2015 NDI 6WS Aff K of TSA

CASE NEG

Lasers CP

1NC Shell

1NCLasers CP
Laser based molecular scanners are more cognizant of privacythey allow us to look for only the things that would endanger
the general public
Simbro 2014 (Andrea M- JD candidate, University of Arizona. The Sky's The
Limit: A Modern Approach To Airport Security Arizona Law Review.
http://arizonalawreview.org/56-2/simbro///GH)
Airport screening procedures have steadily become more invasive as threats have
escalated. n243 While a magnetometer screening is minimally intrusive, n244 the public has
condemned the use of advanced imaging technology as an overly intrusive "virtual
strip search" that is not narrowly tailored to meet airport security needs. n245 In a blog, a former TSA
screener detailed the disturbing activities that took place in the image operator
room before the TSA agreed to remove its x-ray backscatter machines. n246 He witnessed " light sexual
play among officers . . . and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard
to some of [*586] [the passengers'] nude images." n247 Although automatic target
recognition software will prevent TSA officers from viewing passengers' naked
images from a back room, n248 the pat-down opt-out option n249 creates even
more privacy concerns. Passengers expressed outrage at being subjected to these aggressive pat-downs.
n250 Victims of such pat-downs include a four-year-old girl who feared the TSA
agents because of "stranger danger," n251 a cancer survivor who had to endure a
flight covered in his own urine after a TSA agent popped his urostomy bag during a
pat-down, n252 and John Tyner--the famous "don't touch my junk" disgruntled passenger.
n253 Although the pat-down option contributed to the constitutionality of advanced imaging technology, n254

laser-based molecular scanners would be a more desirable option . Unlike a

probing pat-down, laser-based molecular scanners can detect threats without even
touching passengers. n255 With the goal of "quickly identify[ing] explosives,
dangerous chemicals, or bioweapons at a distance," n256 the scanners permit
passengers to speed through security without the fear of being groped by
strangers. Passengers would not have to check their privacy interests at the gate when they chose to fly.

LBMS is better at preventing terrorist attacks

Simbro 2014 (Andrea M- JD candidate, University of Arizona. The Sky's The
Limit: A Modern Approach To Airport Security Arizona Law Review.
http://arizonalawreview.org/56-2/simbro///GH)
Current screening technology has proven ineffective at detecting and deterring
threats. In fact, the TSA has employed a reactive approach to terrorism. n229 As new threats have emerged,
the TSA has rushed to develop solutions, n230 but none have permanently solved the problem .
Because of emerging nonmetallic threats, n231 it appears that magnetometers will soon become obsolete. The
Fifth Circuit identified this shift to nonmetallic threats in the 1970s, explaining that "modern technology has made
it possible to miniaturize to such a degree that enough plastic explosives to blow up an airplane can be concealed
in a toothpaste tube. A detonator planted in a fountain pen is all that is required to set it off." n232 As the
thwarted British liquid explosives plot n233 and the attempted underwear and shoe bombing incidents reveal,

Although advanced imaging

technology can better detect nonmetallic threats, it is not perfec t. A 27-year-old engineer
n234 magnetometers are ineffective at detecting such threats. [*585]

named Jonathan Corbett recently exposed a flaw in the technology. n235 A viral video documented Corbett's
successful attempt to outsmart both types of AIT scanners. n236 He sewed a pocket to the side of a shirt, placed a
metal carrying case inside it, and walked through the scanners undetected. n237 Although such a case could

"easily alarm any of the old metal detectors," the supposedly more advanced body scanners did not detect it. n238

Laser-based molecular scanners can fill

these loopholes by disclosing metallic and nonmetallic threats that are overlooked
by current technology. n240 In fact, the scanners have the capability to precisely
detect traces of substances. n241 To ensure that the scanners' effectiveness is not
reduced by a false positive problem, however, they should be programmed to alert
to substances greater than a specified amount. Such a limitation would avoid the "Big Brother"
Federal investigators conceded these vulnerabilities. n239

scenarios depicted in the Introduction of this Note. n242

Congress CP

1NC Shell

1NCCongress CP
Congress should put guidelines on TSA surveillance
Hoff 2014 (Jessica- editor of the Michigan State Law Review. Enhancing Security While
Protecting Privacy: The Rights Implicated By Supposedly Heightened Airport Security Michigan
State Law Review.
http://www.lexisnexis.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lnacui2api/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T22289642469&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&res
ultsUrlKey=29_T22289642473&cisb=22_T22289642472&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&selRCNodeI
D=2&nodeStateId=411en_US,1&docsInCategory=10&csi=144692&docNo=5//GH)
While scholars have taken a variety of approaches to resolving questions on the constitutionality of TSA measures,

one glaringly missing

solution is for Congress to explicitly limit the TSA's authority. n219 Although some have
n218 none have suggested a satisfactory solution to protecting privacy. Indeed,

suggested that Congress should set guidelines for TSA security methods so that privacy will be respected, n220
any such guidelines could still provide the TSA with too much discretion, as they are extremely vague and would
be [*1645] practically impervious to challenges by citizens due to the high degree of deference that the TSA would

While Congress should indeed set

guidelines, like requiring the TSA to explicitly consider the invasiveness of its
measures, n222 such vague guidelines are simply insufficient to protect privacy and need to be
supplemented by other, more clear directions to the TSA. The problem remains that the TSA
has too little oversight for the vast amount of authority it has to invade individual privacy. Even though
some of the TSA's measures have been held constitutional, n223 Congress should still play a more
active role in limiting the TSA's discretion in areas that so heavily invade personal
privacy and dignity. Although Congress cannot foresee every potential abuse of
privacy in new technological developments, when threats are clear, Congress should be ready and
willing to do what it is able to do: protect Americans from gross invasions of
privacy by the agencies it creates. n224 While Congress cannot protect Americans from every threat,
foreign or domestic, it ought not to stand idly by while the privacy of Americans is daily
infringed upon without significantly enhancing safety. n225 Although Benjamin Franklin's
continue to receive from courts in carrying out its mandates. n221

warning that "'[t]hose [who] would give up their liberty for security deserve neither and lose both'" n226 is rather

the sacrifice of privacy and liberty for the sake of security

becomes too great as the "benefits" of increased invasiveness hit levels of
diminishing returns on the amount of safety gained. While the TSA was charged with
strong, at a certain point,

increasing security at airports, n227 surely Congress did not intend that security come at any cost. n228 However,
since [*1646] security is still vitally important, some type of system must be worked out to both provide for
security and protect privacy.

Conditions CP

1NC Shell

1NCConditions CP
Congress should condition TSA funding on presidential
approval
Hoff 2014 (Jessica- editor of the Michigan State Law Review. Enhancing Security While
Protecting Privacy: The Rights Implicated By Supposedly Heightened Airport Security Michigan
State Law Review.
http://www.lexisnexis.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lnacui2api/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T22289642469&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&res
ultsUrlKey=29_T22289642473&cisb=22_T22289642472&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&selRCNodeI
D=2&nodeStateId=411en_US,1&docsInCategory=10&csi=144692&docNo=5//GH)

Congress could require the President to make a finding that a given

security measure's benefits, measured in the value of lives saved, n259 outweigh
its costs, measured both in monetary expenses and privacy costs. n260 Congress
could condition funds for the TSA's security measures or condition permission for
the TSA to use certain security measures on the President making this finding .
Alternatively,

Imposing such requirements would be easier than having Congress pass laws on specific methods the TSA wants

this could be undone much more easily than passing another law
as the President could make another finding that the condition is no
longer satisfied. n262 Overall, this alternative would allow for the benefit of increasing
the TSA's political accountability by centering attention for these decisions on the
President. However, it could also have a danger of being too micromanaging over the agency, just as could be
to use. n261 Further,
through Congress,

the problem with Congress making rules that are too specific. n263 Even considering the potential disadvantages

the advantages of increased accountability

and greater protections for privacy are worth it.
of the President or Congress taking a more active role,

Trusted Traveler CP

1NC Shell

1NCTrusted Traveler Cp
cp text: the usfg should create a trusted traveler program open
for all persons to apply for. #noideologypls?
CP is good (:^0)
Riley 11 - Vice President at RAND National Security Research Division, Ph.D. in public policy analysis, (K.
Jack, Air Travel Security Since 9/11, RAND Corporation,
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/corporate_pubs/2011/RAND_CP635.pdf)// HH

There are a variety of ways in which we could configure a trusted traveler

program. No program will be bulletproof, but, frankly, it does not need to be, given the extremely low odds of a
suicide terrorist being on a flight originating in the United States. The characteristics, or
combinations of characteristics, around which a trusted traveler program could be
organized include
Possession of a security clearance issued by a U.S. government agency . Most U.S.
government security clearances are issued after a comprehensive background investigation
that includes an examination of foreign ties . These clearances, which are far more stringent
than the criminal background checks conducted on TSA agents, permit the holders to work on the
governments most pressing and sensitive problems . The Washington Post reported in 2010

that more than 850,000 people held top secret clearances, a credential that requires an investigation covering the
preceding ten years that includes contact with employers, coworkers, and others; investigation of education,
professional, personal, and civic affiliations; and agency checks of spouses and significant others.16 Hundreds of
thousands hold lesser clearances that require similar, although not as stringent, investigations.

A profile that involves frequent travel. An individual traveling 100,000 miles per
year is, by conservative estimates, spending 200 hours on airplanes each year. That is
approximately 10 percent of a standard 2,000-hour work year. This, combined again with

the extremely low likelihood of terrorists or suicide bombers being on flights originating in the United States,

suggests that such travelers can be screened via the basic procedures that were in
existence prior to the deployment of WBI machines and pat downs. Airlines generally do
not make information on the size of their frequent-flyer pools publicly available, but such individuals are thought
to number in the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Even at the lower end of the range, they would
still be responsible for a significant fraction of the annual enplanements in the United States.

Travelers willing to submit to the equivalent of a security clearance process .

Some business and leisure travelers would consider it well worth the time and
expense to obtain such a credential in exchange for the ability to get through an
airport more quickly. Several programs, including Global Entry, NEXUS, and SENTRI, already
allow travelers to become pre-approved for expedited clearance for entry into the
United States at borders.

Global Entry members, for example, pay a fee, undergo an interview and background check, and provide
fingerprints as part of seeking approval. Again, numbers are generally not easily available, but the combined
programs likely cover hundreds of thousands of frequent travelers.

I am not advocating that travelers with these characteristics be

exempt from security screening. Rather, they should be eligible for a level of primary
screening that is not as intrusive and time consuming as WBIs and frisks . These
It is important to note that

trusted traveler screenings would be supplemented by random applications of more-intensive secondary screening
on small portions of this population. The

random secondary screenings would help prevent

contraband and risk from creeping in through the process . In the meantime, the moreintensive methods can be more effectively used on people about whom we know little. In addition to
allowing resources to be more effectively used, we would also likely significantly
reduce the number of machines, and therefore people, needed for security procedures
at airports, thereby reducing the expense of operating the system

AT FRAMING MEANS THE CP CANT

SOLVE
Their indicts are logically incoherentwe can use the masters
tools to dismantle the masters housemake them provide
specific indicts against our radical vision of liberalism
Mills 12 [2012, Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and
Intellectual Philosophy, Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism
Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why Theyre All Wrong), Radical
Philosophy Review, Volume 15 number 2 (2012): 305323]
Few lines in the anti-colonial and anti-racist traditions of the last few decades or so
have been as often quoted as Audre Lorde's (1984) celebrated dictum: "The master's
tools can never be used to dismantle the master's house." The reason for its popularity is
obvious: it sums up so well, in such a neat epigrammatical form, a seemingly radical and
uncompromising metatheoretical position. But with all due respect to my late fellow CaribbeanAmerican, the multiple oppressions she had to suffer in the racist, sexist, and heterosexist United States, and her
courage in resisting her subordination, affirming her identity, and making such an invaluable contribution to the

this celebrated dictum is just false. It's not itself

pretending to be an argument, of courseit's just an assertion. But one does try to
come up with a (good) argument for its truth, one quickly finds oneself floundering .
Lorde is not saying: "The masters tools sometimes can, and sometimes cannot, be used to
dismantle the masters house." Such a qualification, while having the happy virtue of making the claim
distinctive feminism of women of color,

true, would have the unhappy vice of reducing it to banalitynot what one wants in a good aphorism or epigram.
Moreover, it would be a banality that nullifies its impact, since, of course, it gets its force precisely from its

only
a few seconds' thoughtmore than most of its reciters have apparently ever given to itshould be
sufficient to demonstrate the obvious falseness of this claim. Take it, to begin with, at
implicit uncompromisingness: "The master's tools can never be used to dismantle the master's house." But

the most literal level, since if an aphorism is untrue in the concrete it is hardly any more likely to be true at the
abstract level meant to be figured and represented by the concrete.

Imagine we're a group of escaped

slaves who have begun by dismanding the master (presumably using our own tools) and now
wish to move on to his house. Hunting around the plantation, we come across a tool-shed of
hammers, pickaxes, saws, barrels of gunpowder, and so forth. Cannot we take
these tools andhammering, digging, sawing in half, blowing updemolish the
master's house? Of course we can^you just watch. So the moment one examines the maxim, it falls apart.
Only if it could plausibly be demonstrated that there is something intrinsic in the
tool itself that prohibits any such emancipatory use of it would the dictum be true .
But obviously there will be many tools, like hammers, which can be used for a wide
variety of ends, so that even if the master has used them, inter alia, to build his
plantation mansion (with our forced labor, of course), this does not mean that we cannot use
them for different purposes once he is no longer with us. Appropriating the
master's toolsafter all, we figure he owes us a lot of back pay^we head out West, where we
construct freedmen's towns with them. Who will refuse to move into these houses because they
were built with the master's tools? Consider now the abstract level of conceptual tools and
theoretical frameworks that the material tools are supposed to represent . I suggest
that Lorde's dictum is no truer here. Some tools, such as racism, will be intrinsically oppressive, so
that one should be dubious aboutto cite a famous exampleJean-Paul Sartre's claim in "Black

that an "antiracist racism" is possible. But liberalism and contract theory, I

would claim, are different. Admittedly, liberalism and contractarianism have historically
been racializedthis was the whole burden of The Racial Contract. But the crucial disanalogy as
"tools" between racism on the one hand, and liberalism and contractarianism, on the
other hand, is that once you purge racism of its scientific errors and moral
viciousness there is nothing left:, while for liberalism and contractarianism, this is not
the case. Racism as an ideology about the natural differentiation of humanity into discrete,
Orpheus"

hierarchically ordered biological groups, or racism as moral disregard for people because of their race,

collapses into nothingness once it is realized that not only are the groups
historically taken to be races not in a hierarchy, but that in fact they do not even
exist as discrete biological entities in the first place, and that racially based disregard
for people is morally unconscionable. But liberalism and contractarianism as
descriptive and normative claims about how we should think of the formation of
society and the rights that morally equal humans should have within that society
can survive the removal of racist conceptions of who should be counted as
fully human and fully equal. The latter "tools," unlike the former, have other
dimensions beside the goal of subordination, and so can be reclaimed. An anticontractarian contractarianism is possible in a way that an anti-racist racism is not .

State PIK

1NC Shell #1
We advocate the entirety of the 1AC with the exception of their lens [of]
United States federal government economic policy
There is no internal link between the plan text and the solvency.
Schlag 90 (Pierre Schlag, professor of law@ univ. Colorado, stanford law review,
november, page lexis)
normative legal thought is so much in a hurry that it will tell you what
to do even though there is not the slightest chance that you might actually
be in a position to do it. For instance, when was the last time you were in a position to put the
In fact,

difference principle n31 into effect, or to restructure [*179] the doctrinal corpus of the first amendment? "In the
future, we should. . . ." When was the last time you were in a position to rule whether judges should become

Normative legal thought

doesn't seem overly concerned with such worldly questions about the
character and the effectiveness of its own discourse. It just goes along and
proposes, recommends, prescribes, solves, and resolves. Yet despite its
obvious desire to have worldly effects, worldly consequences, normative
legal thought remains seemingly unconcerned that for all practical
purposes, its only consumers are legal academics and perhaps a few law students -persons who are virtually never in a position to put any of its wonderful
normative advice into effect.
pragmatists, efficiency purveyors, civic republicans, or Hercules surrogates?

Externalizing ethics onto legal institutions trades off with personal ethics
turns the case and independently kills value to life
Rozo, 4
Diego Rozo, MA in philosophy and Cultural Analysis; Forgiving the Unforgivable:
On Violence, Power, and the Possibility of Justice, p. 19-21 //bghs-ms
[Gender modified]
Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic
where suffering is exchanged for more, but legal suffering, because these
relations are no longer regulated by the culture of the heart [Kultur des Herzens]. (CV
245) As Benjamin describes it, the legal system tries to erect, in all areas where individual
ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be realized only by
legal power. (CV 238) The individual is not to take law in his their own hands; no
conflict should be susceptible of being solved without the direct intervention of
law, lest its authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as
indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The consequence of this
infiltration of law throughout the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more
inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the individual becomes. Legal
and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual . Even the
possibility of forgiveness is monopolized by the state under the right of mercy. Hence the
responsibility of the person toward the others is now delegated on the
authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents of (legal)

exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others,

breaking the moral proximity that makes every ethics possible .20 Thus I am no
longer obliged to an other that by his/her very presence would demand me to be
worthy of the occasion (of every occasion), because law, by seeking to regulate affairs
between individuals, makes this other anonymous, virtual: his their otherness is
equaled to that of every possible other. The Other becomes faceless, making it all
too easy for me to ignore his their demands of justice, and even to exert on him
them violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of evil, then, becomes not a
means but an end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of the states survival.
Hence, the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of my unconditional
responsibility towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarian
institutions of a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self-preserving vengeance . The
vengeance

undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that

the worst could be exerted in the name of law. Even the very notion of crimes
against humanity, which seeks to protect the life of the population, can be
overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own
population.22 From now on, my responsibility towards the Other is taken from me,
at the price of my own existence being constantly threatened by the imminent and
fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate offence. In
this picture, the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of
state violence the law infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts .
They are more interested in playing hermeneutic games than engaging in
politics, the preoccupation with pretending to be policymakers traps them
in a spectator position and bars them from recognizing the bureaucratic
violence of legal praxis.
Schlag 90 (Pierre Schlag, professor of law@ univ. Colorado, stanford law review,
november, page lexis)
All of this can seem very funny. That's because it is very funny. It is also deadly serious. It is deadly serious,

normative legal thought, as Robert Cover explained, takes place in a field

of pain and death. n56 And in a very real sense Cover was right. Yet as it takes place, normative
legal thought is playing language games -- utterly oblivious to the
character of the language games it plays, and thus, utterly uninterested in
considering its own rhetorical and political contributions (or lack thereof)
to the field of pain and death. To be sure, normative legal thinkers are
often genuinely concerned with reducing the pain and the death . However, the
because all this

problem is not what normative legal thinkers do with normative legal thought, but what normative legal thought

What is missing in normative legal thought is any

serious questioning, let alone tracing, of the relations that the practice,
the rhetoric, the routine of normative legal thought have (or do not have) to the
field of pain and death. And there is a reason for that: Normative legal thought misunderstands its
does with normative legal thinkers.

own situation. Typically, normative legal thought understands itself to be outside the field of pain and death and in
charge of organizing and policing that field. It is as if the action of normative legal thought could be separated
from the background field of pain and death. This theatrical distinction is what allows normative legal thought its
own self-important, self-righteous, self-image -- its congratulatory sense of its own accomplishments and
effectiveness. All this self-congratulation works very nicely so long as normative legal [*188] thought continues to
imagine itself as outside the field of pain and death and as having effects within that field. n57 Yet it is doubtful
this image can be maintained. It is not so much the case that normative legal thought has effects on the field of
pain and death -- at least not in the direct, originary way it imagines. Rather, it is more the case that

normative legal thought is the pattern, is the operation of the bureaucratic

distribution and the institutional allocation of the pain and the death. n58
And apart from the leftover ego-centered rationalist rhetoric of the eighteenth century (and our routine), there is
nothing at this point to suggest that we, as legal thinkers, are in control of normative legal thought. The problem

the normative appeal of normative legal thought

systematically turns us away from recognizing that normative legal
thought is grounded on an utterly unbelievable re-presentation of the field
it claims to describe and regulate. The problem for us is that normative
legal thought, rather than assisting in the understanding of present
political and moral situations, stands in the way. It systematically
reinscribes its own aesthetic -- its own fantastic understanding of the
political and moral scene. n59Until normative legal thought begins to deal with its own paradoxical
postmodern rhetorical situation, it will remain something of an irresponsible
enterprise. In its rhetorical structure, it will continue to populate the legal
academic world with individual humanist subjects who think themselves
empowered Cartesian egos, but who are largely the manipulated
constructions of bureaucratic practices -- academic and otherwise.
for us, as legal thinkers, is that

1nc shell #2
My partner and I advocate the entirety of the 1ac minus the plan text.
The affirmatives concept of violence as external from their own lives
allows individuals to abdicate their responsibility. Denial of our individual
culpability with violence forecloses the possibility of meaningful change;
in the process, violence becomes more likely.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Al Akhawayn University. "The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal
Behavior", p. 1-4)
the violence which is talked about is always the violence
committed by someone else: women talk about the violence of men, adults about the violence of young
What is striking is that

people; the left, liberals and the centre about the violence of right extremists; the right, centre and liberals about
the violence of leftist extremists; political activists talk about structural violence, police and politicians about
violence in the `street', and all together about the violence in our society. Similarly, Westerners talk about violence

Violence is
recognized and measured by its visible effects, the spectacular blood of wounded
bodies, the material destruction of objects, the visible damage left in the world of
`objects'. In its measurable damage we see the proof that violence has taken place,
the violence being reduced to this damage . The violation as such, or invisible forms of
violence - the non-physical violence of threat and terror, of insult and humiliation, the violation of human dignity
- are hardly ever the issue except to some extent in feminist and anti-racist
analyses, or under the name of psychological violence. Here violence is recognized
by the victims and defined from their perspective - an important step away from the
catalogue of violent acts and the exclusive evidence of material traces in the object.
Yet even here the focus tends to be on the effects and experience of violence, either
the objective and scientific measure of psychological damage, or the increasingly
subjective definition of violence as experience. Violence is perceived as a
phenomenon for science to research and for politics to get a grip on. But violence is
not a phenomenon: it is the behaviour of people, human action which may be
analysed. What is missing is an analysis of violence as action - not just as acts of
violence, or the cause of its effects, but as the actions of people in relation to other
people and beings or things. Feminist critique, as well as other political critiques,
has analysed the preconditions of violence, the unequal power relations which
enable it to take place. However, under the pressure of mainstream science and a
sociological perspective which increasingly dominates our thinking, it is becoming
standard to argue as if it were these power relations which cause the violence.
Underlying is a behaviourist model which prefers to see human action as the
exclusive product of circumstances, ignoring the personal decision of the agent to
act, implying in turn that circumstances virtually dictate certain forms of behaviour.
Even though we would probably not underwrite these propositions in their crass form, there is nevertheless a
growing tendency, not just in social science, to explain violent behaviour by its
circumstances. (Compare the question, `Does pornography cause violence?') The circumstances identified
in the Balkans, Western citizens together with their generals about the violence of the Serbian army.

may differ according to the politics of the explainers, but the method of explanation remains the same. While
consideration of mitigating circumstances has its rightful place in a court of law trying (and defending) an offender,

this does not automatically make it an adequate or sufficient practice for political

analysis. It begs the question, in particular, `What is considered to be part of the

circumstances (and by whom)?' Thus in the case of sexual offenders, there is a routine search - on the part of
the tabloid press or professionals of violence - for experiences of violence in the offender's own past, an

the relevant
factors are sought in the distant past and in other contexts of action, e a crucial
factor in the present context is ignored, namely the agent's decision to act as he
did. Even politically oppositional groups are not immune to this mainstream
sociologizing. Some left groups have tried to explain men's sexual violence as the
result of class oppression, while some Black theoreticians have explained the
violence of Black men as the result of racist oppression. The ostensible aim of these
arguments may be to draw attention to the pervasive and structural violence of
classism and racism, yet they not only fail to combat such inequality, they actively
contribute to it. Although such oppression is a very real part of an agent's life
context, these `explanations' ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the
same oppression uses violence, that is, that these circumstances do not `cause'
violent behaviour. They overlook, in other words, that the perpetrator has decided to
violate, even if this decision was made in circumstances of limited choice. To
overlook this decision, however, is itself a political decision, serving particular interests .
In the first instance it serves to exonerate the perpetrators, whose responsibility is thus
transferred to circumstances and a history for which other people (who remain beyond
reach) are responsible. Moreover, it helps to stigmatize all those living in poverty and
oppression; because they are obvious victims of violence and oppression, they are
held to be potential perpetrators themselves.' This slanders all the women who
have experienced sexual violence, yet do not use violence against others, and libels
those experiencing racist and class oppression, yet do not necessarily act out
violence. Far from supporting those oppressed by classist, racist or sexist
oppression, it sells out these entire groups in the interest of exonerating individual
members. It is a version of collective victim-blaming, of stigmatizing entire social
strata as potential hotbeds of violence, which rests on and perpetuates the
mainstream division of society into so-called marginal groups - the classic clienteles of social
work and care politics (and of police repression) - and an implied `centre' to which all the
speakers, explainers, researchers and careers themselves belong, and which we are
to assume to be a zone of non-violence. Explaining people's violent behaviour by
their circumstances also has the advantage of implying that the `solution' lies in a
change to circumstances. Thus it has become fashionable among socially minded
politicians and intellectuals in Germany to argue that the rising neo-Nazi violence of young
people (men), especially in former East Germany, needs to be countered by combating poverty
and unemployment in these areas. Likewise anti-racist groups like the Anti. Racist
Alliance or the Anti-Nazi League in Britain argue that `the causes of racism, like
poverty and unemployment, should be tackled and that it is `problems like
unemployment and bad housing which lead to racism' .' Besides being no explanation at all of
understanding which is rapidly solidifying in scientific model of a `cycle of violence'. That is,

why (white poverty and unemployment should lead specifically to racist violence (and what would explain middle-

it is more than questionable to combat poverty only (but precisely)

when and where violence is exercised. It not only legitimates the violence (by
`explaining' it), but constitutes an incentive to violence, confirming that social problems
will be taken seriously when and where `they attract attention by means of violence
and upper-class racism),

- just as the most unruly children in schools (mostly boys) tend to get more attention from teachers than wellbehaved and quiet children (mostly girls). Thus if German neo-Nazi youths and youth groups, since their murderous

assaults on refugees and migrants in Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Dresden etc., are treated to special youth projects and
social care measures (to the tune of DM 20 million per year), including `educative' trips to Morocco and Israel,' this
is am unmistakable signal to society that racist violence does indeed 'pay off'.

Political violence is sustained by organized thinking that looks at violence

through meta-analysis. We need to have deeper insight that realizes that
each of us are culpable for violence. This is integral to ending the cycle of
violence.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Al Akhawayn University. "The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal
Behavior", p. 8-11)
personal behaviour is no alternative to `political' action; there is no question
of either/or. My concern, on the contrary, is the connection between these
recognized forms of violence and the forms of everyday behaviour which we
consider `normal' but which betray our own will to violence - the connection, in
other words, between our own actions and those acts of violence which are
normally the focus of our political critiques. Precisely because there is no choice
between dedicating oneself either to `political issues' or to `personal
behaviour', the question of the politics of personal behaviour has (also) to be
moved into the centre of our politics and our critique. Violence - what we
usually recognize as such - is no exception to the rules, no deviation from the
normal and nothing out of the ordinary, in a society in which exploitation and oppression are
Moreover,

the norm, the ordinary and the rule. It is no misbehaviour of a minority amid good behaviour by the majority, nor
the deeds of inhuman monsters amid humane humans, in a society in which there is no equality, in which people
divide others according to race, class, sex and many other factors in order to rule, exploit, use, objectify, enslave,
sell, torture and kill them, in which millions of animals are tortured, genetically manipulated, enslaved and

It is no error of judgement, no moral

lapse and no transgression against the customs of a culture which is
thoroughly steeped in the values of profit and desire, of self-realization,
expansion and progress. Violence as we usually perceive it is `simply' a
specific - and to us still visible - form of violence, the consistent and
logical application of the principles of our culture and everyday life. War
does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not
the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not
shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of
children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The
violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our
personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation, the
ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the
`outbreak' of war, of sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and
destruction possible at all. 'We are the war', writes Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her
slaughtered daily for `harmless' consumption by humans.

existential analysis of the question, `what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell [my friend], but I see it

It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while
they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my
unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have a yellow form
[for refugees] and I don't, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and
changes our feelings, relationships, values - in short: us. We are the war ...
everywhere.

we cannot hold anyone else responsible. We make this war

possible, we permit it to happen.' `We are the war' - and we also `are' the
sexual violence, the racist violence, the exploitation and the will to
violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called `peacetime', for
we make them possible and we permit them to happen. `We are the war'
does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and
diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians
And I am afraid that

and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of `collective irresponsibility', where people are no
longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the

the object is precisely to analyse the

specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse
situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels
of power by those in a position to make them and to command such
collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their
decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective
`assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where
the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in
relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own
responsibility - leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent
`powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political
disillusionment. Single citizens - even more so those of other nations - have come to feel
secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political
events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia - since the decisions for
such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are
not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian
president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no
responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus
into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of
action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any
relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the
connections between those political decisions and our own personal
decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls
`organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection
between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually
organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and
unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the
major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot `do' anything,
say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation;
because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why
many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in
a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of `What would I do if I were
the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the
minister of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and
equivalent of a universal acquittal.' On the contrary,

truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if
I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually
no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile . For my own action I obviously desire
the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever
more prevalent formulations like `I want to stop this war', `I want military intervention', `I want to stop this
backlash', or `I want a moral revolution.' 7 ,

We are this war', however, even if we do not

command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks , namely as Drakulic

says, in our 'non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for
our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring
innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated
arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages
these offer. And we `are' the war in our `unconscious cruelty towards you',
our tolerance of the `fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I
don't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and
one for refugees, one of our own and one for the `others'. We share in the
responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow
inside us, that is, in the way we shape `our feelings, our relationships, our
values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence . So if
we move beyond the usual frame of violence, towards the structures of
thought employed in decisions to act, this also means making an analysis
of action. This seems all the more urgent as action seems barely to be
perceived any longer. There is talk of the government doing `nothing', of
its `inaction', of the need for action, the time for action, the need for
strategies, our inability to act as well as our desire to become `active'
again. We seem to deem ourselves in a kind of action vacuum which, like
the cosmic black hole, tends to consume any renewed effort only to
increase its size. Hence this is also an attempt to shift the focus again to
the fact that we are continually acting and doing, and that there is no
such thing as not acting or doing nothing.

None of us have our hands on the levers of power; instead we need to

interrogate our own will to violence; only by politicizing the way we think
about violence can we find ways to end the cycle of violence.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Al Akhawayn University. "The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal
Behavior", p. 4-5)
If we nevertheless continue to explain violence by its circumstances and
attempt to counter it by changing these circumstances, it is also because
in this way we stay in command of the problem. In particular, we do not
complicate the problem by any suggestions that it might be people who
need to change. Instead, we turn the perpetrators of violence into the
victims of circumstances, who as victims by definition, cannot act sensibly
(but in changed circumstances will behave differently. We, on the other
hand, are the subjects able to take in hand the task of changing the
circumstances. Even if changing the circumstance combating poverty,
unemployment, injustice, etc. may not be easy, it nevertheless remains
within our scope at least theoretically and by means of state power.
Changing people, on the other hand, is neither within our power nor, it
seems, ultimately in our interest: we prefer to keep certain people under
control, putting limits on their violent behavior, but we apparently have no
interest in a politics that presupposes people's ability to change and aims

at changing attitudes and behavior. For changing (as opposed to restricting)

other people's behavior is beyond the range and influence of our own
power; only they themselves can change it. It requires their will to
change, their will not to abuse power and not to use violence. A politics
aiming at a change in people's behavior would require political work that
is very much more cumbersome and very much less promising of success
than is the use of state power and social control. It would require political
consciousness-raising politicizing the way we think which cannot be
imposed on others by force or compulsory educational measures. It would
require a view of people which takes seriously and reckons with their will,
both their will to violence and their will to change. To take seriously the
will of others however would mean recognizing one's own, and putting
people's will, including our own, at the centre of political reflection. A
political analysis of violence needs to recognize this will, the personal
decision in favour of violence - not just to describe acts of violence, or the
conditions which enable them to take place, but also to capture the moment of
decision which is the real impetus for violent action. For without this decision
there will be no violent act, not even in circumstances which potentially
permit it. It is the decision to violate, not just the act itself, which makes a
person a perpetrator of violence - just as it is the decision not to do so
which makes people not act violently and not abuse their power in a
situation which would nevertheless permit it. This moment of decision,
therefore, is also the locus of potential resistance to violence. To understand the
structures of thinking and the criteria, by which such decisions are reached, but
above all to regard this decision as an act of choice, seems to me a necessary
precondition for any political struggle against violence and for a non-violent society.

Ext impact
When the State Becomes a Sacred Event Unrestrained Nationalism
Produces Endless Slaughter.
Beres 94 (Louis Rene, Professor of International Law in the Department of Political
Science @ Purdue University, Ph.D., Princeton University. Arizona Journal of International
and Comparative Law, ARTICLE: SELF-DETERMINATION, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND
SURVIVAL ON PLANET EARTH Spring 1994. Lexis Nexis)
The State presents itself as sacred. The idea of the State as sacred is met with horror and indignation,
especially in the democratic, secular West, but this notion is indisputable. Throughout
much of the contemporary world, the expectations of government are always cast in terms of
religious obligation. And in those places where the peremptory claims of faith are in conflict with such expectations, it
is the latter that invariably prevail. With States as the new gods, the profane has become not
only permissible, it is now altogether sacred. Consider the changing place of the State in world affairs.
Although it has long been observed that States must continually search for an improved power
position as a practical matter, the sacralization of the State is a development of

modern times. This sacralization, representing a break from the traditional [*20]
political realism of Thucydides, n57 Thrasymachus n58 and Machiavelli, n59 was fully developed in
Germany. From Fichte 1160 and Hegel, through Ranke and von Treitschke, n6 1 the modern transformation of Realpolitik
has led the planet to its current problematic rendezvous with self- determination.
Rationalist philosophy derived the idea of national sovereignty from the notion of individual liberty, but cast in its modem, postseventeenth century expression, the idea has normally prohibited intervention n62 and acted to oppose human dignity and human
rights. 1163

Left to develop on its continuous flight from reason , the legacy of

unrestrained nationalism can only be endless loathing and slaughter. Ultimately, as

Lewis Mumford has observed, all human energies will be placed at the disposal of a
murderous megamachine with whose advent we will all be drawn
unsparingly into a dreadful ceremony of worldwide sacrifice. The State
that commits itself to mass butchery does not intend to do evil. Rather, according
to Hegels description in the Philosophy of Right, the State is the actualitv of the ethical Idea. It commits itself to

State that
accepts Realpolitik generates an incessant search for victims. Though mired in
blood, the search is tranquil and self-assured, born of the knowledge that the
States deeds are neither infamous nor shameful, but heroic. N65 With Hegels
death for the sake of life, prodding killing with conviction and pure heart. A sanctified killer, the

characterization of the State as the march of God in the world, John Lockes notion of a Social Contract the
notion upon which the United States was founded n66 is fully disposed of, relegated to the ash heap of history.
While the purpose of the State, for Locke, is to provide protection that is otherwise unavailable to individuals the
preservation of their lives, liberties and States for Hegel,

the State stands above any private

interests. It is the spirit of the State,

Volksgeist, rather than of individuals, that

is the presumed creator of advanced civilization. And it is in war, rather than in peace, that a State is judged to

How easily humankind still gives itself to the

new gods. Promised relief from the most terrifying of possibilities -- death and disannearance our
species regularly surrenders itself to formal structures of power and immunity.
Ironically, such surrender brings about an enlargement of the very terrors that
created the new gods in the first place, but we surrender nonetheless. In the words of William
Reich, we lay waste to ourselves by embracing the political plague-mongers. A
necrophilous partnership that promises purity and vitality through the killing of
outsiders. Fear of death, to summarize, not only cripples life, it also creates
entire fields of premature corpses. But how can we be reminded of our mortality in a productive
demonstrate its true worth and potential.

way, a way that would point to a new and dignified polity of private selves and, significantly, to fewer untimely
deaths? One answer lies in the ethics of Epicurus, an enlightened creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will
are essential for international stability.

Ext - link discourse

heir Routinized Depiction of Government Surrenders Consent
The Word Terrocrat Threatens Authority [Prefer Our Linguistics
Analysis]
Mann, 98. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @

Sanford U. Report #TL07B: The Nature of Government Online. [KevC])

We could also describe hallucination as "seeing" or "perceiving" what's not
there - or "seeing" or "perceiving" more than exists in reality. NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) could be described as the science of
representational systems. In our brains we have "neural patterns" or
"models" that attempt to represent reality. For example, in my brain I have a "picture" of a table. If someone
asks me to draw a picture of a table, I access the "picture" or "model" in my head, from which I then draw a table. These "pictures," "models," or "neural

. Our
representational systems are more or less "useful." To the extent that we
use them to predict accurately and produce desirable results, we regard
them as useful. Neuro-Linguistic Programming people have identified three
major ways in which our representational systems differ from reality:
Generalization - e.g., the representational system called "furniture" - or the "intellectual" neural pattern: "all women are the same."
Distortion - e.g., "the color of my car is blue" - the physicist tells us this is a distortion; it's more accurate to say that my car's outer surface
reflects light with the wavelength we call "blue," while absorbing light with other wavelengths. Deletion - e.g., "Tom is a wonderful, generous,
happy, healthy individual" - Tom has many other attributes, some of which have been ignored or "deleted" from my representational system. I've
identified a very important fourth way in which our representational
systems differ from reality: Addition - e.g., "John-the-stranger is a King, therefore he has special powers; and the
patterns" are called representational systems. They include intellectual, emotional, visual, auditory, and other sensory data

words that come out of his mouth are special and therefore are the law which must be obeyed." John is really an ordinary man. By representing him as a
"King" in our representational systems, we have added something to what exists in reality. Similarly, John's words are ordinary like those of the rest of

we have added something to

what occurs in reality. The essence of hallucination is "seeing" or
"perceiving" what doesn't really exist or occur. The phenomenon of
addition, as described above, is simply hallucination. To have a neural
patterns or mental models that say "the government runs the country,"
"government makes law," "Slick Willy is President of the U.S.A.," all constitute hallucination.
It's these forms of hallucination that keep "government" in place. Because
practically all humans suffer from similar political hallucinations, they tend
to all agree with each other about certain fundamental political concepts
and notions - such as "government," "state," "country," "nation," "constitution," "king," "president," "law," etc. If
anybody questions or challenges these concepts or nations, they tend to think he's crazy. The phenomenon is mass
hallucination. Here is one of my favorite sentences: "The notion of "law" (so-called) is an hallawcinotion" - it sounds even better in
French: "La notion de la "loi" (soi-disant) est une halloicinotion." How's that for self-referencing?! "Government" is Kept in
Place by Terror and by Violence Ultimately, political power comes from the
barrel of the gun - as Mao said. The last resort of the monsters who
masquerade as "government" is terror and violence. That's why they need the IRS, the ATF, the
FBI, the CIA, etc. They have to threaten, terrorize, punish, and kill to retain their coercive power . Make examples out of
those who question, threaten, or challenge their so-called "authority."
That's why it's appropriate to call them "territorial gangsters" or
"territorial criminals" or "terrocrats" - monsters who use fraud, coercion,
and violence to claim "jurisdiction" over a certain area, and the people who
happen to be in that area. The monsters do so in order to control and
dominate, and to live like parasites or cannibals off the values created by
their victims. The foregoing is another very useful definition of
"government!"us, and when we represent some of his words as "the law" in our representational systems,

Ext: linguistic link

Even If Meaning is Fluid, Certain Words Accumulate Meaning Based on
Repetition Our Linguistic Analysis is More Accurate Its Based on the
Most Inclusive Studies Their Evidence is Flawed.
Mann, 97. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @
Sanford U. The Anatomy of Slavespeak Online.
GENERAL SEMANTICS goes furthest -- it deals not only with words,
assertions and their referents in nature but also with effects on human
behavior. For a 'general semanticist,' communication consists not merely of
words in proper order, properly inflected (as for the grammarian), or
assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician), or
assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all
these, together with the reactions of the nervous systems of the human
beings involved in the communication." The following GS principles (with my personal
interpretations and extensions) I regard as most germane to the subject of Slavespeak. Words Don't Have
Meanings; People Have Meanings Many people suffer from the basic linguistic illusion that "words have
meanings." If a word has a meaning, where do you find it? Can it be found in the sound when you say it? Can you
find it in the ink when you write it? Can you find it in the dictionary, or does the dictionary contain only words?

Consider the possibility

that: Meanings reside in the individual brain; Individuals create, maintain
and update their meanings; Meanings consist of a "neural-patterns-ofinstructions-and-associations"; A "neural-pattern-of-instructions-and-associations" can be
compared to a computer program that essentially tells the user how to use a particular
word; In order for an individual to use a word in a manner such that he or she can think and communicate
What characterizes or distinguishes a meaning and how can you recognize it?

effectively, using that word, requires a brain program vastly more complex, than the "brief-user-instructions" in

Even if you claim that the "brief-user-instructions" constitute the

meaning of a word, an individual couldn't use that word effectively without
integrating at least the meanings of all the words used in the "brief-userinstructions"; In order to use a word effectively, the "brief-userinstructions" have to be "enriched" a thousand-fold, maybe a million-fold;
Operating on the basis that you personally create all the meaning in "your
universe" greatly increases your control over your mental processes,
enabling you to think, communicate, and act much more effectively .
the dictionary;

Corresponding to the word "chair" I have in my brain a generalized picture or template of a range of kinds of
objects that qualify as chairs. This forms part of my meaning for the word "chair." I also have links to other
patterns and memories I relate to "chair." All of this complexity constitutes my meaning for the word "chair" -- a
meaning unique to me and vastly greater and more complex than any "meaning" to be found in a dictionary -- yet
similar to the meanings others have for the word "chair." My meaning (brain-program) for using the word "chair"
includes a module enabling me to determine, when others use the word "chair," whether they use it more or less
the same way I do. (No such "meaning" can be found in the dictionary.) We can communicate because (we have to
assume that) when I say "chair," you trigger, engage, or "boot up" in your brain a meaning similar to mine.
Through observing responses to communication we discern whether or not we refer the same object when we say
"chair." Most importantly, we individually create, maintain, and update our personal meanings. Over time, we can
improve our ability to use any particular word more effectively. We can learn vastly more about any given word
than can be found in the dictionary. For example, I utilized a variant of English called E-Prime to write the portion
of this report dealing with GS. E-Prime does not contain the verb "to be" or any of its variants; otherwise E-Prime
mirrors standard English. (You'll find the reasons for writing this way, below.) You'll also find below, that my
meaning for "to be" and its forms varies dramatically from any "meaning" you can find in a regular dictionary.
Now, what if our meanings constitute our most important creations by a long shot? If so, to what extent do we
render ourselves oblivious of our most important creations? Can we create anything physical, without first
creating it internally in a form that includes meaning? If we render ourselves relatively oblivious of creating our
meanings, how do we affect our awareness of our physical creations and how much control do we have? How

If we ascribe the creation of our meanings to

agencies outside ourselves ("words have meanings"), do we perhaps disown
much responsibility can we demonstrate?

a most important part of ourselves? Do we perform most of our "meaning-processing" more or

less unconsciously? For a more extensive discussion of this principle, see Report #50A: Semantic Rigidity,

The word differs from the thing. In

our minds we make all kinds of maps and models of how we think the world
works. Our concepts (basic ideas) and words constitute maps or models
which represent or reflect (we hope) aspects of the world. Our models and
maps can be more or less useful, measured by the results we produce using
them. Our models and maps -- including our words -- can never do more
than approximate the actual world or the actual phenomena they seek to
represent. Our maps, models, and words (symbols) constitute incomplete abstractions -- condensed,
simplified, and approximated. Ultimately, the actual territory defies verbal
description. Ultimately, the word cannot describe the thing. The world
(territory) has its form or nature. Our description of it (map) includes at best incomplete details.
Flexibility, and Freedom. The Map Differs from the Territory

Hense the GS aphorism (converted into E-Prime): "Whatever description you give something differs from the thing
itself!" The word differs from the thing it tries to describe, reflect, or represent .

Neuro-Linguistic
Programming (NLP), describes three basic ways in which our models or
maps differ from the territory: Deletion -- at best we use partial maps; they
can seldom (if ever) include all the details of the territory. Distortion -- our
maps often include minor or even major inaccuracies; one person "sees" a red car
with two people, another "sees" a brown car with three people; one tennis player "sees" the ball as "in," the

Generalization -- we often have one generalized map that

represents many different parts of the territory. For example, my generalized "cow" map
opponent "sees" it as "out."

might represent cows in general. If someone asks me what breed of cow I saw, a Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, etc.?,
I reply, "What do I care! All cows look the same to me!"

A fourth way in which our maps may

differ from the territory, we've already covered briefly: addition or
hallucination. We "see" and put into our map what does not exist in the
territory. We "see" a "constellation" where only individual stars exist. Our
map contains more than what can be found in the territory -- addition or
hallucination. When scientists tried to find a substance corresponding to the way they "understood" the

word "heat," they attempted to add to the territory an expected "substance" they could never find. Of course,
scientists eventually discovered their error because they require physical evidence which they could never find.
Preponderance of Means over Ends As far as I know (a GS qualification), Hans Vaihinger first enunciated this
principle in his book The Philosophy of As If. He said that our means tend to become more important than our
ends. For example, we want to become happy. We figure if we make lots of money we'll be happy. Money becomes
the means to achieve the end of happiness. Many of us then focus on making money (means), to the extent that we
lose sight of becoming happy (end). The money becomes more important than the happiness; means preponderate

The
preponderance of the map over the territory; or, regarding the map as
more important than the territory. Making the word more important than
the thing. Korzybski called this "Intensional Evaluation -- "Facts" Last." If
we elevate our words in importance above our experience of the world, we
evaluate intensionally. He called this orientation "un-sane" because its
linguistic delusions can endanger our success or survival. For example, if we believe
over ends. In GS a specific aspect of the more general principle above, can be formulated as:

that we can achieve good health by saying, "I create that whatever I eat is good for me," and continue with
unhealthy habits, we behave intensionally or in an un-sane manner. Korzybski claimed that elevating words over
facts causes much human misery, because it leads to dysfunctional, un-sane, evaluating and behavior. To achieve
more sane behaviors, we must look first to experience. Korzybski called this "Extensional Evaluation -- "Facts"
First." The term extensional refers to elevating experience above language. When we observe, sense, and then
describe, we evaluate extensionally. Korzybski considered this a sane way to make our evaluations of the world. To
look, observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc.; and then to describe. Now, if you look back at our two tribes, you'll
find that tribe 1 (the sane ones) practice extensional evaluation, while tribe 2 (the un-sane ones) practice
intensional evaluation. It may be worthwhile to reread the two-tribes story to better grasp the
extensional/intensional distinction. The scientists looking for a substance corresponding to the word "heat,"
evaluated intensionally. They started with the description "heat," then looked and searched the territory in vain for

We experience the world in at least two basic ways: Through

our senses; Through language. We experience the world through our
the "fact" of "heat."

senses as directly as we can. We could call it extensional experience -tends toward greater sanity. When we experience the world through the
intermediary of language indirectly, we could call it intensional experience
-- tends toward less sanity. Hypostatization "Mankind in all ages have had a strong
propensity to conclude that for every name, a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name must
exist; and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual
things, had to have an outward objective reality answering to it." [converted into E-Prime] - J.S. Mill, A System of
Logic "The Fascist State has a consciousness of its own, and a will of its own, on this account constitutes an

Hypostatization
basically refers to construing a word as a thing, or regarding a purely
conceptual idea as a real existent or concrete thing. Hypostatization
closely resembles reification -- regarding something abstract as a material
thing. In his book The Comforts of Unreason: A Study of the Motives behind Irrational Thought, Rupert
Crayshaw-Williams has a chapter on hypostatization, where he analyses hypostatized abstractions
like "England," "Germany," "country," and "nation." He uses the phrases "collective
abstraction" and "empty linguistic convenience." Mill above describes hypostatization or
reification. Mussolini combines reification with personification by treating his
hypostatized "fascist state" (empty linguistic convenience) as a person with
a conscience and a will. Mussolini's map contains more than can be found
in the reality or territory it seeks to represent -- addition, in Mussolini's
case, extreme hallucination -- "seeing" what can't be found.
Hypostatization represents the extreme case of glorifying a map without a
territory -- a word without a thing or discernible referent -- such as the
word "government." To then go further and ascribe to this supposed
"government" volition and magical powers ("The purpose of government is
to do for people what they cannot do for themselves." -- Abraham Lincoln), reflects
personification -- even deification. Hypostatization represents extreme
intensional evaluation -- an empty description , such that, if you look, observe, touch, feel,
test, sample, etc., you fail to find a referent. Vonnegut in effect said, " government represents a
granfalloon." Bentham's "Look to the letter, you find nonsense -- look beyond the letter, you find nothing"
"ethical" state." [converted into E-Prime] - Mussolini on the Doctrine of Fascism

applies here. For a philosophical analysis of "government" (or "state") as an empty linguistic convenience, see the

The majority of political

Slavespeak words constitute examples of hypostatization and intensional
evaluation -- words first, "facts" last; or "false-over-facts"; words without
corresponding things or referents; granfalloons. "Heat" again, represents a classic
article: Deep Anarchy - An Eliminativist View Of "The State".

example of hypostatization. Because scientists had the abstract idea of "heat," they assumed that if they searched

Hypostatization,
reification, personification, deification, and intensional evaluation may all
have their roots in the more primitive forms of a phenomenon called
"participation mystique" by anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl in his book How Natives Think.
Participation mystique can have various elements: kinds of maps and models of how we think the
world works. Our concepts (basic ideas) and words constitute maps or models
which represent or reflect (we hope) aspects of the world. Our models and maps
can be more or less useful, measured by the results we produce using them. Our
models and maps -- including our words -- can never do more than approximate the
actual world or the actual phenomena they seek to represent. Our maps, models, and
words (symbols) constitute incomplete abstractions -- condensed, simplified, and approximated. Ultimately,
the actual territory defies verbal description. Ultimately, the word cannot describe
the thing. The world (territory) has its form or nature . Our description of it (map) includes at
long enough, they would eventually find a substance corresponding to their map.

best incomplete details. Hense the GS aphorism (converted into E-Prime): "Whatever description you give
something differs from the thing itself!" The word differs from the thing it tries to describe, reflect, or represent .

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), describes three basic ways in which our

models or maps differ from the territory: Deletion -- at best we use partial maps;
they can seldom (if ever) include all the details of the territory. Distortion -- our
maps often include minor or even major inaccuracies; one person "sees" a red car with two
people, another "sees" a brown car with three people; one tennis player "sees" the ball as "in," the opponent

Generalization -- we often have one generalized map that represents

many different parts of the territory. For example, my generalized "cow" map might represent cows
"sees" it as "out."

in general. If someone asks me what breed of cow I saw, a Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, etc.?, I reply, "What do I
care! All cows look the same to me!"

A fourth way in which our maps may differ from the

territory, we've already covered briefly: addition or hallucination. We "see" and put
into our map what does not exist in the territory. We "see" a "constellation" where
only individual stars exist. Our map contains more than what can be found in the
territory -- addition or hallucination. When scientists tried to find a substance corresponding to the
way they "understood" the word "heat," they attempted to add to the territory an expected "substance" they could
never find. Of course, scientists eventually discovered their error because they require physical evidence which
they could never find. Preponderance of Means over Ends As far as I know (a GS qualification), Hans Vaihinger
first enunciated this principle in his book The Philosophy of As If. He said that our means tend to become more
important than our ends. For example, we want to become happy. We figure if we make lots of money we'll be
happy. Money becomes the means to achieve the end of happiness. Many of us then focus on making money
(means), to the extent that we lose sight of becoming happy (end). The money becomes more important than the
happiness; means preponderate over ends. In GS a specific aspect of the more general principle above, can be

The preponderance of the map over the territory; or, regarding the map
as more important than the territory. Making the word more important than the
thing. Korzybski called this "Intensional Evaluation -- "Facts" Last." If we elevate
our words in importance above our experience of the world, we evaluate
intensionally. He called this orientation "un-sane" because its linguistic delusions
can endanger our success or survival. For example, if we believe that we can achieve good health by
formulated as:

saying, "I create that whatever I eat is good for me," and continue with unhealthy habits, we behave intensionally
or in an un-sane manner. Korzybski claimed that elevating words over facts causes much human misery, because it
leads to dysfunctional, un-sane, evaluating and behavior. To achieve more sane behaviors, we must look first to
experience. Korzybski called this "Extensional Evaluation -- "Facts" First." The term extensional refers to elevating
experience above language. When we observe, sense, and then describe, we evaluate extensionally. Korzybski
considered this a sane way to make our evaluations of the world. To look, observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc.;
and then to describe. Now, if you look back at our two tribes, you'll find that tribe 1 (the sane ones) practice
extensional evaluation, while tribe 2 (the un-sane ones) practice intensional evaluation. It may be worthwhile to
reread the two-tribes story to better grasp the extensional/intensional distinction. The scientists looking for a
substance corresponding to the word "heat," evaluated intensionally. They started with the description "heat,"

We experience the world in at

least two basic ways: Through our senses; Through language. We experience the
world through our senses as directly as we can. We could call it extensional
experience -- tends toward greater sanity. When we experience the world through
the intermediary of language indirectly, we could call it intensional experience -tends toward less sanity. Hypostatization "Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to
then looked and searched the territory in vain for the "fact" of "heat."

conclude that for every name, a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name must exist; and every
complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual things, had to
have an outward objective reality answering to it." [converted into E-Prime] - J.S. Mill, A System of Logic "The
Fascist State has a consciousness of its own, and a will of its own, on this account constitutes an "ethical" state."

Hypostatization basically refers to

construing a word as a thing, or regarding a purely conceptual idea as a real
existent or concrete thing. Hypostatization closely resembles reification -regarding something abstract as a material thing. In his book The Comforts of Unreason: A
[converted into E-Prime] - Mussolini on the Doctrine of Fascism

Study of the Motives behind Irrational Thought, Rupert Crayshaw-Williams has a chapter on hypostatization,

hypostatized abstractions like "England," "Germany," "country," and

"nation." He uses the phrases "collective abstraction" and "empty linguistic
convenience." Mill above describes hypostatization or reification. Mussolini combines reification
with personification by treating his hypostatized "fascist state" (empty linguistic
convenience) as a person with a conscience and a will. Mussolini's map contains
more than can be found in the reality or territory it seeks to represent -- addition,
where he analyses

in Mussolini's case, extreme hallucination -- "seeing" what can't be found.

Hypostatization represents the extreme case of glorifying a map without a territory
-- a word without a thing or discernible referent -- such as the word "government. "
To then go further and ascribe to this supposed "government" volition and magical
powers ("The purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for
themselves." -- Abraham Lincoln), reflects personification -- even deification.
Hypostatization represents extreme intensional evaluation -- an empty description ,
such that, if you look, observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc., you fail to find a referent. Vonnegut in effect said,
"government represents a granfalloon ." Bentham's "Look to the letter, you find nonsense -- look
beyond the letter, you find nothing" applies here. For a philosophical analysis of "government" (or "state") as an

The
majority of political Slavespeak words constitute examples of hypostatization and
intensional evaluation -- words first, "facts" last; or "false-over-facts"; words
without corresponding things or referents ; granfalloons. "Heat" again, represents a classic
empty linguistic convenience, see the article: Deep Anarchy - An Eliminativist View Of "The State".

example of hypostatization. Because scientists had the abstract idea of "heat," they assumed that if they searched

Hypostatization,
reification, personification, deification, and intensional evaluation may all have
their roots in the more primitive forms of a phenomenon called "participation
mystique" by anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl in his book How Natives Think. Participation mystique can
long enough, they would eventually find a substance corresponding to their map.

have various elements:

Ext link
The Word State Maintains the Myth of a Unified Nationalist
Identity
Mann, 98. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @
Sanford U. Report #TL07B: The Nature of Government Online. [KevC] BBBB)
Reading Spooner's pamphlet was an assault on my whole knowledge structure. It triggered a process of
questioning many concepts such as "constitution" (so-called) - what does this word represent in reality? If Spooner

words did not necessarily

correspond with reality. There were "fraud-words" which served only to
mislead. And if there is no valid "constitution," then what does the word "country" mean? What does it really
represent? Similar questions followed about ''government," "state," "king," "law," etc. In the
was right, then it represented but an empty fraud. It also meant that

Introduction by James J. Martin to Spooner's No Treason, I read: "Since late Neolithic times, men in their

political capacity, have lived almost exclusively by myths [more appropriate:

"fraudulent fabrications "or "murderous misrepresentations!"] And these political myths have
continued to evolve, proliferate, and grow more complex and intricate , even

though there has been a steady replacement of one by another over the centuries. A series of entirely theoretical
constructs, sometimes mystical, usually deductive and speculative, they seek to explain the status and
relationships in the community... It is the assault upon the abstract and verbal underpinnings of this institution
which draws blood, so to speak... those who attack the rationale of the game... are its most formidable
adversaries." [emphasis added] Spooner attacked words and phrases like "the government," "our
country," "the United States," "member of congress," "King," "constitution of the United States," "nations", "the
people," "emperor," "divine right," "president," "monarch," "ambassador," "national debt," "senator," "judge," etc.

He indicated that these were all fraud-words designed to dupe the gullible.

In a letter to Thomas F. Bayard, Spooner wrote: "In practice, the constitution has been an utter fraud from the
beginning. Professing to have been 'ordained and established' by we, the people of the United States, it has never
been submitted to them, as individuals, for their voluntary acceptance... very few of them have ever read, or even
seen it; or ever will read or see it. Of its legal meaning (if it can be said to have any) they really know nothing; and
never did. Nor ever will know anything." Spooner indicated that the people who masqueraded as the so-called
"government" could be more accurately described as fraudulent impostors or a "secret band of thieves, robbers
and murderers." Rick Maybury wrote as follows in an article, "Profiting from the Constitutional Convention,"
published in the November, 1984 issue of an investment newsletter, World Market Perspective:

"Government" is Kept in Place by Certain Fraud-Words Politicians and

bureaucrats use mostly words to impose their will upon others - even when
physical violence is involved, they use words to attempt to justify their
actions. Thomas Szasz wrote in The Second Sin, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is
thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." The language used to
control and dominate others I collectively lump together as "Slavespeak." My "Slavespeak" is similar to the word
"Newspeak," invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use "Slavespeak" in
essentially the same way that Orwell used "Newspeak,", but within the domain of "Slavespeak" I subsume words
that I don't think Orwell would have

included under "Newspeak,": "state," "government," "law,"

"king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime

minister," etc. Slavespeak has developed over many

the use of Slavespeak by freedom lovers as if valid (i.e.,

without questioning its validity, and without considering its consequences),
may easily become counter-productive. I specifically use Slavespeak in the sense of Orwell's "B
centuries. I contend that

vocabulary": "The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political

words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political
implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon
the person using them... the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of
purposes:

ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had

noticed that the tendency

to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian
organizations... the intention being to make speech, and especially speech
been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been

on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent

of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without
involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak'
meaning 'to quack like a duck.'" [emphasis added] I'm also introducing here the concept of "fraud-word." I'm
saying that certain words are fraudulent in themselves. You don't even have to use them in a sentence; the word
itself is a lie. For example, the word "King." We have a perfectly good word "man." When a man calls himself
"King," he's lying as did John-the-stranger above. The word itself is a fraud. In his superb book Restoring the
American Dream, Robert Ringer devoted an entire chapter to how "government" is kept in place by certain words
- Chapter 8: "Keeping It All in Place."

Here is my list of statist fraud-words: "government,"

"state," "country," "nation," "U.S.A.," "empire," "commonwealth," "republic," "society," "emperor," "king,"
"queen," "prince," "princess," "president," "prime minister," "law," "constitution," "public interest," "national
interest," "fair share," "common good," "national security," "social contract," "public policy," "mandate from the

you will realize

the role of language in practically all coercion: be it parents or teachers coercing the
people," etc. Two of the Worst Fraud-Words: "Constitution," and "Law" If you think about it,

young; or those masquerading as (so-called) "state" or "government" coercing (so-called) "subjects."

Politicians and bureaucrats have an armory of weapons they use to coerce

their victims. I put it to you that fraud-words are the most formidable weapons in their armory - not guns
and explosives. Do politicians and bureaucrats use guns or words? I further put it to you that next to
"government," two of their most powerful fraud-words are "law" and "constitution."

Ext: impact
Investing in the law as a marker and method for alleviating violence
reifies a liberal understanding of freedom which has empirically
amplified and cloaked racism.

Kandaswamy 2012/Priya, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Mills

College SYMPOSIUM ON EXPLORING POWER, AGENCY & ACTION IN A WORLD
OF MOVING FRONTIERS: ARTICLE: THE OBLIGATIONS OF FREEDOM AND THE
LIMITS OF LEGAL EQUALITY, 41 Sw. L. Rev. 265/
Despite vast
ways in which the
U.S. state is deeply invested in maintaining social relations of racism, capitalism,
and heteropatriarchy, it is still quite commonplace to assume that to remedy social
injustices one must turn first to the law The pursuit of legal equality is frequently
understood as the most pragmatic approach and a necessary first step to any kind
of broad scale social change. In practice
legal equality struggles have failed to
deliver substantive social justice for many groups
the incompleteness
of legal change,
failures areoften invoked as evidence of the need for further
legal reform rather than prompting the serious consideration of the
law's actual capacity to effect change that perhaps they should

the law maintains

afierce hold on the political imagination
, I argue for the importance of
severing that hold. The assumptions that legal reform is a
pragmatic and necessary first step to social justice is a reflection of the
boundaries that circumscribe what is imagined as politically possible within
dominant discourse rather than the essential truths they are often taken to be
legal interventions will always simultaneously reinforce the legal authority of the
U.S. state, legal reform is bound to reiterate rather than transform unequal
distributions of power. Pinning political possibilities to the law circumscribes
the boundaries of change in very narrow ways

array of critiques that have elucidated the

, however,

. Frequently written off as a sign of

these

back on them, citing legal reform as a necessary evil, the best that

Even those critical of legal strategies frequently fall

can be achieved in the current political context, or the first step toward broader changes. In this way,
.

In this essay

. To the extent

that

. Instead, movements for social justice must seek to open up possibilities for

transformation and

evaluate their engagements with the law in terms of the [*266] future possibilities those engagements might open or foreclose. In other words, rather than presume legal equality is the answer, it is necessary to engage with
the more complex questions about what freedom should and could look like and locate legal interventions in relation to this broader vision. In order to illustrate these points, I turn first to the historical example of
emancipation and the consequent conferral of citizenship to formerly enslaved people, a quintessential moment in the expansion of legal rights in U.S. history. I look to Reconstruction Era struggles over the meaning of
citizenship specifically because they mark a particularly defining moment in the reconfiguration of racial violence through the construct of the liberal subject. Given the ways that U.S. citizenship had been defined against
blackness, the Fourteenth Amendment's extension of citizenship rights to freed people forced the nation to grapple with what racially inclusive citizenship in a nation forged through racial violence would look like. Therefore,
considering the legacies of this historical period raises crucial issues for contemporary struggles for inclusion, equality and the extension of legal rights, particularly given the role emancipation has played as an important
historical reference point for these struggles. Emancipation marked a moment of great possibility, and freed people held broad and diverse visions of freedom that included reparations, land ownership, freedom of mobility, and

legal recognition as citizens worked to

constrain and curtail these more expansive possibilities of freedom by locking
freedom
into an idiom defined by obligation, indebtedness,
and responsibility n2 Rather than mitigate the significance of racial difference in
the national imagination the conferral of
rights collaborated in "the persistent
production of blackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent,
irrational, and infectious" n3 and obliged freed people to shoulder
the responsibilities and burdens of perpetually having to demonstrate their
preparedness for and deservingness of citizenship in a context where their
blackness marked them as otherwise
evident in the ways that state
institutions prioritized enforcing labor and sexual discipline amongst freed people
other self-defined mechanisms of individual and collective self-determination. n1 However, as Saidiya Hartman shows,

for black people

citizenship

. n4 This was

[*267]

. n5

As the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau's Assistant Commissioner Orlando Brown wrote, if freed people were to be citizens, it was necessary "to make the Freedmen into a self-supporting class of free laborers, who shall

racism fundamentally
shaped recognition as a liberal subject While for white male citizensliberal
understand the necessity of steady employment and the responsibility of providing for themselves and [their] families." n6 As Hartman shows, anti-black
. n7

individualism had afforded a kind of entitlement and self-determination , for freed

people, recognition as a liberal subject rendered one responsible and therefore
blameworthy.

n8 This was particularly evident in

the workings of contract. A key distinction between the free person and the slave was self-ownership signified primarily

through the capacity to enter

into contract. n9 The understanding of legal freedom as self-possession meant that there was no inherent contradiction between subordination and freedom as long as subordination was secured through a freely entered into
contract, a phenomenon most clearly illustrated by the labor and marriage contracts. n10 For freed people who had both been structurally denied access to other material resources through slavery and who were subject to

despite the fact that they

functioned to limit black people's mobility, secure the hyper-exploitation of black
labor, and provided the ground for the development of carceral institutions
directed at the punishment of black people entering into the labor contract
became discursively understood as the quintessential sign of freedom

contract provided a rubric for

reinventing relations of subordination by obscuring national responsibility for the
injustices of slavery and instead displacing this responsibility onto the shoulders
of the formerly enslaved.
Liberal concepts of
freedom also functioned as a mechanism of regulating gender and
sexuality through the marriage contract

as an institution would
help civilize freed people by instilling heteropatriarchal gender norms
vagrancy laws that criminalized the refusal to enter into long-term labor contracts, contracts were very much coerced. n11 However,

, n12

. n13 In

called upon to demonstrate their independence and deservingness of freedom by fulfilling the

fact, freed people were

terms of the [*268] labor contract. n14 In this way,

n15 Freedom was rewritten as obligation and independence manifested as a burden.

n16

. While marriages and other kinship ties were not legally recognized under slavery, one of the first

people gained was marriage recognition. n17 However, as Katherine Franke points out, the extension of

rights freed

marriage rights was grounded in the belief that marriage

. n18 A key element of the

rationalization of slavery was the construction of black inferiority as marked by a lack of the gender differentiation that was seen as characteristic of civilization. n19 As Matt Richardson describes, "early attempts to congeal
racist taxonomies of difference through anatomical investigation and ethnographic observation produced the Black body as always already variant and Black people as the essence of gender aberrance, thereby defining the
norm by making the Black its opposite." n20 While marriage recognition did provide some tangible protections to married freed people, the belief in marriage as a civilizing institution simultaneously reiterated and valorized
white supremacist beliefs that black people's inferiority was evidenced in their lack of appropriate gender and sexuality. n21 Additionally, the extension of marriage rights provided the ground upon which alternative sexual

As a result of the
legal recognition of black marriages, many freed people faced convictions for
adultery, fornication, cohabitation, and the failure to provide for their lega
dependents
created new obligations and new
grounds upon which people might be punished
biopower

the capacity to "make live" in particular ways

arrangements were criminalized and rationalized state austerity toward black people by constructing the self-sufficient household as the means to economic security. n22

[*269]

. n23 In this way, much like the labor contract, the extension of rights in fact
black

emergence of

Michel Foucault argues that one of the distinguishing features of the modern state is the

n24 Unlike sovereign power that is expressed in the capacity to take life, biopower is invested in the production of

normalization and regularization, and ultimately

knowledge about and regulation of populations, processes of

. n25 However, Foucault also notes that sovereign

power does not simply disappear but rather that the state continues to exercise sovereign power alongside biopower. n26 This process is delimited by state racism, which "introduces a break into the domain of life that is
under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die." n27 As biopower becomes concerned with regulating the life of the population, racism marks the bodies upon which sovereign power must still be
exercised. n28 Killing the internal or external racial threat becomes understood as a necessary element to making the population stronger. n29 Scholars such as Ann Stoler and Scott Morgensen have elaborated on Foucault's

Hartman's analysis of antiblack racism and the constitution of the liberal subject

highlights the central role of racial violence in the elaboration of state pow
rather scant discussion of racism showing the ways in which biopower in fact emerges in relation to and as a function of colonial violence. n30

complicates Foucault's analysis and adds to

that

scholarship

er. n31 As

Hartman shows, during Reconstruction, black people were simultaneously subject to the normalizing and violent powers of the state, or perhaps more accurately normalizing processes became yet another vehicle for state
violence. n32 On the one hand, freed people were subject to [*270] constant surveillance as their moral capacity for citizenship was always in question, and any failure to comply with labor or marriage contracts was read as
evidence of this incapacity. n33 On the other hand, contractual freedom provided a basis for the state's total disinvestment in black life, thereby making it more or less impossible to live up to the ideals of citizenship. n34 In

the seeming contradictions between racialinclusion and racial violence were

effectively displaced by locating responsibility for state violence in those
who suffered from its effects.

this way,

The black subject was thus brought into the fold of citizenship but as a subject always in need

of reform or punishment. This historical example

powerfully illustrates the ways in which inclusion into citizenship rights can operate as a technique of domination and the role the construct of the liberal subject plays in maintaining state racism. n35 Certainly, laws have
changed a great deal since Reconstruction. However, the differentiated structure of citizenship grounded in anti-black racism that Hartman describes still operates. n36 For example, contemporary political struggles over
marriage reflect the processes by which marriage can secure entitlements for one social group while exacting social obligations from another. On the one hand, a mainstream, predominantly white gay and lesbian movement
seeks access to a wide array of property and social rights through same-sex marriage recognition. n37 On the other hand, marriage incentive programs and increasingly punitive welfare regulations cast marriage and the
economic self-sufficiency that supposedly [*271] comes with it as an obligation for welfare recipients who are most frequently represented as black women. n38 Another terrain upon which racially stratified constructions of
citizenship are evident is in struggles for state protection from violence. Legislation that has increasingly criminalized violence against women and hate crimes against LGBT people holds out the promise of greater equality
and freedom for some by expanding a system of mass incarceration that targets women of color and queer and transgender people of color. n39 In fact, the increasingly punitive and austere orientation of the U.S. welfare state
and the expansion of the prison industrial complex can be understood as the logical extension of the processes of liberal subjection that Hartman outlines. n40 On the one hand, the state disinvests in black life. n41 On the
other hand, processes of criminalization hold individuals responsible for the effects of that disinvestment, displacing responsibility for state violence onto those who feel its effects most and punishing those bodies for their

The assumption that legal equality strategies are the most pragmatic
pathways through which resistance movement might effect change presumes that
recognition as a free and equal liberal subject by the state
is universally desirable, possible, and emancipatory. A historical view, however,
demonstrates that the abstract construction of the liberal subject has functioned
in particular ways to secure continued anti-black violence and that, for many,
liberal subjecthood itself rationalizes and begets state violence. It is essential that
structural location. n42

the utility of the law for social change be assessed from the vantage point of
people who live at this conjuncture My point then is to insist on the necessity
of vociferously challenging hegemonic understanding of how the law works and
what the law offers movements for social change by centering the experiences of
those for whom legal citizenship and the extension of rights have undermined
rather than advanced struggles for freedom. Legal change is often construed as
the benchmark of success for social movements. However, the case
of Reconstruction clearly demonstrates how legal recognition can in practice
[*272] produce a narrowing of political possibilities and a fixing of responsibility
for social injustice onto the black bodies While Reconstruction
is frequently narrated as the transition from slavery to freedom, it is more
accurate to recognize the ways in which the state reduced the multiple
possible meanings of freedom to the rubrics of liberal individualism and
contract

. These rubrics produced black people as both

formally free and structurally subordinated thereby reconciling state racism with the extension of citizenship.

However, it is important to remember that

both in the past and in the present many other concepts of freedom exist and are exercised. For example, Elsa Barkley Brown demonstrates how freed people sought to defy liberal individualism and the exclusion of women
from suffrage by exercising the vote as a collective resource. n43 Tera Hunter shows how black women saw freedom as something to enjoy by reclaiming their time and their bodies. n44 In addition, there is a vast black radical
tradition of intellectual and cultural production that has persistently challenged anti-black racism while putting forward alternate visions of freedom. n45 In the contemporary moment, Native American conceptions of
sovereignty actively challenge settler colonialism and show how structures of collective belonging that are not embedded in state violence might be instated. n46 A vibrant prison abolition movement seeks to dismantle
incarceration in all its form and imagine a world without prisons. n47 Queer and gender nonconforming communities have developed a broad range of strategies for securing community survival and creating spaces to develop
different ways of living without relying upon the law. n48 Feminists of color are building community based mechanisms for addressing interpersonal and state violence against women. n49 These are but a few important

Rather than building on and cultivating these more

expansive notions of freedom
insistence that legal equality is a pragmatic and
necessary first step to change erases them.

it is imperative to decenter the law in

struggles for social justice. Rather than viewing legal change as a benchmark of
success or situating legal equality as a primary goal, it might be more effective to
focus struggles around specific harms.

examples of what [*273] exists beyond the purview of the law.

however,

While there is no easy solution to the dilemmas the law produces for social justice movements, I conclude

by

suggesting some important principles that might be used to rethink our relationship to the law. First,

For example, the

historical case I have discussed shows that legal equality and inclusion is not the most productive site

of struggle because even if it is secured it does not ameliorate and can actually reproduce the violence people experience in their lives. It seems more appropriate to target those forms of violence directly by naming them,
targeting their root causes, and holding state institutions accountable for their perpetuation rather than relying upon an abstract rubric of equality. n.

Ext impact
Investing Power in the Word Government Has Caused the Death of
Millions as Bodies Become Mobilized for a Nationalist Identity
Mann, 97. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @
Sanford U. The Anatomy of Slavespeak Online. AAAA)

The Killer Word "Government" In Restoring The American Dream Robert Ringer acknowledges the influence of Sy
Leon, author of None of The Above. Sy Leon attacked the arrogant and pretentious words and phrases politicians
used (what I call Slavespeak): "Mandate of the people," "majority rule," "democracy," "treason" (betraying a
politician), "assassination" (killing a politician), "tax" (stealing by a politician), "the draft" (slavery practiced by
politicians), "war" (murder organized by politicians on a massive scale), "conspiracy" (talking with others about
defending yourself against politicians), "perjury" (lying to a politician), "public good," "public welfare," "public
duty," "national interest," "public service," "public servant," "eminent domain" (theft of property by politicians),
"legal tender," "counterfeiter" (a non-politician who prints paper currency), "society," "domestic policy," "foreign
policy," "cutthroat competition," etc. Sy Leon writes about "the verbal legerdemain of politicalese" as "one of the
worst frauds ever perpetrated on mankind..." In The Virtue Of Selfishness Ayn Rand wrote: "It is not a mere
semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word "selfishness"
is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual "package-deal" [of contradictory elements and
emotional associations], which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral

The use of one word can have vast and far-reaching

consequences. Suppose I brand you as "selfish" in front of a typical audience. This probably triggers
development of mankind."

emotions in the audience, such as disgust and hatred. It probably also triggers associations, such as: "He only
cares about himself"; "He's greedy"; "He takes unfair advantage of others"; etc. The word "selfishness" constitutes

Slavespeak words (like "government," "state,"

are such intellect-devastating, thoughtdestroying package-deals -- that tend to trigger automatic meanings,
images, associations, emotions, attitudes, and hypnotic, stupefying inhibitions -- beneficial to
terrocrats and harmful to their victims. In None of the Above Sy Leon wrote: "Politics is an
intellectual anesthetic. It can dull the mind, put it to sleep, or even kill it permanently. This is not an
a devastating package-deal. And I suggest that most
"constitution," "law," "king," "president," etc.)

incidental side effect; it is a calculated result that keeps the politician in business..." The effect is created

through the deliberate and careful use of certain words . "Keeping It All in Place" is
Robert Ringer's title for Chapter 8 of his Restoring The American Dream. Most of the chapter is devoted to

(collection of weapons) -- what I call political Slavespeak -- of words

terrocrats use to maintain their power and keep their victims in subjugation .
theARSENAL

Robert Ringer analyses terms such as: "government," "society," "country," "taxation," "conscription," "loophole,"
"windfall," "inflation," "patriotic," "obligation," "justice," "fair," "decent," "duty," "public morals," "public property,"

Each of these terms, to the

degree that it's accepted as valid, adds to the power of terrocrats and reduces
"public good," "public interest," "good of society," "duty to society," etc.

the power and freedom of their victims. Now let's focus our attention on one word: "government." In None of the
Above Sy Leon also wrote: "...[I]ntellectually active people do not think in a rut; they consider new ways, new
alternatives; many of which may never have been attempted before. But this kind of questioning spells death for
politics ...[C]onsidering alternatives; the willingness to challenge and explore -- this is what freedom and
independence are all about." Author Kurt Vonnegut coined the word "granfalloon" to describe abstract concepts
like "nation," "state," "country," "government," "society," "IBM," etc. He wrote, "To discover the substance of a
granfalloon, just prick a hole in a toy balloon." In his book The Incredible Secret Money Machine, Don Lancaster
explains: "A granfalloon is any large bureaucratic figment of people's imagination. For instance, there's really no
such thing as the Feds or the General Veeblefeltzer Corporation. There are a bunch of people out there that relate
to each other, and there's some structures, and some paper. In fact, there's lots and lots of paper. The people sit in
the structures and pass paper back and forth to each other and charge you to do so. All these people, structures,
and paper are real. But nowhere can you point to the larger concept of "government" or "corporation" and say,
"There it is, kiddies!" The monolithic, big "they" is all in your mind." [emphasis added] A granfalloon is the
lumping together of many diverse elements into an abstract collection, and to then think and speak as if the
abstract collection is one single entity capable of performing actions. This phenomenon leads people to say things
like "the government runs the country." I hope you realize by now just how absurd the previous Slavespeak

Consider the possibility that because people generally consider

this word/concept as valid and a given, they think, communicate, and
behave in ways that have resulted in over a hundred million people
slaughtered during this, the Twentieth Century. Because of political
brainwashing the "citizens" believe they must "fight for their country ." When
sentence is!

the terrocrats say, "Go kill the

evil enemy," the "loyal citizens" take up arms and proceed to slaughter each other. Would this happen on such a
massive scale in the absence of Slavespeak? Consider the possibility that in the same way that the entire "legal"

the entire coercive political system

basically rests on the concept/word "government." To begin to see why this might be so,
industry basically rests on the concept/word "law,"

imagine a world in which there are some would-be-terrocrats and a population of enlightened individuals who
either don't understand the word "government" or they think it's a silly joke. (For the purpose of this thoughtexperiment, assume that there's no equivalent word available to would-be-terrocrats.) So a would-be-terrocrat
says, I represent "your government" and I want you to pay me "your taxes" so I can defend your property and
safety. I also want you to join "our army," so we can go and shoot "your enemies" in the "country" next door. What

once the basic concept/word

"government" is accepted, a whole constellation of Slavespeak
concepts/words soon follow in its trail. If you accept the "government"
concept, you also accept that the terrocrats who call themselves
"government" have the power to "make laws," force children into "schools" for political
success would the would-be-terrocrat have? Realize that

brainwashing, force people to pay "taxes," force people into "armies" to kill each other, etc., etc. -- what Ayn Rand
calls a devastating package deal.

By accepting the basic concept/word "government," you

position the terrocrats who call themselves "government" as superior (more
powerful) and you position yourself as inferior (less powerful) . If you operate from this
perspective, the kind of thing you tend to do to promote liberty is to beg the terrocrats to "change the law" so you

You also
operate in a way that, in the long run, reinforces and perpetuates the
master-slave relationship between terrocrats and their victims
can enjoy a little more freedom. You position them in power and you position yourself in weakness.

alt - Fleshmobs
Embrace fleshmobs.
Lauren B Wilcox, 2015 (Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in
International Relations, Chapter 4)
If dont touch my junk is about making bodies less visible, and strategic visibility is, precisely, about increasing

protest known as flesh- mobs

(after the performance art style of flashmobs) is about making bodies hypervisible. In Germany,
critics of the security procedures have subjected themselves to screenings while naked, or
nearly naked. These fleshmobs critique the excess of vision that characterizes the
scanners virtual strip search (Magnet and Rodgers 2012) by making other trav- elers and
airport personnel, rather than only authorized government personnel , into observers
of bodies. Some of these protesters have done even more to make their bodies legible according to the terms
visibility in order to streamline the airport security process, a type of

of the security assemblage: one German protester wrote prosthetic on her arm, and piercing with an arrow
pointed at her breast (Zetter 2010). John Brennan, a man from Portland, Oregon, was acquitted on charges of

Brennans statement points to

the reversal of the power dynamics in such an act: The irony that they want to see me
naked, but I dont get to take off my clothes off .. . . You have all these machines that pretend to
indecent exposure for stripping in protest of TSA screening procedures.

do it (KATU 2012). Unlike dont touch my junk protests, which are about preserving the body as sovereign,
especially for those viewed as unlikely to constitute terrorist threats (such as children, the elderly, wives and
mothers, and white men), fleshmob

protests are not about defending a liberal sphere of

autonomy against government intrusion so much as challenging the log- ics of bodily
visibility. By stripping down, fleshmobs render body-scanning procedures a
meaningless gesture in terms of producing information, and only valuable as a
means of humiliation and domination. In his court tes- timony, Brennan described his act of stripping
naked as intended to reveal to the TSA the effect its policies have on passengers, especially of the body-scanning
procedures: I want to show them its a two-way street. . . I dont like a naked picture of me being available
(Duara 2012). Clearly, the two-way street Brennan is referring to does not mean that TSA personnel are made
naked and subject to the gaze of passengers; rather, the two-way [ 128 ] Bodies of Violence street is about

Stripping naked at security screenings is a refusal to have

ones body made into an image viewed and interpreted only by unseen, authorized
viewers (and possibly leaked into wider circulation) and turns the tables by making the naked
body visible to everyone in the vicinity. The airport security assemblages are made to
appear meaningless by the redistribution of economies of observers and observed :
bystanders are not only bodies waiting to be scanned them- selves, but are viewers of
the bodies of the fleshmobs as well. Such observ- ers are necessary for the protest: this protest
of excessive visibility only works if there is an audience to view bodies that are
both safe in that they could not be concealing contraband, and are
pornographic in the naked- ness of their bodies. The protest hinges on the juxtaposition of the
control over viewing the body.

scandal of too much visibility of naked bodies in public spaces with the visibility of naked bodies as a security

The naked protesters, or fleshmobs, court arrest that would reveal the
hypocrisy of the state producing images of naked bodies for their own purposes,
while disallowing nakedness in general . In these protests, the naked body of the security
assemblage that was a safe body because it has nothing to hide becomes a dangerous body as it
subverts the logic implicit in the security assemblages of the state as authorized
viewer of the body. By becoming a dangerous body, the naked body parodies the logic of
the airport security apparatus. In mak- ing their bodies hypervisible, fleshmob
protesters destabilize the states prerogative to surveil bodies and the production
of bodies as state-owned information.
measure.

Our alternative is to hijack the security process - individual

critical activism can expose the contradictions inherent to the
system and create new forms of liberation
Rocco Bellanova and Gloria Gonzalez Fuster 2013 (International Political
Sociology 7; "Politics of Disappearance: Scanners and (Unobserved) Bodies as
Mediators of Security Practices")
Various processes of the obliteration of bodies through the bodiesscanners set- ting have been described. There is also a parallel

critics of the machines have consistently (re)

introduced, wherever possible, references to bodies and to the appearance of nakedness
and inverse set of phenomena. In stark contrast to such processes,

resulting from the invisibility of clothes in the images displayed by the original scanners. As in the other set of processes,

bodies are enacted both in linguistic and material ways. Many journalists and activists keep
referring to nude airport scanners (Kravets 2011), virtual strip searches (The Privacy Coalition
2010), and whole body imaging or body scanners (Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) 2012). In a
similar fashion, it is possible to highlight a move to retranslate the spectral images of
original scanners into naked, living bodies, and then re-engineer the body-as-object
into body-as-subject. This aspect is very strong in more artistic forms of criticism. One of the most interesting cases,
and with the most explicitly political intentions, is that of the naked activists of the Berlin Pirate Party,
demonstrating in the Berlin Tegel airport against body scanners in January 2010. They define
their political perfor- mance as a fleshmob, a sort of biopolitical version of the
more classical flash- mob (Piratenpartei Berlin 2010; emphasis added). As shown in Figure 6, a pick from a twominute YouTube video, activists distributed pamphlets to passengers while wearing only their underwear and tattoo-like

Nakedness appears to have been one of the most disturbing features of the
images initially generated by body scanners. This nakedness, perceived as prob- lematic, was, in
a sense, an excess of visibility of the bodies. The potential for further controversy was apparent with the
production of images in which individ- uals were not only portrayed naked but also
without face and/or identity, rein- forcing their potential association with images of
bodies presented as mere objects of desire, that is, pornography . The enactment of the
messages.

bodiesscanners setting as a potentially pornographic site underpinned some artistic and activist protests against the scanners, as

Specific enactments within

the bodies scanners setting are not, however, always critical moves, but can also be used for
commercial purposes, as in the case of a Las Vegasbased company that relies on and fosters the nakedness
controversy in an attempt to market so-called flying pasties on their website (Flyingpasties.com 2012). The bodies
scanners setting is not only productive in favor of securitization . It can also
produce a different type of politics, one that can potentially question specific
articulations of the security setting. In this sense, the different tactics, and all the
alternative enactments of the bodiesincluding the concealment of bodies and the resistance to such
concealmentkeep open the possibility of a political landscape. Importantly, to do so, some of the
elements of the setting have to be enrolled to the criticism , either in a material or in a linguistic
way, and either stressing their presence or their absence. Processes of disappearance can be hijacked, be
it by the introduction, and articulation, of further new actants, or by maintaining the visibility of those that
the setting is masking. Taking into account playful and/or critical approaches, such
as the fleshmob or the planned striptease, we better realize that the bodies within the
bodies scanner are not predestined to become only docile, constrained bodies. From
this perspective, even the arms up gesture that the bodies going through the machines
are forced to adopt could at the same time be a movement of submis- sion (it is the
gesture of those arrested and of those threatened with violence) and, within a specific association of elements, a
in the case of planned and video-recorded strip- teases (for example, Furry Girl 2010).

movement of potential libera- tion, a brief interruption in an oppressive security

continuum.

More fleshmobbing
Eric Kula, 2011 (American Political Science Association, " Full-Body Scanners,
Live Information and Rights in the Airport: A Theoretical Perspective on
Information Circulation")
In the immediate aftermath of the Christmas day underwear terror plot, the U.S. was not the only state
aggressively rushing out new security measures. Other nations, including Germany, the Netherlands and Britain,
were already in the testing or implementation phases of their body- scanner initiative. In January 2010, only a few
weeks after the failed underwear bombing attempt, protesters from

Germanys Pirate Party

organized a protest at Berlin-Tegel airport. Like the U.S. Opt Out Day protest, this act was specifically
designed to protest the privacy invasion associated with the visual strip search. These protesters,
however, approached the issue in a very different way. A small number of people descended on the
airport more or less unclothed (most were wearing only underwear.) A statement on the party's website said
they opposed the new security scanners because they threaten the private sphere and the personal rights of

In order to highlight their privacy concerns, the protesters had words

written on their skin. One woman has the word diaper scrawled on her lower back with an arrow
passengers.19

pointing to her underwear and the word prosthetic printed on her leg. The word piercing and an arrow point
to one of her breasts. Another woman dressed in a beige sweater and flesh- colored tights wears a sign reading

Not only were they taking aim at the invasive procedure itself , but they
were also mocking claims made by government officials that this technology can
protect a persons privacy by blurring or pixelating the image to hide personally
identifiable information. By writing slogans and descriptions on their skin, the protesters had
introduced a new form of legibility into the airport space. Presumably, what they were
pixelated.20

attempting to do was to equate their written words with the technically legible body image created by the

By turning themselves into walking examples of privacy violations, the

protesters were drawing a comparison to the technically derived image. The images that the
scanners.

airport security agents see are far less detailed than the YouTube protest video the Pirate Party posted online. In
fact, the images produced by the body scanners cannot be seen by the human eye. We dont have x-ray vision and

boldly equating the technical circulation of x-rays

and electromagnetic waves with the circulation of information through language
and human vision, the protesters claimed that informational privacy in the
technical sphere should be considered identical to that in the experiential sphere
of the human senses.
we dont see bodies as chalk outlines. But, by

altMichael Stipes
Michael Stipe alt
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, 28-08-2014 (Critical Studies on Surveillance 2(2),
"Step Forward Please", available at
https://www.academia.edu/8122906/Step_Forward_Please__Critical_Security_Studies_2_2_)
And then suddenly something magical happens. Is that Michael Stipe singing? Thats definitely Michael Stipe
what song is this? And you concentrate hard to block out the tannoy and the music from the other bars, tilting
your head towards the bar and towards R.E.M. Its got to be nightswimming. That piano riff is unmistakeable.

suddenly everybody stops. Everything stops. The tannoy ceases to bray. And out of
respect for nightswimming the other bars turn off their music. People stop
moving. Transit ceases. And suddenly there is a we. Were alone in this deserted airport with only
R.E.M to guide us. I look around and everyone is swaying. The flow of people past the bar has vanished. With
eyes half closed and drinks resting on the table-tops, everybody is semi-present
letting Michael Stipes voice move through them, and restraining themselves from
singing their favourite lines. Im not sure all these people understand/Its not like years ago the fear
And

of getting caught/The recklessness of water/They cannot see me naked/These things they go away replaced by
everyday/Nightswimming deserves a quiet night. And Im not from braced for impact far from it. I notice that
my hand is gripping the edge of the table, nails digging into the wood to stop from physically singing along. And

everybody is respectfully silent. And we all look around, sharing a few smiles.
There is a we. The barman whistles along with the piano riff as we wipes the tables. When was the last time
we heard the tannoy? When did someone last walk past? When did I last hear someone speak? We all sway and its
bliss. But all too soon its over. The chatter rises, the moment is lost. People are moving past again in herds.
Flight #173 to wherever is still delayed, and it is still requested that people visit information desk three for their
refreshment vouchers. People go back to their separate lives, their conversations rise, and a wall of people once

as I move to the
plane, I occasionally hear quiet whistles of the Nightswimming refrain from people I
pass on the way to gate 53 testament to the fact that something magical really did
happen, if all too briefly. I try to catch their eyes, and fail. Im tempted to switch to academic prose to
again bustles through the airport. The moment is lost. But it was there. I saw it. And

explain the point of this story, if there even is one. To tell you something about intimacy in the face of airport
technologies which atomise and process, about people who dont see each other, about technologies which utilise

whatever an airport is
there are ways of defeating it. Michael Stipe did it with just a voice and a piano ,
and his success dwarfed my smiling Jesus Christ pose through security . And after 6
weeks in transit, that was truly special. For 3-and-a-half minutes, no-one bought anything, noone moved anywhere, and we shared something . There was no airport. There was
security in the sense that we were together, not apart. Something touched us in a
way that pat-down searches and a biometric IDs were unable to comprehend . Thank
people in their quest to see darkly. But in truth, all I can really say for sure is that

you Michael Stipe.

altOpt Out
Opt out alt
Eric Kula, 2011 (American Political Science Association, " Full-Body Scanners,
Live Information and Rights in the Airport: A Theoretical Perspective on
Information Circulation")
The American Protest For a variety of reasons, the U.S. public has begun vocalizing concern about the body
scanners, the conduct of airport security screeners, and the way that some aspects of this screening process occur

call for
protest went out asking flyers to cause delay by refusing the body scanner
screening just as millions of Americans were trying to fly off for annual family feasts. Atop the
in the full view of other passengers. Fueled by two websites - OptOutDay.com and WeWontFly.com- a

protesters tactical list: urging passengers to opt out of full- body scans, forcing TSA employees to instead
administer enhanced, hand-sliding, pat downs that can include feeling a persons inner thighs and buttocks.18

People
were not encouraged to stay home and not fly. They were encouraged to opt out of the
full-body scan and to receive the traditional pat down . The government has always maintained
What is noteworthy about the protest, for the context of this analysis, is the suggested mode of protest.

that a choice exists for passengers to undergo either form of screening. Therefore, there seems a reasonable
outlet for people that do not want revealing body scans to protect their privacy. However,

the mode of

protest, to increase delays by opting for pat downs , still requires what many believe to be an
uncomfortable invasion of their personal space. The protest wasnt designed to rebel against this
invasion. The protest was designed to demonstrate that, in the larger picture of the entire
commercial air industry and government regulations, people dont really have a choice but to
submit to the body scanner. The protesters realized that an obscured tension does
exist in the dual structure of experience. The here and now experience of that
submission ties people (and very personal, private information) to the larger flows of
information, to the circulation of bodies, to the commerce of the air industry, and to the efficacy of
government security regulations. By recognizing that the information generated from their
bodies is a contingent part (indeed, an essential component) of the functionality of the
entire airport space, they have tapped into the tension that exists there and organized a
political movement that brings that tension into focus for others to see . By reemphasizing
the tactile nature of the body, they resist any attempt to generate information in
the form of images. By imposing time constraints (the time of delay) back onto the TSA, I believe that the
protest could demonstrate that the technical expectation of access to bodily
information is unreasonable when separated from its technical supports . It is not a
matter of protecting bodily information, but rather a matter of opposing a particular mode of
information circulation that already presumes that body space will be included in
the production of social space.

At perm
Blurring Disadvantage Affirming Exceptions is the Logic that Masks
Statism Reject Every Deployment of Statist Language
Mann, 97. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @
Sanford U. Why You Must Recognize and Understand Coercion On-line. [KevC])
The problem is that
if you add up all the coercive exceptions of the people who profess their
love for freedom and individual sovereignty,
you get the modern slave-state that all countries are now in , at least to
some extent. Coercion is the essence of slavery. Coercion is the negation of
individual freedom, self-ownership, and individual sovereignty . Can we formulate
Some people say, "I believe in freedom and individual sovereignty, except for..."

another principle: Become wise, strong, and powerful - or suffer coercion? Some forms of coercion imply that the
information of the coerced or victim is no good and/or the victim can't think for himself or herself (can't process
information). Therefore the coercer must decide for the victim. For example, compulsory state "education"
(coercion at its most insidious), compulsory compliance with "regulations", "anti-drug laws", etc., imply that
people are powerless victims, nothings, and nobodies who can't think for themselves. Most coercive bureaucracies
operate on the same principle: creating dependency, helplessness, and powerlessness .

When coercion is perpetrated, there is almost always a loser. Coercive

"government" is a win-lose or lose-lose game - it's destructive. In contrast, voluntary
exchange is win-win - it benefits all parties. Reject Coercion Practice using your mind to persuade, instead of your
muscles to force, and you'll become much more capable. The recognition and rejection of coercion
constitutes the shift from backwards, barbaric savagery, to true
civilization!
It is vital to our progress and survival that the currently increasing trend
of coercion, perpetrated by those who call themselves "government", be
stopped, reversed, and ultimately eliminated altogether!
The solution for the individual is to reject the use of coercion, prevent
yourself from being coerced, and withdraw your support from coercers the means for doing this is called Freedom Technology.

Its Mutually Exclusive

Esteva, 2k5. (Gustavo Esteva, Professor @ Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca. The Revolution of the New Commons
Lecture. September 6, 2006. Online. [KevC])

there is an alternative vision. There are alternative convictions.

There is the conviction that people can govern themselves. That they dont need someone
upstairs governing them. This is a different notion of power. In fact, we cannot use the same
words. In the villages that you will visit, you will see that when they are talking about how they govern themselves, and they
really govern their lives by themselves, they dont use the word government. The word government is used
for that external oppressive structure out there. That is the government. What
they have governing themselves, they dont call that government . When you use
the word government, you have those governing and those governed. Two
classes of people. Here in the communities they are the same people. They are not two classes of people. They are
governing themselves. All the structures are they themselves governing themselves.
Perhaps the word government is not the right word to describe that kind of
situation. To govern ourselves, of course, we need the pertinent political bodies -- different kinds of political bodies -- but not
those in a democratic structure. What we have now is a transition from a conventional power
structure to another conventional power structure, or to a different kind of
organization of the society, a radically new organization of the society. For this, for
What we want to say is that

the second option, what we need to do is basically conclude the dismantling of the
old regime, and, second, reorganize the society from the bottom up.

Permutation Fails Their Advocacy is Mutually Exclusive

Mann, 98. (Frederick Mann, Founder of Terra Libra, BA in Communications @ Sanford U. Report #TL07B: The Nature
of Government Online. [KevC])

Unfortunately, for most people - including many freedom lovers - it seems impossible to grasp the
above refutation because they are locked into the habit of thinking, talking, and
writing about "government" as a volitional entity. They say "government does this
and that" - as if "government" is some kind of living, breathing entity capable of
performing actions - collectivist thinking. Sometimes it seems that when you say to these people, "Look at
anything that "government" supposedly does, like running a school, and you'll find that all the work is being done by individual

They seem so brainwashed with the notion

that "government does things," that their brains automatically shut out anything to
the contrary.
human beings," - individualist thinking - they can't hear you.

At cooption
No Cooption Reclaiming Agency Comes First
Kenney & Zio, 2k9 (Shawna and Zio; Anarchy in the USA, Swindle Magazine, June
12 2009 http://swindlemagazine.com/news/anarchy-in-the-usa/)
American anarchists made headlines later in 1999 while protesting the World Trade Organization Ministerial
Conference in Seattle, Wash., as the black-masked portion of the more than 40,000 demonstrators. Political

its exactly such awareness todays anarchists

are responsible for, despite medias depictions and misconceptions. Anarchists have
brought such important attention to global issues like the IMF and World Bank and how
unelected people are making policies affecting workers around the world, she says. Mainstream
media focuses on wild demonstrators who wear black and throw rocks at
The Gap. But more important is how anarchist groups have drawn attention to the
politics of global exploitation. This especially matters because media is so
incredibly controlled by corporate consolidation. Much of modern American anarchy
exists as civil disobedience, residing in ideas like co-ops and community effort. Anarchist groups
get the word out. Theyre also great about organizing grassroots Free Stores and Food Not
Bombs so that food, clothes and other necessities get straight to the people
who need it, states Tarrant. Numerous anarchist bookstores and publishers thrive here. AK Press, a
scientist and author Dr. Shira Tarrant says

San Francisco-based worker-run collective that publishes and distributes anarchist literature, states on its

anarchism doesnt tell people what to do. It is about emancipation,

empowerment and agency. The statement goes on to encourage people to ask what would your
website

ideal transportation system, agricultural system, neighborhood, school, or workplace look like? Now ask
yourself how much influence you and the people around you have over these issues? Can we afford to leave
these decisions to the same people who have been screwing up our lives thus far? Such questioning goes well

Theres always
the danger that a radical political philosophy will become co-opted by the
mainstream status quo, that it will become just a watered down fashion
statement, says Tarrant, but she stresses the positive change that anarchism
can bring in the face of sexism, racism, unethical capitalist pressures, or
even co-optation. In the recent documentary film Anarchism in America, Murray Bookchin agrees.
beyond kids sporting patches with the anarchy symbol like a trendy corporate logo.

Its illusory to think a food co-op can replace Grand Union or Peoples Bank could replace Chase Manhattan.

It is basically impossible to live a thoroughly anarchist life within a capitalist

system, he says. But I do believe this: One can try to maintain a high ethical
standard. That is one of the beautiful things about anarchismthat it brings ethics into socialism instead
of mere science. One can concern oneself personally with what is humane. One
can protest and try to work with projects in which people learn how to take control of their lives.

Terror DA

Uniqueness/brink
US surveillance is on the brinkno EU cooperation.
Lombard 2010 (Etienne- JD candidate at Tulane University. Bombing Out: Using Full-Body
Imaging To Conduct Airport Searches in the United States and Europe Amidst Privacy Concerns.
Winter 2010, Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law, https://litigationessentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?
action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=19+Tul.+J.+Int%27l+%26+Comp.+L.
+337&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=aa985e4d46ce815557319e05bc877ccd//GH)
The short list of vulnerabilities identified supra militates against investing $ 150,000 to purchase only one

the United States and EU should pool their resources

together to develop a comprehensive technology that considers each of the
identified vulnera-bilities and guards against them while concomitantly preserving
privacy. As aviation security expert Bruce Schneier observed, aviation security methods typically lack foresight
because they guard against only one type of threat. n161 To better protect their citizens, security
administrators from the EU and the United States must collaborate . By sharing
ideas and financial resources these hegemons are better equipped to develop the
technology required to detect multiple potential forms of attack, such as bombs hidden in body cavities,
without impinging upon passenger health. Until then, a piecemeal approach will continue to
leave airports and passengers exposed to the risk of injury or death . The Fourth
scanner. Accordingly,

Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right to be secure in the person. Likewise, the EU
Charter expressly guarantees rights to privacy and modesty. Arguably, AIT infringes upon these rights. Although

one can easily understand why someone would find it

unreasonable to use backscatter or MMW technology that depicts naked images of
men, women, and [*367] children. This understanding becomes readily apparent when consider-ing
reasonable minds may differ,

that other forms of available technology accomplish the same precise objective. Perhaps this conclusion would be

the fact
that passengers are clothed suggests that they retain a reasonable expectation in
the privacy of their naked bodies. Accordingly, the use of AIT violates expressly guaranteed rights in
different if passengers voluntarily decided to walk through the airports completely naked. However,

the EU and protected rights in the United States. Thus, the imposition of AIT absent some restraint upon
government decision makers denotes that, truly, as one commentator remarked, " we

world of significantly less information privacy." n162

are moving toward a

Link
Full-body scanners are key to detect hidden objects.
Eggen et al. 09 (Dan, Plane suspect was listed in terror database after father
alerted U.S. officials, The Washington Post, 12/27,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/12/25/AR2009122501355.html?
sid=ST2009122601151)//FJ
Several top Republicans criticized the administration's approach to counterterrorism, saying the government had
not pieced together warning signs in recent cases, including the slayings of 13 people at Fort Hood, allegedly by a
Muslim soldier. "I think the administration is finally recognizing that they got this terrorism thing all wrong," said
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee and a state

After being
briefed by federal authorities, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said Abdulmutallab did not
undergo body scans that might have helped detect the explosive material when he
went through security at airports in Nigeria and Amsterdam. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.),
gubernatorial candidate. "I think we came very, very close to losing that plane last night."

chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released a statement saying he was "troubled by several
aspects" of the case, including the visit by Abdulmutallab's father to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. Democrats in
the House and Senate vowed to hold hearings in January but also urged caution in jumping to conclusions. Rep.
Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said a federal
official briefed lawmakers about "strong suggestions of a Yemen-al-Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the
plane over U.S. airspace." Administration officials said President Obama is seeking accountability in the incident,
although he has not demanded any sort of special review. He is getting detailed briefings on the facts of the case
and the airport security changes while on vacation in Hawaii, the officials said. One administration official,
speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said
Abdulmutallab received his 2008 tourist visa from the U.S. Embassy in London. "We interviewed him, and his
name was run against the watch list maintained by [the Department of Homeland Security] and the FBI," the
official said. "There was no indication of any derogatory information. There is every indication that whatever
radicalization took place occurred recently." In a new emergency order effective until Wednesday, TSA is requiring
that all passengers bound for the United States undergo a "thorough pat-down" at boarding gates, concentrating
on the upper legs and torso. All carry-on baggage also should be inspected, focusing on syringes with powders or
liquids, TSA said. In addition, passengers must remain seated and may not access carry-on baggage for the final

former
senior U.S. officials spoke in unusually blunt terms about the apparent failure of
aviation security measures to detect a common military explosive allegedly brought on
board. Michael Chertoff, who was homeland security secretary from 2005 to 2009 , said
terrorists appear to have exploited the natural inhibition of screeners to
conduct overly intrusive searches, and he renewed calls for widespread
expansion of whole-body imaging scanners that use radio waves or X-rays
to reveal objects beneath a person's clothes. Chertoff said the government has
sought to expand use of imaging scanners, but privacy advocates and Congress
have raised objections. "This plot is an example of something we've known could
exist in theory, and in order to be able to detect it, you've got to find some way of
detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at," Chertoff said. "It's either
hour before the landing or hold any personal item on their laps. The extraordinary steps came as

pat-downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured
it out."

Body scanners key to stop potential terrorist threats.

Meserve and Ahlers 10 (*Jeanne AND **Mike M., Full-body scanners
improve security, TSA says, CNN, 4/2,
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/04/01/airport.body.scanners)//FJ

Full-body imaging machines that see through clothes have significantly improved
security in airports where they are deployed, and have revealed more than 60
"artfully concealed" illegal or prohibited items in the past year, the Transportation Security
Administration says. To date, no explosives have been detected by the machines, but their ability to spot
even small concealed objects demonstrates their effectiveness as a security tool ,
officials said. "It is absolutely a tremendous improvement of what we can detect at the
checkpoints," TSA Acting Administrator Gale Rossides said this week. "It is an excellent piece of technology
that will significantly improve our detection capabilities." As evidence of the machines' capabilities, the security
agency released five photos of drugs or suspected drugs that airport screeners found after scans revealed
anomalies on the ghost-like images of people's bodies. The agency said metal detectors would not have revealed

Screeners using the technology also found a knife hidden in the small of a person's back at the
a concealed razor blade on a passenger in Phoenix, Arizona, and other
concealed items such as large bottles of lotion, which are prohibited as carry-on items. In addition, the
the items.

Richmond, Virginia, airport,

machines have revealed numerous prohibited items that passengers evidently inadvertently left in pockets. Those
items are confiscated but are not counted in the tally, a TSA spokesman said. The agency field-tested the full-body
imagers for more than a year before announcing last month the deployment of machines to 11 airports
nationwide. Today, 46 machines are in place in 23 airports, and the agency is stepping up deployments and plans
to have about 1,000 set up by the end of 2011. Interest in the machines has heightened since the Christmas Day
incident in which a man allegedly attempted to detonate an explosive concealed in his underwear. In an
appearance before Congress last month, Rossides declined to say whether the machines could have detected the
underwear bomb. But to illustrate the machines' effectiveness, Rossides showed a packet of white powder smaller
than a tea bag, saying it was identical to a concealed bag detected by an imager. "The amazing thing is that our
officers, as they get more and more familiar with this technology, are actually finding very, very small things that
are being secreted on the body," she said. But some passengers say the machine's capabilities are presenting new
Fourth Amendment questions about the government's searches, saying the machines -- in detecting very small
objects -- are subjecting passengers to scrutiny beyond what is needed to safeguard the plane. "I can't imaging an
explosive that is powerful enough in that [tea-bag size] quantity to endanger an aircraft," said John Perry Barlow, a
former Grateful Dead lyricist who once took the TSA to court after a search of his checked luggage revealed a
small amount of drugs. "Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth
Amendment, and often we have to reclaim the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives us powers that were
not envisioned by the Founding Fathers," Barlow said. The security agency said that it searches only for prohibited
items -- not illegal items such as drugs. When it finds illegal items during a search, it refers the item to local law
enforcement officers, it says. "What we're trying to resolve is the anomaly that we're seeing on the body," said
Rossides. "If it's drugs, then we call in local law enforcement and they handle it from there." Barlow predicted that
the body scanner will lead to another court case to clarify the extent it can be used to search the body. "Eventually
they're going to bust somebody for something that was clearly and obviously not a threat to the aircraft, and any
reasonable person would have known that [while looking at the] body scan. And at that point somebody is going to

the body imagers are especially useful because they

can expose contraband on parts of the body that aren't fully explored in pat-downs,
such as the groin. "I think what was so telling about the Christmas Day attack was
that it exploited our cultural norms, that we don't frequently pat down persons in
that part of the body. This technology will give us the image of the entire
body," she said.
make it an issue," he said. Rossides said

Full-body scanners are keyAmsterdam member proves and

counterterrorism programs must be exaggerated in order to be
successful.
Hunter 09 (Marnie, Body scanners not 'magic technology' against terror,
CNN, 12/31,
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/12/30/airport.security.screening/)//FJ
The full-body scanning technology being adopted and discussed since the attempt to take down a passenger plane
on Christmas Day isn't a "magic machine" that will solve aviation security issues, experts say. "Regardless of the
sophistication of the piece of technology, if you can collect the information on how it works and what its technical
parameters are, then that machine is not going to deter a [sophisticated] terrorist operation," said Dr. Richard

Fullbody screening and other security measures are more effective in detecting threats from an
increasing number of unsophisticated, mentally troubled suspects acting alone , he
Bloom, director of terrorism, intelligence and security studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

said. The technology is "only a piece" of aviation security. "If you know ahead of time what you're going to be
facing, you either plan to beat it, or you go somewhere else," Bloom said. The advanced imaging scanners would
not have caught substances hidden in a bodily orifice or substances concealed by folds of skin on an obese

The Transportation Security Administration cannot discuss specific detection

capabilities of its technology for security reasons, said TSA spokesman Greg Soule. Security
suspect, he added.

technologist Bruce Schneier believes that the body scanning machines are a waste of money. Investigation and
intelligence gathering is where the money would make a difference, he said. "Stop trying to guess. You take away
guns and bombs, the terrorists use box cutters. You take away box cutters, they put explosives in their shoes. You
screen shoes, they use liquids. You take away liquids, they strap explosives to their body. You use full-body
scanners, they're going to do something else," said Schneier, who is the author of a number of security-related

authorities have charged Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, 23,

of Nigeria with trying to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear on a flight from
Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan. The device failed to fully detonate. In Amsterdam, metal
detectors and X-ray machines were in place, but the advanced scanning technology was not
available. Dutch authorities have said they are confident about how AbdulMutallab was screened but
acknowledge that they could not have detected the explosive material that he was
said to be carrying. Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport will begin using the full-body scanners on all passengers
books, including "Beyond Fear." Federal

taking flights to the United States, the Dutch interior minister said Wednesday. Also Wednesday, the airport
authority in Nigeria, where AbdulMutallab's flight to Amsterdam originated, announced plans to add body
scanners to its security system. In the United States, 40 of these advanced imaging machines are in use in 19
airports, according to the TSA. Only in six airports are they used as a primary screening option. An additional 150
advanced imaging machines will be installed in U.S. airports over the next year, and the TSA plans to purchase

The controversial technology, first used in a U.S.

can find hidden objects that metal detectors can't. "Advanced imaging
technology enhances security by safely screening passengers for metallic and nonmetallic threats including weapons, explosives and other objects concealed under
layers of clothing without physical contact," Soule said. Privacy rights groups are wary of
300 more machines in 2010, the TSA's Soule said.
airport in 2007,

movements to impose the anatomically revealing technology on all travelers as a primary screening method.
"Obviously, we have a concern, because it's a virtual strip search that is terribly invasive," said Michael German,
policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washingtonbased public interest research center, filed a lawsuit in November against the Department of Homeland Security
seeking details under the Freedom of Information Act about the department's use of the advanced imaging
technology. The privacy rights group is concerned that the focus on hidden explosives will push the TSA to ramp
up use of the machines as a primary screening tool without resolving concerns about appropriate use of the

Addressing privacy concerns, the TSA says faces

are blurred on the body scans generated by the agency's machines. Agents who
deal directly with passengers do not see the scans, and the agents who review the
scans do not see the passengers. Because only a handful of the machines currently are in use in the
technology, said associate director Lillie Coney.

U.S. as a primary screening measure and only a few other countries are using the technology, most travelers
flagged for secondary screening would encounter other means of detecting threats, including pat-down searches

security analysts say pat-down searches

-- which are often perfunctory -- are useless. "Basically, any pat-down that you are not violated
and technology that can detect traces of explosives. Some

and embarrassed after is ineffective," Schneier said. In April 2008, the TSA announced an "enhanced pat-down
search" to address items that could be hidden in "sensitive areas of the body," including the chest and groin. The
more thorough searches, the announcement said, would be used only when all other screening measures failed to
resolve a security alarm. The agency said Wednesday that this is not the current procedure but declined to offer
further details on how pat-down guidelines have evolved. A separate technology that analyzes samples for traces
of explosive material is in place at every airport, Soule said. More than 7,000 explosives trace detectors are in use
in airports across the country. Screening procedures and technology constitute only one layer in combating
terrorism, Bloom said. There is no "magic machine" or "magic technology." "Security has to be layered and the
layering has much more to do than pat downs and technology, it also includes collecting intelligence, analyzing it
and transmitting it in a prompt and responsive and secure fashion," he said. "In general,

the odds are really

stacked in the terrorists' favor ... because they only have to be successful one time
and the government has to be successful all the time."

Key experts agree that full-body scanners are necessary in the fight
against terrorism.
Malveaux 10 (Suzanne, Obama stands by controversial air security screening
methods, CNN, 11/21, http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/11/20/obama.tsa/)//FJ
Obama stood by new controversial screening measures Saturday, calling
methods such as pat-downs and body scans necessary to assure airline
safety. Speaking at a NATO press conference in Lisbon, Portugal, the president called the balance between
President Barack

protecting travelers' rights and their security a "tough situation." Per the new rules, travelers may be subject to
full-body scans at 400 such machines in 69 airports nationwide. Those who voluntarily opt out -- as well as those
who set off a scanning machine or a metal detector -- are subject to a pat-down. Some travelers have likened the

such methods are needed after what happened

December 25, 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria allegedly
boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear .
pat-downs to groping. The president said

Abdulmutallab reportedly failed to set off the bomb, which metal detectors didn't detect, though his attempt led to

the Transportation
Security Administration, in consultation with our counterterrorism experts, have
indicated to me that the procedures that they've been putting in place are the only
ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we
saw in the Christmas Day bombing," said Obama. TSA officers can use "professional discretion" to
airport screening procedures that have caused a holiday travel uproar. "At this point,

determine whether individuals should be subject to further screening, according to a statement from the federal
agency. Critics have called the procedures invasive, with Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead saying the
agency "is forcing travelers to consent to a virtual strip search or allow an unknown officer to literally place his or
her hands in your pants." The president, while noting that he didn't have personal experience with the new
security measures, said he understands "people's frustrations. He said he's asked TSA for assurances that "what
we're doing is the only way to assure the American people's safety." He said that he has also told the federal
agency's administrators that they must consider whether there are "less intrusive" ways to obtain the same goals.
"One of the most frustrating aspects of this fight against terrorism is that it has created a whole security
apparatus around us that causes huge inconvenience for all of us," he said. Obama said that transportation
security officials have a tough task, facing "enormous pressure" to prevent a terrorist attack. In a public statement
released Saturday, TSA Administrator John Pistole spelled out the new security measures and offered tips to those
flying this Thanksgiving week. "As you travel this holiday season, I want to remind you that TSA's mission is to
ensure the safety of you the traveling public and we are committed to doing so efficiently, courteously and
professionally," Pistole said. In Portugal, the president vowed he'd try to find a way to make passengers feel more
both comfortable and safe, whether it is through the current policies or with new ones. " Every

week I meet
with my counterterrorism team and I'm constantly asking them whether -- is what
we're doing absolutely necessary? Have we thought it through? Are there other
ways of accomplishing it that meet the same objectives?" he said.

AT: Its Invasive

Full-body scanners are crucial for detecting terroriststhere
are no privacy violations and the alternative is pat downs which
is far worse.
Carafano 10a senior research fellow for national and homeland security at
the Heritage Foundation (James Jay, Airline Travelers Should Fear Terrorists More
Than Full-Body Scanners, The Heritage Foundation, 1/22,
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/01/airline-travelers-shouldfear-terrorists-more-than-full-body-scanners)//FJ
Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." And it seems a lot of people in Washington
take that mantra seriously. Witness the ferocious debate over the use of full-body scanners in the wake of the
Christmas crotch-bomber episode. The scanning technologies basically allow airport security to look through your
clothes to see if anything is hidden underneath. The very idea seems to enrage some, while others appear
besotted with the machines. The emotion -- and rhetoric -- are running so high, one suspects the two camps are
either ignorant of the legal, testing, and deployment questions surrounding the scanners or they are just playing

for those "outraged" by the deployment of the scanners, where

have you been since 9/11? These technologies are not new. The Transportation Security
Administration has tested and evaluated them for years and given ample opportunity for
public comment on how to regulate their use. The Department of Homeland
Security, which oversees TSA, has even received kudos from the privacy and civil
liberties community for the outreach it conducted in developing guidelines for
politics with the issue. As

employing the scanners. Members of Congress and ACLU lawyers have no doubt already stepped through them at
one time or another at Washington's Reagan National Airport.

So why is stopping the scanners

suddenly a cause clbre in some quarters? Their righteous-sounding indignation does not bear
up well under scrutiny. And the privacy argument seems shakiest of all. If folks truly think the scanners represent
an unreasonable search, why didn't they file suit the day the first passenger walked through the machine? One
possible reason: There is plenty of case law holding that individuals' right to (i.e., expectation of) privacy is far
less when passing through a government security checkpoint than when in their own home. Furthermore, it's hard
to argue that a search for bombs hidden in clothing is unreasonable. Richard Reid's shoes and now Umar Farouk

Consider the alternative: a pat

down. Since most bombs are hidden in the areas that security officials will feel
most uncomfortable touching, an effective pat down requires feeling around the
breasts and crotch. Talk about invasive! Concerns that those scanned would be subject
to ridicule are overblown as well. Scanners render faces nondescript. Breasts
and genitals are tactfully blurred. The image is seen only by a professional
screener, and it is not retained. Sunbathers give away more at the beach. Arguing that the scanners
Abdulmutallab's underpants have put that argument to rest.

aren't efficacious doesn't hold up so well, either. They were used during Saddam Hussein's trial so suicide

have been tested extensively by the TSA. Are

they perfect? No. But no screening technology is. Every system has its shortfalls. Bomb dogs
bombers wouldn't sneak into the courtroom. They

tire quickly, and there aren't enough of them to go around. They can't find hidden guns and knives. Additionally,
many people are scared by dogs, which can be disruptive. Explosive-trace technologies have limitations, too. The
detection systems used to swab bags are too slow to allow universal screening. And, like dogs, they're useless for
detecting knives and guns. Scanners make sense. Yet security zealots who want to put them at every checkpoint in
every airport are equally wrongheaded. Even full-body scanners can be beaten. One technique is the "booty
bomb." Explosives are either placed in the anal cavity or swallowed, then set off with an external detonator like a
cellphone. A body scanner wouldn't find a booty bomb. "Scans for some" makes sense. "Scans for everyone"
doesn't. Erect a Maginot line of scanners in every airport in the world, and airplanes will suffer the same fate as
the French at the onset of World War II. Put all your security eggs in one basket, and the enemy will find a way
around it no matter how technologically advanced that basket is.

be stopped with defense alone.

The hard truth: Terrorists can't

An unseemly rush to buy more body scanners will shift resources from
the most effective means of countering terrorists: a good offense. Without question, the best security tactic is to

stop terrorists before they even enter an airport. Effective counterterrorism operations find and take down plots
before they are put in motion. That's how authorities disrupted the 2006 London-based plot to smuggle liquid
explosives onto United States-bound flights. Next best, security needs to funnel suspicious travelers into
secondary screening where scanners as well as other technologies and techniques can be used to keep malicious
actors off airplanes. Let's not let security-vs.-liberty diatribes hijack the debate. Keep the focus where it belongs:

Scanners don't undermine our privacy or freedom. In fact,

they help keep terrorists from killing us -- the ultimate deprivation of liberty. On the
on how best to fight terrorists.

other hand, they are no cure-all for terrorism. They should be used judiciously.

Full-body scanners dont invade privacy rights and pat-downs are

worse.
Capehart 10 (Jonathan, I'll take the full-body scan, The Washington Post, 1/4,
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/01/call_it_the_thirdgrader_in.html)//FJ
The full-body scanner controversy is much ado about nothing , if you ask me. And Ill
take an electronic scan over a hands-on pat-down any day. A quick synopsis: There
are two types of full-body scanners. The backscatter emits low-level x-rays at you to determine whether you're
trying to get through security with more than God gave you. It takes all of 20 seconds from beginning to end. The
millimeter-wave machine takes up to 40 seconds to do the same thing with radio waves. There are 150

We
need more. But privacy rights groups are up in arms because the equipment produces what looks like
backscatters on order and there are 40 millimeter-wave scanners in operation at 19 airports. My take:

negatives of nudie pictures (millimeter wave) or like the chalky outlines of victims at Pompeii (backscatter). The
rights groups leave the impression that your business will be bared for inspection right there in front of everyone.

The images are viewed in a secure room away from the security checkpoint
and they are destroyed once each passenger is cleared . Id agree with Jon Adler, of the
Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, who told The Post: "I think a bomb detonating on a
plane is the biggest invasion of privacy a person can experience ," Or as Quentin Hines
Not true.

wrote on my Facebook wall after I posted the booty-bomb citation: "Have these flyers rights [folks] forgotten that
flyers reserve the right to take whatever measures neccesary [sic] to escape being blown to bits in midair? I fly
constantly and would gladly submit to a strip search, colonoscopy or the infamous 'please turn your head and
cough' for even the slightest increase in MY safety." How vivid. But I have no doubt his sentiment is widely shared.

Transparency K

1NCTransparency K
Focus on transparency and revealing ignores the ways in which
certain bodies are systematically concealed - turns case
Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta 2015 (Feminist
Surveillance Studies, Chapter 8: "The Public Fetus and the Veiled Woman:
Transnational surrogacy blogs as Surveillant Assuemblage")
Lowry builds on these understandings to assert that reproductive technologies and services form an assemblage
that monitors and dis- tributes information about pregnant women (2004, 364). She points to gestational
ultrasonographys abstraction of the fetus from the maternal body as an example of how the surveillance
assemblage of reproductive technologies breaks down, abstracts, and reassembles female bodies. In addition to
Lowrys understanding of reproductive technologies as sur- veillant assemblages, Halls (2007; this volume)
formulation of the aes- thetics of transparency influences our discussion. Hall locates her analy- sis at national
rather than reproductive borderlands, where Ziplock bags revealing the bodys hygiene products represent the
states investment in policing bodies and bodily interiors. Such policing becomes framed as a way to root out
terror, that is, perceived threats to a particular formu- lated notion of national (and racial) integrity. In Halls
words, The aes- thetics of transparency is motivated by the desire to turn the world (the body) inside-out such
that there would no longer be any secrets or interi- ors, human or geographical, in which our enemies (or the
enemy within) might find refuge. . . . [It] establishes a binary opposition between interi- ority and exteriority and

Fetal images are

consistent with Lowrys discussions of reproductive-imaging technologies , such as
ultrasound, which fetishize the fetus as something separate from the mother. And yet, images of pregnant
surrogates, even veiled or headless surrogates, seemingly contradict this impulse,
bringing the fetal context (the gestat- ing maternal body) firmly into view . These
two gestures appear to bring into conflict Halls assertion that an aesthetics of
transparency relies on a binary opposition between interiority and exteriority . We
investigate the tension between the kind of reproductive surveillance undertaken in clinic
rooms and the sort of national borderland surveillance conducted in airports. While the former
visualizes reproductive interiority in the form of the fetus, the latter brings into
focus the exteriority of the gen- dered and racialized foreign subject desired for the
privileges the external or visible surface over the suspects word (2007, 321).

products of her labor, yet simultaneously distanced and suspect. We examine how trans- national iP blogs, which
routinely post both sorts of images, exemplify a new, globalized world order of surveillance not operated from
above but horizontally, as part of a digital rhizometric crisscrossing of gaze[s]. The ultrasonographic and
photographic images posted on the blogs of infertile couples from the Global North become part of the
information networks and centers of calculation (Haggerty and Ericsson 2000, 603) of an international
surveillant assemblage, playing out on the bodies of women from the Global South.

2NC TKTop Level

Better card for the above
Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta 2015 (Feminist
Surveillance Studies, Chapter 8: "The Public Fetus and the Veiled Woman:
Transnational surrogacy blogs as Surveillant Assuemblage")
We see here the tension between transparent interiors and inscrutable exteriors,
paralleling the same tensions in the type of surveillance done at national
borderlands to root out terror. In the words of Hall, The aesthetics of transparency can thus be defined as
an attempt by the secu- rity state to force a correspondence between interiority and exteriority on the objects of

The distant, impoverished surrogate represents a

reproductive, if not traditional, na- tional security threat. Her poverty, her foreignness, her
racial otherness all represent sources of potential terror to the iP digital nation .
In turn, the iP digital nation attempts to neutralize this threat by knowing the
surrogates nutritional and vitamin status and visualizing her uterine in- teriors in
the form of the fetal ultrasound. Ubiquitous requests to see her baby bump via Skype and emailed
the preventative gaze (this volume, 127).

photos may represent what Hall calls an attempt to flatten the object of surveillance (this volume, 128), yet the
surrogates ultimate distance and inscrutability remain. In

the Levinasian formulation of

mutuality, it is the face of the other that is brought into the light of recognition
by the self who heeds 164 Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta the others
primordial call (Irvine 2005). As such, the headless belly- bump shot signals an undermining
of this sort of recognition: it is a re- veiling of the surrogate such that not only is she
unable to be recog- nized or to gaze back , but her reproductive body alone is
present and not her subjecthood. For the Western iP digital nation, it is ultimately the fetal face
which is unveiled through biotechnology, and it is this fetal image which replaces the
surrogates own literal and figurative face in the Western iP gaze . In the words of Barbara
Katz Rothman, Babies, at least healthy white babies, are very precious products these days. Mothers, rather like
South African diamond miners, are cheap, expend- able, not-too-trustworthy labour necessary to produce the
precious prod- uct (2004, 19). In Margaret Atwoods postapocalyptic novel The Handmaids Tale
(1985), Earths few remaining fertile women are forced to be handmaids bearing children for the (infertile)
ruling class. In the Red Center, their restrictive dormitory, they are taught that no other parts of their bodies other
than their uteruses matter; their hands and feet, for instance, are subject to torture and abuse. So, too, are the

handmaids heads and most of their faces covered by a stiff white veil, which
they must wear or risk punishment of death. There are no mirrors in their world; they are not
meant to see or be seen, but exist solely for the reproductive potential they offer
the Commander and his wife. Faces disappear from the mem- ory of one
handmaid, even as she herself becomes de-faced by her sur- roundings. I try to congure [sic],
to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still
behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they wont stay still for me, they move, theres a smile
and its gone, their features curl and bend as if the papers burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale
shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out
my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I

Where, in all this, is

the voice of the Indian surrogate? Like her veiled or headless image, she is by and large
voicelessmade invisible and mute on iP blogs and discussion sites, unable to participate in
Haggerty and Ericsons (2000) rhizometric criss-crossing of the gaze . She is looked Public Fetus
want to say. But they wont. Its my fault. I am forgetting too much. (Atwood 1985, 193)

and Veiled Woman 165 upon, but does not look and cannot implicate others in her looking. These

conversations remain haunted by her faceless image , as is this essay itself. In our critique, our
desire to contextualize the sighting of her (internal and external) body and its broader sociopolitical implications,
we seek to conjure her face and spirit. We do not speak for but speak with her, listening hard for her reply.18

Eroticism K

1NC Shell

1NCEroticism K
We endorse a reality porn aesthetic- The stage is the scanner
and our bodies are the seductive performers
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. Surveillance is Sexy.
Surveillance & Society. Pg 204-205. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/view/3281//GH)
To begin, I want to turn my attention to Ruth Barcans (2002, 2004) discussion of homemade and reality porn,
which for her includes found and covert footage, paparazzi and other unauthorized images of celebrity skin,
amateur porn, and forms of porn fashioned to look like found, amateur or covert footage. While amateur

porn has a history that outstretches modern surveillance technologies, I think it is

possible to trace, in contemporary forms, a mobilization of a surveillance
aesthetic where the technologies and staging of pornographic images plays on
ideas of surveillance, voyeurism and exhibitionism and where the technologies of surveillance
structure the narrative, the action and most importantly the look of porn. Barcan notes the increasing popularity

reality porn within the overall pornscape, and describes how this genre fetishizes authenticity
and brazenness or rawness. Readable as a response to the pornonormativity of
much mainstream commercial porn, reality porn paradoxically at once ordinariizes porn and
challenges the normativity of the standard porn recipe or script (see also Hardy 2008). The
of

growth of ordinari-ized amateur porn featuring real people has been especially propagated by the Internet,
though it has migrated across other porn platforms, and even into the mainstream, for example on the TV show
Pants Off Dance Off, which features ordinary people stripping and dancing on camera.1 Central to the realitiization of porn for Barcan (itself embedded of course in the broader rise of other reality formats) are
technological changes that have democratized access to image-making technologies and to circuits of both

technological changes, she adds,

have impacted on both the economics of porn production and the cultures of porn
viewing (ibid.). The increasing ubiquity of Internet and other digital imaging technologies has dramatically
amateur and commercial exchange of images (Barcan 2002: 88). These

changed the pornscape for Barcan, bringing about three especially significant and interconnected
transformations: first, the sheer scale, reach and quantity of pornographic images it makes available; second, the
increased visibility of pornographic practices (in the sense that many different kinds of porn become available, or
known about, to any home in which there is a computer connected to the Internet); and third, changes in the
nature of privacy itself, owing to the ambiguously public/private nature of the Internet. (Barcan 2002: 89).
Barcans second point, about the increased visibility of porn practices, connects to broader current arguments
about the sexualization or pornification of the public sphere (eg Cover 2003; Paasonen Nikunen and Saarenmaa

The proliferation of porn and porn-like images, practices and aesthetics, I

want to argue, makes available a new idiom that can be redeployed
subversively in this instance, against normative (and normalizing) surveillance. The
pornification of surveillance (which is not to deny its always-already porn-ness, as Koskela points out)
draws on and connects to the reality porn aesthetic in diverse ways, sexualizing
the positions of both watcher and watched, and the realness and truthfulness
that underpins the logic of surveillance just as it underwrites the realness of
reality porn. While pornification and eroticization should in no way be collapsed together, my argument
here is that the knowing deployment of this surveillance aesthetic in reality porn
serves as an interesting site to consider the hijacking and repurposing of
surveillance. It asks us to think about the pleasures of looking and being looked
at, about the possibility of different ways of configuring the algebra of
surveillance, and about ways of performing surveillance that are about taking
back control over images and their uses. Like other sexual practices which eroticize power
dynamics, such as sadomasochism, this argument goes beyond what some people would
think of as liberatory. And of course, there are much trickier issues at stake here, in terms of the porn
2008).

industry, the exploitation of people on both sides of the camera, and questions of whether porn can ever be truly
emancipatory. These are questions that this paper cannot settle; but I would like to avoid closing down the
possibility of surveillance porn being considered as part of an erotics of resistance in surveillance society. I shall
return to this issue in the conclusion.

Seductive practices flip normative power relations- Our

performance in the reality porn aesthetic seduces the
surveillance state and collapses its domination reversing the
system of power
Robinson 12 (Andrew, political theorist and activist, Jean Baudrillard:
Strategies of Subversion, September 7th, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/intheory-baudrillard-11/)CDD
Baudrillard proposes alternatives to the language of the code, which can
restore other forms of social relations.Changes in media content are assumed to
have little effect. Rather, effective changes alter the form of media. In the field of
language and signs, Baudrillard sees poetry, graffiti and seduction as types of
alternative practice which create different ways of relating. Poetic language is the form of symbolic
In some passages,

exchange within language. This is because it is not reducible to the expression of the code. It renders language open to being broken down into its
particular components like in Freirean education. It is therefore opposed to language as value, and to identity. According to Baudrillard, in the
dominant language, elements are accumulated as dead weight because they are never symbolically destroyed. Poetic language creates a kind of vertigo,
leaving the place of the signified empty. It is the force which destroys the code. Baudrillard thus sees poetic language as non-representational. It implies
reversibility. It escapes the fate of language to silence and separate, allowing ambiguity. This view is advanced against the idea of poetry as simply a
loosening of fixed meanings (the position taken by most poststructuralists). In Baudrillards discussions of poetry, a special place is reserved for
Baudelaire. Baudelaires art is praised as enchanted, ironic, ecstatic, repeating and exceeding the logic of the system. Irony is seen as an expression of
the indifference of the object. Baudrillard also provides an interpretation of graffiti, particularly the kind involving tagging. He sees it as a savage
offensive in response to the enclosure of people and signs in ghettos. The city encloses people in the form of the sign, or the code. Ghettos cut-up social
life, downgrade particular lives, and symbolically destroy social relations. Graffiti exterminates this space of the code by exceeding the code in its nonreferentiality: a tag refers to even less than the code does. Tags are an anti-discourse of empty signifiers, often borrowed from comics. In resistance to
the proper name and private individuality of capitalism, graffiti writes tribal names with symbolic force. They territorialise spaces which have been
decoded by the system, turning areas into collective territories. These signs are quasi-anonymous, and they can be given and exchanged freely. They
dismantle or scramble the signals of the order of signs. They resist both assigned identities and impersonal anonymity. This resistance repeats the
systems own simulations. Graffiti tags reproduce mass relations in that they allow no response. But they are subversive because they simulate symbolic
exchange, play, and non-functional space. They avoid any reference or origin, consisting of nothing but names, and with no message. (Trying to interpret
graffiti as art or as expression of identity is for Baudrillard recuperation). This, for Baudrillard, provides a model for resistance. To dismantle the

Baudrillard also
writes of reinventing the power of illusion and seduction, the power to tear the
same away from the same, to invent signs which point nowhere, to master the art
of escaping chance and causality and causing disappearances. Obscenity and
seduction are closely related. Hence, Baudrillard is almost talking about acquiring
the same power the system has obtained, to create pure images which exist
beyond binaries. Yet he is also talking about recreating the scene, the type of
illusion the system has destroyed. He distinguishes seduction from fascination.
Seduction has something in common with passion, with the hot sphere which is
lost. It is an art of withdrawing something from the visible order and hence
counterposed to liberation and production. It also recreates the experience of
destiny. The fetish performs a miracle of summoning an experience of destiny from
the accidental nature of the world fate instead of chance. It creates a world
which is connected, rather than aleatory. Things have a predestined linkage. Connections occur through the cycle of
network of codes, we need to attack coded difference. The means to do this is through an uncodeable absolute difference.

metamorphoses. Fate happens because everything seems to be linked to everything else, without exception. One can experience oneself as being a

Such unexpected connections can at most

be imitated by strategy. They escape the rule of the code. They take us into a world
which is neither random nor causal, instead resting on the equivalence of the signs
of emergence and disappearance. Seduction brings things outside their objective
or rational causal connections, instead connecting them by arbitrary signs or
codes. However, they do not seem arbitrary. They are experienced as destined. This
decisive element in a situation without willing it as being indispensable.

reverses cause and effect. Effects seem to generate their causes. Neither a chance-based nor a
causal world is as appealing an idea as a world ruled by willed or destined coincidences. From a symbolic point of view, a
neutral world is repugnant. Destiny thus exists in a Manichean conflict with causality and chance. In seduction, the
experience of events is altered. One experiences a pure event rather than a
rational sequence. In a pure event, one experiences oneself as a thing rather than a
word (e.g. as an embodied self rather than a rational ego). This event needs to be transmuted further, into
a spectacle or scene with a magical effect, beyond representation and causality.
And it blurs the barriers between Good and Evil. People secretly desire the
unravelling of rational connections and their replacement with events, in which
things come together spontaneously in a single site of intensity. Such experiences
can be created through unexpected connections. Seduction is antagonistic, like a
duel. It is counterposed to the ideal of universal love. It thus restores symbolic
exchange. Baudrillard suggests that love is part of the Christian defeat of symbolic exchange and the fall into individuation. It is connected to
the maternal and the Oedipal family. It is an imaginary replacement for the actual loss of
connections. Its loss or absence today is cruelly felt. To love, according to Baudrillard, is to isolate someone
from the world, and dispossess her/him of her/his secret or shadow. Love consists of a floating libido which tries to invest its environment in a cold,
dispassionate way. It can be manipulated by the code because it floats in this way. Baudrillard is advocating, against this cool form of desire, a return to

To seduce something
is to return it to the cycle of appearance and disappearance , hence of
metamorphosis. There is a void behind power. Seduction and reversibility causes it
to collapse. In seduction, the object is seductive. The subject dominates the object,
but the object can reverse this domination. Signs become simply a game of
appearances, rather than referring to an absent reality. The ontological status of destiny in Baudrillards
the hot intensities of seduction and passion. He also argues that seduction is more basic than sex or the orgasm.

argument is often unclear. Baudrillards argument seems to be that it is best for us to believe in destiny, and act as if it exists. He argues for it from its
emotional appeal and its role in societies with symbolic exchange. It is the way in which signs obtain intensity, and hence a counterpoint to the cool
signs of today. He also argues that everything is of the order of initiation and symbolic exchange, since everything comes into being and disappears.

Crucially, seduction reverses the usual power of the subject over the object. The
object traps the subject through seduction, and drags it down to annihilation.
Seduction has the effect of making a particular sign or object no longer arbitrary.
Signs become objects become impossible to turn into metaphors. This, presumably,
stops the interchangeability of the code, creating a particular existential territory
or connection. The object is always the master of the game in seduction . Seduction aims for
a kind of contact as if in adversity, which carries out a magical integration of what is otherwise distinct.

Our reality porn aesthetic is an implosive strategy- We bring

the surveillant assemblage to its limit and leave the system to
die- Simple rejection of the surveillance state leaves its
subjects in a static form that allows it to re-establish itself
inevitably
Robinson 12 (Andrew, political theorist and activist, Jean Baudrillard:
Strategies of Subversion, September 7th, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/intheory-baudrillard-11/)CDD
Baudrillard proposes that opponents of the system replace explosive strategies
with implosive strategies. Such strategies outbid the system in the direction in
which it is already going, and/or restore symbolic exchange. Explosion responds to
the order of production. Implosion and reversal similarly respond to the order of
networks, combinations and flows. We live in an era when games of chance and vertigo have replaced competitive,

expressive games. For Baudrillard, an effective subversion today would involve becoming more aleatory than the system. Baudrillard sees this as
possible through symbolic disorder, the return of symbolic exchange. Death offers a higher order than the code, one which can move beyond and

Baudrillard argues for catastrophic rather than dialectical responses.

Catastrophic responses involve pushing things to their limit. Catastrophe is not
necessarily a negative idea Baudrillard means catastrophe for the system, not for
anyone else. Something is catastrophic in the bad sense only from a linear mode of
thought. From another point of view, it is a winding-down of a cycle to its horizon
or to a transition-point where an event happens. The catastrophe is the point of transition after which nothing
overthrow it.

has meaning from ones own point of view. But the rejection of the codes demand for meaning makes catastrophe no longer negative. Catastrophe is the

The challenge must now be taken up at a higher level. The

challenge the code poses for us is the liquidation of all its structures , finding at the
end only symbolic exchange. Baudrillard proposes that we become the nomads of this desert, but disengaged from the
passage to an entirely different world.

mechanical illusion of value. We should live this space, devoid of meaning, as a return to the territory, as symbolic exchange. To become, as one writer
puts it, the hunters and gatherers of the contemporary megacity. We should reconstruct the current space as a sacred space, a space without

Baudrillard was
writing this before the rise of contemporary surveillance and policing
practices, which make it far harder to live in the systems spaces as if they
were territorial. It seems the system has somehow gained a reprieve from death,
as it has several times before. It has done this by further deepening and expanding
the code, and by drawing on reactionary and fascistic energies. According to
Baudrillard, the challenge is to avoid fascination with the death throes of the
system, to avoid giving it our energies in this way to simply leave it to die. The
system keeps itself alive by staging the ruse of its death , while leaving the
subjects it has created intact. It is, rather, through our own death (or metamorphosis) that the system collapses. With the
social failing, it seeks new energy, drawing on the marginal rebellions of excluded groups. For this reason, Baudrillard is suspicious
of attempts to recreate marginal systems of meaning, instead calling for the logical
exacerbation of the systems logic.
pathways, while rejecting the seduction of value allowing work, value, the dying system to bury themselves.

2NC Arguments

2NC AT: Baudrillards sexist

Baudrilard isnt sexist- They misinterpret his definition of
feminine and the power relations of seduction
Karre 11 (Erin, PhD in Philosophy, The Seduction of Feminist Theory,
http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/168/)CDD
Seduction (1979) is a further attempt to articulate this challenge and relies on a
dichotomy whereby all systems of meaning are masculine . In one sense, the
position outside of this structure, which poses a radical challenge to the authority
of this system, is feminine, but Baudrillard posits the word feminine, as it relates
to seduction, outside the dichotomous structure of masculine/feminine, which he
says is also masculine. In Seduction, Baudrillard exposes the difficulty, the almost
unavoidable trap, of attempting to think outside of the productive system . The fact that
Baudrillard instantiates another code, masculine/feminine /feminine, in order to posit an outside to the system of production, is certainly contradictory because his entire
argument is against the political backslash. However, for Baudrillard, to be able to theorize without contradiction is the first sign that a theory itself has run its courseis pass. This

For Baudrillard, contradiction is positive

because, wherever contradiction is exposed, reality and truth cannot be
assumed or contained power cannot be enacted. When contradiction does not occur, we become too close to arguing for
is an argument he makes in critiquing Marx, Freud, and later Foucault.10

universality, and inevitably create new hierarchies of belief. Allowing Baudrillard the admittedly generous benefit of irony (as we most certainly do for many feminists) and
acknowledging that his writing is, to an extent, performative of his own theory, we can approach Seduction as a self-consciously productive discourse of anti-production rather than as
instantiating an authoritative discourse. In Seduction, Baudrillard argues that Freud and Foucault are similar to Marx in that they do not challenge the concept of sexual desire as a
natural givensomething that exists before discourse and before regulatory practices. Expanding on his earlier argument that use value constitutes need, Baudrillard argues that
the process of signification constitutes both sex and sexuality. These terms are never value free. In his readings of both Freud and Foucault, Baudrillard argues that these theorists
not only argue that desire is regulated and structured by discourses but also believe that sexual desire exists prior to such systems.11 For Freud, all children start off bisexual and
mature into heterosexuality or homosexuality. For Foucault sexual desire is regulated through discourses that produce heterosexuals and homosexuals as either natural or aberrant
identities. While Marx takes production as a social given, Freud and Foucault assume that sexual desire, the desire for a specific sexual object, is a social given. As such, human beings
are structured by how they relate to each other as sexual subjects with desire. But Baudrillard sees no natural desire, nor does he define sexuality in terms of desire for a certain sex
object. Rather, he argues that what we come to think of as object desire is also created and regulated ideologically. Heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality are ideologies rather
than identities.12 These discourses structure how we come to think about ourselves as possessing a natural capacity for sex and desire. Freud was not only describing sex and
sexuality he was also creating/constituting it, just as Foucault was not only describing power but also enacting it. For Baudrillard, the moment that Freud became productive in
thought was the moment he dismissed his theory of seduction. Freuds theory of seduction came about as a result of his work on female hysteria. Freud initially argued that hysteria
was a result of latent childhood trauma whereby the young girl experiences sexual advances from her father, or another male relation. But he eventually, and controversially, dismissed
this theory of seduction, arguing that the female hysteric was fantasizing about her fathers sexual advances. Baudrillard argues that Freuds dismissal of the seduction theory was his
first step to becoming productivist because Freud formally established a structural code, a political backslash between fantasy and reality in which a father would not seduce his own
daughter. Freud established a reality of mythic proportions whereby female children possess a universal desire for their father, the hysteric being the pathological variant on this

The reason that Baudrillard defines

seduction as feminine has nothing to do with real women but is precisely
because seduction is a concept that exposes the weakness of masculine ,
productive, realist thought through the challenge and the game: seduction is
where meaning dies. In order to function as reality, the masculine order needs
constant affirmation of its truth truth that, for Baudrillard, feminists are all
too willing to grant. Thus, he is not trying to deny women subjectivity or
sexuality in an attempt to keep women within the roles of the oppressed
feminine, but to show the ways that subjectivity and sexuality are products of
productive discourse grounded in hierarchy, domination, and power. This is what Baudrillard means
when he accuses feminism of going in the direction of the system that it claims to disavow. By arguing for a feminine subjectivity, a
feminine sexuality, a feminine identity, we expand and propagate an oppressive
structure that is based on difference and hierarchy. Even multiplying these conceptual ideologies into pluralities
theme. Fathers, on the other hand, remain powerful in that no negative value is ascribed to them.13

(identities or sexualities) does not change the underlying structure. Baudrillard conceptualizes seduction as a challenge, a game, artifice, gambling, one-upmanship, secrecy, surface,
ritual, and weakness. And nowhere does seduction assert truth. Everything from cosmetics to animals, from cards to actresses, from fairy tales to drag queens falls under his theory of

What these concepts all have in common is their disruption of the concepts of
both meaning and value. They do not carry meaning and they indicate no reality.
Meaning is imposed upon them by productive discourse, and the meaning that is
imposed exposes the inherent weakness of meaning-making systems.
seduction.

2NC AT: Perm

The perm fails1. Situation- Body scanners are uniquely situated at airports,
places of mobility and border crossings. This specific situation
is important foregrounding for a flipping of power dynamics as
its interacting with the most obvious entrance into the
surveillance state. Theres no point to seduction if its not
visible, and the hyper-visibility of airports and scanners
isolated in the 1AC prove them as the best method.
2. State-based surveillance- Camera cuties arent involved with
state surveillance. The entire context of the alt is flirting with
the state surveillance machine, not with individuals camera
phones.
3. Aff turn- It doesnt capture alt solvency as all the reasons the
1AC presents for why body scanners are a uniquely bad form of
surveillance are DAs to the perm.

2NC AT: Reality porn bad

Using reality porn as a method of engagement recognizes the
inherent wrongs with the porn industry and re embodies the
latent sexualization of being watched
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. Surveillance is Sexy.
Surveillance & Society. Pg 210-211. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/view/3281//GH)

whats at stake in claiming these images and practices as

forms of resistance? Have I been led astray by my own imagination, and seen resistance where there is
Yet there are lingering questions

none? As with any work seeking to advance arguments about the political uses of sexualization or eorticization,

there is a danger of getting mired in debates about, among other things, the effects of
sexualized and pornographic materials. In my analysis I have (sometimes hesitantly) positioned
these materials and practices in the context of Albrechtslund and Dubbelds (2005) call for work on playful or
entertaining surveillance. But in positioning surveillance porn as play or entertainment, and as part of the

am aware that alternative viewpoints would immediately

contest such an upbeat analysis, and want instead to emphasize the harmfulness of
pornography, and perhaps especially the increasing harms that new regimes of
pornographic production, distribution and consumption propagate (Hearn, 2008). What,
popular culture of surveillance, I

we might ask, is being resisted by these images, exactly? I do not want to simply wave those counterarguments
away; certainly, to echo (and add to) Koskela (2003: 295), the politics [and erotics] of seeing and being seen are

neither do I want to say that we cannot ever think about sexualized

surveillance as a mode of resistance simply because it brings us into contact with
the heat of the pornography debates. In fact, this paper speaks implicitly to those
debates, in that it seeks to think about the radical potential of sexualized
looking and being-looked-at as, at the very least, re-visibilizing and re-embodying
surveillance, while also highlighting the omnipresent, latent sexualization of
surveillance. What these images do, in short, is to bring to the surface that already
eroticized potential of surveillance. In this context, the possibility of rethinking the act
of being surveilled as one of exhibitionism, and simultaneously making apparent
the voyeuristic element of the surveillant gaze, offers an alternative way of
responding to and acting in the surveillance society. Thats way Big Brother is such an
complex. But

important resource: it dramatizes whats going on all around us. In the same way, reality porn doesnt resist by
trying to evade surveillance: it confronts it head-on, with its own brazen imagery. Look at me all you want, it
says, I know you want to. And then, of course, it adds I like to be watched. At the same time, as Hardy (2008:
62) argues, reality

porn as a genre offers the promise of a general queering of

pornographic texts, to some extent democratizing pornography; surveillance porn contributes
to this broader transformation (see also Barcan 2002). This might seem like a small, even insignificant
resistance; but opening up the erotic to new possibilities surely cant be all bad.

2NC Surveillance good

Using the Big Brother allows us to realize the power of
constant surveillance- this can be used to disrupt the flow of
normalized surveillance structures
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. Surveillance is Sexy.
Surveillance & Society. Pg 209-210. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/view/3281//GH)*Ableist language
While discussion of surveillance has largely focused on its disciplinary, panoptical properties, I agree with Albrechtslund and

the time has come for Surveillance Studies to

recognize and take seriously the fun side of surveillance. For the past decade, we have
been privileged witnesses to the playing out of those reveries of voyeurism ,
exhibitionism and narcissism that Tabor (2001) writes of, in the form of reality TV show Big Brother .
While reality TV is not necessarily or straightforwardly a show about surveillance, I would
argue that the logics, aesthetics and cultural understandings of reality shows
like Big Brother are intimately enmeshed in the culture of surveillance. For
example, the omnipresence of the cameras gaze on set and the countless ways that
contestants respond to being filmed, both consciously and unconsciously, make
shows like Big Brother experiments in surveillance as much as they are supposed
experiments in interpersonal relations. And, I would argue, as reality TV has become a prominent
feature of TV scheduling, so the contestants, programme-makers and viewers come
to understand the logics of surveillance through Big Brother. It teaches us all about how
to act in front of an ever-watchful camera, and about the power of images caught on camera . It
also teaches us that it is still possible , even under conditions of voluntary hypersurveillance, to forget ones public exposure, and reminds us of the eternal
afterlife of images beyond our control websites like YouTube are cluttered with clips from Big Brother
Dubbeld (2005: 220) when they write that

shows around the world. Its hard to believe the initial hesitancy and lack of comprehension that met the first series of Big Brother
in the UK, as audiences and commentators struggled to make sense of the programme and grasp its impact on the landscape of

Big Brother also offers rich insights into the ways in which selfconscious pro-filmic subjects play with surveillance. Borrowing its logic and
aesthetic at least in part from the everyday webcam sites, t he show sought to
reveal what happens to its subjects when they are knowingly exposed to
constant panoptic surveillance. The contestants on Big Brother reflexively
manage their own exhibitionism, knowing that they are participating in the
attention economy (Wise 2004), knowing that one way to profit from surveillance is to be interesting, even shocking
celebrity (Frith 2008). Yet

though within limits. The viewer-voting structure of the show reveals the audiences expectations and tolerance for self-exposure,

shows
like Big Brother depict the economic potential of the exploitation of voyeurism
(and exhibitionism) in an era characterized by the increasingly important economic
role of electronic surveillance. And as the franchise has evolved, globalized and spawned countless variants, so
its voyeuristic tastes, and the relationship between exhibitionism and success. As Mark Andrejevic (2004: 175) puts it,

we have seen the growth of what we might call the popular culture of surveillance a new savvy, even blas attitude to
surveillance, which sees its potential entertainment value (but also knows its disciplining limits). However, some commentators
argue that while this surveillance-savviness, shared by participants and audiences of reality TV may be perverse, is certainly not
subversive. In his reading of the show Temptation Island, Andrejevic (2004) highlights the shows (and the audiences) socially
complicit, even conservative effects. For Andrejevic, Temptation Islands deployment of voyeurism/exhibitionism is socially
productive of the logic of late capitalism precisely because self-revelation is tied to economic success. In his reading, the idea
that submission serves as a form of empowerment is exposed as a fantasy that serves the market and enslaves the individual
(Andrejevic 2004: 192). Yet this psychoanalytic theorizing runs counter to the empirically grounded analysis of exhibitionism
provided by Hugh-Jones et al (2005). While I find much of what Andrejevic writes persuasive, it makes for pessimistic reading of
the (im)possibility of resisting surveillance in that resistance is so easily recuperated by the market. For him, this is the end of the

While I
think that the commodification of resistance neednt be the end game there are, after
all, countless ways to resist within capitalism -- I would also like to think there is a more productive
argument to be made, perhaps by aligning voyeurism/ exhibitionism with work on
countersurveillance. In her broad cultural analysis of nudity, Barcan (2004: 93) argues that nakedness is linked to
line: ideas, images and actions that might appear subversive are actually revealed as complicit (and perverse).

selfassertion or rebellion. In societies where there is a legislated taboo on public nudity, the naked body is an effective weapon in
political protests. While it might well be a stretch to see most of the forms of sexualized surveillance discussed here as political

there is surely an argument to be made for the ways that

sexualization confronts the logic of surveillance, not least in reminding us of its ever closer
in this sense,

scrutiny of the intimate sphere. As already noted, there are parallels with accounts of countersurveillance that I think are fruitfully

a provocative
project because it calls attention to the embodied experiences of watching and
being watched, of recording and being recorded. Shooting Back disrupts the illusion of detached,
resonant. Discussing Steve Manns Shooting Back, for example, Monahan (2006: 524) suggests that this is

objective, impersonal, disembodied monitoring. In embracing those reveries of voyeurism, exhibitionism and narcissism, there is
also a refusal to passively accept surveillance; rather than attempting to block or hide from the camera, being over-exposed is
arguably a more response, tapping into what Tabor (2001: 135) calls the glamour of surveillance. Moreover, given Cuffs (2007)

deploying its logic and its glamour, flashing back so to

speak, works equally well to denaturalize and disrupt the authorized uses and
flow of surveillance.
key point about the omnipresence of surveillance,

We are all modern voyeurs as a result of surveillance- using the

deviant body in opposite to the normative system allows us to
flirt with the surveillance system in a subversive method
Bell 2009 (David- pHD from the University of Birmingham. Surveillance is Sexy.
Surveillance & Society. Pg 211. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3281//GH)
So we arrive at the bigger questions. In what ways can surveillance-savvy exhibitionism and voyeurism be
considered resistance? What or who is being resisted? Where do issues of power and agency sit in my account?

there are precedents for arguing that claiming the right to the erotic is
an act of resistance in an erotophobic or erotonormative culture. Debates about
Clearly,

transgressive sexual acts as political acts have a long history, especially among dissident sexual cultures (Califia

resistance is about confronting the limits of what is considered morally,

ethically or legally acceptable behaviour, asking who gets to decide what is
acceptable, and asking whats at stake in setting the bounds of acceptability in this
way. An oppositional erotics is thus framed against a mainstream variously
characterized as heteronormative, erotonormative, heteropatriarchal,
somatophobic, or just plain straight . There are well established (though not uncontested)
modes of activism that mobilize the deviant body and deviant sex as oppositional
to this mainstream, most notably perhaps in forms of queer politics (though critics argue this
is ultimately an unsuccessful political tactic; see Weeks, 1998). Part of my thinking here would be to group the
practices I have discussed above in with these tactics, not least because they share what we might call an
erotics of resistance using sexualization as a political tactic, but also
sexualizing the oppositional or resistive position itself. In common with the strategy
2000). Here

of dissident sexualities which works to claim pride in practices and identities previously rendered shameful, we
might also suggest that

the sexualization of surveillance opens up the possibility to resist

not through rejection of dominant logics (here, of surveillance) but by playful, loud
and proud engagement with and celebration of sexy surveillance. In his short story The
Modern Voyeur, written to accompany a book of staged voyeurism photos by Richard Kern, Geoff Nicholson
(2008) describes this exchange between his male narrator/voyeur, and the woman he has been following and
covertly photographing: The Peeping Tom is furtive, inhibited, sweaty, he says. The voyeur is open, confident,

cool. The Peeping Tom is small-time, limited, has narrow horizons. The voyeur is worldly, sophisticated,
cosmopolitan. The Peeping Tom skulks. The voyeur holds his head high. I see, she says. Not yet you dont. The
Peeping Tom is ashamed, apologetic, self-hating. The voyeur knows himself, accepts himself for what he is, and
demands that you do the same. The Peeping Tom is square, old-fashioned, out of touch. The voyeur is hip,
fashionable, current, modern (very possibly moderne). The modern voyeur is just like me. (Nicholson 2008: 7).

While this isnt quite a call for voyeurs pride, it nevertheless articulates quite neatly
the kind of reflexive engagement with looking and being looked at that I have been trying
to explore here. In this sense, my argument would be that we are all of us, all of the time,
modern voyeurs and modern exhibitionists. The modern voyeur and modern exhibitionist
are, as Nicholsons narrator says, just like me. Even if we dont partake of the offerings of reality porn (or even
reality TV),

our embeddedness in surveillance makes part of its algebra . And while a

more obvious resistance route to take might be evasion, secrec y, trying to become invisible
(and never looking, either), as Groombridge (2002: 43) argues, many people are [in fact] seeking
to increase their visibility, and are playing with, goading and yes, even flirting
with surveillance.

K links

Antiblackness
The queer political body is inevitably fetishized and
participates in the sustenance of racial structures suffocates
all possibilities for racial liberation.
Agathangelou 13 [Anna M. Agathangelou, Associate Professor at Department
of Political Science, Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:4, 453-476, December 17 2013,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.841560]//JIH
This essay tracks a range of often neglected politics, texts, policies, legal practices, spaces and theories to reveal

the reconstructed sexual queer, whose recognizable humanity

(i.e., imminent living-capacity) is constituted into a recognizable sexual orientation and
gender identity, part of an emerging form of a sovereign body politic, which
presupposes immanent (a Deleuzian outside) slave incapacity for suture (Dayan 2011).
Concomitantly, this suffering fetishized queer political body participates in the
redaction and subsequent sustenance of racialized structures with its recognizable
sexual orientation and gender identity, whereby white bodies become signifiers of
legitimate, radical alterity in the form of queerness and blacks are presumed
imminently incapacious, never registering in the legitimate global political
economy of sex and sexuality (Agathangelou 2004) as well as law. I offer a peripatetic presentation of
an emergent political body:

the Human Rights Watch reports on Iraq (2011) and Hillary Clintons speech to the UN to articulate their political

the three moves

outlined above constitute not only the straightjacketing of sexuality, but also
racial terror where gay rights becomes a discourse and a practice of (perceived)
racial economic superiority and (actual) racial subordination. Querying the
genealogy of sex, neoliberalism and capitalism from the vantage point of black
terror (i.e., lynchings, convict leasing to political disenfranchisement, chain gangs; see Morrison 1987; Dayan
2011) accords us an orientation from which to understand such terror [that]
allow[s] to demonise others . . . to do unspeakable things to them all in the name
of order (Dayan 2011: 323) as well as the visions of radical justice emanating from
antislavery and anti-colonial struggles. In the following sections, I theorize the ways in which
slavery becomes collapsed as sexuality into the neoliberal imperium within which
blacks and black life serve as the literal raw materials to guarantee long-term
growth (Davis 2003: 94). I also point to insurgent social life as a struggle for total freedom (Goddard 2006). In
positions, yoking them without collapsing them into comparison. In so doing, I suggest that

so doing, I work with two political (ethico-juridical) archives tracing their force on bodies directly. First, I
reengage with Hillary Clintons UN speech to trace how the queer is constituted as value in a speculative economy
(i.e., the rational basis for passing laws that integrate them as capacious civil subjects) that reconfigures capital
and globality by distinguishing between different forms of governance and violence, placing the queer on the
inside of the civil society and relegating the hovering black outside the bounds of the civil (Dayan 2011: 22)
consequently changing the world itself and all levels of social existence (Quijano 2000: 547). Second, I use the

how the
suturing of a queer speculative economy here and there depends fundamentally
on value as an abstraction device and a risk threshold that distinguishes between
queers, racialized gays as well as the structurally impossible and ontologically
dead (i.e., blacks; see Agathangelou 2009). Central to my analysis is the concept that queer economies
could not and do not escape being entangled with capitals foundational terror. In
fact, analysing these reports, I show the ways the neoliberal imperium biopolitically constitutes
and manages queer life while ignoring the wailing, the sounds of living death
Human Rights Reports in Iraq to trace how sexual and racial technologies are deployed, exposing

emitting from the chains and the screams from the slave ships of the Atlantic
crossing and from places such as Attica, Abu Ghraib and US prison states (Morrison 1987: 201011 cited in
Childs 2009; Dayan 2011). I end with some thoughts on the possibility that queer projects and the Black Struggle

differentiations between bodies, sexualities, and races in

world politics emerge as strategies that foreclose and suffocates a range of
possibilities, globally constituted imaginaries and freedoms all in the name of
overcoming limits, such as death, stagnation and the loss of material value.
can contravene, noting how

cap
The affirmatives focus on decentering identity traits and individual queer
liberation promotes the goals of global capitalism and destroys hope for
political action.
Kirsch 06 [Max Kirsch, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late
Capitalism and Internalized Homophobia, Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington
Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45]//JIH
the concept of alienation in late capitalism has been replaced
with fragmentation (1991, p.14). Fragmentation highlights the it also becomes more abstract: What we
must now ask ourselves is whether it is precisely this semi-autonomy of the
cultural sphere that has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue
that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy is once enjoyed
as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist
societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction . Quite the contrary; we
must go on to affirm that the autonomous sphere of culture throughout the social
realm, to the point at which everything in our social lifefrom economic value and
state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itselfcan be said
to have become cultural in some original and yet untheorized sense . This proposition is,
Jameson has proposed that

however, substantially quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or simulacrum and a

The fragmentation of
social life repeats itself in the proposal that sexuality and gender are separate and
autonomous from bureaucratic state organization. If , as in Jamesons terms, differences
can be equated, then this should not pose a problem for the mobilization of
resistance to inequality. However, as postmodernist and poststructuralist writers
assume a position that this equation is impossible and undesirable, then the
dominant modes of power will prevail without analysis or opposition. The danger , of
course, is that while we concentrate on decentering identity, we succeed in
promoting the very goals of global capitalism that work against the formation of
communities or provide the means to destroy those that already exist, and with
them, any hope for political action. For those who are not included in traditional sources of
transformation of the real into so many pseudoevents. (Jameson, 1991, p. 48)

community buildingin particular, kinship based groupingsthe building of an affectional community . . . must be

This
building of communities requires identification. If we cannot recognize traits that
form the bases of our relationships with others, how then can communities be
built? The preoccupation of Lyotard and Foucault, as examples, with the
overwhelming power of master narratives, posits a conclusion that emphasizes
individual resistance and that ironically, ends up reinforcing the narrative itself .
as much a part of our political movement as are campaigns for civil rights (Weeks, 1985, p. 176).

Capitalism is the root cause of your impacts, and your impacts are
inevitable until capitalism is destroyed.
Khader 13 Will the Real Robert Neville Please, Come Out? Vampirism, the Ethics
of Queer Monstrosity, and Capitalism in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend? Journal
of Homosexuality Jamil Khader PhD* Volume 60, Issue 4, 2013
Despite its multiculturalist politics of recognition, no matter how progressive it was for its time, Matheson's I Am
Legend is as interpellated as Lawrence's (2007) film within capitalist ideology, in that they both translate
antagonism into difference (iek, 2006, p. 362), substituting sexual difference for the importance of class

struggle. Transvaluing the antagonism (class struggle) underpinning capitalist relations of production into the
politics of identity and difference obscures the problematic relationship between capitalism and queer subjectivity.

the text establishes neoliberal capitalism as an absent presence, by

reproducing the ultimate capitalist fantasy of commodity fetishism, while at the
same time eliding the extent to which capitalism commodifies and exploits queer
sexuality. In other words, neoliberal capitalism is invested with the power to assert itself as the end of history,
Indeed,

to the extent that it has subtracted itself from public discourse to become a completely invisible signifier around
which everything revolves but that refuses to be named. As D'Emilio (1993) memorably states in his article on

The absent
presence of capitalism as the transcendent signifier especially, for sexual
minorities, constitutes the ultimate site for their doing and undoing . For D'Emilio (1993),
sexual minorities inhabit an ambivalent position within the neoliberal capitalist
system, since it facilitates both their emergence as consumers and producers,
allowing, thus, their integration into the labor market as well as their exploitation
to benefit corporate interests, and the homophobic backlash against them . 5 He
capitalism and gay identity, In the most profound sense, capitalism is the problem (p. 474).

attributes this ambivalence to the contradictory position that the nuclear family occupies in the capitalist system:

Capitalism, he argues, has not only subverted the material basis of heteronormative
families, allowing family members to live outside of the family structure, but has also enshrined
these families for their reproductive value as the only functional model of intimate
and personal relationships. He thus states, in divesting the family of its economic independence and
fostering separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and
women to organize personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex (pp. 473474).

Moreover, capitalism has provided the conditions for commodifying sexuality and
erotic desire as a matter of choice outside the parameters of procreative sexual
economy. As long as such erotic choices are coopted and contained as a form of
play, positive and self-enhancing, in D'Emilio's (1993) words (p. 474), sexual identity can be
evacuated from its excessive threats and history of struggle, only to circulate as a
fetish of erotic pleasure. To this extent, sexual identity becomes then the grounds
for collective organization that, nonetheless, substitutes consumption for
production. Not all forms of queer transgression, that is, are necessarily subversive, until the proliferation of
the semiotics of queer identity is understood in relation to the larger social inequalities (Taylor, 2009, p. 201).

While capitalism continues to undermine the fabric of social relations , moreover,

queer communities have been paradoxically blamed for the social ills and
instabilities of the capitalist system. As such, capitalism as the name of the social
totality is left untouched and invisible. Similarly, Matheson's (1954) text naturalizes and normalizes
capitalism and its social relations, by disavowing the need for recognizing class struggle in its terrifying
dimension (iek, 1986, p. 5). As a work of fantasy, that is, Matheson's novella tries to deny the specific conflicts
that embody the capitalist conditions of its production: What the power of the hegemonic capitalist ideology will
not have disclosed, in short, is the presence of capitalism itself. Throughout the text, therefore, Neville takes for
granted the free commodities he consumes, be it the lathe from Sears, the gasoline, and the water bottles,
allowing him to push a shopping cart, what he calls the metal wagon, up and own the silent dust-thick aisles
(Matheson, 1954, p. 26), clinging as much as he can to the norms of his bourgeois suburban life as if nothing
happened around him. Indeed, Neville lives the pure fantasy of commodity fetishism that does not only offer him
the opportunity to fulfill his fantasy of living in a world of abundant free commodities and surplus enjoyment
(which for the last man on earth can indeed be considered infinitehe would have to live many more lives to be
able to exhaust all these resources), but also to kill the undead owners of the store in which he was shopping, and,
thus, foreclose the question of labor altogether. 6 Moreover, Neville's death operates as a nostalgic affirmation of
neoliberal capitalism. After all, it is only when he can no longer maintain his sovereignty over his private property
that the vampires could intrude upon it; in its absent presence, neoliberal capitalism could at least guarantee his
safety inside of his private property. This critique of capitalism in Matheson can also be supplemented by an
attention to the ways in which Matheson (1954) represents revolutionary societies and forms of enjoyment, and
more specifically, the Soviet Union with its spies, collaborators, and purges. Since this new vampire society is
specifically structured by the same violent forms of enjoyment embodied in revolutionary movements, I contend
that Matheson's alleged subversion of the us-them binary of Cold War politics constitutes, in fact, both a thinly
disguised liberal critique of Stalinist terror and a nostalgic affirmation of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, it is

worth pointing out, Matheson's representation of revolutionary society blends and obscures in an Arendtian
fashion, as iek (1986) would say, the distinction between fascism and Stalinism in their differential relations to
class struggle. (For a very useful and clear discussion of iek's political views, see Dean [2006, pp. 4594].) While
fascists neutralize class struggle and displace it on a racialized other such as the case of the Jews in Nazi
Germany, as iek contends, Stalinism abolishes the class struggle and reenacts the capitalist fantasy of unbridled
production and consumption without adhering nonetheless to the constraints of the capitalist form (private
property). For Matheson (1954), recognizing the monstrosity of one's own nonnormative desire facilitates the
relational understanding of the dialectical relationship between the self and the other, in a way that reinscribes

the belief in the

legitimacy of sexual rights is maintained without rethinking its ramifications in
relation to the ability of the capitalist system to coopt and contain any threat that
may be embedded in queer sexuality. Identity politics, therefore, cannot effectively
serve as the basis for a genuine politics of gay liberation. Only acknowledging
class struggle, as the fundamental gap that constitutes the totality of the
social field, can render the absence and invisibility of capitalism present , by
clearing a space for a radical reconfiguration of the ethical relationship to the
other, and recharting alternative forms of solidarity, beyond identity politics, that
can struggle with other oppressed constituencies in order to dismantle and
reimagine the neoliberal capitalist system itself.
them both within a democratic site of multicultural exchange and tolerance. Nonetheless,

Historical Marxism provides a better frame for analyzing queerness than

queer theory itself
Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/156920611x6064
12; The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
Sexuality, once a largely unexplored continent for historical materialism, has long since ceased to be so. In the
1970s and early 80s lesbian/gay historians, using Marxist and feminist analytical tools among others, began to
chart the 1. Some initial thoughts for this article originated as a talk at the IIRE Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Strategy
Seminar in Amsterdam in August 2000; many thanks to the 2000, 2002 and 2009 IIRE Seminar participants for
their comments and ideas. Criticisms and observations by Nina Trige Anderson, Pascale Berthault, Terry Conway
and Jamie Gough, and especially comments, suggestions and written exchanges with Alan Sears, were particularly
helpful. Thanks as well to David Fernbach and to the editorial committee of Science & Society for comments on
earlier versions, to Christopher Beck for his support and stimulating comments and questions, and to Historical
Materialism board-members, especially Paul Reynolds, for their comments and suggestions. This article is
dedicated to Torvald Patterson (19642005), in-your-face revolutionary queer, in loving memory. 4 P. Drucker /
Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities.2 Although historical
materialist categories have been supplemented and then to a large extent supplanted in the field by Foucauldian
approaches since the 1980s and queer theory since the 1990s, elements contributed by the first, Marxistinfluenced generation of historians and theorists still survive to some extent within a broad range of socialconstructionist perspectives. Most historians and theorists if not necessarily most lesbian and gay laypeople
agree that modern lesbian/gay identities are unique, clearly distinguishable from any of the same-sex sexualities
that existed before the last century or so and from many that still exist in various parts of the world. Whether they

historians analysis of lesbian/ gay identity has linked its

emergence to the development of modern, industrialised, urbanised societies .
Some historians3 have linked its emergence, in a more-or-less explicitly Marxist
way, to the development of capitalism. This connection has continued to be made
by writers working within a Marxist framework.4 Recently, Kevin Floyd has detected more
cite Marx, Foucault, or both,

broadly a greater openness [in queer thought] to the kind of direct engagement with Marxism that emphasizes its
explanatory power.5 Yet some theorists have seemed uneasy in recent years about the questions that were
initially not asked in these accounts. Once this specific form of lesbian/gay identity has been explored and its
emergence mapped, the question arises: is this the end of the story? Especially as more writings have charted the

all other forms of samesex sexuality are surrendering to what Dennis Altman has critiqued as the
triumphant global gay, a monolithic figure riding the wave of capitalist
spread of LGBT communities in Asia and Africa, some have wondered whether

globalisation.6

In much the same way that homo sapiens was once naively viewed as the culmination of
biological evolution, and liberal democracy (according to Francis Fukuyama) as the culmination of human history,
one might have sometimes imagined that all roads of LGBT history 2. For example, Fernbach 1981; DEmilio
1983a and 1983b. A word on terminology: the term lesbian/gay in this article refers to a historically specific
phenomenon, defined in Section I below. LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) is used as a broader term
for people with same-sex sexualities or identities. Although the word queer is sometimes used by others to refer
generally to LGBT people, I try to reserve the word in this article to those who self-identify as queer, who are often
rebelling, not only against the heterosexual norm, but also against the dominant forms of lesbian/gay identity. I
sometimes use gay, lesbian/gay or LGB particularly to refer to more respectable people who emphatically do
not identify as queer. 3. See, for example, DEmilio 1983a. 4. See, for example, Hennessy 2000; Sears 2005. 5.
Floyd 2009, p. 2. 6. Altman 2003. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 5 led to Castro Street in
San Francisco. A few queer theorists have tried to undermine any such monolithic vision of gay identity, rejecting
the onedimensional focus on gender-orientation that underlies it.7 But, despite their abstract championing of
difference, they have rarely engaged concretely with the historiography that sometimes seems to suggest that
LGBT history is a one-way street. In Paul Reynoldss words, they have centred on the social production of
categories discursively rather than determinantly through essential causality and power of the social relations of

This article argues that there are socioeconomic forces that have been
leading LGBT people to question lesbian/gay identity as it took shape by the 1970s.
A historically-based, social constructionist, Marxist approach9 can examine
historically different sexual identities under capitalism, without privileging any
particular form of identity; can chart not only the emergence of lesbian/gay
identities, but also shifts in sexual identities in recent decades, exploring
connections between shifting identities and successive phases of capitalist
development. One useful tool is the Marxist theory of capitalist long waves, and specifically Marxist analyses
production.8

of the mode of capitalist accumulation that was on the upswing until the early 1970s and turned sharply

A historical-materialist analysis of this

kind may provide a more solid theoretical basis for addressing a central political
concern of recent queer theory the defence of nonconformist or less privileged
LGBT people against homonormativity11 than queer theory itself offers, while
helping to lay the foundation for a queer anticapitalism. It is by now nothing new
to link the rise of what might be called classic lesbian/gay identity to the rise of a
free labour-force under capitalism. This has taken centuries, and historians have generally looked
at it as a long process. But the breakthrough of gay identity as we know it on a mass-scale
is in fact very recent, more a matter of decades than of centuries. On closer
examination, 7. For example, Seidman 1997, p. 195. 8. Reynolds 2003. 9. This article uses the term social
downward with the recessions of 19745 and 197982.10

constructionism simply as the opposite of essentialism (a view of sexual identities as biologically determined or
otherwise transhistorical), not to refer to a specific school of thought contrary to Marxism. Although Marxists such
as Klara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai wrote insightfully about sexuality within a purely Marxist framework,
more recent Marxist treatments of the subject have almost always engaged critically with other approaches, such
as psychoanalysis, feminism, Foucauldianism, post-colonialism and queer theory. I believe that a rigorous Marxist
approach to sexuality is not only compatible with an engagement with other social-constructionist approaches, but
in fact requires it. 10. Mandel 1978 and 1995. 11. Lisa Duggan has defined homonormativity as a set of norms
that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them

the consolidation and

spread of gay identity, especially among the mass of working-class people, took
place to a large extent during what some Marxist economists refer to as the
expansive long wave of 194573. Gay identity on a mass-scale, emerging gradually
after a period of repression from the 1930s to the 1950s,12 was dependent on the
growing prosperity of the working and middle-classes, catalysed by profound
cultural changes from the 1940s to the 1970s (from the upheavals of the Second
World-War13 to the mass-radicalisation of the New Left years) that prosperity
helped make possible. This means that gay identity was shaped in many ways by
the mode of capitalist accumulation that some economists call Fordism:
(Duggan 2002, p. 179). 6 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332

specifically by mass-consumer societies and welfare-states.14

The decline of Fordism has

also had implications for LGBT identities, communities and politics. The decades of slower economic growth that
began with the 19745 recession had a differentiated impact on LGBT people and their communities. On the one
hand, commercial gay scenes and sexual identities compatible with these scenes advanced and were consolidated
in many parts of the world, particularly among middle-class layers. On the other hand, commercial scenes have
not been equally determinant for the lifestyles or identities of all LGBT people. In the dependent world, many poor
people simply have a hard time taking part in commercial gay scenes. In developed capitalist countries, while
commercial scenes are more accessible to even lowerincome LGBTs, growing economic inequality has meant
increasingly divergent realities in LGBT peoples lives. Alienation has mounted among some LGBT people from the
overconsumption increasingly characteristic of many aspects of the commercial gay scene, which inevitably
marginalises many LGBT people. Alternative scenes of various sorts (not always necessarily less commercial) have
proliferated.

Resistance purely rooted in queer studies cannot effectively confront neoliberalism

Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/156920611x6064
12; The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
There is of course no one-to-one correspondence between economic and social developments and shifts in sexual,

there is a whole set of

institutions that produce (among other things) lesbian/gay ideology and identity,
mediate the underlying class and social dynamics, and represent the imaginary 12.
cultural and political identities. In LGBT communities, as in the world at large,

See, for example, Chauncey 1994, pp. 33446. 13. Brub 1983. 14. The concept of Fordism has been largely
associated with the French rgulation school, the current of Marxist economics relied on by, for example, Floyd
(Floyd 2009). Many of the basic elements of what regulationists call the Fordist mode of accumulation are also to
be found in Mandelian long-wave theory or the social structure of accumulation-approach. These different
schools differ with each other particularly about the causes of the rise and decline of different modes of
accumulation. While important, these debates are not directly relevant to this article. P. Drucker / Historical

relationship of individuals to their real conditions of

existence.15 To analyse how all these institutions from newspapers and
magazines to porn-video producers to (divisions of ) publishing houses to websites
and chat-rooms to lesbian/gay-studies departments to small-business associations
to sports clubs and beyond functioned ideologically under Fordism, and tended to
function differently with the rise of neoliberalism, would go beyond this articles
scope. Nevertheless, no aspect of capitalist culture, including sexual culture, exists in
complete isolation from the mode of production as a whole ; fundamental shifts in
capitalism are detectable, however indirectly, at the level of gender and sexuality as at
other levels of the systemic totality.16 This basic understanding can give us the
audacity, even in the absence of fully worked-out mediations, to point out some
trends that correspond to changing class-dynamics in LGBT communities. A large
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 7

proportion of the institutions that define LGBT communities and produce their self-images tend to reproduce and
defend a unifying lesbian/gay identity in apparent continuity with the identity that took shape by the 1970s. But

a schematic analysis can show that classic lesbian/gay subcultures and

identities were put under pressure or into question in various ways by the decline
of Fordism. Ultimately, as the class and social reality of LGBT communities became
more fragmented and conflict-ridden, so did their ideological and even sexual
expressions. In the end, the mode of production of material life condition[ed]
[their] social, political and intellectual life process in general; their social being . .
. determine[d] their consciousness.17 The changes have included development of a queer identity
seen at least in part as in opposition to existing lesbian/gay identities, a growing visibility of
transgender identities, and the proliferation of a variety of other identities linked
to specific sexual practices or rles. Despite these identities extraordinary
diversity, their rootedness in characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be
even

detected in a number of more-or-less common features . Whether or not they are explicitly
defined as queer, they respond to the increasingly repressive character of the
neoliberal order through their stubborn affirmation of sexual practices that are still
or are increasingly stigmatised. They also reflect the growing inequality and
polarisation of neoliberal capitalism by making sexual power-differentials explicit,
and above all through gender-nonconformity. To understand these features better,
this article looks briefly, first, at the material basis of the emergence of lesbian/gay
identity by the 1970s, and second at the material basis of factors that have been
fracturing it. It then 15. Althusser 1971, p. 162. 16. Floyd 2009. 17. Marx 1968, p. 182. 8 P. Drucker /
Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 examines the ways in which economic changes have been ideologically
mediated in new expressions of gender and sexual identity, particularly among transgendered and other queers.
The last section discusses the political implications of these changes and the challenges facing twenty-firstcentury LGBT communities.

LGBT identity and culture emerged and were formed under the
development of modern capitalism
Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
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12; The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
I. Classic gay identity Classic lesbian/gay identity, as opposed to the many other forms of same-sex identity that
have existed in human history, is (or was) an identity reserved for people whose primary sexual and emotional ties
are with their own sex; who generally do not conclude heterosexual marriages or form heterosexual families
(unlike, say, latter-day gay icon Oscar Wilde); who do not radically change their gender-identity in adopting a
lesbian/gay sexuality (unlike transgendered people in a great variety of cultures); and in which both partners in
relationships consider themselves part of the same lesbian/gay community (a bizarre notion to millions of men
around the world who fuck men or boys without considering themselves gay, and to millions of women at the less

This kind of gay identity emerged in developed

capitalist countries in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries mainly
among middle-class layers (middle-class consumption was particularly crucial to capitalaccumulation in
explicit end of the lesbian continuum).18

the expansive long wave that lasted from the mid-1890s to the mid-1910s). In this same period, declining birthrates and advancements in birth-control made procreation less crucial as a focus of at least middle-class sexuality,
and sexual desire and object-choice more crucial .

The growing importance of consumption and

desire helped foster a shift in the construction of gender under capitalism, from
conceptions of manhood and womanhood focused on the innate character
required for production and reproduction, to conceptions of masculinity and
femininity that were (in Judith Butlers term) more performative,19 defined to a
greater extent by patterns of consumption, dress and everyday behaviour .20 In this
same period, middle-class men and women (particularly women with education and
professions) increasingly had 18. Rich 1983; Wekker 1999. Fernbach (Fernbach 1981, pp. 715) gave
an early and clear account of the uniqueness of lesbian/gay identity among historically existing forms of same-sex
sexuality. Greenberg 1988 provides the most comprehensive survey available of the range of same-sex sexualities.

the
economic and social resources to live independently of their families and to defy
convention. As John DEmilio explained in a seminal article, capitalist development in this way
created the conditions for the rise of gay identity.21 The result was the reification of
sexual desire based on gendered object-choice, the rapid spread among the
middle-classes of medical and later specifically psychoanalytical visions of
sexuality,22 and the invention of heterosexuality as well as homosexuality as
sexological and social categories.23 Working-class and poor people even in developed countries, by
19. Butler 1999. 20. Floyd 2009, pp. 5766. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 9

contrast, tended well into the twentieth century to focus on conceptions of manhood and womanhood rather than

reified conceptions of sexuality.24

Working-class men in the US in particular continued to

form relationships between transgendered people (fairies) on the one hand and
non-transgendered, often married men on the other,25 or to engage in sex with
other men for money or social benefit without taking on any distinctive sexual
identity. In the same period in Germany, a homosexuality defined as masculine was notably
championed by the middle-class Community of the Special, while Magnus
Hirschfelds studies of same-sex relations among largely working-class men led
him to uphold a transgender third sex-model.26 After 1945, however, workingclass living standards in capitalist countries went up rapidly under the Fordist
order, in which increases in labourproductivity were matched to a large extent by
increasing real wages that sustained increasing effective demand, and various
forms of social insurance cushioned the blows that hit working people during dips
in the business-cycle. As a result, for the first time masses of working-class people
living off what DEmilio, following Marx, calls free labour as well as students
and others were also able to live independently of their families, and give sexual
objectchoice a greater rle in their lives and identities. Working-class family-structures and
gender-rles also changed. For the first time since the mid- to late-nineteenth century
when the family-wage had become a cherished ideal, and sometimes a reality, for
broad working-class layers the Second World-War made waged work at least
temporarily normal for even respectable working-class and middle-class women.
This made a dent in the pronounced gender-polarisation that had been
characteristic of both working-class heterosexuality and homosexuality in the first
decades of the 21. DEmilio 1983a. 22. Floyd 2009, pp. 435, following Foucault 1978, pp. 11823. 23. Katz
1995. 24. Foucault 1978, p. 121. 25. Chauncey 1994. 26. Drucker 1997, p. 37. 10 P. Drucker / Historical

twentieth century. In fact, as evidence from both the US and the Netherlands
emerging lesbian/gay communities and organisations in the postwar period
tended increasingly to squelch effeminacy among gay men and masculinity among
lesbians.27 At the same time, higher funding for education and expansion of a social safety-net (in developed
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332
shows,

countries at least) decreased peoples economic dependence on parents to support them as students or young
people, on spouses to help pay the rent, and on children to save them from poverty in old age. Full employment

The combination of
increased economic possibilities and a reconfiguration of gender-rles helped
many more people in the 1950s and 1960s shape a sexually hedonistic culture
extending beyond the largely middle-class limits of the earlier nonconformist
milieu of the 1910s and 1920s. Within this broad hedonistic culture it became possible for a growing
minority to form same-sex relationships and networks. While Fordist mass consumption was,
above all, an attempt to secure a broad and sustained accumulation of capital, the
diversification of consumer-marketing that it entailed created space for an
underground circulation of homoerotic images in an increasingly less
underground gay male [and lesbian] network .28 What remained to prevent people from living
meant more job-opportunities for some people who had previously been marginalised.

openly lesbian/gay lives were the constraints of the law, police, employers, landlords, and social pressure of many

The lesbian/gay movements of the 1960s and 70s rebelled against these
constraints, inspired by a wave of other social rebellions: black, youth, anti-war,
feminist and (at least in some European countries) working-class. 29 Supplementing the
attempts of early lesbian/gay groups to discipline their members gender-norms, the second wave of
feminism was key in drastically reining in the butch-femme patterns that were still
largely hegemonic in 1950s lesbian subcultures (or at least in turning them into a subterranean
sorts.

game).30 The first lesbian/gay legal victories in the 1970s made mass, open lesbian/ gay/bisexual (LGB)
communities possible in the developed countries for the first time in history. Among the preconditions for these

communities were the general increase in peoples living standards and economic security, which made
autonomous lesbian/gay lives possible; the fact that the millions of people who came out around the 1970s had a
certain relative social homogeneity, thanks in part to generational bonds of the baby-boom and in part to the
narrowing of economic divides in the 1950s and 60s, so that there 27. Warmerdam and Koenders 1987, pp. 125,
153, 169; Floyd 2009, pp. 1678. 28. Floyd 2009, p. 174. 29. DEmilio 1983b. 30. Califia 2003, p. 3. P. Drucker /
Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 11 were fewer barriers to a common sense of identity; and a relatively
favourable political/cultural climate. The homogeneity of 1970s lesbian/gay communities was of course relative.
Class and sexual differences always existed .

The relative ease with which women and men

coexisted in the early years of gay liberation lasted only until women became too
fed-up with the treatment they often received at the hands of gay men. A lthough
gender-norms relaxed to a certain extent in the 1960s and 70s, this led to a true devaluation of masculinity and
femininity only in the context of a radical-feminist critique, which was never hegemonic;31 even in the New Left,

Racism was
always a reality. Differences that existed in the 1970s became far greater in the
1980s and 1990s, however, for reasons that go deeper than an inevitable sortingout.
gender-relaxing countercultural influences coexisted with Third-Worldist macho posturing.32

Capitalism fractures LGBT society, hinders the development of individual

identities and renders LGBT resistance impossilbe
Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/156920611x6064
12; The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
The depressive long wave that began by 19745 was
met by the late 1970s with a neoliberal offensive. This offensive included (to be very schematic):
a shift to Toyotist production-techniques and to lean production generally;
economic globalisation, liberalisation and deregulation, taking advantage of new
technologies that accelerated the speed and dispersed the space of production;33
privatisation of many public enterprises and social services ; an increase in the wealth and
II. Gays in the post-Fordist economy

power of capital at labours expense; an increase in inequality among countries (through the debt-crisis and
structural-adjustment policies) and within countries (through regressive tax and welfare-reforms and attacks on
unions), and luxury-consumption that increasingly replaced mass-consumption as a motor of economic growth.

This offensive among other things fragmented the worlds working classes. Big
differences (re) surfaced between better and worse-paid workers, permanent and
temporary workers, white and black, native-born and immigrant, employed and
unemployed.34 The less pronounced differences in income and job-security in 31. See Floyd 2009, pp. 177
8. 32. Floyd 2009, pp. 1689. 33. Hennessy 2000, p. 6. 34. One study of wage-trends shows that among
manufacturing workers in the US, inequality soared in the 1970s and 1980s, reaching levels far higher than those
existing during the Depression. The recovery after 1994 brought inequality down again, but only to just below that
of the worst years of the 1930s (Galbraith and Cant 2001, p. 83). Mike Davis noted extreme income/skill
polarization in the growing US healthcare, business-service, banking and real-estate sectors, resulting in a splitlevel economy and reshaping the traditional income pyramid into a 12 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4

national working classes in the 1960s, which were the backdrop to the
rise of lesbian/gay identity, became a thing of the past. One factor complicating the
neoliberal offensive was the difficulty of rolling back some of the achievements of
black, womens and lesbian/gay movements. The contradictions of these
emancipatory movements in a time of workingclass weakness and growing
inequality were played out in many of the ideological debates of the 1980s and
90s. Womens equality and racial equality became steadily more established as
political commonplaces (in rhetoric if not in reality) at the same time that
redistributive and counter-cyclical economic policies, far less controversial 40
years ago, were dismissed as outmoded and counterproductive (until the 2008 crisis
(2011) 332

prompted massive redistribution of wealth to the worlds biggest banks and various forms of stimulus). What has
the effect of all this been on LGBT people, communities and movements? The end of the Fordist expansive long
wave was not bad news for everyone by any means, and not for all LGB people specifically. Particularly among
some middle-class and upper-working-class social layers that prospered in the 1980s and 90s, especially but not
only in developed capitalist countries, commercial gay scenes continued to grow, continuing to underlie

Market-friendly lesbian/gay identities prospered in

commercialised spaces, in the construction of two-income households among
better-off gays and to a lesser extent lesbians, and in the tolerant public space
fostered by gay-rights victories. Many relatively better-paid lesbian/gay people who benefited from
lesbian/gay identity.35

both economic success and gay-rights reforms have some cause to be contented with the progress they have
made: inside a cozy brownstone, curled up next to a health-insured domestic partner in front of a Melissa
Etheridge video on MTV, flipping through Out magazine and sipping an Absolut and tonic, capitalism can feel
pretty good.36

While all social relations under capitalism are reified distorted so

that relations between people are perceived as relations with or even between
things the shift under neoliberalism to economic growth founded increasingly on
middle-class overconsumption raised the reification of human relations among
neoliberalisms beneficiaries to new heights. This applied notably to sexual and
emotional relations among middleclass gay men and lesbians. new income hourglass
(Davis 1986, pp. 21418). Figures from the US Federal Reserve show that income-inequality increased further at
the end of the 1990s (Andrews 2003). 35. Altman 1982, pp. 7997. 36. Gluckman and Reed 1997, p. xv. P.
Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 13 The 1970s, 80s and 90s and the first decade of the new
millennium were also years in which open LGBT communities and identities became more prominent in much of
the dependent world, first in Latin America and later in many Asian and African countries. Given that dependent
countries as a whole have suffered especially with the decline of the old forms of capitalaccumulation,
communities and identities there have taken on very contrasting forms. 37

The period of slower growth

and neoliberal reaction in the global North was a time of recurrent and devastating
crisis in many parts of the South even before the generalised crisis of 2008
(notably in Latin America after 1982, in Mexico again after 1994, in much of
Southeast Asia after 1997, in Brazil for several years after 1998, and in much of
Africa with scarcely a breathing-space). But this did not prevent the growth of
middle-classes in the South with incomes far above their countries averages and
linked to global consumer-capitalism including gay consumer-capitalism.
Commercialised, Western-oriented lesbian/gay identities seem in this context to
have a complex and contradictory relationship with other same-sex sexualities that
co-exist with them in the dependent world. In many ways gay and lesbian are still largely middle
or upper-class, US or Eurocentric concepts, even if in other ways they provide a reference-point in struggles for
sexual emancipation.38 In both developed and dependent capitalist countries, the ideological and cultural sway of
gay identities in LGBT communities has spread beyond the more privileged social layers in which peoples lives fit
these identities most comfortably. LGBT media in dependent countries rely to some extent on lesbian/gay media in
the capitalist metropoles for their material and imagery.39 In the developed capitalist countries, despite the
proliferation of websites and zines defining identities and subcultures for minorities within the minorities, the
most widely circulated books, periodicals and videos tend to be those most closely linked to the new,
predominantly middle-class, gay mainstream. Even those who are economically least well-equipped for the

more
fundamentally, even celibate or monogamous people who are at least temporarily
not in the market for a partner still tend to define themselves in the culturally
hegemonic categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual or straight. Even poor
transgendered and queer people whose lives are most remote from the images of
the gay mainstream sometimes incorporate aspects of gay mainstream-culture into
their aspirations and fantasies, constructing 37. Drucker 2009, pp. 8268. 38. Altman 2000;
commercial gay scene are often dependent on it as a market for potential (short or long-term) partners;

Oetomo 1996, pp. 2658. 39. Drucker 2000a, pp. 267. 14 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332

their identities in part from images that may be borrowed and adapted from very
different social realities. This hegemony of lesbian/gay identity over much of the

LGBT world, and the physical coexistence of LGBT people of different classes in
lesbian/gay spaces, provides arguments to those who downplay the importance of
class in mixed-class LGBT communities.40 It is true that the class-segregation that characterised
early-twentieth-century LGBT scenes eased in the Fordist period. But cultural commonalities and
cross-class relationships do not make lesbian/gay identity and spaces class-neutral ,
any more than the existence of sexual relationships between masters and slaves meant that slavery was not a
significant factor in them. Undifferentiated accounts of gay life tend to narrate relatively well-resourced and
privileged experience as gay experience, and normatively promote this as a script for how gay life should be

Lesbian/gay spaces are not islands, but heavily influenced by the

structures of class in the surrounding societies: research on young LGBT peoples
schooling in Britain, for example, identifies social class as a major axis of power
which positions LGBT people unequally and unjustly .42 Moreover, as the next section shows,
the fracturing of LGBT scenes in recent decades also has a class-dimension. Both in the centres and at
the margins of the world-capitalist system, three aspects of the lesbian/gay identity
that stabilised by the early 1980s fit well with the emerging neoliberal order: the
communitys self-definition as a stable minority, its increasing tendency towards
gender-conformity, and marginalisation of its own sexual minorities. Lesbians and gay
conceived and lived.41

mens self-definition as a minority group, which built on the reification of sexual desire that progressively
consolidated the categories of gay and straight over the course of the twentieth century, at the same time

To the
extent that lesbians and gays were increasingly defined as people who inhabited a
certain economic space (went to certain bars, bathhouses and discos, patronised
certain businesses, and, in the US at least, even lived to some extent in certain
neighbourhoods), they were more ghettoised than before, more clearly demarcated
from a majority defined as straight. The fact that a fair proportion of those in the bars and bathhouses
expressed a profound social fact about lesbian/gay life as it took shape specifically under neoliberalism.

were always people with at least one foot in the straight world, sometimes even married people with children, was
always an open secret, but one which few people announced with fanfare; they were generally seen as 40. For
example, Seidman 2011. 41. Heaphy 2011. 42. McDermott 2011, p. 64. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4
(2011) 332 15 people who were still half in the closet, tended to be discreet in order to avoid unpleasantness,
and were in any event generally marginal to the developing lesbian/gay culture. The fact that people continued to
come out and join the community at all ages or, for that matter, sometimes form heterosexual relationships at
later ages and as a result often decrease their participation in the community was also none too visible. The
tendency of many early theorists of lesbian/gay liberation to question the categories of heterosexuality and
homosexuality, emphasise the fluidity of sexual identity and speculate about universal bisexuality tended to fade
away with time as the communitys material reality became more sharp-edged. The lesbian/gay-rights movement

The
decline of butch/femme rle-playing among lesbians and of camp culture among
gay men also contributed to a hardening of the genderboundaries that remain
central to capitalist societies. The drag queens who, rebelling against the postwar tightening of genderaccordingly ran less risk of seeming sexually subversive of the broader sexual order of gendered capitalism.

discipline, had played a leading rle in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion found that as social tolerance of lesbians and
gays in general began to increase in the 1970s, social tolerance for gender-nonconformity in many lesbian/gay
spaces decreased once more. In the earlier, smaller community of the immediate post-Stonewall years, nongenderconforming gay men and lesbians, less able or less inclined to hide, had been a higher proportion of the visible

communities expanded, the influx of more normalseeming lesbians and gay men diluted the prominence of transgendered people . In
lesbian/gay milieu; as lesbian/gay

addition, the less polarised gender-rles in the broader culture, which had initially facilitated the emergence of
lesbian/gay identities, now increasingly restricted the room available for more gender-polarised lesbian/gay
identities. Although the temporary relaxation of gender-norms in the 1960s had created some space for playful
gender-bending, full-fledged drag often seemed anomalous and even embarrassing in the context of the

LGB communities thus increasingly

defined themselves in ways that placed transgendered people whose
communities predated the new lesbian/gay identity by millennia and other visible
nonconformists on the margins, if not completely out of bounds . Kevin Floyds
androgynous imagery that was in vogue in the early 1970s.

identification of an ongoing, radical uncertainty about whether gay male sexual practice necessarily feminizes any

the relation between gender and

sexuality is configured differently at different times and 43. Floyd 2009, p. 64. 16 P. Drucker /
Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 locations within a global-capitalist totality that is
neither static nor uniform, but rather strongly differentiated by period, class,
gender, and the processes of combined and uneven development . We have seen, for
of the men involved43 does not do justice to the ways in which

example, that transgendered sexuality was more common in the working class than in the middle-class in
developed countries in the early-twentieth century, as it still tends to be in some parts of the dependent world. The
late 1970s, at the cusp of the transition from Fordism to neoliberalism, was the time in developed countries when
space for transgendered sexualities (and thus Floyds radical uncertainty) was at its historical nadir. While gay-

the increased centrality of consumption

to LGB identity resulted in a series of shifts in its sexual contours, some already
apparent by the late 1970s and early 80s, others emerging only in the 90s or
later. Obviously these shifts did not reflect an instantaneous, spontaneous sea-change in all LGBT peoples felt
male sexuality was masculinised and lesbianism feminised,

desires or sexual practices. Individual desire and psychology are more resilient than that and are shaped over the
course of lifetimes, not totally transmuted by the social developments of a decade or two. In some cases the winds
of erotic fashion undoubtedly have shallower causes than profound socioeconomic change, and it would be a
mistake to read too much into them. But when sexual identities and imagery took on more unequal and genderpolarised forms at just the time when the surrounding societies were undergoing a sharp, long-term rise in
inequality, it would be implausible to dismiss the correlation as pure coincidence. In any event, as the decline of
Fordism put welfare-state programmes under pressure, a renewed emphasis on the centrality of the family to
social reproduction helped put a brake on the relaxation of gender-norms that had characterised the 1960s. This
conservative turn in the broader society was accompanied by a shift among gay men from the largely androgynous
imagery and occasional gender-bending of the early 1970s to the more masculine clone-culture that took hold by
the early 80s. Feminine forms of selfpresentation that lesbian feminists once frowned on had also become more
common and acceptable among lipstick-lesbians by the 1990s a celebration of femininity that Gayle Rubin, for
example, thought could reinforce traditional gender roles and values of appropriate female behavior. 44

higher degree of gender-conformity among LGB people facilitated their

incorporation into a neoliberal social and sexual order. This conformity was congenial for the
growing number of gay men and lesbians who pursued professional, business or political careers in a number of
44. Rubin 1982, p. 214. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 17 capitalist societies, without
necessarily renouncing or hiding their sexuality but preferably without flaunting it. Even the lesbian/gay middleclass layers that live off gay businesses and nonprofits far from all of whom were among the real economic
winners of recent decades, but who tended to be spoken for by those among them who were preferred in general
to keep LGB communityexpressions culturally inoffensive. Another layer of middle-class or middleclass-identified
lesbian/gay people, who were making their careers inside mainstream businesses and institutions, sometimes
cringed at manifestations of a lesbian/gay community that marked them off too much from other people of their
class. Many of these people would like to be able to pursue their careers in straight companies and institutions
while being open about their same-sex relationships fewer people are willing to contract heterosexual marriages
these days and to keep their homosexual lives completely hidden and marginal and for the rest deny or minimise
differences between them and middle-class straights. This professional layer has provided the solid social base for
the most moderate currents of LGB movements, which have often seen same-sex marriage as the culminating
moment in the process of gay emancipation. And, in fact, same-sex marriage and adoption can be the culmination
of some LGBT peoples integration into the productive and reproductive order of gendered capitalism.
Paradoxically, while neoliberalism has in many ways undermined the direct and obvious domination of wives and

neoliberal cutbacks in
social services, by privatising the provision of basic needs, have been restoring the
centrality of the family-unit to the social reproduction of labour in classed ways .
daughters by husbands and fathers under the original Fordist gender-rgime,45

While legal same-sex marriage or partnership can in this context secure new benefits for middle-class and
privileged working-class lesbians and gays, for those most dependent on the welfare-state in countries such as
Britain and the Netherlands legal recognition of their partnerships can lead to cuts in benefits.46 As the number
of children being raised in households headed by same-sex couples has risen, same-sex marriage and adoption can
serve to legitimise and regulate the growing rle that lesbian and gay couples are playing in social production,
consumption and reproduction. Yet the rise of same-sex-coupleheaded nuclear families redefines and even
reinforces rather than overcomes the gay-straight divide, since the ways in which lesbians and gay men form 45.
Brenner 2003, pp. 789. 46. Browne 2011. 18 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 families
(through sperm-donorship, adoption, the break-up of straight families or other trajectories) necessarily remain
distinctive. In the twenty-first century,

an ideological factor has also played a crucial rle in

integrating lesbian/gay people into the neoliberal order: the instrumentalisation of

lesbian/gay rights in the service of imperialist and Islamophobic ideologies, which
Jasbir Puar has defined as homonationalism .47 Particularly but not only in countries such as the
Netherlands48 and Denmark, where both same-sex partnership-rights and anti-immigrant racism are strongly
developed, this homonationalism has been key to consolidating and taming lesbian/gay identity. III. Social and
sexual roots of alternative identities The apparent uniformity of lesbian/gay culture in the mid-1970s in fact
helped disguise social and economic fractures opening up among LGB people. As a result, the relatively
homogeneous lesbian/gay identities that had taken shape in North America and Western Europe by the 1970s
were challenged and fragmented over the following decades, though to different degrees in different countries.
There has been, in particular, a proliferation of alternative sexual or gender-identities, more-or-less outside of the
mainstream commercial scene. Some, though far from all, of these alternative identities represent challenges to
the basic parameters of the gay/straight divide that emerged and was consolidated through much of the twentieth
century. Contrary to much right-wing anti-gay rhetoric, the prosperous couples focused on by glossy lesbian/gay
magazines were never typical of LGBTs in general. Data gathered by the US National Opinion Research Centers
General Social Survey in the 1990s suggested that lesbian and bisexual women were still far less likely than other
women to have professional or technical jobs and more likely to have service or craft/operative jobs, while gay and
bisexual men were more likely than other men to have professional/technical, clerical/sales or service-jobs but less
likely to have managerial jobs.49 The heteronormative constraints of many economic sectors the pressures to
abide by a heterosexual norm of behaviour seems to drive many low-wage service workers . . . to accept a lower
wage than they would be paid elsewhere in exchange for the relative comfort of working in a queer
environment.50 47. Puar 2007, pp. xxiv, 389. 48. Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010. 49. Badgett 1997, p.
81. 50. Sears 2005, p. 106. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 19 Whatever the causes (less
ability or willingness to meet gendered jobexpectations, migration to more competitive job-markets,

the net result (contrary to unfounded claims made not only by anti-gay
ideologues but also by some gay publications) was that, at least in the US, both gay
men and lesbians were under-represented in the higher-income brackets (with
family-incomes of $50,000 or more), while gay men in particular were overrepresented in the lower-income brackets (with familyincomes of $30,000 or less).51 A more
discrimination),

recent study showed that men in samesex couples were still earning significantly less on average than their

women in samesex couples earn

more on average than straight married women, their income is, of course, less than
mens.52 Transgendered people are even worse off: a 2006 study found that in San
Francisco 60% of them earned less than $15,300 a year, only 25% had fulltime
jobs, and nearly 9% had no source of income.53 The expansion of LGBT communities centred on
straight counterparts in 2005 ($43,117 compared to $49,777); while

gay commercial scenes did not improve the situation of lower-income LGBTs. On the contrary, Jeffrey Escoffier has
noted that the gay market, like markets in general, tends to segment the lesbian and gay community by income,
by class, by race and by gender.54 This is especially true of same-sex couples, particularly same-sex couples
raising children together, since two women living together are in a sense doubling the economic disadvantages
they both experience as women. LGBTs are, moreover, more likely to be cut off from broader family-support
networks, and as the social safety-net has frayed ,

inequalities resulting from wage-differentials

have affected them with particular intensity.55 Across the capitalist world, the
welfare-state has been shredded, unions have been weakened, and inequality has
grown. In this context, polarisation within LGBT communities has been particularly
great. Lower-income LGBs, transgendered people, street-youth and LGBT people of colour have been under
assault in various ways in recent decades, as attacks on poor people and minorities have multiplied, racism has
intensified even more in the US, and new forms of antagonism to black and immigrant communities (especially of
Muslim origin) have grown up in European countries. Young LGBTs and sexworkers in particular have been
victims of intensified forms of coercive 51. Badgett and King 1997, pp. 689. 52. Romero, Baumle, Badgett and
Gates 2007, p. 2, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 241. 53. Transgender Law Center and San Francisco Bay Guardian 2006,
cited in Wolf 2009, p. 147. 54. Escoffier 1997, p. 131. 55. Jacobs 1997. 20 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4

Social polarisation within LGBT communities has coincided with

greater prominence for forms of sexual identity and practice that focus explicitly
on gender and power-differences and rle-playing. One of the first notable
mutations in LGBT identity with the rise of neoliberalism was the rle that SM and
leather played in the more masculine culture that took hold among gay men by the
early 1980s. While one gaymale leather-bar opened in New York as early as 1955
(2011) 332 policing.56

and many more followed by the early 1970s, only from 1976 on did leather-culture
become a subject of attention and debate in the broader lesbian/gay community .57
Soon SM came to be linked with male homosexuality in the eighties as firmly as effeminacy and an attack on
gender roles was in the sixties and early seventies,58 while SM clubs such as New Yorks Mineshaft became an
arena for the masculinization of the gay male.59 Paradoxically at this stage, while divisions between tops and
bottoms that would earlier have been widely rejected on liberationist grounds became acceptable and sometimes
blatant, virtually all the men in the scene were masculinised in the process. It was as if SM, while celebrating
difference and power, served, in Dennis Altmans term, as a ritual of catharsis, of both acting out and exorcising
the growing violence and inequality of the broader society.60 As Gayle Rubin put it, class, race, and gender
neither determine nor correspond to the roles adopted for S/M play.61 By the early 1980s, forms of sexuality that
diverged from the perceived feminist norm also affected the previously hegemonic lesbian-feminist culture.
Lesbian-feminist culture in a sense already struck a divergent note in the 1970s. The sense has persisted that
lesbians in general play less of a rle in commercial scenes and persevere more in trying to sustain alternative
scenes. While of course some lesbians, like some gay men, are middle-class or rich, the fact that women trying to
survive independently of men have lower incomes on average and are thus more likely to be working-class or poor

while lesbian feminists had put working-class and poor

women under great pressure in the 1970s to abandon butch-femme relationships
that had been common among them for decades, some lesbians began in the 1980s
to 56. Sears 2005, p. 103. 57. Rubin 1982, p. 219; Califia 1982, pp. 280, 2448. 58. Altman 1982, p. 191. 59. Ira
has contributed to this sense. But

Tattleman, Staging Masculinity at the Mineshaft, cited in Moore 2004, p. 20. 60. Altman 1982, p. 195. 61. Rubin

defend butch-femme
vigorously.62 At about the same time some lesbians took a visible part in SM culture, particularly in San
1982, p. 222. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 21

Francisco. This dovetailed with a general upheaval in the lesbian world through conflict between currents that
defined themselves as anti-pornography and others that defined themselves as pro-sex.63 The most explosive
issue in the sex-wars was, briefly, the issue of intergenerational sex, which was the subject of a major
confrontation during the organisation of the first US national lesbian/gay-rights march in 1979. Going beyond
understandable and legitimate concerns about coercion and abuse of authority, some currents perceived powerdifferences between adults and youths as precluding the possibility of consent to sex.64 However, the very

the clone and SM

subcultures, lipstick-lesbianism and sex-wars of the 1980s were only an initial
phase in a longer-term fracturing of LGBT identity. The consolidation of Reaganism and
explosiveness of the issue quickly placed it beyond the pale of discussion. In hindsight,

Thatcherism by the mid-1980s coincided for LGBT people with the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, a trauma
experienced as a sharp generational break. While some men who survived the epidemic followed a gay variant of

many younger people who came of age in

the era of AIDS and neoliberalism found the road to a safer middle-class existence
strewn with obstacles. Beginning in the mid-1980s a queer social milieu emerged, made up to a large
the trajectory of the middle-class baby-boom generation,

extent of young people on the bottom of the unequal social hourglass that had resulted from economic
restructuring.65 One aspect of the underlying social reality is that the lower young queers incomes were and the
more meagre their job-prospects, the less on average they identified with or wanted to join the lesbian/gay
community that had grown up since the 1960s and 70s. Economic changes . . . meant more part-time and
contract work, especially for young people, which left many unable to see a place for themselves in the by then
established gay middle class.66 Above all initially in English-speaking developed-capitalist countries the
developed countries where social polarisation is greatest young queers resisted disco-culture, a bar-centred
ghetto, and the kind of segregation that fit 62. Nestle 1989; Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, pp. 397404. 63. Vance
(ed.) 1989; Linden, Pagano, Russell and Star (eds.) 1982; Califia 1982, pp. 2509. 64. The state enforces a related
point of view, as shown in hundreds of prosecutions of LGBT people each year under age-of-consent laws, the
repeated prosecutions of the Canadian gay paper Body Politic for discussing the issue in print, and US Senator
Jesse Helmss successful move to block UN recognition of any LGBT group that condones paedophilia. 65.
Drucker 1993, p. 29. 66. Patterson 2000. 22 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 with ethnic-style
minority-group politics. Self-identified queers refused to be comfortable on the social periphery in the
ghettos.67 English-speaking queer scenes have been echoed in some ways by queers in squatters milieus in
continental Western Europe. This generation had also grown up in far more diverse and changeable familystructures, which made the notion of modelling lesbian/gay households on traditional straight ones all the more
implausible for them. In some milieus of young rebels, gender and sexual categories have become more fluid than

Economic marginalisation and

cultural alienation were closely interlinked in the emergence of a queer milieu,
making it hard in many cases to say to what extent poverty was a cause of
alienation, to what extent the choice of a queer lifestyle contributed to more-or-less
would be usual in mainstream straight, gay male or lesbian scenes.

voluntary poverty, and to what extent some queers were middle-class gays
particularly students and academics dressing and talking like down-and-outs, in
some cases perhaps only for a period of a few years of float[ing] in and out of
deviance or propriety.68 In other cases queerness may be defined so much by dress, style or
performance that it becomes as much a matter of consumer-choice and an expression of reification as the middle-

Nevertheless, the overall correlation between lower

incomes and queer selfidentification seems clear. If economic pressures made
integration into the dominant lesbian/gay culture a dubious proposition for
many young and disadvantaged queers in developed countries, the barriers
have been all the greater for poor and working-class LGBTs in Asia, Africa
and Latin America. Dependent capitalist countries have been the site over the
last forty years of social constructions of sexuality that are neither completely
different from the predominant lesbian/ gay identities in imperialist countries in
the 1970s nor merely expressions of a single modern, globalised identity .70
class gay identities it rejects.69

Sexualities that were indigenous to the dependent worlds precapitalist or early-capitalist social formations (such
as the traditional transgender identities of Southeast Asia and Latin America) have persisted, while coexisting

The result of this intersection of dependent development,

sexuality and culture was that poor and working-class LGBT people in the
dependent world were less likely than middle-class LGBs to have identities (let alone
with lesbian/gay identities.

incomes) that facilitated their integration into a Westernised, commercialised 67. Seidman 1997, p. 193; Drucker
1993, p. 29. 68. Califia 2003, p. xiv. 69. Hennessy 2000, pp. 1401. 70. Drucker 1996. P. Drucker / Historical
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 23 gay scene.71 They were more likely to be transgendered people, more likely to
be subject to violence, and more likely to be dependent on family and/or community-structures for their survival.
The economic marginalisation that they experience tended to make post-Fordist lesbian/gay identity at least as
problematic and alien for them as for young self-identified queers in North America or Britain.

Marginalisation of millions of LGBT people worldwide because they are poor,

young or black has impelled many of them towards developing or adopting
identities that have broken to some extent with the dominant patterns of postFordist gay identity. As we have seen, the dominant trend since the 1980s, based particularly on the reality
of more prosperous LGB peoples lives, was for the lesbian/gay community to define itself as a stable and distinct
minority, tend increasingly towards gender-conformity, and marginalise its own sexual minorities. By contrast ,

the nonconformist sexual and genderidentities that have grown up among more
marginalised layers have tended to be non-homonormative: to identify with
broader communities of oppressed or rebellious people, to fail to conform to
dominant gender-norms, and/or to emphasise power-differentials that dominant
lesbian/gay imagery tends to elide. While these counter-identities have shown little sign of coalescing
into any overarching alternative identity on the contrary, different counteridentities can and do clash with each

they do share a number of features that correspond to structural

similarities in their bearers positions under neoliberal capitalism. Non-homonormative
other72

identities defined by marginalisation on the basis of age, class, region and/or ethnicity have overlapped with the
growth or persistence of subcultures that have been marginal in the commercial scene because they constitute
(sometimes extensive) niche markets at best and illicit ones at worse. The relationship between alternative
identities and marginalised sexual practices is elusive, but there does appear to be a correlation. There are, of
course, many LGBTs who limit their sexual rebellion to the safety of a particular brand of bar. But the more
attached people are to their sexual identities, the more reluctant many of them become to give them up at work or
in public. Not coincidentally, the more visible transgendered people are, the less likely they are in most societies
to get one of the well-paid, permanent, full-time jobs that have become scarcer and more coveted commodities in
post-Fordist economies. Moreover, some people are virtually or entirely incapable of hiding 71. Oetomo 1996, pp.
2658. 72. See, for example, Drucker 1993, p. 29. 24 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 aspects
of their identities, particularly effeminacy in men or butchness in women, that are often rightly or wrongly
associated with sexualities that are neither hetero- nor homonormative. Voluntary or involuntary, tell-tale signs of
sexual deviance often lead to managements excluding people from professional or service-jobs or to fellow
workers hostility that impels people to avoid or flee certain workplaces. Paradoxically, in the absence of general
guarantees for workers job-security or free expression at work, antidiscrimination laws that protect LGB people

in general may be of less than no use to the sexually marginalised, as Ruthann Robson has noted: If a company
employs four lesbians, a new manager can fearlessly fire the one who has her nose pierced or who is most

These factors help explain the correlation that exists

between subaltern social positions and various alternative sexual scenes and
identities that do not fit into standard post-Fordist lesbian/gay moulds. This is not a
outspoken or who walks the dykiest.73

straightforward correlation between non-homonormative identities and working-class affiliation. On the contrary,
working-class lesbians and gays and lesbians and gays of colour (sometimes, of course, the same people) have
sometimes reacted against self-defined queer or other sexually dissident groups when such groups demanded
visibility of them that would make their lives more difficult in particular workplaces or communities.74 The
correlation has been rather with particular sectors of the working class on average younger, less skilled, less
organised and lower-paid that have expanded since the 1970s. Part of the younger queer generation has taken
up, and to some extent recast, claims for some of the stigmatised sexual practices that were made during the sexwars of the early 1980s. In doing so they have rebelled against homonormative confining straightjackets that
inserted some queers as the tolerated others within the existing social relations of gender and sexuality and
marginalized others.75 Queer [thus] potentially includes deviants and perverts who may traverse or
confuse the homo/hetero division.76 By contrast with the earlier period, SM has been less in the forefront SM
seems less politically laden now than it was in the sex-wars of the early 1980s and gender-bending and
transgender all the more. SM seems to have become less central to LGBT culture as it has increasingly, in diluted
form, come to permeate the broader sexual culture, as seen in the spread of piercing, tattooing, and leatherfashion and accessories. Among LGBTs, the queer generation has 73. Robson 1992, p. 87, cited in Robson 1997, p.
175, n. 13. 74. Drucker 1993, p. 29. 75. Sears 2005, p. 100. 76. Hennessy 2000, p. 113. P. Drucker / Historical
Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 25 tended more to play with issues of inequality and power-difference in other ways
that expose their artificiality and facilitate their subversion. The contradictions of gender and power have been
particularly visible in transgender and gender-bending subcultures since the 1990s. As Dennis Altman points out,
drag has always to a certain extent subverted mainstream gender-rles through veneration of the strong woman
who defies social expectations to assert herself;77 and Judith Butler has argued that drag subverts gender by
exposing it as a performatively enacted signification.78 Forms of gender-bending have shifted over the decades,
however. In the 1980s, Amber Hollibaugh proclaimed that her vision of butch/femme was not a reaffirmation of
existing gender-categories but a new system of gay gender. More recently, younger transgendered people seem
more likely to take on gender-identities that are difficult to subsume (if at all) under existing feminine or
masculine rles. Today lesbian butch/femme is acquiring more flexibility than it had in the 70s when I came out,
says Patrick Califia, thanks in part to a crosspollination of butch/femme with SM which creates space for butch
bottoms and femme tops.79 These more flexible and ambiguous forms of transgender can be associated
simultaneously with the myriad forms of transgender that have existed for millennia around the planet, and with
queer milieus that have only emerged since the late 1980s in rebellion against the lesbian/gay mainstream. They
are thus, in a sense, very old and very new. New forms of transgender contrast with the forms of transexuality,
which themselves arose only in the 1950s and 60s, as defined by a wing of the medical establishment. The
medical experts not only tend to prescribe sexreassignment surgery as the standard cure for intense gendernonconformity but also tend to urge transexuals to adapt (perhaps somewhat less rigidly than in the past) to the
norms of their new gender.80 Queer-identified transgendered people do not necessarily reject hormonetreatments or surgery, but they can be selective in what they do or do not choose for themselves. Califia links this
new trend among transgendered people to SM peoples attitude towards body-modification: A new sort of
transgendered person has emerged, one who approaches sex reassignment with the same mindset that they would
obtaining a piercing or a tattoo.81 Often these transpeople do not see themselves as transitioning from male to
female or vice versa, but rather as transgendered as opposed to male or female. 77. Altman 1982, p. 154. 78.
Butler 1999, p. 44. 79. Califia 2000, pp. 1869. 80. Califia 2003, pp. 5285. 81. Califia 2003, p. 224. 26 P. Drucker /
Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 More traditional poor and working-class transpeople for their part can
often struggle for years to save the money for their operations, including in dependent countries, or simply
change each others genitals without resorting to official medicine. The thousands of transgender hijras in South
Asia, increasingly visible and militant among the poorest people of their region and notably at the 2004 World
Social Forum in Mumbai, do not often seem to share European and North American queers interest in
transcending or blurring gender-categories. For that matter, even many intersex people (born with genitals that
do not identify them as unambiguously male or female) are perfectly comfortable adopting either a male or
female gender identity.82 Just the same, many LGBTs in dependent countries have been trying in their own ways
to resist pressures to claim them for a homogeneous, middleclass-dominated lesbian/gay community, purge them
of old-fashioned aspects of their identities, or make them come out in ways that would tear them away from their
families and communities without providing them with equivalent support-systems. Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel,
for example, has expressed his identification with Santiagos downtrodden locas [transvestites] and his rejection
of the gay-male model he encountered in New York.83 To a greater or lesser extent, different forms of transgender
are radically subversive of the lesbian/gay identity that emerged under Fordism, in a way that the would-be allencompassing acronym LGBT fails to successfully subsume in a single social subject. Transexuals who identify as
straight (albeit born in the wrong body) often question what they have in common with lesbians, gays or
bisexuals. South Asian hijras, identifying with neither gender, cannot be legitimately classified as either gay or

In
capitalism both North and South in this time of crisis, then, lesbian/gay identity
has been undergoing simultaneous construction and fracturing .84 A very diverse and
straight. Nor can transgendered queers who insist that they have moved beyond male and female.

diffuse set of alternative sexual identities has been diverging more and more from the post-Fordist, genderconformist, consumerist lesbian/ gay mainstream, and in some cases challenge the very social and conceptual
basis of straight or lesbian/gay self-definition.

Class struggles and LGBT struggles are not mutually exclusive-queer

conceptions of sexuality solve for a free society
Drucker 11 [Peter, International Institute of Research and Education; 2011;
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/156920611x6064
12; The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism; 06/29/15; jac]
Recognising the deep roots of the fracturing of same-sex
identities necessarily puts in question any universalism that ignores class, gender,
sexual, cultural, 82. Herndon 2006, p. 1, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 230. 83. Mansilla 1996, p. 23, cited in
IV. Implications for liberation

Palaversich 2002, p. 104. 84. Drucker 2000a. P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 27

racial/ethnic and other differences within LGBT communities. These communities

and identities are being fractured in large part by fundamental changes in the
productive and reproductive order of gendered capitalism . Young queers, working-class and
poor LGBTs, transgendered people and other marginalised groups have increasingly found themselves in
objectively different situations from people in the consolidating gay mainstream. It is thus no surprise that they
have tended to some extent to define distinct identities. The forms taken by alternative, non-homonormative
sexual identities do not necessarily win them easy acceptance among feminists or socialists. The lesbian/gay
identity that emerged by the 1970s had much to commend it from the broad-Lefts point of view (once the Left had

By contrast, transgendered and other queers can

raise the hackles of many on the Left, since their sexuality strikes many as at
variance with the mores to be expected and hoped for in an egalitarian, peaceful,
rational future. One may doubt, however, whether any sexuality existing under capitalism
can serve as a model for sexualities to be forecast or desired under socialism . Nor is
largely overcome its initial homophobia).

it useful to privilege any particular existing form of sexuality in present-day struggles for sexual liberation.

Socialists aim should not be to replace the traditional hierarchical system of

sexual value85 with a new hierarchy of our own. As Amber Hollibaugh pointed out many years
ago, sexual history has first of all to be able to talk realistically about what people are sexually.86 And in
radical struggles over sexuality, as in radical struggles over production, the basic
imperative is to welcome and stimulate self-organisation and resistance by people
subjected to exploitation, exclusion, marginalisation or oppression, in the forms
that oppressed peoples own experience proves to be most effective. This is not to say
that Marxists should simply adopt a liberal attitude of unthinking approval of sexual diversity in general, in a spirit

Our central concern must be to advance the sexual liberation of the

working class and its allies, who today include straights, LGBs and particularly
among its most oppressed layers transgendered and other queers. Resisting the
retreat from class in LGBT activism and queer studies, Marxists should combat
heterosexism and bourgeois hegemony among straights, homonormativity and
bourgeois hegemony among LGBs, and blanket hostility to straights and nonqueer-identified gays where it exists among 85. Rubin 1989, p. 279. 86. Hollibaugh and Moraga
1983, p. 396. 28 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 self-identified queers. This will require
seeking new tactics and forms of organising within LGBT movements . The postof anything goes.

Stonewall lesbian/gay movement waged an effective fight against discrimination and won many victories on the
basis of an identity widely shared by those engaged in same-sex erotic or emotional relationships. But this classic
lesbian/gay identity has not been the only basis in history for movements for sexual emancipation. In the German

homophile-struggle from 1897 to 1933, for example, Magnus Hirschfelds Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the
wing of the movement closer to the social-democratic Left, tended to put forward polarised third sex-theories.87

This is what one might predict on the basis of the evidence that egalitarian gay
identities were at first primarily a middle-class phenomenon, while transgender
and gender-polarised patterns persisted longer in the working class and among the
poor.88 Today in the dependent world as well, transgender identities seem to be more common among the less
prosperous and less Westernised.89 Rather than privileging same-sex sexualities more common among the less
oppressed, however superficially egalitarian, the Left should be particularly supportive of those same-sex
sexualities more common among the most oppressed, however polarised. Another important consideration is the
challenge that alternative, nonhomonormative sexualities can sometimes pose to the reification of sexual desire
that the categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and straight embody .

Marxists question the fantasy of

consumers under neoliberalism that obtaining the right commodities will define
them as unique individuals and secure their happiness; we should not uncritically
accept an ideology that defines individuals and their happiness on the basis of a
quest for a partner of the right gender.90 How will LGBT communities and movements be
structured in a time of increasingly divergent identities? Self-defined queer activist-groups, which emerged
initially in the US and Britain in the early 1990s, have also appeared in recent years in a number of countries in
continental Europe. They pose a 87. See Fernbach 1998, p. 51; Drucker 1997, p. 37. 88. Chauncey 1994. 89.
Oetomo 1996, pp. 2658. 90. Kevin Floyd argues that the reifying of sexual desire needs to be understood as a
condition of possibility for a complex, variable history of sexually nonnormative discourses, practices, sites,
subjectivities, imaginaries, collective formations, and collective aspirations (Floyd 2009, pp. 745). Having earlier
recalled Lukcss later criticism of the conflation of objectification and reification in his History and Class
Consciousness, Floyd here reproduces it upside down, celebrating both as Lukcs had rejected both.
Objectification, the alternate adoption of subject and objectpositions in an interplay between different human
individuals, is inherent to sexuality; reification, the petrifaction of specific rles and sexual identities, is not. P.
Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 332 29 radical challenge to mainstream lesbian/gay organisations,
although they have yet to show much of an orientation towards large-scale mobilisation, to take root among the
racially and nationally oppressed, or to prove their adaptability to the dependent world.91 In countries where civil
rights and same-sex marriage have been won, the process of seeking new horizons and finding appropriate forms
of organising seems likely to be a prolonged one especially since the LGBT social and political landscape seems
likely to remain more fragmented and conflict-ridden than it was in the immediate post-Stonewall period. While
lesbian/gay identity has lost the central place it occupied in the LGBT world of the 1970s and 80s, it is still far
from marginalised; on the contrary, the new homonormativity shows no signs of succumbing to queer assaults in
the foreseeable future. In the dependent world particularly, the diversity of LGBT communities has resulted in an
alliance-model of organising as an alternative or a supplement to the model of a single, broad, unified
organisation. The broadest possible unity across different identities remains desirable in basic fights against
violence, criminalisation and discrimination as well as more ambitious struggles for equality, for example in
parenting. On other issues, LGBT rights can be best defended by working and demanding space within broader
movements, such as trade-unions, the womens movement and the globaljustice movement.92 At the same time,
an alliance-model has in some cases facilitated the process of negotiating unity among constituencies such as
transgendered people on the one hand and lesbian/gay people on the other93 who are unlikely to feel fully
included in any one unitary structure. It can constitute a united front between those whose identities fit the basic
parameters of the gay-straight divide and those whose identities do not, fostering the development of a truly
queer conception of sexuality that, in Gloria Wekkers words, is multiple, malleable, dynamic, and possessing

In a more visionary perspective, developing an inclusive,

queer conception of sexuality can be seen as a way to move towards that truly free
civilization that Herbert Marcuse described a half-century ago in Eros and Civilization, in which all laws are
male and female elements.94

self-given by the individuals, the values of play and display triumph over those of productiveness and
performance, the entire human 91. For discussions from an anticapitalist perspective of the potential and limits of
queer radicalism, see Drucker 1993 and Drucker 2010. 92. On sexual politics in the global-justice movement, see
Drucker 2009. 93. Califia 2003, p. 256. 94. Wekker 1999, p. 132. 30 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4
(2011) 332 personality is eroticised, and the instinctual substance of the perversions . . . may well express itself
in other forms.95

Case

AT structural violence
War turns structural violence
Folk 78 [Jerry, Professor of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College,
Peace Educations Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated Approach, Peace &
Change, volume V, number 1, Spring, p. 58]
Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work of
researchers and educators coming to the field from the perspective of negative peace too easily
forget that the prevention of a nuclear confrontation of global dimensions is
the prerequisite for all other peace research, education, and action. Unless such a
confrontation can be avoided there will be no world left in which to build
positive peace. Moreover, the blanket condemnation of all such negative peace
oriented research, education or action as a reactionary attempt to support and
reinforce the status quo is doctrinaire. Conflict theory and resolution, disarmament studies, studies
of the international system and of international organizations, and integration studies are in themselves neutral.
They do not intrinsically support either the status quo or revolutionary efforts to change or overthrow it. Rather
they offer a body of knowledge which can be used for either purpose or for some purpose in between .

It is
much more logical for those who understand peace as positive peace to integrate
this knowledge into their own framework and to utilize it in achieving their
own purposes. A balanced peace studies program should therefore offer the student
exposure to the questions and concerns which occupy those who view the field essentially from the point
of view of negative peace.

The alt lacks a mechanism for resolving global violence -- the impact is
global war
Moore 4 [Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential
appointee, & Honorary Editor of the American Journal of International Law,
Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton Moore, pages
41-2]
If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and
an absence of effective deterrence,

what is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war?

Past, and many contemporary, theories of war have focused on the role of specific disputes
between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty or social injustice, competition for
resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, and perceptions of "honor," or many other such factors. Such
factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or in serving as a means for generating fear and

while some of these may have more potential

to contribute to war than others, there may well be an infinite set of motivating factors,
or human wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent existence of such
motivating factors for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high
risk decisions leading to war that is the key to more effectively controlling war.
And the same may also be true of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic
manipulating public opinion. The reality, however, is that

conflict," as though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other through spontaneous combustion,
distracted our attention from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and

Certainly if we were
able to press a button and end poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice, and
orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan Tutsis as well as its Hutu opponents.I1

endless disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic governments must

remain committed to policies that will produce a better world by all
measures of human progress. The broader achievement of democracy and the
rule of law will itself assist in this progress. No one, however, has yet been able to
demonstrate the kind of robust correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of
war as is reflected in the "democratic peace." Further, given the difficulties in
overcoming many of these social problems, an approach to war exclusively
dependent on their solution may be to doom us to war for generations to
come.

Extinction outweighs
Wapner, professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy
Program at American University, 2003
(Paul, Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age,
Dissent Winter 2003 http://www.dissentmagazine. org/menutest/archives/2003/
wi03/wapner.html, ldg)
Even the most radical postmodernist
must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existenc e. As I
All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one.

have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different

This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucia l. We

can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no
meanings we ascribe to it.

character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should

But we need not

doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is existence . This in turn
be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that).

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. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good.
They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In

fact, if there is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a
value that stands above the individual contexts of human experience . Such a value would
present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-Franois Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is characterized fundamentally by its

Nonetheless, I can't see how postmodern critics can do

otherwise than accept the value of preserving the nonhuman world . The nonhuman is the
"incredulity toward meta-narratives."

extreme "other"; it stands in contradistinction to humans as a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human

postmodernism inherently advances an ethic of

respecting the "other." At the very least, respect must involve ensuring that the
"other" actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting the
experience and the dangers of reification,

actuality of the nonhuman. Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and

Postmodern critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they don't, they
deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their fundamental moral
commitment.
ecosystems.

Responsibility to future generations only framework that

allows for ethical responsibility.
Kurasawa, Professor of Sociology at York University, 2004
(Fuyuki, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of
Foresight, Constellations

Volume 11 Issue 4, Pages 453 475, Blackwell, ldg)

What can be done in the face of short-sightedness? Cosmopolitanism provides some of the clues to an answer, thanks to its

I want to
expand the notion of cosmopolitan universalism in a temporal direction, so that it
can become applicable to future generations and thereby nourish a vibrant culture
of prevention. Consequently, we need to begin thinking about a farsighted cosmopolitanism, a chrono-cosmopolitics that
formulation of a universal duty of care for humankind that transcends all geographical and socio-cultural borders.

takes seriously a sense of intergenerational solidarity toward human beings who will live in our wake as much as those living
amidst us today.26 But for a farsighted cosmopolitanism to take root in global civil society, the latter must adopt a thicker regulative
principle of care for the future than the one currently in vogue (which amounts to little more than an afterthought of the nondescript
dont forget later generations ilk). Hans Jonass imperative of responsibility is valuable precisely because it prescribes an ethicopolitical relationship to the future consonant with the work of farsightedness.27 Fully appreciating Jonass position requires that we

In
brief, intentionalism can be explained by reference to its best-known formulation,
the Kantian categorical imperative, according to which the moral worth of a deed depends upon whether the a
grasp the rupture it establishes with the presentist assumptions imbedded in the intentionalist tradition of Western ethics.

priori principle of the will or volition of the person performing it that is, his or her intention should become a universal law.28

Ex post facto evaluation of an acts outcomes, and of whether they correspond to

the initial intention, is peripheral to moral judgment. A variant of this logic is found
in Webers discussion of the ethic of absolute ends, the passionate devotion to a
cause elevating the realization of a vision of the world above all other
considerations; conviction without the restraint of caution and prudence is intensely
presentist.29 By contrast, Jonass strong consequentialism takes a cue from Webers ethic of responsibility, which stipulates
that we must carefully ponder the potential impacts of our actions and assume responsibility for them even for the incidence of
unexpected and unintended results. Neither the contingency of outcomes nor the retrospective nature of certain moral judgments

On the contrary, consequentialism reconnects what

intentionalism prefers to keep distinct: the moral worth of ends partly depends upon
the means selected to attain them (and vice versa), while the correspondence
between intentions and results is crucia l. At the same time, Jonas goes further than Weber in breaking with
exempts an act from normative evaluation.

presentism by advocating an ethic of long-range responsibility that refuses to accept the futures indeterminacy, gesturing instead

From a consequentialist perspective,

then, intergenerational solidarity would consist of striving to prevent our endeavors
from causing large-scale human suffering and damage to the natural world over
time. Jonas reformulates the categorical imperative along these lines: Act so that the effects
of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life, or Act so that the effects of your
action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life.31 What
we find here, I would hold, is a substantive and future-oriented ethos on
the basis of which civic associations can enact the work of preventive
foresight.
toward a practice of farsighted preparation for crises that could occur.30

Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and

unconditional human dignity
Cummiskey, philosophy professor Bates College, 1996
(David, Kantian Consequentialism, pg 145-146, ldg)
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of
individuals for some abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons
having to bear the cost for some elusive "overall social good." Instead, the question
is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other
persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of
the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has." 12 But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not

save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and
take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation,
what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally
good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that "rational nature exists as an end in itself"

If one truly believes that all

rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a
dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many
rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian
( GMM429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct.

needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that
agent-centered constraints require a nonvalue-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant's normative theory is based on an

How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a

refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more
extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational
beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from
maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them
arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, that is, an
unconditional and incomparable worth" that transcends any market value
( GMM436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some
must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of
the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear
some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all
rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to
sacrifice some to save many.
unconditionally valuable end.

AT Util
Utilitarianism in the context of surveillance is key.
Laval 12Professor of Sociology at the Universit de Paris Ouest Nanterre La
Dfense (Christian, Discipline and Prevent: The New Panopticon Society, Revue
du MAUSS, 2/2012, No. 40, pg. 47-72)//FJ
According to Benthams utilitarianism, humans are governed by a quest for personal
satisfaction and want to maximize it at all times and in all places . This
consideration is important for understanding the philosophy behind the
panopticon. Humans are calculating beings who seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. They are also
small economical machines designed to increase profits and reduce costs. All of societyincluding all
institutions, laws, and standards must adapt to the fact that the goal of all institutional
systems and the primary aim of governments is to produce the greatest happiness
for the greatest number while regulating and influencing behaviors so that the
satisfaction of individual interests leads to the greatest possible sum of happiness
for society at large. In other words, since we are by nature economic beings governed by our interests, it is
only right that governments should take this fact fully into account. The new system of laws, the balance between
rewards and punishments, and the institutional cogwheels must be designed to encourage each person to

This
means that individuals must be free to make their own decisions and choices, but
also that they must be carefully dissuaded from acting in ways that go against
collective interests and instead encouraged to make choices that are best for all.
calculate his personal interests and pursue his personal goals while taking collective interests into account.

The paradox is that while these self-centered calculators supposedly make free choices, their choices are shaped
by the expectation of reward or punishment from the normative system instituted and maintained by

Here lies a paradox: if individuals pursue personal interests, they cannot

be trusted since they will spontaneously defend their own selfish interests .
Therefore, they must be under constant surveillance, and governments
must indirectly influence their decisions so that while they pursue personal
interests, they still contribute to the greater collective good. 9 As David Hume, a
governments.

predecessor of Bentham, pointed out, humans are rascals. Bentham also thought that everyone was a potential
delinquent. Therefore, utilitarian philosophers tried to design a socio-political system in which individuals would
be free to make choices according to their own calculations while orienting behaviors toward the common

Freedom and security are

thus two aspects of the same political practice. Although social space is now open to all, each
interest, which would require keeping a constant eye on potential delinquents.

agent who can move through it freely, establish the relations he desires, and pursue the business of his choosing
must have interiorized within his calculation of pleasure and pain the relative weight of the punishments and

the best government acts on behaviors indirectly,

silently, internally, and at a distance by integrating itself into the calculation of
probability of being caught each person makes before committing a crime or of being
rewarded before carrying out a good deed. 10 The importance of surveillance in this new form
of power should now be clear: it is intended to influence each individuals
calculation of probabilities. The more we conform to the economic man model and the more free we
believe ourselves to be, the more we need watching. This is Benthams key point. Security is a
condition of collective happiness. Happiness is the overarching goal, and
surveillance in the name of security is the primary means of attaining it.
rewards his actions may produce. Therefore,

AT: Predictions Bad

Evaluate high magnitude predictions first - best way to
communicate threats while facilitating effective responses in
the public.
Cover 14 - Assistant Professor of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and the
Director at the Institute for Global Security Law and Policy, (Avidan Y., Presumed Imminence: Judicial Risk
Assessment in the Post-9/11 World, http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1561&context=faculty_publications)//HH
Consider the following studys findings: [W]hen people are asked how much they will pay for flight insurance for
losses resulting from terrorism, they will pay more than if they are asked how much they will pay for flight

The specter of terrorism and the emotional wallop it entails

leads people to make significant judgments in error regarding the likelihood of
certain harms.57 Moreover, a psychological study further determined that just the
discussion of a low-probability risk, even one in which trustworthy sources
elaborate on the minimal risk, increases perceptions of the risks probability .58 What
are termed dread risks, worst-case scenarios, or low-probability, high-consequence
events, powerfully impact human behavior.59 Consider that in the three months after the 9/11
insurance from all causes.56

attacks occurred, numerous Americans stopped flying and a good proportion of those people chose to drive
instead.60 Flying remains, even with the specter of terrorism, a far less risky endeavor than driving.61 Yet, people
disregarded this fact. The increase in road traffic led to 353 more fatalities nationwide in the last [three] months
of 2001 when compared to the last quarter of the preceding five years, 19962000.62 Also at work here may be

When differing accounts of risk are presented, people are more likely
to favor the more alarming version, crediting the accounts that describe more
dangers as more informative. W. Kip Viscusi characterizes this outcome as one of
irrational asymmetry: respondents overweigh [] the value of a high risk
judgement.63 In fact, there may even be reason to believe that the fear engendered by the 9/11
attacks has contagion effects, leading people to fear increased risks from sources
well beyond terrorism. For example, a study of ninth graders in California found that adolescents
an alarmist bias.

surveyed prior to 9/11 perceived a lesser risk of dying than those surveyed a few weeks after the attacks.64
Specifically, respondents believed there was a 34.62% chance of dying by a tornado before 9/11, but the
perception of such a risk increased to 64.33% after the attacks.65 The perceived risk of dying by earthquake

When seized by fear, people make probability

determinations that they would otherwise not make. Moreover, these decisions do not
track the variations in probability. One study asked participants what they would pay to avoid
increased from 24.64% to 41.94%.66

participating in an experiment in which there was a chance they would be subjected to a painful electric shock or
to a $20 penalty.67 Faced with a 1%, 99%, or 100% risk of shock, participants median willingness to pay ranged
from $7 to avoid the 1% risk to $10 to avoid the 99% risk.68 In contrast, the willingness to pay to avoid the $20
penalty ranged from $1 to avoid the 1% chance to $18 to avoid the 99% chance.69 The results demonstrate that

people are willing to pay a lot to avoid the low probability of an affect-rich
outcome, but that their willingness to pay does not vary greatly with the
probability of the occurrence of the event.70 Similarly, even when the risks of a high outrage
occurrence such as nuclear waste radiation, and a low outrage event, like radon exposure, were the same,

people perceived the high outrage threat as a higher risk and expressed a greater
intention to limit that threat.71 Another study found that people perceived a greater risk from a
terrorist event causing the same number of casualties as a non-terrorist propane tank explosion or release of an
infectious disease.72

Even if predictions arent perfect, the alternative is political

ignorance - leads to worse political decision-making.
Fitzsimmons 06 - Defense analyst, (Michael, December 1, 2006, The Problem of Uncertainty in
Strategic Planning, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Ebsco)//HH

If not sufficiently bounded,

a high degree of variability in planning factors can exact a significant price on
planning. The complexity presented by great variability strains the cognitive abilities
of even the most sophisticated decisionmakers.15 And even a robust decision-making
process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for
breadth as variability and complexity grows. It should follow, then, that in planning under
conditions of risk, variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to
available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance
between complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where
analysis is silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the
void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic surprise, in an environment that lacks
But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challenging.

clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and validity,

The greater the ambiguity, the

greater the impact of preconceptions.16 The decision-making environment that
Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic
planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environment brings upon himself
ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ...

some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and
substitutes a priori scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the
importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and rigorous assessment
can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly,
the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate
those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic.

Without careful analysis of what is

relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for
strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little
more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to
confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not
made explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to
particular strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than
rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly
understood by the organisations charged with their implementation . At their worst,
such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
Moreover, this style of decision-making is self-reinforcing. A strategist dismissive of explicit models
of prediction or cause and effect is likely to have a much higher threshold of
resistance to adjusting strategy in the face of changing circumstances . It is much
All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well.

harder to be proven wrong if changing or emerging information is systematically discounted on the grounds that

The result may be a bias toward

momentum in the current direction, toward the status quo. This is the antithesis of
the strategic environment is inherently unpredictable.

flexibility. Facts on the ground change faster than belief systems, so the extent to which a strategy is based on the

undue emphasis
in planning on uncertainty creates an intellectual temptation to cognitive
dissonance on the one hand, and confirmatory bias on the other . And the effect, both
insidious and ironic, is that the appreciation for uncertainty subverts exactly the value that
it professes to serve: flexibility.
latter rather than the former may be a reasonable measure of strategic rigidity. In this way,

AT complexity theory
Their concept of predictions is nonsensical in the political sphere
Rosenau 97 (James, professor emeritus of international affairs George
Washington University, Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory
and World Affairs, in Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, eds. David
S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski, National Defense University)
In this emergent epoch of multiple contradictions that I have labeled "fragmegration" in order
to summarily capture the tensions between the fragmenting and integrating forces that sustain world affairs,2 a
little noticedand yet potentially significantdiscrepancy prevails between our intellectual
progress toward grasping the underlying complexity of human systems and our
emotional expectation that advances in complexity theory may somehow point the way to
policies which can ameliorate the uncertainties inherent in a fragmegrative world. The links here
are profoundly causal: the more uncertainty has spread since the end of the Cold War, the more are analysts
inclined to seek panaceas for instability and thus the more have they latched onto recent
strides in complexity theory in the hope that it will yield solutions to the intractable
problems that beset us. No less important, all these linksthe uncertainty, the search for panaceas, and
the strides in complexity theoryare huge, interactive, and still intensifying, thus rendering the
causal dynamics ever more relevant to the course of events. In short, all the circumstances are in
place for an eventual disillusionment with complexity theory. For despite the strides, there
are severe limits to the extent to which such theory can generate concrete policies
that lessen the uncertainties of a fragmegrated world. And as these limits become increasingly
evident subsequent to the present period of euphoria over the theorys potential utility, a
reaction against it may well set in and encourage a reversion back to simplistic,
either/or modes of thought. Such a development would be regrettable.
Complexity theory does have insights to offer. It provides a cast of mind that can clarify, that can
alert observers to otherwise unrecognized problems, and that can serve as a brake on undue enthusiasm for
particular courses of action. But these benefits can be exaggerated and thus disillusioning .
Hence the central purpose of this paper is to offer a laymans appraisal of both the potentials and the limits of
complexity theoryto differentiate what range of issues and processes in world affairs it can be reasonably
expected to clarify from those that are likely to remain obscure.

The complexity thesis is wrong---makes policymaking impossible and

destroys hegemony
Gorka et al 12 (Dr. Sebastian L. V., Director of the Homeland Defense Fellows
Program at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense
University, teaches Irregular Warfare and US National Security at NDU and
Georgetown, et al., Spring 2012, The Complexity Trap, Parameters,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Ge
ltzer_Gorka.pdf
We live in a world of unprecedented complexity, or so we are told. President Obamas words
above echo an increasingly common narrative in the American foreign policy and national security establishments:
the forces of globalization, rising nonstate actors, irregular conflict, and proliferating destructive technologies

If strategy is the art of

creating power by specifying the relationship among ends, ways, and means , 3 then
have made crafting sound national security strategy more elusive than ever before. 2

the existence of unprecedented complexity would seem to make this art not only
uniquely difficult today but also downright dangerous, inasmuch as choosing any particular
course of action would preclude infinitely adaptive responses in the future . As
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates memorably described, the pre-9/11 challenges to American national security
were amateur night compared to the world today. 4 And as former State Department Director of Policy Planning
Anne-Marie Slaughter recently stated, there is a universal awareness that we are living through a time of rapid
and universal change, one in which the assumptions of the twentieth century make little sense. 5 The Mr. Y
article that occasioned her comments argued that, in contrast to the closed system of the twentieth century that
could be controlled by mankind, we now live in an open system defined by its supremely complex and protean

Unparalleled complexity, it seems, is the hallmark of our strategic age . These

invocations of complexity permeate todays American national security documents and
inform Washingtons post-Cold War and -9/11 strategic culture. The latest Quadrennial Defense Review
nature. 6

begins its analysis with a description of the complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of
change continues to accelerate. Not since the fall of the Soviet Union or the end of World War II has the
international terrain been affected by such farreaching and consequential shifts. 7 In a similar vein, the National
Intelligence Councils Global Trends 2025 argues that the international system is trending towards greater
degrees of complexity as power is diffused and actors multiply. 8 The Director of National Intelligences Vision
2015 terms our time the Era of Uncertainty, one in which the pace, scope, and complexity of change are
increasing. 9 Disturbingly, the younger generation of foreign policy and national security professionals seems to
accept and embrace these statements declaiming a fundamental change in our world and our capacity to cope
with it. The orientation for the multi-thousand-member group of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy calls
conquering complexity the fundamental challenge for the millennial generation. Complexity, it appears, is all the

We challenge these declarations and assumptionsnot simply because they

are empirically unfounded but, far more importantly, because they negate the very art of
strategy and make the realization of the American national interest impossible . We
rage.

begin by showing the rather unsavory consequences of the current trend toward worshipping at complexitys altar

we question whether the world was

ever quite as simple as todays avowers of complexity suggest, thus revealing the notion
of todays unprecedented complexity to be descriptively false . We then underscore that this
idea is dangerous, given the consequences of an addiction to complexity. Finally, we
and thus becoming a member of the Cult of Complexity. Next,

offer an escape from the complexity trap, with an emphasis on the need for prioritization in todays admittedly

todays obsession
with complexity results in a dangerous denial of the need to strategize .
distinctive international security environment. Throughout, we hope to underscore that

Complexity minimizes commitment to legitimate problems establishing

priorities key
Dr. Sebastian L. V. Gorka et al 12, Director of the Homeland Defense Fellows
Program at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense
University, teaches Irregular Warfare and US National Security at NDU and
Georgetown, et al., Spring 2012, The Complexity Trap, Parameters,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Ge
ltzer_Gorka.pdf
These competing views of Americas national security concerns indicate an important and distinctive

prioritization is simultaneously very difficult and

very important for the United States. Each of these threats and potential threats
al Qaeda, China, nuclear proliferation, climate change, global disease, and
so oncan conjure up a worstcase scenario that is immensely intimidating.
Given the difficulty of combining estimates of probabilities with the levels of risk associated with these threats, it
characteristic of todays global landscape:

is challenging to establish priorities. Such choices and trade-offs are difficult,

but not impossible. 30 In fact, they are the stock-in-trade of the strategist and
planner. If the United States is going to respond proactively and effectively to
todays international environment, prioritization is the key first stepand
precisely the opposite reaction to the complacency and undifferentiated fear
that the notion of unprecedented complexity encourages. Complexity suggests a
maximization of flexibility and minimization of commitment; but prioritization
demands wise allotment of resources and attention in a way that commits
American power and effort most effectively and efficiently. Phrased differently,
complexity induces deciding not to decide; prioritization encourages
deciding which decisions matter most. Todays world of diverse threats
characterized by uncertain probabilities and unclear risks will overwhelm us if the specter of
complexity seduces us into either paralysis or paranoia. Some priorities need to
be set if the United States is to find the resources to confront what threatens it most. 31 As Michael Doran
recently argued in reference to the Arab Spring, the United States must train itself to see a large dune as

This is not to deny the

possibility of nonlinear phenomena, butterfly effects, self-organizing
systems that exhibit patterns in the absence of centralized authority, or emergent properties. 33 If
anything, these hallmarks of complexity theory remind strategists of the
importance of revisiting key assumptions in light of new data and allowing for
tactical flexibility in case of unintended consequences. Sound strategy requires hard
choices and commitments, but it need not be inflexible. We can prioritize
without being procrustean. But a model in which everything is potentially
relevant is a model in which nothing is.
something more formidable than just endless grains of sand.32

Complexity theory is terrible pseudoscience

Phelan 1 (Steven E., William G. Rohrer Professorial Chair in Entrepreneurship,
Director of the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Ph.D. in economics from
La Trobe University, Australia; an M.B.A. in marketing from Monash University;
and a B.S. in psychology from the University of Melbourne , What Is Complexity
Science, Really? EMERGENCE, 3(1), 12036 Copyright 2001, Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Inc.)
The need for a special issue of Emergence on the question What

is complexity science? is disturbing

the voluminous literature
generated in recent years on chaos and complexity theory must contain a clear
exposition of the definition, mission, and scope of complexity science. That this
exposition has not been forthcoming, or is the subject of controversy, is disconcerting. On
another level, the inability to differentiate science clearly from pseudoscience
in complexity studies is also problematic. Allowing pseudoscience to penetrate a
field of study lowers the credibility of that field with mainstream scientists and hinders
the flow of resources for future development. It is my contention that much of the work in
complexity theory has indeed been pseudo-science, that is, many writers in this
field have used the symbols and methods of complexity science (either erroneously
or deliberately) to give the illusion of science even though they lack supporting
on several levels. At one level, one could be forgiven for thinking that

evidence and plausibility (Shermer, 1997). This proliferation of pseudo-science has, in

turn, obscured the meaning and agenda of the science of complexity . The purpose of this
article is twofold: to provide a working definition of complexity science; and to use this definition to differentiate
complexity science from complexity pseudo-science. This is a play in three acts. In the first section, I will
undertake an examination of science and the factors differentiating science from nonscience. In the second
section, I examine the relationship between complexity and science, leading to a definition of complexity science.
In the final section, I offer a test for distinguishing between science and pseudo-science in complexity studies and

it is important
vigorously to reject pseudo-scientific theories.
provide several examples of the latter. I also describe why

for scientists working in the area

There is zero empirical basis for extending complexity to social systemsthey have their epistemology backwards- complexity needs to be
meaningfully capable of describing an empirical example of emergence
otherwise it is a buzzword- the standard of complexity science should be
prescriptive- this is the d-rule for adjudicating complexity in physics and
biology
Terrence W. Deacon, Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology
at University of California Berkeley- he is the foremost expert on different orders
of emergence in thermodynamic, biology, and neurological systems, Emergence:
The Hole at the Wheels Hub, 2006
Over the past few decades, this compositional usage has become more and more prominent as scientists in
different fields have encountered similar transitional patterns in systems as diverse as liquid convection patterns
and the appearance of unprecedented social dynamics. In non-technical discussions the phrase

'the whole is

more than the sum of the parts' is often quoted to convey this sense of novelty generated
via ascent in scale. This phrase originates with Aristotle and captures two aspects of the emergence concept:
the distinction between a merely quantitative difference and a qualitative one, and effects involving the
combination of elements whose patterns of interaction contribute to global properties that are not evident in the

There is something a bit misleading about this way of

phrasing the relationship that harkens back to a something-from-nothing
conception. Exactly what 'more' is being appealed to, if not the parts and
their relationships, is seldom made explicit. This additive conception has often led to the
components themselves.

expectation that new classes of physical laws come into existence with increases in scale and the interaction
effects that result. This conception of emergence is often described as 'strong emergence' because it implies a
dissociation from the physics relevant to the parts and their relationships. It is contrasted with 'weak emergence'
that does not entail introduction of any new physical principles. The latter is often seen merely as a redescriptive
variant of standard reductionistic causality, and thus as emergence only with respect to human observers and
their limited analytic tools. In this essay I will argue that we can still understand the emergence of novel forms of
causality without attributing it to the introduction of unprecedented physical laws. Indeed, I will argue that only to
the extent that an unbroken chain of causal principles links such higher-order phenomena as consciousness to

In the last decades of

the twentieth century the concept of emergence has taken on a merely
descriptive function in many fields. It is applied to any case of the
spontaneous production of complex dynamical patterns from uncorrelated
interactions of component parts. This shift from a largely philosophical to
this more descriptive usage of the term emergence has been strongly influenced by the
more basic physical processes will we have an adequate theory of emergence.

increasing use of computational simulations to study complex systems. Some of the more elaborate examples of
these phenomena have been the topics of so-called chaos and complexity theories, and have
become commonplace in computational models of dynamical systems, cellular automata, and simulations of nonequilibrium thermodynamic processes.

This more general conception of emergence has

been adopted by many other fields where complex interaction effects may be relevant, such as in the
social sciences. Evolutionary and mental processes are also treated as
producing emergent effects, though the complexity of evolution, not to
mention cognition compared with dynamical systems, suggests that more
subtle distinction between kinds of emergence may be necessary (see below).
Because of this terminological promiscuity there is likely to be no common
underlying causal principle that ties all these uses togethe r. Nevertheless, I
think that with care a technical usage tied to a well-characterized class of
empirical exemplars can be articulated for which a clear theory of
emergent processes can be formulated. The exemplars of emergent phenomena that serve as
guides for this analysis occupy a middle position in the taxonomy of different emergent dynamics that I describe
below. They represent a well-understood set of physical and computational systems that all share a formamplifying, form-propagating, form-replicating feature. This feature is exhibited irrespective of whether they are
physical or computational phenomena. These phenomena are often called self-organizing, because their
regularities are not externally imposed but generated by iterative interaction processes occurring in the media
that comprise them. They serve as a useful starting point because they allow us to extrapolate both upward to

I decry using
emergence as an anti-reductionistic code word in holistic criticisms of
standard explanations. In this use, the concept of emergence is a place
holder, indicating points where standard reductionistic accounts seem to
be incomplete in explaining apparent discontinuities. In this negative
usage, emergence serves only as a philosophically motivated promissory
note for a missing explanation that, critics argue, is needed to flll in a gap.
In contrast, the purpose of the present essay is to outline a technical sense of emergence
that explicitly describes a specifc class of causal topologies (i.e. self-constituting
causal structures) and then attempts to show how this may help to explain many
of the attributes that have motivated the emergence concept. This
approach avoids engaging the pointless semantic debates about the
completeness of reductionism or dealing with metaphysical questions
about the ontological status of emergence. The term will only be applied to well-understood
more complex living phenomena and downward to simpler, merely mechanistic phenomena.

empirical processes, and yet I will argue that it does indeed mark the transition to unprecedented and
indecomposable causal architectures. It may be wondered, then, what more besides a taxonomic exercise is

By providing an
explicit account of how apparent reversals of causal logic come about, how
variant forms of these processes are related to one another, and what
aspects of their dynamic organization are most critical to the development
of these attributes, we can gain critical perspective on the apparent
discontinuities between simple mechanistic and teleological models of
causality.
provided by identifying the emergent architectural features of known physical processes?

Complexity cant explain human interactionsit doesnt account for

cooperation
Snooks 07 (Graeme D., Foundation Timothy Coghlan Research Professor Institute
of Advanced Studies Australian National University, 1989-2010, Executive Director
Institute of Global Dynamics Systems Canberra, Australia, since 2010 SELFORGANISATION OR SELFCREATION? FROM SOCIAL PHYSICS TO REALIST

DYNAMICS Social Evolution and History, 6.1, March, online:

http://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140541/)

Cooperation is a vital but problematical concept in social physics. Cooperation is

vital because the idea of order on the edge of chaos self-organised criticality is
a frightening one for physicists who have little understanding of the self-sustaining
nature of human society. Cooperation is seen as a way of avoiding the descent into
chaos. One commentator writes: If we know that cooperation is possible, even in a
world that lacks altruism, we have no reason to despair (Ball 2004: 563). And
cooperation is problematical for social physicists because complexity
theory cannot explain it persuasively. Self-organisation theory is all about
physical interaction or primitive competition not about working together on a
joint life pursuit. Indeed, no supply-side theory whether it beneo-Darwinist or
game theoretic can deal successfully with cooperation as it appears in the
real world (Snooks 2003). It is for the above reasons that some physical and social
scientists, convinced of the importance of self-organisation theory, are concerned
about the implications of the Snooks-Panov algorithm. This algorithm is a
mathematical formulation showing that the process of biological/technological
transformation over the past 4,000 myrs has occurred exponentially (Snooks 1996:
7982, 9295, 402405; Snooks 2005a: 229231; Panov 2005). These scholars are
concerned, unnecessarily, that the checks and balances required to prevent the
order of human society from descending into chaos are not sufficiently robust
(Nazaretyan 2005a-c; Panov 2005). Their unwarranted concern is primarily the
result of the limitations of a supply-side complexity theory. As my demand-side
dynamic-strategy theory shows, robust checks and balances do in fact exist,
with the result that the exponential growth of life and human society has occurred
over the past 4,000 myrs, and will continue to occur, at a constant, not an
increasing,compound rate of growth (Snooks 2005b; 2005c). Human society is
not about to launch itself into the chasm of chaos, because strategic
agents are past masters at managing feedback. How do social physicists
attempt to resolve this dilemma of cooperation or chaos which is of their own
making. The role of governments in compelling cooperation and punishing
transgressors is usually considered but finally rejected by all except those with
authoritarian tendencies. So, in hope rather than conviction, it is suggested that
game theory another supply-side approach might provide the answer all
concerned social physicists are looking for. This would be a happy outcome indeed,
because game theory was the joint product of the statistical physicist John Von
Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern, which resulted in the celebrated
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944. The often-expressed hope of
social physicists is that cooperation can evolve. It is believed that through
repeated interactions, players in the game of life will learn from past errors and
develop mutual trust. One problem with this line of argument is that the results of
organised games are not encouraging. In the late 1970s, Robert Axelrod (1984)
organised a series of internet tournaments to discover how interactive games could
be most effectively played. He found that there is no best way to play these
games, as it all depends on who the participants are and what tactics (strategies

in this context is a misnomer) they are convinced in advance will win which
merely demonstrates that the physical interaction model makes little sense. What
did emerge clearly from these games is that even when convinced cooperators
made initial gains, they were always ultimately vulnerable to rogue defectors. Even
a small band of defectors could totally destroy a cooperative culture. Some have
concluded that only a strong and harsh central government could prevent this,
which is hardly a solution for liberal democracies. And, of course, this brings us
back to the very reason that game theory was resorted to by social physicists in the
first place! It is also clear from any realist stance that game theory is not well
founded. First, games like prisoners dilemma and tit-for-tat (in its various
forms) are highly artificial and unrealistic. They are merely the result of arbitrary
rules that can be changed to obtain the outcomes one desires. In reality, the rules
of engagement are set by strategic demand in any life system. Second, the
implications of this approach for our understanding of reality are metaphysical. It
suggests that life resembles a supply-side computer world in which the rules of
interaction are determined and arbitrarily changed by an all-powerful being from
outside the system. Game theory, as in ACE artificial societies, requires God to
make it work to generate order and prevent chaos. The only solution to this
problem is a robust general dynamic theory that is capable of generating
all the necessary rules of engagement endogenously. This brings us to the
third and most fundamental problem. Social physicists have failed to recognise the
existence, let alone the role, of strategic exchange, which is the central feature of
a demand-dominated general dynamic theory. Social physics is, as I have
mentioned before, like one hand clapping, as it focuses solely on the supply-side
interaction between agents. In doing so, it fails to appreciate the existence of a
dominant demand side that shapes the social order as well as the rules of
engagement. It is, as we have seen, the demand side that provides the
directionality lacking in self-organisation theory. Strategic demand, which
changes as the dominant dynamic strategy unfolds, calls forth a joint response
from all active agents in any society. This is the process of strategic
exchange. And in this process, trust is invested by individuals in the successful
strategic pursuit reflected in an increasing material prosperity and not in each
other. Cooperation is the outcome. When the success of the strategic
pursuit wanes, both trust and cooperation decline and, under conditions of
extreme crisis, evaporate completely. Competition, or interaction, between
agents is a phenomenon that is secondary to strategic cooperation. Order,
therefore, is the outcome of a successfully unfolding dominant dynamic
strategy. The anxiety expressed by social physicists about sustaining order
on the edge of chaos is the outcome of a fundamentally flawed theory a
science fiction. There can be no social physics, only social stratology a new
study of the dynamics of the strategic pursuit.

Body Scanners Defense

Squo Solves
Status quo solvesfull-body scanners being removed now.
Ahlers 13(Mike M., TSA removes body scanners criticized as too revealing,
CNN, 5/30, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/29/travel/tsa-backscatter/)//FJ
The harshest critics labeled them "virtual strip searches." Airport passenger screening that produced particularly
realistic full-body images using backscatter technology. Others also expressed health concerns about low doses of

the Transportation Security

Administration says it has met a June 1 deadline to remove all 250 backscatter
machines from U.S. airports. Travelers will still go through other full-body scans that rely on a
radiation from the X-rays underpinning those scans. Well, it's all over now as

system that uses radio waves and produces less detailed body imaging. The millimeter wave machines raise fewer

from the privacy perspective, that (the

elimination of backscatter machines) has to be considered a victory ," said Marc
privacy and virtually no health concerns. "I think

Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The TSA maintained that the backscatter machines,
manufactured by Rapiscan Systems, were safe and effective. The agency had developed protocols to assure that

Congress voted to
require all body scanners to have privacy-protecting software, and the TSA
announced in February it was phasing out backscatter systems because they could
not meet the new standard. The last backscatter machines were removed about two weeks ago, a TSA
screeners who saw imagery of passengers never saw the passengers themselves. But

spokesman said. All 250 units were removed at Rapiscan's expense, the agency said.

New scanners solve

Tek84, no date ("Body Scanner Continued"
http://www.tek84.com/bodyscanner-more.html)
Current backscatter X-ray body scanners are based upon the technology invented by Dr. Smith in 1992 (Secure 1000).
These systems were designed as single sided units . Persons would stand in front of the
refrigerator-sized machine and be scanned at least twice (front and back poses) and perhaps as many as four
times (additional left and right side poses) to attain full coverage over the body. Vendors have recently introduced twosided systems by placing two of the base units face-to-face; this allows single pose (front and back) scanning which is more
convenient in high throughput applications. Many single pose portals are now installed at US airports - the fundamental design of

Ait84 is a two-sided (single pose)

system designed from scratch, utilizing state-of-the-art technology to overcome three
problems of current technology: First, Ait84 is "Dual Mode" and acquires 5 views of the
passenger; thereby improving detection of the hardest to find threats that can be hidden in
private/groin areas or on the sides of the body. Ait84 acquires these Dual Mode images within the passenger dose
limits prescribed by the "ANSI N43.17 General Use" standard that is recognized by the TSA. Furthermore, all dual
these systems is now 20 years old. Ait84 is a next generation body scanner.

mode images are acquired within the same scan time required by current technologies. Second, by acquiring dual mode 5 view-

AIT84 is able to screen the feet, turbans, hijab, burqa, and some casts and
prosthetics - far surpassing the capabilities of other body scanners. Other scanners are unable to
screen these items and passengers are subjected to additional hand searches and
delays. In this way, AIT84 provides fair and equal screening for all persons - thereby improving
images,

throughput and convenience.

Alt to Scanners is Worse

Full-body scanners dont invade privacy rights and the
alternative is worse.
Cendrowicz 10the Brussels correspondent for TIME magazine (Leo, Can
Airport Body Scanners Stop Terrorist Attacks?, TIME,
1/5,http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1951529,00.html)//FJ
Even following the attempted attack on the Northwest flight, critics remain
resolutely opposed to the machines. "A knee-jerk reaction which sees body scanners, with their
known drawbacks of passenger delays and privacy threats, as a magic solution is a bad move," says Sarah
Ludford, a British member of the European Parliament. "In the Christmas Day case, as in the 9/11 and 7/7

Advocates of civil
liberties agree. Simon Davies, director of the London-based human-rights watchdog Privacy International,
[London] bombings, the failure was not to join the dots of available information."

describes the scanners as a "fashionable and unproven technology" and an "assault on the essential dignity of

Phipson, president of
Britain-based Smiths Detection, the world's largest maker of full-body scanners , insists that the
machines only produce images that show the outlines of the human body,
not anatomical parts. "The privacy concerns are valid," he says. "But our software can blur out
parts of the body. And the scanners are far less intrusive than the traditional
pat down of the body." At the U.S. airports where scanners have been installed, security officers
must look at the images in isolated rooms and are not allowed to have any piece of
equipment, such as a camera or mobile phone, that could be used to capture or
copy the images.
passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate."

But

Stephen

Even if body scanners arent perfect, theyre the best option we have.
Mowery et al. 14sixth-year graduate student at UC San Diego Department of
Computer Science and Engineering (Keaton, Security Analysis of a Full-Body
Scanner, Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium, August 2014, pg.
14, https://www.radsec.org/secure1000-sec14.pdf)//FJ
Despite the flaws we identified, we are not able to categorically reject TSAs
claim that AITs represent the best available tradeoff for airport passenger
screening. Hardened cockpit doors may mitigate the hijacking threat from firearms and knives; what is
clearly needed, with or without AITs, is a robust means for detecting explosives. The millimeter-wave
scanners currently deployed to airports will likely behave differently from the
backscatter scanner we studied. We recommend that those scanners, as well as any future AITs
whether of the millimeter-wave or backscatter [34] variety be subjected to independent, adversarial testing, and
that this testing specifically consider software security

TSA Accountable
TSA regulations check
TSA, no date (https://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/transgender-travelers)
TSA recognizes the concerns members of the transgender community may have
with undergoing the security screening process at our Nations airports and is committed
to conducting screening in a dignified and respectful manner . These travel tips will explain
the various screening processes and technologies travelers may encounter at security checkpoints. Preparing for
Travel Making Reservations: Secure Flight requires airlines to collect a travelers full name, date of birth, gender
and Redress Number (if applicable) to significantly decrease the likelihood of watch list misidentification.
Travelers are encouraged to use the same name, gender, and birth date when making the reservation that match
the name, gender, and birth date indicated on the government-issued ID that the traveler intends to use during

If a traveler has
any medical equipment or prosthetics in a carry-on bag, the items will be allowed
through the checkpoint after completing the screening process . Travelers may ask
that bags be screened in private if a bag must be opened by an officer to resolve an alarm. Travelers
travel. Packing a Carry-on: All carry-on baggage must go through the screening process.

should be aware that prosthetics worn under the clothing that alarm a walk through metal detector or appear as
an anomaly during Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) screening may result in additional screening, to include a

Travelers may request a private screening at any time during the

security screening process. Contacting TSA in Advance of Travel: Travelers may contact TSA prior to a
thorough pat-down.

flight through the TSA Contact Center at 1-866-289-9673 and TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov. The Screening

Screening can be conducted in a private screening area with a

witness or companion of the travelers choosing. A traveler may request private screening or to
Process Private Screening:

speak with a supervisor at any time during the screening process. Travel Document Checker: The traveler will
show their government-issued identification and boarding pass to an officer to ensure the identification and
boarding pass are authentic and match. Transgender travelers are encouraged to book their reservations such
that they match the gender and name data indicated on the government-issued ID. Walk Through Metal Detector:

Screening with advanced

imaging technology is voluntary and travelers may opt out at any time . Travelers who
Metal detectors are in use at all airports. Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT):

opt out of the AIT screening are required to undergo a thorough pat-down by an officer of the same gender as

TSA has upgraded all millimeter

wave advanced imaging technology units with new software called Automated Target
Recognition to further enhance privacy protections by eliminating the image of an
actual traveler and replacing it with a generic outline of a person. Pat-Down: A pat-down may be performed
the traveler presents. New Advanced Imaging Technology Software:

if there is an alarm of the metal detector, if an anomaly is detected using advanced imaging technology, if an

If a pat-down
is chosen or otherwise necessary, private screening may be requested. Pat-downs
are conducted by an officer of the same gender as presented by the individual at
the checkpoint. Prosthetics: A TSA Officer may ask you to lift/raise your clothing to screen a prosthetic (only
if doing so would not reveal a sensitive area). Sensitive areas should not be exposed during the
screening process. Behavior Detection Program: Behavior Detection Officers screen travelers using nonofficer determines that the traveler is wearing non-form fitting clothing, or on a random basis.

intrusive behavior observation and analysis techniques to identify potentially high-risk passengers. Officers are
designated to detect individuals exhibiting behaviors that indicate they may be a threat to aviation and/or
transportation security. Individuals exhibiting specific observable behaviors may be referred for additional

TSA recognizes
that exhibiting some of these behaviors does not automatically mean a person has
terrorist or criminal intent. Referrals for additional screening are solely based on
specific observed behaviors. Reporting Travel Issues or Concerns Travelers who believe
they have experienced unprofessional conduct at a security checkpoint are
encouraged to request a supervisor at the checkpoint to discuss the matter
immediately or to submit a concern to TSAs Contact Center at: TSAscreening, which can include a pat-down and physical inspection of carry-on baggage.

Travelers who believe they have experienced discriminatory

conduct because of a protected basis may file a concern with TSAs Office of Civil Rights &
Liberties, Ombudsman and Traveler Engagement at: Civil Rights for Travelers. Travelers
may also file discrimination concerns with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
ContactCenter@dhs.gov.

TSA Cares solves

MDA, no date ("TSA Cares to Aid Travelers with Disabilities"
http://www.mda.org/quest/tsa-cares-aid-air-travelers-disabilities)
People with disabilities, and especially those who use wheelchairs or other assistive equipment, have at
times experienced overly intrusive and embarrassing TSA searches ; been forbidden to
board planes with some types of respiratory equipment; and in some instances not
been allowed to fly at all. TSA Cares is a new toll-free telephone help line that the
agency says should alleviate those problems. Travelers who hope to expedite their passage
through the security webs at most airports are advised to call (855) 787-2227 at least 72 hours before
their flight. The TSA Cares system operates Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, except on
federal holidays. Callers can ask questions about screening policies and procedures,
and what they can expect at security checkpoints. One thing that hasnt changed is the
requirement that everyone still must be screened before entering airports secure areas. The fashion in
which the screening is conducted will depend on passengers physical abilities and
any assistive devices they may bring with them. Thats where a call to TSA Cares
may help avoid miscommunication. If problems still arise at the terminal, all travelers
are guaranteed the right to speak to a TSA supervisor simply by asking to do so.
For those who have bumped heads with TSA screeners in the past, this new program may seem like its a decade

The agency explains that it consulted with a large number of disability rights
and medical condition advocacy organizations 70 of them, including MDA before
designing and putting into action the TSA Cares program. The agency meets with a
coalition of those groups quarterly to determine how well its doing at meeting
their expectations.
overdue.

TSA self-reflexive
TSA, 2013 ("TSA Hosts 11th annual disability and multicultural coalition
conference")
http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2013/09/24/tsa-hosts-11th-annual-disability-andmulticultural-coalition-conference
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hosted nearly 40 disability and
multicultural organizations at the 11th Annual TSA Coalition Conference held at
WASHINGTON

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Sept. 19, 2013. The TSA Disability and Multicultural Coalition

include leaders from organizations representing various disabilities, cultural and

religious communities. The annual conference brings together coalition members and
TSA senior leaders to discuss advances in transportation security screening and achievable best
practices to improve the screening experience for coalition members and their
constituencies. TSA commends the coalition for its devoted advocacy work on behalf of so many travelers, said
TSA Deputy Administrator John W. Halinski, who spoke at the conference to discuss TSAs risk-based, intelligence-

conference reinforces TSAs ongoing

commitment to the best and most efficient transportation security for all travelers,
driven approach to transportation security. The

including the multicultural community and those with disabilities . As TSA continues to
evolve, we have significantly expanded our unique Passenger Support Specialists program, said Kimberly Walton,
TSA assistant administrator, Office of Civil Rights and Liberties, Ombudsman and Traveler Engagement. More

than 3,000 specially trained TSA employees are voluntarily committed to assisting
passengers who require additional assistance during security checkpoint screening.
Improving the quality of our training remains a top priority . We are committed to the
ongoing education of our workforce to accommodate the needs of travelers from the
various disability and multicultural groups. This years conference focused on improving the
security screening experience for travelers with disabilities and individuals from
religious and cultural groups. Speakers from TSA shared the latest information regarding new TSA
screening initiatives, including enhanced employee training and the continued
progress of risk-based security initiatives. Additionally, the conference included an overview of
TSA Pre and an opportunity to engage in an optional TSA Pre demonstration. Coalition members
and event attendees provided feedback and ideas from their respective
communities in order to engage in a dialogue about the security screening process. More than 40 disability
groups, multicultural groups and federal agencies attended the conference. The groups represented included:
American Diabetes Association, Muslim Public Affairs Council, National Association of the Deaf, National Center
for Transgender Equality, National Council on Disability, National Council on Independent Living and Sikh
American Legal Defense and Education Fund. # # # TSA Cares: TSA Cares is a help line to assist travelers
with disabilities and medical conditions. TSA recommends that passengers call 72 hours ahead of travel to for
information about what to expect during screening. Travelers may call TSA Cares toll free at 1-855-787-2227 prior
to traveling with questions about screening policies, procedures and what to expect at the security checkpoint.

TSA Cares will serve as an additional, dedicated resource specifically for

passengers with disabilities, medical conditions or other circumstances or their
loved ones who want to prepare for the screening process prior to flying . Since its
launch in December 2011, more than 27,000 passengers with disabilities and their families have called TSA Cares
seeking information. Many passengers were referred to TSAs Disability Branch in Washington for additional
support for their upcoming travel. Passenger Support Specialists: The Passenger Support Specialist (PSS)

program is comprised of Transportation Security Officers and Supervisors who

have received special training to provide assistance and resolve traveler-related
screening concerns. Training for Passenger Support Specialists includes enhanced training
from TSA and the disability and multicultural community on assisting individuals
with special needs, communicating with passengers by listening and explaining,
and disability etiquette and disability civil rights . Travelers requiring special
accommodations or concerned about checkpoint screening may ask a checkpoint officer or
supervisor for a Passenger Support Specialist who will provide on-the-spot
assistance.

Aff impacts exaggerated

Security outweighs and they exaggerate
Al D'Amato, 2010 ("The Small Price to Pay for Our Safety",
http://liherald.com/stories/The-small-price-to-pay-for-our-safety,29218?
content_source=&category_id=34&search_filter=&event_mode=&event_ts_from=
&list_type=most_commented&order_by=&order_sort=&content_class=&sub_type
=&town_id=)
Are
we willing to sacrifice our safety to protect our personal freedoms ? You know what I
think? Keeping us safe in the friendly skies should be our top priority . The TSA isnt our
enemy, friends. Our enemy is Al Qaeda, and this is one instance when I can say that I dont mind if Big
More than 40 million people were expected to travel over the Thanksgiving weekend. We must ask ourselves,

Brother government steps in to keep those who want to harm this country off our airplanes. How soon we forget.

The threat to our airport security didnt end with Sept. 11. Just a year later,
Richard Reid pleaded guilty to terrorism for his attempt to blow up an airplane by detonating a
shoe bomb. Last Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a plane with a
powerful plastic explosive sewn into his underwear. Luckily he was unable to detonate the
explosive on the plane and was apprehended. However, we cant always rely on luck. Just think, if
Abdulmutallab had been forced to go through the body scanner or pat-down, he
never would have been able to board that plane. In a recent New York Post editorial, U.S. Rep.
Peter King pointed out that, unfortunately, the media has once again slanted the debate and
created a frenzy. He wrote, If you listen to the debate you get the impression that
one day the TSA said, okay, lets make everybody naked on the body-scanners. And
without any idea of the eight or nine years of whats gone on before and whats
been tested.

Surveillance is inevitable and doesnt cause violence

Simon 14 [William H., Professor of Law at Columbia University - Law School,
October 2014, In Defense of the Panopticon, Columbia Public Law Research
Paper No. 14-412, Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 2492211,
https://www.google.com/search?q=william+h.+simon&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8]
In urban areas, most peoples activity outdoors and in the common spaces of buildings is recorded most of
the time. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. When people move around, their paths are
registered on building access cards or subway fare cards or automobile toll devices. Their telephone and e-mail
communications, internet searches, and movements are tracked by telephone companies and other
intermediaries. All their

credit card transactions which for many people, means nearly all of their

transactions -- are documented by time, place, and substance . The health system extracts and
records detailed information about their psychic and bodily functions. Anyone arrested, and many who fear arrest,
in the criminal justice system typically surrender a variety of personal information and often have to submit to
ongoing monitoring. Even within the home, water and energy consumption is monitored, and some people choose

To many people, this society looks

like the Panopticon a prison designed as a circular tower so that the inmates can be easily observed by a
to install cameras to monitor children or protect against burglars.

centrally located authority figure. Jeremy Bentham originated the Panopticon idea as a low-cost form of
subjugation for convicted criminals. Michel Foucault adopted it as a metaphor for what he regarded as the
insidiously pervasive forms of social control in contemporary society. To him, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and

the
United States, paranoid political style has been associated traditionally with the right
and the less educated. But Foucault helped made it attractive to liberal intellectuals. His
government agencies all engaged in repressive forms of surveillance analogous to the Panopticon. In

Foucault was the most moralistic of social theorists, but he

purported to disdain morality (normativity) and refused to acknowledge, much less
defend, the moral implications of his arguments. He gave intellectual respectability to the three
principal tropes of the paranoid style. First, there is the idea of guilt by association. The resemblance
between some feature of a strikingly cruel or crackpot regime of the past or in
fiction (especially in 1984) and a more ambiguous contemporary one is emphasized in
order to condemn the latter. Thus, the elaborate individualized calibration of tortures in 18th and 19th
contribution was largely a matter of style.

century penology is used to make us feel uncomfortable about the graduated responses to noncompliance in

Orwells image of television cameras transmitting

images from inside the home to the political police is used to induce anxiety about
devices that monitor electricity usage so that the hot water tank will re-heat during
off-peak hours. The second trope of the paranoid style is the portrayal of virtually all tacit
social pressure as insidious. What people experience as voluntary choice is
substantially conditioned by unconscious internalized dispositions to conform to
norms, and a key mechanism of such conformity is the actual, imagined, or anticipated gaze of others. Almost
everyone who thinks about it recognizes that such pressures are potentially
benign, but people differ in their rhetorical predispositions toward them. The
individualist streak in American culture tends to exalt individual choice in a way that
makes social influence suspect. Foucault disdained individualism, but he introduced a
conception of power that was so vague and sinister that it could be applied to
make almost any social force seem creepy. When Neil Richards writes in the Harvard
Law Review that surveillance affects the power dynamic between the watcher and
the watched, giving the watcher greater power to influence or direct the subject of surveillance, he is
channeling Foucault. So is Julie Cohen, when she writes in the Stanford Law Review: Pervasive
contemporary drug treatment courts.

monitoring of every first move or false start will, at the margin, incline choices toward the bland and the
mainstream. We have come a far cry from Jane Jacobss idea of eyes on the street as the critical foundation of

Jacobs, the experience of being observed by diverse strangers

induces, not anxiety or timidity, but an empowering sense of security and stimulation . It
makes people willing to go out into new situations and to experiment with new
behaviors. Eyes-on-the-street implies a tacit social pact that people will intervene to protect each others
safety but that they will refrain from judging their peers non-dangerous behavior. Electronic surveillance
is not precisely the same thing as Jacobean eyes-on-the-street, but it does offer the
combination of potentially benign intervention and the absence of censorious
judgment that Jacobs saw as conducive to autonomy.
urban vibrancy. For

No impact outside of vague buzzwords that can be mystically

asserted in any context assign it zero political value or
predictive power
Mwajeh 5 [Z Al-Mwajeh, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of
Graduate Studies and Research Department of English, CRITIQUE OF
POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS EMBODIED (MUSLIM) OTHERS,
August 2005, https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20AlMwajeh.pdf?sequence=1]
key postmodernism tenets of radical alterity,
incommensurability and undecidability cannot be easily thematized in writing, nor can they be
realized in praxis. They are aporiatic. The only way to explicate their meanings and
possibilities is through using modernist vocabulary they initially oppose and
However, I also think that

deconstruct. Sometimes, thematizing these aporiatic concepts, one lapses into cryptic
and even incantational figurative language, a practice that exposes the
practical limitation and limited accessibility of such cherished concepts (or nonconcepts). As a result, their translation into, or coextension with, lived
realities become basically hypothetical, too. Consequently, the abstract and
idealized postmodern concepts verge on, and intersect with, mystic, (sometimes Biblical)
allusions and traditions, a situation that problematizes their political value and
descriptive power in the realm of action. For example, in Levinasian thought, knowing the
other is incompatible with preserving its alterity. All representational endeavors reduce, or fail to capture, what
they supposedly represent not only due to imperfect linguistic mediums, but also due to the fact that
representation itself is a logocentric institution. It represents the other or the object from the perspective of the
Same, usually a priori reducing its uniqueness or sublimity to the known, quantifiable and predictable. To curb

alterity escapes all modernist categories as it is

an Other not in a relational or quantifiable way. Rather, it is an Other in the sense of
eliding comprehension and representation. Such Other resembles Levinass (Biblical) conception
such modernist reductive practices, Levinass

of God as absolute Alterity where our epistemological categories or mind cannot contain or represent Him. More

the ethics of alterity usually soars above urgent concrete issues

that involve politically and economically charged self-other transactions.
Levinass other is disembodied, not in Dr. Laings sense (e.g. The Divided Self). Rather, Levinass
alterity cannot be substantiated. Defining or embodying the other violates its
alterity and sublimity. Hence, any grand appeal such ethics may initially spark
becomes questionable when juxtaposed to our existing realities and the factors
that regulate self/other different modes of relations. 6 Statement of the Problem, Limitations of
important,

the Study and Methods In this study, I attempt to dislodge postmodern ethics from its speculative and elitist
tendencies through turning to self-other ethical relations in various literary, discursive and political situations. I
focus on bridging the gaps between theory and practice in order to expose the rifts and blind spots in postmodern
ethics of alterity. I think that the demands that alterity as a generalized abstract term exert differ from those
raised by placed and temporalized others. For example, there is an urgent need to know how well Levinass
concept of absolute alterity or Derridas concept of undecidability fares in political situations. In other words, to
argue for prioritizing alterity as a new ethical turn is not the same as to motivate and effect such prioritization.
While I agree that Levinass infinite obligation to the other sounds uplifting, realizing/effecting such a formula is
a different story. Theoretically speaking, alterity is embraceable, but in lived realities, others fall on a spectrum of
difference (sometimes opposition) from self according to various criteria. Actually, there is a general tendency to
posit self and others in terms of difference and opposition, when in fact these are relative and operational terms.
Polarizing self and other risks ossifying them into rigid negatively defining entities at the expense of their
interdependence and mutual constitution. The terms other and self do not only designate metaphysical figures or
linguistic relations, they also describe ontological realities. The metaphor of the embrace may in it turn conceal a
whole repertoire of idealism, philanthropy, and logocentrism/humanism. Worse, sometimes Levinasian ethics

the demand to meet the other on

a neutral ground, pre-ontologically, looks more like an aesthetic ideal/condition
that cannot be achieved as we always meet the other in context with our
conceptions, motivations and values. Blaming Western Metaphysics, or ontology,
for the imbalanced self-other relations somehow brackets subjects role and
agency in the self-other various equations.7 Moreover, we may indulge alterity
ethics in closed and limited contexts that favor our train of thought and take that for a sufficient
action. We may embrace the other or theorize about embracing and preserving alterity as
ethics per se, but we may still live according to dialectical alterity-blind institutions
and practices. In such cases, we are either, consciously or subconsciously, acknowledging and
maintaining theory/practice divisions, or we know that acting ethically toward the
other entails more than theorizing about what form the most ethical relation
should take. Acting ethically demands sharing power and taking risks. More
problematically, the theoretical formulas may not function in the first place as the
seems so good to be true or realizable, at least if taken literally. For

roots of unethical self-other relations cannot be automatically corrected

by theoretically replacing modernist self-centered by alterity-centered ethics.
Furthermore, most of the writings about postmodernismengage strenuous debates and often deploy elitist

philosophical and
theoretical elitist debates alienate larger audiences and may even thrive at the
expense of addressing concrete self-other transactions . To a certain degree, these
debates are inflated and divorced from the stakes involved in political self-other
lived transactions. Once one crosses the threshold of speculating about selfother relations into considering them in light of indispensable concrete
constituencies of race, gender, nationality, power grid, and other variables,
cherished postmodern key termssuch as undecidability, alterity, and nonjudgmentalismbecome anomalous. Hard lived realities demand
resolutions and involve recalcitrant stakes . To solely dwell on the
linguistic/discursive as the origin of self/other imbalance is to overlook the complex
and intricate relations among discourses and actions. To put it differently, there has to be
some mutual trafficking between metaphysics and lived realities, but one cannot
be reduced to the other in any straight predictable manner . Nor are their
relations reducible to cause-effect ones where Western Metaphysics privileging
the subject and reducing the other/object is the causer, while racism, sexism, and
colonial exploitation are the effects. This does not deny that there exists a cause-effect relation
between thought and lived realities, however. Alterity-centered postmodernism shows how modernist
epistemology has failed to establish self-other relations as basically ethical by
relegating the other to the status of a hierarchically inferior object or difference .
But the downside to such critique is the transformation of the modernist individual/self
into postmodernist subject. The postmodernist subject may not be more than a
node or a surface/cite constructed by linguistic, economic and media systems.
Thus, the ethical turn toward alterity loses its halo when one considers the
diminutive role played by human agency and intentionality. Emphasizing the
negative side of constructivismbeing constructed by external or upper systems postmodernism glosses
over the subjects other various roles in sustaining and continuing, sometimes
disrupting, dominant epistemological, economic and political systems . In other words,
modernist subjects are primarily products of metaphysically pre-ordained
itineraries sidestepping other senses such as being a subject by initiating
and performing actions by choice. If subject primarily means subjected to, the
ethics, responsibility and obligations, all become paradoxical. Furthermore, Levinass
dictum to pre-ontologically encounter alterity makes sense; he thinks that the ethical should, or
actually does, precede the ontological. But practically, such divisions may be
divisions of convenience rather than of actuality as if the political and ethical
belonged to different modes of living. I think that we do not need to submit to modernist disciplinary
jargon, a practice that limits their accessibility and descriptive value. Very often

divisions of convenience nor do we need to separate the ethical from the political or from the ontological. I believe

Ethics is
intrinsic to action. Levinass move, however, has to be contextualized. It is his desire to remove
self other relations from under modernist epistemological reductions and
pragmatic/utilitarian arrangements that he wants to go back to a pure self-other encounterbefore
self-other dialectics. He wants to encounter the other before reductive logic moves in. Yet such a move
ends in an impasse. Leaping back into the pre-ontological stems from Levinass
ontological or epistemological consciousness. The irony is that one just cannot exit
that ethics is not a formula or a prescription we choose to apply or we choose to leave behind.

the ontological and still use its structures and vocabularies . Still, Levinass ethical dictum
exposes the working of unconscious ethnocentrism or conscious bias in our self-other relations, systems and
existence, unless we always foreground alterity. Consequently, alterity ethics is both a meta-ethical argument, or
for some it constitutes a moral principle, or a basic revelation about our human conditions: We are always in
relation toindebted tothe other. We may choose to elide such a realization, but we cannot change it.

at: biopolitics impact

The thesis of biopolitics is wrong---its based on a faulty
understanding of liberalism
Selby 13 [Jan, Senior Lecturer of IR at the University of Sussex, "The myth of
liberal peace-building", March 13, Conflict, Security & Development, Volume 13,
Issue 1, 2013]
Most of the above features are shared right across the liberal peace-building debate and have been advanced from

it has been claimed from a constructivist perspective that

contemporary peace-building is rooted in liberal international norms .36 Invoking
Foucault, it has been argued that the liberal peace-building project is an exercise in
global bio-politics or governmentality, which aims to govern and construct liberal
populations and subjectivities.37 From a post-colonial perspective, liberal peace-building
has been described as a colonial project, cast in the mould of colonialism, and aiming to
restructure Southern societies in accordance with Northern metropolitan
ideology.38And in neo-Gramscian terms, peace-building has been critiqued as part of a
transnational neo-liberal project, reflecting the hegemony of liberal values that
reigns in global politics.39 Right across this variegated theoretical terrain, peace-building is represented
any number of theoretical perspectives. Thus

as a liberal project, founded on liberal ideas, pushed forward by a decentralised plurality of institutions
irrespective of the particularity of war-endings and peace agreements, in which global consensus is counterposed

Yet for all this trans-theoretical consensus, these shared emphases

within liberal peace- building discourse constitute a questionable foundation for the
analysis of contemporary peacemaking. Again, this is not to suggest that the liberal peace-building literature is
by local dissensus or disorder.

without merit: the critical literature, in particular, provides much compelling evidence of the hubris of liberal
internationalism, of the destruction wrought by World Bank-IMF policies and of the frequent complicity of peacebuilding projects in coercive processes of state-building, dispossession and subjugation. My contention is not that

the above parameters are unnecessarily

limiting, and can generate significant interpretive errors . To advance this case, my focus in
liberal peace- building research is without value, but that

the remainder of this paper is on the relations between post-conflict peace-building on the one hand, and peace

peace-building is neither a
discrete sphere of action, nor the dominant element within contemporary peace
processes; that states, strategy and geopolitics continue , as ever, to be crucial
determinants of these processes; and that the influence of liberalism , and the degree of
global consensus over the liberal peace, are significantly overstated within liberal peacebuilding discourse. We start by considering one
agreements and their negotiation on the other. What this will reveal is that

Biopolitical control is no longer a threat---crisis of the

sovereign state has caused violence to be abandoned
Short 5 [Jonathan, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social &
Political Thought, York University, Life and Law: Agamben and Foucault on
Governmentality and Sovereignty, Journal for the Arts, Sciences and Technology,
Vol. 3, No. 1]

Adding to the dangerousness of this logic of control, however, is that while there is a crisis of undecidability in the domain of life, it

despite the new

forms of biopolitical control in operation today, Rose believes that bio-politics has become
corresponds to a similar crisis at the level of law and the national state. It should be noted here that

generally less dangerous in recent times than even in the early part of the last
century. At that time, bio- politics was linked to the project of the expanding
national state in his opinion. In disciplinary-pastoral society, bio-politics involved a process of social
selection of those characteristics thought useful to the nationalist project . Hence,
according to Rose, "once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics
has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation" (2001: 3). Disciplinary-pastoral bio- politics
sets itself the task of eliminating "differences coded as defects", and in pursuit of this goal the most horrible programs of eugenics,
forced sterilization, and outright extermination, were enacted (ibid.: 3). If Rose is more optimistic about bio-politics in 'advanced

this notion of 'national fitness', in terms of bio- political

competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous decline thanks
in large part to a crisis of the perceived unity of the national state as a viable political
project (ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again, "the idea of 'society' as a single, if heterogeneous, domain with a national culture,
liberal' societies, it is because

a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and the powers of a national political government"
no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the

the territorial state, the primary institution of

enclosure, has become subject to fragmentation along a number of lines. National
culture has given way to cultural pluralism; national identity has been
overshadowed by a diverse cluster of identifications, many of them transcending the national
governmentalization of the state here, Rose claims that

territory on which they take place, while the same pluralization has affected the once singular conception of community (ibid.: 5).

bio-political programmes of the molar enclosure known

as the nation-state have fallen into disrepute and have been all but abandoned.
Under these conditions, Rose argues, the