culture." "Power" and "culture" are equipollent indications of the social forces which make us more than animals—and which, when the bad guys take over, can turn us into something worse and more miserable than animals. These remarks are not meant to downgrade Foucault—who seems to me one of the most interesting philosophers alive—but just to insist that we go slow about assuming that the discovery of things like "discourse," "textuality," "speech-acts," and the like have radically changed the philosophical scene. The current vogue of "hermeneutics" is going to end soon, and badly, if we advertise these new notions as more than they are—namely, one more jargon which tries to get out from under some of the mistakes of the past. Dewey had his own jargon—popular at the time, but now a bit musty—for the same purpose. But the difference in jargon should not obscure the common aim. This is the attempt to free mankind from Nietzsche's "longest lie," the notion that outside the haphazard and perilous experiments we perform there lies something (God, Science, Knowledge, Rationality, or Truth) which will, if only we perform the correct rituals, step in to save us. Although Foucault and Dewey are trying to do the same thing, Dewey seems to me to have done it better, simply because his vocabulary allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity. AT: UndecidabilityStructural undecidability cannot be the basis for making political or ethical choices, even critics of liberalism agree that democratic institutions are the best way to make decisions.Mouffe 96 (Chantal Mouffe is the Quintin Hogg Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and a member of the Collège International de Philosophic in Paris, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, questia)With respect to Rorty's version of pragmatism, the controverted issue was not its relevance for politics, which nobody denies, but the kind of liberal Utopia and the piecemeal type of social engineering that it promotes. By insisting on the need to keep completely apart the private and the public realms and by envisaging politics solely in terms of pragmatic, short-term compromises, isn't he missing an important dimension of the democratic vision? Can such a reformism do justice to the multiplicity of struggles which call for a radicalization of the democratic ideal? Critchley took issue with Rorty's assertion that there is no way to unite or reconcile the public and private domains and that we must come to terms with the fact that we have two irreconciliable final vocabularies: one where the desire for self-creation and autonomy dominates, and another one where what dominates is the desire for community. When he declares that those different vocabularies function in two different languages games, the public and the private, and that it is dangerous to confuse their field of application, Rorty deprives us of the rich critical potential opened by public ironists like Nietzsche and Foucault. Moreover, wonders Critchley, doesn't such a distinction of the self into ironist and liberal create the conditions for political cynicism? According to Laclau, it is only in a rationalistic world-one clearly at odds with Rorty's anti-foundationalist premises-that the demands of self-realization and those of human solidarity could be so neatly differentiated. In his view, the distinction public/private, important as it is for democratic politics, is not one of essence. It should be problematized and envisaged as an unstable frontier constantly trespassed, with personal autonomy investing public aims and the private becoming politicized. There is therefore no reason to oppose in such a drastic way the private demands for self-creation and the public ones for human solidarity. To criticize Rorty's politics does not signify, though, that we should renounce pragmatism. While unhappy with the liberal piecemeal politics advocated by Rorty, Laclau points out that he is not calling for a rejection of the pragmatic approach. Indeed, he stresses his agreement with several aspects of the Rortyian outlook, which, he says, is compatible with different types of politics. Pragmatic premises do not necessary lead to the type of liberalism favoured by Rorty and they can, for instance, be articulated with a radical-democratic perspective. Despite the fact that their arguments did not manage to convince Rorty, it seems to me that both Critchley and Laclau presented, albeit in different ways, a convincing case for the importance of deconstruction for politics. Their views are not, however, entirely convergent. Both of them agree that an argument concerning structural undecidability cannot provide, in and of itself, any positive grounding for a decision and that something else is required. But with respect to the kind of complement that is needed, their positions differ. This something else is found by Critchley in an ethical grounding along Levinasian lines: the radical opening to the other is a primary experience from which normative contents can be derived. For Laclau, on the contrary, this moment of quasi-grounding (the decision) is something akin to a self-grounding which is, however, radically contingent-it points in that sense to a primacy of politics rather than ethics and to a theory of 'hegemony' as the bridge between undecidability and decision. AT: NietzscheThe Nietzschean criticism of morality can be resolved by democratic institutions. You can vote on framework and be Deweyan, which solves their link to the K. Rorty 1999 (Richard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. xiv)The suggestion that everything we say and do and believe is a matter of fulfilling human needs and interests might seem simply a way of formulating the secularism of the Enlightenment — a way of saying that human beings are on their own, and have no supernatural light to guide them to the Truth. But of course the Enlightenment replaced the idea of such supernatural guidance with the idea of a quasi-divine faculty called 'reason'. It is this idea which American pragmatists and post-Nietzschean European philosophers are attacking. What seems most shocking about their criticisms of this idea is not their description of natural science as an attempt to manage reality rather than to represent it. Rather, it is their description of moral choice as always a matter of compromise between competing goods, rather than as a choice between the absolutely right and the absolutely wrong. Controversies between foundationalists and antifoundationalists on the theory of knowledge look like the sort of merely scholastic quarrels which can safely be left to the philosophy professors. But quarrels about the character of moral choice look more important. We stake our sense of who we are on the outcome of such choices. So we do not like to be told that our choices are between alternative goods rather than between good and evil. When philosophy professors start saying that there is nothing either absolutely wrong or absolutely right, the topic of relativism begins to get interesting. The debates between the pragmatists and their opponents, or the Nictzscheans and theirs, begin to look too important to be left to philosophy professors. Everybody wants to get in on the act. This is why philosophers like myself find ourselves denounced in magazines and newspapers which one might have thought oblivious of our existence. These denunciations claim that unless the youth is raised to believe in moral absolutes, and in objective truth, civilization is doomed. Unless the younger generation has the same attachment to firm moral principles as we have, these magazine and newspaper articles say, the struggle for human freedom and human decency will be over. When we philosophy teachers read this sort of article, we find ourselves being told that we have enormous power over the future of mankind. For all it will take to overturn centuries of moral progress, these articles suggest, is a generation which accepts the doctrines of moral relativism, accepts the views common to Nietzsche and Dewey. Dewey and Nietzsche of course disagreed about a lot of things. Nietzsche thought of the happy, prosperous masses who would inhabit Dewey's social democratic utopia as 'the last men', worthless creatures incapable of greatness. Nietzsche was as instinctively antidemocratic in his politics as Dewey was instinctively democratic. But the two men agree not only on the nature of knowledge but on the nature of moral choice. Dewey said that every evil is a rejected good. William James said that every human need has a prima facie right to be gratified, and the only reason for refusing to gratify it is that it conflicts with another human need. Nietzsche would have entirely agreed. He would have phrased this point in terms of competition between bearers of the will to power, whereas James and Dewey would have found the term 'power', with its sadistic overtones, a bit misleading. But these three philosophers made identical criticisms of Enlightenment, and specifically Kantian, attempts to view moral principles as the product of a special faculty called 'reason'. They all thought that such attempts were disingenuous attempts to keep something like God alive in the midst of a secular culture. Reciprocity GoodReciprocity in speech and political debates is key to creating an effective and non-instrumental politics. Lack of reciprocity guarantees that politics is dominated by techne and exploitation.Dietz 94 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “’THE SLOW BORING OF HARD BOARDS’: METHODICAL THINKING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 December 1994, )In 1994, we are just beginning to take the measure of the astonishing revolutionary events that heralded the final decade of this century and initiated the capacity of millions of citizens to act in concert for the power of democratic self-realization. For political theory, the challenge in the aftermath of 1989 is to advance understandings of democracy and political life that attempt to recover an emancipatory potential in modernity and meaningfully confront what Vaclev Havel calls "the practical task of organizing a better world" (1990, 136). In many respects, I think that the most promising source for this enterprise lies in public realm theory, perhaps particularly in the theories of Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas. Both of these thinkers sustain a deep critical commitment to a politics of citizen interaction, reciprocal understanding, self-realization, and human dignity in a realm where, as Arendt puts it, "speech and only speech [makes] sense" (1958a, 25-26). The compelling quality of Arendt's and Habermas' public realm conceptions of politics has much to do with their adaptations of a venerable conceptual strategy that has its roots in Aristotle and draws a palpable distinction between the human activities of "work" (techne) and "interaction" (praxis). With this strategy to hand, public realm theory inventively juxtaposes a theatrical image of the space of appearances (Arendt) or a communicative metaphor of the public sphere (Habermas) against an instrumentalist reading of manipulative work-processes. Thereby, Arendt and Habermas effectively particularize politics as a vibrant and unique human activity and develop a critique aimed at freeing the subject from the technical domination and violence to nature that they resolutely associate with work. Dietz 94 (Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “’THE SLOW BORING OF HARD BOARDS’: METHODICAL THINKING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 December 1994, )My inclination is to support attempts to locate freedom in a politics of speech or communicative interaction. Thus I do not wish to contest the turn in public realm theory that allows intersubjective under- standing to achieve, as Axel Honneth puts it, "the status in the theory of emancipation which social labor had had in Marxian theory" (1982, 45)2 Never- theless, I think that the conceptual strategy that Arendt and Habermas so brilliantly employ in order to counter modern theories of action as social labor is a double-edged sword; for even as the conceptual dichtomy between work and interaction provides public realm theory with a valuable analytical device for distinguishing between human activities, it un- dercuts the effective theorizing of politics as a human practice. The dichotomy work:interaction seems espe- cially to foreclose what Max Weber had in mind when he called politics "the slow boring of hard boards"-a sustained, purposeful activity that meets obstacles and undertakes acts of transformation in the world (1946, 128). This conceptual inadequacy in public realm theory is not, I think, a minor matter. If our most praxis-oriented theories cannot deliver an ac- tion-coordinating concept that appreciates the pur- poseful nature of human struggle as politics, we should hardly be surprised to find the "project of modernity" (Rasmussen 1990, 7-8) deviously under- mined, if not defeated, by other alternatives, includ- ing the seductive, "affirmative nihilism" (Villa 1992, 719) of late-twentieth-century postmodernism. We need, then, to rethink the action concept of politics in public realm theory. To pursue this task, I shall focus explicitly on Arendt's theory of action,3 not only because it presents public realm theory in what is perhaps its most exemplary anti-instrumental- 873? Methodical Thinking December 1994 ist form but also because it is has played a role in at least one of the most dramatic emancipatory events of our time.4 To provide an instructive critical perspec- tive, I turn to a contemporary of Arendt's, the French thinker Simone Weil. Compared to Arendt, Weil has received relatively little attention as a social and political theorist; but she is surely Arendt's equal as a diagnostician of modernity.5 Indeed, from the per- spective of quite different theoretical traditions, Weil and Arendt present nearly identical and equally pow- erful critiques of the technological determinism of modernity. Yet unlike Arendt, Weil draws a distinction be- tween technology and instrumental action that re- fuses to reduce all forms of instrumentality to vio- lence or purely manipulative processes. As a result, Weil's concept of work as methodical thinking embraces something that Arendt's conceptual strategy re- jects-a liberatory form of instrumentality. A libera- tory form of instrumentality is precisely what public realm theory must be ready to accommodate if it is to be practically prepared for the challenge posed by the world events of 1989. Arendt's public realm theory in particular needs to discover a more neighborly affinity (in Hans-Georg Gadamer's felicitous phrase) between work:interaction and instrumentality:politics than the current agonistic/discursive debates over Arendtian politics allow.6 With this in mind, I tentatively pro- pose the idea of a methodical politics, in order to suggest that Weil's notion of work (instrumentality as purposeful performance), is potentially compatible with Arendt's notion of interaction (politics as theat- rical performance). If this affinity is indeed possible, then public realm theory might be more adequately equipped to deliver on its promise as an emancipatory project in modernity.AT “We Are Political”Politics demands problems, solutions, and methods. The interpretation that makes them “political” reduces politics to useless theater.Dietz 94(Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “’THE SLOW BORING OF HARD BOARDS’: METHODICAL THINKING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 December 1994, )Yet in arriving at this powerful action concept of politics, Arendtian public realm theory also stands in danger of-in Weil's words-sinking into the "purely arbitrary" (1973, 85), for without a dimension of substantive purposefulness that finds positive ex- pression in the vocabulary of "problem," "solution," "means," "end," and "method," Arendt's politics cannot embrace performance as the carrying out or active pursuit of purposes in the very world it strives to vitalize. Politics can encompass performance as public presentation, as in the act of performing a play, a part, or a piece of music: the performing arts "have indeed a strong affinity" with Arendtian poli- tics (Arendt 1969, 154). But without a substantive purpose, Arendt's courageous political performer is constantly in danger of becoming only an actor, "concerned merely with the 'impression' he makes" (Weber 1946, 116). When this happens, the politics of the public realm threatens to become an unconditional surrender to caprice. Moreover, it leaves the theory behind it vulnerable to charges of aestheticism, sentimentalism, and self-defeat. Arendt's public realm theory is dangerously close to this surrender to the arbitrary and the capricious not because it rescues theatrical performance in the face of reductive and routinizing life processes but because it cele- brates the "practical purposelessness" of speech and action and the transcendence of "mere productive activity" in politics as it does so (1958a, 177, 180).23AT “Right Wing UQ”They’re wrong about politics – liberal democracy does not function by creating a solely public identity. Their rush to condemn all politics as conservative destroys the capacity to use democratic institutions to promote inclusion.Dietz 87(Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship”, Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 4, Fall, )My basic point is a straightforward one: for a vision of citizenship, feminists should turn to the virtues, relations, and practices that are expressly political and, more exactly, participatory and democratic. What this requires, among other things, is a willingness to perceive politics in a way neither liberals nor maternalists do: as a human activity that is not necessarily or historically reducible to representative government or "the arrogant, male, public realm." By accepting such judgments, the feminist stands in danger of missing a valuable alternative conception of politics that is historically concrete and very much a part of women's lives. That conception is perhaps best called the democratic one, and it takes politics to be the collective and participatory engagement of citizens in the determination of the affairs of their community. The community may be the neighborhood, the city, the state, the region, or the nation itself. What counts is that all matters relating to the community are undertaken as "the people's affair." From a slightly different angle, we might understand democracy as the form of politics that brings people together as citizens. Indeed, the power of democracy rests in its capacity to transform the individual as teacher, trader, corporate executive, child, sibling, worker, artist, friend, or mother into a special sort of political being, a citizen among other citizens. Thus, democracy offers us an identity that neither liberalism, with its propensity to view the citizen as an individual bearer of rights, nor maternalism, with its attentiveness to mothering, provides. Democracy gives us a conception of ourselves as "speakers of words and doers of deeds" mutually participating in the public realm. To put this another way, the democratic vision does not legitimize the pursuit of every separate, individual interest or the transformation of private into public virtues. Insofar as it derives its meaning from the collective and public engagement of peers, it sees citizens neither as wary strangers (as the liberal marketplace would have it) nor as "loving intimates" (as the maternalist family imagines). To return to my earlier point, democratic citizenship is a practice unlike any other; it has a distinctive set of relations, virtues, and principles all its own. Its relation is that of civic peers; its guiding virtue is mutual respect; its primary principle is the "positive liberty" of democracy and self-government, not simply the "negative liberty" of noninterference. To assume, then, that the relations that accompany the capitalist marketplace or the virtues that emerge from the intimate experience of mothering are the models for the practice of citizenship is to misperceive the distinctive characteristics of democratic political life and to misconstrue its special relations, virtues, and principles. AT SecombIf they’re right, we should be exclusive in our claims to promote disagreement. It is their call for inclusion that creates community, while our framework argument is a statement that we disagree.Secomb 2000(Linnell Secomb is a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney , “Fractured Community”, Hypatia, volume 15, )Against these formulations of unified community, I propose in this paper an interpretation of community as an expression of difference and diversity that is made manifest through disagreement and disunity. While disagreement is generally conceived as a threat to community and as a sign of the imminent collapse of community, I will argue instead that disagreement disrupts the formation of a totalizing identity, or commonality. The creation of a totalizing unity is the movement of totalitarianism and unfreedom. Disagreement, on the other hand, holds a space open for diversity and for freedom. It is not disagreement, resistance, and agitation that destroy community. It is rather the repression or suppression of difference and disagreement in the name of unity and consensus which destroys the engagement and interrelation of community. I argue that the conception of a unified community of commonality destroys freedom, alterity, and heterogeneity. It is only within a community that acknowledges disagreement and fracture that difference and freedom flourish. This interpretation of community as productive disagreement is supported by the experience of Australian community, and in particular the relation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. For over two hundred years Aboriginal people have resisted the dominant legal lie of terra nullius (which created the legal fiction that Australia was an uninhabited country before its English occupation and that therefore there was no need to recognize the rights of the Aboriginal people). 1 It was, in part, a persistent disagreement and fracture within the Australian community that allowed this legal myth to be challenged and recently, finally, revoked. It is this disagreement and fracture which enables community and not, as is usually assumed, agreement, commonality, and unity. This ideal of an agreeable community defaces alterity, extinguishes freedom, and imposes a conformity and identity that annihilates the heterogeneity, surprise, and generosity of social relation. The only way Secomb answers our claims about gender and politics is to claim that intentional communication is impossible. This means they can’t intentionally communicate the content of their argument.Secomb 2000(Linnell Secomb is a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney , “Fractured Community”, Hypatia, volume 15, )Benhabib's critique of universalist liberal theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest that her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue, ultimately destroy difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between alterities [End Page 138] so that each can adopt the point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a "reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable agreement." Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of purpose within community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover, Benhabib's formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication, conversation, and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including: women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do not adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular, coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. . . . [T]he concealment is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves contradiction, inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of différance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final coherent meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually exclusive dichotomies turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as much structured by miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible to the majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and decision-making because they do not adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that assume homogeneity and transparency. AT DelgadoCriticisms of the liberal universal subject and rationalism do not justify rejection of the state, only engaging democratic institutions makes non-foundationalist dialogues productiveMouffe 96(Chantal Mouffe is the Quintin Hogg Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and a member of the Collège International de Philosophic in Paris, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, questia)Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty are at the centre of many controversies and this is not surprising since the implication of their work is radically to undermine the very basis of the dominant rationalist approach. It is no wonder then that Derrida's deconstruction and Rorty's new pragmatism have been repeatedly decried by traditional philosophers. This has not prevented their books, however, from exerting a major influence; indeed, their impact has been felt world-wide. Their perspectives are, no doubt, very different but their common rejection of a foundationalist conception of philosophy locates them on the same side in a great number of debates, especially those concerning the legacy of the Enlightenment. Derrida and Rorty are at one in refusing Habermas's claim that there exists a necessary link between universalism, rationalism and modern democracy and that constitutional democracy represents a moment in the unfolding of reason, linked to the emergence of universalist forms of law and morality. They both deny the availability of an Archimedean point-such as Reason-that could guarantee the possibility of a mode of argumentation that would have transcended its particular conditions of enunciation. Nevertheless, their critique of rationalism and universalism does not prevent them being strongly committed to the defence of the political side of the Enlightenment, the democratic project. Their disagreement with Habermas is not political but theoretical. They share his engagement with democratic politics but they consider that democracy does not need philosophical foundations and that it is not through rational grounding that its institutions could be made secure. To stress the existence of a common ground between Derrida and Rorty does not preclude the recognition of important differences between their approaches. However, it is to suggest that a fruitful dialogue can be envisaged between them despite-or rather one might say precisely because of-those differences. Such was the aim of the symposium that is at the origin of this volume. Its purpose was to inquire in which way Derridean deconstruction and Rortyian pragmatism could contribute to the elaboration of a non-foundationalist thinking about democracy. The idea was to examine their points of convergence as well as their disagreements in this particular terrain and to discuss their respective insights. For that purpose, we invited two other theorists who have helped to develop the deconstructive approach along slightly different lines: Simon Critchley, who complements it with a Levinasian opening to the ethical experience of the other, and Ernesto Laclau, who has proposed to link deconstruction with the logic of 'hegemony'. AT AntonioTheir criticism of democratic institutions is too shallow, we can separate democracy from Enlightenment universalism and absolute rationality. The use of language games to promote a democratic ethos is key to constructing political institutions that can include alterity and prevent exclusion.Mouffe 96(Chantal Mouffe is the Quintin Hogg Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and a member of the Collège International de Philosophic in Paris, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, questia)Rorty is, I think, most useful when he criticizes the pretensions of Kantian-inspired philosophers like Habermas, who want to find a view-point standing above politics from which one could guarantee the superiority of democracy. Surely he is right to assert: 'We should have to abandon the hopeless task of finding politically neutral premises, premises which can be justified to anybody, from which to infer an obligation to pursue democratic politics.' 2 According to Rorty, we have to acknowledge that our democratic and liberal principles define only one possible language game among others. It is then futile to search for arguments in their favour which would not be 'context-dependent' in order to secure them against other political language games. Against Apel and Habermas, Rorty argues that it is not possible to derive a universalistic moral philosophy from the philosophy of language. There is nothing, for him, in the nature of language that could serve as a basis for justifying to all possible audiences the superiority of liberal democracy. He insists that envisaging democratic advances as if they were linked to progresses in rationality is not helpful, and that we should stop presenting the institutions of liberal Western societies as offering the rational solution to the problem of human coexistence; as the solution that other people will necessarily adopt when they cease being 'irrational'. In his view, what is at stake here has nothing to do with rationality but is a matter of shared beliefs. To call somebody irrational in this context, he states, 'is not to say that she is not making proper use of her mental faculties. It is only to say that she does not seem to share enough beliefs and desires with one to make conversation with her on the disputed point fruitful. So force, rather than persuasion, will have to be used.' 3 Democratic action, in this perspective, does not require a theory of truth and notions like unconditionality and universal validity but rather a variety of practices and pragmatic moves aimed at persuading people to broaden the range of their commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community. For Rorty, it is through sentiment and sympathy, not through rationality and universalistic moral discourse, that democratic advances take place. This is why he considers books like Uncle Tom's Cabin to have played a more important role than philosophical treatises in securing moral progress. This is certainly a more promising way of thinking about democratic politics and I share Rorty's conviction that it is high time to 'peel apart Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism'. 4 It is particularly important in the present conjuncture, characterized as it is by an increasing disaffection towards democracy, to understand how a strong adhesion to democratic values and institutions can be established and that rationalism constitutes an obstacle to such understanding. It is necessary to realize that it is not by offering sophisticated rational arguments nor by making context-transcendent truth claims about the superiority of liberal democracy that democratic values can be fostered. The creation of democratic forms of individuality is a question of identification with democratic values and this is a complex process that takes place through a diversity of practices, discourses and languages games. This is something that Rortyian pragmatism, with the importance it gives to shared vocabularies, can help us to grasp much better than can universalist and rationalist moral theories. By putting an exclusive emphasis on the arguments needed to secure the legitimacy of liberal institutions, recent moral and political philosophy have been asking the wrong question. The real issue is not to find arguments to justify the rationality or universality of liberal democracy that would be acceptable by every rational or reasonable person. Liberal democratic principles can only be defended in a contextualist manner, as being constitutive of our form of life, and we should not try to ground our commitment to them on something supposedly safer. To secure allegiance and adhesion to those principles what is needed is the creation of a democratic ethos. It has to do with the mobilization of passions and sentiments, the multiplication of practices, institutions and languages games that provide the conditions of possibility for democratic subjects and democratic forms of willing. Most liberal theorists are bound to miss the relevance of that kind of reflection because they operate with a metaphysical conception which sees the individual as prior to society, bearer of natural rights, utility maximizer or rational subject-according to the brand of liberalism that they follow-but, in all cases, as abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. Indeed, what is precluded in all those approaches is the crucial question of how is democratic agency possible; what are the conditions of existence of the liberal democratic subject? Against the type of liberalism that searches for universal rational justification and believes that democratic institutions would be more stable if it could be proven that they would be chosen by rational individuals under the veil of ignorance or in a situation of undistorted communication, Rorty's pragmatism reminds us of the limits of the claims of reason. By urging us to think in term of practices, it compels us to confront the real issues that have to be tackled in order to enhance democratic citizenship. Structural undecidability cannot be the basis for making political or ethical choices, even critics of liberalism agree that democratic institutions are the best way to make decisions.Mouffe 96(Chantal Mouffe is the Quintin Hogg Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and a member of the Collège International de Philosophic in Paris, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, questia)With respect to Rorty's version of pragmatism, the controverted issue was not its relevance for politics, which nobody denies, but the kind of liberal Utopia and the piecemeal type of social engineering that it promotes. By insisting on the need to keep completely apart the private and the public realms and by envisaging politics solely in terms of pragmatic, short-term compromises, isn't he missing an important dimension of the democratic vision? Can such a reformism do justice to the multiplicity of struggles which call for a radicalization of the democratic ideal? Critchley took issue with Rorty's assertion that there is no way to unite or reconcile the public and private domains and that we must come to terms with the fact that we have two irreconciliable final vocabularies: one where the desire for self-creation and autonomy dominates, and another one where what dominates is the desire for community. When he declares that those different vocabularies function in two different languages games, the public and the private, and that it is dangerous to confuse their field of application, Rorty deprives us of the rich critical potential opened by public ironists like Nietzsche and Foucault. Moreover, wonders Critchley, doesn't such a distinction of the self into ironist and liberal create the conditions for political cynicism? According to Laclau, it is only in a rationalistic world-one clearly at odds with Rorty's anti-foundationalist premises-that the demands of self-realization and those of human solidarity could be so neatly differentiated. In his view, the distinction public/private, important as it is for democratic politics, is not one of essence. It should be problematized and envisaged as an unstable frontier constantly trespassed, with personal autonomy investing public aims and the private becoming politicized. There is therefore no reason to oppose in such a drastic way the private demands for self-creation and the public ones for human solidarity. To criticize Rorty's politics does not signify, though, that we should renounce pragmatism. While unhappy with the liberal piecemeal politics advocated by Rorty, Laclau points out that he is not calling for a rejection of the pragmatic approach. Indeed, he stresses his agreement with several aspects of the Rortyian outlook, which, he says, is compatible with different types of politics. Pragmatic premises do not necessary lead to the type of liberalism favoured by Rorty and they can, for instance, be articulated with a radical-democratic perspective. Despite the fact that their arguments did not manage to convince Rorty, it seems to me that both Critchley and Laclau presented, albeit in different ways, a convincing case for the importance of deconstruction for politics. Their views are not, however, entirely convergent. Both of them agree that an argument concerning structural undecidability cannot provide, in and of itself, any positive grounding for a decision and that something else is required. But with respect to the kind of complement that is needed, their positions differ. This something else is found by Critchley in an ethical grounding along Levinasian lines: the radical opening to the other is a primary experience from which normative contents can be derived. For Laclau, on the contrary, this moment of quasi-grounding (the decision) is something akin to a self-grounding which is, however, radically contingent-it points in that sense to a primacy of politics rather than ethics and to a theory of 'hegemony' as the bridge between undecidability and decision. MovementsPolitics Good - IdentityIdentities are shaped by institutions, we must engage the state in these debatesMeyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)2. Politics and Identity.We need to link notions of identity to an analysis of the political process. This need is particularly evident in the apparently dichotomous character of paradigms emphasizing the political process and those emphasizing “collective identity” or “culture” (Jasper and Goodwin 1999; Koopmans 1999; Rochon 1998). Both deductive logic, however, and close examination of cases point to the necessary relationship between identity and state processes (Clemens 1997; Stevens 1999). If we can move beyond the crudest biological determinism, we recognize that the process of turning physical features or social practices into “identities” is forged from the interaction between people and that state. By forcing some people to sit in the back of the bus, wear a yellow star, or hide their sexual orientations, states create the conditions in which particular identities develop. States can create identities by endorsing or prohibiting religious or sexual practices, by regulating access to social goods, and by setting rules of interaction between groups and individuals. Within these parameters, activists choose how to define themselves, by alliances, claims, and tactics, as Mary Bernstein shows in her chapter about gay and lesbian politics in Vermont (also see Bernstein 1997).Policy Good - MovementsPolitical protest must have a policy dimension to succeedMeyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)5. Policy and Protest. We must not lose sight of the policy dimension of political protest. This critical topic has received insufficient attention from scholars of social movements (but see Amenta 1998; Amenta, Dunleavy, and Bernstein 1994; Burstein 1990; Markoff 1997). This is an unfortunate product of the historical development of the study of social protest. Although the political scientists who studied social movements in the 1960s and early 1970s (esp. Lipsky 1970; Piven and Cloward 1971) focused on government action and public policy, particularly policies affecting poor people, sociologists who entered the debate brought somewhat less attention to the material bases driving activist concerns. Important work that brings attention to the affective dimensions of social protest (e.g., Polletta 1997; Taylor 1996) actually calls for more attention to the concrete policies that provoke emotional reactions.? Manisha Desai’s chapter on the women’s movements’ development in contemporary India tells a story in which tactics and concerns constantly shift in response to the actions of a sometimes somewhat sympathetic state—that is, government policy. Similarly, Belinda Robnett’s chapter on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) organizational form focuses on the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in an analysis that shows activists making decisions in response to meaningful changes in public policy. In both chapters, we see public policy reform not only as the result of movement activities but also as the cause of changes in movement strategy, claims, and tactics. In theoretical parlance, changes in policy influence political opportunities, and activists respond accordingly, trying to mobilize, or to affect new policy changes in these new circumstances.Social Science Good - MovementsOvertheorizing fails, movements depend on social scienceMeyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)6.? Relevance.We must remember the concerns of the social movement and ask relevant questions. Finally, and perhaps most important, in the paradigm battles that animate academic inquiry, it is too easy to stop asking questions whose answer might help make the world better. The people who make social movements, often at great costs and under conditions of threat and danger, do so in the perverse belief that their efforts can make the world better, more just, and indeed, that those actions are necessary to make substantial change.? It is professionally irresponsible to expend efforts on projects that elucidate theories or advance analyses that don’t harken back to critical questions about the quality of our lives and of others. Social science could be a powerful tool for social justice, a Promethean notion too readily abandoned.? Politics Key – Coalitions, TacticsPolitical analysis is key to building movements and coalitions, key to membership and tacticsMeyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)We can gain some insight into the interplay of levels of analysis by thinking about an individual’s decision to participate in social movement activism. At once, an individual decides whether to participate in political activism, what issues to engage, with whom to participate, and how. Under “normal” circumstances, people are unlikely to endure the costs of social movement participation for distant political goals. Of course, all activists’ decisions are not fully informed in terms of narrow strategic calculations; rather, they develop in the course of collective action and social engagement.? Think about how people might have made choices about whether to come to the Common or to engage in any collective action. Ideology or religious belief can drive some people to take strong stands consistently, regardless of their vision of the likely political outcome (Smith 1996). Such actions can become routinized for the regulars at the Common I described, and individuals and organizations can become habituated to particular actions unusual for others. Sometimes the choice to participate is a reaction to what others do, whether allies or opponents. Astonishingly, most people who participate in a political action like this witness don’t offer elaborate theories about how their actions will bring about the political change they seek. Sometimes, like pigeons in a Skinner box, activists repeat activities that they believe once succeeded, without unfolding the causal mechanisms that actually promoted social change. Sensing the need to act, they pick the most promising and available activity they can find, even if the connections between the Common and, say, the National Security Council seem attenuated. What seems promising or available depends on one’s social location, embedded networks, and ideology.? Yet every weekend in the town common, well before the freeze, and for years after the peak of mobilization, a few people stood for an hour or two, regardless of the weather, to make their claim against the threat of nuclear war. Either these committed people are extraordinarily bad calculators, or the narrowest frame of choice analysis is too restrictive. It is not so much that they think that their witness on the Common will likely bring nuclear disarmament directly or quickly. Rather, they see a moral responsibility to act against what they view as dangerous and wrong, regardless of the anticipated policy or political consequences. Bearing witness, even if it did not bring about nuclear disarmament, was a concrete step toward becoming the kind of people they wanted to be: moral or righteous or decent, with or without the sanction of an established religion (see Epstein 1991). Fundamentally, in the decision to participate one’s identity, as defined by self and others, plays a critical role.? But most people are more sporadically active in particular causes. At the height of the nuclear freeze movement, hundreds would assemble on the town common, people who did not previously or subsequently identify themselves? primarily as peace activists. After the freeze peaked in the middle 1980s, the turnout at the demonstrations retreated to the prefreeze levels.? Now, given the real inconveniences of turning up on a Sunday afternoon, given the other demands and attractions of a life, it’s clear that people need motivation for even this rather modest social movement participation. For the long-term crusaders, standing publicly against nuclear weapons, among people they felt some connection with, was enough. They did not need to believe that their acts would make an immediate difference on policy; they had visions of morality and of themselves that nonetheless required action. But this was not enough for most people. Others, who joined later on, doubtless had other motivations. When the policies of the U.S. government changed, the threat of nuclear war and the conduct of national security provided more of a provocation than before, such that participation became more urgent. As more and more people turned out each Sunday, and as mass media paid more attention to both a growing movement and the issues it addressed, the effort might also seem more promising. At one level then, people engage in social movement action because they believe their efforts are both necessary and potentially efficacious.? Beyond policy demands and moral action, when hundreds assemble on the town common, you will likely see people you know or meet people you might like to talk with. Perhaps someone there will sing, tell stories, or sell attractive buttons or vegetarian hot dogs. You get the sense that by participating you are part of something larger, engaged in efforts bigger than yourself, defining your own identity by your participation in the construction of a larger community through collective action (Buechler 1990).? As government and other authorities respond to the demands of social movements, they affect the costs and potential benefits of participation, altering the marginal decisions of people on the periphery of a movement, as well as their senses of urgency and possibility. Importantly, these responses can entail real changes in policy or in the treatment of protestors (see McCarthy and McPhail 1998; della Porta and Reiter 1998). They can also include changes in rhetoric and symbolism (Edelman 1971). As more people join or leave a movement, the choices available to those who remain change, as do the political claims, tactics, and the definitions of self. The rhetoric of a movement becomes available to others, including opponents, as Nancy Naples points out here, altering the possibilities for other challengers. Understanding the reality of a social movement necessitates considering the process of collective action and social mobilization from different levels of analysis. The constellation of external political realities, the opportunities for action offered by mainstream political institutions, the resources and commitments of organizations, and affective and intellectual factors that lead individuals to choose whether to participate in a social movement and how.Movement InteractionPolitical goals for justice reinforce each other, tactical maneuvers to gain political concessions bolster movements for social justice across the spectrum.Meyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)Although scholars can become identified with a particular movement, activists generally are not. Scholarly definition of a “social movement” lends to an identification with a bounded set of issues, but the careers of activists are rarely so narrowly circumscribed. Protesting and organizing for a variety of related social change goals over several decades is the rule rather than the exception for individual activists, as studies of participants in the civil rights, student, and women’s movements show (Carroll and Ratner 1996; Clegg 1996; Fendrich and Lovoy 1988; McAdam 1988b; Whalen and Flacks 1987; Whittier 1995). Activists can shift goals and groups in response to the changing political environment, responding to proximate threats and opportunities, while maintaining an essentially consistent political worldview (Meyer 1993). Among activists, a favorite truism is that the same group of people show up at demonstration after demonstration, even as the issues change. Scholars have been slower to recognize the extent to which related movements share personnel or the broader diversity of issues seemingly narrow movements address.? The pattern of sustained networks working on several issues over time is recurrent in social movements. The range of potential issues a group, network, or individual may address is related to self-identification. The ideological component of collective identity includes a political analysis which identifies a range of social injustices that merit redress and a range of potential activities that a group or individual might undertake. Movement issues may link as the result of ideological, cultural, organizational, or tactical continuity. (Thus, the initial surprise when a group on the Right, for example, Operation Rescue, can adopt political tactics innovated and developed by the Left [Johnson 1999].) Indeed, the cross-fertilization of activists, organizations, and tactics across movements often promotes innovation and revitalization (Voss and Sherman 2001). The characteristics of challengers determine the issues they may take on and how. For convenience, we identify movements by a particular constituency or cause: the women’s movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement. The credulous observer might incorrectly think that these periodic formations are distinct and self-contained, when in fact people and organizations frequently work in a variety of social movements, some not obviously related by ideology or constituency. In fact, specific movement campaigns reflect a larger social movement community (Buechler 1990), comprised broadly of groups and individuals who share more than agreement on particular political issues. A social movement community includes diverse individuals and groups whose primary focus at any one time may vary tremendously, but who are united by a generally shared view of the world and their place in it (see also della Porta and Rucht 1995). Cycles of apparent political engagement and quiescence on a particular issue then (Meyer 1993) reflect less the volatility of mass concerns than the continuous challenges and tactical choices movements make, focusing their efforts in response to changing political circumstances (Morris 1984; Taylor 1989). An activist concerned with peace and social justice may work for a nuclear test ban in 1963, for civil rights in 1965, against the war in Vietnam in 1967, and for women’s rights in 1969. Surely, she would recognize the continuity in these efforts, even if scholars have been slower to see connections activists view as obvious.Meyer 2(David S. Meyer is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements”, Social Movements:Identity, Culture, and the State, Oxford University Press, 2002)As noted, of the scholars studying social protest, some look at movements from the outside in, that is, starting with the grievances, resources, and opportunities provided by forces outside the social movement; and some look at movements from the inside out, that is, starting with the self-conscious decisions and values of those within movements and their lives prior to and through social movement participation. A broader perspective will help us understand the process and politics of social protest and will reveal the meaningful realities of social protest. You cannot understand the reality, genesis, and outcome of a movement without a broader picture, and even if the focus is on one level, we need to fill in the background. We need to avoid false dichotomies of culture and structure to see the interaction of factors exogenous to a social movement and the choices made within it. Activists choose issues, tactics, and allies, but not in the circumstances they please. They can subsequently be trapped in particular positions, wed to odd tactics, or caught in uncomfortable alliances. The issues they express reflect what they think is most promising, important, or urgent—given the constraints of how they see themselves. Unlike the pigeons in Skinner boxes, people who make movements are moral and instrumental actors, if not always narrowly “rational” calculators. They do what they think they can do. Claims are defined not only by what activists want but also by what they think is possible. The nature of the state and the content of public policy define both urgency and possibility. In Eastern Europe during the cold war, for example, dissidents agreed to press for democratic rights of political participation as a foundation for making any other claims. This was true even for dissidents who were generally no friends of democracy. Now that the states they face are more open, we find they agree on much less. Now think about the state and identity. In this case, the state makes “dissidents,” creating common cause and thus an identity. To ignore government policy in creating causes and constituencies is to essentialize identity and ignore the importance of possibility and human agency. Only by understanding structure and constraints can we have a meaningful—and ultimately empowering—understanding of agency. In the case of East European dissidents, the state, by limiting democratic means of participation, turns everyone with a grievance into a democracy activist—at least for a time.? Conversely, states can create narrow constituencies and have done so in familiar ways: by pinning yellow stars on some people; excluding some colors of people from full participation in social, political, or economic life, or finding some hue in skin tone that defines rights; by criminalizing some sexual behaviors. In other words, the action of the state creates these collective identities and sets the boundaries of a dissident collective. Movements are bound neither by narrow issues nor by particular tactics. Although some individuals or groups habitually use the same years to pursue their goals, for example, firebombing, demonstrations, boycotts, or electioneering, most choose strategies they think most likely to be effective, given their perceptions of resources, opportunities, and constraints, including organizational limits and self-imposed moral commitments.? The Women’s Pentagon Action provides a clear example of the mix of pragmatic calculations and moral imperatives that shapes collective action. The WPA staged large demonstrations and civil disobedience actions outside the Pentagon in the early 1980s, linking the nuclear arms race to broader social injustices, including violence against women, poverty, and other violations of human rights (Epstein 1991). The Pentagon actions included expressions of mourning for societal injustice, and anger at the perpetrators of injustice and ended with participants symbolically “exorcising” the evil spirits of the Pentagon by weaving a “web of life” around the building, simultaneously trying to shut the building down. These symbols reprised decades-old, self-consciously dramatic tactics. Activists combined direct political action with spiritual rituals they claimed drew on the strength of goddesses and other sources of women’s power (Spretnak 1982). We can’t begin to understand this, location and frame, without reference to the ideology of the group, the political culture it emerged from, and the political climate of the 1980s, which made the Pentagon a likely site for protest.? As the political landscape changes, activists reconsider their choices of issues and tactics. After the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated the first strategic arms agreement (SALT) and the antiballistic missile treaty in 1972, there was no large and visible peace activism during the following decade (Meyer 1993). Activists, however, continued their efforts, choosing other challenges. Many women shifted their efforts to reproductive rights, either through advocacy or service provision (Staggenborg 1991). Women from the liberal wing of the feminist movement worked through more conventional political institutions, participating in party politics and electoral campaigns, and winning some victories. Finally, women not ostensibly engaged with the feminist movement in the 1970s nonetheless carried its values through what Katzenstein (1998) calls “unobtrusive mobilization” within mainstream institutions and professions. The boundaries between movement activism and more conventional political and social engagement are easily blurred. It might seem that one movement reemerged just as the other faded. Rather, the interplay between the collective identity asserted by dissident claimants and the authorities they challenge is expressed through claims, conduct, and coalitions. The outside configuration of issues and alliances suggests certain claims and tactics as most promising or urgent to challengers at any given time. As states alter the costs and benefits of collective action and develop new techniques for controlling collective action, they allow, encourage, provoke, or discourage movements’ particular changing strategies of influence. A cyclic pattern emerges, as states respond to movement challenges and alter the opportunities available to contemporary and subsequent movements (Tarrow 1989a). The early 1980s, for example, offered a resistant cultural and political climate for women’s rights activists (see Faludi 1991) just as dissenting elites encouraged and supported public mobilization on peace issues. No wonder, then, that many women’s movement activists chose peace issues as the most promising means of advancing political claims (Meyer and Whittier 1994; Sawyers and Meyer 1999).RoleplayingRoleplaying Good – EducationRoleplaying through fiat simulates and encourages learning and empowerment.Innes, Berkeley Director, and Booher, Visiting Scholar, 99 (Judith and David, Journal of the American Planning Association, Winter, Vol. 65, Iss. 1)Our observation and practice of consensus building suggests that the analogy to role-playing games will help to illuminate the dynamic of effective consensus processes. Even when the dispute seems intractable, role playing in consensus building allows players to let go of actual or assumed constraints and to develop ideas for creating new conditions and possibilities. Drama and suspension of reality allows competing, even bitterly opposed interests to collaborate, and engages individual players emotionally over many months. Scenario building and storytelling can make collective sense of complexity, of predicting possibilities in an uncertain world, and can allow the playful imagination, which people normally suppress, to go to work. In the course of engaging in various roles, participants develop identities for themselves and others and become more effective participants, representing their stakeholders' interests more clearly. In many of their most productive moments, participants in consensus building engage not only in playing out scenarios, but also in a kind of collective, speculative tinkering, or bricolage, similar in principle to what game participants do. That is, they play with heterogeneous concepts, strategies, and actions with which various individuals in the group have experience, and try combining them until they create a new scenario that they collectively believe will work. This bricolage, discussed further below, is a type of reasoning and collective creativity fundamentally different from the more familiar types, argumentation and tradeoffs.[sup11] The latter modes of problem solving or dispute resolution typically allow zero sum allocation of resources among participants or finding the actions acceptable to everyone. Bricolage, however, produces, rather than a solution to a known problem, a new way of framing the situation and of developing unanticipated combinations of actions that are qualitatively different from the options on the table at the outset. The result of this collective tinkering with new scenarios is, most importantly, learning and change among the players, and growth in their sophistication about each other, about the issues, and about the futures they could seek. Both consensus building and roleplaying games center on learning, innovation, and change, in a process that is entertaining and-when conducted effectively-in some fundamental sense empowers individuals.Roleplaying Good – Devil’s AdvocateMalcolm X proves that roleplaying lets us learn about other peoples’ opinions.Branham, former professor at Bates College, 95[Robert James, author of Sweet Freedom's Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Democracy in America, as well as, Winter 1995, “`I was gone on debating': Malcolm X's prison debates and public confrontations.” Augmentation & Advocacy, Vol. 31 Issue 3, p117, , accessed 7/5/13, MC]Norfolk had a fine library of several thousand volumes and prisoners were able to check out books of their choice. Malcolm X became a voracious and critical reader, discovering "new evidence to document the Muslim teachings" in books ranging from accounts of the slave trade to Milton's Paradise Lost (X, 1965b, pp. 185186). Malcolm X's "prison education, including Elijah Muhammad," writes Baraka, "gives him the form with which overtly to combine consciousness with his actual life" (p. 26). As Malcolm X sought new outlets for his heightened political consciousness, he turned to the weekly formal debates sponsored by the inmate team. "My reading had my mind like steam under pressure," he recounted; "Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face. I decided to do this by putting my name down to debate" (1965b, p. 184).Malcolm X's prison debate experience allowed him to bring his newly acquired historical knowledge and critical ideology to bear on a wide variety of social issues. "Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I'd track down and study everything I could find on it," wrote Malcolm X. "I'd put myself in my opponent's place and decide how I'd try to win if I had the other side; and then I'd figure out a way to knock down those points" (1965b, p. 184). Preparation for each debate included four or five practice sessions. Debaters conducted individual research and also worked collaboratively in research teams (Bender, 1993). Visiting debaters "could not understand how we had the material to debate with them," recalls Malcolm Jarvis, Malcolm X's debate partner at Norfolk. "They were at the mercy of people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s to teach them," he explains.The weekly Norfolk debates attracted large audiences, generally filling the three-hundred-seat prison theater. Most prisoners attended and the sessions also attracted curious visitors, usually invited representatives of organizations connected to the topic under discussion. These debates provided Malcolm X with the first large audiences of his speaking career.I will tell you that right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilirating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been. Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, the things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate -- once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating. (1965b, p. 184)Roleplaying Good – DecisionmakingRoleplaying is empowering and helps us better make decisions.Rawls, former Harvard Professor, 99[John, 2009, “The Law of the Peoples,” University of Chicago Law Review, The Law of Peoples, vol.64: no.3, p. 54-7, , accessed 7/5/13, MC]Developing the Law of Peoples within a liberal conception of justice, we work out the ideals and principles of the foreign policy of a reasonably just liberal people. I distinguish between the public reason of liberal peoples and the public reason of the Society of Peoples. The first is the public reason of equal citizens of domestic society debating the constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice concerning their own government; the second is the public reason of free and equal liberal peoples debating their mutual relations as peoples. The Law of Peoples with its political concepts and principles, ideals and criteria, is the content of this latter public reason. Although these two public reasons do not have the same content, the role of public reason among free and equal peoples is analogous to its role in a constitutional democratic regime among free and equal citizens. Political liberalism proposes that, in a constitutional democratic regime, comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right are to be replaced in public reason by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. Here note the parallel: public reason is invoked by members of the Society of Peoples, and its principles are addressed to peoples as peoples. They are not expressed in terms of comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right, which may hold sway in this or that society, but in terms that can be shared by different peoples. 6.2. Ideal of Public Reason. Distinct from the idea of public reason is the ideal of public reason. In domestic society this ideal is realized, or satisfied, whenever judges, legislators, chief executives, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the idea of public reason and explain to other citizens their reasons for supporting fundamental political questions in terms of the political conception of justice that they regard as the most reasonable. In this way they fulfill what I shall call their duty of civility to one another and to other citizens. Hence whether judges, legislators, and chief executives act from and follow public reason is continually shown in their speech and conduct. How is the ideal of public reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative government, citizens vote for representatives-chief executives, legislators, and the like-not for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote directly on referenda questions, which are not usually fundamental questions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally, citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact.7l When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech.Roleplaying Good – PoliticsRoleplaying is key to decision making — teaches us both pragmatic and philosophical values – detachment from the personal is keyHangh?j, University of Bristol Author, 08 — [Thorkild Hangh?j, author affiliated with Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, research the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education, 2008 (“PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming,” University of Southern Denmark, p. 50-51 Available Online at , Accessed on July 7, 2013)][SP]Joas’ re-interpretation of Dewey’s pragmatism as a “theory of situated creativity” raises a critique of humans as purely rational agents that navigate instrumentally through meansends- schemes (Joas, 1996: 133f). This critique is particularly important when trying to understand how games are enacted and validated within the realm of educational institutions that by definition are inscribed in the great modernistic narrative of “progress” where nation states, teachers and parents expect students to acquire specific skills and competencies (Popkewitz, 1998; cf. chapter 3). However, as Dewey argues, the actual doings of educational gaming cannot be reduced to rational means-ends schemes. Instead, the situated interaction between teachers, students, and learning resources are played out as contingent re-distributions of means, ends and ends in view, which often make classroom contexts seem “messy” from an outsider’s perspective (Barab & Squire, 2004). 4.2.3. Dramatic rehearsal The two preceding sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative activity of educational value, and how his assumptions on creativity and playful actions represent a critique of rational means-end schemes. For now, I will turn to Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal, which assumes that social actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for future action. Dewey uses the concept dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the most extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action… [It] is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This excerpt illustrates how Dewey views the process of decision making (deliberation) through the lens of an imaginative drama metaphor. Thus, decisions are made through the imaginative projection of outcomes, where the “possible competing lines of action” are resolved through a thought experiment. Moreover, Dewey’s compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies that decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or mechanical exercises, but that they have emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are relatively few discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A notable exception is the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, who praises Dewey’s concept as a “fortunate image” for understanding everyday rationality (Schütz, 1943: 140). Other attempts are primarily related to overall discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary, 1991, 2000, 2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003; R?nss?n, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out, dramatic rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of deliberation that does not characterise the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes “duties and contractual obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and rights” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Instead, dramatic rehearsal should be seen as the process of “crystallizing possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Thus, deliberation can in no way guarantee that the response of a “thought experiment” will be successful. But what it can do is make the process of choosing more intelligent than would be the case with “blind” trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of dramatic rehearsal provides a valuable perspective for understanding educational gaming as a simultaneously real and imagined inquiry into domain-specific scenarios. Dewey defines dramatic rehearsal as the capacity to stage and evaluate “acts”, which implies an “irrevocable” difference between acts that are “tried out in imagination” and acts that are “overtly tried out” with real-life consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This description shares obvious similarities with games as they require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific problems (cf. chapter 2). On the other hand, there is also a striking difference between moral deliberation and educational game activities in terms of the actual consequences that follow particular actions. Thus, when it comes to educational games, acts are both imagined and tried out, but without all the real-life consequences of the practices, knowledge forms and outcomes that are being simulated in the game world. Simply put, there is a difference in realism between the dramatic rehearsals of everyday life and in games, which only “play at” or simulate the stakes and risks that characterise the “serious” nature of moral deliberation, i.e. a real-life politician trying to win a parliamentary election experiences more personal and emotional risk than students trying to win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same time, the lack of real-life consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a relatively safe learning environment, where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be enacted and validated for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games are able to provide a safe but meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving a poor political presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular “competing possible lines of action” that are relevant to particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from this pragmatist perspective, the educational value of games is not so much a question of learning facts or giving the “right” answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent outcomes and domain-specific processes of problem-based scenarios. Roleplaying Good - ToleranceRole play allows students to discover their political identity and overcome stereotypes.Mitchell, Northwestern Professor & Chair of Communication, 2k[Gordon R., Winter 2000, “Simulated Public Argument As a Pedagogical Play on Worlds.” Argumentation & Advocacy, Vol. 36: Issue 3, , accessed 7/5/13, MC]When we assume the posture of the other in dramatic performance, we tap into who we are as persons, since our interpretation of others is deeply colored by our own senses of selfhood. By encouraging experimentation in identity construction, role-play "helps students discover divergent viewpoints and overcome stereotypes as they examine subjects from multiple perspectives..." (Moore, p. 190). Kincheloe points to the importance of this sort of reflexive critical awareness as an essential feature of educational practice in postmodern times. "Applying the notion of the postmodern analysis of the self, we come to see that hyperreality invites a heteroglossia of being," Kincheloe explains; "Drawing upon a multiplicity of voices, individuals live out a variety of possibilities, refusing to suppress particular voices. As men and women appropriate the various forms of expression, they are empowered to uncover new dimensions of existence that were previously hidden" (1993,p. 96).This process is particularly crucial in the public argument context, since a key guarantor of inequality and exploitation in contemporary society is the widespread and uncritical acceptance by citizens of politically inert self-identities. The problems of political alienation, apathy and withdrawal have received lavish treatment as perennial topics of scholarly analysis (see e.g. Fishkin 1997; Grossberg 1992; Hart 1998; Loeb 1994). Unfortunately, comparatively less energy has been devoted to the development of pedagogical strategies for countering this alarming political trend.However, some scholars have taken up the task of theorizing emancipatory and critical pedagogies, and argumentation scholars interested in expanding the learning potential of debate would do well to note their work (see e.g. Apple 1995, 1988, 1979; Britzman 1991; Giroux 1997, 1988, 1987; Greene 1978; McLaren 1993, 1989; Simon 1992; Weis and Fine 1993). In this area of educational scholarship, the curriculum theory of currere, a method of teaching pioneered by Pinar and Grumet (1976), speaks directly to many of the issues already discussed in this essay. As the Latin root of the word "curriculum," currere translates roughly as the investigation of public life (see Kincheloe 1993, p. 146). According to Pinar, "the method of currere is one way to work to liberate one from the web of political, cultural, and economic influences that are perhaps buried from conscious view but nonetheless comprise the living web that is a person's biographic situation" (Pinar 1994, p. 108). The objectives of role-play pedagogy resonate with the currere method. By opening discursive spaces for students to explore their identities as public actors, simulated public arguments provide occasions for students to survey and appraise submerged aspects of their political identities. Since many aspects of cultural and political life work currently to reinforce political passivity, critical argumentation pedagogies that highlight this component of students' self-identities carry significant emancipatory potential.Roleplaying Good – Solves ExclusionPretending to fill the role of policymakers is key to prevent exclusion and fight political passivityKulynych, PolySci Professor at Winthorp University 97 [Jessica, Winter 1997, “Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity, Vol. 30: No. 2, p. 344-5, JFS]Unfortunately, it is precisely these elements of citizen action that cannot be explained by a theory of communicative action. ?It is here that a performative conception of political action implicitly informs Hager’s discussion. ?From a performative perspective, the goal of action is not only to secure a realm for deliberative politics, but to disrupt and resist the norms and identities that structure such a realm and its participants. ?While Habermas theorizes that political solutions will emerge from dialogue, a performative understanding of participation highlights the limits of dialogue and the creative and often uncontrollable effect of unpremeditated action on the very foundations of communication. ?When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. ?Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. ?The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. ?Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients.Roleplaying Good – DemocracyAffirming a policy through roleplaying allows us to access liberal democratic participation.Rawls, former Harvard Professor, 99[John, 2009, “The Law of the Peoples,” University of Chicago Law Review, The Law of Peoples, vol.64: no.3, p. 56-57 , accessed 7/5/13, MC]To answer this question, we say that, ideally, citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact. When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political and social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty. I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech. Similarly, the ideal of the public reason of free and equal peoples is realized, or satisfied, whenever chief executives and legislators, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the principles of the Law of Peoples and explain to other peoples their reasons for pursuing or revising a people’s foreign policy and affairs of state that involve other societies. As for private citizens, we say, as before, that ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were executives and legislators and ask themselves what foreign policy supported by what considerations they would think it most reasonable to advance. Once again, when firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal executives and legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate the public reason of free and equal peoples, is part of the political and social basis of peace and understanding among peoples.Generic K Answers*StatismState Good – MovementsTurning away from the state prevents mobilization for good causes.Goble 98 (Paul, Publisher of RFE/RL, “THE CONSEQUENCES OF DEPOLITICIZATION,” Radio Free Europe, October 12, 1998, (opt,mozilla,unix,english,,new), accessed July 07)First, as people turn away from the state as the source of support, they inevitably care less about what the state does and are less willing to take action to assert their views. That means that neither the state nor the opposition can mobilize them to take action for or against anything. As a result, the opposition cannot easily get large numbers of people to demonstrate even if the opposition is taking positions that polls suggest most people agree with. And the government cannot draw on popular support even when it may be doing things that the people have said they want. That means that the size of demonstrations for or against anything or anyone are an increasingly poor indicator of what the people want or do not want the state to do. Second, precisely because people are focusing on their private lives and taking responsibility for them, they are likely to become increasingly upset when the state attempts to intervene in their lives even for the most benign purposes, particularly if it does so in an ineffective manner. Such attitudes, widespread in many countries and important in limiting the power of state institutions, nonetheless pose a particular danger to countries making the transition from communism to democracy. While those views help promote the dismantling of the old state, they also virtually preclude the emergence of a new and efficient one. As a result, these countries are often likely to find themselves without the effective state institutions that modern societies and economies require if they are to be well regulated. And third, countries with depoliticized populations are especially at risk when they face a crisis. The governments cannot count on support because people no longer expect the governments to be able to deliver. State Good – ExtinctionTransition from the nation-state system ensures violent extinctionRubin 8 (Dani, Earth Editor for PEJ News. “Beyond Post-Apocalyptic Eco-Anarchism,” .)Unlike twenty-five years ago, increasingly, people are adopting the anarcho-apocalyptic, civilization-must-fall-to-save-the-world attitude. It is a fairly clean and tight worldview, zealously bulletproof, and it scares me. I want the natural world, the greater community of life beyond our species, with all its beautiful and terrifying manifestations, and its vibrant landscapes to survive intact – I think about this a lot. A quick collapse of global civilization, will almost certainly lead to greater explosive damage to the biosphere, than a mediated slower meltdown. When one envisions the collapse of global society, one is not discussing the demise of an ancient Greek city-state, or even the abandonment of an empire like the Mayans. The end of our global civilization would not only result in the death of six billion humans, just wiping nature’s slate clean. We also have something like 5,000 nuclear facilities spread across the planet’s surface. And this is just one obvious and straightforward fact cutting across new radical arguments in favor of a quick fall. We have inserted ourselves into the web of life on planet Earth, into its interstitial fibers, over the last 500 years. We are now a big part of the world’s dynamic biological equation set – its checks and balances. If we get a “fever” and fall into social chaos, even just considering our non-nuclear toys laying about, the damage will be profound. It will be much more devastating than our new visionaries of post-apocalyptic paradise have prophesized. If one expands upon current examples of social chaos that we already see, like Afghanistan or Darfur, extrapolating them across the globe, encompassing Europe, Asia, North and South America, and elsewhere, then one can easily imagine desperate outcomes where nature is sacrificed wholesale in vain attempts to rescue human life. The outcomes would be beyond “ugly”; they would be horrific and enduring. That is why I cannot accept this new wave of puritanical anarcho-apocalyptic theology. The end-point of a quick collapse is quite likely to resemble the landscape of Mars, or even perhaps the Moon. I love life. I do not want the Earth turned barren. I think that those who are dreaming of a world returned to its wilderness state are lovely, naive romantics – dangerous ones. Imagine 100 Chernobyl’s spewing indelible death. Imagine a landscape over-run with desperate and starving humans, wiping out one ecosystem after another. Imagine endless tribal wars where there are no restraints on the use of chemical and biological weapons. Imagine a failing industrial infrastructure seeping massive quantities of deadly toxins into the air, water and soil. This is not a picture of primitive liberation, of happy post-civilized life working the organic farm on Salt Spring Island. State Good – EnvironmentState is the only actor that can solve the environmentYacobucci 6 (Brent, Science, and Industry Division, Feb, “Climate Change: Federal Laws and Policies Related to Greenhouse Gas Reductions”)JFSClimate change is generally viewed as a global issue, but proposed responses generally require action at the national level. In 1992, the United States ratified the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which called on industrialized countries to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases. During the past decade, a variety of voluntary and regulatory actions have been proposed or undertaken in the United States, including monitoring of electric utility carbon dioxide emissions, improved appliance efficiency, and incentives for developing renewable energy sources. This report provides background on the evolution of U.S. climate change policy, from ratification of the UNFCCC to the Bush Administration’s 2001 rejection of the Kyoto Protocol to the present. The report focuses on major regulatory programs that monitor or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, along with their estimated effect on emissions levels. In addition, legislation in the 109th Congress calling for monitoring or reducing greenhouse gas emissions is identified and examined. The earlier Bush, Clinton, and current Bush Administrations have largely relied on voluntary initiatives to reduce the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. This focus is particularly evident in the current Administration’s 2002 Climate Action Report (CAR), submitted under the provisions of the UNFCCC. Of the 50-plus programs summarized in the 2002 CAR, 6 are described as “regulatory.” However, this small subset of the total U.S. effort accounts for a large share of greenhouse gas emission reductions achieved over the past decade. In general, these efforts were established and implemented in response to concerns other than climate change, such as energy efficiency and air quality. State Good – Strategic Reversibility Power is strategically reversible – The resistance to state power counteracts the disciplinary power at the heart of their impactsCampbell 98 (David- PHD, Prof of cultural & poli geog @ U of Durham, Writing Security, p.257-258,ET)The possibility of rearticulating danger leads us to a final question: what modes of being and forms of life could we or should we adopt? To be sure, a comprehensive attempt to answer such a question is beyond the ambit of this book. But it is important to note that asking the question in this way mistakenly implies that such possibilities exist only in the future. Indeed, the extensive and intensive nature of the relations of power associated with the society of security means that there has been and remains a not inconsiderable freedom to explore alternative possibilities. While traditional analyses of power are often economistic and negative, Foucault's understanding of power emphasises its productive and enabling nature.36 Even more importantly, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and normalizing practices. Put simply, there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need to institute negative and constraining power practices comes about only because without them freedom would abound. Were there no possibility of freedom, subjects would not act in ways that required containment so as to effect order.37 Freedom, though, is not the absence of power. On the contrary, because it is only through power that subjects exercise their agency, freedom and power cannot be separated. As Foucault maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an `agonism' — of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.38 The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the `bio-power' discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have been increasingly directed towards modes of being and forms of life — such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government — the on-going agonism between those practices and the freedom they seek to contain, means that individuals have articulated a series of counter-demands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are a consequence of the permanent provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the 'strategic reversibility' of power relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistances, then the 'history of government as the "conduct of conduct" is interwoven with the history of dissenting "counter- conducts" '.39 Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation of 'the political' has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they ruled. State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, 'The core of what we now call "citizenship" . . . consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war.'40 In more recent times, constituencies associated with women's, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims upon society.*LanguageNo AlternativeThe alt is exactly like the link or the perm solves – Totalizing rejection of the aff premises is a right-wing fascistic tactic to control the terms of debate – Liberal reason defines progressive politics and solves bestHicks 9 (Stephen PhD Phil, )What links the Right and the Left is a core set of themes: antiindividualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a ?process of socialization, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group conflict, violence, and war. Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet for all of their differences, both the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly constant view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialization, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups. Rousseau, for example, is often seen as being a man of the Left, and he has influenced generations of Left thinkers. But he was also inspirational to Kant, Fichte, and Hegel—all men of the Right. Fichte in turn was used regularly as a model for Right thinkers— but he was also an inspiration for Left socialists such as Friedrich Ebert, president of the Weimar Republic after World War I. Hegel’s legacy, as is well known, took both a Right and a Left form. While the details are messy the broad point is clear: the collectivist Right and the collectivist Left are united in their major goals and in identifying their major opposition. None of these thinkers, for example, ever has a kind word for the politics of John Locke. In the twentieth century, the same trend continued. Scholars debated whether George Sorel is Left or Right; and that makes sense given that he inspired and admired both Lenin and Mussolini. And to give just one more example, Heidegger and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School have much more in common politically than either does with, say, John Stuart Mill. This in turn explains why thinkers from Herbert Marcuse to Alexandre Kojève to Maurice Merleau-Ponty all argued that Marx and Heidegger are compatible, but none ever dreamed of connecting either to Locke or Mill. The point will be that liberalism did not penetrate deeply into the main lines of political thinking in Germany. As was the case with metaphysics and epistemology, the most vigorous developments in social and political philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth century occurred in Germany, and German socio-political philosophy was dominated by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. By the early twentieth century, accordingly, the dominant issues for most Continental political thinkers were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option—but rather exactly when it would collapse—and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the socialism of the future. The defeat of the collectivist Right in World War II then meant that the Left was on its own to carry the socialist mantle forward. Accordingly, when the Left ran into its own major disasters as the twentieth century progressed, understanding its fundamental commonality with the collectivist Right helps to explain why in its desperation the Left has often adopted ?fascistic? tactics.A2: Word PICsLanguage is reversible – The introduction of injurious language simultaneously introduces the prospect of contestation – Their erasure avoids the prospect of contestationButler 97 (Judith, Excitable Speech, UC-Berkeley, p. 2)One is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name, one is derogated and demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a name, one is also, paradaoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call. When the address is injurious, it works its force upon the one in injures. Their certainty about the effects of language belies the nature of human agency and the importance of context, making us powerless in the face of language – Extricating the language from the plan doesn’t make the words “go away” – Confrontation via the permutation solves bestButler 97 (Judith, Excitable Speech, UC-Berkeley, p. 13)Indeed, recent effort to establish the incontrovertibly wounding power of certain words seem to founder on the question of who does the interpreting of what such words mean and what they perform. The recent regulations governing lesbian and gay self-definition in the military of, indeed, the recent controversies over rap music suggest that no clear consensus is possible on the question of whether there is a clear link between the words that are uttered and their putative power to injure. To argue, on the one hand, that the offensive effects of such words is fully contextual, and that a shift of context can exacerbate or minimize that offensiveness, is still not to give an account of the power that such words are said to exercise. To claim, on the other hand, that some utterances are always offensive, regardless of context, that they carry their contexts with them in ways that are too difficult to shed, is still not to offer a way to understand how context is invoked and restaged at the moment of utterance. This theory of agency is critical to true liberation – Their conception of liberty is in service to the state and systemic power – “Only policy formulations truly matter” is their argButler 97 (Judith, Excitable Speech, UC-Berkeley, p. 15)Those who seek to fix with certainty the link between certain speech acts and their injurious effects will surely lament the open temporality of the speech act. That no speech act has to perform injury as its effect means that no simple elaboration of speech acts will provide a standard by which the injuries of speech might be effectively adjudicated. Such a loosening of the link between act and injury, however, opens up the possibility for a counter-speech, a kind of talking back, that would be foreclosed by the tightening of that link. Thus, the gap that separates the speech act from its future effects has its auspicious implications: it begins a theory of linguistic agency that provides an alternative to the relenetless search for legal remedy. Te interval between instances of utterance not only makes the repetition and resignifcation of the utterance possible, but shows how words might, through time, become disjoined from their power to injure and recontextualized in more affirmative modes. I hope to make clear that by affirmative, I mean “opening up the possibility of agency” where agency is not the restoration of a sovereign autonomy in speech, a replication of conventional notions of mastery. Only we have a legitimate theory of human agencyButler 97 (Judith, Excitable Speech, UC-Berkeley, p. 16)Whereas some critics mistake the critique of sovereignty for the demolition of agency, I propose that agency begins where sovereignty wanes. The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset.They can’t solve the case--Censoring words transforms politics into a fight over language rather than the institutions that generate true violence. Perm solvesBrown 1 [Wendy Brown, professor at UC-Berkeley, 2001 Politics Out of History, p. 35-36]JFS “Speech codes kill critique,” Henry Louis Gates remarked in a 1993 essay on hate speech. Although Gates was referring to what happens when hate speech regulations, and the debates about them, usurp the discursive space in which one might have offered a substantive political response to bigoted epithets, his point also applies to prohibitions against questioning from within selected political practices or institutions. But turning political questions into moralistic ones—as speech codes of any sort do—not only prohibits certain questions and mandates certain genuflections, it also expresses a profound hostility toward political life insofar as it seeks to preempt argument with a legislative and enforced truth. And the realization of that patently undemocratic desire can only and always convert emancipatory aspirations into reactionary ones. Indeed, it insulates those aspirations from questioning at the very moment that Weberian forces of rationality and bureaucratization are quite likely to be domesticating them from another direction. Here we greet a persistent political paradox: the moralistic defense of critical practices, or of any besieged identity, weakens what it strives to fortify precisely by sequestering those practices from the kind of critical inquiry out of which they were born. Thus Gates might have said, “Speech codes, born of social critique, kill critique.” And, we might add, contemporary identity-based institutions, born of social critique, invariably become conservative as they are forced to essentialize the identity and naturalize the boundaries of what they once grasped as a contingent effect of historically specific social powers. But moralistic reproaches to certain kinds of speech or argument kill critique not only by displacing it with arguments about abstract rights versus identity-bound injuries, but also by configuring political injustice and political righteousness as a problem of remarks, attitude, and speech rather than as a matter of historical, political-economic, and cultural formations of power. Rather than offering analytically substantive accounts of the forces of injustice or injury, they condemn the manifestation of these forces in particular remarks or events. There is, in the inclination to ban (formally or informally) certain utterances and to mandate others, a politics of rhetoric and gesture that itself symptomizes despair over effecting change at more significant levels. As vast quantities of left and liberal attention go to determining what socially marked individuals say, how they are represented, and how many of each kind appear in certain institutions or are appointed to various commissions, the sources that generate racism, poverty, violence against women, and other elements of social injustice remain relatively unarticulated and unaddressed. We are lost as how to address those sources; but rather than examine this loss or disorientation, rather than bear the humiliation of our impotence, we posture as if we were still fighting the big and good fight in our clamor over words and names. Don’t mourn, moralizeTheir language K’s imply a relativism about language that equates right and wrong with effectiveness, allowing their evidence to employ a bias that you should be skeptical towardHicks 9 (Stephen PhD Phil, )This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists6 and repeatedly labels ?Amerika? a fascist state.7 With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness. If we now add to the postmodern epistemology of language the far Left politics of the leading postmodernists and their firsthand awareness of the crises of socialist thought and practice, then the verbal weaponry has to become explosive.Punishment of Language BadPunishing offensive language makes it worse—censorship only drives it underground where its effects are more acutely felt.Matthew Roskoski and Joe Peabody, “A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of Language ‘Arguments,’” 1991, , accessed 10/17/02If language "arguments" become a dominant trend, debaters will not change their attitudes. Rather they will manifest their attitudes in non-debate contexts. Under these conditions, the debaters will not have the moderating effects of the critic or the other debaters. Simply put, sexism at home or at lunch is worse than sexism in a debate round because in the round there is a critic to provide negative though not punitive feedback. The publicization effects of censorship are well known. "Psychological studies reveal that whenever the government attempts to censor speech, the censored speech - for that very reason - becomes more appealing to many people" (Strossen 559). These studies would suggest that language which is critiqued by language "arguments" becomes more attractive simply because of the critique. Hence language "arguments" are counterproductive. Conclusion Rodney Smolla offered the following insightful assessment of the interaction between offensive language and language "arguments": The battle against {offensive speech} will be fought most effectively through persuasive and creative educational leadership rather than through punishment and coercion... The sense of a community of scholars, an island of reason and tolerance, is the pervasive ethos. But that ethos should be advanced with education, not coercion. It should be the dominant voice of the university within the marketplace of ideas; but it should not preempt that marketplace. (Smolla 224-225).1 We emphatically concur. It is our position that a debater who feels strongly enough about a given language "argument" ought to actualize that belief through interpersonal conversation rather than through a plea for censorship and coercion. Each debater in a given round has three minutes of cross-examination time during which he or she may engage the other team in a dialogue about the ramifications of the language the opposition has just used. Additionally even given the efficacy of Rich Edwards' efficient tabulation program, there will inevitably be long periods between rounds during which further dialogue can take place. Punishing offensive language creates a backlash and drives it undergroundMatthew Roskoski and Joe Peabody, A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of Language Arguments, 1991Previously, we have argued that the language advocates have erroneously reversed the causal relationship between language and reality. We have defended the thesis that reality shapes language, rather than the obverse. Now we will also contend that to attempt to solve a problem by editing the language which is symptomatic of that problem will generally trade off with solving the reality which is the source of the problem. There are several reasons why this is true. The first, and most obvious, is that we may often be fooled into thinking that language "arguments" have generated real change. As Graddol and Swan observe, "when compared with larger social and ideological struggles, linguistic reform may seem quite a trivial concern," further noting "there is also the danger that effective change at this level is mistaken for real social change" (Graddol & Swan 195). The second reason is that the language we find objectionable can serve as a signal or an indicator of the corresponding objectionable reality. The third reason is that restricting language only limits the overt expressions of any objectionable reality, while leaving subtle and hence more dangerous expressions unregulated. Once we drive the objectionable idea underground it will be more difficult to identify, more difficult to root out, more difficult to counteract, and more likely to have its undesirable effect. The fourth reason is that objectionable speech can create a "backlash" effect that raises the consciousness of people exposed to the speech. Strossen observes that "ugly and abominable as these expressions are, they undoubtably have had the beneficial result of raising social consciousness about the underlying societal problem..." (560).*NarrativesNarratives Bad – Self-Fulfilling ProphecyNarrative fails to subvert the dominant paradigm – They recreate absolutismsClawson 98 (Mark, J.D. – Stanford, 22 Legal Stud. Forum 353)These subjective identities give certain individuals solid ground upon which they can build a progressive framework of thought. But the narrowly defined identities of contemporary progressivism limit the possibility that those outside the narrow group of interest will share the agenda. One might hope that progressives could be somewhat open-minded. But as Stanley Fish has observed, "to say that one's mind should be open sounds fine until you realize that it is equivalent to saying that one's mind should be empty of commitments, should be a purely formal device." n165 Assuming that a broad base of progressive factions can mold diverse individuals-with distinct notions of identity-into a cohesive whole is simply asking the framework of progressive thought to do something that, in the end, it cannot. Contemporary narratives of identity seek to resolve the questions of authority that plague progressivism, but they lack the power that religion once held. In an earlier era, progressives could unite behind an over-arching paradigm that commanded them to "do as they would be done by." n166 Since widely shared cultural assumptions fueled the progressive agenda of early decades, slavery was vanquished and monopolies were crushed. But increasingly subjective narratives of identity command obeisance only within narrow spheres, not translating easily into the realities of other social worlds. The interpretation of the world facilitated by these narrow identities-including a well-defined course of future action-is accessible only to those who share their cultural assumptions. This interpretation may, in fact, challenge the social worlds established by other progressives. In the end, it seems that progressive narratives, like Frye's romances, end where they began, but with a difference. n167 Questions of authority and feelings of dissonance remain in the larger progressivism, but those who gain new identities now live in temporary worlds of absolutes.Narratives Bad – Self-Fulfilling ProphecyNarratives support hegemonic structures- they link personal experience to universal unquestionable truth Ewick and Silbey 95 Patricia Susan S. Law & Society Review, 00239216, 19, Vol. 29, Issue 2In the previous section, we discussed how narratives, like the lives and experiences they recount, are cultural productions. Narratives are generated interactively through normatively structured performances and interactions. Even the most personal of narratives rely on and invoke collective narratives — symbols, linguistic formulations, structures, and vocabularies of motive — without which the personal would remain unintelligible and uninterpretable. Because of the conventionalized character of narrative, then, our stories are likely to express ideological effects and hegemonic assumptions.[ HYPERLINK "" \l "bib10" \o "10" 10] We are as likely to be shackled by the stories we tell (or that are culturally available for our telling) as we are by the form of oppression they might seek to reveal. In short, the structure, the content, and the performance of stories as they are defined and regulated within social settings often articulate and reproduce existing ideologies and hegemonic relations of power and inequality. It is important to emphasize that narratives do more than simply reflect or express existing ideologies. Through their telling, our stories come to constitute the hegemony that in turn shapes social lives and conduct "The hegemonic is not simply a static body of ideas to which members of a culture are obliged to conform" (Silberstein 1988:127). Rather, Silberstein writes, hegemony has "a protean nature in which dominant relations are preserved while their manifestations remain highly flexible. The hegemonic must continually evolve so as to recuperate alternative hegemonies." In other words, the hegemonic gets produced and evolves within individual, seemingly unique, discrete personal narratives. Indeed, the resilience of ideologies and hegemony may derive from their articulation within personal stories. Finding expression and being refashioned within the stories of countless individuals may lead to a polyvocality that inoculates and protects the master narrative from critique. The hegemonic strength of a master narrative derives, Brinkley Messick (1988:657) writes, from "its textual, and lived heteroglossia … [, s]ubverting and dissimulating itself at every … turn"; thus ideologies that are encoded in particular stories are "effectively protected from sustained critique" by the fact that they are constituted through variety and contradiction. Research in a variety of social settings has demonstrated the hegemonic potential of narrative by illustrating how narratives can contribute to the reproduction of existing structures of meaning and power. First, narratives can function specifically as mechanisms of social control (Mumby 1993). At various levels of social organization — ranging from families to nation-states — storytelling instructs us about what is expected and warns us of the consequences of nonconformity. Oft-told family tales about lost fortunes or spoiled reputations enforce traditional definitions and values of family life (Langellier & Peterson 1993). Similarly, bureaucratic organizations exact compliance from members through the articulation of managerial prerogatives and expectations and the consequences of violation or challenge (Witten 1993). Through our narratives of courtship, lost accounts, and failed careers, cultures are constructed; we "do" family, we "do" organization, through the stories we tell (Langellier & Peterson 1993). Second, the hegemonic potential of narrative is further enhanced by narratives' ability to colonize consciousness. Well-plotted stories cohere by relating various (selectively appropriated) events and details into a temporally organized whole (see part I above). The coherent whole, that is, the configuration of events and characters arranged in believable plots, preempts alternative stories. The events seem to speak for themselves; the tale appears to tell itself. Ehrenhaus (1993) provides a poignant example of a cultural meta-narrative that operates to stifle alternatives. He describes the currently dominant cultural narrative regarding the United States's involvement in the Vietnam War as one that relies on themes of dysfunction and rehabilitation. The story, as Ehrenhaus summarizes it, is structured as a social drama which characterizes both the nation and individual Vietnam veterans as having experienced a breakdown in normal functioning only recently resolved through a process of healing. This narrative is persuasive because it reiterates and elaborates already existing and dominant metaphors and interpretive frameworks in American culture concerning what Philip Rieff (1968) called the "triumph of the therapeutic" (see also Crews 1994). Significantly, the therapeutic motif underwriting this narrative depicts veterans as emotionally and psychologically fragile and, thus, disqualifies them as creditable witnesses. The connection between what they saw and experienced while in Vietnam and what the nation did in Vietnam is severed. In other words, what could have developed as a powerful critique of warfare as national policy is contained through the image of illness and rehabilitation, an image in which "'healing' is privileged over 'purpose' [and] the rhetoric of recovery and reintegration subverts the emergence of rhetoric that seeks to examine the reasons that recovery is even necessary" (Ehrenhaus 1993:83). Constituent and distinctive features of narratives make them particularly potent forms of social control and ideological penetration and homogenization. In part, their potency derives from the fact that narratives put "forth powerful and persuasive truth claims — claims about appropriate behavior and values — that are shielded from testing or debate" (Witten 1993:105). Performative features of narrative such as repetition, vivid concrete details, particularity of characters, and coherence of plot silence epistemological challenges and often generate emotional identification and commitment. Because narratives make implicit rather than explicit claims regarding causality and truth as they are dramatized in particular events regarding specific characters, stories elude challenges, testing, or debate. Van Dijk (1993) has reported, for instance, that stories containing negative images and stereotypes of nonwhite persons are less subject to the charge of racism when they recount personal experiences and particular events. Whereas a general claim that a certain group is inferior or dangerous might be contested on empirical grounds, an individual story about being mugged, a story which includes an incidental reference to the nonwhite race of the assailant, communicates a similar message but under the protected guise of simply stating the "facts." The causal significance or relevance of the assailant's race is, in such a tale, strongly implied but not subject to challenge or falsifiability. Thus representations, true and/or false, made implicitly without either validation or contest, are routinely exchanged in social interactions and thereby occupy social space. Third, narratives contribute to hegemony to the extent that they conceal the social organization of their production and plausibility. Narratives embody general understandings of the world that by their deployment and repetition come to constitute and sustain the life-world. Yet because narratives depict specific persons existing in particular social, physical, and historical locations, those general understandings often remain unacknowledged. By failing to make these manifest, narratives draw on unexamined assumptions and causal claims without displaying these assumptions and claims or laying them open to challenge or testing. Thus, as narratives depict understandings of particular persons and events, they reproduce, without exposing, the connections of the specific story and persons to the structure of relations and institutions that made the story plausible. To the extent that the hegemonic is "that order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies … that come to be taken-for-granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it" (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991), the unarticulated and unexamined plausibility is the story's contribution to hegemony. The following two examples drawn from recent sociolegal research illustrate the ways in which legally organized narrativity helps produce the taken-for-granted and naturalized world by effacing the connections between the particular and the general. Sara Cobb (1992) examines the processes through which women's stories of violence are "domesticated" (tamed and normalized) within mediation sessions. Cobb reports that the domestication of women's stories of violence are a consequence of the organization of the setting in which they are told: within mediation, the storyteller and her audience are situated within a normative organization that recognizes the values of narrative participation over any substantive moral or epistemological code or standard. Being denied access to any external standards, the stories the women tell cannot therefore be adjudged true or compelling. The stories are interpreted as one version of a situation in which "multiple perspectives are possible." Cobb demonstrates how this particular context of elicitation specifically buries and silences stories of violence, effectively reproducing women's relative powerlessness within their families. With women deprived of the possibility of corroboration by the norms of the mediation session, their stories of violence are minimized and "disappeared." As a consequence, the individual woman can get little relief from the situation that brought her to mediation: she is denied an individual legal remedy (by being sent from court to mediation) and at the same time denied access to and connections with any collective understanding of or response to the sorts of violence acknowledged by the law (through the organization of the mediation process). Through this process, "violence, as a disruption of the moral order in a community, is made familiar (of the family) and natural — the extraordinary is tamed, drawn into the place where we eat, sleep and [is] made ordinary" (ibid., p. 19). Whereas mediation protects narratives from an interrogation of their truth claims, other, formal legal processes are deliberately organized to adjudicate truth claims. Yet even in these settings, certain types of truth claims are disqualified and thus shielded from examination and scrutiny. The strong preference of courts for individual narratives operates to impede the expression (and validation) of truth claims that are not easily represented through a particular story. Consider, for example, the Supreme Court's decision in the McClesky case (1986). The defendant, a black man who had been convicted of the murder of a police officer, was sentenced to death. His Supreme Court appeal of the death sentence was based on his claim that the law had been applied in a racially discriminatory way, thus denying him equal protection under the law. As part of McClesky's appeal, David Baldus, a social scientist, submitted an amicus brief in which he reported the results of his analysis of 2,000 homicide cases in that state (Baldus 1990). The statistical data revealed that black defendants convicted of killing white citizens were significantly more likely to receive the death sentence than white defendants convicted of killing a black victim. Despite this evidence of racial discrimination, the Court did not overturn McClesky's death sentence. The majority decision, in an opinion written by Justice Powell, stated that the kind of statistical evidence submitted by Baldus was simply not sufficient to establish that any racial discrimination occurred in this particular case. The court declared, instead, that to demonstrate racial discrimination, it would be necessary to establish that the jury, or the prosecutor, acted with discriminatory purpose in sentencing McClesky.[ HYPERLINK "" \l "bib11" \o "11" 11] Here, then, an unambiguous pattern of racial inequity was sustained through the very invocation of and demand for subjectivity (the jury's or prosecutor's state of mind) and particularity (the refusal to interpret this case as part of a larger category of cases) that are often embodied in narratives. In this instance, relative powerlessness and injustice (if one is to believe Baldus's data) were preserved, rather than challenged, by the demand for a particular narrative about specific concrete individuals whose interactions were bounded in time and space. In other words, the Court held that the legally cognizable explanation of the defendant's conviction could not be a product of inferential or deductive comprehension (Mink 1970; Bruner 1986). Despite its best efforts, the defense was denied discursive access to the generalizing, and authoritative, language of social logico-deductive science and with it the type of "truths" it is capable of representing. The court insists on a narrative that effaces the relationship between the particular and the general, between this case and other capital trials in Georgia. Further, the McClesky decision illustrates not only how the demand for narrative particularity may reinscribe relative powerlessness by obscuring the connection between the individual case and larger patterns of institutional behavior; it also reveals how conventionalized legal procedures impede the demonstration of that connection.[ HYPERLINK "" \l "bib12" \o "12" 12] The court simultaneously demanded evidence of the jurors' states of mind and excluded such evidence. Because jury deliberations are protected from routine scrutiny and evaluation, the majority demanded a kind of proof that is institutionally unavailable. Thus, in the McClesky decision, by insisting on a narrative of explicit articulated discrimination, the court calls for a kind of narrative truth that court procedures institutionally impede. As these examples suggest, a reliance on or demand for narrativity is neither unusual nor subversive within legal settings. In fact, given the ideological commitment to individualized justice and case-by-case processing that characterizes our legal system, narrative, relying as it often does on the language of the particular and subjective, may more often operate to sustain, rather than subvert, inequality and injustice. The law's insistent demand for personal narratives achieves a kind of radical individuation that disempowers the teller by effacing the connections among persons and the social organization of their experiences. This argument is borne out if we consider that being relieved of the necessity, and costs, of telling a story can be seen as liberatory and collectively empowering. Insofar as particular and subjective narratives reinforce a view of the world made up of autonomous individuals interacting only in immediate and local ways, they may hobble collective claims and solutions to social inequities (Silbey 1984). In fact, the progressive achievements of workers' compensation, no-fault divorce, no-fault auto insurance, strict liability, and some consumer protection regimes derive directly from the provision of legal remedies without the requirement to produce an individually crafted narrative of right and liability.Narratives Bad – FetishizationThe affirmative fetishizes the narrative – prevents true changeBrown 96 (Wendy is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable)But if the silences in discourses of domination are a site for insurrectionary noise, if they are the corridors we must fill with explosive counter-tales, it is also possible to make a fetish of breaking silence. Even more than a fetish, it is possible that this ostensible tool of emancipation carries its own techniques of subjugation--that it converges with non-emancipatory tendencies in contem- porary culture (for example, the ubiquity of confessional discourse and rampant personalization of political life), that it establishes regulatory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of confession, in short, feeds the powers we meant to starve. While attempting to avoid a simple reversal of feminist valorizations of breaking silence, it is this dimension of silence and its putative opposite with which this Article is concerned. In the course of this work, I want to make the case for silence not simply as an aesthetic but a political value, a means of preserving certain practices and dimensions of existence from regulatory power, from normative violence, as well as from the scorching rays of public exposure. I also want to suggest a link between, on the one hand, a certain contemporary tendency concerning the lives of public figures--the confession or extraction of every detail of private and personal life (sexual, familial, therapeutic, financial) and, on the other, a certain practice in feminist culture: the compulsive putting into public discourse of heretofore hidden or private experiences--from catalogues of sexual pleasures to litanies of sexual abuses, from chronicles of eating disorders to diaries of homebirths, lesbian mothering, and Gloria Steinam's inner revolution. In linking these two phenomena--the privatization of public life via the mechanism of public exposure of private life on the one hand, and the compulsive/compulsory cataloguing of the details of women's lives on the other--I want to highlight a modality of regulation and depoliticization specific to our age that is not simply confessional but empties private life into the public domain, and thereby also usurps public space with the relatively trivial, rendering the political personal in a fashion that leaves injurious social, political and economic powers unremarked and untouched. In short, while intended as a practice of freedom (premised on the modernist conceit that the truth shall make us free), these productions of truth not only bear the capacity to chain us to our injurious histories as well as the stations of our small lives but also to instigate the further regulation of those lives, all the while depoliti- cizing their conditions. This turns the case- it writes oppression into the lawBrown 96 (Wendy is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable)These questions suggest that in legally codifying a fragment of an insurrec- tionary discourse as a timeless truth, interpellating women as unified in their victimization, and casting the "free speech" of men as that which "silences" and thus subordinates women, MacKinnon not only opposes bourgeois liberty to substantive equality, but potentially intensifies the regulation of gender and sexuality in the law, abetting rather than contesting the production of gender identity as sexual. In short, as a regulatory fiction of a particular identity is deployed to displace the hegemonic fiction of universal personhood, the discourse of rights converges insidiously with the discourse of disciplinarity to produce a spectacularly potent mode of juridical-regulatory domination. Again, let me emphasize that the problem I am seeking to delineate is not specific to MacKinnon or even feminist legal reform. Rather, MacKinnon's and kindred efforts at bringing subjugated discourses into the law merely constitute examples of what Foucault identified as the risk of re-codification and re- colonisation of "disinterred knowledges" by those "unitary discourses, which first disqualified and then ignored them when they made their appearance." n23 They exemplify how the work of breaking silence can metamorphose into new techniques of domination, how our truths can become our rulers rather than our emancipators, how our confessions become the norms by which we are regulated.Narratives Bad – VictimizationTheir narratives of suffer produce flawed knowledge about the other and exclude those whose narratives aren’t about sufferingBrown 96 (Wendy is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable)If, taken together, the two passages from Foucault we have been consider- ing call feminists to account in our compulsion to put everything about women into discourse, they do not yet exhaust the phenomenon of being ensnared 'in the folds of our own discourses.' For if the problem I have been discussing is easy enough to see--indeed, largely familiar to those who track techniques of co-optation--at the level of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it is altogether more disquieting when it takes the form of regulatory discourse in our own sub- and counter-cultures of resistance . . . when confessing injury becomes that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than injured. In an age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally significant--gender, race, sexuality, and so forth--confessional discourse, with its truth-bearing status in a post-epistemological universe, not only regulates the confessor in the name of freeing her as Foucault described that logic, but extends beyond the confess- ing individual to constitute a regulatory truth about the identity group. Confessed truths are assembled and deployed as "knowledge" about the group. This phenomenon would seem to undergird a range of recurring troubles in feminism, from the "real woman" rejoinder to post-structuralist deconstructions of her, to totalizing descriptions of women's experience that are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of survivor stories. Thus, for example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited, violated and humiliated in her work invariably monopolizes the truth about sex work; as the girl with math anxieties constitutes the truth about women and math; as eating disor- ders have become the truth about women and food; as sexual abuse and viola- tion occupy the knowledge terrain of women and sexuality. In other words, even as feminism aims to affirm diversity among women and women's ex- periences, confession as the site of production of truth and its convergence with feminist suspicion and deauthorization of truth from other sources tends to reinstate a unified discourse in which the story of greatest suffering becomes the true story of woman. (I think this constitutes part of the rhetorical power of MacKinnon's work; analytically, the epistemological superiority of confes- sion substitutes for the older, largely discredited charge of false consciousness). Thus, the adult who does not suffer from her or his childhood sexual experi- ence, the lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily or "correctly" identify with her marking as such--these figures are excluded as bonafide members of the categories which also claim them. Their status within these discourses is that of being "in denial," "passing" or being a "race traitor." This is the norm-making process in feminist traditions of "breaking silence" which, ironically, silence and exclude the very women these traditions mean to empower. (Is it surprising, when we think in this vein, that there is so little feminist writing on heterosexual pleasure?) But if these practices tacitly silence those whose experiences do not parallel those whose suffering is most marked (or whom the discourse produces as suffering markedly), they also condemn those whose sufferings they record to a permanent identification with that suffering. Here, we experience a temporal ensnaring in 'the folds of our own discourses' insofar as we identify ourselves in speech in a manner that condemns us to live in a present dominated by the past. But what if speech and silence aren't really opposites? Indeed, what if to speak incessantly of one's suffering is to silence the possibilities of overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it? What if this incessant speech not only overwhelms the experiences of others, but alternative (unutterable? traumatized? fragmentary? inassimilable?) zones of one's own experience? Conversely, what if a certain modality of silence about one's suffering--and I am suggesting that we must consider modalities of silence as varied as modalities of speech and discourse--is to articulate a variety of possibilities not otherwise available to the sufferer?Victimization turns and outweighs the case – causes oppression and denies agencyKappeller 95 (Susanne, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, pg. 18)There cannot therefore in the context of specific women’s actions be continued and undifferentiated talk of ‘women’s powerlessness’ —~ viewed simply in relation to men, the state, the power of leading capitalists or any other more powerful groups which can always be found. The discussion about power relations among women or within the women’s movement should have once and for all dispelled the simplistic view of women as powerless, impotent or ‘victims’. On the contrary, we are trying to gain an understanding of the position each of us has in a variety of power structures, where we are sometimes on the side of the oppressed, sometimes of the oppressors, in a complex network of relative power relations which have to be specifically analysed in each situation and cannot be determined simply in terms of social ‘identities’. Moreover, feminism has produced an analysis — if not of action generally, at any rate of sexual violence — which not only emphasizes the abuser’s will and choice of action, but also uniquely recognizes the survivor’s action of resisting, and in this her will to resist. While violence constitutes precisely the violator’s attempt to reduce his victim’s freedom of action to nought — where the ultimate consequence is indeed her total victimization in death — the survivor’s survival means that she has recognized and made use of her remaining, even if minimal, scope for action. Feminist analysis sees in the survivor not a passive victim, but a person and agent who has successfully sought to resist. This means recognizing even in her virtual powerlessness the still existing potential for action. Resistance by definition means acting in situations of violence and oppression where our freedom’- of action is severely limited and circumscribed. All the more vital that we recognize what scope for action there is. All the more vital, also, that we recognize how much greater is our scope of action and resistance most of the time, compared to the extremity of victimization in experiences of life—threatening violence and enslavement - which we invoke metaphorically and all too lightly by claiming victim status on account of oppression.Narratives Bad – Narcissism They narcissistically use narratives for the ballot – guts solvency and furthers oppressionDarling-Wolf, Phd candidate at the University of Iowa, 98 (Fabienne, “White bodies and feminist dilemmas: on the complexity of positionality. (Constructing (Mis)Representations). Journal of Communication Inquiry v.22.n4(Oct1998): pp410(16)If our position can render even well-intended and carefully crafted speech epistemologically dangerous and place it beyond our control, attempts to speak for others motivated by self-interest and/or ignorance can conceivably have even more damaging consequences. Consciously or not, our speech might not be as well intended as we claim. Rey Chow's (1993) Maoist, described in her book Writing Diaspora, exemplifies how identification with the subaltern can be self-interestingly used by academics pressured to include issues of gender, race, or class into their work. Chow defines the Maoist as a person who desires a social order opposed to the one supporting her undertaking but refuses to recognize her own complicity with it. Identifying with a generalized non-Western subaltern, the Maoist uses the subaltern as a "subject" to advance her career and places herself in a fraudulent position of self-subalternization employed to claim authority in academia. The urge to speak for the subaltern may also originate in white Western theorists' desire to assuage their guilt. Such a desire is exemplified by a telling anecdote mentioned by both Sabina Sawhney (1995) and Dympna Callaghan (1995) in which two feminist publishing houses made special efforts to publish writings on the plight of Asian girls by a young theorist named Rahila Khan--until they found out that Khan was in fact a male, middle-class, white vicar from Brighton named Toby Forward. Callaghan interprets the publishing houses' participation in the masquerade as a sign of "white feminism's still troubled encounter with racial difference" (p. 198). While attempting to "give Khan a voice," white feminists treated her as an anthropological case study of an "authentic" other, as exemplified by their constant requests for more "ethnic" writings. In their search for ethnic specimens to increase their own knowledge, white feminists were not ready to deal with the complexity of positionality and consequently eagerly participated in the commodification of ethnic identity. They contributed to "a fetishization of women of color that once again reconstitutes them as other caught in the gaze of white feminist desire" (Friedmah 1995, 11). Like Costner, Western theorists are searching for the authentic other in ethnic difference and an idealized past. In Writing Diaspora, Chow (1993) quotes a sinologist complaining about the fact that Chinese writers are losing their heritage. She compares the orientalist's desire to save the perishing traditions of "native" cultures and the "culture collecting" tendencies of "new historicism" to the work of primatologists capturing specimens for the safe enjoyment of white audiences at home. She also notes that in East Asian studies, political and cultural difference is frequently used as a judgment of authenticity. "Natives" of communist China are treated as communist specimens who ought to be faithful to their nation's official political ideology. This focus on authenticity and national identity is often accompanied by pressures to concentrate on the "internal" and specific problems of a culture and serves to gloss over the impact of imperialism. "Native others are thus put to the difficult task of "authentically" representing their culture. Like the white model on the cover of a Japanese magazine, they are forced to stage their "exoticism" and turned into cultural icons. For instance, while she acknowledges that her work as a cultural critic is intimately related to her experience as an Asian American woman, Leslie Bow (1995) expresses her discomfort with the fact that her Asian body serves to authenticate her "knowledge claims" about Asian Americans, Asian women, and, to some extent, women of color within the academy. As she explains, "[This] makes me acutely aware that we can be positioned not only according to our own agenda, but to that of others" (pp. 41-42). Furthermore, if the representation is judged inadequate--that is, if their work does not fit the dominant group's nostalgic notion of authenticity--native others are exposed to the danger of being charged with self-interest. Chow mentions the case of the Chinese poet Bei Dao accused of being "supremely translatable" by a Western sinologist, or her own experience of being deemed not "really" Chinese. Others, judged to be authentic enough by the dominant group, may become canonized in the academy and championed as a major cultural voice (Lakritz 1995). Those token "native informants" can be used to assuage the guilt and hide the ignorance of a majority concerned with including multiculturalism in its curriculum, a majority that, in the process of granting space to select informants, keeps control over the terms of the debate. Another side effect of this forced positioning is exclusion from the dominant discourse. As Trinh Minh-ha (1992, 164) puts it, "We have been herded as people of color to mind only our own culture." Uma Narayan (1989) notes that scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origin often see the "darker side" of their identity played up, while the fact that they are distanced from the groups they are supposed to represent is ignored. On a more general level, Chow (1993) observes that the framing of Chinese literature as minority discourse impedes its ascension to the status of world literature, as the rhetoric of universals ensures its ghettoization. She maintains that Chinese literature is thus trapped in its minority status because it is that status that gives it legitimacy. Furthermore, Chow (1993) notes that within Chinese studies, minority discourse is not simply a fight for the content of oppression but also a fight for the ownership of speaking. She explains that male Chinese authors often denounce feminist scholarship in their efforts to defend tradition, sinocentrism, and heritage. By doing so, such authors claim the minority discourse for themselves and in turn relegate Chinese women to minority status within the field of Asian studies. Thus, a feminist perspective may be considered compromising for minority scholars who can easily be accused of cultural betrayal (Bow 1995; Zavella 1996). For instance, bell hooks has been accused of committing acts of betrayal when turning her feminist critique to African American males. She warns that such practices can lead to hazardous self-censorship within minority communities. As she notes, "The equation of truth-telling with betrayal is one of the most powerful ways to promote silence" (hooks 1994, 68). The claims of Japanese feminists have often similarly been dismissed as manifestations of Western influence (Fujieda and Fujimura-Fanselow 1995)--that is, as not "truly" Japanese (see also Gamham 1993). But while minority discourse can be a trap, it can also serve the interests of academics in the West. Chow (1993) charges Chinese intellectuals speaking within the American academy on behalf of the neglected other in China with a certain level of dishonesty, especially if the former do not acknowledge the privilege afforded by their position overseas. She notes that scholars working in Western institutions might have more in common with their white middle-class colleagues than with the women "back home" they are supposed to represent. As she writes, "If it is true that 'our' speech takes its `raw materials' from the suffering of the oppressed, it is also true that it takes its capital from the scholarly tradition, from the machineries of literacy and education, which are affordable only to a privileged few" (p. 114). Bow (1995) similarly questions the self-positioning of some scholars, including Trinh Minh-ha and Gayatri Spivak, as Third World cultural critics rather than Asian Americanists. She wonders about the effects of disavowing American national affiliation on the part of scholars benefiting from American resources. Finally, the fact that the act of speaking itself is necessarily embedded in structures of domination and reinforces the speaker's authority over "subaltern subjects" spoken for or about raises the question of whether the subaltern can ever speak. According to Spivak, she or he cannot. As Spivak puts it, "If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not subaltern any more" (quoted in Chow 1993, 36). Thus, Spivak urges us to recognize the double bind of identification that either results in the subaltern's protection against her own kind (Dunbar saving the Lakota Sioux women from the patriarchal attitudes of the men in their own culture) or in the assimilation of her voice into the project of imperialism (Khan's "ethnic" writings embraced by white feminists). Narratives Bad – NarcissismTheir narcissistic movement begs for attention, ensuring hegemonic elites will notice it and crush itCarlson 96 (Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature in the Ph.D. Program at the City University of New York, Marvin A., Performance: A critical Introduction, p. 181)So much attention has been given to the social importance of visibility, in fact, that Peggy Phelan, in her recent book Unmarked (1993), has cautioned that the operations of visibility itself need to be subjected to more critical inquiry. In stressing performance’s ability to make visible, feminists have not considered the power of the invisible, nor the unmarked quality of live performance, which “becomes itself through disappearance.” Without seeking to preserve itself through a stabilized copy, it “plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control.” Phelan cites the performance works of Angelika Festa as work “in which she appears in order to disappear” – appearing as a motionless figure wearing a mirror as a mask (You Are Obsessive, Eat Something, 1984) or hanging for hours from a slanted pole, her eyes covered and her body wrapped in cocoon – like sheets (Untitled Dance (with fish and others), 1987). Traditional representation, committed to resemblance and repetition, attempts to establish and control the “other” as “same.” This is the strategy of voyeurism, fetishism, and fixity, the ideology of the visible. If performance can be conceived as representation without reproduction, it can disrupt the attempted totalizing of the gaze and thus open a more diverse and inclusive representational landscape. As Elwes has noted, women performers should “never stay the same long enough to be named, fetishized.”*IronyIrony Bad – Non-FalsifiableIrony is kinetic and determined by the listener – necessitates judge interventionKaryshyn 95 (Jennifer Reksovna, prof @ Johns Hopkins University, Project Muse, )JFSAccording to Hutcheon, irony does not "exist." Instead, it is a kinetic--indeed, almost ephemeral--event that can "happen" between speaker and auditor, or between curator and museum visitor; and "the final responsibility for deciding whether irony actually happens in an utterance or not (and what that ironic meaning is) rests, in the end, solely with the interpreter" (45), rather than with the initiating ironist. The political force of this shift from a receptive recognition to a kinetic "happening," as the author herself admits, is to dislodge the commonplace that those who don't "get" particular ironies lack the cognitive skills the rest of us enjoy. "Interpretive competence" is a term often used in speech act theory; Hutcheon sets out to banish it--with its ironist-centric perspective--from the lexicon of irony, in favor of the more egalitarian concept of felicitously overlapping (or not) "communities": the cultural competence that interpreters are said to need might be more a matter of overlapping discursive communities between both participants. In a sense, then, it would be less a matter of the competence of one than of what Dan Sperber and Diedre Wilson have called the relevance of the context to both. (96; emphasis in original) Irony Bad – Alt FailsIrony can never replace the existing system and it provides cover for tyrannical intentionsWallace 97 (David Foster, Professor of Creative Writing and English at Pomona College, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, p. 66-68)JFSSo then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage:'32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow . . . oppressed. Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves — in other words, they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.Irony Bad – Apolitical Irony is apolitical Karyshyn 95 (Jennifer Reksovna, prof @ Johns Hopkins University, Project Muse, )JFSThe variety of densely-textured and lucid readings that Hutcheon provides--of Kenneth Branagh's 1989 response to Olivier's 1944 Henry V, of the Ring cycle performed at Thé?tre de la Monnaie in 1991, of Beauvais Lyons' art exhibit "Reconstruction of an Aazudian Temple"--seems to demonstrate the sheer variety of disciplines to which irony is available; although the reader notes that, in each of these extended readings, the "dominant" or "in" group (colonizers, white English males, members of academe, non-semitic Germans) inevitably is ironized by a member of its own ranks. This choice of practical examples gently undermines Hutcheon's claim that irony can be used by any group for any reason. Her theory, however, is useful in its very gesture to dissociate irony from unilateral political ramifications; and her recognition of the interpretive vicissitudes that result from one's individuality and simultaneous "membership" in a community fruitfully takes into account contemporary debates about identity politics and obligation. Yet the emphasis on individuals and their particular matrices of discursive communities makes any irony seem more accidental than political. Hutcheon repeatedly uses "happens" to describe irony's operation: "that's the verb I think best describes the process." The verb is appropriate: the great, unnamed determinant of Irony's Edge is hap, happenstance, the sheer (remote) chance that discursive communities will overlap and irony will "happen." The chanciness of irony leads us to question--appropriately, in this self-proclaimed age of irony--whether there could ever be a coherent "politics of irony" at all. ? Irony is slacktivism – we parody problems but do nothing about themGoerlandt 6 (Iannis, Professor at Ghent University, Critique, “"Put the Book Down and Slowly Walk Away": Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest”, Volume 47, Issue 3, Spring, Proquest)Hutcheon also spots the possibility of complacency in irony: irony becomes a kind of surrogate for actual resistance and opposition. Ironists have been accused of smugness before, [. . .] but this time it is the interpreter too who is not being let off the hook. Even worse, irony is seen by some to have become a cliché of contemporary culture, a "convention for establishing complicity," a "screen for bad faith" [. . .]. What was once an "avenue of dissent" is now seen as "a commodity in its own right" [. . .]. This position is usually articulated in terms of contrast: the "authentic" or "sincere" past versus the ironic present of the "total" ironist [. . .] whose use of what is interpreted as a mode of "monadic relativism" [. . .] prevents taking any stand on any issue. (28)9Irony can’t challenge the dominant ideology – not linked to a political movementBewes 97 (Timothy, Assistant Professor of English at University of Sussex, “Cynicism and Postmodernity”, p. 41)JFSThere is a second, more obviously `dangerous' way in which irony functions as a kind of ideological sophistry. `The greatest advantage that irony gives to those who possess it [sic],' writes Toby Young, is `the ability to resist passionate political movements'. The extent to which irony, or laughter, might be harnessed by forces of political reaction is obvious. Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek provides perhaps the most lucid account of this in the opening chapter of his The Sublime Object of Ideology. With reference to Peter Sloterdijk's distinction between `cynicism' and `kynicism', cynicism as irony, says Zizek, has replaced the classical Marxist notion of `false consciousness' as the dominant operational mode of ideology. The ruling ideology is no longer even meant to be taken seriously, according to Zizek. Irony as an end in itself represents the rapid commodification of a strategy that once provided a legitimate means of challenging the dominant ideology. Kynicism, by taking itself too seriously, becomes vulnerable to precisely its own critical processes — the moment when, as Sloterdijk says, `critique changes sides', and cynicism is perversely reconstituted as a "negation of the negation" of the official ideology'.66 Toby Young's version of irony is a psychic reification, a critique that no longer has an object, that exists solely and absurdly as an assertion of superiority over all conditions of representation. Since in principle nothing escapes its invective, enlightened cynicism is in effect a disabled critique that mistakes its own absence for a kind of universalized rigour.Irony Bad – Solvency TurnIrony plays into the existing political systemMartin 10 (Bill, DePaul University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 24, No. 1, )JFSBut here is where we need a political economy of irony, or an ironic reading of political economy. I love the fact that Willett is aiming very high, at the very heart of our heartless social system, as captured well by the title of her second chapter, “Laughter Against Hubris: A Preemptive Strike.” It is a matter of deploying the comedic modes against imperial hubris, as a strike against empire itself. Irony absolutely abounds in this crazy social system, from the couple whose money went toward a dirt bike rather than health insurance to the role that “exotic financial instruments” (such as the bizarre phenomenon of “naked short selling”) have played in the current economic crisis, to say nothing of a seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout for “capitalists” who are criminal rip-off artists on a scale and who are playing the central contradiction of capitalism, of socialized production and privatized accumulation, at a pitch that Marx could not have imagined. Surely there is a large role for ridicule here, but perhaps even much more for simple, outright condemnation and even more for, as Marx said, the weapons of criticism to go over to “criticism” by weapons! Irony, on the one hand, works differently from “simple” ridicule (even if it can fill out a certain kind of ridicule); among other complexities it always comes in at an angle, so to speak, and not simply straight on. On the other hand, for this very reason, it may not be able to play an emancipatory role in a world that is so upside down—or, at the very least, we’d better be careful in how we approach the question of a politics of irony.Irony Bad – Not SubversiveRadicalization of irony destroys its subversive potential Asquith 9 (Nicole, UC Davis, SubStance Issue 118, Volume 38, No. 1, Project Muse )JFSShe focuses in particular on Baudelaire’s mastery of irony—his “self fractured by irony” serving as a useful model for our modern condition. Her term “irony as counterviolence,” a rubric for the committed yet vexed authors that interest her, does not seem to capture the full range of poetic engagement she describes. However, her analysis of Baudelaire’s irony is a good example of the way that she rehabilitates the theory of [End Page 161] modern poetry by mediating between seemingly opposed views. In this case, she critiques—and yet claims for her own purposes—deconstructionism’s “radicalization of irony as constitutive indeterminacy of meaning,” pointing out that, while the latter captures the breakdown of meaning associated with the psychological condition of trauma, it also threatens to undermine the critical edge of irony in a normative context (37). She resists dehistoricizing the aporia produced by irony, insisting that even a fractured discourse exists in historical context “within a shared representational context or habitus” (49).A2: Irony Avoids CooptionIrony is easily commodifiedDuncombe 97 (Stephen, Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University, “Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture”, p. 148)JFSBesides, the article of faith that critical irony cannot be co-opted by the commercial culture is a shaky one. Exactly how shaky was demonstrated in 1996 when Nike, the master of this game, added the song "Search and Destroy" to its sneaker ad lineup. The song, written in the early seventies by draft-dodging punk pioneer Iggy Stooge (aka Iggy Pop), was originally a mock celebration of the Vietnam War and American testosterone-driven culture. Reborn and stripped of any ironic message, "Search and Destroy" is now the soundtrack to a testosterone-driven basketball game and marketing strategy. I suppose it's only a matter of time until "Kill the Poor" sells Nikes too, most likely providing the musical backdrop to a scene of Nike-wearing ghetto kids playing aggressive b-ball.No uniqueness – irony has already been cooptedKuspit 4 (Donald, Professor of Art and Philosophy at University of Michigan, “Revising the Spiritual in Art”, Presented at Ball State Unviersity, January 21, )JFSOne of the reasons that Kandinsky was concerned with inner life is that it registers the pernicious emotional effects of outer materialistic life, affording a kind of critical perspective on materialism that becomes the springboard for emotional transcendence of it. The inability of Pop art to convey inner life, which is a consequence of its materialistic disbelief in interiority, and especially spirituality, which is the deepest interiority, indicates that Pop art’s irony is at best nominally critical. Irony in fact mocks belief, even as it spices up materialism, making it seem less banal, that is, populist, thus giving Pop art the look of deviance characteristic of avant-garde art. In Pop art it is no more than a simulated effect. I dwell on irony because it is opposed to spirituality, not to say incommensurate with it, and also its supposedly more knowing alternative, and because irony has become the ruling desideratum of contemporary art, apparently redeeming its materialism. This itself is ironical, for contemporary materialistic society and its media have discovered the advantage of being ironical about themselves, namely, it spares them the serious trouble of having to change. This suggests that irony has become a form of frivolity. It is no longer the revolutionary debunking understanding it once claimed to be, e.g., in Jasper Johns’s American flag paintings, but an expression of frustration.***Kritiks Bad*****Shells2AC Shell A. Our interpretation is that the affirmative should be able to weigh the advantages of the plan against the kritik alternative, which must be enacted by the United States federal government. B. Violation – they don’t let us weigh the aff and their aff is not enacted by the USfgC. Vote Aff1. Plan focus – we allow for a stable locus for links and comparison of alternatives. Their framework makes confusion and judge intervention inevitable. 2. Ground – they access a massive amount of K frameworks, links, and impacts. They can leverage framework to moot the 1AC. We can never predict what we will have to compare the plan to. Even if we get ground, it’s bad and unpredictable. 3. Topic education – their framework encourages generic Ks that get rehashed every year. We change the topic to learn about new things. Apolitical alternatives fail Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, “achieving our country”, Pg. 7-9)JFSSuch people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transformation would be needed because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2 1NC Shell(IF THEY READ A PLAN TEXT)A. Interpretation: The affirmative must present and defend the hypothetical implementation of [plan] by the United States federal government. (IF THEY DON’T READ A PLAN TEXT)A. Interpretation: The affirmative must present and defend the hypothetical implementation of topical plan by the United States federal government. (BOTH)“Resolved” proves the framework for the resolution is to enact a policy. Words and Phrases 64 Permanent EditionDefinition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”. The USFG is the government in Washington D.C.Encarta 2k “The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC”B. Violation – [fill in]C. Vote neg1. Topicality – they don’t defend the resolution, which is a voting issue to preserve competitive equity and jurisdictional integrity2. Fairness – their framework allows infinite non-falsifiable, unpredictable, totalizing, and personal claims – impossible to be neg3. Switch-side debate – spending every round theorizing about your K is unproductive – you cannot know your argument is true unless you consider both sides of it4. No offense – you can read this arg when you’re negative – to win this round, they have to prove why reading this aff and not being topical is good5. Topicality before advocacy – vote negative to say that you think they are not topical, not that you don’t believe in their projectThis is an a priori issueShively, 2k (Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, Ruth Lessl, Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 181-2)JFSThe requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.Limits are key – infinite political theories exist, artificial limits are key Lutz 2k (Donald S. Professor of Polisci at Houston, Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 39-40)JFSAristotle notes in the Politics that political theory simultaneously proceeds at three levels—discourse about the ideal, about the best possible in the real world, and about existing political systems.4 Put another way, comprehensive political theory must ask several different kinds of questions that are linked, yet distinguishable. In order to understand the interlocking set of questions that political theory can ask, imagine a continuum stretching from left to right. At the end, to the right, is an ideal form of government, a perfectly wrought construct produced by the imagination. At the other end is the perfect dystopia, the most perfectly wretched system that the human imagination can produce. Stretching between these two extremes is an infinite set of possibilities, merging into one another, that describe the logical possibilities created by the characteristics defining the end points. For example, a political system defined primarily by equality would have a perfectly inegalitarian system described at the other end, and the possible states of being between them would vary primarily in the extent to which they embodied equality. An ideal defined primarily by liberty would create a different set of possibilities between the extremes. Of course, visions of the ideal often are inevitably more complex than these single-value examples indicate, but it is also true that in order to imagine an ideal state of affairs a kind of simplification is almost always required since normal states of affairs invariably present themselves to human consciousness as complicated, opaque, and to a significant extent indeterminate. A non-ironic reading of Plato's Republic leads one to conclude that the creation of these visions of the ideal characterizes political philosophy. This is not the case. Any person can generate a vision of the ideal. One job of political philosophy is to ask the question "Is this ideal worth pursuing?" Before the question can be pursued, however, the ideal state of affairs must be clarified, especially with respect to conceptual precision and the logical relationship between the propositions that describe the ideal. This pre-theoretical analysis raises the vision of the ideal from the mundane to a level where true philosophical analysis, and the careful comparison with existing systems can proceed fruitfully. The process of pre-theoretical analysis, probably because it works on clarifying ideas that most capture the human imagination, too often looks to some like the entire enterprise of political philosophy.5 However, the value of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the General Will, for example, lies not in its formal logical implications, nor in its compelling hold on the imagination, but on the power and clarity it lends to an analysis and comparison of actual political systems. We control external impacts – abandoning politics causes war, slavery, and authoritarianism Boggs 2k (CAROL BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 00, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1)But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo. Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible. The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action. If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”. Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare. A belief that totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises. Oakeshott’s minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people’s lives. Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege. Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration. Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system. In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories. Answers ToA2: No Internal Link to PolicymakingScholars play an essential role in effective policy makingGallucci, Former Georgetown Foreign Service Dean, 12[Robert L., president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has 21 years of government service, former Special Envoy for United States on proliferation, 11/26/12, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “How Scholars Can Improve International Relations,” , accessed 7/7/13, MC]Something is seriously wrong in the relationship between universities and the policy community in the field of international relations. The worlds of policy making and academic research should be in constant, productive conversation, and scholars and researchers should be an invaluable resource for policy makers, but they are not.One hears perennial laments from those in academe that their valuable work is being ignored by policy makers. And, on the other hand, policy makers complain they can get nothing useful from the academy. They may all be right.Now would be a good time for policy makers and scholars to be deeply engaged on some of the highest-priority issues for the United States and international security. Consider, for example:The causes and implications—immediate and long term—of the Arab Spring for that region and for its relevance to future social and political change elsewhere.The real consequences of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program for the political dynamics of the Middle East, as well as for the durability of the global norm against nuclear-weapons proliferation.The complicated internal politics of Pakistan, how they relate to that country's political and economic development, and their importance to America's policies in South Asia.A2: Kills agencyPoliticizing education allows students to construct meaningful understandings.Hodson, U of Toronto Professor of Education, 9[Derek, 2009, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, “Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Towards an Action-oriented Science Curriculum,” , accessed 7/7/13, MC]Politicization of science education can be achieved by giving students the opportunity to confront real world issues that have a scientific, technological or environmental dimension. By grounding content in socially and personally relevant contexts, an issues-based approach can provide the motivation that is absent from current abstract, de-contextualized approaches and can form a base from which students can construct understanding that is personally relevant, meaningful and important. It can provide increased opportunities for active learning, inquiry-based learning, collaborative learning and direct experience of the situatedness and multidimensionality of scientific and technological practice. In the Western contemporary world, technology is all pervasive; its social and environmental impact is clear; its disconcerting social implications and disturbing moral-ethical dilemmas are made apparent almost every day in popular newspapers, TV news bulletins and Internet postings. In many ways, it is much easier to recognize how technology is determined by the sociocultural context in which it is located than to see how science is driven by such factors. It is much easier to see the environmental impact of technology than to see the ways in which science impacts on society and environment. For these kinds of reasons, it makes good sense to use problems and issues in technology and engineering as the major vehicles for contextualizing the science curriculum. This is categorically not an argument against teaching science; rather, it is an argument for teaching the science that informs an understanding of everyday technological problems and may assist students in reaching tentative solutions about where they stand on key SSI.Debate empowers students. Framework is a prerequisite—any alt must go through policy means first if it’s to achieve actual changeZwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters’ student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning” accessed: 7/5/13 EYS]A debate education becomes a way for students to think of themselves as activists and critics of society. This is a practice of empowerment. Warner and Brushke (2001) continue to highlight how practicing public speaking itself may be vitally empowering. Speaking in a highly engaged academic environment where the goal is analytical victory would put many on edge. Taking academic risks in a debate round, however, yields additional benefits. The process of debating allows students to practice listening and conceiving and re-conceiving ideas based on in-round cooperation. This cooperation, even between competing teams, establishes respect for the process of deliberation. This practice may in turn empower students to use speaking and listening skills outside the debate round and in their local communities skills making students more comfortable talking to people who are different from them (Warner and Brushke, 2001, p. 4-7). Moreover, there is inherent value in turning the traditional tables of learning around. Reversing the traditional classroom demonstrates students taking control of their own learning through the praxis of argumentation. Students learn to depend on themselves and their colleagues for information and knowledge and must cooperate through the debate process. Taken together, policy debate aids academic achievement, student behavior, critical thinking, and empowers students to view themselves as qualified agents for social change. Role – playing is a prerequisite to real life decision making and agencyHangh?j, University of Bristol Author, 08 — [Thorkild Hangh?j, author affiliated with Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, research the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education, 2008 (“PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming,” University of Southern Denmark, p. 50-51 Available Online at , Accessed on July 7, 2013)][SP]Thus, debate games require teachers to balance the centripetal/centrifugal forces of gaming and teaching, to be able to reconfigure their discursive authority, and to orchestrate the multiple voices of a dialogical game space in relation to particular goals. These Bakhtinian perspectives provide a valuable analytical framework for describing the discursive interplay between different practices and knowledge aspects when enacting (debate) game scenarios. In addition to this, Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy also offers an explanation of why debate games (and other game types) may be valuable within an educational context. One of the central features of multi-player games is that players are expected to experience a simultaneously real and imagined scenario both in relation to an insider’s (participant) perspective and to an outsider’s (co-participant) perspective. According to Bakhtin, the outsider’s perspective reflects a fundamental aspect of human understanding: In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others (Bakhtin, 1986: 7). As the quote suggests, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. Thus, it is in the interaction with other voices that individuals are able to reach understanding and find their own voice. Bakhtin also refers to the ontological process of finding a voice as “ideological becoming”, which represents “the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981: 341). Thus, by teaching and playing debate scenarios, it is possible to support students in their process of becoming not only themselves, but also in becoming articulate and responsive citizens in a democratic society. Debate is uniquely important for high school students discovering themselves through political engagementZwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters’ student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning” accessed: 7/5/13 EYS]High school students experience unique developmental challenges as they search for their own identities and establish relationships with authority and their peers. In addition to social changes, high school students also actively seek information, challenge systems of power, and negotiate their own world-views amid conflicting messages of childhood and emerging adult expectations. High school debate may heighten this search as students seek to know more about their own political identity through relatively mature exchanges of information. These maturing dialogues do not trade-off with stereotypical teen-aged irresponsible acts of foolishness. From a sociological perspective, Fine (2004) investigated the high school debate community and observed students’ behavior, attitudes, and characteristics. Fine (2004) advances that adolescents are agents of theirown world. They interact with institutions and persons that determine their sense of self and their world-views. What those experiences are that influence that child’s development help determine immediate behavior and long-term identity. Thus, “…adolescents shape their actions in light of how they are viewed and treated by adults and adult institutions, how they are viewed and treated by their peers, and how they desire to view themselves” (Fine, 2004, p. 2). Both mature and childish, high school debaters “…have the power to construct their own lifeworlds, but not always in ways that adults endorse” (Fine, 2004, p.7). Questions of moral and ethical development surround what type of arguments students are exposed to, what type of competition students experience, and overall how coaching can impact a child’s development. Each of these questions raises ethical questions within the debate community. A2: Ideological rigidity Debate breaks down the ideological preconceptions of the participantsZwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters’ student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 “High School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating Possibilities for Political Learning” accessed: 7/5/13 EYS]Other scholars note benefits to debate outside traditional academic achievement or behavioral measures. These studies theorize the importance in face-to-face communication and adversarial dialectics. Galloway, Debate Director at Samford University, studies the benefits to communication through dialogue and the switch-side requirement of policy debate. Galloway (2007) encourages audiences to view debate as a critical dialogue, where every argument is crafted to begin a meaningful, if not strategic, dialogue. The values not only advance intellectual gain, but also to look for argumentative consistency and personal validity.[I]n a dialogical exchange, debaters come to realize the positions other than their own have value, and that reasonable minds can disagree on controversial issues. This respect encourages debaters to modify and adapt their own positions on critical issues without the threat of being labeled a hypocrite. The conceptualization of debate as a dialogue allows challenges to take place from a wide variety of perspectives. By offering a stable referent the affirmative must uphold, the negative can choose to engage the affirmative on the widest possible array of “counterwords,” enhancing the pedagogical process produced by debate (p. 12). Viewing debate as a dialogue helps move understanding debate beyond students set in one political ideology to those who must consider the best in arguments from multiple sides of an argument. One of the most compelling arguments as to how debate increases empathy, regards the practice of debating multiple sides of the same issue. This practice is one of political understanding as it helps create empathy by humanizing people who advance opposing arguments. This practice bridges the world of argument with political and personal understanding. “[T]he unique distinctions between debate and public speaking allow debaters the opportunity to learn about a wide range of issues from multiple perspectives. This allows debaters to formulate their own opinions about controversial subjects through an in-depth process of research and testing of ideas”(Galloway, 2007, p. 13). Students already have preconceived notions about how the world operates---government policy discussion is vital to force engagement with competing perspectives Esberg and Sagan, special assistant to the director at New York University's and Professor at Stanford, Center 12 *Jane Esberg is special assistant to the director at New York University's Center on. International Cooperation. She was the winner of 2009 Firestone Medal, AND Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation “NEGOTIATING NONPROLIFERATION: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Nuclear Weapons Policy,” The Nonproliferation Review, 19:1, 95-108 accessed 5-7-13, RRRThese government or quasi-government think tank simulations often provide very similar lessons for high-level players as are learned by students in educational simulations. Government participants learn about the importance of understanding foreign perspectives, the need to practice internal coordination, and the necessity to compromise and coordinate with other governments in negotiations and crises. During the Cold War, political scientist Robert Mandel noted how crisis exercises and war games forced government officials to overcome “bureaucratic myopia,” moving beyond their normal organizational roles and thinking more creatively about how others might react in a crisis or conflict.6 The skills of imagination and the subsequent ability to predict foreign interests and reactions remain critical for real-world foreign policy makers. For example, simulations of the Iranian nuclear crisis—held in 2009 and 2010 at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center and at Harvard University's Belfer Center, and involving former US senior officials and regional experts—highlighted the dangers of misunderstanding foreign governments’ preferences and misinterpreting their subsequent behavior. In both simulations, the primary criticism of the US negotiating team lay in a failure to predict accurately how other states, both allies and adversaries, would behave in response to US policy initiatives.7By university age, students often have a pre-defined view of international affairs, and the literature on simulations in education has long emphasized how such exercises force students to challenge their assumptions about how other governments behave and how their own government works.8 Since simulations became more common as a teaching tool in the late 1950s, educational literature has expounded on their benefits, from encouraging engagement by breaking from the typical lecture format, to improving communication skills, to promoting teamwork.9 More broadly, simulations can deepen understanding by asking students to link fact and theory, providing a context for facts while bringing theory into the realm of practice.10 These exercises are particularly valuable in teaching international affairs for many of the same reasons they are useful for policy makers: they force participants to “grapple with the issues arising from a world in flux.”11 Simulations have been used successfully to teach students about such disparate topics as European politics, the Kashmir crisis, and US response to the mass killings in Darfur.12 Role-playing exercises certainly encourage students to learn political and technical facts—but they learn them in a more active style. Rather than sitting in a classroom and merely receiving knowledge, students actively research “their” government's positions and actively argue, brief, and negotiate with others.13 Facts can change quickly; simulations teach students how to contextualize and act on information.A2: K is a Prereq to PolicyK is not a prereq – there is a widening gap between theory and policy, making it impossible to have interrelationshipBertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero, University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio, University of Denver, International Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices” in Scholar–Practitioner Relations: Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 2 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)The literature on scholar–practitioner interactions in International Relations (IR) is dominated by a sense of chasm. 2 Practitioners generally conceive schol arly outputs as abstract discussions specifically tailored to satisfy the intellectual demands of other scholars rather than responding to the pressing issues policy makers must deal with on a daily basis. Many scholars, in turn, disdain the over simplifications and lack of analytical rigor they often attribute to policy officials. IR is often described as a self-regulated field in which professional success depends almost entirely on one’s reputation among peers. In this field, there is a strong incentive to produce highly specialized and methodologically rigorous research because this type of work, as opposed to teaching or public service, is what a scholar’s career advancement is predicated on. Hence, IR scholars focus on generating novel arguments that will impress other scholars, rather than poli cymakers. Policymakers, on their part, want to know how events occur and pursue knowledge specific to the policy process, that is, about what policy levers to acti vate in order to shape outcomes in the desired direction, as opposed to knowing why events occur and producing general explanations that abstract from the workings of policy processes (George 1993; Kruzel 1994; Lepgold and Nincic 2001; Jentleson 2002; Walt 2005; Nau 2008; Nye 2008a; Krasner 2011).This perceived gap, according to some observers, is growing larger. Even though there have been several examples of how the study of international rela tions could and did contribute useful insights to foreign policy practitioners (e. g., research on nuclear strategy and arms control was widely used by U.S. policy makers during the Cold War and research on “democratic peace theory”—that democracies do not fight each other—has recently entered popular discourse and also shaped policy in the United States), these contributions have allegedly become more scarce as IR scholars increasingly turn to theoretical models that only qualified insiders can penetrate and that policymakers consider irrelevant (Nye 2008a:654).Critique can’t influence policy – policymakers need empiricism to fill their academic niche, scholars prescriptive ideas are not received in the decision-making processBertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero, University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio, University of Denver, International Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices” in Scholar–Practitioner Relations: Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 9 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)The influence of scholarly ideas on policymakers is contingent on factors beyond the control of scholars. These factors are usually related but not limited to the politicized and haphazard nature of public policy decision-making processes.Scholarly contributions, if defined as findings published in leading academic journals, do not often directly affect policymaking. As discussed above, only in the case of USAID’s democracy promotion efforts academic findings informed policymaking. Particularly in the fields of Comparative Politics and IR, actual scholarly contributions do not appear to systematically impact policy. 16 Rather, it is “prescriptive ideas”, for which there is no empirical evidence but that resonates within universities because the common layperson sees them as the right thing to do—for example, the issue of “responsibility to protect” 17—that end up influencing policy. “Prescriptive ideas” are logical arguments about why they would provide better policy outcomes vis-a`-vis other policies, but these ideas are not actually demonstrated by empirical evidence—whether a new idea would make the world safer or better cannot be empirically demonstrated before the policy is actually implemented (Krasner 2011). As a general rule, in academia, where scholars strive to “publish or perish” in leading journals, scholars do not care about what one another “think” about a certain issue; what matters is what can be shown through systematically collected empirical evidence.Criticism can’t influence policy – lack of interior advocates, lack of communication interoperability and timing all trump theoryBertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero, University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio, University of Denver, International Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices” in Scholar–Practitioner Relations: Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 10 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)Scholarly success in influencing policymaking also depends on the existence of receptive allies within government institutions—what Rafael Fernandez de Castro calls “brokers”—that are willing to advance policy recommendations based on sound scholarly research (Fernandez de Castro 2011:6). However, not all efforts at effectively influencing policy are reducible to nurturing relations with government “brokers”. The United States was well on its way to creating the FTAA when countries like Brazil blocked the path. In this case, the United States let the moment pass, while other Latin American countries, such as Argentina, turned their back to the FTAA as soon as free trade-friendly governments left office, strengthening the position of the already ambiguous Brazilians. Thus, government “brokers” are important, but timing is also a factor that may facilitate or impede the effective influence of scholarly outputs on policy (Feinberg 2011).Communicating the fruits of rigorous and policy-relevant research in “user friendly” ways presents another challenge for scholars seeking to influence policy. Scholars, in general, are trained to write for peers interested in theory development, rather than for practitioners, interested in absorbing jargon-free policy recommendations based on rigorous diagnoses. Practitioners have no time to read books and articles written for a scholarly audience that require readers to immerse themselves in academic debates.To be sure, scholarly influence on policy is a two-way street—practitioners must also be willing to listen to scholars and respect the value of their work. However, practitioners’ likelihood of paying attention to expert knowledge appears to be tied to issue-specific perceptions. For instance, the success of economists in influencing policy can be explained by the widespread perception that economic policymaking requires technical knowledge. There is no similar consensus behind the idea that technical knowledge is needed for crafting foreign policy, for example. This is certainly the case in the area of citizen security, where “no one” assumes that technical knowledge is a prerequisite for speaking about the issue (Casas-Zamora 2011).A2: Psychic violence Anderson, prof of English at Johns Hopkins 05 (Amanda, October 24, 2005, The Way We Argue Now, p. 37-39, QDKM)MY RECENT BOOK, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced-if misconceived-criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement-the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent-and in some versions, even celebratory-attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society. One example of the trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was taken by the late stage of the Foucault/Habermas debate, where an appeal to ethos-specifically, an appeal to Foucault's style of ironic or negative critique, often seen as most in evidence in the interviews, where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers-was used to exemplify an alternative to the forms of argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I provide this example, and the framing summary of the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my respondents provided any contextualizing summary of the book's central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense of the book's claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don't assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the book, and because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide sufficient context for their remarks, I will perform this task as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have carried more weight if provided by a respondent rather than the author.) The Foucauldian counter-critique importantly emphasizes a relation between style and position, but it obscures (1) the importance or value of the Habermasian critique and (2) the possibility that the other side of the debate might have its own ethos to advocate, one that has precisely to do with an ethos of argument, an ideal of reciprocal debate that involves taking distance on one's pre-given forms of identity or the norms of one's community, both so as to talk across differences and to articulate one's claims in relation to shared and even universal ideals. And this leads to the second thesis of the book, the insistence that an emphasis on ethos and character is interestingly present if not widely recognized in contemporary theory, and one of the ways its vitality and existential pertinence makes itself felt (even despite the occurrence of the kinds of unfair trumping moves I have mentioned). We often fail to notice this, because identity has so uniformly come to mean sociological, ascribed, or group identity-race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth. Instances of the move toward character and ethos include the later Foucault (for whom ethos is a central concept), cosmopolitanism (whose aspiration it is to turn universalism into an ethos), and, more controversially, proceduralist ethics and politics (with its emphasis on sincerity and civility). Another version of this attentiveness to ethos and character appears in contemporary pragmatism, with its insistence on casualness of attitude, or insouciance in the face of contingency-recommendations that get elevated into full-fledged exemplary personae in Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist" or Barbara Herrnstein Smiths portrait of the "postmodern skeptic." These examples-and the larger claim they support-are meant to defend theory as still living, despite the many reports of its demise, and in fact still interestingly and incessantly re-elaborating its relation to practice. This second aspect of the project is at once descriptive, motivated by the notion that characterology within theory is intrinsically interesting, and critical, in its attempt to identify how characterology can itself be used to cover or evade the claims of rational argument, as in appeals to charismatic authority or in what I identify as narrow personifications of theory (pragmatism, in its insistence on insouciance in the face of contingency, is a prime example of this second form). And as a complement to the critical agenda, there is a reconstructive agenda as well, an attempt to recuperate liberalism and proceduralism, in part by advocating the possibility, as I have suggested, of an ethos of argument. Robbins, in his extraordinarily rich and challenging response, zeroes in immediately on a crucial issue: who is to say exactly when argument is occurring or not, and what do we do when there is disagreement over the fundamentals (the primary one being over what counts as proper reasoning)? Interestingly, Robbins approaches this issue after first observing a certain tension in the book: on the one hand, The Way We Argue Now calls for dialogue, debate, argument; on the other, its project is "potentially something a bit stricter, or pushier: getting us all to agree on what should and should not count as true argument." What this point of entry into the larger issue reveals is a kind of blur that the book, I am now aware, invites. On the one hand, the book anatomizes academic debates, and in doing so is quite "debaterly" This can give the impression that what I mean by argument is a very specific form unique to disciplinary methodologies in higher education. But the book is not generally advocating a narrow practice of formal and philosophical argumentation in the culture at large, however much its author may relish adherence to the principle of non-contradiction in scholarly argument. I take pains to elaborate an ethos of argument that is linked to democratic debate and the forms of dissent that constitutional patriotism allows and even promotes. In this sense, while argument here is necessarily contextualized sociohistorically, the concept is not merely academic. It is a practice seen as integral to specific political forms and institutions in modern democracies, and to the more general activity of critique within modern societies-to the tradition of the public sphere, to speak in broad terms. Additionally, insofar as argument impels one to take distance on embedded customs, norms, and senses of given identity, it is a practice that at once acknowledges identity, the need to understand the perspectives of others, and the shared commitment to commonality and generality, to finding a way to live together under conditions of difference. More than this: the book also discusses at great length and from several different angles the issue that Robbins inexplicably claims I entirely ignore: the question of disagreement about what counts as argument. In the opening essay, "Debatable Performances," I fault the proponents of communicative ethics for not having a broader understanding of public expression, one that would include the disruptions of spectacle and performance. I return to and underscore this point in my final chapter, where I espouse a democratic politics that can embrace and accommodate a wide variety of expressions and modes. This is certainly a discussion of what counts as dialogue and hence argument in the broad sense in which I mean it, and in fact I fully acknowledge that taking distance from cultural norms and given identities can be advanced not only through critical reflection, but through ironic critique and defamiliarizing performance as well. But I do insist-and this is where I take a position on the fundamental disagreements that have arisen with respect to communicative ethics-that when they have an effect, these other dimensions of experience do not remain unreflective, and insofar as they do become reflective, they are contributing to the very form of reasoned analysis that their champions sometimes imagine they must refuse in order to liberate other modes of being (the affective, the narrative, the performative, the nonrational). If a narrative of human rights violation is persuasive in court, or in the broader cultural public sphere, it is because it draws attention to a violation of humanity that is condemned on principle; if a performance jolts people out of their normative understandings of sexuality and gender, it prompts forms of understanding that can be affirmed and communicated and also can be used to justify political positions and legislative agendas.If the state is racist as the aff purposes, then there is no way to fix the state but engage with and make it non-racist. Rejecting the state as a whole will solve nothing. We defend the biggest solvency mechanism to solve for the impacts of the 1AC. Anderson, prof. John Hokins University, 07 (Amanda, “Reply to my Critic(s)” 2007, , accessed July 5, 2013, QDKM) Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced—if misconceived—criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement—the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of [End Page 281] a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent—and in some versions, even celebratory—attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society.A2: Pragmatism badPragmatism doesn’t focus on the morality of claims, rather it hopes to question normsRorty, philosopher, 82 [Richard, 1982, “Consequences of Pragmatism” 7/5/13 EYS]The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from a pragmatist theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about. For pragmatists, “truth” is just the name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to “Bacon did not write Shakespeare,” “It rained yesterday,” “E = mc2” “Love is better than hate,” “The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer’s best work,” “2 plus 2 is 4,” and “There are nondenumerable infinities.” Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be said about this common feature. They doubt this for the same reason they doubt that there is much to be said about the common feature shared by such morally praiseworthy actions as Susan leaving her husband, America joining the war against the Nazis, America pulling out of Vietnam, Socrates not escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and the suicide of the Jews at Masada. They see certain acts as good ones to perform, under the circumstances, but doubt that there is anything general and useful to say about what makes them all good. The assertion of a given sentence – or the adoption of a disposition to assert the sentence, the conscious acquisition of a belief – is a justifiable, praiseworthy act in certain circumstances. But, a fortiori, it is not likely that there is something general and useful to be said about what makes All such actions good-about the common feature of all the sentences which one should acquire a disposition to assert.Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy” – a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too “literary,” they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach.All this is complicated by the fact that “philosophy,” like “truth” and “goodness,” is ambiguous. Uncapitalised, “truth” and “goodness” name properties of sentences, or of actions and situations. Capitalised, they are the proper names of objects – goals or standards which can be loved with all one’s heart and soul and mind, objects of ultimate concern. Similarly, “Philosophy” can mean simply what Sellars calls “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Pericles, for example, was using this sense of the term when he praised the Athenians for “philosophising without unmanliness” (philosophein aneu malakias). In this sense, Blake is as much a philosopher as Fichte, Henry Adams more of a philosopher than Frege. No one would be dubious about philosophy, taken in this sense. But the word can also denote something more specialised, and very dubious indeed. In this second sense, it can mean following Plato’s and Kant’s lead, asking questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., “truth,” “rationality,” “goodness”) in the hope of better obeying such norms. The idea is to believe more truths or do more good or be more rational by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality. I shall capitalise the term “philosophy” when used in this second sense, in order to help make the point that Philosophy, Truth, Goodness, and Rationality are interlocked Platonic notions. Pragmatists are saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to practise Philosophy. They think it will not help to say something true to think about Truth, nor will it help to act well to think about Goodness, nor will it help to be rational to think about Rationality.Pragmatism questions the individualRorty, philosopher, 82 [Richard, 1982, “Consequences of Pragmatism” 7/5/13 EYS]So far, however, my description of pragmatism has left an important distinction out of account. Within Philosophy, there has been a traditional difference of opinion about the Nature of Truth, a battle between (as Plato put it) the gods and the giants. On the one hand there have been Philosophers like Plato himself who were otherworldly, possessed of a larger hope. They urged that human beings were entitled to self-respect only because they had one foot beyond space and time. On the other hand – especially since Galileo showed how spatio-temporal events could be brought under the sort of elegant mathematical law which Plato suspected might hold only for another world – there have been philosophers (e.g., Hobbes, Marx) who insisted that space and time make up the only Reality there is, and that Truth is Correspondence to that Reality. In the nineteenth century, this opposition crystallised into one between “the transcendental philosophy” and “the empirical philosophy,” between the “Platonists” and the “positivists.” Such terms were, even then, hopelessly vague, but every intellectual knew roughly where he stood in relation to the two movements. To be on the transcendental side was to think that natural science was not the last word – that there was more Truth to be found. To be on the empirical side was to think that natural science – facts about how spatio-temporal things worked – was all the Truth there was. To side with Hegel or Green was to think that some normative sentences about rationality and goodness corresponded to something real, but invisible to natural science. To side with Comte or Mach was to think that such sentences either “reduced” to sentences about spatio-temporal events or were not subjects for serious reflection.It is important to realise that the empirical philosophers – the positivists – were still doing Philosophy. The Platonic presupposition which unites the gods and the giants, Plato with Democritus, Kant with Mill, Husserl with Russell, is that what the vulgar call “truth” the assemblage of true statements – should be thought of as divided into a lower and an upper division, the division between (in Plato’s terms) mere opinion and genuine knowledge. It is the work of the Philosopher to establish an invidious distinction between such statements as “It rained yesterday” and “Men should try to be just in their dealings.” For Plato the former sort of statement was second-rate, mere pistis or doxa. The latter, if perhaps not yet episteme, was at least a plausible candidate. For the positivist tradition which runs from Hobbes to Carnap, the former sentence was a paradigm of what Truth looked like, but the latter was either a prediction about the causal effects of certain events or an “expression of emotion.” What the transcendental philosophers saw as the spiritual, the empirical philosophers saw as the emotional. What the empirical philosophers saw as the achievements of natural science in discovering the nature of Reality, the transcendental philosophers saw as banausic, as true but irrelevant to Truth.Pragmatism cuts across this transcendental/empirical distinction by questioning the common presupposition that there is an invidious distinction to be drawn between kinds of truths. For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to – no need to worry about what “makes” it true. (Just as there is no need to worry, once one has determined what one should do, whether there is something in Reality which makes that act the Right one to perform.) So the pragmatist sees no need to worry about whether Plato or Kant was right in thinking that something non-spatio-temporal made moral judgments true, nor about whether the absence of such a thing means that such judgments are is merely expressions of emotion” or “merely conventional” or “merely subjective. “This insouciance brings down the scorn of both kinds of Philosophers upon the pragmatist. The Platonist sees the pragmatist as merely a fuzzy-minded sort of positivist. The positivist sees him as lending aid and comfort to Platonism by leveling down the distinction between Objective Truth – the sort of true sentence attained by “the scientific method” – and sentences which lack the precious “correspondence to reality” which only that method can induce. Both join in thinking the pragmatist is not really a philosopher, on the ground that he is not a Philosopher. The pragmatist tries to defend himself by saying that one can be a philosopher precisely by being anti-Philosophical, that the best way to make things hang together is to step back from the issues between Platonists and positivists, and thereby give up the presuppositions of Philosophy.One difficulty the pragmatist has in making his position clear, therefore, is that he must struggle with the positivist for the position of radical anti-Platonist. He wants to attack Plato with different weapons from those of the positivist, but at first glance he looks like just another variety of positivist. He shares with the positivist the Baconian and Hobbesian notion that knowledge is power, a tool for coping with reality. But he carries this Baconian point through to its extreme, as the positivist does not. He drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of “correspondence” (either of thoughts to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that “true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are” is no more illuminating than “it is right because it fulfils the Moral Law.” Both remarks, in the pragmatist’s eyes, are empt y metaphysical compliments – harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and “clarified” philosophically.It is the impossible attempt to step outside our skins – the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism – and compare ourselves with something absolute. This Platonic urge to escape from the finitude of one’s time and place, the “merely conventional” and contingent aspects of one’s life, is responsible for the original Platonic distinction between two kinds of true sentence. By attacking this latter distinction, the holistic “pragmaticising” strain in analytic philosophy has helped us see how the metaphysical urge – common to fuzzy Whiteheadians and razor-sharp “scientific realists” – works. It has helped us be sceptical about the idea that some particular science (say physics) or some particular literary genre (say Romantic poetry, or transcendental philosophy) gives us that species of true sentence which is not just a true sentence, but rather a piece of Truth itself. Such sentences may be very useful indeed, but there is not going to be a Philosophical explanation of this utility. That explanation, like the original justification of the assertion of the sentence, will be a parochial matter – a comparison of the sentence with alternative sentences formulated in the same or in other vocabularies. But such comparisons are the business of, for example, the physicist or the poet, or perhaps of the philosopher – not of the Philosopher, the outside expert on the utility, or function, or metaphysical status of Language or of Thought.Only pragmatic philosophy can evade the logical harms of the K and still take action against great atrocities – We’re not committed to their slippery slope link argsRorty, philosopher, 82 [Richard, 1982, “Consequences of Pragmatism” 7/5/13 EYS]The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark:Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.A post-philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, position was only a halfway stage in the development of such a culture-the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God. For positivism preserved a god in its notion of Science (and in its notion of “scientific philosophy”), the notion of a portion of culture where we touched something not ourselves, where we found Truth naked, relative to no description. The culture of positivism thus produced endless swings of the pendulum between the view that “values are merely ‘relative’ (or ‘emotive,’ or ‘subjective’)” and the view that bringing the “scientific method” to bear on questions of political and moral choice was the solution to all our problems. Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature-or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more “relative” or “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings. The question of what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what narratives to listen to and comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or about what we should want).No. The question of whether the pragmatist view of truth-that it is t a profitable topic-is itself true is thus a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for. It is not a question about what the word “true” means, nor about the requirements of an adequate philosophy of language, nor about whether the world “exists independently of our minds,” nor about whether the intuitions of our culture are captured in the pragmatists’ slogans. There is no way in which the issue between the pragmatist and his opponent can be tightened up and resolved according to criteria agreed to by both sides. This is one of those issues which puts everything up for grabs at once -where there is no point in trying to find agreement about “the data” or about what would count as deciding the question. But the messiness of the issue is not a reason for setting it aside. The issue between religion and secularism was no less messy, but it was important that it got decided as it did.If the account of the contemporary philosophical scene which I offer in these essays is correct, then the issue about the truth of pragmatism is the issue which all the most important cultural developments since Hegel have conspired to put before us. But, like its predecessor, it is not going to be resolved by any sudden new discovery of how things really are. It will be decided, if history allows us the leisure to decide such issues, only by a slow and painful choice between alternative self-images.A2: Narratives goodPersonal narratives undermine their own solvency by limiting discussion to either sympathy or silenceCoughlin, Vanderbilt Law Professor, 95 [Anne M., August 1995, “REGULATING THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP” Virginia Law Review, Volume: 81, p. 1229 EYS]The warning this episode conveys to readers signals more than a textual incoherence or the failure of Williams's own collaborative engagement. More fundamentally, it reveals the inherent inadequacy of autobiography as a tool of social criticism. The institutional spaces where the outsider stories have their existence, including the lecture tour podium and the pages of scholarly journals, are arenas that foster, indeed, depend on, vigorous inquiry and dialectical exchange. Before we agree to reorder society along lines a group of scholars may propose, scrupulous testing of their theories seems wholly appropriate. Yet, as Williams's bitter rebuke of her editors portends, personal stories tend to pre-empt responses other than sympathy or silence, precisely because any critical commentary or desire for clarification may be dismissed as ad hominem-and any criticism necessarily is ad hominem, since the material available for criticism or clarification is the scholar's personal experience.193 Ironically, therefore, the power of the autobiographical exchange to inspire readers' sympathy turns out to be a significant shortcoming within the context of an academy whose participants, even when sympathetic to an idea, are committed to immediate, often face-to-face, critical inquiry and debate.194 By rejecting any critical reaction as a treacherous failure of sympathy for the author's pain, if not as the product of prejudiced ignorance, and dismissing criticism as a personal attack on the author's character, autobiographical rhetoric is no less coercive of readers than the legal rhetoric that the outsiders desire to supersede.195 A2: Roleplaying = utopianUtopianism good – key to changeStreeten, BU econ professor, 99 [Paul, 1999, Development, v. 42 n.2 ingenta, JFS]First, Utopian thinking can be useful as a framework for analysis. Just as physicists assume an atmospheric vacuum for some purposes, so policy analysts can assume a political vacuum from which they can start afresh. The physicists’ assumption plainly would not be useful for the design of parachutes, but can serve other purposes well. Similarly, when thinking of tomorrow’s problems, Utopianism is not helpful. But for long-term strategic purposes it is essential. Second, the Utopian vision gives a sense of direction, which can get lost in approaches that are preoccupied with the feasible. In a world that is regarded as the second-best of all feasible worlds, everything becomes a necessary constraint. All vision is lost. Third, excessive concern with the feasible tends to reinforce the status quo. In negotiations, it strengthens the hand of those opposed to any reform. Unless the case for change can be represented in the same detail as the case for no change, it tends to be lost. Fourth, it is sometimes the case that the conjuncture of circumstances changes quite suddenly and that the constellation of forces, unexpectedly, turns out to be favourable to even radical innovation. Unless we are prepared with a carefully worked out, detailed plan, that yesterday could have appeared utterly Utopian, the reformers will lose out by default. Only a few years ago nobody would have expected the end of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the marketization of China, the end of apartheid in South Africa. And the handshake on the White House lawn between Mr Peres and Mr Arafat. Fifth, the Utopian reformers themselves can constitute a pressure group, countervailing the self interested pressures of the obstructionist groups. Ideas thought to be Utopian have become realistic at moments in history when large numbers of people support them, and those in power have to yield to their demands. The demand for ending slavery is a historical example. It is for these five reasons that Utopians should not be discouraged from formulating their proposals and from thinking the unthinkable, unencumbered by the inhibitions and obstacles of political constraints. They should elaborate them in the same detail that the defenders of the status quo devote to its elaboration and celebration. Utopianism and idealism will then turn out to be the most realistic vision. It is well known that there are three types of economists: those who can count and those who can’t. But being able to count up to two, I want to distinguish between two types of people. Let us call them, for want of a better name, the Pedants and the Utopians. The names are due to Peter Berger, who uses them in a different context. The Pedants or technicians are those who know all the details about the way things are and work, and they have acquired an emotional vested interest in keeping them this way. I have come across them in the British civil service, in the bureaucracy ofthe World Bank, and elsewhere. They are admirable people but they are conservative, and no good companions for reform. On the other hand, there are the Utopians, the idealists, the visionaries who dare think the unthinkable. They are also admirable, many of them young people. But they lack the attention to detail that the Pedants have. When the day of the revolution comes, they will have entered it on the wrong date in their diaries and fail to turn up, or, if they do turn up, they will be on the wrong side of the barricades. What we need is a marriage between the Pedants and the Utopians, between the technicians who pay attention to the details and the idealists who have the vision of a better future. There will be tensions in combining the two, but they will be creative tensions. We need Pedantic Utopian Pedants who will work out in considerable detail the ideal world and ways of getting to it, and promote the good cause with informed fantasy. Otherwise, when the opportunity arises, we shall miss it for lack of preparedness and lose out to the opponents of reform, to those who want to preserve the status quo.*****Critiques GoodDefinitionsResolved“Resolved” doesn’t mean to enact laws, the definition is to prompt an action to change the state of mind, which is what the aff does Oxford English Dictionary 10 (Oxford English Dictionary, premier English dictionary, March 10th, ;, accessed July 5, 2013, QDKM) Resolved, adj.1. a. Of the mind, etc.: freed from doubt or uncertainty; settled. Obs. b. Of a person: convinced, satisfied, or certain of something. Obs. c. Of doctrine: adopted or accepted after careful deliberation. Obs.2. a. Of a person: that has resolved to do something; having a fixed intention; determined, decided.Usually followed by an expression (prepositional phrase, that-clause, or to and infinitive) indicating the intended action, outcome, etc. b. Of an action, state of mind, etc.: fully determined upon, deliberate. c. Of a person: staunch, dedicated; committed, confirmed; that is thoroughly committed to the specified or implied course of action, practice, religious belief, doctrine, etc. 3. Of a person, the mind, etc.: characterized by determination or firmness of purpose; resolute.ShouldShould denotes obligationMerriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2Merriam-Webster’s Inc., Tenth Ed., in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediencyDebate should be focused on questions of ethical obligationsDuffy, Communication Professor Cal Poly, 83 [Bernard, Rhetoric PhD – Pitt, “The Ethics of Argumentation in Intercollegiate Debate: A Conservative Appraisal,” National Forensics Journal, Spring, pp 65-71, accessed at ]Debate at its worst is an activity which promotes self abnegation rather than self discovery. Intercollegiate debate ought to educate students in more than structure, credibility, and logical reasoning. It should teach them the effective use of arguments from definition as well as arguments from consequence, circumstance and authority. Definitional arguments, better than others, orient students toward their own beliefs and principles. Logic, fact, and authority wither without ethics, and debate without ethical judgments sounds hollow and contrived.I am not proposing that debaters only make arguments they believe in. Students also learn from articulating the principles which underlie positions they oppose. To ignore principle as a line of argument and focus instead on mere fact and authority makes debate less effective as a method of exploring one's own preferences and values.It might be argued that debate is not dialectic, and that my criticisms require debate to be something we cannot make it. After all the sophists, not Plato, gave birth to debate. Protagoras saw it as a lesson in sophistic relativism. If one believes in the relativism of the sophists, it would be absurd for debaters to search after principles upon which to base their arguments. Of what use, one might ask. are the eloquently expressed propositions of a bygone era to a scientific age winch bases decisions on calculable fact? For today's neosophists it would be foolish indeed to think of debate as a philosophical or ethical enterprise. But in this case, why talk about the ethics of debate at all? If the term only means observing the rules of the game, it is not particularly significant. Debate should be a thoroughly ethical enterprise. It should educate students in ethics, as well as requiring them to follow the rules.Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of choice. Should we as coaches and judges permit the steady dismantling of debate as a means of educating students? Ought we to praise students for making sensationalistic arguments, and for relying on appeals to authority, while ignoring arguments from principle? Should we give ballots to speakers who are the most adept at parroting back the commonplaces they have learned and to those who can read evidence with the greatest speed and the least visible understanding? Should we encourage debate as a contest of evidence rather than as a meeting of minds? No matter how much lip service is given to the educational values of intercollegiate debate, it cannot now be claimed as an activity which forces students to reflect upon or use their ethical beliefs in the formulation of arguments.Kritiks GoodAnswers to Policy ClaimsA2: LimitsInnovation is a prerequisite to change – limits on a topic restrict the ability to create new solutions and theoriesBleiker, professor of International Relations, and Leet, Senior Research Officer with the Brisbane Institute 6 (Roland, and Martin, “From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fear, Awe and Wonder in International Politics” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), pg. 733 igm)A subliminal orientation is attentive to what is bubbling along under the surface. It is mindful of how conscious attempts to understand conceal more than they reveal, and purposeful efforts of progressive change may engender more violence than they erase. For these reasons, Connolly emphasises that ‘ethical artistry’ has an element of na?veté and innocence. One is not quite sure what one is doing. Such na?veté need not lead us back to the idealism of the romantic period. ‘One should not be na?ve about na?veté’, Simon Critchley would say.56 Rather, the challenge of change is an experiment. It is not locked up in a predetermined conception of where one is going. It involves tentatively exploring the limits of one’s being in the world, to see if different interpretations are possible, how those interpretations might impact upon the affects below the level of conscious thought, and vice versa. This approach entails drawing upon multiple levels of thinking and being, searching for changes in sensibilities that could give more weight to minor feelings or to arguments that were previously ignored.57 Wonder needs to be at the heart of such experiments, in contrast to the resentment of an intellect angry with its own limitations. The ingredient of wonder is necessary to disrupt and suspend the normal pressures of returning to conscious habit and control. This exploration beyond the conscious implies the need for an ethos of theorising and acting that is quite different from the mode directed towards the cognitive justification of ideas and concepts. Stephen White talks about ‘circuits of reflection, affect and argumentation’.58 Ideas and principles provide an orientation to practice, the implications of that practice feed back into our affective outlook, and processes of argumentation introduce other ideas and affects. The shift, here, is from the ‘vertical’ search for foundations in ‘skyhooks’ above or ‘foundations’ below, to a ‘horizontal’ movement into the unknown. Limits constrain possible solutions – politics is best informed by different levels of analysisBleiker, professor of International Relations, 3 (Roland, “Discourse and Human Agency”, Contemopary Political Theory, 2003, 2, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, pg. 39-40 igm)Approaching the political - and by extension dilemmas of agency requires tolerance towards various forms of insight and levels of analysis, even if they contradict each other’s internal logic. Such differences often only appear as contradictions because we still strive for a universal standard of reference that is supposed to subsume all the various aspects of life under a single totalizing standpoint (Adorno, 1992, 17–18). Every process of revealing is at the same time a process of concealing. Even the most convincing position cannot provide a form of insight that does not at the same time conceal other perspectives. Revealing always occurs within a frame. Framing is a way of ordering, and ordering banishes all other forms of revealing. This is, grossly simplified, a position that resonates throughout much of Heidegger’s work (1954, 35). Taking this argument to heart is to recognize that one cannot rely on one form of revealing alone. An adequate understanding of human agency can be reached only by moving back and forth between various insights. The point, then, is not to end up with a grand synthesis, but to make most out of each specific form of revealing (for an exploration of this theme, via an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, see Deleuze, 1994). A2: PredictabilityTheir cards are not about contest debate, but about dialogic processes of deliberation - Debate is distinct from deliberative dialogueAnderson, Professor of Philosophy Babson College, 98(Albert A., , “Why Dialogue?”, )Dialogue is not debate. Debate differs from discussion in that the verbal exchange usually has a limited number of positions stipulated at the outset (such as affirmative vs. negative, liberal vs. conservative, or plaintiff vs. defendant), each competing with the others with the clear goal of winning the contest. Debate is a zero?sum game. If one side wins, the other side must lose. The goal in a debate is to win the verbal contest by persuading others, often without concern for the truth of the matter. It differs from discussion in its single?minded purpose of proving a pre?established position in order to win; to change positions in a debate is to lose the contest. The adversarial method frequently employed by lawyers is one familiar form of debate. Although it is not necessary for the legal process to employ this method, when money and power are at stake it is not surprising that a win/lose strategy takes over.The most important difference between dialogue and these other forms of oral exchange is its primary dedication to what is common or universal. Conversation often depends on the tastes and inclinations of the participants without an agenda or clear objective. Discussion and debate, by contrast, are dedicated to presenting and defending a specific position or point of view, usually determined by the context or the group being represented. Unlike these other forms of verbal activity, dialogue makes no prior judgment about the outcome of the process. It is serious inquiry that seeks to understand the nature and activity of whatever subject matter is being considered. It searches for truth rather than taking it as given at the outset of the inquiry. Participants in a dialogue are free to change their mind in the course of the exchange.A2: DeliberationZero sum debate competition makes deliberation impossibleBartanen, Pacific Lutheran University and Frank, University of Oregon 99(Michael D. Bartanen and David A. Frank, “Reclaiming a Heritage: A Proposal for Rhetorically Grounded Academic Debate”, Journal of the National Parliamentary Debate Association, vol 6, #1, p.39-40, )Unfortunately, without compensating for the zero-sum game element of competitive debate, even parliamentary debate cannot fulfill its potential in encouraging greater civility in the debate process. Any form of debate works best when arguers interact with their opponents in a context where "risk taking" occurs. The importance of taking the risk of "being proved wrong." is a vital characteristic of debate introduced by Wayne Brockriede.25 Debate is just a game when arguers are encouraged to defend their own arguments without reference to adapting to the views of others.The structure of both policy and parliamentary debates heavily relies on gaming as an organizing principle.26 The zero sum outcome of the debate round, where one team wins and the other loses, destroys any incentive to seek common ground or modify any pre-conceived position. Further, the zero sum outcome encourages debaters to overstate the strength of their own position and denigrate the status of their opponent's views. Debaters onlv re-examine their own views if those arguments are competitively unsuccessful, rather than if an opponent has raised substantive flaws in the argument.Contest debate only produces bad deliberationBartanen, Pacific Lutheran University and Frank, University of Oregon 99 (Michael D. Bartanen Pacific Lutheran University and David A. Frank University of Oregon, “Reclaiming a Heritage: A Proposal for Rhetorically Grounded Academic Debate”, Journal of the National Parliamentary Debate Association, vol 6, #1, p.40, )Both policy and parliamentary debate fail to promote habits of effective argument analysis and research. Trapp is right that policy debate discourages careful testing of the inferences between evidence and claims. In addition, policy debate, by emphasizing the use of expert testimony evidence and discouraging debate about the traditional stock issues, effectively narrows the range of viewpoints that can be considered. There is a third tendency in policy debate for arguers to develop positions which mirror those of many other teams. Some of these positions have an almost notorious reputation (e.g. "Nuke War Disad") for accentuating the tendency in policy debate to prefer "low risk / high impact" positions rather than ones which effectively test the causal relationships between a proposed policy change and its potential disadvantages.A2: Hanghoj - DeliberationCan’t solve any of these deliberation claims, have read impacts to a process of debate that they don’t engage in, this is zero sum contest debate, not the deliberative styles their cards assume. Hanghoj ev doesn’t apply, is about a specific debate event called “The Power” used in Danish secondary schools, he agrees can only evaluate a specific game in its own contextHanghoj, PhD Candidate Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies University of Southern Denmark, 8(Thorkild, “PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming”, , )First of all, the educational use of games should be understood in relation to how particular games are enacted in actual contexts. Thus, instead of playing "the definition game", and trying to define the essence or ontology of games, this thesis presents a more pragmatic approach to the study of actually playing educational games. More specifically, I have identified a series of game elements - scenarios, goals, outcomes, rules, roles, resources and dialogue - which are all relevant for understanding the interplay between a particular game design and the educational context in which it is enacted. These game elements also reflect how games and education represent different traditions of knowledge, which involve a range of partially overlapping assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Barth, 2002). Finally, both games and education create specific criteria for validating particular forms of knowledge. In this way, educational gaming represents a tension between two different traditions of knowledge which I have captured in the term playful knowledge.Hanghoj conceives of debate that is detached side switching as distinct from deliberative forums - no internal link to their deliberation impactsHanghoj, PhD Candidate Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies University of Southern Denmark, 8 (Thorkild, “PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming”, PhD Dissertation Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies University of Southern Denmark, )This gradual process of shifting from a pragmatic design perspective toward a more analytically oriented perspective on the social actors in the game encounters implied a reconceptualisation of my study. For example, having observed how the game scenario was enacted and validated by the teachers and students, I decided to modify my initial assumptions about creating a "realistic" game and focus more on the relevance of the design elements. Furthermore, the end-of-game discussions and post-game interviews resulted in a significantly high degree of responses about the students' debate practices - especially in relation to the students that performed as politicians. This focus was consistent with my own observations and the analytical themes that emerged when transcribing and coding the video data from the game session. Moreover, some of the social studies teachers in this study were slightly negative toward the label "role-playing" as it had obvious drama pedagogical connotations. Based on these findings, I decided to reconceptualise the game label from a realistic role-playing game to a debate game. During the process of relabelling the game, I learned that debate games and debate education are fairly well-known phenomena in the English speaking world and have a long history that can be traced back to ancient Greece, where Protagoras and other Sophists taught and debated on the premise that there are always "many sides" to any subject (Billig, 1996: Snider & Schnurer, 2006). At the same time, the formalised and staged aspects of debate games represent a relatively unknown phenomenon in the German-Nordic countries, which have a stronger tradition for more deliberative models of democratic debate (cf. Habermas, 1981). Hopefully, English speaking readers will bear such difference between various national debate cultures in mind when reading this thesis.A2: Freely & Steinberg - DecisionmakingOur debate accesses all their Freely & Steinberg decision-making– ethics are a crucial component Freeley, Late, John Carroll University & Steinberg, University of Miami 8(Austin j. Freeley, and David L Steinberg, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, p.16-17)In addition to making well-reasoned decisions, it is important to make decisions that are ethical. The consequences of a failure to consider ethical constructs when making decisions range from business failures (ENRON) to incarceration (Scooter Libbey), to the destruction of personal relationships. Ethics are a set of constructs that guide our decision making by providing standards of behavior telling us how we ought to act. While ethics may be based on or reflected in laws, they are not the same as laws. Similarly, we learn value systems and thus standards for ethical behavior from our communities and cultures, but that a behavior is a cultural standard or norm does not make it ethical.According to Thomas White, there are two broad philosophical approaches to understanding ethical choices: teleological and deontological. The teleological approach is results oriented, and would focus on the good or bad consequences of an action or a decision. The deontological ethic is process or act oriented, and is based on the notion that actions have moral value."" Scholars at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University have suggested that in making ethical decisions one ought to follow a framework through the following steps:■ Recognize an ethical issue■ Get the facts■ Evaluate alternative actions from various ethical perspectives■ Make a decision and test it■ Act, then reflect on the decision later23Debate offers the ideal tool for examining the ethical implications of any decision, and critical thinking should also be ethical thinking.Freeley & Steinberg include creative topicality defenses within the bounds of answers to the resolutional question that create clashFreeley, Late, John Carroll University & Steinberg, University of Miami 8 (Austin j. Freeley, Late, John Carroll University and David L Steinberg, University of Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, p.45)Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.They agree alternative forms of debate are still debateFreeley, Late, John Carroll University & Steinberg, University of Miami 8 (Austin j. Freeley, Late, John Carroll University and David L Steinberg, University of Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, p.232-3)As has been discussed earlier in this book (Chapters 2, 4, and 6), one thing intrinsic to debate is self-examination and change. Although what you have read thus far in this chapter will provide a sound traditional framework for policy and value debate, the traditions are slowly evolving. An unbounded creativity in practice has evolved, with new conceptions of fiat as the reflexive authority of those participating in the debate round itself, and with critical examination of the battle to give rhetorical space to marginalized voices and open the debate experience to more viewpoints, standpoints, and cultures. Debate approaches may disregard the traditional frameworks in favor of storytelling, hip-hop, music and film, poetry, and other novel challenges to the conventional approaches. In more subtle structures, debaters can build their comparative advantage cases with philosophical foundations. More radical challenges to tradition may offer argumentation (sometimes in aesthetic forms) to defend the resolution and/or to challenge the framework of policy debate. Critical approaches focus on philosophical and value-based interpretations of propositional terms, and performance-based approaches find clash in music, visual communication, role playing, and other creative forms of self expression. Elizabeth Jones of Louisville University presented the following rap as a part of her affirmative case in favor of U.S. withdrawal from NATO:Roma people feel just like me, tired of being deprived of their liberty. Relegated to ghettos, held as slaves, poor health care leading to early graves. Prison scars, from prison bars, walking round the prison yard. No running water, no heat, no jobs, and everything you've seemed to love, you've lost.While the rich get richer, who's paying the cost?George Soros, Bill Clinton, to Dick Cheney, the so-called bearers of democracy.NATO represents the military wing, of the all-powerful capitalist regime. While you think gangsters listen to rap and sag, They really wear suits and carry leather bags.Politicians with the power to pick, define, and choose who will win and who will lose.Not hearing the Roma or Palestine,I guess it depends how genocide is defined.SOURCE: USED BY PERMISSION OF ELIZABETH JONES.A2: Deliberative Democracy ImpactsContest debating rewards strategic behavior and domination via attempts to win that make it impossible to use as a space for deliberative democracyLovbrand, Assistant Professor Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research Linkoping University and Khan, Assistant Professor Environmental and Energy Systems Studies, Lund University 10(Eva Lovbrand, and Jamil Khan, “The deliberative turn in green political theory”, Environmental Politics and Deliberative Democracy: Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance, Ed. Backstrand)Deliberative democracy can consequently be understood as an expression of the Enlightenment devotion to reason as an arbiter of disagreement (Baber and Bartlett, 2005. p. 231). Largely under the influence of Jurgen Habermas, the theory defends a communicative account of rationality based on free discussion, sound argument and reliable evidence. In contrast to instrumental forms of rationality (for example administrative or economic), which according to Habermas (1971) colonize the life-world and repress individual freedom and creativity, communicative (or deliberative) rationality has been described as a form of social interaction that emancipates the individual from myth, illusion and manipulation (Dryzek, 1990). At the core of the theory are a number of procedural criteria that boil down to two fundamental conditions; inclu-siveness and unconstrained dialogue (Smith. 2003. p. 56). lnclusiveness requires that all citizens are allowed to participate in public discourse and have equal rights to advance claims and arguments. The discourse is in turn unconstrained when the only authority is that of a good argument (Dryzek, 1990, p. 15). Hence, communicative rationality requires that social interaction is free from domination, manipulation and strategic behaviour.A2: Climate ImpactsNo internal link to changing climate policy – debates just use to legitimate bureaucratic decision-making as usualBackstrand et al, Associate Professor Political Science, Lund University 10(Karin Backstrand, Jamil Khan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental and Energy Systems Studies, Annica Kronsell, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, all at Lund University and Eva Lovbrand, Eva Lovbrand is Assistant Professor al the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research at Linkoping University, “Environmental politics after the deliberative turn”, Environmental Politics and Deliberative Democracy: Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance, Ed. Backstrand, p.231)This book has systematically examined the promise of new modes of environmental governance through eight case studies in policy fields such as climate, water, food safety, forestry and sustainable development. The most significant and obvious finding is that the win-win rhetoric of new modes fails to translate into practice. Not surprisingly, the promise to deliver more legitimate and effective environmental policies seems too ambitious. While many of the governance arrangements analysed in this book have indeed increased the participation of new actors in environmental politics, the procedural qualities of these new modes are secondary to the quest for improved policy performance. At the same time there is no conclusive evidence that the governance arrangements actually generate more effective environmental problem-solving. Even in cases where environmental policy innovations, such as the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, have established an institutional structure for the monitoring of performance, the environmental effectiveness remains uncertain. The extent to which new modes of environmental governance will in fact lead to marked improvement of the natural resource base or decreased pollution levels, therefore remains an open question.Another central conclusion of this book is that the concept of 'new' modes is misleading. The shadow of hierarchy, which is the catchword for the continued influence of states, intergovernmental organization and supranational organizations in environmental politics, is prevalent in all of the governance arrangements examined in this book. The state and international organizations often initiate, broker and facilitate new modes of governance that can garner public legitimacy. This finding does not, however, challenge the claim that environmental politics has taken a deliberative turn in recent decades. It merely questions the assumption that such a turn is enacted in the absence of government. In general we have found evidence of a governance trend towards increased public participation, openness and dialogue. Although the deliberative turn primarily seems to engage organized societal groups in collaborative decision-making, some of our cases also indicate that the 'softer* forms of steering can enable more inclusive reason-giving among a diversity of actors. Encouraging examples are to be found in the implementation of the EU Water Directive and deliberations around GMOs in the EU. While far from the ideal model of deliberative democracy, these deliberative encounters emerge as an important, albeit piecemeal, complement to representative democracy that may add legitimacy to decision-making processes.Their climate policy change impacts assume applied debate, not academic debateFreeley, Late Communications Professor, John Carroll University & Steinberg, Comm Professor University of Miami, 8(Austin j. Freeley, and David L Steinberg, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, p.19)Debate can be classified into two broad categories: applied and educational. Applied debate is conducted on propositions, questions, and topics in which the advocates have a special interest, and the debate is presented before a judge or an audience with the power to render a binding decision on the proposition or respond to the question or topic in a real way. Academic debate is conducted on propositions in which the advocates have an academic interest, and the debate typically is presented before a teacher, judge or audience without direct power to render a decision on the proposition. Of course the audience in an academic debate does form opinions about the subject matter of the debate, and that personal transformation may ultimately lead to meaningful action. However, the direct impact of the audience decision in an academic debate is personal, and the decision made by the judge is limited to identification of the winner of the debate. In fact, in academic debate the judge may be advised to disregard the merits of the proposition and to render her win/loss decision only on the merits of the support as presented in the debate itself. The most important identifying characteristic of an academic debate is that the purpose of the debate is to provide educational opportunities for the participants.Deliberation waters down environmental policy to lowest common denominatorLehtonen, Research Fellow Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, 6(Markku, Sussex Energy Group. Science and Technology Policy Research, The Freeman Centre, University of Sussex, “Deliberative Democracy, Participation, and OECD Peer Reviews of Environmental Policies”, American Journal of Evaluation; 27; 185)Another problem with the OECD's approach from the perspective of true deliberation is that the "soft" advocacy for policy integration and "win-win" rhetoric that underpin EPRs may win the support of the more powerful sectors only at the cost of excessively "diluting" the message of sustainable development. This might lead to the search for consensus around the lowest common denominator, largely dictated by the more powerful "economist community" within the OECD by transforming sustainable development into simply an issue of efficient environmental policies. This could imply that environmental (or social) concerns should be taken into account, but only as long as they do not harm economic development. One possibility of avoiding such risks would be to abandon the requirement that, for instance, all public documents produced by the different units of the organization should be in strict coherence with one another. In concrete terms, instead of attempting to harmonize the views across the different OECD peer reviews, destined to represent an "OECD view on sustainable development," it might be more fruitful to allow each one to defend its own perspective, even if this would lead to contradictory conclusions across the reviews. Of course, this would require that any peer review would clearly make explicit its underlying basic premises. Such an approach would be more in line with the ideas of plurality of values, uncertainty, and complexity and recognize the often irreconcilable differences between the descriptions of reality from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives (see, e.g.. Norgaard. 1994).A2: Switch-SideSwitch side doesn’t solve – it misunderstands the purpose of debateGreene, University of Minnesota professor of Communication, and Hicks, University of Denver Associate Professor of communication, 5 (Ronald Walter, Darrin, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the? Ethical Self Fashioning of Liberal Subjects” , pg. 105 date accessed 7/10/13 igm)The description of debate as a dialectical method did not mean that the? proponents of switch-side debating rejected the importance of conviction for? public argument. They did, however, claim that sound conviction, as opposed? to dogmatism, was a product of debate, not its prerequisite. Baird (1955),? arguing that debate should be understood less as public advocacy and more as a? dialectical method of inquiry, claimed that sound conviction was a product of a? rigorous analysis of all aspects of a question and that this analysis was best? conducted through a method which had students practice defending and? rejecting the major arguments on both sides. Thus, debating both sides should? be understood as an educational procedure designed to generate ‘sound’? convictions prior to public advocacy. Baird urged that the critics of switch-side? debating should understand the practice as a pedagogical device and to judge it? accordingly. ‘These student exercises’, he told debaters and their coaches, ‘are? to be sharply distinguished from the later ‘practical life’ situations in which you? are preachers, lawyers, business men and women, politicians and community? LOST CONVICTIONS 105leaders. Debate and discussion training is essentially training in reflective? thinking, in the defence of different sides (‘role playing’ as some call it), and in? the revelation of strength and weakness of each position’ (p. 6). It was Baird’s? recognition that debating both sides was equivalent to role-playing that? warranted re-thinking the fit between the speaker and the words spoken.? Furthermore, if a debater did in fact appear to be shallow, insincere and prone? to manipulate public opinion for her or his own ends, this was certainly not,? argued Wayne Thompson (1944) and Nicholas Cripe, the fault of switch-side? debating, but the ‘result of other causes / weakness in the character of the? offender or a misunderstanding of the proper functioning of debate’? (Thompson 1944, p. 296). The proper way to deal with any ethical? shortcomings in debaters, the proponents argued, was for the national? forensics associations to develop a code of ethics that would stress the ethical? responsibility of intercollegiate debaters (to present the best possible case? according to facts as the debater understood them) and to forcefully condemn? individual acts of malfeasance such as misconstruing evidence, falsifying? sources, and misrepresenting their opponents’ positions. For Robert Newman? (1963), the controversy over debating both sides was simple to resolve: as long? as a good case could be made on each side of the resolution and individual? debaters did not lie or cheat, there simply was no ethical dilemma and? certainly no need for a disciplinary-based ethic to guide debate practice.? Finally, debate coaches justified switch-side debate on the pragmatic grounds? that it was a necessary component of tournament debating and that abandoning? the practice would mean the end of intercollegiate debating. ‘In fact, if the? proponents of ethical debate are correct’, Cripe warned, ‘and it is immoral for? a team to debate both sides, then many schools would have to discontinue? debate as we practice today’ (1957, p. 209).A2: Switch Sides = ToleranceLooser method of accounting for other perspectives is a better modelYoung, late Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, 94(Iris Marion, “Comments on Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self Author(s)”, New German Critique, No. 62, Spring - Summer, pp. 172)The injunction to take the other person's standpoint is supposed to aid communication. It may in fact impede it. If you think you already know how the other people feel and judge because you have imaginatively represented their perspective to yourself, then you may not listen to their expressions of their perspectives very openly. If you think you can look at things from their points of view, then you may avoid the sometimes arduous and painful process in which they confront you with your prejudices, fantasies, and misunderstandings about them, which you have because of your point of view. If you enter a dialogue with all the best intentions of taking the other people's perspectives, and in the course of the discussion they then express anger and frustration at you for misunderstanding their position, you are likely to become defensive and shut down the dialogue. If, on the other hand, you approach a moral dialogue with others with the attitude that you cannot see things from their standpoint, that there are aspects of where they are coming from that you do not understand, then you will likely be more open to listening to the specific expression of their experience, interests, and claims.Thus, I want to conclude with the suggestion that a communicative ethics needs to distinguish between taking the standpoint of the other person, reversing perspectives with others on the one hand, and on the other hand taking the perspectives of others into account in making moral and political judgments. To take the perspectives of others into account is to acknowledge that they are specific and not reversible with those of others, and thus that they require a specifically institutionalized voice. Seyla Benhabib says this herself.A2: Debate =/= Social ChangeDebate is critical to positive change – critical examination and freedom of argumentationWarner, director of the debate program at the University of Louisville, and Bruschke, professor of Human Communication Studies 3 (Ede, John, “‘GONE ON DEBATING:’ COMPETITIVE ACADEMIC DEBATE AS A TOOL OF EMPOWERMENT FOR URBAN AMERICA”, , date accessed 7/10/13 igm)These arguments are theoretical; they cannot speak as powerfully as the voices of those who have experienced both the oppression of an education system failing from the “unique synergy between lack of funding and anachronistic pedagogical practices.” Ed Lee, who now holds a Master’s degree and works for an Urban Debate League in San Francisco, recounts his experience as an urban debater: Educated in the public school system of inner-city Atlanta, my high school experience was tragically similar to the one depicted above. My savior, like many others, was the Atlanta Urban Debate League. It provided the opportunity to question the nefarious rites of passage (prison, drugs, and drinking) that seem to be uniquely debilitating to individuals in the poor urban communities. In enclaves of poverty, there is also an undercurrent of nihilism and negativity that eats away at the soul of the community. Adults are hopeless. Children follow their lead and become hopeless. The solution is to offer people a choice beyond minimum wage or prison. Urban Debate Leagues provide that. Debating delivers a galaxy of alternatives and opportunity for those who are only offered hopelessness and were unnecessary elements of our culture that existed becaused they (predominantly) go unquestioned. Questioning the very nature of our existence is at the heart of the debate process. I am left wondering what would occur if debate became as compulsory in inner-city educational culture as football and basketball? Imagine graduating from high school each year millions of underprivileged teenagers with the ability to articulate their needs, the needs of others, and the ability to offer solutions. I am convinced that someone would be forced to listen. Urban debate Leagues offers a pedagogical tool that simultaneously opens the mind to alternatives and empowers students to take control of their lives. Half of the time, students are disseminating information and forming arguments about complex philosophical and political issues. In the other half, they answer the arguments of others. Self-reflexivity is an inherent part of the activity. Debating gives students the ability to articulate the partiality of all critical assessments. Contemporary educational techniques teach one side of the issue and universalize it as the only “truth.” Debate forces students to evaluate both sides, and determine their independent contextualized truth. Additionally, unlike the current pedagogy, debate allows everything to be questioned…The ability to question subjectivities presented as the objective truth makes debate uniquely empowering for individuals disenfranchised by the current system. It teaches students to interrogate their own institutionalized neglect and the systemic unhindered oppression of others. It is one of the few venues we are able to question authority. (pp. 95-6) Given the possibilities an urban debate program presents, it is worth examining the practical possibilities for a revitalization of urban debate. One thing is clear: Urban debate is under-utilized at present. Many urban debate programs died in the late sixties and early seventies as the result of massive budget cuts. As tax revenues diminished in educational coffers, debate programs, always treated as just one of the “extracurricular” activities, got lost in efforts to stop the institutional bleeding by “doing more with less.” While college debate is more vibrant, as early as 1975 major college debate organizations were acknowledging the lack of diversity in intercollegiate forensics. Little has changed over the past twenty-five years; minority participation remains exceptionally low at the two major national policy debate tournaments, the Cross Examination Debate Association championship and the National Debate Tournament (Hill, 1997; Stepp, 1997) Critiques Good – GeneralEpistemology Focus - Prereq/Precede PolicyQuestioning knowledge production is prerequisite to policy action – refusal to engage in criticism leads to ineffective policies and educationOwen, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton, 2 (David, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, , pg. 659 date accessed 7/10/13 igm)The first dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR? theory and postmodernist IR ‘theory’ (and the examples illustrate the claims concerning pluralism and factionalism made in the introduction to this? section). It is exhibited when we read Walt warning of the danger of postmodernism as a kind of theoretical decadence since ‘issues of peace and war are too important for the field [of IR] to be diverted into a prolix? and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world’,12 or? find Keohane asserting sniffily that:Neither neorealist nor neoliberal institutionalists are content with? interpreting texts: both sets of theorists believe that there is an? international political reality that can be partly understood, even? if it will always remain to some extent veiled.13 We should be wary of such denunciations precisely because the issue at stake for the practitioners of this ‘prolix and self-indulgent discourse’ is? the picturing of international politics and the implications of this picturing? for the epistemic and ethical framing of the discipline, namely, the? constitution of what phenomena are appropriate objects of theoretical or other forms of enquiry. The kind of accounts provided by practitioners of? this type are not competing theories (hence Keohane’s complaint) but conceptual reproblematisations of the background that informs theory- construction, namely, the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, inferences and assertability warrants that are taken for granted in the course of the debate between, for example, neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists? (hence the point-missing character of Keohane’s complaint). Epistemic structures reinforce unethical policies – criticism is key to effective decision-makingOwen, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton, 2 (David, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, , pg. 660 date accessed 7/10/13 igm)The point of these remarks is to call critically into question the background? picture (or, to use another term of art, the horizon) against which the disciplinary discourse and practices of IR are conducted in order to make? this background itself an object of reflection and evaluation. In a similar vein, Rob Walker argues:Under the present circumstances the question ‘What is to be done?’? invites a degree of arrogance that is all too visible in the behaviour of the dominant political forces of our time. . . . The most pressing questions of the age call not only for concrete policy options to be offered to existing elites and institutions, but also, and more? crucially, for a serious rethinking of the ways in which it is possible? for human beings to live together.15The aim of these comments is to draw to our attention the easily forgotten? fact that our existing ways of picturing international politics emerge from, and in relation to, the very practices of international politics with which? they are engaged and it is entirely plausible (on standard Humean grounds)? that, under changing conditions of political activity, these ways of guiding? reflection and action may lose their epistemic and/or ethical value such? that a deeper interrogation of the terms of international politics is required. Whether or not one agrees with Walker that this is currently required, it is a perfectly reasonable issue to raise. Epistemological debate is necessary to test policy Owen, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton, 2 (David, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, , pg. 663 date accessed 7/10/13 igm)The third dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR? theory and critical IR theory, where White’s distinction enables us to make? sense of a related confusion, namely, the confusion between holding that? forms of positivist IR theory (e.g., neorealism and neoliberal? institutionalism) are necessarily either value-free or evaluative. It does so because we can now see that, although forms of positivist IR theory are not normative theories, they presuppose a background picture which? orients our thinking through the framing of not only what can be intelligibly up for grabs as true-or-false (the epistemic framing) but also what can be? intelligibly up for grabs as good-or-bad (the ethical framing). As Charles Taylor has argued, a condition of our intelligibility as agents is that we? inhabit a moral framework which orients us in ethical space and our practices of epistemic theorising cannot be intelligibly conceived as existing? independently of this orientation in thinking.21 The confusion in IR theory? arises because, on the one hand, positivist IR theory typically suppresses acknowledgement of its own ethical presuppositions under the influence of the scientific model (e.g., Waltz’s neorealism and Keohane’s neoliberal? institutionalism), while, on the other hand, its (radical) critics typically view its ethical characteristics as indicating that there is an evaluative or normative theory hidden, as it were, within the folds of what presents? itself as a value-free account. Consequently, both regard the other as, in? some sense, producing ideological forms of knowledge; the positivist’s claim is that critical IR theory is ideological by virtue of its explicitly normative character, the critical theorist’s claim is that positivist IR theory? is ideological by virtue of its failure to acknowledge and reflect on its own? implicit normative commitments. But this mutual disdain is also a product of the confusion of pictures and theories. Firstly, there is a confusion between pictures and theories combined with the scientistic suppression? of the ethical presuppositions of IR theory. This finds expression in the? thought that we need to get our epistemic account of the world sorted out before we can engage responsibly in ethical judgement about what to do, where such epistemic adequacy requires the construction of a positive? theory that can explain the features of the world at issue. An example of? this position is provided by Waltz’s neorealism.22 Against this first position, we may reasonably point out that epistemic adequacy cannot be intelligibly? specified independently of background ethical commitments concerning what matters to us and how it matters to us.Ontology Focus - Prereq/Precede PolicyOntology precedes policymaking – questions of being and understanding define the limits and conditions of politicsDillon, professor Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, 3 (Michael, pg. 1 “Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought” Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003, igm)International Relations is a discipline concerned with observing how the political? project of living-out the modern emerged, and how it continues to operate globally.? I am concerned with how we might out-live the modern politically. I think of? outliving here as surpassing the modern political imagination, not merely surviving? its dereliction.? In making its contribution to out-living the modern, politics must be an art? capable not only of applying existing moral and economic codes, or of? administering the interests of existing subjectivities. It must be capable, also, of? allowing new possibilities of political being to emerge out of the unstable, unjust? and violently defended sediment of modern political existence. In the development? of such a project, International Relations becomes more rather than less important.? For the question of whether or not human being does out-live the modern is one? posed in and through the interstitial politics of (inter)national politics.? To conceive of politics as being concerned with making way for new? possibilities of being requires reimagining politics itself. Speci?cally, it requires? that politics be thought as something which arises from human being as a? possibility. To understand human being as a possibility, however, means understanding that it consists in the improbable feat of always already containing? more than it is possible to contain; understanding that there is always already in? human being an excess of being over appearance and identity.? Thought as a possibility rather than a ?xed and determinate actuality, human? being must necessarily also be thought as free; free to take-up the dif?cult and? inescapable challenge it encounters in itself as a possibility, and make that possibility? its own. For if the human were not free, in the condition of having its being as a? possibility to be, there would be no action to take, no decisions to make, no dilemmas? to face, no relations to relate, no loves to love, no fears to fear, no laws to make and no laws to break. There would, in short be no politics. Consequently, the very project of politics is made possible by human being as a possibility. A possibility engendered by the freedom of human being as a possibility, the project for politics must then be the making way for the taking place of human being’s as possibility. Such an account of politics would also make International Relations more rather less important: albeit, it would make International Relations something which its orthodox proponents would not recognize. Ontology informs action – determining the implications of a policy start with questions of ontologyCambell, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, and Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai?i, 99 (David, Michael J., pg. 96, “Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics” University of Minnesota Press, igm)As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political-never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything about that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other-regional-modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate through the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock-innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making. While Certain continental thinkers like Blumenberg and Lowith, for example, were prompted to interrogate or challenge the modern’s claim to being distinctively “modern,” and others such as Adorno questioned its enlightened credentials, philosophers like Derrida and Levinas pursued the metaphysical implications (or rather the implications for metaphysics) of the thinking initiated by Kierkegaard, as well as by Nietzsche and Heidegger. The violence of metaphysics, together with another way of thinking about the question of the ethical, emerged as the defining theme of their work. Other, notably Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Bataille turned the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger into a novel kind of social and political critique of both the regimes and the effects of power that have come to distinguish late modern times; they concentrated, in detail, upon how the violence identified by these other thinkers manifested itself not only in the mundane practices of modern life, but also in those areas that claimed to be most free of it, especially the freedom and security of the subject as well as its allied will to truth and knowledge. Questioning the appeal to the secure self-grounding common to both its epistemic structures and its political imagination, and in the course of reinterrogating both the political character of the modern and the modern character of the political, this problematization of modernity has begun to prompt an ontopolitcally driven reappraisal of modern political thought.State Focus BadState Focus Bad – AgencyState focused debates preclude discussions of individual action – kills effectiveness and agencyBleiker, professor of International Relations, 2k (Roland, “Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics” pg. 8, Cambridge University Press, igm)To expand the scope of international theory and to bring transversal struggles into focus is not to declare the state obsolete. States remain central actors in international politics and they have to be recognised and theorised as such. In fact, my analysis will examine various ways in which states and the boundaries between them have mediated the formation, functioning and impact of dissent. However, my reading of dissent and agency makes the state neither its main focus nor its starting point. There are compelling reasons for such a strategy, and they go beyond a mere recognition that a state-centric approach to international theory engenders a form of representation that privileges the authority of the state and thus precludes an adequate understand?ing of the radical transformations that are currently unfolding in global life. Michael Shapiro is among an increasing number of theor?ists who convincingly portray the state not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a set of 'stories' — of which the state-centric approach to international theory is a perfect example. It is part of a legitimisation process that highlights, promotes and naturalises cer?tain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an inside and an outside, between a people and its others. Shapiro stresses that such state-stories also exclude, for they seek 'to repress or delegitimise other stories and the practices of identity and space they reflect.' And it is these processes of exclusion that impose a cer?tain political order and provide the state with a legitimate rationale for violent encounters.22State Focus Bad – EducationState focus kills critical education – testing all parts of an action is key to international scholarship. This is a portable impactBiswas, Associate Professor of Politics, 7 (Shampa “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as International Relations Theorist” Millennium - Journal of International Studies , pg. 125, date accessed 7/10/13 igm)In making a case for the exilic orientation, it is the powerful hold of the nation-state upon intellectual thinking that Said most bemoans. 31 The nation-state of course has a particular pride of place in the study of global politics. The state-centricity of International Relations has not just circumscribed the ability of scholars to understand a vast ensemble of globally oriented movements, exchanges and practices not reducible to the state, but also inhibited a critical intellectual orientation to the world outside the national borders within which scholarship is produced. Said acknowledges the fact that all intellectual work occurs in a (national) context which imposes upon one’s intellect certain linguistic boundaries, particular (nationally framed) issues and, most invidiously, certain domestic political constraints and pressures, but he cautions against the dangers of such restrictions upon the intellectual imagination. 32 Comparing the development of IR in two different national contexts – the French and the German ones – Gerard Holden has argued that different intellectual influences, different historical resonances of different issues, different domestic exigencies shape the discipline in different contexts. 33 While this is to be expected to an extent, there is good reason to be cautious about how scholarly sympathies are expressed and circumscribed when the reach of one’s work (issues covered, people affected) so obviously extends beyond the national context. For scholars of the global, the (often unconscious) hold of the nation-state can be especially pernicious in the ways that it limits the scope and range of the intellectual imagination. Said argues that the hold of the nation is such that even intellectuals progressive on domestic issues become collaborators of empire when it comes to state actions abroad. 34 Specifically, he critiques nationalistically based systems of education and the tendency in much of political commentary to frame analysis in terms of ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ - particularly evident in coverage of the war on terrorism - which automatically sets up a series of (often hostile) oppositions to ‘others’. He points in this context to the rather common intellectual tendency to be alert to the abuses of others while remaining blind to those of one’s own. 35Critical discussion is crowded out by state focus – kills educationBiswas, Associate Professor of Politics, 7 (Shampa “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as International Relations Theorist” Millennium - Journal of International Studies , pg. 123, date accessed 7/10/13 igm)The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this ? war has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national ? debate wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic ? ‘for or against’ and ‘costs and benefits’ analysis can simply not be raised. ? In effect, what Said argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular ? heed to, is an understanding of ‘intellectual relevance’ that is larger and ? more worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical, historical, ethical and ? perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering of recipes and ? solutions, that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most ? fundamental and important senses of the vocation.21It is not surprising that the ‘cult of expertise’ that is increasingly ? driving the study of global politics has occurred in conjunction with a ? larger depoliticisation of many facets of global politics, which since the ? 1980s has accompanied a more general prosperity-bred complacency ? about politics in the Anglo-European world, particularly in the US. There ? are many examples of this. It is evident, for instance, in the understanding ? of globalisation as TINA market-driven rationality – inevitable, inexorable ? and ultimately, as Thomas Friedman’s many writings boldly proclaim, ? apolitical.22 If development was always the ‘anti-politics machine’ that ? James Ferguson so brilliantly adumbrated more than a decade ago, ? it is now seen almost entirely as technocratic aid and/or charitable ? humanitarianism delivered via professionalised bureaucracies, whether ? they are IGOs or INGOs.23 From the more expansive environmental and ? feminist-inspired understandings of ‘human security’, understandings of ? global security are once again increasingly being reduced to (military) ? strategy and global democratisation to technical recipes for ‘regime ? change’ and ‘good governance’. There should be little surprise in such ? a context that the ‘war on terror’ has translated into a depoliticised ? response to a dehistoricised understanding of the ‘roots of terror’. For IR ? scholars, reclaiming politics is a task that will involve working against the ? grain of expertise-oriented professionalism in a world that increasingly ? understands its own workings in apolitical terms.A2: Roleplaying – AgencyRoleplaying bad – forcing state representation kills agency in debateMitchell, Associate Professor of Communication and 98 (Gordon R., Director of the William Pitt Debating Union at the University of Pittsburgh, “Pedagogical possibilities for argumentative agency in academic debate” Argumentation and Advocacy, Volume 35, Issue 2 Fall 1998 ) In the process of explaining their teaching approach, argumentation scholars sometimes invoke a bifurcation that separates academic study of argumentation from applied practice in public argument. This explanation typically begins with an elucidation of the democratic and emancipatory potential of debate as a process of decisionmaking, and then proceeds to an explanation of academic study as an essential preparatory step on the way to achievement of such emancipatory potential. This route of explanation is consistent with the American Forensic Association Credo, which declares that the purpose of forensic education is to "prepare students through classrooms, forums, and competition for participation in their world through the power of expression" (qtd. in Freeley 1996, p. 122). Writing from this posture to defend the value of National Debate Tournament (NDT) policy competition, Edward Panetta posits that NDT debate "will prepare students to be societal leaders ..." (1990, p. 76, emphasis added). Similarly, Austin Freeley suggests that academic debate "provides preparation for effective participation in a democratic society" and "offers preparation for leadership" (1997, p. 21, emphasis added). What are the entailments of such a preparatory framework for argumentation pedagogy, and how do such entailments manifest themselves in teaching practice? On the surface, the rhetoric of preparation seems innocuous and consistent with other unremarkable idioms employed to describe education (college prep courses and prep school spring to mind). However, by framing argumentation pedagogy as preparation for student empowerment, educators may actually constrain the emancipatory potential of the debate enterprise. In this vein, approaches that are purely oriented toward preparation place students and teachers squarely in the proverbial pedagogical bullpen, a peripheral space marked off from the field of social action. In what follows, I pursue this tentative hypothesis by interrogating the framework of preparatory pedagogy on three levels, considering how it can position sites of academic inquiry vis-a-vis broader public spheres of deliberation, how it can flatten and defer consideration of complex issues of argumentative engagement and how it can invite unwitting co-option of argumentative skills.We’ll impact turn roleplaying - State focus denies agency – neorealist frameworks eliminate the possibility of localized political changesBleiker, professor of International Relations, 2k (Roland, “Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics” pg. 9, Cambridge University Press, igm)Questions of agency have been discussed extensively in international theory, mostly in the context of the so-called structure—agency debate. Although strongly wedded to a state-centric view, this debate nevertheless evokes a number of important conceptual issues that are relevant as well to an understanding of transversal dynamics. The roots of the structure—agency debate can be traced back to a feeling of discontent about how traditional approaches to international theory have dealt with issues of agency. Sketched in an overly broad manner, the point of departure looked as follows: At one end of the spectrum were neorealists, who explain state identity and behaviour through a series of structural restraints that are said to emanate from the anarchical nature of the international system. At the other end we find neoliberals, who accept the existence of anarchy but seek to understand the behaviour of states and other international actors in terms of their individual attributes and their ability to engage in cooperative bargaining. If pushed to their logical end-point, the two positions amount, respectively, to a structural determinism and an equally farfetched belief in the autonomy of rational actors. 24 The structure—agency debate is located somewhere between these two poles. Neither structure nor agency receive analytical priority. Instead, the idea is to understand the interdependent and mutually constitutive relationship between them. The discussions that have evolved in the wake of this assumption are highly complex and cannot possibly be summarised here. 25 Some of the key premises, though, can be recognised by observing how the work of Anthony Giddens has shaped the structure—agency debate in international relations. Giddens speaks of the 'duality of structure,' of structural properties that are constraining as well as enabling. They are both 'the medium and outcome of the contingently accomplished activities of situated actors'. 26 Expressed in other words, neither agents nor structures have the final word. Human actions are always embedded in and constrained by the structural context within which they form and evolve. But structures are not immutable either. A human being, Giddens stresses, will 'know a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member'. 27 The actions that emerge from this awareness then shape the processes through which social systems are structurally maintained and reproduced.A2: Roleplaying – Justifies ViolenceRoleplaying is bad – using the state as the starting point for discussion justifies bad policies and violenceSmith, Professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Wales, 97 (Steve, University of Wales, Aberystwyth “Power and Truth, A Reply to William Wallace,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), p. 513)Those academics who do get involved in talking truth to power must accept that in so doing they must adopt the agenda of those to whom they are talking. They will be involved in problem-solving, and thereby must accept the 'givens' of the policy debate. Policy-makers see certain things as givens; therefore if you write about them in order to influence the policy debate, you tend to have to write as if they are given as well. For academics such 'givens' are rarely seen as such. This has extremely important political and intellectual consequences since it questions the very notion of talking 'truth' to power. It is more a case of accepting the policy agenda of those to whom one is talking and then giving them a series of alternative ways of proceeding. I see no connection between this and speaking 'truth to power'. I can also admit the tendency to make what one says acceptable to those 'listening', so as to ensure that one is indeed 'listened to'. But more importantly, why should academics take the policy agenda of governments as the starting point? Why do we privilege that starting point rather than the needs and wants of the have-nots in our society or in the global political system? Indeed, maybe speaking 'truth to power' is itself a very political act, albeit in the name of academic neutrality, an act that supports the existing division of resources in the world. This situation is made all the worse once the possibility arises of getting funding from policy-making bodies, however much the individual academic wants to maintain the independence of his or her research. In my view, academics need a critical distance from which to look at the activities of governments. Perhaps the greatest form of isolation and self-righteousness is to accept the policy-makers' view of the world as the starting point, so that the academic sees the world as the policy-maker sees it. Where would questions of gender, famine, and racism fit into that world-view? Yet aren't these every bit as 'political' and 'international' as the traditional agenda? This seems to me to take us very far indeed from the idea of 'speaking truth to power'; the danger must be of telling the powerful what they want to hear and of working within their world-view. Of course, academics spend much time trying to avoid these dangers, and Wallace himself cannot be accused of simply adopting the agenda of the powerful, but surely he would admit that these dangers are profound and very difficult to avoid, especially if one wants to have influence and prestige within the policy-making community. My objection is really to those who pretend that any of this has anything to do with truth and academic objectivity.A2: Cede the PoliticalNon unique – the political has already been ceded to the eliteAmsden, Professor of Political Economy at MIT, DiCaprio World Institute for Development Economics Research fellow, and Robinson, Professor of Government at Harvard University 10 (Alice, Alisa, James, , date accessed 7/10/13 igm)In addition, their control over resources also gives elites the ability to make decisions over production and technology. The owners of the factors of production have influence over what is produced and how it is produced. They can act as entrepreneurs and innovators and increase factor productivity and diversification. Or they can overexploit existing resources without regard for sustainability into the future.Elites also impact development outcomes through their control over decision-making processes that allocate political resources within a society. This introduces two additional channels through which their activities impact growth in the long run. The first is that elites have the resources to design and implement institutions that favour their interests. Such institutions may promote participation and information flow. Or they may simply cement the position of a particular group within the governance structure.Another feature of elite control over institutions is that they are able to influence how both elites and non-elites within a society perceive different issues. Elites control how issues are framed through their ability to distribute or withhold information, and their influence over and within the media. Even where there is a free media, it depends on elites for information, and can choose to present issues that reflect a particular bias.**A2: Utilitarianism/ConsequentialismUtilitarianism Bad – Genocide/War/MoralsPolicy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever means will encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral valuesCallahan 73 (Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, Daniel, “The Tyranny of Survival”, p 91-93)The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.Utilitarianism Bad – IndividualityUtilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a wholeFreeman 94 (Avalon Prof in the Humanities @ U of Penn, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina Samuel, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, )The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines the force of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some notion of equal concern and respect for persons. But let us assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just the other way: utilitarianism is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed to by legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a separate issue] to assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice.) Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior requirement to treat people with equal consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a universal point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for example, that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests (by for example, determining our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better explication of equal consideration of each person's interests than is the utilitarian aggregative method, which in effect collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals' "interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization? Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that, to say we ought to give equal consideration to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely formal principle, which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product" of equal consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the procedure. That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences, all of which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the human good: a person's good is defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they were his own, sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual" utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision procedure, then maximizing aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure that gives equal consideration to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is. If anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal to equal consideration. Utilitarians appeal to impartiality in order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ, pp. 26-27). Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of others as if they were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand, made possible by equal consideration and sympathy. The significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to equal consideration have nothing to do with impartiality between persons. What is really being given equal consideration are desires or experiences of the same magnitude. That these are the desires or experiences of separate persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact that has no substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can more accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of clarity is gained. It is in this sense that persons enter into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any mention of them can be dropped without loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how to apply utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong with the common claim that utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not substantive equality and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes neither procedural nor substantive equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on distributions even get underway, it is little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such substantive inequalities. What follows is that utilitarian appeals to democracy and the democratic value of equality are misleading. In no sense do utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern and respect.Utilitarianism Bad – Morals Owning oneself is a moral imperative – utilitarianism imposes interpersonal obligations to society, which destroys moralityFreeman 94 (Avalon Prof in the Humanities @ U of Penn, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina Samuel, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, )Kymlicka distinguishes two interpretations of utilitarianism: teleological and egalitarian. According to Rawls's teleological interpretation, the "fundamental goal" (LCC, p. 33) of utilitarianism is not persons, but the goodness of states of affairs. Duty is defined by what best brings about these states of affairs. " [M] aximizing the good is primary, and we count individuals equally only because that maximizes value. Our primary duty isn't to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable states of affairs" (LCC, p. 27). It is difficult to see, Kymlicka says, how this reading of utilitarianism can be viewed as a moral theory. Morality, in our everyday view at least, is a matter of interpersonal obligations-the obligations we owe to each other. But to whom do we owe the duty of maximizing utility? Surely not to the impersonal ideal spectator . . . for he doesn't exist. Nor to the maximally valuable state of affairs itself, for states of affairs don't have moral claims." (LCC, p. 28-29) Kymlicka says, "This form of utilitarianism does not merit serious consideration as a political morality" (LCC, p. 29). Suppose we see utilitarianism differently, as a theory whose "fundamental principle" is "to treat people as equals" (LCC, p. 29). On this egalitarian reading, utilitarianism is a procedure for aggregating individual interests and desires, a procedure for making social choices, specifying which trade-offs are acceptable. It's a moral theory which purports to treat people as equals, with equal concern and respect. It does so by counting everyone for one, and no one for more than one. (LCC, p. 25) Utilitarianism Bad – Mass DeathRisks taken by the government to increase overall utility will severely compromise the individual which will result in fatalitySchroeder 86 (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, “Rights Against Risks,”, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, )Equity has provided a limited answer to the question of acceptable risk. The traditional doctrine of injunctions against tortious behavior holds that courts may enjoin behavior that is virtually certain to harm an identifiable individual in the near future.'2 This body of law, however, focuses more on avoidance of harm to specific persons than on regulation of risk.'3 It is thus inapposite to the questions of modern technological risk, risk that is quite unlikely to injure any identifiable individual in the short-term, but that carries severe consequences that are certain to occur to someone in the medium to distant future. Consider the paradigm of the Acme Chemical Company: Acme Chemical Company is discovered to be storing chemical wastes on its land in such a way that seepage containing traces of those wastes are entering an underground water system that serves as the sole drinking water supply for a town several miles away. One of the chemicals has been classified as a carcinogen in laboratory experiments on mice. Although extrapolating from these results to predictions of human carcinogencity is somewhat controversial, federal agencies routinely do so. Under one of a number of plausible sets of assumptions, a concentration of ten parts per billion (ppb) in drinking water is estimated to increase a human's chance of contracting cancer by one in one hundred thousand if the human is assumed to consume a normal intake over the course of twenty years. Analyses show that the current concentration in the underground aquifer near Acme's plant is ten ppb. This case exhibits the typical features of risky actions associated with modern technology. The probability of risk to any individual is relatively small while its severity is substantial, perhaps fatal. Risk is being imposed on individuals who have not consented to it in any meaningful sense. Finally, risk is unintentional in the sense that imposing risk on others is not an objective of Acme's plan.'4 We may assume its executives in fact would be tremendously relieved if they could avoid the risk. Utilitarianism Bad – Value to LifeUtilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks for the overall utilitySchroeder 86 (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, “Rights Against Risks,”, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, )From the individual's point of view, the balancing of costs and benefits that utilitarianism endorses renders the status of any individual risk bearer profoundly insecure. A risk bearer cannot determine from the kind of risk being imposed on him whether it is impermissible or not. The identical risk may be justified if necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product of an act of profitless carelessness, but the nature and extent of the underlying benefits of the risky action are fre quently unknown to the risk bearer so that he cannot know whether or not he is being wronged. Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is well-known, the status of a risk bearer is insecure because individuals can justifiably be inflicted with ever greater levels of risk in conjunction with increasing gains. Certainly, individual risk bearers may be entitled to more protection if the risky action exposes many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological risks will cause greater harm increases as more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely to be justifiable. Once again, however, that insight seems scant comfort to an individual, for it reinforces the realization that, standing alone, he does not count for much. A strategy of weighing gains against risks thus renders the status of any specific risk victim substantially contingent upon the claims of others, both those who may share his victim status and those who stand to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the "distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism,"58 the criticism that, despite its famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one,"59 utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of values. Various versions of utilitarian ism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60 Whatever the specific formulation, the goal of maximizing some mea sure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual. It reduces the individual to a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his monitoring function.61 It also produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account, the individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the trampling of the few in furtherance of the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent. The individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing total utility. Otherwise, the individual can be discarded. Consequentialism Bad – EpistemologyWe don’t evaluate consequences neutrally – epistemic basis bankrupts their consequentialist analysisOwen 2 (David, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, )JFS First, ‘human acts’ and ‘consequences’ should both be construed broadly to include, in the former case, human practices in general and, in the latter case, effects ranging from transformations of being to transformations of environment across both material and conceptual registers. Second, Dewey’s point concerning the perception of consequences draws to our attention the fact that the visibility of consequences is dependent on the background picture in terms of which the practices in question are situated and hence the central role that world-disclosure plays in the constitution of forms of government. Third, Dewey’s stress on the relationship between common perception and action-coordination directed to governing the effects of the practices in question. Fourth, and particularly importantly, the reflexive character of this starting point, that is, the fact the efforts at governing the effects of certain practices themselves involve practices which have consequences. This fourth point is significant because it indicates that Dewey is providing a way of accounting not only for the emergence and development of forms of government, but also for the emergence and development of forms of contesting or governing government (such as, for example, criticism in the sense of an art of reflexive indocility which protests against being governed like this, at this costs and with these consequences). In other words, Dewey’s pragmatist approach to the issue of government links perception, knowledge and action in orienting itself to our conduct and the ways in which we seek to conduct our conduct. Although this approach may be readily aligned with the burgeoning literature within IR on government and governance, a literature prompted in part by Kratochwil and Ruggie,25 it has two significant advantages with respect to this literature. First, the focus on perception opens up a space within which questions of the background picture informing the discourse and practices of international relations can be perspicuously posed. Second, its reflexive application to practices of government and governance clarifies the relationship between government and freedom such that the legitimacy of practices of government is seen to depend not simply on its efficacy but on the consent of those who are governed by it. This starting point is, as I have noted, very general and since our concern is not with government in general, but with government of the common or public affairs of humanity, it is appropriate to note that Dewey specifies this more restricted sense by distinguishing between public transactions, transactions which have significant effects for others beyond those involved in the transaction, and private transactions, transactions whose significant effects do not extend beyond the parties engaged in the transaction.26 This is still fairly general, not to mention rough and ready, but that may not be a bad thing since, on this account, publics are formed on the basis of the shared practical judgement that a given (type of) transaction has consequences of extensive significance—and it would be wholly against Dewey’s general ethical orientation to seek to specify standards of significance in advance, as I shall illustrate in the next section. It follows from this account that (political) publics are specified relative to practices of political government in terms of advocating a practice of government at a given level and/or in terms of contesting a practice, or proposed practice, of government. Publics can be local, regional, national, transnational or global, and publics form, dissolve and reform over time— some may be relatively enduring, others relatively passing. In the contemporary context, we may take it as a strength of Dewey’s approach that it does not presuppose what we might call methodological statecentrism; on the contrary, precisely because it takes government as its focus, it is methodologically suited to reflecting not only on states but on the whole panoply of agencies involved in government and governance, or in contesting these practices, without prejudging their significance.27**A2: PragmatismPragmatism Bad – Empty RhetoricRorty is heavy on rhetoric, weak on reason – Be skeptical of their willy-nilly combinations and put a premium on our linksDavidson 7 (John, Princeton, )JFSOne particularly contentious issue has arisen in connection with Rorty's appropriation of earlier philosophers; prominent readers of the classical American pragmatists have expressed deep reservations about Rorty's interpretation of Dewey and Peirce, in particular, and the pragmatist movement in general. Consequently, Rorty's entitlement to the label "pragmatist" has been challenged. For instance Susan Haack's strong claims on this score have received much attention, but there are many others. (See, for example, the discussions of Rorty in Thomas M. Alexander, 1987; Gary Brodsky, 1982; James Campbell, 1984; Abraham Edel, 1985; James Gouinlock, 1995; Lavine 1995; R.W: Sleeper, 1986; as well as the essays in Lenore Langdorf and Andrew R. Smith, 1995.) For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatist movement is John Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own central doctrines. In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of his own view of philosophy as the hand-maiden of a humanist politics, of a non-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holistic conception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist, historicist conception of philosophical thought. To read Dewey his way, however, Rorty explicitly sets about separating the "good" from the "bad" Dewey. (See "Dewey's Metaphysics," CP, 72-89, and "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin", in Saatkamp, 1-15.) He is critical of what he takes to be Dewey's backsliding into metaphysics in Experience and Nature, and has no patience for the constructive attempt of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Rorty thus imposes a scheme of evaluation on Dewey's works which many scholars object to. Lavine, for instance, claims that "scientific method" is Dewey's central concept (Lavine 1995, 44). R.W. Sleeper holds that reform rather than elimination of metaphysics and epistemology is Dewey's aim (Sleeper 1986, 2, chapter 6). Rorty's least favourite pragmatist is Peirce, whom he regards as subject to both scheme-content dualism and to a degree of scientism. So it is not surprising that Haack, whose own pragmatism draws inspiration from Peirce, finds Rorty's recasting of pragmatism literally unworthy of the name. Rorty's key break with the pragmatists is a fundamental one; to Haack's mind, by situating himself in opposition to the epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, Rorty ends up dismissing the very project that gave direction to the works of the American pragmatists. While classical pragmatism is an attempt to understand and work out a novel legitimating framework for scientific inquiry, Haack maintains, Rorty's "pragmatism" (Haack consistently uses quotes) is simply an abandonment of the very attempt to learn more about the nature and adequacy conditions of inquiry. Instead of aiding us in our aspiration to govern ourselves through rational thought, Rorty weakens our intellectual resilience and leaves us even more vulnerable to rhetorical seduction. To Haack and her sympathisers, Rorty's pragmatism is dangerous, performing an end-run on reason, and therefore on philosophy.Pragmatism Bad – Atrocities Pragmatism opens the door for genocide and nuclear warLeiter 7 (Brian, Law@UTexas, )JFSNow Rorty does sometimes write as though, in terms of practical success, science and morals are on a par. He says, for example, “We have been equally successful in both morals and physics. To be sure, we have more difficulty convincing people of our moral views than of our scientific views, but this does not mean that the two differ in something called ‘epistemic status.’”18 Yet what could count as the evidence of “equal success” in morals and physics that Rorty has in mind? It can’t be that those who try to violate the laws of physics end up frustrated, maimed, or dead, while those who violate the moral law (however it is understood) suffer no predictable set of consequences at all. It can’t be that Nazi scientists and Manhattan Project scientists were interested in the same physics, but had rather different morals and politics. It can’t be that the academic community in physics is global, transcending culture and nationality, while most moral debate is parochial in the worst sense of that term, that is, tracking the interests and horizons of particular classes, cultural traditions, and experiences. Rorty objects, however, that “brute facts about the presence or absence of consensus—whether about planetary orbits or about sodomy—are to be explained sociologically rather than epistemologically.” For this to be persuasive, however, we would need to hear the details about how the actual sociological explanation goes, and Rorty, alas, never offers any. About the only explanatorily relevant psychosocial factor in the offing is that humans everywhere share an interest in predicting the future course of their experience, but that simply explains why the Scientific Norm works for human purposes, and why Nazis and social democrats share the same physics, but not the same morals. But that is a “sociological” explanation that simply underlines the fundamental difference between morals and science.Pragmatism Bad – Decision-MakingMany decisions need to be based in frames other than practicalityLeiter 7 (Brian, Law@UTexas, )If I am right, then perhaps there is only one plausible pragmatic thesis that deserves notice in philosophy, and it is the one suggested by the powerful metaphor of Neurath’s boat. This thesis is, contra Rorty, very much an epistemological thesis, that is, a thesis about the justification of what we ought to believe. And it says that justification can not run all the way down, that it is grounded, unavoidably, in propositions (and practices) that we accept because they work, and not for any other reason. But nothing in human experience or history gives us any reason to think that the criterion of “what works” extends all the way up the chain of justification. For it turns out that from human experience and human history, the practices “that work” are practices whose criteria of belief and action have nothing to do with practical considerations. And when we take those practices seriously, natural science and morality seem to be very different indeed.Pragmatism Bad – TautologicalRorty is tautological – How can we “prove” prag w/o an epistemological basis for favoring what “works? Olsen 6 (Michael, UC-SD undergrad, Cal Undergrad Philo Review, )Richard Rorty argues in “Solidarity or objectivity?” that the course of philosophy since the time of Plato has concerned two opposing ways of thinking of one’s life: objectivity or solidarity. The first is defined as a pursuit of justification for knowledge independent of appearance, or “standing in relation to a nonhuman reality” (Rorty 1991, p. 21). Solidarity is, on the other hand sought among the relations of individuals in a community without the detachment of a “God’s eye view.” Rorty proposes that we accept solidarity, looking at “knowledge [and truth] as a compliment paid to the beliefs […] we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not needed” (Rorty 1991, p. 24). Problematic to Rorty’s pragmatism is that it leaves us in a regress in attempt to justify our knowledge. Additionally, even if we accept his theory as coherent, coherence can be grounded in falsity and truth alike. At the heart of our desire for objectivity, is not to seek Truth for its own sake as Rorty contends (Rorty 1991, p. 21), but to seek truth for the very purpose of reasoned communal discourse. While we should always be willing to adjust our beliefs and grow, a view that Rorty espouses, his view of knowledge in fact hinders our ability to move forward.Pragmatism Bad – EpistemologyTheir argument for pragmatism is circular – It presumes that there is a rationality to their epistemologyLeiter 7 (Brian, Law@UTexas, )We may see how Rorty’s “pragmatism,” as he calls it, goes wrong by recalling the most evocative metaphor in the pragmatist genre, “Neurath’s boat,” an image due to the logical positivist Otto Neurath but made famous in post-WWII philosophy by the American pragmatist Quine.16 Neurath (and Quine) analogized our epistemological situation to that of sailors at sea who must rebuild the boat in which they sail. Being afloat, they cannot abandon the ship and rebuild it from scratch, so they must choose to stand firm on certain planks of the ship while rebuilding others. They, of course, choose to “stand firm” on those planks that are the most sturdy and reliable—the ones that “work” the best—though there may come a point when the sailors will tear those up too and replace them with new ones. Our epistemological situation, on this Quinean pragmatic view, is the same. In figuring out what we ought to believe, we necessarily “stand firm” on certain epistemic “planks” in our best-going theory of the world, the one that, to date, has worked the best. To be sure, we cannot rule out that we may one day want to replace those planks too—just as our predecessors replaced planks like “the truth is what the Good Book says” and “Newtonian mechanics describes the laws governing all matter”—but that is just to renounce absolute certainty and accept fallibilism as fundamental to our epistemological situation.Rorty is backward on epistemology – Fundamentally undermines pragLeiter 7 (Brian, Law@UTexas, )Where the Neurath/Quine picture agrees with Rorty is that all our epistemic judgments are “parochial,” but only in the fairly trivial sense that it is conceptually (hence practically) impossible for us to climb out of our ship (our best-going theory of the world) and rebuild the whole edifice from scratch by reference to nonparochial (nonhistorical) standards of truth and warrant. (On Quine’s view, “there is no Archimedean point of cosmic exile from which to leverage our theory of the world.”17) We must necessarily rely on certain epistemic criteria—criteria for what we ought to believe—any time we ask about the justification of any other belief (including beliefs about epistemic criteria). That is just to say that we must stand firm on certain “planks” in the boat while rebuilding (or figuring out whether we ought to rebuild) any other planks. The only question, then, is which planks we ought to “stand firm” on because they work so well.**A2: Switch Sides DebateSwitch Sides Bad – SpanosSwitch-side debate makes people disinterested in real belief and prepares a world of neoconsSpanos 4 (William, in Joe Millers’ Book Cross-ex pg. 467)JFSDear Joe Miller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I strongly believed then –and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about “objectivity” has crept into the “philosophy of debate” — that debate in both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take place nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that positions are always represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I find it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn’t matter which position you take on an issue — say, the United States’ unilateral wars of preemption — as long as you “score points”. The world we live in is a world entirely dominated by an “exceptionalist” America which has perennially claimed that it has been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its “errand in the wilderness.” That claim is powerful because American economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is to efface the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not “disinterested.” It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the “democratic” institutions that have power precisely by way of showing that their language if “truth,” far from being “disinterested” or “objective” as it is always claimed, is informed by the will to power over all manner of “others.” This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate world who felt like him should call into question the traditional “objective” debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept of debate and of language in which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush administration — judges, pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their “disinterested” argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate protocols from which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must occur. It must force that unworldly world down into the historical arena where positions make a difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of “deterring democracy” (in Noam Chomsky’s ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.Switch Sides Bad – Hicks and GreenDebating on both sides of an issue severs sincerity and ethics from public speaking; ethical speech becomes impossible, this causes moral relativismRonald Walter Green and Darrin Hicks in 5 (Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 100-126, “Lost Convictions: Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens”, January 2005)LOST CONVICTIONS Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens This paper takes as its point of departure the ethical problematization of debating both sides #/ having students argue both affirmative and negative on a debate resolution #/ in order to highlight the role of communication as a cultural technology of liberalism. It argues that debating both sides contributed to the cultural governance of cold war liberalism by separating speech from conviction to cultivate the value of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. The valorization of free and full expression as a pre-requisite for ‘decision by debate’ prepared the ground for dis-articulating debate from cold war liberalism and rearticulating it as a game of freedom that contributes to the moral education of liberal citizens. In so doing, debate becomes a global technology of liberalism creating exceptional subjects by circulating the communicative norms of deliberative democracy. Keywords conviction; free speech; cold war; debate; American exceptionalism; deliberative democracy In 1954, the US military academies, and a host of other colleges, refused to affirm the national debate resolution: ‘Resolved: The United States should diplomatically recognize the People’s Republic of China’. The problem of speaking in favour of the diplomatic recognition of ‘Red China’ came amidst an acute moment in the US containment strategy of domestic and international communism (Ross 1989). This, in turn, sparked a national controversy that included discussion in the New York Times (Burns 1954). Due to the growing prevalence of ‘switch-side debating’, a procedure that required teams to debate both sides of the resolution in consecutive debate rounds at intercollegiate debate tournaments, the controversy manifested itself as an ethical concern about the relationship between public speaking and the moral attributes of good citizenship. At the heart of the ‘debate about debate’ (Ehninger 1958) was the idea of conviction and how it should guide the moral economy of liberal citizenship. But why dredge up this event from the archive of communication education? First, since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a vigorous trade in debate as a tool for democratic education, often with the hope of inculcating students with the norms necessary for deliberative democracy. For example, since 1994, the International Debate Education Association ‘has introduced debate to secondary schools and universities throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Central Asia and Haiti and continues to grow throughout the world’ ( 2004). The promotion and circulation of debate as a technique of democratic decision-making suggests a need to explore the history of its ethical problematization. As a cultural technology, the value of debate rests on its claim to cultivate the ethical attributes required for democratic citizenship. Therefore, those challenges to debate’s civic function require special consideration in order to assess the role of communication in the selffashioning of liberal citizens.1 In Foucauldian fashion, we are interested in the ethical problematization of debating both sides so that we might learn how this pedagogical technique organizes forms of democratic subjectification available in the present (Foucault 2001).The second reason to write about the debating both sides controversy is because it highlights how communication becomes an object, instrument and field of cultural governance. The emphasis on the linguistic dimension of communication tends to privilege a methodological and political commitment to read the circulation of power as an ideological phenomenon mediated by the ?process of generating and controlling the meaning of contested values, identities, and symbols (Nelson & Gaonkar 1998, Rosteck 1999). As an alternative to this vision of a ‘communicational cultural studies’ (Grossberg 1997) this paper highlights the ‘technical dimension’ of speech, that is, itscirculation as an object and instrument for regulating the conduct of citizensubjects. 2 Therefore, we approach the debating both sides controversy in terms of what Michel Foucault (2001) calls a ‘history of thought’ #/ a ‘history of how people become anxious about this or that’ (p. 74). Moreover, to write a history of debate as a cultural technology reveals how power works productively by augmenting the human capacity for speech/communication. For us, an under-appreciated aspect of the productive power of cultural governance resides in the generation of subjects who come to understand themselves as speaking subjects willing to regulate and transform their communicative behaviours for the purpose of improving their political, economic, cultural and affective relationships.This paper argues that the strong liberal defence of debating both sides separates speech from conviction. Debating both sides does so by de-coupling the sincerity principle from the arguments presented by a debater. In place of the assumption that a debater believes in what he or she argues, debating both sides grooms one to appreciate the process of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. We argue the debating both sides controversy articulates debate to Cold War liberal discourses of ‘American exceptionalism’ by folding the norm of free and full expression onto the soul of the debater. In turn, a debater willing to debate both sides becomes a representative of the free world. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how debating both sides as a technique of moral development works alongside specific aesthetic modes of class subjectivity increasingly associated with the efforts of the knowledge class to legitimize the process of judgment. Debating both sides reveals how the globalization of liberalism is less about a set of universal norms and more about the circulation and uptake of cultural technologies. In the first part of this essay, we will offer a thick description of how the relationship between speech and conviction led to the ethical problematization of debating both sides. In the second part of the essay, we contextualize this history through an encounter with Cold War liberalism and the importance of debating both sides as a technology capable of generating a commitment to free speech. The third section of the paper will describe how debate re-invents itself as a game of freedom that instils the ethical attributes of deliberative democracy by re-coding debating both sides as necessary to the moral development of students.4 Debate and the problem of conviction In the United States, the 1920s and 1930s saw a veritable explosion in the popularity of intercollegiate debate. To accommodate the growing numbers of students wishing to debate and the rising costs of hosting and travelling to debates, the model of annual contests between rival schools gave way to triangular and quadrilateral debating leagues and eventually to the debate tournament. Intercollegiate debating underwent major transformations during this period, many of them brought on by tournament competition.5 Perhaps the most significant #/ and certainly the most controversial #/ transformation resulting from tournament debating was the practice of having participants debate both sides of the proposition. Debating both sides, its proponents argued, had the pragmatic benefit of allowing more teams to participate in more debates and to make scheduling tournaments much more efficient. There was, as well, the pedagogical benefit of rewarding those students with the most refined skills in marshalling evidence and formulating arguments in support of their respective positions. By the 1950s, debating both sides had become so prevalent that the West Point National Debate Tournament, the largest and most prestigious tournament of the day, mandated it as a condition of participation.6 The growing professionalization of tournament debating carried out in extra-curricular competitive spaces increasingly relied on debating both sides.1 0 2 CULTURAL STUDIES As a tournament progresses, a student moves from one side of the resolution to the next, a switch in sides, demarcated by the next ‘round’ of debate. The technique of debating both sides increases the efficiency of debate to train students in critical thinking and argumentative advocacy by modifying the side of the resolution the debater advocates. Since each debate is a situated rhetorical event with changing interlocutors and different individual judges, each debate round allows a unique pedagogical opportunity to learn and evaluate behaviour. The relationship between debate as a competitive activity amenable to pedagogical intervention and debating both sides as a specific technique of debate pedagogy and tournament administration, however, did not appear naturally, but was the effect of intellectual struggle. While the opposition to debating both sides probably reaches back to the challenges against the ancient practice of dissoi logoi , we want to turn our attention to the unique cultural history of debate during the Cold War. In the midst of Joseph McCarthy’s impending censure by the US Senate, the US Military Academy, the US Naval Academy and, subsequently, all of the teacher colleges in the state of Nebraska refused to affirm the resolution #/ ‘Resolved: The United States should diplomatically recognize the People’s Republic of China’. Yet, switch-side debating remained the national standard, and, by the fall of 1955, the military academies and the teacher colleges of Nebraska were debating in favour of the next resolution. Richard Murphy (1957), however,was not content to let the controversy pass without comment. Murphy launched a series of criticisms that would sustain the debate about debate for the next ten years. Murphy held that debating both sides of the question was unethical because it divorced conviction from advocacy and that it was a dangerous practice because it threatened the integrity of public debate by divorcing it from a genuine search for truth. Murphy’s case against the ethics of debating both sides rested on what he thought to be a simple and irrefutable rhetorical principle: A public utterance is a public commitment. In Murphy’s opinion, debate was best imagined as a species of public speaking akin to public advocacy on the affairs of the day. If debate is a form of public speaking, Murphy reasoned, and a public utterance entails a public commitment, then speakers have an ethical obligation to study the question, discuss it with others until they know their position, take a stand and then #/ and only then #/ engage in public advocacy in favour of their viewpoint. Murphy had no doubt that intercollegiate debate was a form of public advocacy and was, hence, rhetorical, although this point would be severely attacked by proponents of switch-side debating. Modern debating, Murphy claimed, ‘is geared to the public platform and to rhetorical, rather than dialectical principles’ (p. 7). Intercollegiate debate was rhetorical, not dialectical, because its propositions were specific and timely rather than speculative and universal. Debaters evidenced their claims by appeals to authority and opinion rather than formal logic, and debaters appealed to an audience, even if that audience was a single person sitting in the back of a room at a relatively isolated debate tournament. As such, debate as a species of public argument should be held to the ethics of the platform. We would surely hold in contempt any public actor who spoke with equal force, and without genuine conviction, for both sides of a public policy question. Why, asked Murphy, would we exempt students from the same ethical obligation? Murphy’s master ethic #/ that a public utterance entails a public commitment #/ rested on a classical rhetorical theory that refuses the modern distinctions between cognitive claims of truth (referring to the objective world), normative claims of right (referring to the intersubjective world), and expressive claims of sincerity (referring to the subjective state of the speaker), although this distinction, and Murphy’s refusal to make it, would surface as a major point of contention in the 1960s for the proponents of debating both sides.7 Murphy is avoiding the idea that the words spoken by a debater can be divorced from what the speaker actually believes to be true, right, or good (expressive claims of sincerity). For Murphy, to stand and publicly proclaim that one affirmed the resolution entailed both a claim that the policy being advocated was indeed the best possible choice, given extant social conditions, and that one sincerely believed that her or his arguments were true and right. In other words, a judge should not make a distinction between the merits of the case presented and the sincerity of the advocates presenting it; rather, the reasons supporting a policy and the ethos of the speakers are mutually constitutive forms of proof. The interdependency of logos and ethos was not only a matter of rhetorical principle for Murphy but also a foundational premise of public reason in a democratic society. Although he never explicitly states why this is true, most likely because he assumed it to be self-evident, a charitable interpretation of Murphy’s position, certainly a more generous interpretation than his detractors were willing to give, would show that his axiom rests on the following argument: If public reason is to have any legitimate force, auditors must believe that advocates are arguing from conviction and not from greed, desire or naked self-interest. If auditors believe that advocates are insincere, they will not afford legitimacy to their claims and will opt to settle disputes through force or some seemingly neutral modus vivendi such as voting or arbitration. Hence, sincerity is a necessary element of public reason and, therefore, a necessary condition of critical deliberation in a democratic society. For Murphy, the assumption of sincerity is intimately articulated to the notion of ethical argumentation in a democratic political culture. If a speaker were to repudiate this assumption by advocating contradictory positions in a public forum, it would completely undermine her or his ethos and result in the loss of the means of identification with an audience. The real danger of undermining the assumption of sincerity was not that individual speakers would be rendered ineffective #/ although this certainly did make training students to debate both 1 0 4 CULTURAL STUDIES sides bad rhetorical pedagogy. The ultimate danger of switch-side debating was that it would engender a distrust of public advocates. The public would come to see the debaters who would come to occupy public offices as ‘public liars’ more interested in politics as vocation than as a calling. Debate would be seen as a game of power rather than the method of democracy. The nation’s leading debate coaches, taking Murphy’s condemnation as an accusation that they had failed in their ethical responsibility as educators, quickly and forcefully responded to his charges. They had four primary rejoinders to Murphy: that he had misunderstood the nature of tournament debate; that switch-side debating was a sound educational procedure; that intercollegiate debate should be held accountable to a different ethic than those of the platform; and that switch-side debating was necessary to the maintenance of intercollegiate debate. Proponents of switch-side debating, such as A. Craig Baird (1955), Nicholas Cripe (1957), and George Dell (1958) agreed that Murphy’s ethic applied ‘to argument in the pulpit, in the legislative halls, in the courtroom, and the marketplace’ (Cripe 1957, p. 209).. This ethic, that a public utterance entails a public commitment, should not, however, apply to the forms of advocacy performed in tournament debating. For the proponents of switch-side debating, there was a sharp distinction between school and public debate. School debate, in particular tournament debating, was not a species of public argument geared towards gaining the consent of an audience to the rightness of the speaker’s stand on a public issue, but, rather, a pedagogical tool designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills. Not only did tournament debating differ in purpose, but it also differed in method from public debate. Tournament debate was defined as a dialectical method of disputation, a method suitable for adjudication by an expert judge on technical criteria rather than by a public audience. Hence, the sincerity principle simply did not apply to intercollegiate debate. The description of debate as a dialectical method did not mean that the proponents of switch-side debating rejected the importance of conviction for public argument. They did, however, claim that sound conviction, as opposed to dogmatism, was a product of debate, not its prerequisite. Baird (1955), arguing that debate should be understood less as public advocacy and more as a dialectical method of inquiry, claimed that sound conviction was a product of a rigorous analysis of all aspects of a question and that this analysis was best conducted through a method which had students practice defending and rejecting the major arguments on both sides. Thus, debating both sides should be understood as an educational procedure designed to generate ‘sound’ convictions prior to public advocacy. Baird urged that the critics of switch-side debating should understand the practice as a pedagogical device and to judge it accordingly. ‘These student exercises’, he told debaters and their coaches, ‘are to be sharply distinguished from the later ‘practical life’ situations in which you are preachers, lawyers, business men and women, politicians and community LOST CONVICTIONS 1 0 5 leaders. Debate and discussion training is essentially training in reflective thinking, in the defence of different sides (‘role playing’ as some call it), and in the revelation of strength and weakness of each position’ (p. 6). It was Baird’s recognition that debating both sides was equivalent to role-playing that warranted re-thinking the fit between the speaker and the words spoken. Furthermore, if a debater did in fact appear to be shallow, insincere and prone to manipulate public opinion for her or his own ends, this was certainly not, argued Wayne Thompson (1944) and Nicholas Cripe, the fault of switch-side debating, but the ‘result of other causes #/ weakness in the character of the offender or a misunderstanding of the proper functioning of debate’ (Thompson 1944, p. 296). The proper way to deal with any ethical shortcomings in debaters, the proponents argued, was for the national forensics associations to develop a code of ethics that would stress the ethical responsibility of intercollegiate debaters (to present the best possible case according to facts as the debater understood them) and to forcefully condemn individual acts of malfeasance such as misconstruing evidence, falsifying sources, and misrepresenting their opponents’ positions. For Robert Newman (1963), the controversy over debating both sides was simple to resolve: as long as a good case could be made on each side of the resolution and individual debaters did not lie or cheat, there simply was no ethical dilemma and certainly no need for a disciplinary-based ethic to guide debate practice. Finally, debate coaches justified switch-side debate on the pragmatic grounds that it was a necessary component of tournament debating and that abandoning the practice would mean the end of intercollegiate debating. ‘In fact, if the proponents of ethical debate are correct’, Cripe warned, ‘and it is immoral for a team to debate both sides, then many schools would have to discontinue debate as we practice today’ (1957, p. 209). Baird’s defence of debating both sides #/ in which he defined it as an educational procedure designed to generate sound conviction #/ was the most formidable of the defences of switch-side debating. However, it was defeated,according to Murphy (1957), once educators understood that there were many ways of teaching students to see both sides of an issue. He or she could prepare briefs on both sides of the question, form roundtable discussions where students would play devil’s advocate to test the strength of each other’s positions, and even have informal practice rounds in a closed club setting where students debated both sides to test and strengthen their convictions. It was not the fact that students explored all sides of an issue that worried Murphy. Rather, Baird’s defence, and any defence that claimed debating both sides was ethical because it was a pedagogical tool, ignored ‘a basic rhetorical principle that the speaker should read and discuss, and inquire, and test his [sic ]position before he [sic ] takes the platform to present it’ (Murphy 1957, p. 5).Turn: we cannot be educated by just anybody speaking on an issue; real education occurs when those who really care about an issue speak to us about it in earnest.Ronald Walter Green and Darrin Hicks in 5 (Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 100-126, “Lost Convictions: Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens”, January 2005)Because debate propositions are deliberately worded so good arguments can be made on both sides, there should never be a shortage of speakers on both sides of the issue, speakers who really believe in what they were arguing. The real benefit of hearing both sides of an issue, Murphy claimed, is that it encourages individuals to open their minds to other perspectives and to modify their beliefs if so warranted. Yet, alternative views will not be taken seriously, unless we ‘hear them from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them’ (Murphy 1957, p. 4). Switch-side debating, Murphy argued, is not justified by the principles of free speech; rather, those principles support revoking the practice. For Day, in contrast, the re-coding of free speech as the ethical substance of debate, a substance that was internal to its procedures, allowed for an ethical re-description of debate as a deliberative technique. For instance, as Day argues, the ‘prime requisite which must be met if debate is to provide sound decisions is that it be thorough and complete, that all arguments and information relevant to a decision be known and understood’ (1966, p. 6). Day’s commitment to free speech is based on a radical reading of Mill: Freedom of expression entails more than lifting prior restraints on argumentation; it necessitates the construction of avenues of access for minority views within dominant media outlets and, if necessary, the restructuring of deliberative forums so minority views will not be rejected outright because they challenge hegemonic methods of interpretation. ‘Free speech is the necessary prerequisite of full debate’, Day argues, because ‘it guarantees that full debate can take place’ (p. 6). Yet, freedom of speech does 1 1 0 CULTURAL STUDIES not guarantee that full debate will take place. It is in this gap between opportunity and outcome that Day discovers the ethical demand for debating both sides: ‘A commitment to debate as the method of democratic decisionmaking demands an overriding ethical responsibility to promote the full confrontation of opposing opinions, arguments, and information relevant to decision. Without the confrontation of opposing ideas debate does not exist, and to the extent that that confrontation is incomplete so is debate incomplete’ (p. 6). To promote debate as a democratic mode of decision-making required full and free expression so as to maximize the confrontation of opposing ideas. Debating both sides emerged as a specific pedagogical technique to inculcate and encourage students to embrace the norm of full and free expression. Two practical obligations are entailed in the acceptance of this ethic: First, the forums for public deliberation must be fully inclusive; encouragement and incentive must be provided to those who hold unpopular views to express themselves. Second, and more important, ‘all must recognize and accept personal responsibility to present, when necessary, as forcefully as possible, opinions and arguments with which they may personally disagree’ (p. 7). Few are likely to challenge the first entailment, but the second provided Day with a radical redefinition of the ethics of conviction. Day argues that persuasively presenting a position that contradicts one’s personal conviction is the ‘highest ethical act in democratic debate’ (p. 7). Moreover, to argue forcefully for a position one abhors is the hallmark of democratic citizenship. To set aside one’s convictions and present the argument for the other side demonstrates that the citizen has forsaken her or his personal interests and particular vision of the good for the benefit of the commonweal. That is, the citizen recognizes the moral priority of democratic debate when she or he agrees to be bound by its results regardless of personal conviction. Debating both sides, then, is necessitated by the ethical obligations intrinsic to the technology of democratic debate. Both of Murphy’s charges that debating both sides is unethical #/ that requiring students to debate both sides is a form of blackmail and that the separation of speech and conviction courts sophistry #/ are answered by this position. On the one hand, if debating both sides of a question is an ethical duty, requiring students to do so as a condition of participation is not an immoral imposition but rather an ethical and pedagogical duty. On the other hand, given the political dangers that privileging personal conviction over democratic process courts, divorcing speech from conviction is a prerequisite to democratic legitimacy. In so doing, one’s convictions should be reassigned so as to promote a commitment to debate as the fundamental process of a democratic form of public deliberation. The practice of debating both sides does not warrant support simply because it is ethical; it does so because it is an effective pedagogical technique for inculcating the communicative ethics necessary for democratic citizenship. According to Day, ‘Debating both sides teaches students to discover, analyze, LOST CONVICTIONS 1 1 1 and test all the arguments, opinions, and evidence relevant to a decision. In addition, it provides an opportunity for students to substantiate for themselves the assumption that ‘‘truthful’’ positions may be taken on both sides of controversial questions’ (1966, p. 13). Affirmative Kritiks GoodAffirmation is necessary for criticismJohnson 97 (James, Rochester, Political Theory 25(4), JSTOR)This is an essay of criticism in the sense Foucault seems to intend. It targets the postmodern consensus among political theorists. This consensus consists of the view, common to both its admirers and detractors, that postmodern political thought is corrosively skeptical, that it relentlessly uncouples its critical pretensions from any constructive normative commitment. Jacques Derrida once made a comment which, by its very incongruity, highlights the postmodern consensus. He confessed to an interviewer: "Indeed, I cannot conceive of a radical critique which would not be ultimately motivated by some sort of affirmation, acknowledged or not."'This remark should seem highly discordant to anyone who has witnessed the persistent jousting between critics and defenders of postmodernism.2 The postmodern consensus takes as primitive precisely what Derrida, surprisingly but rightly in my estimation, deems inconceivable. Affirmation is critical to value to lifeHeiner 3 (Brady, U of Padua, differences: a Jnl of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15.1, Muse)Points of resistance exist virtually everywhere in the network of power established by contemporary social institutions. 30 The affective intensities of the multitude are what simultaneously fuel social production and disrupt the institutional mechanisms of control. Potentia, or the art of existence, gives rise to a notion of resistance that is radically distinguished from the dialectic. Where the dialectic valorizes the sad passions, potentia presents itself as a joyful practice; where the dialectic posits affirmation as the theoretical and practical product of the suffering of the negative, potentia presents affirmation as that which destroys the will to nothingness that fuels the negative dialectic; and whereas the dialectic seeks transformation through the negation of the negation, potentia constitutes transformation as the affirmation of affirmation. “Do not think,” Foucault affirms, “that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force” (preface to Deleuze and Guattari xiii–xiv). It is toward the self-productive potentiality of the multitude that Foucault’s later work moves—toward a creative militancy that enacts resistance as counterpower and rebellion as a praxis of joy.Affirmation is key to solution – negative criticism is fruitlessJohnson 97 (James, Rochester, Political Theory 25(4), JSTOR)In his analysis of modern power, Foucault focuses on what he terms the "micro-physics of power" and, in particular, on the "effects of domination" that it induces. He claims that this power operates through "techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation" which, considered as a whole, constitute a "policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipu- lation of its elements."'8 Nancy Fraser suggests that this sort of language, this talk of domination, coercion, exploitation, and so on, may betray an unstated affirmative stance. She finally concedes, however, that Foucault's writings afford "no clues . . . as to what his alternative norms might be." And she concludes that his attempt to sustain a critical stance on the basis of a totalizing analysis of power is "normatively confused."19 This judgment is too quick. In the next section, I show that Foucault's analytics of power-not just his language, but the conceptual structure of his analysis-in fact harbors a crucial, if understated, affirmative dimension. In this section, I first want to explore two themes in his work that potentially afford escape from the postmodern consensus. Political theorists commonly present the promise of a dialogical ethics and the notion of resistance to suggest how Foucault indeed does strike, however tentatively, an affirmative stance. On this view, dialogical ethics and resistance each occupy and extend the sort of "space for freedom" that could facilitate a "possible transformation" of extant practices and institutions. I argue that both themes comport poorly with conventional understandings of Foucault's writings on power precisely insofar as they exhibit the crucial value he places on relations of communication. Consequently, both the promise of a dialogi- cal ethics and the concept of resistance prompt us to reexamine those conventional understandings. Affirmative Kritiks GoodOnly affirmation empowers resistanceJohnson 97 (James, Rochester, Political Theory 25(4), JSTOR)Resistance trades upon a number of affirmative possibilities. Foucault locates these possibilities within a quite specific understanding of the rela- tions that obtain between intellectuals and political movements.27 As he explains: If one wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one should turn, but towards the possibility of a newform of right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time liberated from the principle of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980, 108; emphasis added) The essential political problem for the intellectual is ... that of ascertaining the possibil- ity of constituting a new politics of truth. (Foucault 1980, 133; emphasis added) Political analysis and criticism have in large measure still to be invented-so too have the strategies which will make it possible to modify the relations of force, to co-ordinate them in such a way that such a modification is possible and can be inscribed in reality. That is to say, the problem is ... to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization. (Foucault 1980, 190; emphasis added) Affirmation is criticalHeiner 3 (Brady, U of Padua, differences: a Jnl of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15.1, Muse)Here we can see an “explosion” and “return of masks” similar to what Foucault referred to above when invoking Nietzsche. The aggression that drives the negation-beyond-negation of his early work resolutely differs from the inherent sadness of the dialectic; the negativity of total critique manifests itself as affirmation. “[A]ggression,” Deleuze affirms, “is the negative, but the negative as the conclusion of positive premises, the negative as the product of activity, the negative as the consequence of the power of affirming” (Nietzsche 121). Like Nietzsche, Foucault flees from the labor of opposition and the suffering of the negative in order to enact [End Page 32] “the warlike play of difference, affirmation and the joy of destruction” (191). For the negative dialectic lacks a will that goes beyond it; it has no power of its own but remains a mere reaction to (a mere representation of) power. 11 Deleuze describes this “ontological emptiness” of negativity in the context of a discussion of Nietzsche: Nietzsche’s enemy [. . .] is the dialectic which confuses affirmation with the truthfulness of truth or the positivity of the real; and this truthfulness, this positivity, are primarily manufactured by the dialectic itself with the products of the negative. The being of Hegelian logic is merely “thought” being, pure and empty, which affirms itself by passing into its own opposite. But this being was never different from its opposite, it never had to pass into what it already was. Hegelian being is pure and simple nothingness; and the becoming that this being forms with nothingness, that is to say with itself, is a perfectly nihilistic becoming; and affirmation passes through negation here because it is merely the affirmation of the negative and its products. (183) Therefore, Deleuze continues, “An activity which does not raise itself to the powers of affirming, an activity which trusts only in the labor of the negative is destined to failure; in its very principle it turns into its opposite” (196). Separated from the power of affirmation—the creative motor of being—the dialectic can do nothing but reactively turn against itself. “Separated from what it can do,” Deleuze argues, “active force does not evaporate. Turning back against itself it produces pain” (128). The aim of total critique, as distinguished from the dialectic, is a different way of feeling—another sensibility. The aim of total critique is the constitution of a joyful practice. 12 In all of Foucault’s work, he actively dismantles the reactive conception of power as negativity—as that which says “no.” 13 He reaffirms Nietzsche’s discovery that the dialectic only produces a phantom of affirmation. 14 Whether in the form of an overcome opposition or a resolved contradiction, the image of positivity yielded by the dialectic is a radically false one (196). 15 Through the nondialectical negation enacted in the limit-experience, Foucault affirms that positivity is not “a theoretical and practical product of negation itself,” 16 but rather that which destroys the will to nothingness that fuels the dialectic. Positivity, first taking form in the becoming-active “joy of annihilation,” the “affirmation of annihilation and destruction,” clears the terrain for a truly active, which is to say, a joyful [End Page 33] practice of constitution (Nietzsche 3). For only an unrestrained aggression against the established “essence”—the death of the adversary—can procure the opportunity for a positive creation. Only by the light of this conflagrant destruction is it possible to discern the potentialities of contemporary thought and practice. **State-Centricity BadStatism Bad – AgencyAn analysis of policymaking that proceeds from the state cannot provide the resources to articulate a capacity for human agency. Bleiker 2k (Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)While opening up the study of global politics to a variety of new domains, most efforts to rethink the international have not gone as far as they could have, or, indeed, should have gone. Here too, questions of conceptualisation and representation are of crucial importance. Campbell stresses that for all their efforts to understand a wide range of global phenomena, most approaches to international theory have displayed a remarkably persistent compulsion to anchor an under standing of the complexities of global life in a 'something-national' formulation — whether it is 'international', 'multinational', or 'transna tional'.14Representative for such forms of conceptualising is Mark Zacher's seemingly sensible claim that 'non-state actors such as multi national corporations and banks may increase in importance, but there are few signs that they are edging states from centre stage'.15 Debates about the role of human agency display similar state-centric tendencies. There are disagreements on various fronts, but virtually all discussions on agency in international theory remain focused on conceptualising state behaviour. Alexander Wendt, who has been instrumental in bringing issues of agency to the study of international relations, has been equally influential in directing ensuing discussions on a state-centric path. He explicitly and repeatedly acknowledges 'a commitment to states as units of analysis' and constructs much of his theoretical work around an examination of states and the constraints within which they operate.16 Here too, the logic behind adapting a state-centric form of representation rests on the assumption that 'as long as states are the dominant actors in international politics, it is appropriate to focus on the identity and agency of the state rather than, for example, a transnational social movement'.17 Questions of agency in international theory should not and cannot be reduced to analyses of state behaviour. This book demonstrates how an instance of transversal dissent may influence global politics at least as much as, say, a diplomatic treatise or a foreign policy decision. At a time when processes of globalisation are unfolding and national boundaries are becoming increasingly porous, states can no longer be viewed as the only consequential actors in world affairs. Various scholars have thus begun to question the prevalent spatial modes of representation and the artificial separation of levels of analysis that issues from them. They suggest, as mentioned above, that global life is better understood as a series of transversal struggles that increasingly challenge what Richard Ashley called 'the paradigm of sovereign man.' Transversal struggles, Ashley emphasises, are not limited to established spheres of sovereignty. They are neither domestic nor international. They know no final boundaries between inside and out side.18 And they have come to be increasingly recognised as central aspects of global politics. James Rosenau is among several scholars who now acknowledge that it is along the shifting frontiers of trans versal struggles, 'and not through the nation state system that people sort and play out the many contradictions at work in the global scene'.19We can claim our agency only by rejecting the state-centric view of politics.Bleiker 2k (Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)Questions of agency have been discussed extensively in international theory, mostly in the context of the so-called structure—agency debate. Although strongly wedded to a state-centric view, this debate nevertheless evokes a number of important conceptual issues that are relevant as well to an understanding of transversal dynamics. The roots of the structure—agency debate can be traced back to a feeling of discontent about how traditional approaches to international theory have dealt with issues of agency. Sketched in an overly broad manner, the point of departure looked as follows: At one end of the spectrum were neorealists, who explain state identity and behaviour through a series of structural restraints that are said to emanate from the anarchical nature of the international system. At the other end we find neoliberals, who accept the existence of anarchy but seek to understand the behaviour of states and other international actors in terms of their individual attributes and their ability to engage in cooperative bargaining. If pushed to their logical end-point, the two positions amount, respectively, to a structural determinism and an equally farfetched belief in the autonomy of rational actors. 24 The structure—agency debate is located somewhere between these two poles. Neither structure nor agency receive analytical priority. Instead, the idea is to understand the interdependent and mutually constitutive relationship between them. The discussions that have evolved in the wake of this assumption are highly complex and cannot possibly be summarised here. 25 Some of the key premises, though, can be recognised by observing how the work of Anthony Giddens has shaped the structure—agency debate in international relations. Giddens speaks of the 'duality of structure,' of structural properties that are constraining as well as enabling. They are both 'the medium and outcome of the contingently accomplished activities of situated actors'. 26 Expressed in other words, neither agents nor structures have the final word. Human actions are always embedded in and constrained by the structural context within which they form and evolve. But structures are not immutable either. A human being, Giddens stresses, will 'know a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member'. 27 The actions that emerge from this awareness then shape the processes through which social systems are structurally maintained and reproduced.Statism Bad – ViolenceState-centricity leads to the violent exclusion of other viewpoints Bleiker 2k (Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)To expand the scope of international theory and to bring transversal struggles into focus is not to declare the state obsolete. States remain central actors in international politics and they have to be recognised and theorised as such. In fact, my analysis will examine various ways in which states and the boundaries between them have mediated the formation, functioning and impact of dissent. However, my reading of dissent and agency makes the state neither its main focus nor its starting point. There are compelling reasons for such a strategy, and they go beyond a mere recognition that a state-centric approach to international theory engenders a form of representation that privileges the authority of the state and thus precludes an adequate understanding of the radical transformations that are currently unfolding in global life. Michael Shapiro is among an increasing number of theorists who convincingly portray the state not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a set of 'stories' — of which the state-centric approach to international theory is a perfect example. It is part of a legitimisation process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an inside and an outside, between a people and its others. Shapiro stresses that such state-stories also exclude, for they seek 'to repress or delegitimise other stories and the practices of identity and space they reflect.' And it is these processes of exclusion that impose a certain political order and provide the state with a legitimate rationale for violent encounters.22Statism Bad – EducationState-centricity leads to a monopoly on education that silences other viewpointsBiswas 7 (Shampa, Professor of Politics at Whitman College, December, “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 125-126)In making a case for the exilic orientation, it is the powerful hold of the nation-state upon intellectual thinking that Said most bemoans. 31 The nation-state of course has a particular pride of place in the study of global politics. The state-centricity of International Relations has not just circumscribed the ability of scholars to understand a vast ensemble of globally oriented movements, exchanges and practices not reducible to the state, but also inhibited a critical intellectual orientation to the world outside the national borders within which scholarship is produced. Said acknowledges the fact that all intellectual work occurs in a (national) context which imposes upon one’s intellect certain linguistic boundaries, particular (nationally framed) issues and, most invidiously, certain domestic political constraints and pressures, but he cautions against the dangers of such restrictions upon the intellectual imagination. 32 Comparing the development of IR in two different national contexts – the French and the German ones – Gerard Holden has argued that different intellectual influences, different historical resonances of different issues, different domestic exigencies shape the discipline in different contexts. 33 While this is to be expected to an extent, there is good reason to be cautious about how scholarly sympathies are expressed and circumscribed when the reach of one’s work (issues covered, people affected) so obviously extends beyond the national context. For scholars of the global, the (often unconscious) hold of the nation-state can be especially pernicious in the ways that it limits the scope and range of the intellectual imagination. Said argues that the hold of the nation is such that even intellectuals progressive on domestic issues become collaborators of empire when it comes to state actions abroad. 34 Specifically, he critiques nationalistically based systems of education and the tendency in much of political commentary to frame analysis in terms of ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ - particularly evident in coverage of the war on terrorism - which automatically sets up a series of (often hostile) oppositions to ‘others’. He points in this context to the rather common intellectual tendency to be alert to the abuses of others while remaining blind to those of one’s own. 35Statism Bad - IdentityIt is bad to focus on the state in IR- the state creates boundaries within its self and excludes and represses certain aspects in order to reflect a certain identityBleiker in 2000 (Roland, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics)To expand the scope of international theory and to bring transversal struggles into focus is not to declare the state obsolete. States remain central actors in international politics and they have to be recognised and theorised as such. In fact, my analysis will examine various ways in which states and the boundaries between them have mediated the formation, functioning and impact of dissent. However, my reading of dissent and agency makes the state neither its main focus nor its starting point. There are compelling reasons for such a strategy, and they go beyond a mere recognition that a state-centric approach to international theory engenders a form of representation that privileges the authority of the state and thus precludes an adequate understanding of the radical transformations that are currently unfolding in global life. Michael Shapiro is among an increasing number of theorists who convincingly portray the state not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a set of 'stories' — of which the state-centric approach to international theory is a perfect example. It is part of a legitimisation process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an inside and an outside, between a people and its others. Shapiro stresses that such state-stories also exclude, for they seek 'to repress or delegitimise other stories and the practices of identity and space they reflect.' And it is these processes of exclusion that impose a certain political order and provide the state with a legitimate rationale for violent encounters. The state sustains collective identity through an increasing process of oppressive power struggles, culminating in violenceConnoly in 2k2 (William, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science @ Johns Hopkins University, Identity/Difference, expanded edition) In several domains, the state no longer emerges as a consummate agent of efficacy, even though it expands as a pivotal agent of power.4 A crack in the very unity of "power" has opened up. We have entered a world in which state power is simultaneously magnified and increasingly disconnected from the ends that justify its magni- fication. As obstacles to its efficacy multiply, the state increasingly sustains collective identity through theatrical displays of punish- ment and revenge against those elements that threaten to signify its inefficacy. It launches dramatized crusades against the internal other (low-level criminals, drug users, disloyalists, racial minor- ities, and the underclass), the external other (foreign enemies and terrorists), and the interior other (those strains of abnormality, subversion, and perversity that may reside within anyone). The state becomes, first, the screen upon which much of the resentment against the adverse effects of the civilization of produc- tivity and private affluence is projected; second, the vehicle through which rhetorical reassurances about the glory and durability of that civilization are transmitted back to the populace; and third, the instrument of campaigns against those elements most disturbing to the collective identity. In the first instance, the welfare apparatus of the state is singled out for criticism and reformation. In the second, the presidency is organized into a medium of rhetorical diversion and reassurance. In the third, the state disciplinary-police-punitive apparatus is marshaled to constitute and stigmatize constituencies whose terms of existence might otherwise provide signs of defeat, injury, and sacrifice engendered by the civilization of productivity itself. <p206> **Answers ToAT: Predictability Unpredictability is inevitable – embracing this fact, however, allows us to live meaningful lives. Bleiker and Leet 6 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, and Martin, Senior Research Officer with the Brisbane Institute, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), p. 729-730)JMDramatic, sublime events can uproot entrenched habits, but so can a more mundane cultivation of wonder and curiosity. Friedrich Nietzsche pursued such a line of enquiry when reflecting upon what he called the ‘ after effects of knowledge’. He considered how alternative ways of life open up through a simple awareness of the fallibility of knowledge. We endure a series of non-dramatic learning experiences as we emerge from the illusions of childhood. We are confronted with being uprooted from the safety of the house. At first, a plunge into despair is likely, as one realises the contingent nature of the foundations on which we stand and the walls behind which we hide and shiver in fear: All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honour) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it.43 The sense of meaninglessness, the anger at this situation, represents a reaction against the habits of one’s upbringing and culture. One no longer feels certain, one no longer feels in control. The sublime disruption of convention gives rise to the animosity of loss. The resentment may last a whole lifetime. Nietzsche insists, however, that an alternative reaction is possible. A completely different ‘after effect of knowledge’ can emerge over time if we are prepared to free ourselves from the standards we continue to apply, even if we do no longer believe in them. To be sure, the: old motives of intense desire would still be strong at first, due to old, inherited habit, but they would gradually grow weaker under the influence of cleansing knowledge. Finally one would live among men and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproaches, overzealousness, delighting in many things as in a spectacle that one formerly had only to fear.44 The elements of fear and defensiveness are displaced by delight if and when we become aware of our own role in constructing the scene around us. The ‘cleansing knowledge’ of which Nietzsche speaks refers to exposing the entrenched habits of representation of which we were ignorant. We realise, for example, that nature and culture are continuous rather than radically distinct. We may have expected culture to be chosen by us, to satisfy our needs, to be consistent and harmonious, in contrast to the strife, accident and instinct of nature. But just as we can neither predict a thunderstorm striking nor prevent it, so we are unable ever to eliminate the chance of a terrorist striking in our midst. We can better reconcile ourselves to the unpredictability and ‘irrationality’ of politics and culture by overcoming our childhood and idealistic illusions. The cultivation of the subliminal, then, can dilute our obsession with control by questioning the assumptions about nature and culture in which this obsession is embedded. Without this work of cultivation, we are far more vulnerable once hit by the after effects of knowledge. We find ourselves in a place we never expected to be, overwhelmed by unexamined habits of fear and loathing. But if, as Nietzsche suggests, we experiment with the subliminal disruptions encountered in the process of ‘growing up’, we may become better prepared. We may follow Bachelard’s lead and recognise that the house not only offers us a space to withdraw from the world when in fear, but also a shelter in which to daydream, to let our minds wander and explore subliminal possibilities. That, Bachelard believes, is indeed the chief benefit of the house: ‘it protects the dreamer’ .45 Their predictability claims pervert education – Uncertainty encourages interrogation, not the other way aroundMcDonough 93 (Kevin, U-Ill-Educ, )The fact that individuals (and their aims) are necessarily embedded in power relations also structures the educational task in an interesting way. The Foucauldian educational task becomes not the common sense one of making the uncertain certain, the unfamiliar familiar.8 That is the logic of the examination, which assumes prior fixed knowledge which individuals must acquire. Rather, Foucault would regard education as primarily a matter of making the certain uncertain, the familiar unfamiliar, the given contingent. If nothing else, this educational ideal embodies more than a little of the spirit of Deweyan inquiry.AT: LimitsA focus on limits engenders violent practices by stopping productive discussions. Bleiker and Leet 6 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, and Martin, Senior Research Officer with the Brisbane Institute, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), p. 733-734)JMA subliminal orientation is attentive to what is bubbling along under the surface. It is mindful of how conscious attempts to understand conceal more than they reveal, and purposeful efforts of progressive change may engender more violence than they erase. For these reasons, Connolly emphasises that ‘ethical artistry’ has an element of na?veté and innocence. One is not quite sure what one is doing. Such na?veté need not lead us back to the idealism of the romantic period. ‘One should not be na?ve about na?veté’, Simon Critchley would say.56 Rather, the challenge of change is an experiment. It is not locked up in a predetermined conception of where one is going. It involves tentatively exploring the limits of one’s being in the world, to see if different interpretations are possible, how those interpretations might impact upon the affects below the level of conscious thought, and vice versa. This approach entails drawing upon multiple levels of thinking and being, searching for changes in sensibilities that could give more weight to minor feelings or to arguments that were previously ignored.57 Wonder needs to be at the heart of such experiments, in contrast to the resentment of an intellect angry with its own limitations. The ingre d i e n t of wonder is necessary to disrupt and suspend the normal pre s s u res of returning to conscious habit and control. This exploration beyond the conscious implies the need for an ethos of theorising and acting that is quite diff e rent from the mode directed towards the cognitive justification of ideas and concepts. Stephen White talks about ‘circ u i t s of reflection, affect and arg umentation’.58 Ideas and principles provide an orientation to practice, the implications of that practice feed back into our affective outlook, and processes of argumentation introduce other ideas and affects. The shift, here, is from the ‘vertical’ search for foundations in ‘skyhooks’ above or ‘foundations’ below, to a ‘horizontal’ movement into the unknown. We must incorporate alternative perspectives in order to stop violence. Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(3), p. 519)JMHope for a better world will, indeed, remain slim if we put all our efforts into searching for a mimetic understanding of the international. Issues of global war and Third World poverty are far too serious and urgent to be left to only one form of inquiry, especially if this mode of thought suppresses important faculties and fails to understand and engage the crucial problem of representation. We need to employ the full register of human perception and intelligence to understand the phenomena of world politics and to address the dilemmas that emanate from them. One of the key challenges, thus, consists of legitimising a greater variety of approaches and insights to world politics. Aesthetics is an important and necessary addition to our interpretative repertoire. It helps us understand why the emergence, meaning and significance of a political event can be appreciated only once we scrutinise the representational practices that have constituted the very nature of this event. Limits exclude and are an innately subjective process -- Objectifying rules obliterates agency Bleiker 3 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Contemporary Political Theory, 2, p. 39-40)JMApproaching the political - and by extension dilemmas of agency requires tolerance towards various forms of insight and levels of analysis, even if they contradict each other’s internal logic. Such differences often only appear as contradictions because we still strive for a universal standard of reference that is supposed to subsume all the various aspects of life under a single totalizing standpoint (Adorno, 1992, 17–18). Every process of revealing is at the same time a process of concealing. Even the most convincing position cannot provide a form of insight that does not at the same time conceal other perspectives. Revealing always occurs within a frame. Framing is a way of ordering, and ordering banishes all other forms of revealing. This is, grossly simplified, a position that resonates throughout much of Heidegger’s work (1954, 35). Taking this argument to heart is to recognize that one cannot rely on one form of revealing alone. An adequate understanding of human agency can be reached only by moving back and forth between various insights. The point, then, is not to end up with a grand synthesis, but to make most out of each specific form of revealing (for an exploration of this theme, via an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, see Deleuze, 1994). AT: Rules GoodRules undermines interrogationMcDonough 93 (Kevin, U-Ill-Educ, )The “for better or for worse” is important here since discipline for Foucault, by producing individuals, does not merely hinder resistance, but also enables it (“once one knows where to look for it,” as Covaleskie says). Similarly, educators should consider the possibility that Foucault’s insight might enable, rather than hinder, a deeper understanding of what Dewey meant by discipline as intelligent inquiry. For Foucault, once one recognizes that one’s aims are the product of power relations, they becomes “contingent and arbitrary.” What once seemed inevitable and natural, now seems open to inquiry and investigation. Thus, the teacher may come to realize that she has unconsciously been shaping her classroom behavior to conform to the imperatives of an assessment driven educational system. Even after recognizing this, she may continue to regard her behavior as in many respects beyond her control. For example, she may find herself unable simply to refuse to prepare her students for the test, because they’ll fail and she might lose her job. But the fact that she now recognizes her behavior as an effect of power, and thus no longer legitimate, may also open up for her a new “field of action” for resistance.Regulation of communication exemplifies power over, much like prison – academics keyDeacon 6 (Roger, Aukland U.-NZ, )Over a comparatively short period of time, modern schooling has brought countless individuals and diverse populations to accept and tolerate steadily increasing degrees of subjection. Aside from the more historical and methodological aspects discussed in the preceding two sections, Foucault's work also offers nuanced understandings of the manifestations, functioning and effects of contemporary educational institutions and practices. Such institutions, where relations of power and knowledge come to support and link up with each other in more or less constant ways, form what Foucault called 'blocks of capacity–communication–power'. These 'regulated and concerted systems' fuse together the human capacity to manipulate words, things and people, adjusting abilities and inculcating behaviour via 'regulated communications' and 'power processes', and in the process structuring how teaching and learning take place. What distinguishes educational institutions from prisons, armies, and hospitals is that the former emphasize 'communication' above 'capacity' and 'power' (Foucault, 1982:218-219).184 Deacon Universities, like schools, are multifaceted amalgamations of economic, political, judicial and epistemological relations of power, which still reflect the exclusionary and inclusionary binaries of their origins: university campuses are relatively artificial enclaves where students are expected to absorb socially desirable modes of behaviour and forms of knowledge before being recuperated into society. Foucault predicted that universities will become increasingly important politically, because they multiply and reinforce the power-effects of an expanding stratum of intellectuals and, not least, as a result of new global demands for active, multi-skilled and self-regulated citizens. Only our method provides students with the means to criticize education itself, fundamentally expanding the scope of our turnsMourard 1 (Roger, Wastenaw CC-College of educ, )Critical scholarship in education is largely confined to critique about education as a discrete social and cultural institution. The shortcoming is that such work does not really step “outside” of the histories and practices of schooling. This inferiority unjustifiably limits the possibilities for critical scholarship in several ways. First, it does not encourage borrowing ideas from other fields and disciplines that could provide a new vantage point for critique. Second, it places conceptual barriers on critical reflection about education. These boundaries consist of the basic components of schooling that place a context around students, such as curricula, teachers, classrooms, methods, grade levels, and administrators. AT: EducationOrienting ourselves to understanding experts is a bad educational lens – We can more effectively combat covert control through thinking outside the boxBiswas 7 Professor of Politics at Whitman College, December, “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 124What Said offers in the place of professionalism is a spirit of ‘amateurism’ – ‘the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession’, an amateur intellectual being one ‘who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies’. ‘(T)he intellectual’s spirit as an amateur’, Said argues, ‘can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.’ 24 This requires not just a stubborn intellectual independence, but also shedding habits, jargons, tones that have inhibited IR scholars from conversing with thinkers and intellectuals outside the discipline, colleagues in history, anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, sociology as well as in non-academic venues, who raise the question of the global in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Arguing that the intellectual’s role is a ‘non-specialist’ one, 25 Said bemoans the disappearance of the ‘general secular intellectual’ – ‘figures of learning and authority, whose general scope over many fields gave them more than professional competence, that is, a critical intellectual style’. 26 Discarding the professional strait- jacket of expertise-oriented IR to venture into intellectual terrains that raise questions of global power and cultural negotiations in a myriad of intersecting and cross-cutting ways will yield richer and fuller conceptions of the ‘politics’ of global politics. Needless to say, inter- and cross- disciplinarity will also yield richer and fuller conceptions of the ‘global’ of global politics. It is to that that I turn next.AT: You Lead To No LimitsTheir 'no limits' args are overstated -- openness is a leap of faith guided by ethics which prevents the abuse of conversational encounters Bleiker and Leet 6 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, and Martin, Senior Research Officer with the Brisbane Institute, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), p. 737)JMThe most typical objection to such an open-ended approach to ethics is, of course, the accusation that it inevitably leads into a relativist void from whence it becomes impossible to separate good and evil: that only a categorical approach to ethics can save us in a time of moral need. But our most difficult ethical decisions must usually be taken precisely at a time when subliminal events have shaken the very foundations of our principles, at moments when the boundaries between good and evil need to be revisited and redrawn. Falling back into old intellectual habits, whether they are codified or not, will not give us any answers, at least not those we need to deal with the issues in an innovative, sensitive and fair way. Finding ethical solutions at such times of dearth requires a leap of faith into the unknown. S?re n K i e r k e g a a rd already knew that the results of such a leap can never be known, that the ensuing decisions are, by nature, terrible.63 No foundation can ever guarantee to save us from a fall. No pre - e s t a b l i s h e d principles can give us certainty that we are on the right path. Nothing, in short, can absolve us from the terrible burden of decision-making. But we are most likely to face the ensuing challenges successfully when equipped with an aesthetic and ethical sensibility that the conscious alone cannot provide. It is at such moments of need that the lessons learned from the sublime and the subliminal can become most useful – as long as we have discovered ways of embracing the sense of wonder and enchantment they engender. AT: Limits/Exclusion InevitableLanguage has an infinite number of constructions – there are no limitsWarsi no date (jilliani, linguistics author, jilaniwarsi.language.pdf)JFSLanguage provides opportunities to send the message that has never been sent before and to understand novel messages. It also suggests that number of sentences in language is limitless. Any speaker can construct a sentence that has never been constructed before. It is this feature of language that is referred to as productivity or creativity of language.Language has no limits – politics transcends to the personal level and becomes infiniteOkadigbo 2 (Chuba, former African Senate President, )JFSYes. Dialogue has no limits especially when the dialogue leads to a general, consensual agreement. The purpose of politics is the well-being of the masses; the common good is the object of politics. These calculations focus on the subject of power and politics. Where politics stops, government begins. Where government stops, politics begins. Now, I give you one example. Do you know, Mr. Editor, that there are already manipulations in the press to reduce the impeachment saga into a regional affair between North and South? By not being emotive but intellectual about it, I watch that argument with every discretion. Dialogue is of the essence right now. If you allow any emotive, temperamental or tribal argument in the calculus, we will lose the objective of state policyDialogue is limitless and allows new possibilities for thoughtCII no date (The Co-Intelligence Institute non-profit research institute, )JFSThe late quantum physicist David Bohm observed that both quantum mechanics and mystical traditions suggest that our beliefs shape the realities we evoke. He further postulated that thought is largely a collective phenomenon, made possible only through culture and communication. Human conversations arise out of and influence an ocean of cultural and transpersonal meanings in which we live our lives, and this process he called dialogue. Most conversations, of course, lack the fluid, deeply connected quality suggested by this oceanic metaphor. They are more like ping-pong games, with participants hitting their very solid ideas and well-defended positions back and forth. Such conversations are properly called discussions. "Discussion," Bohm noted, derives from the same root word as "percussion" and "concussion," a root that connotes striking, shaking and hitting. Dialogue, in contrast, involves joining our thinking and feeling into a shared pool of meaning which continually flows and evolves, carrying us all into new, deeper levels of understanding none of us could have foreseen. Through dialogue "a new kind of mind begins to come into being," observed Bohm, "based on the development of common meaning... People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning, which is capable of constant development and change." Bohm's approach to dialogue involved participants working together to understand the assumptions underlying their individual and collective beliefs. Collective reflection on these assumptions could reveal blind spots and incoherences from which participants could then free themselves, leading to greater collective understanding and harmony. Bohm maintained that such collective learning increases our collective intelligence. (For links to sites, groups, and listservs working with Bohm's approach to dialogue,?click here.) (For Bohm's introduction to group dialogue,?click here.)Limits are not inevitable – They naturalize themRobbins 4 (Paul, p. 109, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, U of Az-Geography & Dev’t)Moreover, the politics that govern the fate of natural systems are secured without resistance to the degree that this constructedness is hidden from view. Political ecologists suggest, therefore, that because this stuff is not inevitable and has history, it can be unmasked for what it is, reinvented, and changed for a better and more sustainable future. In any case, in political ecology, things are rarely what they appear. Their limits are socially constructed and we have impacts to the specific limits they constructRorty 99 (Richard, Atlantic Monthly, Yale-Phil, )These philosophers can agree with the social constructionists that notions like "the homosexual" and "the Negro" and "the female" are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good. But they are not sure that "X is a social construction" adds much to "talking about X is not inevitable, and there are probably better ways of talking." They see the point of Foucault's famous observation that in the nineteenth century homosexuality was "transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul." Foucault went on to say, "The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." They agree that we would have been better off with the commonsensical thought that some men prefer to have sex with other men than with the sophisticated attempt to ground this preference in a deep, dark psychopathology. But they think that the energy Foucault's disciples have put into arguing that something is a social construction would be better put into proposing some alternative social construction: a more effective and less damaging way of talking about what is going on. All our controversial ways of talking are, to be sure, choices that society has made about how to classify things. In that sense these classifications are of course socially constructed. But the interesting question is whether anybody can suggest a better classification.Their inevitability claims crush agencyClare 2 (blogger, )Since the early 1980s Foucault has been criticised – particularly by sociologists and also by Habermas et al for not having a theory of ‘agency’. Quite apart from indicating an inability to think outside the boundaries of a certain way of conceptualising the world, this criticism also indicates an ahistorical reading of Foucault’s work. If in his earlier work he doesn’t discuss in detail the interiority of the way people made decisions about action, his work is all about showing that these decisions were not inevitable and that the current configuration of culture is not the result of some pre-determined process. Quite the contrary in fact. There is a good deal of accident, chance, and petty politicking which operates in any situation making its outcome unpredictable.AT: You Lead To Different LimitsDialogue?is?intersubjective Kent et al 2 (Michael L. Kent, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, Maureen Taylor, Ph.D., is Gaylord Family Chair of Strategic Communication, Sheila M. McAllister-Spooner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Communication, Monmouth University, Research in dialogic theory and public relations)Since dialogue is intersubjective, it necessitates interpretation and understanding by all parties involved. Dialogue necessitates that all participants are willing to exert themselves on the part of others in a dialogue to understand often- diverse positions. Commitment to interpretation also means that efforts are made to grasp the positions, beliefs, and values of others before their positions can be equitably evaluated (Gadamer, 1994; Ellul, 1985; Makay & Brown, 1972).These?intersubjective?limits?are?better?than?imposed?limits?for?self/other?worthKent et al 2 (Michael L. Kent, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, Maureen Taylor, Ph.D., is Gaylord Family Chair of Strategic Communication, Sheila M. McAllister-Spooner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Communication, Monmouth University, Research in dialogic theory and public relations)Genuine dialogue, involves more than just a commitment to a relationship. Dialogue occurs when individuals (and sometimes groups) agree to set aside their differences long enough to come to an understanding of the others’ positions. Dialogue is not equivalent to agreement. Rather, dialogue is more akin to intersubjectivity where both parties attempt to understand and appreciate the values and interests of the other. Dialogue is both Socratic and Kantian. Dialogue rests on an acknowledgement of the worth of the other as well as a willingness to “continue the conversation”—not for purposes of swaying the other with the strength of one’s erudition, but as a means of understanding the other and reaching mutually satisfying positions.Open-ended?dialogue?solves?colonizing?tendencies?of?externally?imposed?limitsHawkins and Muecke 3 (Gay and Stephen, Culture and Waste, p. 54, Google Books)Monologue?is?the?narcissistic?conversation?that?the?'West?has?with?itself?key?feature?of?which?is?that?the?other?never?gets?to?talk?bark?on?its?terms.?Monologue?is?a?practice?of?power,?of?course.?since?it?involves?silencing?the?people?whose?words?and?though.?would?require?a?break?with?self=absorption.?Much?of?what?passes?for?conversation?is?actually?monologue?because?it?is?constructed?around?a?self=other?structure?such?that?the?"other.?is?the?absence?or?reflection?of?self?In?contrast.?dialogue?is?intersubjective?It?is?an?openended?meeting?of?subjects.?Emil?Fackenheim?articulates?two?main?precepts?for?structuring?the?ground?for?ethical?dialogue.'?The?first?that?dialogue?begins?where?one?is,?and?thus?is?always?situated;?the?second?is?that?dialogue?is?Open,?and?I?thus?that?the?outcome?is?not?known?in?advance.?Openness?produces?reflexivity,?to?that?one's?own?round?becomes?destabilized.?In?open?dialogue?one?holds?one's?self?available?to?be?surprised,?to?be?challenged,?and?to?be?knocked?out?of?narcissism.?Dialogue?breaks?up?monologue,?it?clears?a?round?for?meeting,?generating?a place?where?people?cm?speak?on?their?own?terms.?It?thus?requires?attentive?listening?and an?open?mind.?Construed?in?this?way,?dialogue?is?a?decolonizing?practice?leading?toward?unpredictable?outcomes.Guilar 6 (Joshua, School of Communication and Culture?In dialogic education, students, teachers, and content are related intersubjectively. Different disciplines have contributed to the understanding of such relations. One source for understanding the intersubjective nature of instruction is the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1982: 1960; Smith, 1993). Gadamer proposed a dialogical mode of knowing through shared conversation regarding the interpretation of texts. An educational community is intersubjective in nature when all parties relate to one another as having a sense of agency and a unique perspective. In such a community there is not a knowing subject (e.g., the teacher) and a known object (e.g., the student or the content of instruction). Rather, all three elements—the teacher, the student, and the content—relate in an intersubjective, interpretive community. In this community, roles such as teacher and student are still significant. However, the nature of the dialogic conversation changes power relations in contrast to conventional pedagogy. Particularly, the nature of the conversation is such that the students become agents in the hermeneutic community. Students’ roles change from being passive learners to becoming co-creators. In expressing his or her perspective, a student co-creates along with other students and the teacher a shared world in which difference is expressed and respected. Power is shared mutually in this co-created community. AT: ShivelyIt is no longer a question of searching for Truth, but rather of accepting difference and facilitating dialog within that differenceBleiker 98 asst. prof. of International Studies at Pusan National University (Roland, “Retracing and redrawing the boundaries of events: Postmodern interferences with international theory”, Alternatives, Oct-Dec 1998, Vol. 23, Issue 4)In the absence of authentic knowledge, the formulation of theoretical positions and practical action requires modesty. Accepting difference and facilitating dialogue becomes more important than searching for the elusive Truth. But dialogue is a process, an ideal, not an end point. Often there is no common discursive ground, no language that can establish a link between the inside and the outside. The link has to be searched first. But the celebration of difference is a process, an ideal, not an end point. A call for tolerance and inclusion cannot be void of power. Every social order, even the ones that are based on the acceptance of difference, excludes what does not fit into their view of the world. Every form of thinking, some international theorists recognize, expresses a will to power, a will that cannot but "privilege, oppress, and create in some manner."[54] There is no all-encompassing gaze. Every process of revealing is at the same time a process of concealing. By opening up a particular perspective, no matter how insightful it is, one conceals everything that is invisible from this vantage point. The enframing that occurs by such processes of revealing, Martin Heidegger argues, runs the risk of making us forget that enframing is a claim, a disciplinary act that "banishes man into that kind of revealing that is an ordering." And where this ordering holds sway, Heidegger continues, "it drives out every other possibility for revealing."[55] This is why one must move back and forth between different, sometimes incommensurable forms of insights. Such an approach recognizes that the key to circumventing the ordering mechanisms of revealing is to think in circles--not to rest too long at one point, but to pay at least as much attention to linkages between than to contents of mental resting places. Inclusiveness does not lie in the search for a utopian, all-encompassing worldview, but in the acceptance of the will to power--in the recognition that we need to evaluate and judge, but that no form of knowledge can serve as the ultimate arbiter for thought and action. As a critical practice, postmodernism must deal with its own will to power and to subvert that of others. This is not to avoid accountability, but to take on responsibility in the form of bringing modesty to a majority.Truth seeking is bad – Truth to power is keyMourard 1 (Roger, Wastenaw CC-College of educ, )The political task is not to discover the truth and thereby free humanity from domination or alienation. Truth is a function of power/knowledge. Rather, the task is to conduct “a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role that it plays.” Foucault’s approach is to challenge the existing social order of the present by showing how it emerged from the will to dominate through the creation of a fictitious individual self and its equally manufactured objectification as an entity to be investigated scientifically. AT: Do It On The Neg"Do it on the neg" marginalizes our arg.Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(3), p. 523)JMA second and related shortcoming of early postmodern contributions is their focus on criticising/deconstructing the shortcomings of dominant Realist and Liberal approaches to international political theory. While essential at a time when there was little space for alternative knowledge, this process of critique has nevertheless limited the potential of postmodern contributions. Discourses of power politics and their framing of political practice cannot overcome all existing theoretical and practical dilemmas. By articulating critique in relation to arguments advanced by orthodox approaches to IR, the impact of critical voices remains confined within the larger discursive boundaries that were established through the initial framing of these debates. "Run it as an advantage” pigeon-holes our args.Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(3), p. 523)JMMy suggestion is, thus, to ‘forget IR theory’, to see beyond a narrowly defined academic discipline and to refuse tying future possibilities to established forms of life.57 Instead of seeking nostalgic comfort and security in the familiar interpretation of long gone epochs, even if they are characterised by violence and insecurity, conscious forgetting opens up possibilities for a dialogical understanding of our present and past. Rather than further entrenching current security dilemmas by engaging with the orthodox discourse that continuously gives meaning to them, forgetting tries to escape the vicious circle by which these social practices serve to legitimise and objectivise the very discourses that have given rise to them. “Do it on the aff” compromises our arguments.Herring 6 (Eric, Reader in International Politics at the University of Bristol, [] AD: 7/9/10)JMInsider activism (that is, intellectual and policy work within mainstream institutions) risks co-option and deradicalisation. For some, being an activist scholar necessarily involves being an anti-military, anti-state, anti-capitalist outsider opposing British-backed US foreign policy, but there is no consensus on this.21 The risks of co-option and deradicalisation needs to be considered in relation to context, strategy and tactics as well as theorised understandings of the underlying characteristics of those mainstream institutions. To insist on or assume pacifism, anarchism, socialism and opposition to all aspects of British and US foreign policy misses what may turn out to be the ambiguous, contingent, factionalised and therefore potentially progressive aspects of the military, the state, capitalism and the foreign policies of Britain and the United States. AT: Wrong ForumDebate is a place for the voice of the oppressed – this is the key arena for our movementWarner and Bruschke 3 (Ede, University of Loiusville, John, CSU Fullerton, “GONE ON DEBATING:” COMPETITIVE ACADEMIC DEBATE AS A TOOL OF EMPOWERMENT FOR URBAN AMERICA)JFSThese arguments are theoretical; they cannot speak as powerfully as the voices of those who have experienced both the oppression of an education system failing from the “unique synergy between lack of funding and anachronistic pedagogical practices.” Ed Lee, who now holds a Master’s degree and works for an Urban Debate League in San Francisco, recounts his experience as an urban debater: Educated in the public school system of inner-city Atlanta, my high school experience was tragically similar to the one depicted above. My savior, like many others, was the Atlanta Urban Debate League. It provided the opportunity to question the nefarious rites of passage (prison, drugs, and drinking) that seem to be uniquely debilitating to individuals in the poor urban communities. In enclaves of poverty, there is also an undercurrent of nihilism and negativity that eats away at the soul of the community. Adults are hopeless. Children follow their lead and become hopeless. The solution is to offer people a choice beyond minimum wage or prison. Urban Debate Leagues provide that. Debating delivers a galaxy of alternatives and opportunity for those who are only offered hopelessness and were unnecessary elements of our culture that existed becaused they (predominantly) go unquestioned. Questioning the very nature of our existence is at the heart of the debate process. I am left wondering what would occur if debate became as compulsory in inner-city educational culture as football and basketball? Imagine graduating from high school each year millions of underprivileged teenagers with the ability to articulate their needs, the needs of others, and the ability to offer solutions. I am convinced that someone would be forced to listen. Urban debate Leagues offers a pedagogical tool that simultaneously opens the mind to alternatives and empowers students to take control of their lives. Half of the time, students are disseminating information and forming arguments about complex philosophical and political issues. In the other half, they answer the arguments of others. Self-reflexivity is an inherent part of the activity. Debating gives students the ability to articulate the partiality of all critical assessments. Contemporary educational techniques teach one side of the issue and universalize it as the only “truth.” Debate forces students to evaluate both sides, and determine their independent contextualized truth. Additionally, unlike the current pedagogy, debate allows everything to be questioned…The ability to question subjectivities presented as the objective truth makes debate uniquely empowering for individuals disenfranchised by the current system. It teaches students to interrogate their own institutionalized neglect and the systemic unhindered oppression of others. It is one of the few venues we are able to question authority. (pp. 95-6) Given the possibilities an urban debate program presents, it is worth examining the practical possibilities for a revitalization of urban debate. One thing is clear: Urban debate is under-utilized at present. Many urban debate programs died in the late sixties and early seventies as the result of massive budget cuts. As tax revenues diminished in educational coffers, debate programs, always treated as just one of the “extracurricular” activities, got lost in efforts to stop the institutional bleeding by “doing more with less.” While college debate is more vibrant, as early as 1975 major college debate organizations were acknowledging the lack of diversity in intercollegiate forensics. Little has changed over the past twenty-five years; minority participation remains exceptionally low at the two major national policy debate tournaments, the Cross Examination Debate Association championship and the National Debate Tournament (Hill, 1997; Stepp, 1997) AT: Debate CommunityLinking education to group outcomes ruins the value to lifeMourard 1 (Roger, Wastenaw CC-College of educ, )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 to say that this ethos of betterment through competency will inevitably fail to fulfill the dream 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. AT: PolicymakingPolicy making framework makes a commodity of violence – ensures its continuance – and is unethicalMakau 96 (Josina., Ph.D. in Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley, Responsible Communication, Argumentation Instruction in the Face of Global Perils)Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation instruction . Like the Nazi doctors, students in traditional argumentation courses are taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to abstraction." Weisel urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned – that people are not abstractions. Weisel urges educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of humanizing their charges, of teaching students to view life as special, 'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph.' Trained as technocrats with powerful suasory skills but little understanding , students participating in traditional argumentation courses would have difficulty either grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly, they would have difficulty grasping or appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above all, openness, trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues. Trained to view problems in black and white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and traditional courses become subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or unprincipaled person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional debaters, deprived of true dialogic encounter , fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the 'multiplicity of viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'. They are thus inclined to lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and perspicacious judgment.' Encouraging student to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept uncritically a sovereign view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the traditional argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious resources. It would appear, in fact, that the argumentation course foster precisely the 'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by modern science and discharged into the administration of things' associated with most of the world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable that feminist and others critics would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of debate. Their limitation of politics to the state denies creativity which eliminates the things that makes life worth living and perverts politics.Bleiker and Leet 6 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, and Martin, Senior Research Officer with the Brisbane Institute, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), p. 735-736)JMPromoting aesthetic engagements with politics is not to replace social scientific enquiries or to suggest that art offers a solution to all problems. The point, rather, is that the key political challenges of our time, from terrorism to poverty, are far too complex not to employ the full register of human intelligence and creativity to deal with them. Aesthetic engagements with the sublime are central to this endeavour. But to remain valid, such engagements must go beyond a mere process of aestheticising the political. Establishing societal models based on beauty and harmony has led to dangerous political experiments. We need to acknowledge, along with George Kateb, that the aesthetic is a dominant force in human life. But we need to do so while recognising the potentially problematic practice of searching for stability amidst chaos and contingency through a resort to beauty as the ultimate value. In his view, such ‘unaware and unrationalized aestheticism’ is responsible for a great deal of immorality.60 In attempts to transform the ambivalent experience of the sublime into something unambiguously ‘beautiful’, moral limits are often ignored. In contrast to aesthetic ‘cravings’, then, the challenge is to cultivate an appreciation of sublimity in the everyday, and to use the aesthetic not to mask our fears of the uncertain, but to recognise them and search for ways of living comfortably with the contingent dimensions of life. The conception of politics devolves to a form of absolute control that overlimits the realm of the political, making true representation impossible & violence inevitable.Bleiker and Leet 6 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, and Martin, Senior Research Officer with the Brisbane Institute, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), p. 736)JMAn aesthetic engagement with the sublime inevitably contains an ethical component. But the ethics we find here is very different from the automatic and codified form of ethics that prevails in much of the theory and practice of international politics. This is so because prevailing approaches to scholarship and decision-making have stated a clear preference for the conscious in the fields of politics and ethics, to the point of imposing order in an attempt to repress ambivalence. The ethical significance of the aesthetic ensues from the effort to be mindful about the inherent violence of such forms of representation. It involves relaxing pressures always working to cut the world down to the size and shape of our fears, needs and desires. Morton Schoolman, for instance, argues that the aesthetic refers to a kind of openness and responsiveness that contrasts sharply with those tendencies in the modern world towards control and the repression of difference. He distinguishes ‘formal reason’ which ‘finds what is unknown and diff e rent from thought to be an obstacle to its emancipation from fear’, from an ‘aesthetic reason’ that is ‘unafraid of the unfathomable in which it finds the source of its receptivity to the diversity of diff e rent forms of life’.61 John Gray illustrates the practical dimensions of this position by reminding us that consciousness can actually be an obstacle, that the most accomplished pianist, for instance, is at his or her most skilful when playing with the least amount of self-awareness .62 Similarly, in the domain of ethics, the conscious self can be both the source of moral behaviour and an obstacle to it. Expanding what counts as politics is critical to solve environmental crisis.Mallory 8 (Chaone, prof of environmental philosophy @ Villanova U, [] AD: 7/9/10)JMAlthough I think that Sandilands overstates the case somewhat—environmental movements, even those which utilize fairly conventional discourses and strategies, are always self-consciously calling for political action and thus understand themselves as political actors as such—nonetheless Sandilands points out something very significant. One of the most salient questions for environmentalists is not how to best exploit existing political avenues for the sake of making gains for the more-than-human world, not about how humans ought best “represent” the interests of nature in incorrigibly anthropocentric political arenas, but to question, and ultimately reconfigure what counts as politics itself; to revise, or rupture where necessary, traditional political categories and assumptions about who or what counts as a political subject and what counts as political action and speech, and challenge the instrumentalist view of politics in favor of a view that considers politics as a space where ecological subjectivities are formed, contested, destabilized, and re-formed. Ecofeminist political philosophy wonders how nature can have a voice in the polis. This leads to other sorts of philosophical tasks and questions, as Sandilands notes. The kritik doesn’t preclude politics – it allows for an understanding of it that can solve problems more effectively. Zalewski 2K (Marysia, Director, Centre for Gender Studies, Feminism After Postmodernism, p. 67-68)JMA typical postmodern claim is that power is not something that is simply or only repressive. In keeping with a desire to dismantle dualistic thinking, postmodernists refuse to perceive power as fundamentally opposed to resistance, hence the intertwined phrase; power/resistance. Indeed, the idea that there is a monolithic power ‘out there’, whether that is patriarchy, racism or capitalism, can lead to a sense of fatalism and despair, which is hardly the best way to achieve emancipatory ends, postmoderns might argue. This links into the notion of productive power introduced earlier, which implies that the persistent battle over the meanings of things will inevitably foster new forms of resistance and new meanings emerge from this. The battles over the words 'queer' and 'nigger* serve as good examples of this. The consistent postmodern emphasis on disputing meanings and displacing traditional ideas and values, inevitably leads to a questioning and dishevelling of modernist definitions and certainties about what counts as politics. This imposition of the authority of correct meaning is something that postmodernists are keen to expose. Postmodernists also resist the idea that their views of the subject and epistemology lead to an inability to be political or do politics. If we think of a specific postmodern method, deconstruct ion, we can understand it as something that questions the terms in which we understand the political, rather than an abandonment of the political. Surely, postmodernists argue, questioning what counts as politics is a political act? Rethinking what the political is can allow a whole range of differences of opinions to appear. Additionally, rather than concentrating on the 'why' of things, postmodernists prefer to focus on effects. So instead of asking. 'Why are women oppressed?', postmodernists are more likely to ask questions about the effects of particular practices. For example. 'What are the effects of beliefs about the "proper" roles for women such as those espoused by the Catholic Church?' Or in other (postmodern) words. "How do women gel said [or described] as "good wives" by the Catholic Church?' Questioning foundations, beliefs about who and what 'the subject is' and opening the notion of politics surely counts as taking feminist responsibility seriously? A focus on politics proper is neither inevitable nor natural – The presumption that we should debate politics and produce research on politics proper reifies policymaking as a verified truth which devolves agency, obscures social change, and naturalizes state violence – Put away your limits and ground da’s: The historical moment of the state is tiny; debate is older and more robustLemke 97 (Thomas, German Science Foundation-heisenberg fellow, )It follows that an analytics of government takes seriously the historical and systematic importance of ‘political knowledge’ (Foucault, 1997: 67) for state analysis. Historically, the emergence and stability of state agencies is intimately tied to the incessant generation, circulation, storage and repression of knowledge. The constitution of the modern state was closely connected with the rise of the human sciences and the production of knowledge about the population and individuals. It depended on information concerning the physical condition of the national territory, diplomatic and secret knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of foreign states, and other forms of knowledge that made objects visible and rendered them into a calculable and programmable form. State actors and agencies used statistical accounts, medical expertise, scientific reports, architectural plans, bureaucratic rules and guidelines, surveys, graphs, and so on to represent events and entities as information and data for political action. These ‘inscription devices’ (Latour, 1986) made it possible to define problems, specify areas of intervention, calculate resources, and determine political goals (Burke, 2000; Vismann, 2000; Desrosières, 2002; Collin and Horstmann, 2004). In systematic terms, political knowledge plays a dual role in the constitution of the modern state. On the one hand, political rationalities provide cognitive and normative maps that open up spaces of government which are intrinsically linked to truth. State agencies produce and proliferate forms of knowledge that enable them to act upon the governed reality. On the other hand, the state is constituted by discourses, narratives, world-views and styles of thought that allow political actors to develop strategies and realize goals. What is more, these symbolic devices even define what it means to be an actor, who may qualify as a political actor and citizen (Nullmeier, 1993; Meyer, 1999; Steinmetz, 1999a; Müller, Raufer and Zifonun, 2002; Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003). Finally, it would be a misunderstanding to reduce political knowledge to scientific reasoning and rational argumentation since it is also embodied in routine action, cultural self-evidence and normative orientations. Thus the state is not only a material structure and a mode of thinking, but also a lived and embodied experience, a mode of existence (see Maihofer, 1995; Sauer, 2001: 110–12). This analytical perspective has two important theoretical merits. First, the commonplace contrast between state formation and policymaking loses credibility, since the former is not a single event but an enduring process in which the limits and contents of state action are permanently negotiated and redefined. It follows ‘that “policies” that affect the very structure of the state are part of the ongoing process of stateformation’ (Steinmetz, 1999b: 9; Gottweis, 2003). Second, this approach makes it possible to include the observer’s position in the process of theory construction. Political and sociological knowledge, operating with dualisms like individual and state, knowledge and power, and so on, plays a constitutive role in the emergence and reproduction of concrete forms of statehood. It provides a symbolic infrastructure that maps possible sites of intervention, and it is also inside this cultural framework that subjects define and live their relation to the state (Demirovic, 1998: 49–50; Mitchell, 1991: 94; Rose and Miller, 1992: 182). AT: Policymaking Solves ViolenceEmpirically, policymaking can't solve violence Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(3), p. 509-510)JMThose who make the analysis of these political events their professional purview—the students of international relations (ir)—adhere to representational habits that have become equally objectified and problematic. Many of them are social scientists for whom knowledge about the ‘facts’ of the ‘real world’ emerges from the search for ‘valid inferences by the systematic use of well-established procedures of inquiry’.3 But relatively little practical knowledge has emerged from these efforts, even after successive generations of social scientists have refined their models and methods. Our insights into the international have not grown substantially, nor have our abilities to prevent deadly conflicts. From Kosovo to Afghanistan violence remains the modus operandi of world politics. Even proponents of scientific research lament that ‘students of international conflict are left wrestling with their data to eke out something they can label a finding’.4 Expanding what is considered political is crucial to solve global problems. Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(3), p. 519)JMTo broaden our knowledge of the international does, however, require more than simply adding a few additional layers of interpretation. What is needed is a more fundamental reorientation of thought and action: a shift away from harmonious common sense imposed by a few dominant faculties towards a model of thought that enables productive flows across a variety of discordant faculties. For Deleuze, this difference amounts to a move from recognition to a direct political encounter, from approaches that affirm appearances without disturbing thought towards approaches that add to our understanding and, indeed, force us to think.44 Their framework constrains meaningful discussion – this allows violence to persist. Bleiker 1 (Roland, prof of International Relations @ U of Queensland, Brisbane, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(3), p. 524)JMBeing aware of the problematic dimensions of representation, aesthetic approaches view academic disciplines as powerful mechanisms that direct and control the production and diffusion of knowledge. Disciplines establish the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are considered proper for the pursuit of knowledge. While providing meaning, coherence and stability, these rules also delineate the limits of what can be thought, talked, and written of in a normal way. Innovative solutions to existing problems cannot be found if our efforts at understanding the international remain confined to a set of rigid and well-entrenched disciplinary rules. AT: Must Be Policy RelevantAcademics don’t influence policyBarnett 6 (Michael What the Academy Can Teach by Academy and Policy, Vol. 28 (2) - Summer 2006 the Harold Stassen Prof of IR at the Humphrey Institute and Profof Poli Sci at the U of Minnesota ) TBC 7/9/10Over the years I have had a recurring encounter at professional meetings: a cluster of academics, discussing the implications of their research, worry that the findings, if ripped out of context and misappropriated by government officials, could have unintended consequences. A debate follows about whether academics are responsible for how their research is used and, if so, how they can control its interpretation and appropriation. I have always been bemused by these exchanges—academics worry about the implementation of their ideas, without realizing that policymakers simply might not care what international relations scholars have to say, let alone listen to their opinions. At these moments I am reminded of a classic exchange in Casablanca between Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart. Lorre asks, “You despise me, don’t you, Rick?” Bogart replies, “I guess I would if I thought about you.” Although US government officials are not nearly as dismissive of academics and their ideas as Bogart was of Lorre, they certainly have a low threshold for academic research. Some of their dismissiveness is understandable. Policymakers need to act in complex situations defined by tremendous uncertainty and with some knowledge of the key participants before deciding what to do. Academic knowledge rarely meets this standard of “usability.” Yet the impatience of policymakers cannot be completely attributed to the kind of knowledge they desire. It also is a result of a general intolerance for theory and frustration with the ways in which academics collect and analyze information. This dismissal of scholarly knowledge and research can be dangerous in several ways, including a failure both to acknowledge important developments in world affairs that should affect policy and to recognize the positive effects of thinking like a scholar. Academics don’t influence policy – MethodologyBarnett 6 (Michael What the Academy Can Teach by Academy and Policy, Vol. 28 (2) - Summer 2006 the Harold Stassen Prof of IR at the Humphrey Institute and Profof Poli Sci at the U of Minnesota ) TBC 7/9/10Academics pay considerable attention to sources, data, methods, and research design. While there are places in the foreign policy bureaucracy that approximate this logic of inquiry, often what passes for research in government is not scientifically driven observation but rather arguments that conform to the political realities of the moment. Academics consider alternative hypotheses and appeal to evidence to show why their proposed argument is superior to existing explanations. Many policymakers do not. Academics privilege relatively long, exhaustive, footnote-crowded papers that methodically consider an issue from all angles. Policymakers, as they rise in status, become less likely to read anything longer than three pages. I learned the art of writing memos that did not exceed two pages, stripped complex processes down to their bare bones, and simplified issues to the point of being simple-minded and one-dimensional. The immediate victims of this makeover were nuance, complexity, and contingency. Academics tend toward probabilistic statements, while policymakers favor deterministic, “if-then” statements. Academics tend to favor conclusions that are provisional and invariably call for further study, while policymakers assert their findings with an air of confidence that suggests that no further debate is needed.Academics don’t influence policy – Academics aren’t accessibleBarnett 6 (Michael What the Academy Can Teach by Academy and Policy, Vol. 28 (2) - Summer 2006 the Harold Stassen Prof of IR at the Humphrey Institute and Profof Poli Sci at the U of Minnesota ) TBC 7/9/10The fast-paced policy world left little time to read academic research, though there were occasions when scholarly findings penetrated the thick walls of government. These successful “crossover” ideas shared certain attributes. They were easily digestible. If scholarly research is to have an impact, it must be presented in a “talking points” formula—relatively short, simplified, representations of the world. A good, if somewhat extreme, example is Foreign Policy magazine. It used to resemble Foreign Affairs with relatively lengthy, serious examinations of contemporary issues. Several years ago Foreign Policy switched to a new format with fewer articles and a preference for simplified statements (globalization is a myth) and highly provocative, sometimes inflammatory claims (Mexicans are taking over the United States) as well as many bright, multicolored graphics. There is, in essence, a preference for style over substance, for simplicity over complexity. A close friend of mine who works in the US Department of State tells me that he and his colleagues like the change in part because it is their version of People magazine.AT: Elite TakeoverElites control society – they influence all aspects of decision making. Amsden, DiCaprio, and Robinson 9 (Alice, prof of Political Economics at MIT, Alisa, Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER, and James, prof of Government at Harvard U, August, [] AD: 7/9/10)JMElites also impact development outcomes through their control over decision-making processes that allocate political resources within a society. This introduces two additional channels through which their activities impact growth in the long run. The first is that elites have the resources to design and implement institutions that favour their interests. Such institutions may promote participation and information flow. Or they may simply cement the position of a particular group within the governance structure. Another feature of elite control over institutions is that they are able to influence how both elites and non-elites within a society perceive different issues. Elites control how issues are framed through their ability to distribute or withhold information, and their influence over and within the media. Even where there is a free media, it depends on elites for information, and can choose to present issues that reflect a particular bias. The extent to which these channels are used for social or personal welfare gain varies among societies. But the fact that these channels exist in every society highlights the fact that if elites can be induced to adopt developmental behaviour, it can have a disproportionately positive impact on growth and development. Elite control nowSaeger 7 (Olivia, Haverford College. Dept. of Political Science, [] AD: 7/9/10)JMIt is also important to realize that the space for civil society to thrive is created by political elites outside of the state. Essentially, political elites control the creation of civil society by allowing for civil society to function autonomously. Once it was determined that political elites were the vital factor in creating a successful democratic transition, two case studies were examined which allowed us insight into how political elites work and what they must do in order to succeed. Democracy is a sham – current events proveWafawarova 7 (Reason, postgraduate student in International Relations at Macquarie U, March 6, [] AD: 7/9/10)JMNeo-liberal democracy is the pretext upon which the Americans invaded Iraq and now they have a crisis on how they should be handling their defeat there. It is the pretext they used to be in Afghanistan and the same pretext they used to come up with the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. It is the pretext they use to call their perceived enemies "axes of evil, dictators, despots, tyrants, extremists and rogue or failed states." Democracy as a model of governance will always be excellent but America's version of democracy is a sham. It is not designed for governance but for fomenting conflict between the middle class and the lower class of the developing countries. AT: Topical Version The neg rigs debate to forego social change and creates stale educationLemke 97 (Thomas, German Science Foundation-heisenberg fellow, The%20Birth%20of%20Biopolitics%203.pdf)The semantic linking of governing ("gouverner") and modes of thought ("mentalité") indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them. In other words, there are two sides to governmentality (at certain points Foucault also speaks of "the art of government"). First, the term pin-points a specific form of representation; government defines a discursive field in which exercising power is "rationalized". This occurs, among other things, by the delineation of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, the provision of arguments and justifications etc. In this manner, government enables a problem to be addressed and offers certain strategies for solving/handling the problem. In this way, it also structures specific forms of intervention. For a political rationality is not pure, neutral knowledge which simply "re-presents" the governing reality; instead, it itself constitutes the intellectual processing of the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include agencies, procedures, institutions, legal forms etc. that are intended to enable us to govern the objects and subjects of a political rationality. Their version of the aff is strategic politics that produces tyrannical controlSmith 9 (Neil, CUNY-Anthro, )But Foucault must be defended. He was writing only months after Iranian oil workers sparked the revolution by going on strike and at a time when the hijacking of the revolt by a theocratic elite was far from certain. For him, in the spring of 1979, the “Iranian movement” still defied “that `law’ of revolutions” whereby “the tyranny lurking within them” comes to the surface. Yet the controversy over Foucault’s revolu- tionism has largely sidestepped a central and symptomatic dilemma in Foucault’s forceful defense of revolution, and here he may be on less secure ground. Insofar as the penchant for revolt is, as he suggests, universal, this sits very awkwardly with the “subjectivity” of revolution to which he is just as equally attuned. To span the breach between universality and irreducibility on the one side and subjectivity on the other Foucault proposes a “theoretical ethics”. This theoretical ethics is opposite to, and for Foucault replaces, any strategic politics; it is explicitly “antistrategic”, he says. Potential tyranny lurks not only in revolt, he implies, but equally in a strategic politics. As an intellectual, he feels that his role therefore is to “keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it.”They vacate individual agency to politics proper, weakening politics and overdefining the value in lifeInfluxus 7 (Major contributor, Foucault blog, )When you say that the individual is not un-political are you agreeing with Craig’s point that liberal political theory, cannot recognise the political, because it vacates all dividing practices from the domain of politics proper? Taking the individual as object, as base unit, is precisely not the disciplinary pole of anatomo-politics. Disciplinary power, as Foucault articulates it in HoSv1, is about dividing and sharing the body through a series of drives, impulses etc. The relationship between liberal political theories, that take the individual as base point, and a management of the body, that divides the anatomy into a series of potentials, should be antagonistic to say the least. Which might be why disciplinary techniques often come as challenges to liberal rights – to privacy and bodily integrity. The standard move of declaring someone pathological or deviant, “in serious need of help”, is to exclude them from the liberal body, from being a candidate for ordinary ethical relations between citizens. In other words if politics is taken to appropriately be concerned with the individual person, then it can only be a form of biopolitics. It is a way of organising the mass-population as though it were a collection of atomic particles. As you point out through Hacking the person is an entity that is generated and categorised through many forms of auto-management. However, if politics takes the relevant aspects of personhood to be attributes that all persons (supposedly) share-alike, such as reason, autonomy and universal rights then the only division that matters is the original division of the population into individual persons. Hence, once liberal political theory is taken up, all relevant decisions of division are already made for it. AT: Must Debate About PolicyThousands of years of history prove that debate is possible without the gov’t properLemke 97 (Thomas, German Science Foundation-heisenberg fellow, The%20Birth%20of%20Biopolitics%203.pdf)Second, Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense geared strongly to the older meaning of the term and adumbrating the close link between forms of power and processes of subjectification. While the word government today possesses solely a political meaning, Foucault is able to show that up until well into the 18 th century the problem of government was placed in a more general context. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts, but also in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. In addition to control/management by the state or the administration, "government" also signified problems of self-control, guidance for the family and for children, management of the household, directing the soul, etc. For this reason, Foucault defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as "the conduct of conduct" and thus as a term which ranges from "governing the self" to "governing others". All in all, in his history of governmentality Foucault endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual co-determine each other's emergence (Lect. Feb. 8, 1978/1982b, 16/17; Foucault, 1982a, 220-1; Senellart, 1995). AT: Cede The PoliticalPower is not monolithic, but has fissures that can be exploited – The aff empowers said resistance – Elitism now, we solveSmith 97 (University of Wales, Professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Steve, “Power and Truth, A Reply to William Wallace,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), p. 513)Those academics who do get involved in talking truth to power must accept that in so doing they must adopt the agenda of those to whom they are talking. They will be involved in problem-solving, and thereby must accept the 'givens' of the policy debate. Policy-makers see certain things as givens; therefore if you write about them in order to influence the policy debate, you tend to have to write as if they are given as well. For academics such 'givens' are rarely seen as such. This has extremely important political and intellectual consequences since it questions the very notion of talking 'truth' to power. It is more a case of accepting the policy agenda of those to whom one is talking and then giving them a series of alternative ways of proceeding. I see no connection between this and speaking 'truth to power'. I can also admit the tendency to make what one says acceptable to those 'listening', so as to ensure that one is indeed 'listened to'. But more importantly, why should academics take the policy agenda of governments as the starting point? Why do we privilege that starting point rather than the needs and wants of the have-nots in our society or in the global political system? Indeed, maybe speaking 'truth to power' is itself a very political act, albeit in the name of academic neutrality, an act that supports the existing division of resources in the world. This situation is made all the worse once the possibility arises of getting funding from policy-making bodies, however much the individual academic wants to maintain the independence of his or her research. In my view, academics need a critical distance from which to look at the activities of governments. Perhaps the greatest form of isolation and self-righteousness is to accept the policy-makers' view of the world as the starting point, so that the academic sees the world as the policy-maker sees it. Where would questions of gender, famine, and racism fit into that world-view? Yet aren't these every bit as 'political' and 'international' as the traditional agenda? This seems to me to take us very far indeed from the idea of 'speaking truth to power'; the danger must be of telling the powerful what they want to hear and of working within their world-view. Of course, academics spend much time trying to avoid these dangers, and Wallace himself cannot be accused of simply adopting the agenda of the powerful, but surely he would admit that these dangers are profound and very difficult to avoid, especially if one wants to have influence and prestige within the policy-making community. My objection is really to those who pretend that any of this has anything to do with truth and academic objectivity.Policy pros can’t slap us down – People have power through agencyBleiker 98 (asst. prof. of International Studies at Pusan National University, Roland, “Retracing and redrawing the boundaries of events: Postmodern interferences with international theory”, Alternatives, Oct-Dec 1998, Vol. 23, Issue 4)In rendering meaningful, one is not describing or representing, one is intervening.[29] An event today is no longer apprehensible through traditional spatial understandings of world politics. Advances in economic, technological, and informational domains have led to what could be called a "deterritorialization" of the world, a situation in which "the local is instantly global."[32] This transformation has rendered obsolete the convention of investigating world politics through several distinct levels of analysis.[33] David Campbell argues convincingly that globalized life is best seen "as a series of transversal struggles rather than as a complex of inter-national, multi-national or trans-national relations."[34] The latter, he points out, are modes of representation that have strong investments in the very borders that are currently being questioned. By contrast, to conceptualize global politics as a site of transversal struggles is to draw attention to the multiple and multilayered interactions that make up contemporary life. It is to recognize the complex cross-border flow of people, goods, ideas, capital-in short, "the increasing irruptions of accelerated and nonterritorial contingencies upon our horizons."[35](A world political event, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, cannot be understood through a spatial mode of representation that relies on a distinction between different levels of analysis. The key dynamics took place in various interstices, in the transversal gray zones that loom along the boundaries between local, domestic, and international politics. The processes that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall are thus best characterized as a series of diverse but interconnected occurrences that transgressed the spatial and political givenness of both East German and Cold War international politics.)[36]Their arg obliterates agencyBleiker 00 Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)An approach that specifies operational schemes recognises these limits to cognition. Instead of establishing a new and better theory of agency, it is content with formulating a framework that facilitates understanding of how human agency is incessantly constituted and reconstituted in the context of transversal struggles. Expressed in de Certeau's language, one must comprehend forms of action in the context of their regulatory environment. Such an approach departs from ways in which traditional philosophy (and, by extension, international theory) has framed the understanding of human action. This framing process has revolved around three ways of explaining action: teleological, causal and intentional. 39 My analysis breaks with most elements that are entailed in this mode of analysis. It does not assume that agency can be assessed only by establishing links between means and ends. It does not assume that every form of agency needs an identifiable agent that causes an identifiable outcome. It does not assume that agency occurs only if it stands in a relationship with a declared intention. What is left of the concept of human agency if one no longer relies upon causal, teleological and intentional explanations? The Interlude situated between chapters 7 and 8 deals with this question at a conceptual level. Its objective is to outline a framework that facilitates an understanding of the discursive conditions that are necessary for the exertion of human agency. From this vantage point, the most potent forms of transversal dissent operate in tactical, rather than strategic ways. They move along an indeterminate trajectory, transgress political boundaries and slowly transform values. They becomes visible and effective only through maturation over time and space. Power can’t crush tactical resistance like the affBleiker 00 Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)A further deconstruction of the notion of discourse is necessary to appreciate the unfolding of transversal dissent through tactic and temporality. Despite their power to frame the world, discourses are not monolithic forces that crush everything in sight. They are often thin, unstable, fragmented. They contain cracks. By moving from epistemological to ontological levels of analysis, the inquiry explores the ways in which people can resist discursive domination (chapter 7). Human beings have hyphenated identities. Furthermore, these identities are not frozen in time, but part of a constantly unfolding process of becoming. By tapping into these multiple and shifting dimensions of Being, individuals are able to think and act beyond the narrow confines of the established discursive order. They engage in everyday forms of resistance that allow them to reshape the social context in which they are embedded. Such forms of discursive dissent can be found in countless seemingly insignificant daily acts of defiance. They transform values, transgress boundaries and may eventually promote social change far more effectively than the so-called great events of international politics.Cede the political fails – reinforces capitalism and strengthens the rightDean 8 (Joan, Politics Without Politics, political theorist, )JFSDemocracy, though, is inadequate as a language and frame for left political aspiration. Here are two reasons why; there are others. First, the right speaks the language of democracy. It voices its goals and aspirations in democratic terms. One of the reasons given for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, was the goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Similarly, leftists in the United States urge inclusion and participation, and so do those on the political right. The right complains about the exclusion of conservatives from the academy and God from politics. They, too, try to mobilize grass-root support and increase participation. There is nothing particularly left, then, about inclusion and participation. These are elements of democracy the right also supports. This rightwing adoption of democratic ideals prevents the left from occupying the position of a political alternative to the right—if left positions are the same right ones then the left isn’t an alternative. Slavoj Zizek describes this situation where one’s enemy speaks one’s language as “victory in defeat” (2008, p. 189). When one's enemy accepts one's terms, one's point of critique and resistance is lost, subsumed. The dimension of antagonism (fundamental opposition) vanishes. A second reason democracy is inadequate as an expression of left aspiration is that contemporary democratic language employs and reinforces the rhetoric of capitalism: free choice, liberty, satisfaction, communication, connection, diversity. Like any media savvy corporation, democratic activists want to ensure that voices are heard and opinions registered. Corporations and activists alike are united in their preoccupation with awareness: people need to be aware of issues, of products, of products as signs of issues. In this concrete sense, Zizek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes (2002, p. 273; 2008, p. 184). In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one’s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the same way of life, the same daily practices of “aware-ing” oneself and expressing one’s opinion, of choosing and voting and considering one’s choice a vote and one’s vote a choice.Leftist politics are worthless – they lead to deadlock and whining Dean 8 (Joan, Politics Without Politics, political theorist, )JFSThe criticisms of left embrace of democracy I raise here are part of a broadly shared frustration with and on the contemporary left. Indeed, left complaining or whining might even be the primary mode of left theorizing today. We wallow in misery, in the deadlock in which we find ourselves. But whereas my emphasis is on democracy as the name of left deadlock, of the fantasy of politics without politics, others view the current problem as a crisis of de- democratization (Wendy Brown) or de-politicization (Jacques Ranciere). As Ranciere makes clear in his writings from the nineties , elements of the depoliticization thesis resonate with mainstream political discussions of the end of ideology, the rise of consensus politics, and even the neoliberal withering away of the state, that is, the revisioning of the state as just another contractor of economic services—we were told that the era of big government was over. Financial crises that manifest themselves in the U.S. in 2008 and led to what the Bush administration presented as a necessary 700 billion dollar bailout of banks and institutions “too big to fail” quickly made this notion seem quaint and unconvincing. Nonetheless, the theme of depoliticization has been a pronounced one in the United States and Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It makes sense, then, to consider this theme more closely, interrogating its suppositions and their applicability in the contemporary setting. If the diagnosis of de- democraticization and de-politicization is correct, then left politics should seek more democracy, should attempt re-politicization. But if I am right about the contemporary democratic deadlock, then a politics that reasserts democracy as the solution to all our problems will continue to entrap us in the same old circuits of defeat. It will fail, moreover, to attend to the politicizations already conditioning the current conjuncture.AT: Focus On Solvency/ProcedureStructural focus on mechanisms for solvency crushes human agency, controlling expression of the value in lifeBleiker 2k (Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)Questions of agency have been discussed extensively in international theory, mostly in the context of the so-called structure—agency debate. Although strongly wedded to a state-centric view, this debate nevertheless evokes a number of important conceptual issues that are relevant as well to an understanding of transversal dynamics. The roots of the structure—agency debate can be traced back to a feeling of discontent about how traditional approaches to international theory have dealt with issues of agency. Sketched in an overly broad manner, the point of departure looked as follows: At one end of the spectrum were neorealists, who explain state identity and behaviour through a series of structural restraints that are said to emanate from the anarchical nature of the international system. At the other end we find neoliberals, who accept the existence of anarchy but seek to understand the behaviour of states and other international actors in terms of their individual attributes and their ability to engage in cooperative bargaining. If pushed to their logical end-point, the two positions amount, respectively, to a structural determinism and an equally farfetched belief in the autonomy of rational actors. 24 The structure—agency debate is located somewhere between these two poles. Neither structure nor agency receive analytical priority. Instead, the idea is to understand the interdependent and mutually constitutive relationship between them. The discussions that have evolved in the wake of this assumption are highly complex and cannot possibly be summarised here. 25 Some of the key premises, though, can be recognised by observing how the work of Anthony Giddens has shaped the structure—agency debate in international relations. Giddens speaks of the 'duality of structure,' of structural properties that are constraining as well as enabling. They are both 'the medium and outcome of the contingently accomplished activities of situated actors'. 26 Expressed in other words, neither agents nor structures have the final word. Human actions are always embedded in and constrained by the structural context within which they form and evolve. But structures are not immutable either. A human being, Giddens stresses, will 'know a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member'. 27 The actions that emerge from this awareness then shape the processes through which social systems are structurally maintained and reproduced.We meet by discussing the state, but a procedural focus reads the narrative of state primacy as natural and inevitableBleiker 2k (Roland, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics)To expand the scope of international theory and to bring transversal struggles into focus is not to declare the state obsolete. States remain central actors in international politics and they have to be recognised and theorised as such. In fact, my analysis will examine various ways in which states and the boundaries between them have mediated the formation, functioning and impact of dissent. However, my reading of dissent and agency makes the state neither its main focus nor its starting point. There are compelling reasons for such a strategy, and they go beyond a mere recognition that a state-centric approach to international theory engenders a form of representation that privileges the authority of the state and thus precludes an adequate understanding of the radical transformations that are currently unfolding in global life. Michael Shapiro is among an increasing number of theorists who convincingly portray the state not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a set of 'stories' — of which the state-centric approach to international theory is a perfect example. It is part of a legitimisation process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an inside and an outside, between a people and its others. Shapiro stresses that such state-stories also exclude, for they seek 'to repress or delegitimise other stories and the practices of identity and space they reflect.' And it is these processes of exclusion that impose a certain political order and provide the state with a legitimate rationale for violent encounters. The impact is banality of violence – The focus on means ignores productive discussion on the lens of power which makes violent procedures seem like a natural choiceConnoly in 2k (William, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science @ Johns Hopkins University, Identity/Difference, expanded edition) In several domains, the state no longer emerges as a consummate agent of efficacy, even though it expands as a pivotal agent of power.4 A crack in the very unity of "power" has opened up. We have entered a world in which state power is simultaneously magnified and increasingly disconnected from the ends that justify its magni- fication. As obstacles to its efficacy multiply, the state increasingly sustains collective identity through theatrical displays of punish- ment and revenge against those elements that threaten to signify its inefficacy. It launches dramatized crusades against the internal other (low-level criminals, drug users, disloyalists, racial minor- ities, and the underclass), the external other (foreign enemies and terrorists), and the interior other (those strains of abnormality, subversion, and perversity that may reside within anyone). The state becomes, first, the screen upon which much of the resentment against the adverse effects of the civilization of produc- tivity and private affluence is projected; second, the vehicle through which rhetorical reassurances about the glory and durability of that civilization are transmitted back to the populace; and third, the instrument of campaigns against those elements most disturbing to the collective identity. In the first instance, the welfare apparatus of the state is singled out for criticism and reformation. In the second, the presidency is organized into a medium of rhetorical diversion and reassurance. In the third, the state disciplinary-police-punitive apparatus is marshaled to constitute and stigmatize constituencies whose terms of existence might otherwise provide signs of defeat, injury, and sacrifice engendered by the civilization of productivity itself. <p206> ................
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