1AC

Morrissey
 Gulf Militarism
The US imposed and maintained military presence in the Gulf to secure geoconomic
interests. CENTCOM used the guise of deterrence to create military sites, liberalize
regional markets, and increase arms sales further destabilizing the region
Morrissey, J. (2015), Geoeconomics in the Long War. (PhD, Professor at the School of Geography and
Archaeology, National University of Ireland) Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2015 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 120 doi:
10.1111/ pg. 5- KAF

Stretching back to the early nineteenth century, the United States has projected a range of commercial,
military and geopolitical interests in the Middle East. Initially, the Middle East offered what Michael Palmer
(1992:1) calls an open field for American capital and industry, which was gradually built up despite British
colonial dominion across the region. As Palmer has shown, by the 1920s and 1930s, American corporations fueled
the regions development (1992:19). To secure this commercial activity and growing economic interests in
the region, the US increasingly assumed Western geopolitical and military leadership with the decline of Britain as a
colonial powerparticularly so after World War II, and with acute urgency in the later 1970s in the
aftermath of a range of regional political and economic crises (Morrissey 2011b). President Jimmy Carters State
of the Union Address in January 1980 declared that any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault
will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force (Carter 1980). Two months later, the establishment of the Rapid
Deployment Joint Task Force signaled the first formal commitment of US military force to the Persian
Gulf region. With CENTCOMs succession in 1983 as a full regional command, the US government had fully
committed to the Carter Doctrine and the securitization of the Persian Gulf. CENTCOM quickly assumed the role
of Guardian of the Gulf (Palmer 1992), but it is important to remember that this did not come about in the absence of support from
European and other industrial powers such as Japan. There were consistent calls for greater US military leadership in
the Middle East from the major industrial powers from the 1970s: a broad neoliberal concern established the
Trilateral Commission in 1973 to foster closer economic cooperation between the US, Europe and Japan;
British and French war ships were rushed to the Indian Ocean in the late 1970s in support of potential
US naval intervention in the Persian Gulf; and the US strategy of reflagging Kuwaiti oil tankers with American
ensigns was fully supported politically at the G7 Summit in Venice in 1987 at the height of the so-called Tanker War (Gamlen 1993; Gold
1988). The US naval presence in the Persian Gulf remained through the later 1980s and its ground presence was
to intensify in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Six months prior to Iraqs invasion of Kuwait in 1990, CENTCOM Commander-
in-Chief General Norman Schwarzkopf issued his posture statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It is highly
revealing: the greatest threat to US interests in the area is the spillover of regional conflict which could endanger
American lives, threaten US interests in the area or interrupt the flow of oil, thereby requiring the commitment of US combat forces (US Central
Command 1990). In
essence, Schwarzkopf had pre-scripted the imminent Gulf War for the US Congress and
American people. His commands geoeconomic mission to protect vital US interests in the Gulf
required intervention. CENTCOMs subsequent success in its execution of the war confirmed it in its
role as Guardian of the Gulf, and in the wars aftermath a number of CENTCOM-commissioned studies
promoted a focused mission for the command thereafter, largely defined around two concepts: critical
economic interests and forward deterrence of regional rivals (Lesser 1991; Pelletiere and Johnson II 1992). The
aftermath of the Gulf War saw the beginnings of a new period in US global ambition, which certainly intensified post 9/11, as Neil Smith has
argued, but the seeds were planted through the course of the 1990s. A
permanent ground presence of CENTCOM forces
started to take shape across the Arabian Gulf, bilateral treaties confirming access sites, logistics sites,
free-trade agreements and arms sales were signed with various Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and a
comprehensive weapons pre-positioning program mirrored an active deterrence policy of military
policing in the region (Morrissey 2009, 2011c). Through the course of the 1990s, the commands mission and vision were
clear according to the then Commander-in-Chief General James Peay: US CENTCOM supports US and free-world
interests (Binford Peay III 1995a:8, 10). To this end, the commands theater strategy was equally clear:
maintaining the free flow of oil at stable and reasonable prices and ensuring freedom of navigation
and access to commercial markets (Binford Peay III 1995a:2).

CENTCOM constructs binaries of perpetual geopolitical volatility and necessary

geoeconomic deterrence in order to maintain permanent military occupation in the
name of free oil and regional stability. The drive for capital accumulation that began in
the 30s metastasized into endless military occupation - a permanent state of war
continually justified by deterrence securitization.
Morrissey, J. (2015), Geoeconomics in the Long War. (PhD, Professor at the School of Geography and
Archaeology, National University of Ireland) Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2015 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 120 doi:
10.1111/ pp. 6-9 - KAF

David Harvey argues in The New Imperialism that contemporary US imperialism arises out of a dialectical
relation between territorial and capitalistic logics ofpower and can be understood most clearly with the
realization that the endless accumulation of capital produces crises within the territorial logic
because of the need to create a parallel accumulation of political/military power (2003:183). The US
military overseas has played an important role in opening up access to commercial markets for some time, as
evidenced above for CENTCOM. I do not wish to frame, however, any neat relationship between the US military, on the one hand, and the
economic actors its activities serve, on the other. Certainly, there appears no straightforward national correlation of militaryindustrial
relations, which existed to some degree during the Cold War but increasingly less so in the globalized world of multinational corporations and
dynamic transnational capital today. CENTCOMs emergence in the globalized context of late modern capitalism
meant that its operational strategy came to be defined by a deterrence policy underpinned by a dialectic
of coercion and consent (Harvey 2003; cf. Harcourt 2012). In 1997, General James Peay explained the commands
deterrence policy thus to the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on National Security: we know from experience
that [Middle Eastern] leaders are intimidated by military strength [and] consequently we deter these
individuals by continuing to organize, equip, and exercise premier joint and combined forces; [and]
positioning a credible mix of those forces forward in the region (US Central Command 1997c). So what does deterrence look like in practice?
Here is General Peay elaborating on CENTCOMs day-to-day theater strategy: Every day, sailors and marines
show the flag daily conducting frequent naval exercises to demonstrate American naval prowess to friend
and foe, enforcing freedom of navigation in narrow channels and vital choke points, and rappeling in the
middle of the night onto rolling decks of merchant ships to enforce U.N. economic sanctions against
Iraq. Over 12,000 such hoardings have been carried out since August 1990. The sailors and marines are
joined by airmen secur[ing] the skies over southern Iraq More than 48,000 sorties have flown over
southern Iraq since August 1992 (Binford Peay III 1995a:6). Between the end of the Gulf War and beginning of
the Iraq War, CENTCOM was effectively on a permanent war footing, a point rarely acknowledged. Its overseeing
of the Joint Task Force Southwest Asias implementation of Operation Southern Watch ensured the Iraqi
no-fly zone that regulated airspace south of the 32nd Parallel (extended further north, just south of Baghdad, to the
33rd Parallel in 1996). In addition to aerial deterrence, naval deterrence in the Persian Gulf and regional
ground deterrence have also been core elements of the commands operations since the early 1990s. For
the latter, manoeuvres such as Operation Vigilant Warrior, Operation Desert Spring, and wargame exercise Internal Look, involved frequent
mobilizations of ground troops and military equipment, resulting in a near continuous presence surrounding the Iraqi
border to deter conflict, promote stability, and facilitate a seamless transition to war, if required (US
Central Command 1997b:5). Deterrence relies on territorial access, and in the case of CENTCOM it has long
been, to reverse Cowen and Smiths broader assertion, a strategic necessity rather than a tactical option (2009:42).
Deterrence was central to CENTCOMstheater strategy in the later 1990s, and its universalist legitimacy
was repeatedly affirmed by CENTCOM Commanders-in-Chief in their annual reports to Congress. In 1999, for instance,
CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief General Anthony Zinni asserted that the ability to project overwhelming and decisive military power is key to
Its chief strategy document from 1999
CENTCOMs theater strategy (US Central Command 1999a; cf. Ullman et al. 1996).
further underlined deterrence as the central means of carrying out its security mission, involving a range of
core elements, from air, ground and naval maneuvers, joint military exercises and war gaming, to the initiation of prepositional programs,
infrastructure improvements and access and logistic sites development (US Central Command 1999b:913). Daily deterrence activities across
CENTCOMs regional Area of Responsibility (AOR) include: monitoring and analyzing significant military, political and economic events;
planning and conducting unit and combined (foreign) military exercises and operations; and refining deployment and contingency plans for
the region (US Central Command 2007). The latter concern, refining deployment and contingency plans, is wholly dependent on CENTCOMs
basing strategy, which includes Forward Operating Sites, Cooperative Security Locations, and the contingency use of ports and airfields
throughout its AOR; all of which are systematically developed to assure US access and legally enabled by the ongoing negotiation of status
of forces agreements with host countries (Global Security 2015; cf. Morrissey 2011c). Arguably, CENTCOMs most important
concern is rapid deployability, a concept prominently proclaimed more broadly by the DoD with the publication of the Global
Defense Posture Review in 2004. Within the review, bilateral and multilateral legal arrangements sanctioning and
facilitating territorial access and freedom of movement are underscored as critical for the necessary
flexibility and freedom of action to meet 21st century security challenges (US Department of Defense 2004:8). The
rapid deployment concept has earlier origins than its official policy codification in 2004, of course. From the early 1980s, it was regularly
touted in Strategic Studies circles as crucial in the reorganization of the US military to orientate optimum
interventionary power, and particularly so in the Middle East. In the geopolitically precarious yet geoeconomically
pivotal space of the Central Region, the argument has long been made for the rapid military regulation of access to resources and free
markets (Epstein 1981; Record 1981; Waltz 1981). Sketching its deterrence mission via a distinctly geoeconomic imagination, a further
CENTCOM strategy document in 1997 began with the following assertion: [t]he unrestricted flow of petroleum resources from friendly Gulf
states to refineries and processing facilities around the world drives the global economic engine (US Central Command 1997a:1). In the same
year, CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief General James Peay declared to the House Appropriations Committee
Subcommittee on National Security that his commands mission was critical to a successfully functioning global
economy, as any disruption to the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf would precipitate economic
calamity for developed and developing nations alike (US Central Command 1997c). His successor, General Anthony Zinni,
was equally clear in underlining the Central Regions pivotal geoeconomic importance: Americas
interests in [the Central Region] reflect our beliefs in access to free markets The vast quantities of oil, gas,
and other resources present in the gulf region, which includes 69 percent of the worlds known oil reserves
plus significant natural gas fields, are essential to todays global economies (US Central Command 1998). In a subsequent
interview to Joint Force Quarterly, Zinni pointed out the obvious consideration underpinning CENTCOM theater strategy: Our theater strategy
is built [on] four elements. The first is obviousproviding access to the energy resources of the region, which is a vital national interest. The
second element is something often overlookedthe growing commercial significance of the area. The pattern of global trade is shifting from
east to west. Investments are flowing into the region because of its geostrategic position. The third is the number of maritime choke points in
the region, such as the Suez Canal and Strait of Hormuz. We must ensure these passages remain open to communication and trade. Fourth,
there are issues of stability the Middle East peace process, extremism, and other concerns (Joint Force Quarterly Forum 2000:26). General
Zinni underlines above the dual logics of military and economic security at the heart of CENTCOMs
mission. In essence, it is a mission of geoeconomic deterrence. His successors at Central Command have
continued to champion deterrence thus. General John Abizaid outlined to Congress in 2006, for instance, that his
commands AOR incorporates a nexus of vital transportation and trade routes, encompasses the
worlds most energy-rich region and that his forces were postured to ensure the flow of global
resources and deter hostile powers throughout the region (US Central Command 2006). It is this effective
binary of perpetual geopolitical volatility and necessary geoeconomic deterrence that has been at the
heart of CENTCOMs securitization discourse for over three decades. Successive commanders have
repeatedly affirmed the commands vital function of policing stability and security in a region scripted
unrelentingly as integral to the political and economic wellbeing of the international community (Binford
Peay III 1995b:32). And they have shown a firm awareness too of the pivotal role CENTCOM plays in enabling
commercial markets, despite never detailing the far from straightforward relationship between
militarization and markets, a point I return to later.

US military presence produces poverty, environmental disaster and structural violence

Jones 12 (2012, Toby, PhD in Middle Eastern History from Stanford University, assistant professor of
history at Rutgers University, America, Oil, and War in the Middle East, Journal of American History
(2012) 99 (1): 208-218)

It might be tempting to argue that the escalating involvement of the United States and its history of militarism and
military engagement in the Gulf region have provided a kind of security for the region. After all, oil has continued to flow,
the network of oil producers has remained the same, and thus the primary interests of the United States in the region have
been served. But three decades of war belie this argument. War is not tantamount to security, stability, or
peace. Even in the periods between wars in the region the violence carried out by regimes against their own
subjects makes clear that peace is not always peaceful . The cost has been high for the United States and
especially for people who live in the Middle East. In thirty years of war, hundreds of thousands have died
excruciating and violent deaths. Poverty, environmental disaster, torture, and wretched living
conditions haunt the lives of many in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere in the region. Of course, the burden of death
and destruction does not fall entirely on the United States and its policy of militarization. The politics of war have primarily
served the interests of regional leaders who have, often from a position of weakness, exported violence to deflect
internal challenges to their authority. And international political rivalry, particularly during the Cold War, drew in
the other global powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which also helped facilitate insecurity and disorder in the
Middle East. The regions autocrats have also remained in power. As citizens began to challenge ruling
regimes in early 2011 in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Omanthree of the closest allies of the United States in
the regionit became clear that those governments are all too willing to turn the weapons of war,
purchased mostly from the United States, on their subjects. It is also clear that those regimes are hardly stable and
that they are and will remain perennially vulnerable to domestic and regional shocks, which poses a real dilemma for U.S.
policy. In addition to factoring in the human toll of wars and the moral dilemmas they raise, Americans trying to determine the
true price of oil in the United States must take into account the financial cost of maintaining a massive military presence in the
Gulf region. Roger Stern estimates that between 1976 and 2007 the total cost of maintaining the U.S. military in the Persian
Gulf was about $7 trillion, and that figure does not include the costs of the 2003 Iraq War.23 The increasing willingness of
the United States to use force and violence to shore up the flow of oil to global markets has not been a
sign of American strength but rather of its limits. Popular political discourse in the United States often posits
Americans and their government as unwitting victims of an unhealthy and unsustainable addiction or as dupes of duplicitous oil
producers. It would certainly be wise to break this addiction to oil, but to do so requires coming to terms with the history of
that addiction and the multiple costs it entails. But it is hardly clear that any such reconsideration is happening. Instead, the
United States appears set to continue along a familiar path. Having crafted a set of relationships with oil and unstable oil
producers and having linked the fate of those relationships to American national security virtually ensures that while the
United States is wrapping up the most recent oil war, its military and political strategists are already
preparing for the next one.
The binary of economic and military securitization produce endless instability and
intervention, turns any DAs
Jones 12. Toby Craig Jones, associate professor of Middle Eastern history at Rutgers, America, Oil, and
War in the Middle East, the Journal of American History, June 2012, pg. 208
Over the course of the twentieth century, preserving the security not just of Saudi Arabia but of the entire Persian Gulf region and the flow of Middle Eastern oil
were among the United States chief political-economic concerns.2
The pursuit of American power in the Gulf has been fraught
with peril and has proved costly in terms of both blood and treasure. Oil has flowed, although not without difficulty. Since
the late 1970s the Gulf has been rocked by revolution and almost permanent war. Security, if measured
by the absence of conflict, has been elusive, and safeguarding the Persian Gulf and the regions oil
producers has meant increasingly more direct and dearer forms of U.S. intervention. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in
2003 and the American military occupation there represented only the latest stage of American militarism in the Middle East. While more considerable in scale,
duration, and devastation than previous military misadventures in the region, the
Iraq War was the outgrowth of several decades of
strategic thinking and policy making about oil. It is true, of course, that terrorism and especially the attacks of September
11, 2001, helped accelerate the drive to war in 2003, but to focus too much on 9/11 is to overlook and

discount the ways that oil and oil producers have long been militarized, the role oil has played in
regional confrontation for almost four decades, and the connections between the most recent
confrontation with Iraq and those of the past.3 Oil and war have become increasingly interconnected in
the Middle East. Indeed, that relationship has become a seemingly permanent one. This outcome was
not inevitable; the United States has not only been mired in the middle, but its approach to oil has also
abetted the outcome. It is also important to understand the U.S. emphasis on security, and the
contradictions of its approach to it, in a broader regional context. While this essay does not dwell on the
U.S.-Israeli relationship, U.S. Persian Gulf policy and Americas relationship with the regions oil
producers were often at odds with the alliance between the United States and Israel. The tensions
created by American policies in the Gulf have undermined U.S. claims about pursuing regional security
more generally. This contradiction played out most spectacularly during the 1973 oil crisis.4 The Strategic Logic of Militarism The United States is not the
only Western power with a history of war in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In a rush to secure and expand their own supplies in the region, the British landed an
expeditionary force near Basra in what is now Iraq in 1914. By 1918 the British captured Baghdad and ensconced themselves and their allies there, a perch from
American ascendance in the Persian Gulf later in the century created a
which they projected power for several decades.5

new pattern of militarism and war. Unlike its predecessors, the United States did not wage war out of old-
fashioned imperial calculation or ambition. American oil wars have not been about establishing direct
control over oil fields nor about liberation or freedom, at least not political freedom for the peoples of
the region. Instead, they have primarily been about protecting friendly oil producers. The objective has not
necessarily been to guarantee that Middle Eastern oil made its way to the United States, although meeting basic domestic energy needs remained a vital part of the
broader calculation. Keeping prices stable (not low) and keeping pro-American regimes in power were central to
U.S. strategic policy. The pattern of militarism that began in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s has partly
been the product of American support for and deliberate militarization of brutal and vulnerable
authoritarian regimes. Massive weapons sales to oil autocrats and the decision to build a geopolitical
military order in the Gulf that depended on and empowered those rulers resulted in a highly militarized
and fragile balance of power. And from the 1970s on, oil- producing states have faced repeated internal and
external threats, including domestic unrest, invasion, and regional or civil war, or at least the imminent
prospect of turmoil. Such instability and conflict has had much to do, of course, with internal political problems, only some of which were the result of
outside intervention. But the militarization that began in earnest under the United States watch exacerbated

and accelerated those uncertainties and helped further destabilize oil-producing states and the region.
The approach of the United States to oil and the Persian Gulf in the late twentieth century was both a sign of its superpower status and a demonstration of its limits.
What began as an effort to build up and empower surrogates, client states in the Gulf that would do the
bidding of the United States, proved instead to be the gateway for more direct projections of American
military power. Jimmy Carters warning during his 1980 state of the union address that the United States would use any means necessary, including
military force to safeguard its vital interests in the Gulf has clearly come to pass.6

Only US withdrawal solves regional disintegration is inevitable absent local

leadership
Freeman 15 (Chase W., retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and former president of the Middle East Policy Council (1997-
2009) and U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War of 1991. Responding to Failure: Reorganizing U.S. Policies in
the Middle East. Middle East Policy, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Summer 2015) **Daesh = ISIS, from earlier in the article: America is at
war with the renegade Islamist insurgency that calls itself the Islamic State. (I see no reason to dignify it with that title and,
like most people in the region, I prefer to call it by its less pretentious Arabic acronym, Daesh.)**

Since this century began, America has administered multiple disappointments to its allies and friends in the
Middle East, while empowering their and our adversaries. Unlike the Gulf Arabs, Egypt and Turkey, Washington does
not have diplomatic relations with Tehran. Given our non-Muslim identity, solidarity with Israel, and recent
history in the Fertile Crescent, the United States cannot hope to unite the regions Muslims against Daesh.
Daesh is an insurgency that claims to exemplify Islam as well as a governing structure and an armed force. A
coalition led by inhibited foreign forces, built on papered-over differences and embodying hedged
commitments will not defeat such an insurgency with or without boots on the ground. There is an
ineluctable requirement for Muslim leadership and strategic vision from within the region.
Without it, the existing political geography of the Arab world not just the map drawn by Sykes-Picot faces
progressive erosion and ultimate collapse . States will be pulled down, to be succeeded by warlords, as is already
happening in Iraq and Syria. Degenerate and perverted forms of Islam will threaten prevailing Sunni and Shi`a religious
dispensations, as Daesh now does. If indeed Saudi Arabia is finally prepared to organize a regional coalition to
enable it to deal directly with these issues, we should welcome this and give it our backing, while seeking to assure that it
does not damage Israels security, impede our transit through the region, or otherwise harm our interests. I come at last to our
objectives of promoting trade and liberal values. The need for considered judgment and restraint extends to refraining from
expansive rhetoric about our values or attempting to compel others to conform to them. In practice, we have insisted on
democratization only in countries we have invaded or that were otherwise falling apart, as Egypt was during the first
of the two noncoups it suffered. When elections have yielded governments whose policies we oppose, we
have not hesitated to conspire with their opponents to overthrow them. But the results of our efforts to
coerce political change in the Middle East are not just failures but catastrophic failures . Our
policies have nowhere produced democracy. They have instead contrived the destabilization of
societies, the kindling of religious warfare, and the installation of dictatorships contemptuous
of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities Frankly, we have done a lot better at selling things, including
armaments, to the region than we have at transplanting the ideals of the Atlantic Enlightenment there. The regions
autocrats cooperate with us to secure our protection, and they get it. When they are nonetheless overthrown,
the result is not democracy or the rule of law but socio-political collapse and the emergence of a Hobbesian state of nature in
which religious and ethnic communities, families, and individuals are able to feel safe only when they are armed and have the
drop on each other. Where we have engineered or attempted to engineer regime change, violent politics,
partition, and ethno-religious cleansing have everywhere succeeded unjust but tranquil order. One
result of our bungled interventions in Iraq and Syria is the rise of Daesh. This is yet another illustration that, in our
efforts to do good in the Middle East, we have violated the principle that one should first do no harm.
Americans used to believe that we could best lead by example. We and those in the Middle East seeking nonviolent
change would all be better off if America returned to that tradition and forswore ideologically motivated
hectoring and intervention . No one willingly follows a wagging finger. Despite our unparalleled ability to use force
against foreigners, the best way to inspire them to emulate us remains showing them that we have our act together. At the
moment, we do not. In the end, to cure the dysfunction in our policies toward the Middle East, it comes down to this: We must
cure the dysfunction and venality of our politics. If we cannot, we have no business trying to use an 8,000-mile-long
screwdriver to fix things one-third of the way around the world. That doesnt work well under the best
of circumstances. But when the country wielding the screwdriver has very little idea what its doing, it
really screws things up.

Plan: The United States should significantly reduce its military presence in the Arab
states of the Persian Gulf
 Framing
The discursive production of risk justifies permanent interventionism.
-Identification of risk justifies deploying technologies of management

-This views permanent interventionism as therapeutic, to close the gap in civilization by bringing others
within it

-This often entails preemptive strategies in the face of future danger

-Potential threats get actualized to justify permanent intervention

-Stock market analogywar on terror created terrorism everywhere, which allows further profit to be
made

-This violent intervention is justified in liberal discourse, painting the West always as the good side

John MORRISSEY, Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, 11 [Closing the

Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization, Antipode, Volume 43, Issue 3,
June 2011, p. 874-900, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]

Insecurity, Risk and the Temporality of Preemption: CENTCOM's Aleatory Contract The
aleatory nature of the Middle East's
future has long been a key discursive touchstone of CENTCOM geopolitical discourse. Since its initiation in the
early 1980s, the command's strategy papers, mission statements and reports to Senate and House Armed Services Committees
have implicitly touted it as the fundamental reason for its existence (Morrissey 2009b). In effect, it signed an
aleatory contract to securitize the Middle East, and that contract has been legitimized at regular
intervals by the discursive production of politically charged senses of risk, precarity and fear . And as
Jennifer Hyndman (2007:361) reasons, such
discourses have a particularly potent (geo)political power precisely
because they neatly combine an expression of vulnerability with a rationale for security measures.
They function to justifyindeed demandpractices of securitization. Various social theorists have explored in recent
years how discourses of fear, insecurity and risk feature prominently and constitutively in everyday
governmentalities and reproductions of the state (Bernstein 1996; Campbell 1992; Giddens 1999; Lupton 1999; Mythen and
Walklate 2006). Ulrich's Beck's formulation of how modernity can be characterized as a risk society has been a particular source of reflection
across various disciplines (Beck 1992, 1999; cf OMalley 1999). And while Michel Foucault did not write extensively on risk, his work on
governmentality has been especially influential in some of the most important recent theorizations of the subject (Braun 2008; Dean 1999;
Foucault 1979, 1991, 2007; OMalley 2004). In
the context of the war on terror, risk has played a key role in the
legitimization of state governmental and military strategies of securitization (Cooper 2008; Dillon 2008). Claudia
Aradau and Rens Van Munster (2007:108), for instance, have shown how it is through the perspective of risk
management that securitization is so seductively seen to function by the deployment of
technologies to manage dangerous irruptions in the future. George W. Bush's declaration of the war on
terror in 2001 was predicated on specific notions of insecurity and risk management; and that war had already
begun, of course, some years earlier when Bill Clinton dispatched bombing raids on Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1998, Clinton warned the world
about the risks of inaction, which outweighed the risks of action; a key political rhetoric subsequently used by Bush in launching the pre-
emptive strikes on Iraq in 2003 (Beck 2009; Heng 2006; OMalley 2006). Five years later, Bush's 2008 National Defense Strategy was concluded
with a specific section entitled Managing Risk. Therein, future challenges risk is underlined along with other identified risks as a critical
element to be planned for in the strategic projection of US foreign policy (US Department of Defense 2008:2023). Military
strategies of
securitization from future challenges risk are justified additionally by neoliberal beliefs that
securitization practices simultaneously function to correct, to reconstruct, to close the gap of
global security, economic freedom and indeed civilization (Simmons and Manuel 2003; Knights 2006; OHanlon 2008;
Kaplan 2009). This binaryneatly coupling the identification of risk with the idea that military
reconstruction is necessaryresults in a therapeutic and persuasive geopolitical argument about
permanent interventionism . It is at this point that temporality becomes an important register. From its genesis,
CENTCOM's temporal gaze has been directed to emerging and future danger. Such a focus is militarily to
be expected of course given that its theater engagement strategy has consistently entailed pre-emptive
strategies of deterrence and containment (US Central Command 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2009). A logic of military preemption,
in other words, has long been registered in CENTCOM circles. The logic of preemption has attracted considerable academic interest in recent
years. Randy Martin's (2007) Empire of Indifference usefully deploys the concept to theorize the dual political and economic calculus of risk
that has featured so centrally in recent US military interventionism. Echoing Naomi Klein's
argument about event-based
disaster capitalism, Martin places particular emphasis on the import of the eventand the risk of
future eventsand argues that preemption is the temporality of their securitization, the future made
present (Martin 2007:18; Klein 2007). For Martin, when such temporality drives foreign policy, [p]otential threats
are actualized as demonstrations of the need for further intervention. Melinda Cooper (2007) too has argued that
US involvement in Iraq is based on a mode of intervention that is curiously indifferent to its own
success or failure, since both eventualities open up a market of future risk opportunities where even
hedges against risk can be traded for profit. And as Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith (2009:42) point out, the everyday
rationale for the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may well be pragmatic military geography, but
viewed more broadly, both can be seen as market war[s] par excellence in which hundreds of
corporations have feasted at the trough of billion-dollar contracts committed to destruction and
failed reconstruction. For Cooper (2007), the war on terror has served to provoke a certain unity of purpose amongst various
denominations of militant Islamism, crystallizing alliances that would otherwise have lain dormant, and the pre-emptive action on
the part of the US military has succeeded in generating relations at a distance and risk opportunities
where none existed before. In other words, as Martin (2007:98) argues: Fighting terror unleashed it elsewhere,
just as a well-placed put or call (sell or buy) of stock would send ripples of price volatility through the
market. Drops in price can be hedged against, turned into derivatives, and sold for gain. The terror war
converts both wins and losses into self-perpetuating gain . But the gain is only for the few of course, and while the
argument is compelling in terms of capturing the mercenary impulses of security contract firms like Blackwater (Scahill 2007), it is perhaps a
little too neat to encapsulate the multiple urges of CENTCOM strategists and planners. However, the
notion of CENTCOM
consciously signing up to a foundational aleatory contract to securitize the neoliberal gap in the Persian
Gulf certainly bears up to scrutiny. One can arguably trace that aleatory contract back to the signing of the RooseveltAziz pact in
the immediate post-World War II period, which can be read as an early designation of the link between economic and security interests in
advancing US hegemony in the Middle East (Painter 1986). In
the 1970s, a series of crises solidified this link: oil supply
disruptions; Saudi unease over Horn of Africa crises; the removal of the Shah in Iran; and the Soviet
Invasion of Afghanistan. The Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) was created in October 1979 with crisis
management as its foundational remit (and CENTCOM, of course, as permanent successor to the RDJTF, effectively took
over the management of that ongoing crisis in 1983). In 1980, the Carter Doctrinethe geopolitical pre-scripting
for CENTCOM's initiation as a permanent regional commandposited the entire Middle East and Central Asia region as a
vital strategic space for the global political economy: The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is
of great strategic importance: it contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has
brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of
the world's oil must flow (US President Jimmy Carter 1980). President Carter
emphasized the potentially grave situation
in the Middle East and made the case for the necessity of resolute action, not only for this year but for many
years to come (US President Jimmy Carter 1980). He was, in effect, sketching the idea of preemptive military action
and a long war. The opening salvo in that long war occurred with little media attention in the summer
of 1987. The IranIraq War was still raging and in what became known as Operation Earnest Will CENTCOM forces were forward deployed
for their first major intervention; the operation would define the command's role thereafter. The Reagan administration, fearing an
escalation of regional economic volatility, ordered CENTCOM warships to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian
Gulf and ensure freedom of navigation by reflagging them with American ensigns. Such a clear-cut
geoeconomic intervention, according to President Reagan, was to demonstrate U.S. commitment to the
flow of oil through the Gulf (quoted in Klare 2004:4). And that commitment was considerable: at the height of what
became known as the Tanker War in 1987, at least 48 US Navy combat vessels were operating on full alert in the Persian Gulf and northern
Arabian Sea.6 Reagan's successor, George Bush, continued Central Command's neoliberal policing role in
emphatically checking Iraqi regional ambition in 1991; in the Gulf War's aftermath, he spoke of the command's triumph in
securing global economic health (Morrissey 2009b). After the war, a more permanent ground presence of

CENTCOM forces in Saudi Arabia and a proactive weapons pre-positioning programme across the Arabian Peninsula signalled a
new hands-on US deterrence policy to fulfil its policing role in the region. And this shift in command engagement
strategy was confirmed by a number of CENTCOM-commissioned reports in the early 1990s (Lesser 1991; Pelletiere and Johnson II 1992).
Stephen Pelletiere and Douglas Johnson's Oil and the New World System: CENTCOM rethinks its Mission, for example, scripted the command's
role thus: [US Central Command] has a crucial mission to performguarding the flow of oil In effect, CENTCOM must become the Gulf's
policemen, a function it will perform with mounting patrols (1992:v, 26). CENTCOM's theater strategy of deterrence built strongly on well-
established military maxims honed during the Cold War. Deterrence continued
to feature at the heart of US foreign
policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it comprised both a discursive production of defense and
prevention rhetoric, and an active operational war-fighting strategy (Klein 1988, 1989). And as Bradley Klein (1994:5)
points out, the strategic violence of deterrence does not merely patrol the frontiers, it helps

constitute them as well . Klein's reminder is important because Western interventionary violence has a long
history of being incorporated into liberal discourse by the legitimization of aggression as exceptional,
as necessary, as allowable. As Klein argues, Western imperial and geopolitical violence draws upon a
variety of discursive resources that are themselves widely construed as rational, plausible and
acceptable, and chief among these is a series of apparent opposites such as domestic and foreign,
inside and outside, order and anarchy, peace and war, us and them, good and bad, First World and Third World
(1994:5). And what Central Command's discursive strategy does in identifying, on the one hand, senses of risk
and volatility for the US and world economy, and justifying, on the other hand, practices of securitization and
violence is to provide a map for the negotiating of these dichotomies in such a way that Western
society always winds up on the good side of the equation (Klein 1994:5). In other words, CENTCOM's risk-
securitization discourse ultimately provides a persuasive linking of risk to responsibility (Giddens 1999);
Western responsibility, that is, to intervene, to police and to use military force if necessary.

The national security apparatus proliferates supposedly unique dynamics to justify

continued violence distrust claims that this time is different
Bacevich 15 (Andrew J., Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole (Again), June 18, (Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor
of International Relations and History at Boston University. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he
received his PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of
Boston University, he taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins.)
http://aep.typepad.com/american_empire_project/2015/06/washington-in-wonderland.html#more)

As it turns out, however, the vehicle of choice for ISIS suicide bombers these days is the up-
armored Humvee. In June 2014, when the Iraqi Army abandoned the countrys second largest city,
Mosul, ISIS acquired 2,300 made-in-the-U.S.A. Humvees. Since then, its captured even more of them. As
U.S. forces were themselves withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, they bequeathed a huge fleet of Humvees
to the new Iraqi army it had built to the tune of $25 billion. Again, the logic of doing so was
impeccable: Iraqi troops needed equipment; shipping used Humvees back to the U.S. was going to cost
more than they were worth. Better to give them to those who could put them to good use. Who could
quarrel with that? Before they handed over the used equipment, U.S. troops had spent years trying to
pacify Iraq, where order had pretty much collapsed after the invasion of 2003. American troops in Iraq
had plenty of tanks and other heavy equipment, but once the country fell into insurgency and civil war,
patrolling Iraqi cities required something akin to a hopped-up cop car. The readily available Humvee
filled the bill. When it turned out that troops driving around in what was essentially an oversized jeep
were vulnerable to sniper fire and roadside bombs, hardening those vehicles to protect the occupants
became a no-brainer -- as even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld eventually recognized. At each
step along the way, the decisions made possessed a certain obvious logic. Its only when you
get to the end -- giving Iraqis American-made weapons to destroy specially hardened American-made
military vehicles previously provided to those same Iraqis -- that the strangely circular and seriously
cuckoo Alice-in-Wonderland nature of the entire enterprise becomes apparent. AT-4s blowing up
those Humvees -- with fingers crossed that the anti-tank weapons dont also fall into the hands of ISIS
militants -- illustrates in microcosm the larger madness of Washingtons policies concealed by the
superficial logic of each immediate situation. The Promotion of Policies That Have Manifestly Failed Let me provide a firsthand illustration. A week ago, I appeared on a
network television news program to discuss American policy in Iraq and in particular the challenges posed by ISIS. The other guests were former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta, former Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy and current CEO of a Washington think tank Michelle Flournoy, and retired four-star general Anthony Zinni who had once headed up United States Central Command. Washington is a city in which whatever
happens within the current news cycle trumps all other considerations, whether in the immediate or distant past. So the moderator launched the discussion by asking the panelists to comment on President Obamas decision,
announced earlier that very day, to plus-up the 3,000-strong train-and-equip mission to Iraq with an additional 450 American soldiers, the latest ratcheting up of ongoing U.S. efforts to deal with ISIS. Panetta spoke first and
professed wholehearted approval of the initiative. Well, theres no question that I think the presidents taken the right step in adding these trainers and advisers. More such steps -- funneling arms to Iraqi Kurds and Sunnis and
deploying U.S. Special Operations Forces to hunt down terrorists -- were going to be necessary in order to be able to achieve the mission that we have embarked on. That mission was of critical importance. Unless defeated, ISIS
would convert Iraq into a base [for] attacking our country and attacking our homeland. Flournoy expressed a similar opinion. She called the decision to send additional trainers a good move and a smart move, although she, too,
hoped that it was only the first step in a broader series of escalatory actions. If anything, her view of ISIS was more dire than that of her former Pentagon boss. She called it the new jihad -- violent jihadist vanguard in the Middle
East and globally. Unless stopped, ISIS was likely to become a global network with transnational objectives, while its thousands of foreign fighters from the West and Gulf states were eventually going to return and be
looking to carry out jihad in their home countries. General Zinni begged to differ -- not on the nature of the danger confronting Washington, but on what to do about it. He described the present policy as almost dj vu, a
throwback to Vietnam before we committed the ground forces. We dribble in more and more advisers and support. Were not fully committed to this fight, the general complained. We use terms like destroy. I can tell you,
you could put ground forces on the ground now and we can destroy ISIS. Zinni proposed doing just that. No more shilly-shallying. The template for action was readily at hand. The last victory, clear victory that we had was in the
first Gulf War, he said. And what were the keys to success then? We used overwhelming force. We ended it quickly. We went to the U.N. and got a resolution. We built a coalition. And that ought to be a model we ought to look
at. In short, go big, go hard, go home. Panetta disagreed. He had a different template in mind. The Iraq War of 2003-2011 had clearly shown that we know how to do this, and we know how to win at doing this. The real key was
to allow Americas generals a free hand to do what needed to be done. [A]ll we really do need to do is to be able to give our military commanders the flexibility to design not only the strategy to degrade ISIS, but the larger
strategy we need in order to defeat ISIS. Unleashing the likes of Delta Force or SEAL Team 6 with some missile-firing drones thrown in for good measure was likely to suffice. For her part, Flournoy thought the real problem was
making sure that there is Iraqi capacity to hold the territory, secure it long-term, so that ISIS doesnt come back again. And that involves the larger political compromises -- the ones the Iraqis themselves needed to make. At the
end of the day, the solution was an Iraqi army willing and able to fight and an Iraqi government willing and able to govern effectively. On that score, there was much work to be done. Panetta then pointed out that none of this was

That much was patently obvious.

in the cards unless the United States stepped up to meet the challenge. [I]f the United States doesnt provide leadership in these crises, nobody else will.

Other countries and the Iraqis themselves might pitch in, but we have to provide that leadership. We
cant just stand on the sidelines wringing our hands. I mean... ask the people of Paris what happened
there with ISIS. Ask the people in Brussels what happened there with ISIS. What happened in Toronto?
Whats happened in this country as a result of the threat from ISIS? Ultimately, everything turned on
the willingness of America to bring order and stability out of chaos and confusion. Only the
United States possessed the necessary combination of wisdom, competence, and strength. Here
was a proposition to which Flournoy and Zinni readily assented. With Alice in Washington To participate
in an exchange with these pillars of the Washington establishment was immensely instructive. Only
nominally did their comments qualify as a debate. Despite superficial differences, the discussion
was actually an exercise in affirming the theology of American national security -- those essential
matters of faith that define continuities of policy in Washington, whatever administration is in power. In
that regard, apparent disagreement on specifics masked a deeper consensus consisting of three
elements: * That ISIS represents something akin to an existential threat to the United States, the latest
in a long line going back to the totalitarian ideologies of the last century; fascism and communism may
be gone, but danger is ever present. * That if the United States doesnt claim ownership of the problem
of Iraq, the prospects of solving it are nil; action or inaction by Washington alone, that is, determines
the fate of the planet. * That the exercise of leadership implies, and indeed requires, employing armed
might; without a willingness to loose military power, global leadership is inconceivable. In a fundamental
respect, the purpose of the national security establishment, including the establishment media, is
to shield that tripartite consensus from critical examination. This requires narrowing the
aperture of analysis so as to exclude anything apart from the here-and-now. The discussion in
which I participated provided a vehicle for doing just that. It was an exercise aimed at fostering
collective amnesia. So what the former secretary of defense, think tank CEO, and retired general chose
not to say in fretting about ISIS is as revealing as what they did say. Here are some of the things they
chose to overlook: * ISIS would not exist were it not for the folly of the United States in invading -- and
breaking -- Iraq in the first place; we created the vacuum that ISIS is now attempting to fill. * U.S.
military efforts to pacify occupied Iraq from 2003 to 2011 succeeded only in creating a decent interval
for the United States to withdraw without having to admit to outright defeat; in no sense did our Iraq
War end in anything remotely approximating victory, despite the already forgotten loss of thousands of
American lives and the expenditure of trillions of dollars. * For more than a decade and at very
considerable expense, the United States has been attempting to create an Iraqi government that
governs and an Iraqi army that fights; the results of those efforts speak for themselves: they have failed
abysmally. Now, these are facts. Acknowledging them might suggest a further conclusion: that anyone
proposing ways for Washington to put things right in Iraq ought to display a certain sense of
humility. The implications of those facts -- behind which lies a policy failure of epic proportions -- might
even provide the basis for an interesting discussion on national television. But that would assume a
willingness to engage in serious self-reflection. This, the culture of Washington does not encourage,
especially on matters related to basic national security policy. My own contribution to the televised
debate was modest and ineffectual. Toward the end, the moderator offered me a chance to redeem
myself. What, she asked, did I think about Panettas tribute to the indispensability of American
leadership? A fat pitch that I should have hit it out of the park. Instead, I fouled it off. What I should
have said was this: leadership ought to mean something other than simply repeating and
compounding past mistakes. It should require more than clinging to policies that have
manifestly failed. To remain willfully blind to those failures is not leadership, its madness.

Our calculations of violence need to be tailored to long term structural thinking

Nixon 11 (Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3)

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically,
imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually
and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence
that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is
immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe,
to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather
incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal
scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges
posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift,
biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host
of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational
obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and
staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are
underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading
Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as
a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion
toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow
violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about
violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to
account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and
respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental
calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but
slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential,
elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially,

operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in

situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually
degraded.

No Saudi prolifeven if it happened, it would take decades

Dina ESFANDIARY, MacArthur Fellow at the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King's College
London AND Ariane TABATABAI, visiting assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at the
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and an associate in the Belfer Center's International
Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University, 15 [Why nuclear dominoes
won't fall in the Middle East, April 22, 2015, http://thebulletin.org/why-nuclear-dominoes-wont-fall-
middle-east8236]

Saudi Arabia: The human and technical impediments to a nuclear arsenal. Saudi
Arabia is viewed as the Middle East's most
likely nuclear proliferator. Riyadh has been the loudest voice in the region, claiming it'll "go nuclear" should
Iran do so. It also wants an enrichment capability to mirror Irans. An assessment of the nascent Saudi nuclear
power program shows that for all of Riyadh's foot-stomping, it doesn't have the technical capability to build

nuclear weapons. Even if this technical deficit could be overcome, its allies could influence its
intentions . Saudi Arabia has ambitious plans for its nuclear industry. It wants to build 16 nuclear reactors in the next
few decades, but right now Saudi Arabia does not have any nuclear reactors, and its first won't go on
line until 2022, at earliest. To date, the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA-CARE) has scouted out
foreign suppliers and developed regulatory frameworksbut gone no further down the nuclear path.
Riyadh lacks the human capacity to develop and operate its own nuclear infrastructure in the foreseeable
future. But Saudi Arabia is aware of its technical shortcomings, and its looking for other options After contributing financially to
Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and defense sector, the Saudis may want Islamabad to return the favor,
some observers believe. The Saudi leadership plays along with suggestions it may acquire nuclear technology from Pakistan. In March
2015, King Salman bin Abdulaziz urgently summoned Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Riyadh to discuss strategic cooperation efforts,
while calling for Pakistani involvement in Saudi efforts in Yemen. This was intended to remind nuclear weapons state negotiators that Riyadh is
keeping its nuclear options open. But it is unlikely the Saudis will get a nuclear weapon from Pakistan. Pakistan
which covertly developed its nuclear arsenal outside the nuclear nonproliferation regimeaims to normalize its nuclear status,
rather than becoming further alienated from the international community. Islamabad was already singled
out for the activities of the world's biggest and most successful illicit nuclear trafficking network, led by a key
figure in its nuclear weapons program, A.Q. Khan. Whats more, Islamabad is extremely proud of its nuclear
achievements. In the words of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, We will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own [bomb].
Pakistanis didnt eat grass, but they endured a great deal of hardship to get the bomb. The program was
extremely costly for the country. So, its no surprise that many Pakistani officials and former officials take
issue with assertions that their country might give nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia. Even if Pakistan
agreed to provide the Kingdom with the bomb, the Saudis are very unlikely to go through with such an
acquisition . Saudi Arabia is dependent on the United States for security guarantees. As long as Washington remains Riyadhs main security
guarantor, it has the power to influence Saudi decision making on other issues, including, specifically, nuclear weapon acquisition. And the
Kingdom would find it very difficult to attract another country willing to supply the security and trade guarantees that the United States now
provides. It is hard to imagine any of the world's major powers agreeing to be viewed as a supporter of nuclear proliferation. It
is
reasonably likely that Saudi Arabia will continue its efforts to develop a civilian nuclear program. Saudi
Arabia recently signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with South Korea to explore the feasibility of
building two nuclear reactors in the Kingdom. Moving forward with South Korea as the main supplier raises a key
issue: Washington says that Seouls reactors are US designs, and that, if that technology is to be sold, the
countries acquiring it must enter into nuclear cooperation contracts (known as 123 agreements, because they are
based on Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act) with the United States. Although South Korea disputes the need for a 123 agreement, if
Saudi Arabia does agree to enter into such a pact, it could well mean a ban on enrichment and reprocessing
in the Kingdom, closing domestic paths to the bomb .

Presence enables Israeli agression

Freeman 15 (3/10, Charles, 30 year veteran of the United States Foreign Service, the State and
Defense Departments, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs,
former president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation
and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council, Responding to Failure: Reorganizing US Policies
in the Middle East, http://www.mepc.org/articles-commentary/speeches/responding-failure-
reorganizing-us-policies-middle-east)
enablement and the creation of moral hazard. Both are fall-
Two related problems in our overall approach need correction. They are

out from relationships of codependency. Enablement occurs when one party to a relationship indulges or supports and thereby
enables another partys dysfunctional behavior. A familiar example from ordinary life is giving money to a drunk or a drug addict or
ignoring, explaining away, or defending their subsequent self-destructive behavior. Moral hazard is the condition that obtains when one party is emboldened to

take risks it would not otherwise take because it knows another party will shoulder the consequences and bear the costs of failure.The U.S.-Israel
relationship has evolved to exemplify codependency. It now embodies both enablement and moral hazard.
U.S. support for Israel is unconditional. Israel has therefore had no need to cultivate relations with others
in the Middle East, to declare its borders, or to choose peace over continued expansion into formerly Arab lands. Confidence in U.S.
backing enables Israel to do whatever it likes to the Palestinians and its neighbors without having to worry about the consequences. Israel is now a rich country,
but the United States continues to subsidize it with cash transfers and other fiscal privileges. The Jewish state is the most powerful country in the Middle East. It

can launch attacks on its neighbors, confident that it will be resupplied by the U nited S tates. Its use of U.S. weapons
in ways that violate both U.S. and international law goes unrebuked. 41 American vetoes in the United Nations Security Council have exempted Israel from censure
and international law. We enable it to defy the expressed will of the international community, including, ironically, our own. We Americans are facilitating Israel's

The biggest
indulgence in denial and avoidance of the choices it must make if it is not to jeopardize its long-term existence as a state in the Middle East.

contribution we could now make to Israel's longevity would be to ration our support for it , so as to
cause it to rethink and reform its often self-destructive behavior . Such peace as Israel now enjoys with
Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians is the direct result of tough love of this kind by earlier American
administrations. We Americans cannot save Israel from itself, but we can avoid killing it with uncritical kindness. We should support Israel when it makes sense to
do so and it needs our support on specific issues, but not otherwise. Israel is placing itself and American interests in jeopardy. We need to discuss how to reverse
this dynamic.

Making contingent demands of the state is necessary and good --- reject totalizing
accounts that label all political engagement as violent
Laura Zanotti 13, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of
Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. Governmentality, Ontology,
Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World, originally published online 30
December, Sage
Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist ontological assumptions and epistemological

framework they criticize, positions that embrace an intra-agential (or relational) ontology, maintain that nothing is but everything is made within
specific practices. Governmentality as a research program that explores the present as multiply constituted,
polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . . and not just the expression of a singular logic or the resultant of a linear process61 has an

important role to play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the techniques through
which power is practically enacted, the ambiguity embedded in its practices, and the various tactics for unsettling it
that become possible in the context of multifarious political encounters. Because political power scripts do not
stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that construct
them , the application of a relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis, analyses of politics and
conceptualizations of political agency. In this framework, the space for politics is rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the making and remaking of
meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations. What Does This All Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more
specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that, while not necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power
and subjects in non-substantialist ways and embraced situatedness and ambiguity as the very constitutive space for politics for conceiving political agency beyond
liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the
definition of what ones identity is, ambiguityand uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites of
struggles where the differences between inside and outside are uncertain.62 Here political action is not predicated on asserting
the life and freedom or some sovereign identity, some community of truth that is victimized and
repressed by power.63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning practices of power that attempt
to impose and fix ways of knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to
autonomous being.64 For Ashley and Walker, in other words, political action is about questioning assumptions about
the unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of
power. In taking issue with descriptive governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is itself a governmental
strategy, part of governments very attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what exceeds efforts to govern
through risk.66 Therefore, one should not be seduced by contemporary governmental strategies own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the
foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory of power, rooted in
the nontransparency of language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in the presence of
governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal institutionalism that looks at norms as entities and explanatory variables for institutional behavior,
regulations are only a shell and norms are always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are interpreted. Postcolonial
literature has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of powers self representation as a powerful and mighty script.
Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial powers self-representation as unity is a colonial strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the
mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridityits peculiar replicationterrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its
mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is
the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its
enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western civil discourses. 68 Bhabha sees
subjection and resistance as intimately related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through transformation of meaning. Thus, Colonial hybridity is not a
problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial
representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and
estrange the basis of its authorityits rules of recognition.69 Political agency is not portrayed as the free subjects total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage
of power. While (the colonizers) power attempts to reproduce its script by creating the mimic men, that is, the docile colonial subjects who are almost the
same, but not quite,70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction between same and not quite that can be appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is
easily camouflaged as mockery, with the colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the masters lessons. Instead of producing a
controlled imitation or a managed response from the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71

Agency is exerted through moves that are imbricated with discourses of power but also recognize and
question them . In this way, universal claims are unsettled and powers purported unity menaced. Bhabha
sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that overcoming domination, far from getting rid of it, often
occasions its mere reversal.72 Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that the agent must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon,
despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even less when the very
ideas of what accounts for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucaults understanding of power and on feminist elaborations of
Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint and the acceptance of ambiguity as central for conceptualizing human agency and for
exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions positions that see agency as a reflection of externally imposed circumstances as well as traditions
that bestow the human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.75 Assumptions of fundamental autonomy (or freedom) would freeze a specific
image of human agency to the detriment of all others.76 As Bleiker puts it: A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition,

a one-sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There
is no essence to human agency, no
core that can be brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long
sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of
human agency to the detriment of all others .77 For Bleiker, universals are indeed tainted with an imperial
flavor. This includes the imperialism of ideas of identity based on liberty and freedom (rather than imbrication,
situatedness, and relationality) as the ontological horizon for understanding human nature and assessing political

agency. Non-substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do not establish linear links
between intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of agency needs an identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In
this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest conceptualization of agency, one that relies upon Michel de Certeaus operational schemes, Judith Butlers contingent
foundations, or Gilles Deleuzes rhizomes.78 In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing
political agency based upon actors intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele, as
actors practice
their agency within the space of a public sphere, intentionalityat bestbecomes dynamic as new
spaces in that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in such a
dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of human interaction.80 In shifting attention from intention to
the context that made some actions possible, Steele sees agency as a redescription of existing
conditions, rather than the total rejection of or opposition to a totalizing script. As a
consequence, Steele advocates pragmatist humility for politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-
substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and redescriptions, a
series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the construction of new openings, possibilities and different
distributive processes, the outcomes of which are always to an extent unpredictable. Political
agency here is not imagined as a quest
for individual authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the
creation of a better totality where subjects can float freed of oppression, or a multitude made into
a unified subject will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social
justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-
substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated
in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is pragmatist humility, that is the patience of playing with
the cards that are dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering 82 with what
exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmentality
as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of
coconstitution and the importance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the
possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straightjacket. They
represent international liberal biopolitical and
governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress
subjects, that are in turn imagined as free by nature. Transformations of power modalities through
multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of politics is
reduced to homogenizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are reduced to total
heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments. By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the
possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects relational character and the contingent processes of their
(trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options
for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to
rejection, revolution, or dispossession to regain a pristine freedom from all constraints or an
immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted
within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them.
This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of
their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying
universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts
in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed,
hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics
of events . It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching
demonizations of power, romanticizations of the rebel or the the local. More broadly, theoretical formulations
that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the
terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative

formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural
and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to what happens instead of fixations on
what ought to be.83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a
pristine freedom to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by
playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the
consequences of political choices . To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault my point is not that everything is bad, but that
everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy
but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.84

Defer towards disjunctive impacts conjunctive fallacy

Yudkowsky 8 [2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a Research Fellow at theMachine Intelligence Research
Institute Cognitive Biases Potentially Aecting Judgment of Global Risks., In Global Catastrophic Risks,
edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. irkovi, 91119]

The conjunction fallacy similarly applies to futurological forecasts . Two independent sets of professional
analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate, respectively, the probability of A
complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983 or A
Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the
Soviet Union, sometime in 1983. The second set of analysts responded with significantly higher probabilities
(Tversky and Kahneman 1983). In Johnson et al. (1993), MBA students at Wharton were scheduled to travel to Bangkok as part of their degree
program. Several groups of students were asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance. One group of subjects was asked
how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the flight from Thailand to the US. A second group of subjects was asked
how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the round-trip flight. A third group was asked how much they were willing
to pay for terrorism insurance that covered the complete trip to Thailand. These three groups responded with average willingness to pay of
$17.19, $13.90, and $7.44 respectively. According to probability theory, adding additional detail onto a story must
render the story less probable. It is less probable that Linda is a feminist bank teller than that she is a
bank teller, since all feminist bank tellers are necessarily bank tellers. Yet human psychology seems to
follow the rule that adding an additional detail can make the story more plausible. People might pay
more for international diplomacy intended to prevent nanotechnological warfare by China, than for an
engineering project to defend against nanotechnological attack from any source. The second threat scenario is
less vivid and alarming, but the defense is more useful because it is more vague. More valuable still would be strategies which
make humanity harder to extinguish without being specific to nanotechnologic threatssuch as colonizing
space, or see Yudkowsky (2008) on AI. Security expert Bruce Schneier observed (both before and after the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans) that
the U.S. government was guarding specific domestic targets against movie-plot scenarios of terrorism,
at the cost of taking away resources from emergency-response capabilities that could respond to any
disaster (Schneier 2005). Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety : X is not an
existential risk and you dont need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E; where the failure of any one of propositions A,
B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species. We dont need to worry about nanotechnologic
war, because a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such
time as an active shield is developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is
capable of producing, and this condition will persist indefinitely.
Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our probability
estimates of security, as well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or
implausibly detailed risk scenarios. More generally, people tend to overestimate conjunctive probabilities
and underestimate disjunctive probabilities (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). That is, people tend to overestimate
the probability that, e.g., seven events of 90% probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to
underestimate the probability that at least one of seven events of 10% probability will occur. Someone
judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup, must evaluate the probability that many individual
events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers will want the product) while also
considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses a loan, the biggest project fails,
the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44% of entrepreneurial ventures2 survive after 4 years (Knaup 2005). Dawes (1988, 133)
observes: In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions (either this or that or the other could have occurred, all of which would
lead to the same conclusion) in favor of conjunctions.
1NC
 1NC K
The affirmatives call for action is backwards contemporary governance force us to
constantly act, seizing our impotentiality the most radical position is a reversion of
this question can this be an instance of our not doing anything? The impact is an
infinite ressentiment and Eichmann
Snoek 12 (Anke, PhD in Philosophy Department @ Macquarie U., Agambens Joyful Kafka)
*We do not endorse gender/ableist language in this evidence
Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the laws being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafkas work of this
situation, Agambens praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form of
resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criticisms on Agambens work, that in it, at least
when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri,
also one of Agambens close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy. 2
Agambens work is often described as a radical passivity. 3 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agambens passivity is not a
regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing. 4 This passivity also shows evidence of a
radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a movement that is often attributed to Foucault and whose traces
can be found in Kafka avant la lettre. As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of

metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him a work of his own. If
the human being has no identity of his own and no activity of his own, then this also has consequences for
our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as
goal-oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line
with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man. Kafkas opera singing executioners or questioners Deleuze
once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But, Agamben states, There is, nevertheless, another

and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do their
potentiality but rather their impotentiality, that is, what they cannot do, or better, can not do (N, 43). Given that

flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every
demand by society, is cut off from his impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a
politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, No
problem, I can do it, comes precisely at the moment when he should instead realize that he has been
consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control (N, 44). This
flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people
are no longer in touch with their inability. Agamben sees an example of this in Kafkas The Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death,
two men enter through Joseph K. s door. They are his questioners/ executioners, but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are [o]ld
second-rate actors or opera singers? 5 Agamben argues that, in
Kafkas world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to
impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead of making use of our possibility of not being, we fail it, we flee from our
lack of power, our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise some power of being (CC, 32). But this
power we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their
weakness. In Kafkas world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our
lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from
impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated
from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist. (N, 45) And it is evident, according to
Agamben, from the example of Eichmann how right Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power

as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A
clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the Tiqqun collective. This French
collective has written several political manifestoes and in 2008 their compound was raided by the anti-terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging
to an ultra-left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations.
The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and accuses
French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the Tiqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucaults idea of the
non-subject. One of the latters greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that
was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking was the idea of non-authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power
relation, a process that Foucault termed subjectivization techniques. In
Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via
disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the
expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of
actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting

oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture
Tiqqun instead is making , according to Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of
saviour or revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our
society (instead of focusing on the subject). In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse,
new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear
picture of Agambens position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely with

respect to the direction in which they should go. Agambens constant reply was that anyone who poses
this question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be
done? If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do
with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing
activists present at Agambens lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Tiqqun collective, the activists
present at Agambens lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the

power of the Tiqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actions
but sought unexpected possibilities in being-thus. In that same sense, Agambens analysis of Kafkas
work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of
examples in which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use.
Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a
goal; rather, they are means without end. As Kishik pointed out, Agambens work is an attempt to make means meet (not with their ends, but
with each other). 7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafkas work, the shame of
Joseph K. and the as not in Kafkas On Parables show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.

The aff appeal to legal solution reinvests us in the mythos that we can access justice
through the law masking the force of the law as that which denies its own
impotentiality. Rather than attempt to mobilize debate to use the law, we should
perform a continuous study of the law with no goal or end in sight Only this activates
a true politics that breaks with the biopolitical control of the status quo.
Snoek 12
(Anke, PhD in Philosophy Department @ Macquarie U., Agambens Joyful Kafka)

According to Agamben, study is an important strategy for living outside the law and making it inoperative . In
what sense can study be a strategy? Study has a long tradition in Judaism as a form of resistance. In 586 BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the temple of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the rest were taken captive and brought to
Babylonia. During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer had a temple and were forbidden to practise their faith, the Jewish people focused
on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated Babylonia and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could
return to their homelands and rebuild their holy sanctuaries, 40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple. But the religion of the Jews was
already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The temple was not rebuilt and study has since
then become the true temple of the Jews. The Jewish religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic
significance (IP, 63). Talmud means study; the original meaning of Torah is not law but instruction Mishnan, the set of rabbinic laws, is
derived from a root that has repetition as its basic meaning. The
study Agamben is aiming at does not have a
predetermined goal: getting a degree and a good position in society, or getting some valuable insight
that can be used to overthrow a political structure. Just as the strategy to close the door of the law
was especially hard because the law does not prescribe anything and the task of the Messiah is
paradoxical because there is no original structure of the law to restore, so study also lacks a
transcendent meaning it can aim at, a goal it can set. As far as etymology is concerned, the word studium is closely related
to a root that indicates a coffision, a shock or influence. Study and surprise are closely related in that sense. Whoever studies finds oneself
shocked, amazed and is, in a certain sense, stupid (cf. studium, stupefying). On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the other,
undertaken. Here
Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotles description of potentiality, which is
passive on the one hand an undergoing and active on the other an unstoppable drive to
undertake something, to do something, to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and
undertaking converge; it is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm of studying is an alternation between
amazement and clarity, discovery and loss, doing and undergoing. This combination of undergoing
and undertaking yields a kind of passive activity, a radical passivity. Something happens without
seeming to happen. Agamben argues that study is pre-eminently unending. Study does not have an
appropriate end nor does it desire it. This gives the scholar a woeful air. At first glance, the students in Kafkas
works seem to be of little use or significance. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play: Among Kafkas creations,
there is a clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest places in Kafkas works are the
spokesmen for and leaders of this clan3 Agamben is in complete agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary embodiment of study
in our culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in certain novels of Kafka or
Walser. (IP, 65) It is precisely the apparent uselessness of the students and the hopelessness of study that plays such an important role in the
strategy they develop with respect to power. Kafkas useless students without Schrift So the students operating in Kafkas stories have an
important characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees a strange young man: He watched silently as the man read in
his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in another book that he always picked up at lightning speed, often making
entries in a notebook, his face always bent surprisingly low over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. ... Youre
studying? asked Karl. Yes, yes, said the man, using the few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his books.3 (...) And when wifi you be
finished with your studies? asked Karl. Its slow going, said the student. ... [Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself
have been studying for years, out of pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. 32 Karl
explains his problems with Delamarche to the student. The student cannot really help him either; he does not offer
Karl any insight in what he must do and even advises him to remain with Delamarche absolutely33
Karl wonders where studying had got him [or her] he [or she] had forgotten everything again.34
The most extreme example of a student, in Agambens view, is Melvills Bartleby, the scriber who stopped writing.
According to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped writing or that
they have lost the Schrift in the sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not lost the
Schrift or the Torah, but they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamins genius is apparent, according to
Agamben, precisely in the fact that the students have lost the Schrift. Their commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law, are
notes in the margin of a blank page.35 Study does not lead to an a priori determined goal; Kafka does not
attach any promises to study that are traditionally attached to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study
is turned around here. Or better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede
but follows its action, which it has left behind forever, of a Talmud that has not only announced the reconstruction of the
temple but has already forgotten it. At this point, study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to
its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul (IP, 65).36 Kafkas assistants are
members of a congregation who have lost their house of prayer. His students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing
stops them on their [u]ntrammeled, happy journey:37 The study of the horse Bucephalus But the most enigmatic example of the student in
Kafkas work may be Alexander the Greats horse Bucephalus, who happens to become a lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a
new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his outward appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia.
... I recently saw a quite simple court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveffing at the lawyer as the latter, lifting his
thighs high, mounted step by step with a stride that made the marble clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. ...
Nowadays, as no one can deny, there is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder ... and many feel that Macedonia is
too narrow ... but no one, no one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days Indias gates were beyond reach, but their direction was
indicated by the royal sword. ... Today ... no one shows the way; many carry swords but only wave them in the air and the gaze that tries to
follow them grows confused. Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus has done, to immerse oneself in law books. Free, his flanks
unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexanders baffle, he reads and turns the pages of our old
books.38 In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft concludes that law is set over against myth in the name of
justice: instead of taking part in the mythical (pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law.39 Benjamin sees
this as a serious misunderstanding of Kafkas story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and human
beings, like the horse Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But, according to Benjamin,
what is new about this new lawyer what is new for the legal profession, is that he does not practice
law but only studies it, reading in tranquil lamplight. Bucephalus is free: his flanks are no longer squeezed by Alexander
the Greats thighs and he is no longer carrying the latter on his back. The door to justice is not to employ law but to make

it inoperative not by practicing law (which would be a repetition of the mythical forces, given that
law is in force without significance), but by doing nothing more than studying it. The law which is
studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice. Bucephalus strategy against law is thus study.
Agamben remarks that it is decisive that the law that is not practiced but only studied does not itself
become justice but only the door to it. The study of the law has no higher purpose that is why the
law has become inoperative.4 That which opens the passage to justice is not the abolishment of the
law but its deactivation and inactivity that is, another use of the law (SE, 63). This is a law that is
liberated from all discipline and all relation to sovereignty. Bucephalus depicts a figure of the law that is
possible after its link with violence and power has been deposed, a law that is no longer in force and
applied (SE, 63-64), just as the study of doorkeepers by the man from the country makes it possible to
remain living outside the law. Agamben then outlines the following picture of the future: One day
humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to
their canonical use, but to free them from it for good. (SE, 64)
 Case
Training students to speak the language of power teaches mediocrity and
complacency instead educators should strive to disrupt normal patterns of thought
and frustrate standards of reasonableness. Endorsing models of mediocrity to the next
generation of legal bureaucrats guarantees extremely violent decision-making
Schlag 9 [Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University of
Colorado Law School, ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of
Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art), March, 2009, Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo.
L.J. 803]

In terms of social organization then, there may be something to be said for creating a professional corps (lawyers) whose modes of
communication are widely shared and relatively standardized. Notice that if this is the objective, then the only place where that sort of
standardized communication can be widely shared is somewhere close to the middle of the bell curve. Both intellectual sloth and intellectual
excellence are, by definition, aberrant and thus detract from our efforts at standardization.

Thus, trainingfor mediocrity does serve a social function (within limits, of course). Mediocrity is not the only aim
here. One would like this mediocrity to be the best it can be. We would like legal professionals to share a
language and a mode of thought and, at the same time, for that language and mode of thought to be as perspicuous and
intelligent as possible. Given the omnipresence of the bell curve, these desiderata are obviously in tension. The economists would likely
talk about achieving "the optimal degree" of intelligence and mediocrity at the margin, but my sense is this will only get us so far.

For law professors, the tension is bound to be somewhat frustrating. What many law professors would like--because many of them are
intellectually inclined--is to bring intelligence to bear within legal discourse. This is bound to be a somewhat frustrating venture. Legal
discourse is not designed to produce intelligence and, frankly, the materials and the discourse can only
bear so much.

Good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness--any of these virtues is often enough to snuff out real
thinking . Indeed, whatever appeal good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness may have for a judge or a lawyer (and I am prepared
to say the appeal is considerable), such virtues are not particularly helpful to intellectual achievement . On the
contrary, intellectual achievement requires the abandonment of received understandings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that
intellectual vitality (at least in the context of a discipline like law) [*829] requires some degree of defamiliarization,
some reach for the exotic. The thing is, those sorts of efforts are not going to get very far if they constantly
have to answer to good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness, and the like.

And at this point, I would like to flip the argument made earlier in the paper. Here, I would like us to think
of appeals to good
judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness in legal thought as appeals to mediocrity. Making people
see things involves things far different from good judgment, groundedness, or reasonableness. It
involves a kind of artistry--a reorientation of the gaze, a disruption of complacency, a sabotage of
habitual forms of thought, a derailing of cognitive defaults. This is part of what a really good
education is about. Constant obeisance to good judgment or groundedness or reasonableness, by
contrast, will systematically frustrate such efforts. n57

This is all rather vexing. Legal

academics--with aspirations to intellectual excellence--are thus destined to play out the myth
of Sisyphus. The main difference, of course, is that Sisyphus had a real rock to push up a real hill. The law
professors' rock and hill, by contrast are symbolic--imaginative constructions of their own making. Arguably,
pushing a symbolic rock up a symbolic hill is substantially easier than doing it for real. At the very least, it
is easier to fake it and to claim success. At the same time, though, the symbolic nature of the exercise perhaps makes it more
transparently pointless. As between these two points, there is a certain dissonance. On the one hand, we are dealing with
pushing rocks up hills--and that is surely hard work. On the other hand, the rocks and hills are of our
own imagination--so it should be easy. This is very confusing. n58 My best guess (and I offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis)
is that the dissonance here might yield a certain degree of neurosis. n59

Still the question pops up again: "So what?" So what--so you have maybe seven thousand-something law
professors in the nation and you know, maybe ninety-six percent are engaged in a kind of vaguely neurotic scholarship.
So what? Maybe it's borderline tragic. Maybe, these people could have done so much better. None of this, by the way, is clearly established.
But let's just assume, it's true.

Who cares? Seven thousand people--that's not a lot of people. Plus, it's hard to feel for them. I know that nearly all of
them would be us (but still). It's an extraordinarily privileged life. So why care about this?

Here's why. The thing about legal scholarship is that it plays--through the mediation of the professorial mind--an important role
in shaping the ways, the in which law students think with and about law . n60 If they are
[*830] forms,

taught to think in essentially mediocre ways, they will reproduce those ways of thinking as they
practice law and politics. If they are incurious, if they are lacking in political and legal imagination, if they
are simply repeating the standard moves (even if with impressive virtuosity) they will, as a group, be wielding
power in essentially mediocre ways. And the thing is: when mediocrity is endowed with power, it yields
violence. And when mediocrity is endowed with great power, it yields massive violence . n61

All of which is to say that in making the negotiation between the imprinting of standard forms of legal thought
and the imparting of an imaginative intelligence, we err too much on the side of the former. (Purely my
subjective call here--but so is everybody else's.) Another way to put it is that while there is something to be said for the
standardization point made earlier, generally, standardization is overdone. n62

Throw legal thought into a lake any other legal orientation folds in upon itself
Schlag 9 [Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University of
Colorado Law School, Law and Philosophy in the Hyperreal, ch. 30, On Philosophy in American Law, ed.
Francis J. Mootz, Cambridge University Press, Mar 23, 2009, google books, p. 263-4]

It is in this way that legal thought folds in on itself. Not so long ago, one might reasonably have believed
that rightness disputes were designed and conducted to ascertain the value of the thought or the
thinker. Now, however, we seem to be on the other side of an inversion. Now, both the thought and the
thinker serve as occasions and vehicles for the prosecution and adjudication of rightness disputes.
Combined with a furious focus on productivity and the ferocious pursuit of self-promotion, the rightness
orientation leads legal thought to fold in on itself. This fold is perhaps most easily exemplified in the
rankings mania. Once it was thought that the rankings were reflective, or at least supposed to be
reflective, of excellence (or the lack thereof). The rankings could be praised or criticized for their success
or failure in evaluating excellence. The rankings served as a proxy for excellence. But now rankings
mania has folded in on itself. What matters now is not the logic of the proxy, but the logic of self-
reference. The whole point of rankings is to rank - just as the whole point of self-promotion is to self-
promote and the whole point of publishing is to publish. There is no significant external end. Not long
ago, this was the kind of outre claim one might expect of a French philosopher (Baudrillard
1990).Today, its just a banal observation. What then can we say of legal thought? It is what it is. If this
seems unduly grim, realize that this ubiquitous phrase, "it is what it is" has a wonderfully ambivalent
and ironic cast. On the one hand, it implies resignation, as in "it is what it is and there's not much to be
done about it." But the phrase also implies a certain mature reflection as in, "it is what it is and so
better to focus your energies elsewhere." CODA Be intellectually serious. Drop the received scholarly
agendas. Forget reflective equilibrium. Ditch the ideal observer. Throw your copy of "The Concept of
Law" into a lake and give "Law's Empire" to a homeless person. Also stop worrying about helping the
courts with their various legitimation needs. They don't need you. Really. They'll be just fine. Instead,
try to find the best description you can of whatever might be called the postmodern condition. Maybe
Postman or Zengotita or Baudrillard or Lyotard, or whoever. It doesn't really matter. Rather, what
matters is that you find some salient description of our contemporary intellectual-cultural condition: A
description that seems credible and convincing. \Let the condition become your mind and try to think
about law from within that condition. Think sociologically. Think normatively if you want - but do it
from within that condition. Try to leave the academic formalizations behind. Avoid rightness disputes.
If necessary, leave the room. Abjure and disdain scholasticism in all its forms. Avoid tinkering. If you
tinker anyway, don't call it philosophy. If you do call your tinkering philosophy, try not to publish it. Try
to think from within the as yet undertheorized here and Give it a form. Give law a form. Realize that
there is no glory, no virtue, and no challenge in theorizing from the exceedingly well-rehearsed formal
frames of jurisprudence and legal philosophy. It's been done. And we do not have a lot to show for it.
Instead try to rethink law from a position that is at least plausibly our own. Maybe it'll work for you and
maybe it won't. If it does work for you, it's as close as you (and we) are likely to come to doing serious
philosophy. Failing that, you can retrieve the soggy book you threw into the lake. But that should be
your last, not your first option. Oh hell, it shouldn't be an option at all: Leave the book alone. Just
[go]walk away.

You should view the affs vision of reformist liberal peacebuildling with suspcision
their ethical claims are designed to preserve the epistemic and economic superiority
of the West.
Oliver RICHMOND IR @ Manchester 15 Security cosmopolitanism or securitopia: an ontological trap and a half-
hearted response to structural war? Critical Studies on Security Vol. 3, No. 2, pgs. 182-184

Anthony Burke has written an important piece: yet it is one of which security communities around the
world probably will not take much note. Perhaps, in future historical or theoretical retrospectives of
early-twenty-first-century security praxis his voice will be noted as a marginal example of both common
sense and important insight, but one that was ignored as hegemonic and elite power performed its
tragic, historical, self-interested, and resilient insensitivity towards the phenomena of direct and
structural violence. As Burke notes towards the end of his essay, power often prefers nationalism,
imperialism, racism, or neoliberalism in order to inculcate its version of progress together with material
accumulation (Burke 2013, 25). Increasing war, conflict, and political violence are being replaced with
structural war, which is hybrid in strategy and designed to maintain naturalised and structural,
comparative inequalities in the lives of peoples across the world, often whilst simultaneously speaking
of progress. In modernity, power prefers this version of progress to pluralism, equity, and justice across
time and space. This underlying preference of power is, of course, contrary to the obvious historical
evidence about the dangers and weaknesses of such oppressive strategies, which are simultaneously the
target of many forms of resistance. Burkes article joins a long tradition in European political thought
aimed at reining in power, making it accountable and answerable to the needs of society, inducing
cooperation and highlighting relationality. It points to historical processes, and their impact on modern
networks of agency, identity, and norms, as well as a subaltern understanding from below about what
social and local claims for security (and indeed politics) might be. Burke has drawn together a range of
critical perspectives and reapplied them to security in an attempt to restructure its ontological
foundations (Burke 2013, 14) in order to move towards a new understanding of cosmopolitan security.
He argues that this evolution does not represent a new security utopia (or what I term securitopia). It
balances the architecture of security with the subjects of security, placing the already secured in league
with the unsecured subaltern. His approach attempts also to accept the agonism that goes with the
impossibility of fully reconciling security preferences (Burke 2013, 19) and explains what this means for
cosmopolitan thought concerned with universal norms, or alternatively, for global solidarity. He also
builds a longer-term perspective of some considerable complexity, including future generations, and a
multidimensional awareness far beyond the standard two-dimensional political analysis often connected
with binary-code versions of security in the mainstream securitised, territorialised, nationalistic yet
globalised, policy environment. Burkes approach also acknowledges the certainty of unintended and
unknowable consequences (Burke 2013, 23). Yet, I still suspect that his argument reproduces another
securitopia because the already secure (ontologically and/or epistemologically) have such an enormous
head start over the insecure subaltern. Much of what Burke offers draws on and refreshes a 1990s era
understanding of Critical Security theories, updated in view of new understandings about mobility,
networks, technology, environmental issues, and the capillary circulation, rather than immobility and
capture of power. His attempt to bring together (whilst taming) post-structuralist insights with post-
English School debates on critical security uses the common critical theory gambit of retaining a long-
standing liberal international expectation that universality and globality are necessary (though perhaps
thin) and may yet offer ethical and epistemological perspectives (Burke 2013, 14) about a deeper
understanding of universal security capable of incorporating subaltern claims. However, this is despite
much evidence throughout history that concepts of universality tend to follow hegemony rather than
the subaltern, merely to knock off its rough edges and domesticate it. His argument of course retains a
strong hint of the other critical internationalist mode of thought Marxist structural accounts of power
and its impact on the social, taken up by many critical and post-structural theorists. Thus, he touches
upon the contradiction between any universal understandings of security and the social implications of
insecurity, which any subaltern rendering of security immediately lay bare. What he argues bears
repetition as an example of the potential for incremental development in our understanding of the
relationship between security and emancipation. Emancipation might be understood in Balibarian
terms. More or less, it may start from a subaltern positionality in order to represent and balance rights,
material equality, environmental sustainability, identity, culture, norms, through social and transversal
consensus, law, institutions, the state, regional and international institutions. It may be described as
equa-liberty (Balibar 2014), and is significant especially where contemporary radical thought has
become increasingly wary of even discursively offering suggestions for deep, structural reform (Burke
2013, 14). There are hints of such thinking throughout his argument (such as with the questions of
normative principles, future cohabitation, and difference) (Burke 2013, 17), but they seem to remain in
submission to cosmopolitan versions of power, emancipation, and subjectivity (which can be seen as
liberal-vanguardist version of liberty). Though cosmopolitan thought often conjures up an image of
global polycentricity, and confederal forms of global governance, in practice it is often centred on the
historical emergence of Western power, the relationship between liberal subjects, legitimate
governance at state and international levels, and global capital: it is grounded in a shaky liberal
international order, in other words. As Mazowers recent work on the historical evolution of
international institutions implies, cosmopolitanism points to an anti-Copernican, post-Cold War
dynamics in which ethical politics are centred on the west, and spiral out into the rest of the world as it
emerges from colonialism and communism. This makes the brute force upon which the
postcolonial/postCold War, and now neoliberal world, has emerged appear to be ethically plausible
(Mazower 2012). Does security cosmopolitanism perform the same function, hiding the dark side of
securitopias continuing use of slaves? Regardless of the problem of whether ontology is freely
reshaped, is polycentric, or dispersed, hegemonic power across the ages has done its best to ignore
arguments about the equal weight of humans, and implications for their material, abstract, and identity
rights. Similarly, it ignores the scale of solidarity across political communities, about the de-centring of
power, and about the superiority of the underlying ethical systems that might make such a milieu
possible. Yet, who could not agree with such ethics, apart from the most ardent of liberals, the most
conservative of realists, or the most brutal authoritarian moderniser? Even so, concessions have been
slow in coming throughout history, and grudging when they arrive. Power even a variant of liberal
power justifies its reluctance to concede on the grounds of divine right translated in modern
stratification, leadership, economy, and management based upon epistemic superiority, and ultimately
as the guardians of the security of the less capable. It has been well documented that power legitimates
itself by maintaining blind spots about the unintended consequences of its approaches. Direct and
structural violence tend to naturalise themselves through governance, militarism, social organisation,
and capital, hiding away in their opaque corners. We are confronted with increasing empirical evidence
that power adopts security perspectives that prettifies and preserves its structures and privileges,
regardless of their rhetoric of the liberal peace or of noting scientific, evidence bases, normative and
ethical, or social and anthropological concerns. Security and capital have together become the modern
basis for the preservation of unfair privilege simultaneous to their other functions of safety and wealth
distribution. They provide the modern basis for the many exceptions to equality under norms of
democracy and human rights. Reform in the security structure of the state and the international system
cuts to the heart of existing and historic power structures, their allocation of resources, their biases, and
objectives. They will not dismantle themselves, but they claim to incorporate the evidence and best
practice into their ongoing practices. Thus, resistance to power and flatter forms of political (as well as
bureaucratic, professional, and social) organisation will always be seen as a security problem, rather
than constituent of increasing security (Burke 2013, 21) according to power holders, however they
justify their position (and being relatively more secure than their subjects). Note how, after a lengthy
valourisation of globalisation and its benefits for human freedom, it is now being termed a danger for
security in many such quarters, and globalisation itself is becoming a venue for the strengthening of the
security communities which patrol the existing world order. Security itself is constituted by power
relations, definitions of normality and estimations of priorities and objectives across the full range of
human activity, with the loudest voices maintaining the discourse and the structure. Even where
freedom and liberty is the goal, the growth of security is ontologically predicated on a growing
awareness of insecurity for an existing or ideal order and concurrent hierarchy intent on balancing
present with future, and power with norms. Insecurity is ever expanding, refined, mixed with ideals
(often for others) and embedded into the existing political order in order to maintain its progressive,
interventionary power structures and the exceptions that enable its vanguardism. It is a very complex,
perhaps impossible task to logically reconcile these different elements in a world that is at least socially
intent on making its own democratic futures. Yet the alternative is to merely submit to fate as
determined solely by power.

The AFFs enacts a political economy of misfortune which must be eradicated is a

politics of ressentiment that produces an endless quest for crisis victimhood
becomes a symbolic capital to assuage our western guilt
Baudrillard 05 [Intelligence of Evil, 144-45]
Evil is the world as it is and has been, and we can take a lucid view of this.
Misfortune is the world as it ought never to have been but in the name of
what? In the name of what ought to be, in the name of God or a transcendent ideal, of a good
it would be very hard to define. We may take a criminal view of crime: that is tragedy. Or we may take a reciminative view of it: that is
humanitarianism; it is the pathetic, sentimental vision, the vision that calls constantly for reparation. We have here all the Ressentiment

that comes from the depths of a genealogy of morals and calls within us for
reparation of our own lives. This retrospective compassion, this conversion of
evil into misfortune, is the twentieth centurys finest industry. First as a mental
blackmailing operation, to which we are all victim, even in our actions, from which we
may hope only for a lesser evil keep a low profile, decriminate your existence! then as a source of
a tidy profit, since misfortune (in all its forms, from suffering to insecurity ,
from oppression to depression) represents a symbolic capital, the exploitation of
which, even more than the exploitation of happiness, is endlessly profitable: it is a goldmine with a
seam running through each of us. Contrary to received opinion, misfortune is easier to manage than happiness that is why it is the ideal solution
Just as
to the problem of evil. It is misfortune that is most distinctly opposed to evil and to the principle of evil, of which it is the denial .

freedom ends in total liberation and, in abreaction to that liberation, in new

servitudes, so the ideal of happiness leads to a whole culture of misfortune,
of recrimination, repentance, compassion and victimhood.

The proliferation of meaning and consciousness raising rely on a fantasy of

communication which imlodes under its own weight. More knowledge does not
change reality.
Baudrillard 2000 /http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-
viii-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/

*we reject offensive language

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of

Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than
signification in every domain.

it can be reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of
transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.). Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly
speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code,
like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation
between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning. Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and

The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of

signification, or that it neutralizes them.

information, the media, and the mass media. The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere
socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is
desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of
meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated
rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that
nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an

We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity,
excess of wealth and social purpose.

without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is
collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the
opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social . And for two
reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather

than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview,
speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are
concerned, you are the event , etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom
content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement
through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is
never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of
the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal
desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to
ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of

it is a circular process that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of

the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none,

communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. Thus not only
communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure to which the force of myth is
attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives
of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies.
One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this
system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that

the
people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses. 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scne of communication, the mass media,

pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves
meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on
the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the

implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the

message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant
form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or
subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious,
which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the
content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit there is not only an implosion of the message in the
medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can
no longer be determined. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the
medium is the message the sender is the receiver the circularity of all poles the end of panoptic and perspectival space such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all
the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message that lends credibility to the medium, that gives the medium its determined,
distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate,

the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message,
simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real." Finally,

but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of
electronic mass media) that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole
into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any
dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage

It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream

this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us.

of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is
indecipherable. The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total circularity of the
model, of the implosion of the social in the masses, may seem catastrophic and desperate. But this is only the case in light of the idealism that dominates our whole view of information. We all live by a

passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through

meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us. But one must
realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of accumulation, of productive finality, imposed on us by the system. Etymologically, the term itself only signifies
the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon of the event," to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that has meaning for us but it suffices to
get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary. Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that
results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social. What is essential today is to evaluate this
double challenge the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to
revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge. Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed
[informe] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the Media," I analyzed and
condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of
the masses themselves when they encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence
perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of
the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists,

insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a good use of the media there is none).The media
carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this
process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to
this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind exactly like children faced with the
demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to
subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither

in the political sphere only the practices of

strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive just as

freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and
subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object
practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning precisely the practices of the
masses that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices
respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute
ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting
ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting,
producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as
serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and
repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more
reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer
the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum
production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word or of the
hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting

.
meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter

All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history,
of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising ," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see
that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the
overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

Productivity is a fantasy -- the promise of debate keeps us working within a liberal

institution, wasting our time in this place that cant change the world. The more we
think debate can do something for us, the more the fantasy grows and the crueler the
relationship of optimism will be.
Berlant 2007 Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Sense 33-36

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want
someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in
a person, a thing, an institution, a text , a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever . To phrase 'the object of desire'
as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation
for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that
the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are
optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing
or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the

object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the subject
leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object.' 'Cruel
optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is
discovered either to be impossible , sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely
inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object

or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content
of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the
subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world . This phrase
points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with
Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a
which she has identified her ego continuity.

problematic object . One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst
observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that attachment exists without being an event, or
even better, seems to lighten the load for someone /some group.^ But if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced

by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat
the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a
sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in
them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed
wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the
loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some
scenes of optimism are clearly crueller
than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of
desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work
of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for
a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually

unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. This means that a poetics of
attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the
emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer
and proffer. To
understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection, as a way of
thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling . I
learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes
is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in
a performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the
writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the
proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am describing in the optimism of
attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my transference with her thought. In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,'
which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present
but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker
in whose head the entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its
enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of

intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The present moment
is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence.
Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an

animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realises something
in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as, and to, two: but
only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically
impossible but phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects
to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others,
the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on
'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the

conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness into another require a double negation: of the
speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less
a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing. Of course
psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible. It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an enduring sense
of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition

and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without , again,
necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to be nothing
enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered,
open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of attachment to the object of address who must be absent in
order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate
kind of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora
Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an
observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading,
judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good way,
despite whatever desires they may have not to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's
work on projection is about the
optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity
demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a libidinal position,
not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political
depression. Political depression persists in affective judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in
affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not
detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of sociality.'" The politically depressed position is
manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no
longer be said to be doing their work, and which indeed make obstacles to the desires that animate
them; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the
terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast." Cruel optimism is, then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate

location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good

life,' which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless , and at the same time, find
their conditions of possibility within it . My assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world
even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour
of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering,
the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^ Cruel

optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived imminence, one that grows from a perception about the
reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system
of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity,
reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the
consensual promise, and to misrecognise that promise as an achievement. This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John
Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman - of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that
had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and provide tools for suggesting why these

exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise
machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is , after all, a rhythm people can enter
into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that
they have attached to in this world.
The aff is a form of empathetic identification which is a process of deathmaking which
ensures the smooth functioning of imperialism.
Berlant 1999 [Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago,
The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics and the
Law ed. Sarat and Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Pg. 49-54]

*we reject offensive language

Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace in which the United States seeks desperately to compete "competitively,"
as the euphemism goes, signifying a race that will be won by the nations whose labor conditions are most optimal for profit.2 In the United
States the media of the political public sphere regularly register new scandals of the proliferating sweatshop networks "at home" and "abroad,"
which has to be a good thing, because it produces feeling and with it something at least akin to consciousness that can lead to action) Yet,
even as the image of the traumatized worker proliferates, even as evidence of exploitation is found
under every rock or commodity, it competes with a normative/utopian image of the US. citizen who
remains unmarked, framed, and protected by the private trajectory of his life project, which is sanctified
at the juncture where the unconscious meets history: the American Dream.4 In that story one's identity is borne of
suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the US worker is lucky enough to live at an economic moment that sustains the Dream, he gets to
appear at his least national when he is working and at his most national at leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men
producing surplus manliness (e.g., via sports). In
the American dreamscape his identity is private property, a zone in
which structural obstacles and cultural differences fade into an ether of prolonged, deferred, and
individuating enjoyment that he has earned and that the nation has helped him to earn. Meanwhile,
exploitation only appears as a scandalous nugget in the sieve of memory when it can be condensed into
an exotic thing of momentary fascination, a squalor of the bottom too horrible to be read in its own
actual banality. The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not generally
induce more than mourning on the part of the state and the public culture to whose feeling-based opinions the state is said to
respond. Mourning is what happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no longer living (to you). Mourning is
an experience of irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am living, he is dead, I am mourning. It is a beautiful,
not sublime, experience of emancipation; mourning supplies the subject the definitional perfection of a being no longer in flux. It takes place
over a distance: even if the object who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness is neither dead nor at any great distance from where you
are.5 In
other words, mourning can also be an act of aggression, of social deathmaking: it can perform
the evacuation of sig-nificance from actually-existing subjects. Even when liberals do it, one might say,
"others" are ghosted for a good cause.6 The sorrow songs of scandal that sing of the exploitation that is always "elsewhere"
(even a few blocks away) are in this sense aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military march of capitalist
triumphalism (The Trans-Nationale) can be heard. Its lyric, currently crooned by every organ of record in the United States, is about necessity.
It exhorts citi-zens to understand that the "bottom line" of national life is neither utopia nor freedom
but survival, which can only be achieved by a citi-zenry that eats its anger, makes no unreasonable
claims on resources or control over value, and uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimate
spheres while scrapping a life together flexibly in response to the market world's caprices. In this
particular moment of expanding class unconsciousness that looks like consciousness emerges a peculiar,
though not unprecedented, hero: the exploited child. If a worker can be infanfilized, pic-tured as young, as small, as
feminine or feminized, as starving, as bleeding and diseased, and as a (virtual) slave, the righteous indigna-tion around procuring his survival
resounds everywhere. The child must not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded image speaks a truth that subordinates
narrative: he has not "freely" chosen his exploitation; the optimism and play that are putatively the right of childhood have been stolen from
him. Yet
only "voluntary" steps are ever taken to try to control this visible sign of what is ordinary and
systemic amid the chaos of capitalism, in order to make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable. Privatize the
atrocity, delete the visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the child to the family, replace the
children with adults who can look dignified while being paid virtually the same revolting wage. The problem
that organizes so much feeling then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable pressure of feeling dissipates, like so much gas.
Meanwhile, the pressure of feeling the shock of being uncomfort-ably political produces a cry for a double therapy-4o the victim and the
viewer. But before "we" appear too complacently different from the privileged citizens who desire to
caption the mute image of exotic suffering with an aversively fascinated mourning (a desire for the image to be
dead, a ghost), we must note that this feeling culture crosses over into other domains, the domains of what
we call identity politics, where the wronged take up voice and agency to produce transformative
testimony, which depends on an analogous conviction about the self-evidence and therefore the
objectivity of painful feeling The central concern of this essay is to address the place of painful feeling
in the making of political worlds. In particular, I mean to challenge a powerful popular belief in the
positive workings of something I call national sentimentality, a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be
built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy.
Sentimental politics generally promotes and maintains the hegemony of the national identity form, no
mean feat in the face of continued widespread intercultural antagonism and economic cleavage. But
national sentimentality is more than a current of feeling that circulates in a political field: the phrase
describes a longstanding contest between two models of U.S. citizenship. In one, the classic model,
each citizen's value is secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of national
identity provides juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific about
them. In the second model, which was initially organized around labor, feminist, and antiracist struggles
of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is imagined as the index of
collective life. This nation is peopled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whose structural exclusion
from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state's claim of legitimacy and virtue to an acid
wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually impossible, at certain moments of
political intensity. Sentimentality has long been the means by which mass subaltern pain is advanced, in the dominant public sphere, as
the true core of national collectivity. It operates when the pain of intimate others burns into the conscience of classically privileged national
subjects, such that they feel the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their pain. Theoretically, to eradicate the pain those
with power will do whatever is necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian
odor. Identification with pain, a universal true feeling, then leads to structural social change. In return, subalterns scarred by the
pain of failed democracy will reauthorize universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, which
involves believing in a redemptive notion of law as the guardian of public good. The object of the nation and the law in this light is to eradicate
systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom. Yet, since these very sources of protectionthe state, the law,
patriotic ideologyhave traditionally buttressed traditional matrices of cultural hierarchy, and since their historic job has been to protect
universal subject/citizens from feeling their cultural and corporeal specificity as a political vulnerability, the imagined capacity of these
institutions to assimilate to the affective tactics of subaltern counterpolitics suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these tactics. For
one thing, it may be that the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of pain implicitly mischaracterizes
what a person is as what a person becomes in the experience of social negation; this model also
falsely promises a sharp picture of structural violence's source and scope, in turn promoting a dubious
optimism that law and other visible sources of inequality, for example, can provide the best remedies
for their own taxonomizing harms. It is also possible that counterhegemonic deploy-ments of pain as the
measure of structural injustice actually sustain the utopian image of a homogeneous national
metaculture, which can look like a healed or healthy body in contrast to the scarred and exhausted
ones. Finally, it might be that the tactical use of trauma to describe the effects of social inequality so
overidentifies the eradication of pain with the achievement of justice that it enables various confusions:
for instance, the equation of pleasure with freedom or the sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass
scale, amount to substantial social change. Sentimental politics makes these confusions credible and
these violences bearable, as its cultural power confirms the centrality of inter-personal identification
and empathy to the vitality and viability of col-lective life. This gives citizens something to do in response
to over-whelming structural violence. Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called
"national culture," these important transpersonal linkages and intimacies all too frequently serve as
proleptic shields, as ethically uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemanic field.9

This card is totally confusing and they will lose on it.

Bataille 45 (Georges, On Nietzsche, Pantheon Books, pp. 184-187)
*we reject offensive language

**errors due to ocr

'Life." I said. "is bound to be lost in death, as a river loses itself in the sea, the known in the unknown"
(Inner Experiena). And death is the end life easily reaches (as water does sea level). So why would I wish to tum my
desire to be persuasive into a worry? I dissolve into myself like the sea-and I know the roaring waters
of the torrent head straight at me! Whatever a judicious understanding sometimes seems to rude, an inunense folly connected
with it (understanding is only an infinitesimal part of that folly), doesn't hesitate to give back. The certainty of incoherence in reading, the
inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books.
Since appearance constitutes a limit, what
truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid thinking. The
apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions. So why exhaust myself with
efforts toward consciousness? I can only make lun of myself as I write. (Why write even a phrase if laughter doesn't immediately join me?) It
goes without saying that, lor the task. I bring to bear whatever rigor I have within me. But the
crumbling nature of thinking's
awareness of itself and especially the certainty of thinking reaching its end only in failing, hinder any
repose and prevent the relaxed state that facilitates a rigorous disposition of things. Committed to the
casual stance-l think and express myself in the free play of hazard. Obviously, everyone in some way
admits the importance of hazard. But this recognition is as minimal and unconsdous as possible. Going
my way unconstralned. unhampered. I develop my thoughts, make choices with regard to expression-but I don't have the control over myseH
that I wanl. And the actual dynamic of my intelligence is equally uncontrollable. So that l owe to other dynamics-to lucky chance and to fleeting
moments of relaxation-the minimal order and relative learning that I do have. And the rest of the time . . . Thus,
as I see it my
thought proceeds in harmony with its object, an object that it attains more and perfectly the greater
the state of its own ruin. Though it isn't necessarily conscious of this. At one and the same time my
thinking must reach plenary illumination and dissolution . . . In the same individual, thought must
construct and destroy itself. And even that isn't quite right. Even the most rigorous thinkers yield to chance. In
addition, the demands inherent in the exercise of thought often take me far from where I started. One
of the great difficulties encountered by understanding is to put order into thought's interrelations in time. In a given moment, my thought
reaches considerable rigor. But how to link it with yesterday's thinking? Yesterday, in a sense, I was another person, responding to other
worries. Adapting one to the other remains possible, but . . . This insufficiency bothers me no more than the insuffidency relating to the many
woes of the human condition generally. Humanness is related in us to nonsatisfaction. a nonsatisfaction to which we yield without accepting it,
though; we distance ourselves from humann ess when we regard ourselves as satisfied or when we give up searching for satisfaction. Sarue is
right in relation to me to recll the myth Of Sisyphus, though "in relation to me""' here equates to "in relation to humanity," I suppose. What can
be expected of us is to go as far as possible and not to stop. What by contrast. humanly speaking. can be aitidzed are endeavors whose only
meaning is some relation to moments of completion. Is it possible for me to go further? I won't wait to coordinate my efforts in that case-I'll go
further. I'll take the risk. And the reader. free not to venture after me, will often take advantage of that same freedom! The critics are right to
scent danger here! But let me in turn paint out a greater danger, one that comes from methods that, adequate only to an outcome of
knowledge, confer on individuals whom they limit a sheerly fragmentary existence-an existence that is mutilated with respect to the whole that
remains inaccessible. Having recognized this, I'll defend my position. I've spoken of inner experience: my intention was to make known an
object. But by propo!iing this vague title, T didn't want to confine myself sheerly to inner facts of that experience. It's an arbitrary
procedure to reduce knowledge to what we get from our intuitions as subjects. This is something only a
newborn can do. And we ourselves (who write) can only know something about this newborn by observing it from outside (the child is only our
object). A separation experience, related to a vital continuum (our conception and our birth) and to a
return to that continuum (in our first sexual feelings and our first laughter), leaves us without any
clear recollections, and only in objective operations do we reach the core of the being we are. A
phenomenology of the developed mind assumes a coincidence of subjective and objective aspects and
at the same time a fusion of subject and object.* This means an isolated operation is admissible only
because of fatigue (so, the explanation I gave of laughter, because I was unable to develop a whole movement in tandem with a
conjugation of the modalities of laughter would be left suspended-since every theory of laughter is integrally a philosophy and. similarly, every
integral philosophy is a theory of laughter . . . ). But that is the point- though I set forth these principles, at the same time I must renounce
following them. Thought is produced in me as uncoordinated flashes, withdrawing endlessly from a term to which its movement pushes it. I
can't tell if I'm expressing human helplessness this way, or my own . . . I don't know. though I'm not hopeful of even some outwardly satisfying
outcome. Isn't there an advantage in creating philosophy as I do? A flash in the night-a language belonging to a brief moment . . . Perhaps in
this respect this latest moment contains a simple truth. In order to will knowledge, by an indirect expedient I tend to become the whole
universe. But in this movement I can't be a whole hwnan beinSt since I submit to a particular goal. becoming the whole. Granted. if I could
become it, I would thus be a whole hwnan being. But in my effon, don't I distance myself from exactly that? And how can I become the whole
without becoming a whole human being? I can't be this whole hwnan being except when I let go. I can't be this through willpower: my will
But if misfortune (or chance) wills me to let go, then I know I am an integral
necessarily has to will outcomes!
whole humanness. subordinate to nothing. In other words. the moment of revolt inherent in willing a
knowledge beyond practical ends can't be indefinitely continued. And in order to be the whole
universe, humankind has to let go and abandon its principle, accepting as the sole criterion of what it
is the tendency to go beyond what it is. This existence that I am is a revolt against existence and is
indefinite desire. For this existence God was simply a stage-and now here he is, looming large, grown
from unfathomable experience, comically perched on the stake used for impalement.
2AC
 K
Framework: our interpretation is that this debate should be about the desirability of
the political action of the aff.

This model is comparatively superior. Allows discussion of political tradeoffs.

Day 09 (Christopher, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the
Revolutionary Project,
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/historical_failure_of_aanarchism_chris_day_kasama.pdf)

The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context.
It
is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is
neccesary to actually win freedom. Anti-capitalism doesnt do the victims of capitalism any good if you dont actually destroy capitalism.
Anti-statism doesnt do the victims of the state any good if you dont actually smash the state.
Anarchism has been very good at putting forth visions of a free society and that is for the good. But it
is worthless if we dont develop an actual strategy for realizing those visions. It is not enough to be right, we must
also win.

Continues

Finally revolutionaries have a responsibility to have a plausible plan for making revolution. Obviously
there are not enough revolutionaries to make a revolution at this moment. We can reasonably anticipate that the future
will bring upsurges in popular opposition to the existing system. Without being any more specific about where those upsurges might occur it seems clear that it
is from the ranks of such upsurges that the numbers of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation (which is
distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a revolutionary movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up
with the existing system and who are willing to commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for likeminded people who have an idea of what to do. If we
dont have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will. There
is no guarantee that
revolutionary-minded people will be spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics. The plan doesnt have
to be an exact blueprint. It shouldnt be treated as something sacred. It should be subject to constant revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very
least it needs to be able to answer questions that have been posed concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as
previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we cant say what we would have done in the past we should
not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.
 Overview
Morissey

You have to win 100% risk that debate is useless. Any risk that the 1AC generates productive dialogue is
a win for us. Were an impact turn. You would never protest things. Alt is nihilism

Perm do both. Their impotentiality and study arguments are about being in and outside of the law,
which is debate. Sometimes were aff, sometimes were neg.

Doesnt allow structures. We always give in.

 Harris
Legal approaches, demands, and discussions are essential in the context of military
presence its essential to help promote and sustain anti-basing movements
otherwise, hawkish foreign policy wins out and manipulates citizenry to justified
continued expansionism
Harris, Visiting Lecturer at Earlham College, 14
(Peter, Getting Away With It: How Governments Sew Up Foreign Policies in Advance, http://www.e-
ir.info/2014/06/13/getting-away-with-it-how-governments-sew-up-foreign-policies-in-advance/)

Few foreign policies deal with a single subject matter in isolation from all others. Instead, any given foreign policy will likely have an
impact on multiple issue areas, whether by design or by unintended consequence. Sometimes, foreign policy-makers have
incentives to conceal or downplay the relatedness of the issues to which their policies pertain. For example, when the U.S. supplies military aid
to friendly regimes with poor human rights records, an unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy might be to worsen the prospects of
democratic reforms taking hold in that country. Such an adverse effect of military aid is not something that foreign policy-makers will want to
trumpet; instead, they will seek to maintain a focus on the appropriateness of the aid from a military perspective. At other times, however,
foreign policy issue areas are deliberately sewn together in order to increase the appeal of a particular
policy. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the George W. Bush administration sought to build popular and political support for its
policies with recourse to international law, humanitarian concerns, economic objectives, as well as claims regarding regional and U.S. national
security. In this essay, I discuss how governments strategically bundle foreign policies in order to achieve political support for their actions. I
argue that all foreign policies are the results of political considerations, bargaining, and logrollingthat is, foreign policies are stitched together
in order to appease the greatest number of potential stakeholders while limiting the number of potential opponents (at home and abroad).
While understanding this phenomenon of strategic bundling is important from the analytic perspective of foreign
policy scholars, it is also critical for a normative reason : to help others in the public square better understand and
evaluate the actions taken by governments on the international stage. Theoretically, I draw upon the scholarship of political
scientist E.E. Schattschneider, whose work remains an indispensable guide to the organization and execution of political conflict. Empirically, I
focus upon U.S. (and British) foreign policy towards overseas military bases. Politics and Foreign Policy Foreign policy, like any branch of
politics, is about who gets what, when, how (Lasswell, 1950); it involves conflict over the distribution of resources. Moreover,
the stakes can be high: contemporary U.S. foreign policy costs billions of dollars to finance and deals with weighty issues of right and wrong,
morality and immorality, life and death. Those
charged with formulating and executing foreign policy therefore
have powerful incentives to maintain a firm grip on the policy-making process: as E.E. Schattschneider (1957
and 1960) argued decades ago, politics is not just about conflict itself, but also the management of conflictits scope and organization. Before
it can be decided who gets what, when, how, it must first be determinedwhether implicitly or explicitlywho is included in the conversation,
what is up for grabs, and what timetables and processes will be used to conduct the discussion. These prior questions of procedure are highly
political in nature; how they are resolved will affect the subsequent decisions over substance. Essentially, Schattschneiders model of politics
constitutes an injunction to problematize the ground upon which distributive conflict takes place. One of his lasting contributions to the study
of politics is the idea that the organization of conflict is endogenous to conflict itself. This perspective implies that political combatants
must be adroit at defining the salience of issues and delineating the circle of participants. All participants in conflict
must be cognizant of procedure and process ; they must be ready to expand or contract the conversation
depending upon their own strategic interests. If participants fail to organize conflict in a way that
advantages them and disadvantages their opponents , then it is highly likely that they will incur losses
on the substantive issues at stake. In the realm of foreign policy, the bundling of issue-areas constitutes one way via which actors
can achieve the strategic goals stated above. By coupling two or more foreign policy issues through deed or through rhetoric, elected officials
and bureaucrats, in particular, can enlarge the range of issues to which foreign policies are seen to apply; at the same time, they can control the
size and makeup of the interested audience. Conversely, by
downplaying the connectedness of two issue areas or by
moving to uncouple particular topics , any given debate can be narrowed in scope and certain
participants excluded from the conversation. Although it is not just governmental officials who have a say in foreign policy,
Schattschneider himself was clear that the best point at which to manage conflict is before it starts (Schattschneider
1960: 15). Undoubtedly, those operating within the states decision-making apparatus have a first-mover
advantage in this regard. Overseas Military Bases In the real world, how does foreign policy bundling work as a strategy of managing
the scope of conflict? What are some of the practical and normative implications of the practice? A brief consideration of U.S. (and British)
foreign policies towards overseas military bases will help to answer these questions. First and foremost, military bases are created
and maintained for military purposes: they are temporary or permanent facilities designed to host military forces in pursuit of
military objectives. Since World War II, billions of dollars have been spent maintaining U.S. overseas military bases in the name of ensuring
national security and defending U.S. allies. In the Cold War, the primary purpose of such bases was to defend against the Soviet military threat;
as a consequence, the biggest concentrations of overseas bases were to be found in Europe and East Asia, the two most important theaters of
the Cold War. Since the 1990s, the military-security rationale of maintaining a vast global footprint has shifted to center on ensuring regional
stability, reassuring allies, keeping strategic sea lanes open, fighting against transnational terrorism, andsince the early 2000smaintaining
security in active warzones such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet military bases
have much broader social and political
implications than just the promotion of U.S. national security. In her classic investigation into gender and international
politics, Cynthia Enloe (1990) found that overseas military bases wrought incredible change upon their host nations (and vice versa). She
pointed to the intermingling of service personnel and adjacent civilian populations, the economic relations that were fostered, the personal and
sexual relationships that formed, and the social attitudes that were changed. Enloe linked the presence of overseas bases to prostitution and
the spread of sexually transmitted infections. She noted that military installations could serve as catalysts for womens political organization,
but also as institutions that marginalized and disempowered women across the world. More recent critical
investigations into U.S.
bases similarly have linked overseas installations to myriad themes (e.g. environmental destruction ,
colonialism and imperialism , nuclear insecurity , gross abuses of human rights , high rates of sexual assault )
that sit uncomfortably alongside the notion that military bases are purely military affairs (e.g. Lutz 2009; Vine 2009; Yeo 2011). Clearly, those
responsible for handling U.S. security policy have a vested interest in downplaying these adverse policy
implications of the U.S. global footprint. Instead, then, officials tend to focus upon othermore positiveimplications of
overseas bases. Overseas military bases assist in the smooth functioning of the international economy, for example, because forwardly
deployed maritime forces are essential for keeping sea lanes open and free of piracy. Military bases can be keystone employers, helping to
drive local economies and regional economies. Bases also play an important humanitarian role by creating the infrastructure necessary to
mobilize rapid responses to crises such as natural disasters. As I describe below, military bases even have been portrayed as useful tools in the
service of environmental protection. Understood via Schattschneiders framework, U.S. officials have been wise to associate their overseas
bases with such positivealbeit subsidiaryimplications and issue-areas because the reality of politics means that no foreign
policy is ever set in stone . All policy depends upon politics , and politics is fluid . Military bases , in
particular, are susceptible to political change at home if, for example, legislators decide to cut funds for overseas
bases. Such an attack could arise out of fiscal concerns, ideological opposition to overseas engagement, or simply because of a judgment that
the strategic value of overseas bases does not outweigh the negative consequences that they entail. Abroad, too, military bases can be
vulnerable to political change (Calder 2007; Cooley 2008). Host nations or local opposition groups could (and do) mobilize against
foreign bases. At times, such opposition has led to the closure of U.S. bases, including most recently the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan. Given
these latent threats to bases longevity, the political challenge for foreign policy-makers (who have decided, a priori, that
military bases are essential to the national interest) is to devise and disseminate foreign policies in such a way as to

create the broadest possible support for bases. Bundling is one response to this pressing challenge.
Military Bases and Environmentalism One of the most interesting and overlooked ways in which foreign policy executives and bureaucrats have
sought to increase the acceptability of military bases (in the eyes of domestic and international audiences) has been to embrace environmental
protection regimes as part-and-parcel of basing strategiesthat is, to bundle together military and environmental concerns. Because military
bases often impose a high degree of seclusion and insularity upon their immediate physical surroundings, resulting in the (unintended) creation
of de facto nature reserves, it is common for bases to be adjacent to areas of natural beauty or special ecological value. Wildlife flourishes
where military ordinances outlaw permanent civilian habitationon live fire ranges, testing and training grounds, demilitarized zones, disused
fortifications, and so forth. In turn, military
conservation can be used as a post hoc rationalization for the
existence of military bases: to retain military custodianship of the countryside or the wilderness is to maintain an
effective and irreplaceable conservation regime, whereas to close such bases would be to jeopardize a
vulnerable ecosystem . Guam is one military site where a foreign policy of maintaining a permanent military presence has been
bundled with a policy of environmentalism. A U.S. territory since 1898, Guam (today an organized, unincorporated U.S. territory) is one of
Washingtons most important overseas possessions, from a military standpoint. Big enough to host large numbers of troops and heavy-duty
airstrips, and blessed with a deep harbor, Guam is a veritable anchor of the U.S. military presence in the Western Pacific. From Guam, the U.S.
can exercise control over vital sea lanes and plan to conduct military operationsair, sea, and landacross the Asia-Pacific region. Since 1993,
Guam has also been the site of an expansive environmental reserve, the Guam National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). Indeed, visitors to Guam are
encouraged to take advantage of the rich natural environment that the Guam NWR is supposedly in place to protect. The vast majority of the
wildlife refuge is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and is kept off-limits to civilianstourists, to be sure, but also the
indigenous Chamorro people of Guam. The justification given is that Guams natural environment has suffered terribly at the hands of human
encroachment; military stewardship of the islands wilderness is a good thing because it gives native flora and fauna an opportunity to thrive in
peace and isolation. In short, there are positive environmental benefits to be derived from the U.S. militarys presence on Guam and the
Pentagons ownership (and control) of the land. Upsetting this political status quo would be detrimental to the cause of conservation. Is the
Guam NWR a genuine attempt to preserve the natural environment? Or is it a cynical add-on to the Pentagons overseas basing strategy that is
designed for public consumption more than anything else? Critics have certainly accused the U.S. government of cynicism when it comes to the
construction of environmental reserves around other island bases. David Vine and Miriam Pemberton, for example, accuse the Bush
administration of using environmental protection initiatives as an excuse for maintaining control over strategically located islands in the
Pacificespecially the Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, and Midway Island. Even though military activities are known to be disastrous for the
natural environment, using the language of conservation and enacting laws that claim the mantle of environmentalism can add a positive
environmentalist spin to the permanent U.S claim on these territories as military outposts, write Vine and Pemberton. The U.S. base on Diego
Garcia in the British-controlled Chagos Archipelago (central Indian Ocean) is the most recent overseas base to be surrounded by an
environmental protection regime. Diego Garcia is a deeply controversial installation, not least of all because several thousand indigenous
islanders, expelled from the territory in the 1960s and 1970s, still claim the island (and the rest of Chagos) as their rightful home (Vine 2009;
Jeffery 2011; Evers and Kooy 2011). Neighboring Mauritius, too, claims the entire Chagos Archipelago as part of its sovereign territory. The base
has been marred by official admissions that it was used as a staging post for extraordinary rendition flights and is currently mired in allegations
that it is (or has been) the location of a CIA black site prison. Several foreign policy issues thus intersect over Diego
Garcia. The base is not
merely a tool of military power-projection as it was designed to be in the 1960s and 1970s: instead, the base is firmly connected to

questions of indigenous peoples rights , imperialism and colonialism , international law, civil liberties, human rights
and torture, and much more. All of these issues threaten to spill over and affect the U.S. base in thse political
sphere; all of them are issues that the Pentagon would prefer not to have bundled together with its
military aims. How can support for Diego Garcia be maintained, however, when there is such fertile ground for criticizing its very
existence? Politically, responsibility for maintaining Diego Garcia as a venue for the U.S. military rests with the British governmentnot the
United States. Yet London has proven to be just as adept at foreign policy bundling as has Washington. In 2010, Britain
declared a
marine protected area in the Chagos Islands in a move that many saw as designed to buttress the Anglo-
Americans control over Diego Garcia and undermine the claims of their detractors (especially Mauritius and the
Chagos Islanders). In critical circles, such policy-packaging was castigated as greenwashing that is, a cynical adoption of
green and environmentally-friendly policies for disingenuous or even deceitful purposes. Nevertheless, the conservation zone went ahead,
drawing significant support from environmentalist organizations and conservation groups, including in the academic and scientific
communities. In effect, the decision to bundle military affairs and environmentalism succeeded in redefining
the political debate over Diego Garcia: the question for many is now not so much whether it is just and
proper for a military base to take precedence over the rights of the indigenous islanders of the claims of
post-colonial Mauritius, but rather whether or not the natural environmenta pristine safe haven for
endangered species can be risked by altering the status quo. Conclusion Governments are strategic when it
comes to stitching together their foreign policies. Bundling certain issue-areas together can be an important means of
agenda-setting or framing. Divorcing other issue-areas can similarly help in the sale of foreign policies to
domestic and international constituencies. How foreign policies are put together and portrayed is rarely a matter of
happenstance, but rather is the product of political considerations. Such fusion of foreign policy issues therefore warrants

careful critical attention from analysts and ordinary citizens alike. This is clearly the case when it comes to military
environmentalism and overseas bases. Military installations are not by their nature concerned with the
preservation of the natural environment, yet have been cast as such in recent years. In the process, new
political stakeholders have come to see themselves with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo
surrounding military basesenvironmentalists, conservationists, and their financial backers. The questions
that must be asked are these: Why has such an unnatural melding of militarism and environmentalism been decided upon? Which
issues pertaining to military bases are being downplayed? And which issues are being completely concealed from public
view via the foregrounding of environmentalism? The answers will not be volunteered by those in
positions of power.
 At Reform

The 1AC Zanotti evidence should frame this debate for you. The 1AC is a negative
state action, a demand that the United States no longer engage in a harmful and
violent practice, not an allegiance to the state. These contingent demands are good
because they allow us to determine our relationship to institutional structures and
develop strategies to change their harmful practices.

The Harris evidence impacts this. The affirmative is key to larger antibase movements
because it teaches us the skills needed to combat ongoing US militarism through
institutional demands. The alternative allows hawks to fill in and become the
exclusive determiners of military policy, which escalates structural violence as per the
Morrissey ev.

The 1NC doesnt access these forms of engagement which means its terminal offense
for the affirmative. Any risk the aff can affect structures of US militarism means you
vote aff because we are the only ones who can access an external impact.
 Even if: reform is good
We arent a legal reform, but even if we are a use of the law, forcing it to be used
against the US prevents manipulation
Ioannis Kalpouzos 7, Professor of Law at The City Law School, "David Kennedy, Of War and Law", J
Conflict Security Law, (2007) 12 (3): 485-492, jcsl.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/3/485.full

It is important, however, not to sweepingly and debilitatingly generalise discontent about the current situation.
The structural disconnects of the legal system do not mean that law and legal language cannot be part of the
solution. Actions and motives are abstracted in logical categories that seem to reflect a normative consensus or a structural status quo. Admittedly, the
intercession of the law-creating process by the structural and conceptual wall of sovereignty differentiates it from the equivalent process in national legal orders.
The often-described weaknesses of the international system, the absence of a sovereign to impose formal validity
and the often-disheartening problems of enforcement are very real difficulties that plague
international law and, especially, the laws of war. The stakes there may seem higher and the scrutinising process weaker. Such problems are
sometimes intimidating for legal analysis, but should not be off-putting and they should not lead to
disregard of the importance of law as a tool in the international system. To the extent that war is the
continuation of politics with the admixture of other means, and that politics is the interaction between different
actors in society, legal regulation of such an interaction, in peace or war, is possible and, indeed, necessary.
The task might be discouragingly complex but the better the use of legal tools, the more accurate the
observation of practice, and the more legitimate the processes of legal abstraction are, the more the
rules will be valid and effective. Ultimately, Kennedy's diagnosis warrants a prescription. The question that arises is, to which
extent focusing on lawfare holds interpretative value in order to address the issues at hand. Although the conflicts within
legal concepts and among legal institutions cannot, of course, be resolved once and for all and although there will
always be room for manipulation and instrumentalisation of the rules, any approach should seek to clarify the
interrelations between concepts and actors. Kennedy does provide interesting insights on this interrelation, but he does so at
a rather macroscopic level. The diagnosis of structural and conceptual confusion warrants a technical legal
approach for dealing with the specific issues that arise from it. Formal legal thoroughness will never substitute
personal moral choices, but it can be an important tool in the effort to minimise the uncertainty in the use

of the rules and the weakness of the institutional structure. The law or even a formal expert consensus will
never substitute the necessary choices by soldiers on the ground or by politicians deciding to wage war, but legal
language provides a formal platform for claims to be supported and actions to be justified. This will not
substitute the important moral choices, but it can ground them in a legal structure that reflects substantive
core values and provides useful tools to assess them. Furthermore, there is a fear that by focusing on lawfare one can come very
close to accept it. Accordingly, the relativisation of the formal validity of legal claims can clear the way for supporting

utterly subjective decisions, allowing more powerful actors to manipulate the loopholes. The structural and
substantive loopholes of the legal system are real enough, and Kennedy is right to point that out, but by accepting the practice of

lawfare, a degree of unwarranted justification can be attached to the exploitation of these loopholes. This,
arguably, will not work in favour of the cohesiveness of the legal system, especially in an area as legally contentious as

the laws of war. Kennedy's disenchantment with the expert consensus and its practical use is perhaps
understandable, and his exhortation to experience politics as our vocation and responsibility as our fate (p. 172) is altogether laudable, but we
need more than that. We need to know exactly how to assess decisions and actions on the ground, and
professionalism in lawfare and moral exhortations are not substitutes for legal analysis. Both the strengths and
weaknesses of this book reinforce the need for a clearer understanding of the relevant legal rules, their
interaction and the nature of the existing legal regime.
 It can get better
All their reasons the state is bad are a reason to vote affirmativeengaging means we
know the tactics of the oppressor
Williams, 70 [1970, Robert F. Williams, interviewed by The Black Scholar, Interviews,, Vol. 1, No. 7,
BLACK REVOLUTION (May 1970), pp. 2-14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41163455]

Williams:
It is erroneous to think that one can isolate oneself completely from institutions of a social
and political system that exercises power over the environment in which he resides. Self-imposed
and premature isolation, initiated by the oppressed against the organs of a tyrannical establishment,
militates against revolutionary movements dedicated to radical change. It is a grave error for
militant and just minded youth to reject struggle-serving opportunities to join the man's government
and the services, police forces, peace corps and vital organs of the power structure. Militants should
become acquainted with the methods of the oppressor. Meaningful change can be more
thoroughly effectuated by militant pressure from within as well as without. We can obtain valuable
know-how from the oppressor. Struggle is not all violence. Effective struggle requires tactics, plans,
analysis and a highly sophisticated application of mental aptness. The forces of oppression and
tyranny have perfected highly articulate systems of infiltration for undermining and frustrating the
efforts of the oppressed in trying to upset the unjust status quo. To a great extent, the power structure
keeps itself informed as to the revolutionary activity of freedom fighters. With the looming threat of
extermination looming menacingly before black Americans, it is pressingly imperative that our
people enter the vital organs of the establishment. Infiltrate the man's institutions.
Case
 Schlagg
We can reshape the law to be accountable to its ideals and ascribe to equality like
healthcare---Schlag agrees that breaks normativity
Pierre Schlag 9, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University
of Colorado Law School, ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of
Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art), March, 2009, Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo.
L.J. 803

There's something gratuitous about legal scholarship. No one, of course, writes that the constitution should be like Ben & Jerry's ice cream. But just what is it

that precludes anyone from suggesting that the Constitution should guarantee universal health care. (I'd be in
favor--I really would.) The answer: [*834] there are constraints on what we argue . Sure there are. n69 And who generates . .
. the constraints? Well, in part, we do: n70 So what we have is an imaginary legal thought shaped by
imaginary collective constraints , one of which is the injunction that we should follow those constraints with great rigor.
My question: Is this a neurotic structure? Yes, it is. Straight out--full-flower. It has to be because without the neurosis, there would be nothing there. No constraints
at all. Now please understand: As a matter of form, I have nothing against collective imaginaries. My only problem is this: if we law professors have to
work so hard (and so painfully) on our collective imaginaries, couldn't we pick something more interesting, or
important, or aesthetically enlivening, or morally salient, or politically relevant than bus schedules? I mean, couldn't

we? Uh, no. Which raises perhaps my final point. It's not very nice, but someone's got to say it, and apparently it's going to be me. As mentioned earlier, our
people are not cognitively challenged. They are, bell curve and all, very intelligent. It is easy then for people like you and I, when we look at the extreme intricacy of
the work produced by these very intelligent people, to associate the intricacy of their work with their manifest intelligence. Indeed, we are likely to think of the
relation in reciprocal terms: Because they are intelligent, their work is intricate, and because their work is intricate, it shows great intelligence. n71 But the thing I
want to suggest as a possibility here is that all this intricacy of legal scholarship is less a function of intelligence than it is a manifestation of neurosis in the face of
intractable conflicts. What conflicts? Consider the prototypical needs of the legal academic: A need to display great intelligence in a discourse (law) that will
ultimately not bear it. A need to contribute to disciplinary knowledge in a discourse which is not really about knowledge or truth in any profound sense of those
terms. A need to say something intellectually respectable within a disciplinary paradigm that we know, on some
level, is intellectually compromised. [*835] A need to display control over social, political, and economic

transactions that are in important senses not subject to control . A need to activate moral and political virtue in a discourse that uses both
largely as window dressing. A need to make one's thought seem real and consequential in a discourse that is neither. I want to suggest then, and this is perhaps the
unkindest cut of all, that within the dominant paradigm of legal scholarship, it may be that there is very little of enduring value to be said. In the main it's the
rehearsal of a form, a genre--and not a self-evidently good one. n72 I have a cheery ending and a not so cheery ending The cheery ending is that it has not
always been like this. And, maybe it doesn't have to be like this now.
 Baudrillard

Well impact turn this argument. Even if Baudrillard is right and images and affect can
sometimes be bad things, its not true for the aff. Morrissey ev indicates most people
dont even know about the people were killing in the status quo. Knowing that were
doing violence is obvi a pre-req to stopping that violence.
Our critique of structural injustice turns vampirism. Contextualizing vulnerability, and
the background of injustice balances emphasizing with material suffering and avoiding
sentimentality
Michalinos Zembylas 13, Education @ Open (Cyprus), The Crisis of Pity and the Radicalization of
Solidarity: Toward Critical Pedagogies of Compassion, Educational Studies 49, p. 512-516

a politics of compassion that takes into consideration the possible dangers of compassion fatigue,
First of all,

desensitization, and victimization has to begin from acknowledging common vulnerability and its
self- human

influence in inspiring meaningful actions that avoid presumptuous paternalism The (Porter 2006; Whitebrook 2002).

recognition of ones own vulnerability can constitute a powerful point of departure for developing
compassion and solidarity with the others vulnerability (Butler 2004). As Butler asserts: Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies. ... We cannot ... will away this vulnerability. We must attend

recognition of our
to it (2004, p. 29). Butlers description of the vulnerable body and self refers to the way we perform and are performed upon, and part of what we fear in the other is a projection of our own selves. Hence, Butler suggests that

own vulnerability opens up the potential for recognition of all humanity as vulnerable. Vulnerability may ,

be a more appropriate term than suffering

therefore, because the focus is not merely on to ground the political applications of compassion,

the alleviation of material suffering and hence a slide from compassion

to benevolence and sentimentality Suggesting this epistemological shift does not imply (Porter 2006; Whitebrook 2002). of focus ,

that a narrative that focuses on the alleviation of material suffering will necessarily result in
however,

a slide into sentimentality political applications of compassion cannot be completely separated

. Undoubtedly, the

from questions of material suffering . Thus, it needs to be acknowledged that although the move away from suffering may be theoretically useful, the shift to a narrative of common human vulnerability is not completely

The idea of common vulnerability enables usteachers and students

unproblematic. 8 to explore how in the classroom, for instance

we might move beyond dichotomies that single out the self or the other as victims, and therefore as

deserving someone elses pity. That is, the idea of common vulnerability puts in perspective the notion
of all of us as vulnerable, rather than the individual-other who needs our compassion. This addresses notion the

concerns of students who seem to be stuck in self-victimization claims and refuse to

, for example,

acknowledge that others also suffer . Although the idea of common vulnerability does not guarantee any departure from such claims, it opens space to some

problematize moralistic positioning . In addition, the notion of common vulnerability attacks a major emotional ideology grounded in the view that it is natural or normal to be fearful of the other, especially if it involves racial
differences. This is one of the most common and pernicious emotional ideologies underlying resistance (especially among White, middle-class students) to identifying with the other. However, if vulnerability concerns everyone and yet compassion is assigned differently (i.e., students

Through addressing this

think that some deserve compassion but others do not), then it is important to explore what it would take for students to begin imagining themselves as objects of lesser compassion in an unsuspected vulnerable moment.

issue it is possible to respond to some of the desensitization concerns outlined

in ways that do not reify stereotypes or promote essentialism,

earlier, because the dichotomies between we and they will become meaningless and unproductive. Second,

compassion serves to reinforce a strong connection between the personal and the political and
accentuates the interpersonal and the interrelational (Whitebrook 2002). Empathetic identification with the plight
of others, then, is not a sentimental recognition of potential samenessyou are in pain and so am I,
so we both suffer the samebut a realization of our own common humanity, while acknowledging
asymmetries of suffering, inequality, and injustice. A discourse of vulnerability neither eschews
questions of material suffering nor obscures issues of inequality on the contrary, it highlights both and injustice;

the symmetries and the asymmetries of vulnerability although the experience of vulnerability may be . That is,

universal, the discourse of common vulnerability raises important critical questions such as
more or less

vulnerable to what? to whom? to dismiss the possibility of sliding into a sentimental recognition of potential

samenesswhich is what a politics of compassion seeks to avoid

exactly ardently . Without this double realizationthat is, we are all vulnerable but not in the same manner

If properly recognized this realization can

our actions run the danger of being a form of charity and condescension toward those who are systematically and institutionally oppressed (Bunch 2002). in schools, double

potentially address both the concern about the desensitization of students and that of their self-
victimization, because the distance between spectator and sufferer will not be taken for granted any
more, but rather its multiple complexities will be acknowledged and interrogated the kind of . In a sense then,

compassion that is explored here requires a simultaneous identification and disidentification with the
suffering of the other. The simultaneous recognition of symmetry and asymmetry with the other
removes the arrogance of claiming that we know and feel their suffering. This emotional ambivalence pain and

of simultaneous identification and disidentification is needed to focus attention on the others

suffering, but not becoming too identified with it a point raised earlier in Nelsons (2004) reading of Arendts reporting on Eichmanns trial. Students who already endure forms of suffering, of course,

awareness that
do not need a pedagogy to enlighten them how to disidentify with their own suffering. This does not imply, however, that pedagogies that interrogate pity and encourage critical compassion are not for them; on the contrary, the critical

others are vulnerable is important in the struggle for action-oriented solidarity and the avoidance of
, too,

egocentricity and cultural narcissism . Finally, the third element of a politics of compassion is attentiveness to how the ethics of compassion questions injustice and inequality. 9 In particular, an important component of a

politics of compassion that is critical and justice-oriented is how it deals with anger at injustice (Hoggett 2006). A politics of compassion does not intentionally seek to cause anger, however, but rather encourages students and teachers to develop a critical analysis of anger, as it is likely
that they will experience such feelings, when they begin questioning long-held assumptions and beliefs about other people and social events (Zembylas 2007). Anger may call attention to demands for recognition, but also emphasize inequalities (Holmes 2004) and injustices at the civic
level (Silber 2011). Anger at injustice can be a positive and powerful source of personal and political insight in education (Lorde 1984), because it helps to move teachers and students out of a cycle of self-pity, blame, or guilt into a mode of action that somehow responds to injustice. For
example, civic anger can be promoted in the classroom as a form of cultivating individual and collective political consciousness and social resistance to injustices in the students community, although anger is not inevitably emancipatory. However, recognizing the positive power of anger

The pedagogical challenge for critical

and its link to the struggle against injustice in ones own community is valuable, if teachers want to promote options for action that may change the c onditions of others vulnerability.

pedagogues is how to encourage students to become active participants with a nuanced understanding
of the emotional complexities involved in histories of injustice and oppression .
 Berlant
Their arg is totally wrong---stories of pain combined with political action avoid
vampiristic consumption and motivate effective harm-reduction
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Washington U
in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, 228-232
Despite my disappointment in these lms and frequent annoyance with the narrative trajectory of many of their productions, I admit that I have a bit of a soft spot
for the Lifetime network. I,
too, used to automatically criticize made-for-television movies inspired by a true story about
women at risk. I found them exploitative, as any lm can be that makes entertainment out of a personal
tragedy. Lifetime Television has been called television for victims, in a criticism of its seemingly endless capacity to show lms about the victimization of
women.5 One of the questions that this moniker raises is what kind of storylines about people have the most dramatic impact. Popular lms with high dramatic
impact depict violence, stories of surviv- ing some atypical traumatic event, or struggling with some more powerful person or entity. One aspect of the criticisms of
Lifetime is the objection to formulaic melodrama in itself, framed within the gendered derision of womens victimization narratives or, on the other side of the
political spectrum, discomfort with such narratives as demeaning, reductive, and trite. The lms shown on the network, some produced by Lifetime but most
produced elsewhere, vary in quality, but the criticisms of Lifetime raise a question that I have explored throughout this book: What is the best way to represent a
story of suffering? 229 Simply
crying at a Lifetime lm clearly cannot sustain any sub- stantive political work
but what if the crying citizen is directed to, at the very least, awareness, and in the best case scenario,
action, after their emotional catharsis? Sorrow produced at the sight of a dead or wounded woman may
not accomplish anything unless the representation is framed in relationship to some political action,
but tears in relation to abolition and child abduction did produce action. However, a major ethical problem with using
sympathy and compassion as the primary mechanism for political change is that sentimental politics depends on the cultural feelings of those in power, and the
disempowered must depend on patronage. Hannah Arendt argues that compassion cannot embrace a larger population, but pity can, and pity is a dangerous affect
because it cannot exist without misfortune, thus it has just as much vested interest in the existence of the unhappy as thirst for power has a vested interest in the
existence of the weak . . . by being a virtue of sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glori cation of its cause,
which is the suffering of others.6 Following Arendt, the
charge against Lifetime could be that it thus encourages sadism
because watchers could take pleasure in pity. Or, as literary critic Marianne Noble has suggested in her study of sentimentality, the
network might embrace masochism because watchers would identify with the sufferer and might begin to take pleasure in these fantasies of subjection.7

However, these readings of the pleasures of consuming stories of subjection are too narrow . In the case of
Lifetime, casting these lms as only narratives of victimization is too limited a reading. After watching several lms, I began to

be compelled by stories I had not heard before about women interven- ing when the state fails to protect them. The stories were clearly not only

about victimization, but also about survival. The movies negotiate a balance between structural critique
and stories of individual heroism, and I am often disappointed, as with the lms discussed above, with how much weight is placed on the side of
individual transformation. Nonetheless I later began defending the network out of political principle, as part of a broader effort to challenge the 230 facile
denunciation of the word victim. Lifetimes lms are often poor in terms of artistic merit, but the network is contributing to a national conversation about what
agency can look like. My argument may seem as if I am looking for politics in all the wrong places, relying on
sentimentality when I should focus on politically rational arguments that eschew the appeals of emotional response. I
am not asking for radical
progressivism from popular culture. Instead, I am arguing that politics is often accomplished through the
popular and conventional work of emotional appeals, as many activists throughout history have

demonstrated. The question facing activists for African American womenor, for that matter, advocates for any identity
group outside the national imaginary of ideal citizenshipis not only how to expose discrimination, but also how to make use

of existing rhetoric so that attacks on their bodies can be read as pressing concerns for all U.S. citizens.
Affect and popular culture can be easily criticized as tools of anti-intellectual conservative machines. As Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno rightly argue, popular culture focuses on producing narratives of comfort or affects that can ultimately serve the states purposes.8 Totally
escaping the political storytelling of the status quo elicited by mass-produced texts is indeed impossible.
However, the impossibility of total escape does not preclude the possibility of making use of tools
produced by ideology. Mobilizing affect demands use of proven rhetorical tools, but this use need not
forestall a criticism of the need to employ the structures in the rst place. Negotiating the relationship
between challenging the masters tools and making use of them to garner nancial support and political
power is not an easy project, but it is a necessary one. The books title is inspired by this very tension between see- ing popular
cultural productions as inevitably politically inef cacious and recognizing the possibilities offered by making use of widely circulated genres and media. When Gil
Scott-Heron produced his famous choreo-poem, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, in 1974, he called attention to the disconnect between radical action and
violent struggles taking place in the streets and the pleasures of oblivion offered by scripted television and commercials.9 Television stood in for mass-produced
media that would not show what was really occurring in the streets, like pigs shooting down brothers in instant replay. Scott-Heron pointed to the need for his
audience to take to the streets and participate, live, in the revolution. Indeed, a 231 rue revolution requires live political action and organizing, and television
and many cultural productions neglect a multitude of issues that are politically urgent. However, it is clearly no longer the case that pigs shooting down brothers in
the street is left off of instant replay. Important events are depicted on the news, in scripted tele- vision shows, in genre ction, in magazines, in movies, and on
the Internet. You can even catch the occasional social message in a television commercial. Rather than reject various media wholesale, we are left with a set of
questions about what to do with contemporary media realities. How and why are certain kinds of traditionally neglected issues represented? Once represented,
how are they interpreted, and can activists play a role in that interpretation? What do activists do about the complexities lost when they make use of certain kinds
of mass-marketed discourses? Octavia Butler perhaps best articulated this problem in her science- ction novel Parable of the Talents. The novel exempli es what
Lauren Berlant calls the postsentimental textone that exhibits longing for the uncon icted intimacy and political promise senti- mentality offers but is skeptical of
the ultimate political ef cacy of making feeling central to political change. Her heroine, Olamina, suffers from hyperempathy syndrome, which allows her to feel
the emotions of others, but Butler is careful to argue that being able to feel the pain of others is not the means for liberationit is a delusional disorder. Thus
Olamina focuses on other modes of political change, and struggles to gain followers for her politi- cal and spiritual project for survival, Earthseed, in a United States
devastated by environmental destruction and the domination of a repressive fusion of government and a religious right organiza- tion called Christian America.
Through Olaminas struggle, Butler addresses the intellectual discomfort with consumption by having a character explicitly argue that only strategic commodi
cation will result in successful dissemination of radical ideas. Olamina struggles with the means by which she can circulate Earthseed, until someone suggests to her
that she must use the marketing tools she slightly disparages to compel people to her project. Her companion, Len, argues that Olamina must focus on what
people want and tell them how your system will help them get it. She resists the call to preach the way her Christian American enemy Jarret does, rejecting
preaching, telling folksy stories, emphasizing a pro t motive, and self-consciously using her charismatic persona to sell Earthseed. 232 Len argues that her
resistance to using the tools of commodi cation leaves the eld to people who are demagoguesto the Jarrets of the world.10 Butler ultimately presents the
moral that the project of producing populist texts for mass consumption cannot be left to those with unproductive or dangerous dreams, abandoned by a Left that
desires not only revolution but also political change resulting in real material gains. Clearly, the productions
of mass-culture are not the only
way to move people to action, but they are no doubt a tool. The dismissiveness accompanying the label of
the sentimental in contemporary culture is because academic critics claim that it does not do anything, it is the
antithesis of action. However, this book is about how sentimentality is doing things all the time. For better or worse, it
teaches people to identify proper objects of sympathy. It teaches people how to relate to each other.
It teaches people how to make compelling arguments about their pain. The circulation of sentimental political storytelling often
depends on media to which many progressives have a schizophrenic relationship. News media and television are often tools of the state, but citizens depend on the
news for the free circulation of information and often look for progressive politics in television shows. Others disavow the idiot box altogether and have faith only
in alternative news sources. However, the dichotomy between the popular and other spaces in which people tell stories about suffering is a false one. Sentimental

political storytelling is omnipresent in U.S. culture. While the discourse has many short-comings, people interested in
political change are taking a perilous road if they ignore the possibilities of imperfect stories told
about citizens in pain.
 Bataille
All of our above arguments answer this arg. If it turns into something later we get those answers in the
1AR.

Bataille concedes that we should evaluate consequences

Kenneth Itzkowitz, associate professor of philosophy at Marietta College, To witness spectacles of
pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille 1999

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_199901/ai_n8846380/pg_4

Yet self-preservation is also a fundamental value for Bataille; there is also ample motive to resist
the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the
above passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can
be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of . . . [ourselves]
and to know clearly what . . . [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly
disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are
most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively.
2NC
Snoek K
 Legalism
AT: Zanotti
Precaido 13 [Interview between Ricky Tucker and Beatriz Preciado, professor of Political History of the
Body, Gender Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII, Pharmacopornography: An Interview
with Beatriz Preciado, December 4, 2013, The Paris Review]

We dont have to be afraid of questioning democracy, but Im also very interested in disability,
nonfunctional bodies, other forms of functionality and cognitive experiences. Democracy and the model
of democracy is still too much about able bodies , masculine able bodies that have control over the
body and the individuals choices, and have dialogues and communications in a type of parliament. We
have to imagine politics that go beyond the parliament, otherwise how are we going to imagine politics
with nonhumans, or the planet? I am interested in the model of the body as subjectivity that is working
within democracy, and then goes beyond that. Also, the global situation that we are in requires a
revolution. There is no other option . We must manage to actually create some political alliance of
minority bodies, to create a revolution together. Otherwise these necropolitical techniques will take
the planet over . In this sense, I have a very utopian way of thinking, of rethinking new technologies of
government and the body, creating new regimes of knowledge. The domain of politics has to be taken
over by artists. Politics and philosophy both are our domains. The problem is that they have been
expropriated and taken by other entities for the production of capital or just for the sake of power
itself. Thats the definition of revolution, when the political domain becomes art. We desperately
need it .
 AT: Action Good
The drive to tie all theories to prescriptions for action is a capitalist ploy to require
utility from everything that you think or say our alternative is a masturbatory
philosophy that explicitly refuses to be useful so as to show us the gross failure of an
ideological system in which we are trapped
Esplin 4 prof of phil @ U of
Sydney

(Gregory, Philament Journal, Beating Off Teleology: A Defense of Non-Productive Thought)

**We do not endorse the gendered/ableist language in this evidence

Masturbatory philosophy seeks movement, yet has no destination. Rejecting the notion that
intellectual inquiry can at some point be fully completed, such a philosophy never tires of reconfiguring
its method. Thus, this beating off approach to thought celebrates the thoroughly offbeat. Here we must cite once more the influence of
Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-thought" on my conception of philosophy as a masturbatory project. Insisting on the non-teleological
potential of philosophy, they write in A Thousand Plateaus: But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end ,
origin nor destination ; to speak of the absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad
departure nor arrival,
play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion; it is the absolute speed of
movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor the two, nor the relation of
the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. [4] In this problematic the conflicting
rivalry between movement and destination undermines the Western sensibility of progress. In denying
an end point, Deleuze and Guattari liberate thought from being directed towards a goal, freeing
philosophy to become, as they put it, "nomadic." Perhaps it is, not so much a matter of nomadic politics being an alternative
means of intervention, as it is an accurate realization of our position as fractured subjects, isolated individuals
unable to collectively enact political change. In this respect, perhaps the hope that we can find liberation in being nomads
shares something with the sensibility that preoccupied Benjamin in his study of urban culture: the very mechanisms of capitalism
might contain their revolutionary potential. [5] Resisting the longing for a pre-capitalist world, we hope that we might find
redemption in embracing our status as de-centered subjects. It is true, of course, that this politics of resistance seems
strangely similar to the mechanisms of Capital. However, far from being a concession to the dominant powers, this is precisely its liberating
appeal. [6] The nomad's refusal to mourn a lost pre-modern world of harmony is matched by his willful celebration of the fractured. Following
Nietzsche, the
nomad refuses any "peace of soul." The nomad is at war with everything, including most
essential, himself. The nomad does not seek asylum, only further struggle. [7] There is no homeland he
seeks, no goal for which he strives. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par
excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterrirtorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary
(the sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the
contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on
deterritorialization itself. [8] In this formulation, there
is no end - in both senses of the word: there is no conclusion,
no completion, to the nomad's project. Additionally, the nomad has no goal, no purpose, to his
wandering. He travels to accomplish nothing. The end to his search comes in the search itself. At this
point, we must address the important objection that such nomadic, non-essentialist politics is purely a
negative project - it seeks only to deny current social configurations, offering no alternatives. In
response, we might point to the redemptive possibilities enabled by such theorizing in the negative,
something along the lines of what Fredric Jameson has diagnosed as a "utopian" politics. The absence of positive claims,
constitutes, on Jameson's account, its importance: Utopia
is somehow negative; and that it is most authentic when we
cannot imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in
demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future - our imprisonment in a non-utopian
present without historicity or futurity - so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are
somehow trapped and confined. [9] The brilliance of Jameson's dialectics is located in his awareness of the nonrepresentational
nature of utopian thinking, turning its supposed weakness into its strength through refusing to engage in positive characterizations of new
modes of sociality. [10] Of course the teleological sensibility that Deleuze and Guattari rebel against informs not
merely Leftist understanding of history, but the triumphant polemics of Fukuyama and others on the Right. What makes
Fukuyama's pronouncements so flawed is not in his perception of the current dominant status of Western Capitalist political configurations -
here he might be somewhat correct - but in his assumption that this fact is not at all a matter of contingent forces. History, according to
Fukuyama, could not have been different. In this understanding, everything happened for a reason, leading to the fulfillment of pre-established
design - that is, to the realization of the world as it is now. We have truly become children of the structures of modern
capitalism in our obsession with utility. While we might easily castigate American intellectual history, represented by that
curious word, pragmatism, as the most grievous instance of dogmatic rationalism, I suggest that the underpinnings of this sensibility lie, not
only in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but equally in the teleological grounding of the Western philosophical tradition. Aristotelian physics
conceives of a purpose behind the apparent chaos of the world: far from simply contingent configurations of matter, Aristotle asserts, objects
in the world possess a fixed essence that, when realized, contribute to the functioning of the larger system.
1NR
Case
 Communication Dead
faith in debates continual processes of agonistic contestation produces a bullet-
spraying of information which 1) destroys political efficacy through addiction to
debate simulation and 2) continues the investment of energy into the academic
industrial complex
Jean Baudrillard 1992 (Jean, Pataphysics of Year 2000)

Outside of this gravitational pull which keeps bodies in orbit, all the atoms of meaning lose themselves or self-absolve in space. Every single
atom follows its own trajectory towards infinity and dissolves in space. This is precisely what we are living in our present
societies occupied with the acceleration of all bodies, all messages, all processes in all possible senses and
wherein, via modern media, each event, each narrative, each image gets endowed with the simulation of an
infinite trajectory. Every political, historical, cultural fact is invested with a kinetic energy which spreads
over its own space and thrusts these facts into a hyperspace where they lose all meaning by way of an
inability to attain their meaning. It is useless to turn to science-fiction: from this point on, from the here and now, through our
computer science, our circuits and our channels, this particle accelerator has definitively disrupted and broken the referential orbit of things.
With respect to history, the narrative has become impossible since by definition it is the potential re-
narrativization of a sequence of meaning. Through the impulse of total diffusion and circulation each event is liberated for itself only
each event becomes atomized and nuclear as it follows its trajectory into the void. In order to diffuse itself ad infinitum, it has to be fragmented
like a particle. This is the way it attains a speed of no-return, distancing it from history once and for all. Every cultural, eventual group needs to
be fragmented, disarticulated to allow for its entry into the circuits, each language must be absolved into a binary mechanism or device to allow
for its circulation to take place not in our memory, but in the electronic and luminous memory of the computers. There is no human
language or speech (langage) that could compete with the speed of light. There is no event that could withstand its own diffusion across the
planet. No meaning stands a chance once offered the means of its own acceleration. There is no history that will
resist the centrifugal pull of facts or its short-circuiting in real time (in the same order of ideas: no sexuality will resist its own liberation, not a
single culture will foreclose its own advancement, no truth will defy its own verification, etc.). Even theory is no longer in the state of
"reflecting" on anything anymore. All it can do is to snatch concepts from their critical zone of reference and transpose them to the point of no
return, in the process of which theory itself too, passes into the hyperspace of simulation as it loses all "objective" validity, while it makes
significant gains by acquiring real affinity with the current system. The second hypothesis, with respect to the vanishing of history, is the
opposite of the first, i.e., it pertains not to the acceleration but to the slowing down of processes. This too is derived directly from physics.
Matter slows the passage of time. More precisely, time seems to pass very slowly upon the surface of a very dense body of matter. The
phenomenon increases in proportion to growth in density. The effect of this slowing down (ralentissement) will raise the wavelength of light
emitted by this body in a way that will allow the observer to record this phenomenon. Beyond a certain limit, time stops, the length of the wave
becomes infinite. The wave no longer exists. Light extinguishes itself. The analogy is apparent in the way historyslows down as it
brushes up against the astral body of the "silent majorities". Our societies are governed by this process of
the mass, and not only in the sociological or demographical sense of the word, but also in the sense of a "critical mass", of going
beyond a certain point of no-return. That is where the crucially significant event of these societies is to be found: the advent of their
revolutionary process along the lines of their mobility, (they are all revolutionary with respect to the centuries gone by), of their equivalent
force of inertia, of an immense indifference, and of the silent power of this indifference. This
inert matter of the social is not
due to a lack of exchanges, of information or of communication; on the contrary, it is the result of the
multiplication and saturation of exchanges. It is borne of the hyperdensity of cities, of merchandise, messages
and circuits. It is the cold star of the social, a mass at the peripheries of which history cools out. Successive events attain their
annihilation in indifference. Neutralized and bullet-sprayed by information, the masses neutralise
history retrospect and act as a screen of absorption. They themselves have no history, no meaning, no
conscience, no desire. They are potential residues of all history, of all meaning, of all desire. By inserting themselves into modernity,
all these wonderful things managed to invoke a mysterious counterpart, the misappreciation of which has unleashed all current political and
social strategies. This time, it's the opposite: history, meaning, progress are no longer able to find their speed or tempo of liberation. They can
no longer pull themselves out of this much too dense body which slows down their trajectory, slows down their time to the point from whereon
perception and imagination of the future escapes us. All social, historical and temporal transcendence is absorbed via
this mass's silent immanence. Already, political events no longer conduct sufficient autonomous energy to rouse us and can only
run their course as a silent movie in front of which we all sit collectively irresponsible. That is where history reaches its end, not because of the
lack of actors or participants, not due to a lack of violence (with respect to violence, there is always an increasing amount), not due to a lack of
events (as for events, there will always be more of them thanks to the role of the media and information!) but because of a slowing down or
deceleration, because of indifference and stupefaction. History can no longer go beyond itself, it can no longer envisage its own finality or
dream of its own end, it shrouds or buries itself in its immediate effect, it self-exhausts in special effects, it implodes in current events.
Essentially, one can no longer speak of the end of history since it has no time to rejoin its own end. As its effects accelerate, its meaning
inexorably decelerates. It will end up stopping and extinguishing itself like light and time at the peripheries of an infinitely dense mass...
Humanity too, had its big-bang: a certain critical density, a certain concentration of people and exchanges that compel this explosion we call
history and which is none other than the dispersal of dense and hieratic cores of earlier civilizations. Today, we are living an effect of reversal:
we have overstepped the threshold of critical mass with respect to populations, events, information, control of the inverse process of inertia of
history and politics. At the cosmic level of things, we don't know anymore whether we have reached this speed of liberation wherein we would
be partaking of a permanent or final expansion (this, no doubt, will remain forever uncertain). At the human level, where prospects are more
limited, it is possible that the energy itself employed for the liberation of the species (acceleration of birthrates, of techniques and exchanges in
the course of the centuries) have contributed to an excess of mass and resistance that bear on the initial energy as it drags us along a ruthless
movement of contraction and inertia. Whether the universe infinitely expands or retracts to an infinitely dense and infinitely small core will
hinge upon its critical mass (with respect to which speculation itself is infinite in view of the discovery of newer particles). Following the
analogy, whether our human history will be evolutionary or involuted will presumably depend upon the critical mass of humanity. Are we to
see ourselves, like the galaxies, on a definitive orbit that distances us from each other under the impact of a tremendous speed, or is this
dispersal to infinity itself destined to reach an end, and the human molecules bound to draw closer to each other by way of an inverse effect of
gravitation? The question is whether a human mass that grows day by day is able to control a pulsation of this genre? Third hypothesis, third
analogy. But we are still dealing with a point of disappearance, a point of evanescence, a vanishing-point, this time however along the lines of
music. This is what I call the stereophonic effect. We are all obsessed with high fidelity, with the quality of musical "transmission"
(rendu). On the console of our channels, equipped with our tuners, our amplifiers and our baffles, we mix, regulate and multiply
soundtracks in search of an infallible or unerring music. Is this, though, still music? Where is the threshold of high fidelity beyond the point of
which music as such would disappear? Disappearance would not be due to the lack of music, it would disappear for having stepped beyond this
boundary, it would disappear into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect. Beyond this point, neither judgement nor
aesthetic pleasure could be found anymore. Ecstasy of musicality procures its own end. The disappearance of history is of the same order: there
too, we have gone beyond this limit or boundary where, subjected to factual and informational sophistication, history as such
ceases to exist. Large doses of immediate diffusion, of special effects, of secondary effects, of fading and this famous Larsen effect
produced in acoustics by an excessive proximity between source and receiver, in history via an excessive proximity, and therefore the
disastrous interference of an event with its diffusion create a short-circuit between cause and effect, similarly to
what takes place between the object and the experimenting subject in microphysics (and in the human sciences!). All things entailing a certain
radical uncertainty of the event, like excessive high fidelity, lead to a radical uncertainty with respect to music. Elias Canetti says it well: " as

of a certain point", nothing is true anymore. This is also why the soft music of history escapes us, it
 Berlant
The affective bounty provided of the ballot creates a proximity to the political in
which the affirmatives oppression becomes a heroic moment for the judge---this
continues the circulation of survival narratives upon which capitalist social life thrives-
--the process of attachement becomes that which we pin our political hopes, making
proximity to the political the boundary at which our transformation is drawn
Lauren Berlant 11, prof at U Chicago, Cruel Optimism, 174-8

So even if, in these two films, the promise of familial love is the convey- ance for the incitement to
misrecognize the bad life as a good one, this is also a story about the conditions under which fantasy
takes the most conservative shape on the bottom of so many class structures. The adults want to pass
the promise of the promise on to their children.14 That may be the children's only sure inheritance-
fantasy as the only capital assuredly pass- able from one contingent space to another. And of course
here, as every- where, the gendered division of labor mediates the attritions of capital and the intimate
spaces in which the labor of living is imagined beyond the urgencies of necessity. As Gayatri Spivak
writes of another example, "This is not the old particularism/universalism debate. It is the emergence of
the generalized value form, global commensurability in the field of gender. All the diversity of daily life
escapes this, yet it is inescapable." ts Rosetta and La Promesse are training differently gendered children
to take up a position not within normative institutions of intimacy but within something proximate to
them. The hypervigilance required to maintain this proximity is the main visceral scene of post-Fordist
affect. The fantasy of intimacy that will make one feel normal (as opposed to making one able to secure
the conditions of dependable reciprocal life) provides a false logic of commensurateness and
continuity between everyday appearance and a whole set of abstract value- generating relations. The
aesthetic of the potentially good enough love enables crisis to feel ordinary and less of a threat than the
affective bounty that makes it worth risking being amid capitalist social life. But in the Dardennes'
mise en scene, normative intimacy has been worn down to the nub of the formal and the gestural. The
emotions associated with intimacy, like tenderness, are most easily assumed as scavenging strate- gies
that the children are compelled to develop to get by. Igor acts genuinely sweet to the old woman whose
wallet he steals in the opening scene; Rosetta [175] acts in loving and protective ways toward her
mother, whom she also beats for manifesting nonnormative appetites. Roger appeals to Igor for loyalty,
although he has also lied to him, beat him, and destroyed his opportunity to be a kid and to cultivate a
different life (also involving building things: but go-carts that move, not houses that require property).
Yet Roger can still say, "The house, this whole thing, it's all for you!" To which Igor can only say, "Shut
up! Shut up!" because there is no story to counter Roger with, no proof that it wasn't love, or that love
was a bad idea. Apparently, the register of love is what there is to work with, when you are managing
belonging to worlds that have no obligation to you. But this is why optimism for belonging in a scene ofp
otential reciprocity amid tragic impediments is, in these films, not merely cruel, even in its repe- titions.
The endings of these films tie the audience in identificatory knots of vicarious reciprocity that extend in
affective and formal ways beyond the actual episode. Rosetta approaches her final shots having just had
to quit her hard-won job in order to take care of her degenerating mother. She is miser- able and
defeated by her daughterly love and her commitment to not living outside the loop of a reciprocity
whose feeling feels legitimate to her. At the end, we see her dragging a big canister of gas. It is unclear
whether she is about to commit suicide by asphyxiation, or to make a go of things the way she always
does, and it doesn't matter: her body collapses in exhaus- tion as Riquet arrives. Riquet-whom she has
previously beaten up, left to drown, turned in as a thief, and had a strange, unsteady, asexual night with,
a night that ends with her sleeping, not alone, but whispering intimately with herself.16 Riquet-who is
stalking her in revenge for taking his job. He is the only resource for potential reciprocity she has. As the
film closes, Rosetta weeps, looking off-screen toward he who is only a proximate friend, in the hope of
stimulating his compassionate impulse to rescue her. And the film cuts to darkness. Likewise, the close
of La Promesse involves a scene of wishful gallantry. In the train station, just as Assita is about to escape
Belgium, Igor's father, Igor, and the whole shoddy mess, Igor confesses one part of his secret. Perversely
fullfilling and breaking "the promise" after which the picture is named, he gambles that revealing
Amidou's death will keep Assita there, and indeed it binds her and her child to him and to the local
scene of danger, violence, and poverty for the indefinite future. In the final shot, they walk away from
the camera, together and not together, and as they become smaller the film cuts sharply to black. Both
of these works thus end engendering in the audience [176]a kind of normativity hangover, a residue of
the optimism of their advocacy for achieving whatever it was for which the protagonists were
scavenging. Because Rosetta and Igor are cut off from the normal, the spectators become holders of
the promise. In classic Hollywood cinema and much of queer theory, such expectant "families we
choose" endings would make these films, generically, come- dies, and the anxieties we feel on the way
would be just the effects of the conventional obstacles genres put out there that threaten the genre's
fail- ure.17 In Foucault's rendering, such scenes of communicative tears and confession would mark the
children's ascension into sexuality, that is, into the place where desiring acts evince the youths'
subjugation to the clarifying taxonomic machinery of familial and social discipline. In La Promesse and
Rosetta it is where they become sexual, but such evocations of the two clari- fying institutions of social
intelligibility, genre and gender, would mishear the tonalities of these particular episodes. In these
scenarios, sexuality is not only an accession to being intelligible, but also a performance of affective
avarice, a demand for a feeling fix that would inject a sense of normality. What does it mean to want a
sense of something rather than something? In the emergent regime of privatization that provokes
aggressive fantasies of affective social confirmation in proximity to the political often without being in
its register, genre shifts can point to new ways of apprehending improvisations within the ordinary. In
the Dardennes' films, the formal achievement of genre and gender suggests not success but survival, a
survival reeking of something that partakes of the new generic hybrid, situation tra9edy: the marriage
between tragedy and situation comedy where people are fated to express their flaws episodically, over
and over, without learning, changing, being relieved, becoming better, or dying.18 In the situation
comedy, personality is figured as a limited set of repetitions that will inevitably [177] appear in new
situations-but what makes them comic and not tragic is that in this genre's imaginary, the world has the
kind of room for us that enables us to endure. In contrast, in the situation tragedy, one moves between
having a little and being ejected from the social, where life is lived on the outside of value, in terrifying
nonp laces where one is a squatter, trying to make an event in which one will matter to something or
someone, even as a famil- iar joke (in the situation tragedy, protagonists often try heart-wrenchingly to
live as though they are in a situation comedy).19 In reinventing some ver- sion of the couple, the family,
or the love link, at the end, Rosetta and Igor are repeating a desire they have fancied and longed for
throughout: a desire simply and minimally to be in the game. Not controlling the conditions of labor,
they take up positions within sexuality that at least enable a feeling of vague normalcy that can be
derived on the fly, in a do-it-yourself (DIY) fash- ion. They do this in gestures that try to force a sense of
obligation in someone, which will just have to stand in as the achievement of their desire for
acknowledgment and a way of life. Thus, we see forming here submission to necessity in the guise of
desire; a passionate attachment to a world in which they have no controlling share; and aggression, an
insistence on being proximate to the thing. If these motives stand as the promise of the scene that will
provide them that holding feeling they want, the proof that it's worth investing in these forms is not too
demanding. There is a very low evidentiary bar. The key here is proximity; ownership has been
relinquished as the children's fantasy. The geopolitical space of fantasy is not a nation or a plot of land
secured by a deed but a neighborhood. And just as both films feature careers involving soldering and
sewing, techniques that bind parts to bigger wholes, they restage at the close our protagonists' coercive
appeal to a relative stranger for rescue and reciprocity, and all the stranger has to do is to be near, to
stick around. [178] That this is an appeal to a proximate normativity is signified by their spatial
placement outside the home (in a terminal, on the ground) but never very far afield at all; they are all in
proximity to the natal and fantasmatic home, in the end. And, affectively speaking, is Riquet not a man
on whom the silent Rosetta must depend; and is Assita not a motherfsisterfloverffriend forced by Igor,
by his sweet downcast eyes and aphonia, to submit? Normalcy's embrace can only flicker, therefore, in
the Dardennes' ren- dering of the contemporary historical moment. Each time it looks as though a
reciprocal relation has been forged, the temporal and monetary economy in which the experience of
belonging can be enjoyed is interrupted by other needs, the needs of others that seem always to take
priority. Nonetheless, in the context of material and parental deprivation, Rosetta and Igor crowd the
cramped space of any potentially transitional moment to maintain, for one more minute, their optimism
about having a thing, a life, a scene of practices of belonging and dignity that can be iterated, repeated,
and depended on without much being looked forward to. So, what does it mean that the endings of
these films solicit audience desire one more time for the protagonists to receive, finally, the help they
seek because it feels like their last chance to experience, through openness to another, a good change
amid the violence and numbing everywhere present? Since "at all costs" is no metaphor from this perch
on the bottom of the class structure, here fantasy and survival are indistinguishable effects of the
affects' own informal economy. To be made to desire a normativity hangover trains the audience in
cruel optimism.