1NC

There was only ever one debate to be had, that of being versus becoming. This
card is extremely complicated and if you even try to answer it you will lose.
Bataille 1985. Georges. "The labyrinth." trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 5 (1985). The Labyrinth (1930)

**This evidence is gender-modified pronouns are replaced in brackets

Negativity, in other words, the integrity of determination - Hegel

I. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF BEINGS

[Humans] act in order to be. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation
(conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of a
tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. From incoherent
agitation to crushing sleep, from chatter to turning inward, from overwhelming love to
hardening hate, existence sometimes weakens and sometimes accomplishes "being". And not
only do states have a variable intensity, but different beings "are" unequally. A dog that runs
and barks seems "to be" more than a mute and clinging sponge, the sponge more than the
water in which it lives, an influential [human] more than a vacant passerby.

In the first movement, where the force that the master has at [their] disposal puts the slave at
[their] mercy, the master deprives the slave of a part of [their] being. Much later, in return, the
"existence" of the master is impoverished to such an extent that it distances itself from the
material elements of life. The slave enriches [their] being to the extent that [they] enslaves
these elements by the work to which [their] impotence condemns him.

The contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of
human existence, a bewildering complexity. The fundamental separation of [humans] into
masters and slaves is only the crossed threshold, the entry into the world of specialized
functions where personal "existence" empties itself of its contents; a [human] is no longer
anything but a part of being, and [their] life, engaged in the game of creation and destruction
that goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle lacking reality. The very fact of assuming
that knowledge is a function throws the philosopher back into the world of petty inconsistencies
and dissections of lifeless organs. Isolated as much from action as from the dreams that turn
action away and echo it in the strange depths of animated life, [they] led astray the very being
that [they] chose as the object of [their] uneasy comprehension. "Being" increases in the
tumultuous agitation of a life that knows no limits; it wastes away and disappears if [they]
who is at the same "being" and knowledge mutilates himself by reducing [oneself] himself to
knowledge. This deficiency can grow even greater if the object of knowledge is no longer
being in general but a narrow domain, such as an organ, a mathematical question, a juridical
form. Action and dreams do not escape this poverty (each time they are confused with the
totality of being), and, in the multicolored immensity of human lives, a limitless insufficiency is
revealed; life, finding its endpoint in the happiness of a bugle blower or the snickering of a
village chair-renter, is no longer the fulfillment of itself, but is its own ludicrous degradation - its
fall is comparable to that of a king onto the floor.

At the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufficiency. In isolation, each [human] sees
the majority of others as incapable or unworthy of "being". There is found, in all free and
slanderous conversation, as an animating theme, the awareness of the vanity and the emptiness
of our fellowmen; an apparent stagnant conversation betrays the blind and impotent flight of all
life toward an indefinable summit.

The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other. Even the look that expresses
love and admiration comes to me as a doubt concerning my reality. A burst of laughter or the
expression of repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which
my profound insufficiency is betrayed - just as sobs would be the response to my sudden death,
to a total and irremediable omission.

This uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and reverberates, since at each detour, with a
kind of nausea, [humans] discover their solitude in empty night. The universal night in which
everything finds itself - and soon loses itself - would appear to be the existence for nothing,
without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that
emerges within it to give a dramatic importance to being and life. But this absurd night manages
to empty itself of "being" and meaning each time a [human] discovers within it human destiny,
itself locked in turn in a comic impasse, like a hideous and discordant trumpet blast. That which,
in me, demands that there be "being" in the world, "being" and not just the manifest
insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature, necessarily projects (at one time or another and in
reply to human chatter) divine sufficiency across space, like the reflection of an impotence, of a
servilely accepted malady of being.

II. THE COMPOSITE CHARACTER OF BEINGS AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FIXING EXISTENCE IN
ANY GIVEN Ipse

Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want - outside of me. It is a clumsy
[person] man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the me.
Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be
divine, at the summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which has at its base the
immensity of the simplest matter.

Being could be confined to the electron if ipseity were precisely not lacking in this simple
element. The atom itself has a complexity that is too elementary to be determined ipsely. The
number of particles that make up a being intervene in a sufficiently heavy and clear way in the
constitution of its ipseity; if a knife has its handle and blade indefinitely replaced, it loses even
the shadow of its ipseity; it is not the same for a machine which, after six or five years, loses
each of the numerous elements that constituted it when new. But the ipseity that is finally
apprehended with difficulty in the machine is still only shadowlike.

Starting from an extreme complexity, being imposes on reflection more than the precariousness
of a fugitive appearance, but this complexity - displaced little by little becomes in turn the
labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely loses its way.
A sponge is reduced by pounding to a dust of cells; this living dust is formed by a multitude of
isolated beings, and is lost in the new sponge that it reconstitutes. A siphonophore fragment is
by itself an autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs, is
itself hardly different from a being possessing unity. Only with linear animals (worms, insects,
fish, reptiles, birds and mammals) do the living individual forms definitively lose the faculty of
constituting aggregates bound together in a single body. But while societies of nonlinear animals
do not exist, superior animals form aggregates without ever giving rise to corporeal links;
[humans] as well as beavers or ants form societies of individuals whose bodies are autonomous.
But in regard to being, is this autonomy the final appearance, or is it simply error?

In men, all existence is tied in particular to language, whose terms determine its modes of
appearance within each person. Each person can only represent [their] total existence, if only in
[their] own eyes, through the medium of words. Words spring forth in [their] head, laden with a
host of human or superhuman lives in relation to which [they] privately exists. Being depends
on the mediation of words, which cannot merely present it arbitrarily as "autonomous being,"
but which must present it profoundly as "being in relation". One need only follow, for a short
time, the traces of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in a disconcerting vision, the
labyrinthine structure of the human being. What is commonly called knowing - when a
[human] knows [their] neighbour - is never anything but existence composed for an instant (in
the sense that all existence composes itself - thus the atom composes its unity from variable
electrons), which once made of these two beings a whole every bit as real as its parts. A limited
number of exchanged phrases, no matter how conventional, sufficed to create the banal
interpenetration of two existing juxtaposed regions. The fact that after this short exchange the
[human] is aware of knowing [their] neighbour is opposed to a meeting without recognition in
the street, as well as to the ignorance of the multitude of beings that one never meets, in the
same way that life is opposed to death. The knowledge of human beings thus appears as a
mode of biological connection, unstable but just as real as the connections between cells in
tissue. The exchange between two human particles in fact possesses the faculty of surviving
momentary separation.

A [human] is only a particle inserted in unstable and entangled wholes. These wholes are
composed in personal life in the form of multiple possibilities, starting with a knowledge that
is crossed like a threshold - and the existence of the particle can in no way be isolated from
this composition, which agitates it in the midst of a whirlwind of ephemerids. This extreme
instability of connections alone permits one to introduce, as a puerile but convenient illusion, a
representation of isolated existence turning in on itself.

In the most general way, every isolable element of the universe always appears as a particle
that can enter into composition with a whole that transcends it. Being is only found as a whole
composed of particles whose relative autonomy is maintained. These two principles dominate
the uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that never ceases to put everything in
question. Emerging in universal play as unforeseeable chance, with extreme dread imperatively
becoming the demand for universality, carried away to vertigo by the movement that composes
it, the ipse being that presents itself as a universal is only a challenge to the diffuse immensity
that escapes its precarious violence, the tragic negation of all that is not its own bewildered
phantom's chance. But, as a man, this being falls into the meanders of the knowledge of [their]
fellowmen, which absorbs [their] substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes
beyond the virulent madness of [their] autonomy in the total night of the world.

Abdication and inevitable fatigue - due to the fact that "being" is, par excellence, that which,
desired to the point of dread, cannot be endured - plunge human beings into a foggy labyrinth
formed by the multitude of "acquaintances" with which signs of life and phrases can be
exchanged. But when [they] escapes the dread of "being" through this flight - a "being" that is
autonomous and isolated in night - a [human] is thrown back into insufficiency, at least if [they]
cannot find outside of himself the blinding flash that [they] had been unable to endure within
himself, without whose intensity [their] life is but an impoverishment, of which [they] feels
obscurely ashamed.

III. THE STRUCTURE OF THE LABYRINTH

Emerging out of an inconeivable void into the play of beings, as a lost satellite of two phantoms
(one with a bristly beard, the other softer, her head decorated with a bun), it is in the father and
mother who transcend [them] that the miniscule human being first encountered the illusion of
sufficiency. In the complexity and entanglement of wholes, to which the human particle
belongs, this satellite-like mode of existence never entirely disappears. A particular being not
only acts as an element of a shapeless and structureless whole (a part of the world of
unimportant "acquaintances" and chatter), but also as a peripheral element orbiting around a
nucleus where being hardens. What the lost child had found in the self-assured existence of the
all-powerful beings who took care of [them] is now sought by the abadoned [human] wherever
knots and concentrations are formed throughout a vast incoherence. Each particular being
delegates to the group of those situated at the centre of the multitudes the task of realizing the
inherent totality of "being". [they] is content to be a part of a total existence, which even in the
simplest cases retains a diffuse character. Thus relatively stable wholes are produced, whose
centre is a city, in its early form a corolla that encloses a double pistil of sovereign and god. In
the case where many cities abdicate their central function in favour of a single city, an empire
forms around a capital where sovereignity and the gods are concentrated; the gravitation
around a centre then degrades the existence of peripheral cities, where the organs that
constituted the totality of being wilt. By degrees, a more and more complex movement of group
composition raises to the point of universality the human race, but it seems that universality,
at the summit, causes all existence to explode and decomposes it with violence. The universal
god destroys rather than supports the human aggregates that raise [their] ghost. [they] himself
is only dead, whether a mythical delirium set [them] up to be adored as a cadaver covered with
wounds, or whether through [their] very universality [they] becomes, more than any other,
incapable of stopping the loss of being with the cracked partitions of ipseity.

IV. THE MODALITIES OF COMPOSITION AND DECOMPOSITION OF BEING

The city that little by little empties itself of life, in favour of a more brilliant and attractive city,
is the expressive image of the play of existence engaged in composition. Because of the
composing attraction, composition empties elements of the greatest part of their being, and this
benefits the centre - in other words, it benefits composite being. There is the added fact that, in
a given domain, if the attraction of a certain centre is stronger than that of a neighbouring
centre, the second centre then goes into decline. The action of powerful poles of attraction
across the human world thus reduces, depending on their force of resistance, a multitude of
personal beings to the state of empty shadows, especially when the pole of attraction on which
they depend itself declines, due to the action of another more powerful pole. Thus if one
imagines the effects of an influential current of attraction on a more or less arbitrarily isolated
form of activity, a style of clothing created in a certain city devalues the clothes worn up to that
time and, consequently, it devalues those who wear them within the limits of the influence of
this city. This devaluation is stronger if, in a neighbouring country, the fashions of a more
brilliant city have already outclassed those of the first city. The objective character of these
relations is registered in reality when the contempt and laughter manifested in a given centre
are not compensated for by anything elsewhere, and when they exert an effective fascination.
The effort made on the periphery to "keep up with fashion" demonstrates the inability of the
peripheral particles to exist by themselves.

Laughter intervenes in these value determinations of being as the expression of the circuit of
movements of attraction across a human field. It manifests itself each time a change in level
suddenly occurs: it characterizes all vacant lives as ridiculous. A kind of incandescent joy - the
explosive and sudden revelation of the presence of being - is liberated each time a striking
appearance is contrasted with its absence, with the human void. Laughter casts a glance,
charged with the mortal violence of being, into the void of being, into the void of life.

But laughter is not only the composition of those it assembles into a unique convulsion; it most
often decomposes without consequence, and sometimes with a virulence that is so pernicious
that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions.
Laughter attains not only the peripheral regions of existence, and its object is not only the
existence of fools and children (of those who remain vacant); through a necessary reversal, it is
sent back from the child to its father and from the periphery to the centre, each time the father
or the centre in turn reveals an insufficiency comparable to that of the particles that orbit
around it. Such a central insufficiency can be ritually revealed (in saturnalia or in a festival of the
ass as well as in the puerile grimaces of the father amusing [their] child). It can be revealed by
the very action of children or the "poor" each time exhaustion withers and weakens authority,
allowing its precarious character to be seen. In both cases, a dominant necessity manifests itself,
and the profound nature of being is disclosed. Being can complete itself and attain the
menacing grandeur of imperative totality; this accomplishment only serves to project it with a
greater violence into the vacant night. The relative insufficiency of peripheral existences is
absolute insufficiency in total existence. Above knowable existences, laughter traverses the
human pyramid like a network of endless waves that renew themselves in all directions. This
reverberation convulsion chokes, from one end to the other, the innumerable being of [human]
- opened at the summit by the agony of God in a black night.

V. THE MONSTER IN THE NIGHT OF THE LABYRINTH

Being attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its fullest impact
on being at the moment when, in the fall that it unleashes, a representation of death is cynically
recognised. It is not only the composition of elements that constitutes the incandescence of
being, but its decomposition in its mortal form. The difference in levels that provokes common
laughter - which opposes the lack of an absurd life to the plenitude of successful being - can be
replaced by that which opposes the summit of imperative elevation to the dark abyss that
obliterates all existence. Laughter is thus assumed by the totality of being. Renouncing the
avaricious malice of the scapegoat, being itself, to the extent that it is the sum of existences at
the limits of the night, is spasmodically shaken by the idea of the ground giving way beneath its
feet. It is in universality (where, due to solitude, the possibility of facing death through war
appears) that the necessity of engaging in a struggle, no longer with an equal group but with
nothingness, becomes clear. THE UNIVERSAL resembles a bull, sometimes absorbed in the
nonchalance of animality and abandoned to the secret paleness of death, and sometimes hurled
by the rage of ruin into the void ceaselessly opened before it by a skeletal torero. But the void it
meets is also the nudity it espouses TO THE EXTENT THAT IT IS A MONSTER lightly assuming
many crimes, and it is no longer, like the bull, the plaything of nothingness, because nothingness
itself is its plaything; it only throws itself into nothingness in order to tear it apart and to
illuminate the night for an instant, with an immense laugh - a laugh it never would have attained
if this nothingness had not totally opened beneath its feet.<b>Georges Bataille</b>

They will not be able to provide a definition of human that isnt racist. What
is necessary is a queering of life.
Chen 12. Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and womens studies at UC Berkeley, Animacies:
Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U Press, pg. 10

Furthermore, political interest stokes public alarm toward toxins. We must therefore
understand the ways in which toxicity has been so enthusiastically taken up during times of
economic instability and panic about transnational flow. Animacies demonstrates that
interests in toxicity are particularly (if sometimes stealthily) raced and queered. Indeed, toxins
participate vividly in the racial mattering of locations, human and nonhuman bodies, living and
inert entities, and events such as disease threats. This book aims to offer ways of mapping and
diagnosing the mutual imbrications of race, sexuality, ability, environment, and sovereign
concern.

In addition, animal and science studies have offered tools through which we can rethink the
significance of molecular, cellular, animal, vegetable, or nonhuman life.22 Animacies not only
takes into account the broadening field of nonhuman life as a proper object, but even more
sensitively, the animateness or inanimateness of entities that are considered either live or
dead. Considering differential animacies becomes a particularly critical matter when life
versus death binary oppositions fail to capture the affectively embodied ways that
racializations of specific groups are differentially rendered. Sianne Ngai explores the affective
meanings of the term animatedness, focusing on its manifestation as a property of Asianness
and of blackness: the affective state of being animated seems to imply the most basic or
minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or another, moved. But, as we
press harder on the affective meanings of animatedness, we shall see how the seemingly neutral
state of being moved becomes twisted into the image of the overemotional racialized
subject.23 Animacy has consequences for both able-bodiedness and ability, especially since a
consideration of inanimate life imbues the discourses around environmental illness and
toxicity. For instance, the constant interabsorption of animate and inanimate bodies in the case
of airborne pollution must account for the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies and the
merging of forms of life and nonlife. This book seeks to trouble this binary of life and
nonlife as it offers a different way to conceive of relationality and intersubjective exchange.

I detail an animacy that is in indirect conversation with historical vitalisms as well as Bennetts
vital materiality.24 Yet this book focuses critically on an interest in the animal that hides in
animacy, particularly in the interest of its attachment to things like sex, race, class, and dirt.
That is, my purpose is not to reinvest certain materialities with life, but to remap live and dead
zones away from those very terms, leveraging animacy toward a consideration of affect in its
queered and raced formations. Throughout the book, my core sense of queer refers, as might
be expected, to exceptions to the conventional ordering of sex, reproduction, and intimacy,
though it at times also refers to animacys veering-away from dominant ontologies and the
normativities they promulgate. That is, I suggest that queering is immanent to animate
transgressions, violating proper intimacies (including between humans and nonhuman things).

For the purposes of this book, I define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I include the
notion that affect is something not necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages many
bodies at once, rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single body. Affect
inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected. Yet I am also interested in the relatively
subjective, individually held emotion or feeling. While I prioritize the former, I also attend to
the latter (with cautions about its true possessibility) precisely because, in the case of
environmental illness or multiple chemical sensitivity, the entry of an exterior object not only
influences the further affectivity of an intoxicated human body, but emotions that body: it
lends it particular emotions or feelings as against others. I take my cue from Sara Ahmeds
notion of affective economies, in which specific emotions play roles in binding subjects and
objects. She writes, emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing positively
within them. Indeed, emotions may seem like a force of residence as an effect of a certain
history, a history that may operate by concealing its own traces.25 The traces I examine in this
book are those of animate hierarchies. If affect includes affectivity how one body affects
another then affect, in this book, becomes a study of the governmentality of animate
hierarchies, an examination of how acts seem to operate with, or against, the order of things
(to appropriate Foucaults phrasing for different purposes).26

Queer theory, building upon feminisms critique of gender difference, has been at the forefront
of recalibrating many categories of difference, and it has further rewritten how we understand
affect, especially with regard to trauma, death, mourning, shame, loss, impossibility, and
intimacy (not least because of the impact of the hiv/ aids crisis); key thinkers here include Ann
Cvetkovich, Lauren Ber- lant, Heather Love, and Lee Edelman, among others.27 As will be
demonstrated, these are all terms that intersect in productive ways with animacy.
Constructions of the coherent subject who possesses life segment and organize
life in a manner that eviscerates the possibility of joy this is the writing of
identity onto abstract life that is the essence of biopolitics and the violence of
the organism. The 1NC stands in contest, refusing the struggle for survival.
Braidotti 09. Rosi Braidotti, distinguished professor in the humanities at Utrecht University
(Netherlands),In: Braidotti, R. and Colebrook, C. and Hanafin, Patrick (eds.) Deleuze and Law:
Forensic Futures. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Publishers Limited, pg. 109

It is a paradox that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper
level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in
the stillness of non-life. Self-styling ones death is an act of affirmation. It means cultivating an
approach, a style of life that progressively and continuously fixes the modalities and the stage
for the final act, leaving nothing unattended. Pursuing a sort of seduction into immortality, the
ethical life is life as virtual suicide. Life as virtual suicide is life as constant creation. Life lived so
as to break the cycles of inert repetitions that usher in banality. Lest we delude ourselves with
narcissistic pretences, we need to cultivate endurance, immortality within time, that is to say
death in life. The generative capacity of this Life cannot be bound or confined to the single,
human individual. It rather transversally trespasses all boundaries in the pursuit of its aim,
which is the expression of its potency. It connects us trans-individually, trans-generationally and
eco-philosophically. Just as the life in me is not mine or even individual, so the death in me is
not mine, except in a very circumscribed sense of the term. In both cases all I can hope for is to
craft both my life and my death in a mode, at a speed and fashion which can sustain all the
intensity I is capable of. I can self-style this gesture auto-poietically, thus expressing its
essence as the constitutive desire to endure. I call it potentia.

What we humans truly yearn for is to disappear by merging into this eternal flow of becomings,
the precondition for which is the loss, disappearance and disruption of the atomised, individual
self. The ideal would be to take only memories and to leave behind only footsteps. What we
most truly desire is to surrender the self, preferably in the agony of ecstasy, thus choosing our
own way of disappearing, our way of dying to and as our self. This can be described also as the
moment of ascetic dissolution of the subject, the moment of its merging with the web of non-
human forces that frame him/her the cosmos as a whole. Call it death, it has rather to do
with radical immanence, with the totality of the moment in which, we finally coincide
completely with our body in becoming at last what we will have been all along: a virtual corpse.

This is neither Christian affirmation of Life nor transcendental delegation of the meaning and
value system to categories higher than the embodied self. On the contrary, it is the intelligence
of radically immanent flesh that states with every single breath that the life in you is not
marked by any master signifier and it most certainly does not bear your name. The awareness
of the absolute difference between intensive or incorporeal affects and the specific affected
bodies that one happens to be is crucial to the ethics of choosing for death. Death is the
unsustainable, but it is also virtual in that it has the generative capacity to engender the actual.
Consequently, death is but an obvious manifestation of principles that are active in every
aspect of life, namely, the pre-individual or impersonal power of potentia; the affirmation of
multiplicity and not of one-sidedness and the interconnection with an outside which is of
cosmic dimension and infinite. It is a temporal brand of vitalism that could not be further
removed from the idea of death as the inanimate and indifferent state of matter, the entropic
state to which the body is supposed to return. It is desire as plenitude and over-flowing, not as
lack, following the entropic model built into psychoanalytic theory. Death, on the contrary, is
the becoming-imperceptible of the nomadic subject and as such it is part of the cycles of
becomings, yet another form of inter-connectedness, a vital relationship that links one with
other, multiple forces. The impersonal is life and death as bios/zoe in us the ultimate outside
as the frontier of the incorporeal.

This centering of human life engenders apophenia, the seeing of patterns

where there is none as the messiness of innate chaos cannot be comprehended
by the AFFs segmented vitalism. Overwhelmed by the abundance of non-
human agents enacting strange, weird, and unpredictable pushes and pulls on
the global Stack of information. Politics is no longer possible.
---apophenia: the seeing of patterns where there is in fact only noise

---AT: capitalism good

Bratton 13. Benjamin Bratton, professor of visual arts at the University of California, San
Diego, Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical
Aesthetics, e-flux #46 06/2013, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/some-trace-effects-of-the-post-
anthropocene-on-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/

*gender modified

To predict (and prototype) what will and will not survive the Anthropocene demands that
artist/designer speculate upon irreducibly complex material interdependencies (of oil, water,
nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, avian influenza, rotting iron, insect biomass, plankton genomics, and
so forth), as well as speculate upon the effects that the subtraction or amplification of any one
of these will have on the others. These things are impossible to really know (and yet nothing
deserves more attention) and so anything like a geopolitical aesthetic in the Jamesonian sense
(a cinematic mechanism, however conspiratorial, for the comprehension of a World System and
its waves of control) is necessarily an exercise inapophenia, in drawing connections and
conclusions from sources with no direct connection other than their indissoluble perceptual
simultaneity. This apophenia, a seeing of patterns where there is actually only noise, is neither
a failure of imagination nor a virtue, but rather an unavoidable qualification of our predicament
and its (only partially decipherable) aftermath. There cannot be a post-Anthropocenic
politics in any recognizable, normative sensea politics predicated on the self-regard of
the human subject mapping herself as a coherent agent within a stable historical unfolding. Its
just not possible to distinguish between what is an existential risk and what is an absolute
invention, and what is both at once, and mobilize positions accordingly. So mobilization must
go on without that distinction. To governthat is, to account for the general economy of decay
and creation with some nominal degree of authorshipsomething else is required.

We are brought to this Anthropocenic precipice not just by a cosmic predicament but by the
tempestuous, ambivalent violences of Capitalism, particularly our current Algorithmic
Capitalism. But do we contain it, or it us? This economics is, on the one hand, the megamachine
of incredible anthropocentric composition and consumption, and on the other, the
appropriation of planetary matter, including human flesh, without concern for politics or limit,
by an intelligence from the future.6 Capitalism is seen at one and the same time as a
compulsive eco-economics linked inextricably to our omnivore dominance, and/or an alien
entropy machine for the processing of terrestrial material, value, and information into absolute
speed, peeling back the husk of human markets so as to finally suck dry the complicit
mammalian diagram. To eat or to be eaten? But this reversibility of insides and outsides is
perhaps exactly why it is necessary to retrain the work of the political away from a direct
confrontation with or acceleration of Capitalism as the scope of the problem as such, and
instead towards a direct engagement-in-advance with what succeeds and exceeds it.

Instead of post-Capitalism as the futural specter on call, I prefer the more encompassing
post-Anthropocene.7 The latter names not only another eco-economic order but articulates
in advance the displacement of the human agent from the subjective center of its operations. It
measures its situation from picoseconds to geologic temporal scopes, and nanometric to
comparative-planetary scales, and back again. It does not name in advance, as some
precondition for its mobilization today, all the terms with which it will eventually have at its
disposal in the future. The aporia of the post-Anthropocene is not answered by the
provocation of its naming, and this is its strength over alternatives that identify too soon what
exactly must be gained or lost by our passage off the ledge. The post-Anthropocene indicates
that the organizing work of a xenogeopolitical aesthetics (or whatever) can be done only in
relation to a mature alienation from human history and anthropocentric time and scale. As it
foreshadows and foregrounds the eclipse and extinction of Anthropocenic anthropology and
corresponding models of governance, it establishes not only that humanism disappears with
humans, and vice versa, but that the more elemental genetic machines with which we now co-
embody flesh can and will, in time, re-appear and express themselves as unthinkable new
animal machines, and with them, New Earths. The apophenia is never resolved for us after all.

That of the anthropocene will be the disaster to end all disasters we need to
get ready by developing non-human centric understandings of ecological
agency which can understand the layers of stratification of the Earth only a
non-human ethos can effectively account for this new era of geological agency
Clark 14. Nigel Clark, professor in the Lancaster Environment Center at Lancaster University
(UK), Geopolitics and the disaster of the anthropocene, The Sociological Review, 62:S1, pg. 21
It is anthropogenic climate change, and especially the prospect of passing over thresholds or
tipping points in the Earths climate system, that is helping drive forward claims for a geological
transition at the planetary scale. Other human impacts, however, such as the triggering of a
mass extinction event, the depositing of nuclear and chemical wastes, and the large-scale
geomorphic transformations of the Earths surface are also taken into account. In each case,
what is under consideration by the commission is not the experience of living through
upheavals in Earth systems, but what these changes will mean for the geological stratification
of the planet. As sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski sums up: it is important to realise that the
truth of the Anthropocene is less about what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity
will leave behind (2012: 169).

We might imagine the Anthropocene, then, as [is] the disaster to end all disasters. Here I set
out at once from disaster studies the interdisciplinary field which seeks to inform practical
measures to help keep people out of the path of hazardous events and from the thought of
the philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1995) for whom the disaster is a crisis of such severity that it
undermines our very capacity to make sense of the world. The figure of the Anthropocene
announces the prospect of multiple, interconnected and cascading transformations in Earth
systems whose current state human beings and other species have come to rely upon. This
presents an immense challenge to those tasked with managing environmental change, but at
the same time underscores a human embedding in dynamical physical processes which, as Earth
scientists would have it, ensures that we cannot be in a position to manage the Earth System in
any objective fashion (Steffen et al., 2004: 286). In other words, the Earth sciences disclose
material conditions that not only defy prediction, but reveal the precarious existence of those
beings who are asking questions of it. With the coming of the Anthropocene, literary theorist
Timothy Morton argues, geoscience finds itself confronting an abyss whose reality becomes
increasingly uncanny, not less, the more scientific instruments are able to probe it (2012: 233).
And yet, scientists continue to go to the ends of the Earth, literally, in search of evidence about
the past, present and future operation of Earth systems.

Such an entanglement of the known and the unknowable, the tryst between that which adds
to knowledge and that what radically undoes this knowledge, is not a world away from the
paradoxes of the disaster in which Blanchot (1995) immersed himself. For Blanchot and his
heirs, the disaster is an event that we cannot simply turn into an object of knowledge for such
is its force and shock that it dismantles the very platforms from which we apprehend reality.
And yet, even as the disaster overwhelms our taken-for-granted senses and sensibilities, it also
challenges us to try and begin sensing, thinking, acting in new ways. It ends the world, and
begins it turning anew.
Is there more we could do with our renewed sense of implication in revolu- tions of the Earth? What might it mean geo-politically,
I ask, to think of the Anthropocene as a disaster and to think disaster at the spatial and temporal scale of the planet in its entirety?
In the light of the failure of all attempts thus far at global governance of climate and other Earth systems the summit by summit
drift of compromise and deferral what are the political potentialities that might yet be drawn out of the geological conditions of
human existence?

I want to first review the emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene and look at the meaning and implications of the changes
assembled under its name. I will then address political risks that have, with some justification, been seen to accompany declarations
of a global state of emergency, before moving on to consider what else might be done with a dawning sense of geophysical
disaster. There is, setting out from this predicament, no clear-cut or obvious passage from the countenance of planetary disaster to
Kant was
a novel sense of geo-politics the fate of Kants answer to geologically induced trauma being an object lesson here. But
right about one thing: the disaster is a moment that calls for an audacious response. If it is not
to be a prelude to despair, the disaster must be an incitement to risk-taking, improvisation and
experiment. Though none of this should distract us from an understanding that this is also a
time for mourning for dwelling on the experience of loss.

The imposition of a universal notion of life paradoxically causes the destruction

of all life.
Evans 10. Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the
University of Leeds and Programme Director for International Relations, Foucaults Legacy:
Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century, Security Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August 2010,
pg. 422-424, sage

Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous
recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already
received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault was concerned more with the
continuation of war once peace has been declared.4 Denouncing the illusion that we are living
in a world in which order and peace have been restored (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to
disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of
peace/civic normality. War accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that
follows. None have been more ambitious in map-- ping out this warpeace continuum than
Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009). Their liberal war thesis provides a provocative insight into
the lethality of making live. Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreserved
righteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populations that exist beyond the
liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be included. With liberal peace therefore
predicated on the pacification/elimination of all forms of political difference in order that
liberalism might meet its own moral and political objectives, the more peace is commanded,
the more war is declared in order to achieve it: In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are
nonetheless committed also to making war. This is the martial face of liberal power that,
contrary to the familiar narrative, is directly fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for
which liberalism is to be admired (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here
of universalizing war in its pursuit of peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds
the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal
as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in
the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes
profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own
allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid,
2009: 7). While Dillon & Reids thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto-- theological
dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that
war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with only two possible outcomes:
endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul--
tures (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems.
Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations, which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear
demarcations (them/us, war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit
from the possibility of scoring outright victory, retreating, or achieving a lasting negotiated
peace by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining enmity in
advance, war itself becomes just as complex, dynamic, adaptive and radically interconnected
as the world of which it is part. That is why any such war to end war becomes a war without
end. . . . The project of removing war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in
principle, continuous and unending process (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on from
these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to suggest that since wars for
humanity are inextricably bound to the global life--chance divide, it is now possible to write of a
Global Civil War into which all life is openly recruited: Each crisis of global circulation . . .
marks out a terrain of global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and
between the modalities of life itself. . . . What is at stake in this war is the Wests ability to
contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live
and consume beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms
inevitably marks an important depar-- ture. Not only does it illustrate how liberalism gains its
mastery by posing fundamental questions of life and death that is, who is to live and who can
be killed disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be the point of
theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a globally ambitious biopolitical
imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to
justify their use of military force (Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be one, must be for the
unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently
it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has become
biopolitical (hearts and minds) in everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While
criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal
idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the
tactics deployed in the will to govern illiberal populations. Foucault returns here with renewed
vigour. He understood that forms of war have always been aligned with forms of life. Liberal
wars are no exception. Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its
most meaningful expression through the battles waged in its name: At this point we can invert
Clausewitzs proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. . . .
While it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to establish
the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of
power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15).
What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politically settled:
political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations of force
the shifting balances, the reversals in a political system, all these things must be interpreted
as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and
displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when
we are writing the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15). David Miliband
(2009), without perhaps knowing the full political and philo-- sophical implications, appears to
subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed deployment:
NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our thinking as
our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like our own. The mental models
of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st century counterinsurgency. That is why my
argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz that
warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the
continuation of warfare by other means. Milibands Foucauldian moment should not escape
us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary scale hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful
distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of Newtonian space (i.e. inside/outside,
friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he firmly locates the conflict among the
world of peoples. With global war there-- fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs,
vanquishing enemies can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new
moment has arrived, in which the destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on the
success of humanitys own political strategies. No coincidence, then, that authors like David
Kilcullen a key architect in the formulation of counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and
Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too much controversy. Viewed
from the perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a
global civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life. Giving primacy to counter-- insurgency,
it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e.
population regulation) become central to the war effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed
recovery of maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined--up
response in which sovereign/militaristic forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel--
opmental forms of progress (Bell & Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other words a planetary
outlook, it collapses the local into the global so that lifes radical interconnectivity implies that
absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a
more humane recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation,
warfare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the name of
local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity now implies that war
effectively takes place by every means. Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast.
Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a
well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have never fully accepted the
inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly
became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by
colonialisms own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his-- tory.
While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternative histories of the
subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms not least civil
war for Foucault in particular there was something altogether more important at stake: there
is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what
some scholars may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the
sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of
reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of
our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative
removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily
dangerous simply because location dictates. With enmity instead depending upon the complex,
adaptive, dynamic account of life itself, what becomes dangerous emerges from within the
liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can only be sanctioned against those newly
appointed enemies of humanity a phrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical
category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species complete, for
the sake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human existence, doing what is
necessary out of global species necessity requires a new moral assay of life that, pitting the
universal against the particular, willingly commits violence against any ontological
commitment to political difference, even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the
practice of destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters.
Necessary Violence Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is
to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia
(an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live selecting out those ways of
life that are fittest by design inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are
retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order
(Bauman, 1991). Racism thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze
& Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When
life itself becomes the principal referent for political struggles, power necessarily concerns
itself with those biological threats to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life
becomes the author of its own (un)making, the biopolitical assay of life necessarily portrays a
commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: a race that is portrayed as the one
true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who
deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage (Foucault,
2003: 61). Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions
aside, racial problems occupy a permanent presence within the political order (Foucault, 2003:
62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of threat the
constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous Others that exist within that
societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject, since
everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for political modernity to
function one always has to be capable of killing in order to go on living: Wars are no longer
waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the
existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter
in the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. . . . The principle underlying the
tactics of battle that one has to become capable of killing in order to go on living has become
the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When Foucault refers to
killing, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: When I say killing, I
obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact
of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply,
political death, expulsion, rejection and so on (Foucault, 2003: 256). Racism makes this process
of elimination possible, for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial
(dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing a break in the domain of life that is under
powers control: the break between what must live and what must die (Foucault, 2003: 255).
While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we should
lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take place in the name of species
improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when notions of security are invoked in order
to preserve the destiny of a species, when the defence of society gives sanction to very real
acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to
legitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes
altogether more rational, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether more frightening: When a
diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it
becomes the bio-power or bio-politics of populations, controlling and administering life, it is
indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces
that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to
produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on
the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a
population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the
juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of biological
danger. Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful
example of necessary killing the violence that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity
(see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most essential
characteristics of modern biopolitics is to constantly redefine the threshold in life that
distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside, it is within those sites that
eliminate radically the people that are excluded that the biopolitical racial imperative is
exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be
the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a space in which power confronts
nothing other than pure biological life without any media- tion (Agamben, 1995: 179). While
lacking Agambens intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean--inspired approach to violence
that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception has certainly gained
wide-- spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for
instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the exceptional times in which
we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in
the Global War on Terror have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of
understanding violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when it is
associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq,
Guantnamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical
evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that take place within the remit of
humanitarian discourses and practices, there is a categorical failure to address how necessary
violence continues to be an essential feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-
interventionary forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature
of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal occupations is
removed from the analytical arena.
They deny the possibility of creating new forms of life that are not subservient
to dualistic limitations of becoming. The attempt to impose a plan is the denial
of the very possibility of thought.
Papadopoulos 10. Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation at the
University of Leicester, Activist Materialisms, Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement: pg.
74

The materialism emerging gradually after the 1990s focuses on the question of monism instead
of concentrating on the binary opposition between materialism and idealism. It is this very
dichotomy that undermines monist materialism. It is not about which position you take in this
thinking, it is about the very act of taking a position. For Deleuze and Guattari the real enemy of
materialist thinking is not idealism, it is dualism. The only enemy is two (Deleuze 2001: 95).
Materialism after the 1990s is an anti-dualism that gradually transforms the relation between
activism and materialism that informed most of social movements during the Leninist period
and after: matter and mind, activism and materialism start to fuse again into one process. The
practice itself, the site of action and its thinking, gradually became equally important for the
activism of the 1990s. It is not a coincidence that many of the social movements of this period
and since focus on the question of reclaiming. The activism of reclaiming attempts to re-
appropriate the immediate spaces of existence by simultaneously transforming them through
everyday actions: reclaim the streets, reclaim the city, earth activism and the permaculture
movement, the remaking of transnational spaces through migration movements, radical queer
activism and the building of new social relationalities and communities, cyberactivism, the
alter-globalisation movement, the production of the commons. In all of them we encounter an
emphasis on reclaiming material spaces and relations vital for developing new alternative
social and material projects (for an extended discussion see Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Chesters
and Welsh 2006). This was, of course, also a central characteristic of previous forms of political
activism, in particular of feminism. But the primary difference here is that either the question of
reclaiming social and material spaces was not conceptualised as such or else was considered
secondary with regards to the real and primary struggle, which was supposed to focus on
radical demands addressed to the state and its institutions in respect of recognition and
representation. In contrast, the activism emerging after the 1990s, and in particular since the
Zapatista movement, is less concerned with the states mediation; instead it consciously
attempts to force existing institutions to change by creating alternative materialities and forms
of life.

Deleuze and Guattaris monist materialism captures a key moment of this form of activism that
reconnects us with the activist materialism of the early Marx described at the beginning of this
paper. It is the question of how to change matter and create new forms through collective
practices. Deleuze and Guattaris materialism questions how the very moment of morphing
matter comes into being. The emergence of form is neither the transcendent imposition of a
preconceived plan on matterforget the architect and the beenor is it simply a movement of
self-organised matter that becomes represented in the mind of the subject forget autopoietic
systems. Neither external plan, nor internal self-organisation. In this sense, it is neither
idealism nor materialism (as conceived until now). The position Deleuze and Guattari try to
develop is that it is the movement of matter itself that makes both a materialist as well as an
idealist stance possible. Both the capacity to create form and the capacity to understand the
emergence of form are immanent to existence. There is no monism if there is a dualist option;
there is nothing that is one, there is nothing that is multiple (Deleuze 2001: 99). Deleuze and
Guattari tried to avoid thinking along the either-or of materialism and idealism/dualism. The
very possibility of thought is immanent to matters movements.

Prediction markets replace reality with an ordered, controlled simulation of it

this impulse to restrain chaos is the root cause of modern violence state
actors will ignore results and translate knowledge of the future into
increasingly violent interventionism this card literally says trying to control
prediction markets is the cause of all global war this is a spec application of
knowledge as dissuasive to the aff the alt solves by seducing the human
subject into its own dissolution
--alt solves better seduction of systems causes chaos that solves global problems
comparatively better -- the alt is an act of seduction: not knowing the future NOT knowing
what will happen keeps actors in check we can still do things other countries can solve
embracing this frame of predictive arguments refuses the quest for certainty seductive
method of the 1nc endorses the same knowledge but with the possibility of chaos the systm
they preserve is a dead system knowledge is dissuasive

Aitken 11 [Rob Aitken, University of Alberta, Canada, Financializing security: Political prediction
markets and the commodification of uncertainty, Security Dialogue April 2011 vol. 42 no. 2
123-141]

It is perhaps most baldly articulated by Abramowicz, who, as we noted above, was not too
bothered about the superiority of information markets' predictions, so long, it transpires, as they
could still help discipline those who would seek to exercise freedom, either in their own name
or that of others, since the predictions of wellfunctioning information markets are objective
(2003, Executive Summary). The objective here has a curious relation to the real, a revealing
problematic which perhaps indicates much of what is fundamentally at stake here. For the
objective is not so much the actually existing, rather it is that which can be ascertained without
objection. Consider as particular exemplification of this point the following. Abramowizc, in suggesting
ever more arcane ways to ensure that only fundamental traders hold sway in the final analysis of a market's arbitration, posits the
possibility of a two stage information market. In
the first players effectively bet on the outcome of a second,
with the second open only briefly, after the close of the first, with only the payouts of the
second dependent upon the verification (or not) of some future event. For Abramowizc one virtue
of such a device is that there will no longer be risk associated with real world randomness(note
156)! It is thus not reality itself and the randomness it entails that concerns those that seek
solace in prediction markets but rather certainty and reduction; a reality perhaps, but like the freedom we
encountered above, only that reality which has been suitably reformulated. Made single,
indisputable, and dead; not manifold, contestable and lived. Such a singular representation of
reality can only be a simulation, in the most pejorative of senses, that which will always be by
passed, confounded and exceeded by practical experience (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 155). For there is
always irruption of that minimum of reversibility which exists in every irreversible process
(Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161), requiring our endless human intervention to secure it, to keep its mask in
place and to maintain the illusion that it is outside of us and that we are not required for its
maintenance. Indeed, one could go further. Our endless defence, our securing of our simulated worlds,
against the ceaseless encroachment of the entropy from which they are formed is, according to Baudrillard, that which gives
them their purchase upon us. They are only made interesting by this interminable maintenance
requirement. The attractiveness of ordered production and prediction (see also, Cooper, 2005) is thus
ironically provided by its potential to fall back into disorder, which secretly ruins and
dismantles it while simultaneously ensuring that a minimal continuity of pleasure traverses it,
without which it would be nothing (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161). And for Baudrillard this means that the
seduction through which all our attempts to stabilize the real world are undone doesn't belong
to the order of the real but rather surrounds it, providing the background against which our
small victories over chaos are able to shine, just as derivatives markets surround those in their
underlying assets. [S]eduction envelops the whole real process of power, as well as the whole
real order of production, with endless reversibility and disaccumulation without which neither
power nor production [nor indeed prediction] would exist (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 159, original emphases). This
continual disintegration of order and manufactured form is the very ground that production,
prediction and power require for their perpetuation. It is what makes these latter processes
seductive. The lack of real prediction associated with PAM and similar systems is made abundantly clear
by Mason Richey (2005). Here PAM is indicted not for the reasons we have encountered above in the media furore surrounding its
announcement but rather on more philosophical terms, entirely consonant with the line of argument we have been developing.
Richey follows the logic of PAM to its selfdefeating terminal conclusion. Traders purchase a contract on PAM if they think its
underlying event is more likely than its current price would suggest. En masse such trading will raise the price of that contract. But
PAM is an information and prediction market. Its raison d'tre is to provide a signal to those who are interested in the occurrence, or
rather the prevention, of the events that underlie traded contracts. Thus a
rise in prices is likely to instigate a
response from those for whom the market was created as signalling mechanism. In turn this
thus reduces the likelihood of the occurrence of the event. I bet, you see I bet, you act, I lose. Or
as Richey (2005, p. 10) puts it: The idea that government authorities employ the market to foresee events that they will prevent
would, a priori, mute the signal. But this is not the most fundamental of the flaws. It merely reflects one
of a deeper level. And it is precisely why Hanson seems so misguided in his rendering of existing instruments as being in need
of supplementation if they are to deliver prediction of a precise enough nature. For in the act of specification of the
possible future, the job that the signalling market of derivatives is intended to achieve is already
done. In the case of PAM, again in Richey's (2005, p. 10) words: [T]he derivatives of maximal predictive interest, the impetus for
the system's design, terrorism derivatives, must be explicitly articulated in order to be offered. But if the market designers can list a
specific terrorist event, then they have already defined, determined, and predicted the very event that the market is designed to
identify. If the market designers know which terrorist derivatives to offer, then they have already done the work of the market. For
Richey (2005, p. 10) then: The system does both too little and too much. This combination of inadequacy and
excess is intimately tied to PAM's curious relation to a simulated future of an ordered, predicted, singular real. Our reading of Dillon
(2004, 2006, forthcoming) suggests that such
fetishization of fixation is increasingly anathema to key
strands of, themselves increasingly dominant, thinking within the strategic centres of our
Western security apparatus. As he pithily puts it, the contingent has become a new order of the
real[17]. This contingent is the strategic thinking that both we, and any securing agency, actually
need to engender in a world in which human being is increasingly relativised in space and time
through technologies of communication and information (Cooper, 2005, p. 10); a world exemplified by PAM
and its derivatives. What we, and they, certainly do not need to engage in is evergreater emplacement. For in a world ever
more clearly revealed by the congenitally failing securing action of such technologies as an
inexhaustible informational remainder which, strangely, appears only to disappear (Cooper, 2005, p.
22), such yearning for the objective, for a singular real in which to find and found ourselves is
futile in the extreme. Indeed, one could go further it is in the desire for and the violent imposition
of a singular truth that most contemporary conflict is rooted. It is only a manifold real that has
sufficient play of space and space of play to prevent the horrors attendant upon crusades for the
truth. So where do we end up? We began by invoking the range of different readings of PAM's demise and worked through the
differences and similarities between them. At the same time we considered the differences and similarities between PAM and other
markets. What was revealed by both of these comparisons was the tension between instrumental representation and the prior
simulation upon which it depends, a tension embodied perhaps most quintessentially by markets themselves. Markets are able to
reconcile the reversible imminence of simulation through endless deferral both between different markets and their derivatives
and indeed between the present and the future, so long as the latter always remains deferred and can never definitively be reached.
In doing so they encompass both effectcause and causeeffect. As such they are able to sustain manifold reality so long as the world
keeps turning and money keeps making it go round. But what they cannot do, except in nave and impoverished accounts, such as
those of many of the protagonists we considered, is be simply resolved to one, singular reality that would arbitrate the truth,
particularly the truth of a prediction. PAM's attempt to capture effect in order to enable intervention at the level of cause is forever
undone by the ways in which such effect is both overly prefigured and by the ways in which such prefiguring, when coupled with
the informative role the market is intended to perform for interventionists, acts to ensure that its signals are suppressed. Despite
their myriad other disagreements, the extraction of a singular reality from the manifold is what most of
our commentators seem desperate to achieve. However the divergence in their views does not
thus reveal some underlying neutral core of truth from which each raps out a different line.
Rather, we witness the opposite. A manifold, polyphonous world that endlessly resists and undoes any singular
articulation of its nature or trajectory. Such a world allows each to tell a different story of its benefits and
costs. We thus happily join in celebrating the cessation of PAM's singular call. But we would
equally revel in the silencing, or rather the drowning out via cacophony, of those other
monologues that brought about its end.
 1NR
Their overdetermination of what activism and engagement looks like is
precisely the pointtheir topical version, predictability, and decision-making
arguments are clever smokescreens for the violence of the conformity machine
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics, Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 3

Rather than problematising the political, this royal understanding of activism uses its metric
power to axiomatise politics, while simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse
simply to align with the given of formal politics. An example of this can be seen in the hostility
of western states towards organisations such as Wikileaks or the Animal rights movement,
each of which are immersed in creative acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new
scenes and acts are constantly at risk of being appropriated by this royal science of politics,
which imposes upon them a model that channels civic participation according to established
rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only to guarantee the workings of representative
democracy are essentially slave activisms; they dwell in safety and their impact and potential is
expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new structures of resonance.

The assumption that mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy not only
imposes a particular model of the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive
activism. By positing representative democracy (or any other regime) as the reified model of
political process, theory necessarily idealises certain forms of involvement over others. For
example, classical participatory theory is often blind to [unable to comprehend] the creative
significance of the activist energies being unfolded in such events as critical teaching in schools,
revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive effect of a critical assemblage that
confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality which disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the
assumptions underlying representative participation are troublesome for at least two reasons.
Firstly, participation in the formal political process of representative democracy does not in
itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude or action, seeking a less repressive and more
creative life. To evidence this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of
mass political support for representative state violence, as occurred last May when thousands
of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli
Defence Forces of nine activists from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms
and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara ship sailing to Gaza as part of a
humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, we might remain mindful of other, no less electrifying, cases of
popular support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, or of
events such as the Holocaust. In these instances, mass participation more accurately falls within
the Reichian analysis of a popular desire for fascismwhich lies worlds away from a
participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public to activist citizenship (see
Isin 2009) and to the tolerant good life that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly,
passivity is not necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression that
requires local explanation. Here, research at times confuses the visible with the political:
absence of visible mass participation might be a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious
compliance with ongoing forms of oppression, and can impact more energetically on the
perpetuation of a regime than can tangible acts of the body these modes of active
abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms.

After Deleuze and Guattari, political activism may be approached in a fundamentally different
way: without an image, without a form. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the interaction
between royal and nomad science produces a constantly shifting borderline, meaning that
there is always some element that escapes containment by the iron collars of representation
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367; see also Deleuze 1994). This occurs when the plane of
consistency is passionately thrown against the plane of organisation, when a nomad element
inserts itself in political struggles in which, for instance, the boundaries of citizenship are
challenged and reopened (as occurred in the struggle associated with the sans-papiers
movement, see Isin 2009), or barriers of ethnic segregation are challenged by new forms of
interculturalism (as occurs with bilingual forms of education). It is through these smallest
deviations that smooth types of political activity dwell within the striated forms of state
politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 371). Deleuzes and Deleuze and Guattaris political
philosophies have created some of the conceptual tools which may be put to innovative use in
activism that seeks to break with repressive traditions. Their alien relation to the standards set
by the royal science of politics (see Patton 2000) an alienation laid out in the philosophical
resources they draw on, in the issues and concepts that characterise their work and, principally,
in the incessant movement of their thought points towards a richer philosophical weaponry
with which to confront and possibly overcome political inhibitions, in both knowledge and
practice.