Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 1 | Opponent: Towson  | Judge: 

1.    Their notion of debate produces antagonisms between becoming complicit with the status quo and being producers of expert knowledge causing their calls for openness to fail

Welsh 12 Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency Scott Welsh Department of Communication Appalachian State University Philosophy and Rhetoric  Volume 45, Number 1, 2012

I argue that the ongoing debate in rhetorical studies about the relationship between scholarly reflection and political agency is illuminated by Žižek’s account of ideology, identity, and desire. In this debate, references to the factual, the empirical, or the material are deployed, not incidentally, to address the impossible subject position that academics inhabit. Often pursuing lines of research motivated by a desire to create wholeness amid End Page 2 social, cultural, political, or institutional brokenness, rhetoric scholars nevertheless become, in the sustained act of academic investigation, significantly alienated from motivating practical concerns. Moreover, because rhetoric scholars spend a large majority of their time in faculty offices, classrooms, and archives of one kind or another, by necessity, mostly talking, reading, and writing about political action, the felt alienation from public life can feel like hypocrisy or, even worse, complicity in the perpetuation of brokenness.

The subject position inhabited by many rhetoric scholars is not only structured by a fundamental antagonism between scholarly reflection and political agency but also by an antagonism between the production of expert knowledge and a democratic faith in the judgment of the people. An academic produces accounts or recommendations that are intended to enlighten, supplement, or replace those currently accepted by a public imagined to be, at its best, democratic. At the same time, the rhetoric scholar committed to democracy often imagines that the academic’s role is to resist the expert control of publics. Taken together, the two antagonisms yield a deeply conflicted scholarly identity: the suspension of immediate action in favor of reflection can be reduced to an act of complicity in the status quo, just as the act of producing expert accounts can be reduced to the demonstration of a lack of trust in democratic publics. The challenge is to resist synthetically resolving these antagonisms, whether in confirming or disconfirming ways. Rather, as Žižek might suggest, the aim should be to “come to terms” with these antagonisms by articulating academic identities less invested in reparative fantasies that imagine a material resolution of them (1989, 3, 5, 133; 2005, 242–43). Accounts that fail to come to terms with the impossibility of closure and continue to invest in such fantasies yield either indignant calls for activism or too-easy assurance of the potential consequence of one’s work, neither of which is well suited to scholar-citizen engagement.

2.    Their mode of advocacy should be rejected – it only results in ideological fantasies

Welsh 12 Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency Scott Welsh Department of Communication Appalachian State University Philosophy and Rhetoric  Volume 45, Number 1, 2012

In light of Žižek’s account of antagonism, one should not be surprised, however, by the conclusion that broadly effective activism is only possible outside of academia. The failure to unify scholarship and politics was predestined in the symbolic imagination that rendered them unified. Instead, effectively coming to terms with an antagonism means finding ways to keep the competing elements of the antagonism in view—and not simply as “bad” academic pretensions in conflict with “good” political motives. Rather, the two elements that constitute the scholarly subject position, reflective investigation and the production of unavoidable consequences, must be constantly present, each vying for our attention. And, insofar as the two elements are not kept in tension with each other, the scholarly subject position becomes increasingly unbearable, leading to the production of what Žižek calls supplemental ideological fantasies or ready explanations for the gap.

3.    Solutions must be based in the institutions that created them

Ruggero 9 E. Colin Ruggero  PhD Candidate at the New School for Social research, engaged as an activist and living in Philadelphia Radical Green Populism: Climate Change, Social Change and the Power of Everyday Practices http:~/~/theanarchistlibrary.org/library/e-colin-ruggero-radical-green-populism-climate-change-social-change-and-the-power-of-everyday-phttp://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/e-colin-ruggero-radical-green-populism-climate-change-social-change-and-the-power-of-everyday-p

Radical Green Populism is a model or framework to potentially guide further discussions of radical responses to climate change. It comes from a strong desire to see radical discourse that can encompass both the large and small-scale elements of social change. Environmental problems must be framed and connected to the social systems that created them. However, this can prove to be an overwhelming picture. By linking that critique to alternative visions, embodied in day-today material practices that can fulfill basic needs, the overwhelming picture suddenly becomes a bit more manageable. That said, there remains a great deal of work to be done. Again, this is a framework for discussion; the internal elements of the strategy must be filled in. Radicals must carefully deliberate the development of alternative social institutions and intellectual resources for subversion and, ultimately, change. What will they look like? Self-managed energy systems, car and bicycle shares, farming collectives, green technology design firms, recycling and composting operations, construction and refitting operations...the needs are broad and the possibilities are endless, but each must be carefully considered. What institutions and resources might prove most valuable over the long term? What institutions and resources can help strengthen radical communities? What institutions and resources would other communities be best served by, a particularly important question in the process of broadening the cultural-social unity of a wide social base for change.

4.    The aff’s form of criticism becomes a never ending trap of self-criticism- makes moving beyond the criticism impossible

Ono and Sloop 92 COMMITMENT TO TELOS—A SUSTAINED CRITICAL RHETORIC KENT A. ONO AND JOHN M. SLOOP KentA. Ono and John M. Sloop are doctoral candidates at the University of Iowa COMMUNICATION MONOGRAPHS, Volume 59, March

By persistently acknowledging and reflecting on the social aspect of a "critical rhetoric," one is able to escape the dogmatic traps that accompany a stress on the critique of domination. Rorty (1989) notes this very problem when he suggests that, "Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seem to me invaluable in our attempt to form a private self-image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics" (p. 83). Rorty is pointing to the tension between accepting the poststructural displacement of an absolute grounding of knowledge and creating a position of "play," of aestheticizing being, for the scholar. That is, he is concerned that all too often those theorists who have broken the philosopher's stone have shattered personal and social responsibility with it. Rather than turning their attention to social and political conditions. such theorists have often given up any responsibility except for the creation of their "self and the cultivation of the type of play one can engage in if one gives up absolute morals. Such a critique can be levelled at Baudrillard, a theorist who moves from a period in which he shows an expressed interest in changing the social conditions and codes of oppression in The Mirror of Production (1975) to his more recent work (Baudrillard, 1977/1987) in which he takes on the role of a describer, rather than transformer, of postmodern society. Our attempt here is both to accept the stance of the ironist, indeed to accept that one could choose, like Baudrillard, to be "giddy" in the face of reality, while simultaneously urging the critical rhetorician to choose not to play but to create an end which could guide us in attempting to effect social change.** As Rorty (1989) notes, "A belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worthy of dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance" (p. 189). In sum, then, a stress on McKerrow's critique of freedom has the potential to lead to a shedding of every vestige of commitment and predisposition to a particular viewpoint for the sake of constant self-reflection and self-criticism. Such a position necessarily commits a critic to a self-criticism from which the critic could not escape long enough to provide direction. It is just this potential whirlpool of criticism brought about by the critique of freedom that we hope to amend. The remainder of this essay will be an attempt to conceptualize and identify an arena for commitment within a critical rhetoric. The critic in our conception maintains a commitment toward telos through which criticism is directed, while simultaneously recognizing the contingencies of this goal. One of the results of this configuration of a critical rhetoric will be the transcendence of the critiques of domination and of freedom; our critic will recognize that all criticism, because it shifts the current relations of power, critiques forms of domination by transforming them into new forms of power.^ The critique of domination and critique of freedom are effectively one, and are little more than different perspectives about a single discursive struggle.

5.    The relativist approach undermines open academic debate which fuels public disenfranchisement from the political process

Furedi 6 Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Where have all the intellectuals gone? 2^nd edition, p. 76-77

The powerful influence of relativist currents has made it difficult to debate matters of substance. As Russell Berman and Stephen Haber argue, 'the shared beliefs that allowed debate to take place have now largely been erodcd'.6 Without a common intellectual language and a minimalist consensus about standards, real debate becomes difficult to conduct. The estrangement of academia from the intense and creative experience of debates that have consequences has encouraged a cultural style that celebrates intellectual disengagement. Public debate, controversy and the single-minded pursuit of ideas, once seen as fundamental features of academic life, are no longer accorded automatic respect. Academic freedom is no longer an inviolable right that people are prepared to defend. Traditionally academics, particularly social scientists, have been in the forefront of asserting the principle of freedom of speech. These days academics attempt to deny their colleagues the right to free speech. The campaign to ban Tom Paulin from speaking at Harvard for being anti-Semitic, and the censoring of Israeli academics by the editor of an academic journal based in Manchester on the grounds that they are Israeli, is a testimony to the illiberal tendencies that prevail in academia. Academic freedom has become negotiable. In the US there has been little opposition to the introduction of campus speech codes that prohibit speech that 'offends'. In the UK, academics have barely raised a murmur about the introduction of processes and regulations that compromise the free pursuit of knowledge and research. Lecturers now need to ensure that their teaching is consistent with bureaucratically devised 'learning outcomes' that meet the requirements of externally imposed benchmarking criteria. Lecturers are no longer supposed to teach what they think needs to be taught, and they certainly do not have the right to lecture material for which the learning outcome cannot be demonstrated in advance. Fortunately, despite these formalities, scholars still teach what they think they should teach, but the acceptance of these bureaucratic codes underlines the fragile foundation for academic freedom. Of course words can offend. But one of the roles of a university is to question conventional truths. The pursuit of ideas has always demanded that intellectuals question the sacred and mention the unmentionable. A civilized intellectual institution teaches its members how not to take criticisms personally, and how not to be offended by uncomfortable ideas. It also teaches its members how to deal with being offended. Cavalier attitudes towards free and unfettered debate, and lack of enthusiasm for engagement in controversy, contribute towards the wider sense of political malaise. Instead of countering the public's mood of disengagement, such attitudes provide cultural affirmation for it. The absence of a cultural commitment to debate does not cause the disengagement of the public from the political process, but these two things are inextricably linked. More importantly, the diminishing status of debate underlines the lack of respect that society accords to intellectual clarification.

6.    Mass public disenfranchisement causes war, slavery, and authoritarianism

Boggs 2k (CAROL BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 00, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1)

But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism.  While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique.  In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo.  Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible.  The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action.  If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”.  Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare.  A belief that totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises.  Oakeshott’s minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people’s lives.  Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege.  Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration.  Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system.  In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories. 

Experienced based evidence undermines the value of collective research and knowledge- their standard for evidence makes evaluating evidence impossible further delegitimizing the importance of all forms of knowledge

Furedi 6 Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Where have all the intellectuals gone? 2^nd edition, p. 62-64

Today's postmodernists follow the path set out by the antiEnlightenment reaction of the nineteenth century. They claim that all knowledge is socially constructed; therefore, all knowledges are incommensurable and all knowledges are in principle, equally valid. Truth depends entirely on the perspective adopted. Postmodernists frequently claim that there is no single road to understanding. This insistence on difference also pertains to methodology - truths are arrived at by different methods. The elaboration of the relativization of methodology is one of the distinctive characteristics of postmodernism. It is based on the old romantic conviction that the road to understanding is through subjectivity, specifically intuition. Postmodernists have elaborated this idea to suggest that since there are many truths, there are also many valid ways of getting there. It is also suggested that those who live a particular experience are best capable of understanding it. Some would claim they are the only ones fit to comment on their particular experience. The elaboration of methodological relativism is rarely made explicit. In general, it assumes the polemical form of an accusation of cultural imperialism or ethnocentrism. For example, in the United States it has been strongly suggested that only blacks have the right to write black history. During the past three decades a number of groups have taken out a patent on their soul, and their unique way of knowing becomes the validation of their knowledge. Of all groups, academic feminism has the most elaborated particularistic epistemology. In reaction to an apparently male-centred world-view, some cultural feminists try to project a female-centred one. Carole Gilligan's A Woman's Way of Knowing clearly expresses the trend towards the marriage of subjective experience and knowledge. Moreover, as Novick writes, 'for many feminists the ideology of "difference" extended to fundamental questions of cognitive style and epistemological values' .14 Specific female qualities are abstracted by feminist theorists to elaborate women's perspective. Needless to say, from this exclusivist cultural point of view only women can know women. Novick reminds us that by the 'late 1970s the assertion that women's history could only be legitimately written from a feminist standpoint was no longer argued; it was a settled question, beyond argument'.15 The denunciation of 'Western rationality' or 'male logic' assumes that theorizing and knowing is to be equated with experiencing. This perspective contends that the path to the truth is above all through subjective experience rather than theorizing or contemplating. Yet being black or white or male or female or disabled or Japanese does not confer a privileged access to the knowledge of the experience. As Mattick persuasively argues, being part of a culture does not give the individual greater understanding of that culture than those who study it from the outside. He writes that 'participants in a culture, even while they may (and indeed must) know the rules and criteria regulating social behaviour in that culture, may have only a very vague notion of how the parts of social life in which they participate fit together'2. To strengthen his point, Mattick cites Fritz Machlup's illustration of an alien Martian anthropologist who observes the stock market and interviews its participants: Since probably 999 out of 1000 persons on the stock market do not really know what it does and how it does it, the most diligent observer-plus-interviewer would remain largely ignorant. Alas, economics cannot be learned either by watching or by interviewing the people engaged in economic activities. It takes a good deal of theorizing before one can grasp the complex interrelations in an economic system. 16 Observation, like experience, is meaningless outside the framework of a theory. The precondition for a sound account of how the stock exchange works is not contingent on being employed there. Someone with the possession of a sound theory of economic life is far more likely to grasp the intricate workings of the stock market. The tendency to equate knowledge with the insights that people gain from fragmentary experience makes it impossible to have a meaningful common standard to evaluate knowledge claims. Through transforming knowledge into knowledges, the role of the intellectual has become compromised. The knowledge possessed by the intellectual can be interpreted as just a point of view with no special significance for society. It is not only the role of the intellectual that has been affected by this trend. The growing trend towards the relativization of knowledge claims has had a significant impact on pedagogic theories and practice. Many educationalists now regard experiential learning as having a status comparable to theoretical knowledge.

F/W

A. Interp – the AFF must defend a USFG policy that either reduces restrictions on or provides financial incentives for energy production.

“Resolved” means the framework for the resolution is to enact a policy.

Words and Phrases 64

(Permanent Edition)

Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.

The USFG is the government in Washington D.C.

Encarta 0

(http://encarta.msn.com)

 “The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC”

B. Violation— the AFF does not defend the literal USFG implementation of a policy

C. Reasons to prefer—

1) Competition – without a stable resolutional advocacy, the AFF can sever all links and moot pre-round prep; competitive equity is valuable and necessary for self-growth. We must have a basis to challenge the AFF and engage in struggle.

Yovel 5

Jonathan, Faculty of Law at University of Haifa in Israel, “Gay Science as Law: An Outline for a Nietzschean Jurisprudence,” Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws, 2005, rehosted at http:~/~/papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950742url:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950742 // myost

While reactive forces respond to their context and in this way are dictated by them, active forces find their own mediums for action. There is a catch, however. Force needs resistance in order to matter, grow, and be challenged. In a paragraph whose importance to the understanding of Nietzsche’s “mechanics” of power can hardly be exaggerated, he spells it out: Strong nature . . . needs objects of resistance; hence it looks for what resists . . . . The strength of those who attack can be measured in a way by the opposition they require: every growth is indicated by the search for a mighty opponent . . . . The task is not simply to master what happens to resist, but what requires us to stake all our strength, suppleness, and fighting skill—opponents that are our equals.41 Thus the will is measured in the scope of its challenges. But the active will is not satisfied by those challenges it happens to come by. For the challenge to be worthwhile it must be the most powerful possible, and so the Person of Power must cultivate the will to power of those who are not. In debate, the Person of Power will make the best of her opponent’s position, nourish it, then go after the strong points or strongest version or interpretation. Kasparov must play Karpov, then Deep Blue. The philosophical problems most worthy of engagement—and Nietzsche spoke of problems as something a philosopher challenges to single combat—are the toughest ones. Of himself, he asserts “I only attack causes which are victorious . . . . I have never taken a step publicly that did not compromise me: that is my criterion of doing right.”42

2) Creation – creativity is only possible within a system of rules. We cannot speak from nowhere, so we must locate ourselves within morality in order to grow or create.

Ramaekers 1

Stefan, assistant professor at the Laboratory for Education and Society at KU Leuven in Belgium, “Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35.2 (2001): 255-264 // myost

Much as one values Nietzsche for his cultural criticism and for his culturally innovative ideas, it would be a mistake to overlook the importance he attaches to obedience. Johnston argues that one cannot infer an anarchistic account of education from Nietzsche's writings because of his emphasis on obedience and discipline in the primary school.2 However, Johnston fails to give obedience its rightful place. For Nietzsche's account of morality (particularly in Beyond Good and Evil, and more specifically in the chapter `The Natural History of Morals') shows that obedience is not just about keeping pupils in line, but means obedience to cultural and historical rules, and as such is a moral imperative for all of humankind. The most important thing about every system of morals for Nietzsche is that it is `a long constraint', a `tyranny of arbitrary laws'.3 For such cultural and historical phenomena as virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality, philosophy, politics and so on the creative act requires not absolute freedom or spontaneous unconstrained development but subordination to what is or at least appears to be `arbitrary'. It entails a long bondage of the spirit. The singular fact remains . . . that everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law; and in all seriousness, it is not at all improbable that precisely this is `nature' and `natural'—and not laisser-aller!4 The nature of morality inspires us to stay far from an excessive freedom and cultivates the need for restricted horizons. This narrowing of perspective is for Nietzsche a condition of life and growth.5 It is interesting to see how this is prefigured in Nietzsche's second Unfashionable Observation (On the Utility and Liability of History for Life). The cure for what he there calls `the historical sickness',6 i.e. an excess of history which attacks the shaping power of life and no longer understands how to utilise the past as a powerful source of nourishment, is (among others) the ahistorical: `the art and power to be able to forget and to enclose oneself in a limited horizon'.7 Human beings cannot live without a belief in something lasting and eternal.8 Subordination to the rules of a system of morality should not be understood as a deplorable restriction of an individual's possibilities and creative freedom; on the contrary, it is the necessary determination and limitation of the conditions under which anything can be conceived as possible. Only from within a particular and arbitrary framework can freedom itself be interpreted as freedom. In other words, Nietzsche points to the necessity of being embedded in a particular cultural and historical frame. The pervasiveness of this embeddedness can be shown in at least four aspects of Nietzsche's writings. First, in his critique of morality Nietzsche realises all too well that it is impossible to criticise a system of morals from outside, as a view from nowhere. Instead a particular concretisation is required. Beyond Good and Evil may very well, as a prelude to a philosophy of the future, excite dreams about unlooked-for horizons and unknown possibilities. In The Genealogy of Morals, however, written by Nietzsche as further elaboration and elucidation of the same themes, he explicitly states that Beyond Good and Evil does not imply going beyond good and bad.9 Criticising a system of morals inevitably means judging from a particular point of view.

3) Education – we must learn to lie and exploit systems of rules. This is necessary to function in society, where we have to work with others and obey the rules.

Ramaekers 1

Stefan, assistant professor at the Laboratory for Education and Society at KU Leuven in Belgium, “Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35.2 (2001): 255-264 // myost

In view of the importance Nietzsche attaches to obedience, to being embedded, one should not be surprised that he considers initiating the child into a particular constellation of arbitrary laws to be a natural part of her education. For the child, education means, at least in the early stages, being subordinated to a particular view of what is worth living for, and being introduced into a system of beliefs. Education consists in teaching the child to see and to value particular things, to handle a perspective: to lie. The argument goes even further. In view of Nietzsche's perspectivism one must now say that not initiating the child into a perspective, not teaching him to lie is educationally speaking not even an option: the child makes himself familiar with a perspective he cannot ignore since this is the precondition for making sense of anything and exploring the unfamiliar. Put differently, because of the necessity of being embedded a human being is moulded into a particular shape that he cannot do without. My understanding of Nietzsche is consequently at variance with any understanding which argues for a radical individualism and takes the individual to be the point of reference of all values and truths. Johnston35 for example tilts the scales too strongly towards the individual as a self-affirming autonomous agent and hence disregards the epistemologically and ethically constitutive importance of the individual's embeddedness for what she affirms as true and valuable. He even claims that the individual put forward by Nietzsche is the antithesis of the social realm. For Nietzsche, Johnston writes, `there is no question of a reconciliation between the realms of the individual and the social'.36 Referring to Dewey, he makes it look as if the Nietzschean individual can withdraw herself from social embeddednes since she apparently has no need to refer her own action to that of others.37 Adopting a thoroughly Nietzschean stand on education therefore requires, in Johnston's opinion, a break with education conceived as a matter of `making familiar with' and of being initiated into a particular cultural inheritance, that is as a matter of socialisation in this rich sense. In consequence education becomes essentially self-education. It is not hard to see that focusing in this manner on the individual is greatly welcomed by progressive educational movements such as child- centred pedagogies. In their critique of the traditional educational model, characterised simply as a bestowal of values by the educator, they show their concern with the child's personal identity. In this view initiating the child into a particular view of life does injustice to her personal identity, her true self is suppressed, suffocated and not given the opportunity to develop into what it `really' is. Education should by contrast create room for the self-development of the child's true self: this seems to be the educational lesson to be learned from Rousseau, Rogers, Steiner and Freinet among others. An emphasis on a particular kind of experiential learning, supported by a distinctive conception of the nature of experience, warrants the child giving meaning to her own life.

4) Purposelessness – the ballot cannot be based on self-affirmation. Such affirmation can have no higher purpose; it cannot require the judge’s authority nor can it be premised on success. Like Sisyphus, only when we persist with no hope of overcoming this world by achieving some metaphysical victory does it become possible to celebrate life. For their 1AC to be meaningful, you should vote for us. Vote NEG to recognize the AFF’s ability to be self-affirming, requiring the anxiety the ballot represents.

Lane 96

Bob Lane, Instructor at Malaspina University-College in British Columbia, Canada, “The Absurd Hero,” 1996, http:~/~/www.levity.com/corduroy/htm // myost

Sisyphus is the absurd hero. This man, sentenced to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain and then watching its descent, is the epitome of the absurd hero according to Camus. In retelling the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is able to create an extremely powerful image with imaginative force which sums up in an emotional sense the body of the intellectual discussion which precedes it in the book. We are told that Sisyphus is the absurd hero "as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing." (p.89). Sisyphus is conscious of his plight , and therein lies the tragedy. For if, during the moments of descent, he nourished the hope that he would yet succeed, then his labour would lose its torment. But Sisyphus is clearly conscious of the extent of his own misery. It is this lucid recognition of his destiny that transforms his torment into his victory. It has to be a victory for as Camus says: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (p.91). Sisyphus' life and torment are transformed into a victory by concentrating on his freedom, his refusal to hope, and his knowledge of the absurdity of his situation. In the same way, Dr. Rieux is an absurd hero in The Plague, for he too is under sentence of death, is trapped by a seemingly unending torment and, like Sisyphus, he continues to perform his duty no matter how useless or how insignificant his action. In both cases it matters little for what reason they continue to struggle so long as they testify to man's allegiance to man and not to abstractions or 'absolutes'.

D. This is a voter for competition and education. We should fashion the rules of debate to make ourselves more excellent individuals.

Yovel 5

Jonathan, Faculty of Law at University of Haifa in Israel, “Gay Science as Law: An Outline for a Nietzschean Jurisprudence,” Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws, 2005, rehosted at http:~/~/papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950742url:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950742 // myost

In society, the law that best serves the Person of Power is that which empowers the other to best prepare him for such “war”.43 Law must elevate the other’s own powers to the fullest of their potential (the overman, of course, has no presupposed potential: a potential for her would be power-constraining rather than a horizon for development). The Person of Power will not rely on social norms to serve her in overcoming or in dominating: that is the way of ressentiment. Instead she will form law that will make the best out of that which she must stand up to, namely the others. Nietzsche is no closet-liberal: the principle of law as empowerment of the other is strictly a mean for the will to become more, for the power to will.44 Law does not empower the other as a subject, although through empowerment the other might discover her own power and so much the better. The other—the person enslaved by the psychology of ressentiment, be he called slave or master—needs not be empowered to become less contemptible, yet it is because of his contemptibility that he must be elevated. Empowerment of the other is the active will’s maxim in the exact sense in which the elevated will categorizes natural phenomenon and shapes cognition and language—namely, creating the environment for the best possibilities for the will to cast itself in the world, both natural and social.

Tournament: KY | Round: 4 | Opponent: Trinity | Judge: 

CP

Plan: The Department of defense should increase the purchase of solar panels.

The military development of solar would not be exposed to negative reception because Solyndra.

Lacey August 2012 (Stephen Reporter Climate Progress, “The Solyndra Standard: On Loan Guarantees, Military Spending, And Clean Energy Politics”, http:~/~/www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/08/com/rea/news/article/2012/08/the-solyndra-standard-on-loan-guarantees-military-spending-and-clean-energy-politics, Vance)

Earlier this week the Air Force announced that its X-51 Scramjet Engine Demonstrator called the WaveRider — a hypersonic jet designed to travel up to 3,600 miles per hour — crashed into the Pacific Ocean 15 seconds into a test flight. This is the second failed test in a row for the WaveRider — an aircraft technology that the military has already spent between close to $300 million on developing. And that’s just on one program. We’ve been working on hypersonic flight programs since the 1960′s . But even with more than a quarter billion dollars worth of hardware now sitting in the Pacific Ocean (chump change for the Pentagon), we haven’t heard a peep from anyone in Washington on the crash. No calls for a Congressional investigation, no outrage about hundreds of millions of dollars sinking in 15 seconds, no public flogging of Defense Department leaders. But hell, when a few cutting-edge clean energy companies crash after getting support from the federal government, they’re used by the national Republican party as a tool to question the very idea of making strategic investments in cleantech. It’s been almost a year since Solyndra, the solar manufacturer that received a $527 million loan guarantee, went bankrupt. Since then, House lawmakers have held 12 hearings and official meetings, acquired more than 300,000 documents, issued two subpenas, and likely spent more than a million dollars on the investigation. What have they found? “No evidence of wrongdoing,” reported Bloomberg Businessweek. The Washington Post went further in a recent investigation: “The records do not establish that anyone pressured the Energy Department to approve the Solyndra loan to benefit political contributors.” This is not to say we should shrug off the bankruptcy of Solyndra and other clean energy companies. It’s Congress’ job to determine whether taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely — and taking a look into the causes and consequences of these types of incidents is important for transparency. But as we predicted when the Solyndra story first broke, these investigations have turned into a political sideshow. One year later, GOP lawmakers failed to prove their theory that decisions to offer loan guarantees to clean energy companies were based on political insider deals. Yet theycontinue to call for more documents and potentially more hearings, hoping to extend the Solyndra “crony capitalism” meme until after the election. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) was the most blunt about the GOP’s plan for Solyndra: Push the manufactured scandal until November and then drop it after the election. EandE News reported on Jordan’s comments in March: For all the talk over possible “smoking guns” that might show some wrongdoing on the part of the Obama administration on Solyndra or another Department of Energy loan, one House Republican acknowledged yesterday that multiple GOP probes on the subject are in some ways a play for votes on Election Day. "Ultimately, we’ll stop it on Election Day, hopefully. And bringing attention to these things helps the voters and citizens of the country make the kind of decision that I hope helps them as they evaluate who they are going to vote for in November." That’s exactly how it’s playing out. The politically-manufactured outrage over Solyndra has turned into an all-out campaign — with tens of millions of dollars being spent this election season specifically targeting federal renewable energy investments. Mitt Romney has jumped on the bandwagon, using Solyndra as a central piece of his campaign. And here’s the really astonishing disconnect: While supporting tens of thousands of jobs, the loan guarantee program is expected to cost $2 billion less than Congress budgeted for, according to an analysis from Herb Allison , John McCain’s former National Finance Chairman. Meanwhile, amidst the Solyndra saga, we casually accept a $300 million aircraft failure without batting an eye. No outrage. No sustained political campaign. It’s just another day testing our military toys. Why? Because we don’t often see programs like this as a “failure” in the political arena. We would never use one failure as an excuse to abandon investment in new technologies. Most politicians accept losses in military RandD expenditures because the long-term gains are potentially so important for national defense and for eventually developing technologies for civilian use.

Privatization incentives have empiric solvency for the solar power with the DoD.

DeMaio 2009 (Douglas, USAG Bamberg Public php?search=Douglas+DeMaio,+USAG+Bamberg+Public+Affairs, “Bamberg's solar panel implementation supports DoD, Army goals”, http:~/~/www.army.mil/article/22201/bambergs-solar-panel-implementation-supports-dod-army-goals/http://www.army.mil/article/22201/bambergs-solar-panel-implementation-supports-dod-army-goals/, Vance)

BAMBERG, Germany -- The installment of solar panels at the energy plant on U.S. Army Garrison Bamberg's Warner Barracks isn't just increasing energy efficiency, it's supporting the Department of Defense's Energy Conservation Investment Program. The solar panels grand opening ceremony was May 27, the day the post celebrated Earth Day. "All Earth Day activities are designed to instill a sense of environmental responsibility in our children and so it is very fitting for us to have this ceremony today as it puts a responsible use of energy resources into practice," said Lt. Col. Gary A. Rosenberg, commander of USAG Bamberg commander, at the solar panel grand opening ceremony. "For garrisons, the Army has a voluntary goal with regard to electricity from renewable sources of 25 percent by 2025. The installation of the solar panels brings us much closer to that goal." Renewable energy is generated through natural resources like sunlight, wind, and tides. The funding for the project came from Stadtwerke Bamberg. The company gets an incentive by the German government to compensate the high investment. Through contractual agreements, Stadtwerke Bamberg, the company that operates the energy plant on Warner Barracks and supplies its utilities, will give the installation credit toward onsite-produced power, lowering the installations energy consumption costs. Bamberg started privatization of its utilities in 2002. The photovoltaic project costs around $250,000, said Klaus Rubach, Chief Executive Officer for Stadtwerke. The energy plant is tied into the city's power grid, so the solar power can be used throughout the city. According to www.energy.eu, Germany is world's leading location for photovoltaic investments. DoD is investing $120 million in funding for key component of the department's energy strategy, which offsets rising energy costs, supports environmental protection and reduces the department's reliance on fossil fuels, according to www.recovery.gov. The Bamberg project did not receive any of this money, but the project still supports the department's energy strategy. In April 2000, the Army began to implement more energy efficient benchmarks through its Sustainable Design and Development Policy. Since then, laws, executive orders and DoD and Army policy and guidance have made the development of energy efficiency more progressive for the military. Secretary of the Army Pete Geren stated in a press release Oct. 6, 2008 that the Army spends $3 billion every year on energy and a majority of it is spent on installations. USAG Bamberg receives electrical power produced by renewable sources at the same price as conventionally produced power with zero investment costs, said Dieter Gerber, chief of Operations and Maintenance Division for the Directorate of Public Works. . This is a win, win situation, Gerber said. The installation gets credit for producing power with renewable energy sources and Stadtwerke gets an incentive.

Elections

Obama will win and is gaining momentum – national polls

The Hill 7/12 (2012, ‘Pew poll: Obama widens lead nationally,’ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/polls/237617-pew-obama-widens-lead-nationally

President Obama has widened his lead to 7 percentage points over Mitt Romney nationally, according to a Pew Research survey released on Thursday. Obama took 50 percent in the poll, compared to Romney, at 43 percent. Obama led by 4 percentage points, 50 to 46, in the same poll from June. Despite recent poor economic news, Romney has been unable to capitalize on the question of who is better equipped to handle jobs and the economy. The former Massachusetts governor has staked his campaign on arguing that his experience in the private sector makes him better equipped to handle the economy, and has blamed sluggish economic growth on what he says are Obama’s failed economic policies. The economy added only 80,000 jobs in June, below the forecasts of most economists, and the unemployment rate remained stuck at 8.2 percent.  But according to Pew, Romney is losing ground on these fronts. Obama leads Romney 48 to 42 percent on who would be better for the economy – a 14-point swing from June, when Romney led by 8 on that issue. Obama also leads Romney 46 to 42 percent on the question of who will do better in improving the job situation. The only issue where Romney polled better than Obama was on reducing the deficit, where Romney has a sizable lead of 50 to 36 percent.  Romney also suffers from an enthusiasm gap — something that plagued him throughout the Republican primaries — with only 34 percent of his supporters saying they support him strongly, compared to 64 percent for Obama.

Due to Solyndra any action by the usfg for solar will be seen negatively

Approval ratings are key to the election

Cook, The National Journal Political Analyst, 11

(Charlie, October 27, “Underwater,” http:~/~/www.nationaljournal.com/columns/cook-report/com/columns/cook-report/the-cook-report-obama-underwater-20111027, d/a 7-20-12, ads)

The best barometer of how a president is going to fare is his approval rating, which starts taking on predictive value about a year out. As each month goes by, the rating becomes a better indicator of the eventual results. Presidents with approval numbers above 48 to 50 percent in the Gallup Poll win reelection. Those with approval ratings below that level usually lose. If voters don’t approve of the job you are doing after four years in office, they usually don’t vote for you. Of course, a candidate can win the popular vote and still lose the Electoral Askey-Munday Neg It happened to Samuel Tilden in 1876, Grover Cleveland in 1888, and Al Gore in 2000. But the popular votes and the Electoral College numbers usually come down on the same side.

Romney will repeal Obamacare

FRIEDMAN Jun 28, 2012 EMILY FRIEDMAN ABC producer and digital reporter covering Gov. Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign “Romney Calls for Obamacare Repeal as ‘Bad Law’” http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/romney-calls-for-obamacare-repeal-as-bad-law/

Mitt Romney today renewed his vow to repeal the health care law that the United States Supreme Court today upheld, referring to the plan as “bad law” and “bad policy.”

“As you might imagine I disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision and I agree with the dissent,” said Romney, with the Capitol building as his backdrop. “What the Court did not do on its last day in session I will do on my first day if elected President of the United States and that is I will act to repeal Obamacare.”

Obamacare key to economy – employment and consumer spending

Gruber July 12, 2012 Jonathan Gruber is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “New Republic: Obamacare Means Higher Employment” http://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156660203/new-republic-obamacare-means-higher-employment

By now, most people who follow politics know that the law will result in more than 30 million additional Americans getting health insurance. But what few realize is that, by expanding insurance coverage, the law will also increase economic activity. These newly insured individuals will demand more medical care than when they were uninsured. And while it takes many years to train a family physician or nurse practitioner, it doesn't take much time to train the assistants and technicians (and related support staff) who can fill much of this need. In many cases, these are precisely the sort of medium-skill jobs that our economy desperately needs — and that the health care sector has already been providing, even during the recession.¶ More immediately, the increase in economic security for American families will also mean an increase in consumer spending. Many uninsured consumers are forced to set aside money in low interest liquid accounts to make sure they have enough to cover unexpected medical costs. With the security provided by health insurance, they can free that money up for consumption that is much more valuable to them. When the federal government expanded Medicaid in the 1990s, my own research has shown, the newly insured significantly increased their spending on consumer goods. More purchases of consumer goods will provide short-run stimulation to the economy and more hiring.

Economic decline causes multiple scenarios of nuclear war

Burrows and Harris 2009 Mathew J. Burrows counselor in the National Intelligence Council and Jennifer Harris a member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis” The Washington Quarterly 32:2 https://csis.org/files/publication/twq09aprilburrowsharris.pdf

Increased Potential for Global Conflict¶ Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the¶ future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking¶ forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity.¶ Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to¶ believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be¶ drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and¶ multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on¶ the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the¶ same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the¶ twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in¶ which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more¶ apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change¶ would be steadier.¶ In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and¶ nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the¶ international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth¶ continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those¶ terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of¶ technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most¶ dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a¶ combination of descendants of long established groups

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inheriting¶ organizational structures, command and control processes, and training¶ procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks

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and newly emergent¶ collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized,¶ particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower¶ in an economic downturn.¶ The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S.¶ military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s¶ acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed¶ Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with¶ external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own¶ nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship¶ that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge¶ naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity¶ conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an¶ unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states¶ involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals¶ combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile¶ dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in¶ achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The¶ lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile¶ flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on¶ preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises.Types of conflict that the world continues¶ to experience, such as over resources, could¶ reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and¶ there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices.¶ Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive¶ countries to take actions to assure their future¶ access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this¶ could result in interstate conflicts if government¶ leaders deem assured access to energy resources,¶ for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of¶ their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical¶ implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval¶ buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of¶ blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed¶ turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of¶ regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and¶ counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational¶ cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in¶ Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is¶ likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more¶ dog-eat-dog world.¶

Rer da

The price and Supply of rare earth resources are stable now

Bradsher 12 (Keith, June 21, writer for the New York Times, “China, Citing Errors, Vows to Overhaul Rare Earth Industry”, (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/business/global/china-vows-tighter-controls-over-rare-earth-mining.html?_r=1)CD)

The white paper says China has only 23 percent of the world’s rare earth reserves and has already depleted the most accessible reserves. But the United States Geological Survey a year ago raised its estimate of Chinese rare earth reserves, to half the world’s supply, compared with a third of the world’s reserves. Various local and provincial governments across China have announced numerous discoveries of large rare earth deposits in recent years, yet Chinese officials have scarcely changed official estimates for nationwide reserves, rare earth industry experts point out. The Chinese government has already been quietly closing rare earth refineries for months at a time in the last year and forcing them to install costly environmental controls. Together with a plunge in world prices for rare earths in the last year as a speculative surge has subsided, the environmental rules have hurt profit margins for exporters

Plan uses critical RERs that causes supply disruptions

DOE 11 (Department of Energy, dec, “CRITICAL MATERIALS STRATEGY”, (http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/DOE_CMS2011_FINAL_Full.pdf)CD)

Four clean energy technology components have been the principal focus of this analysis:   • PMs made from alloys of REEs used in wind turbines as well as advanced vehicles and bicycles   with electric drive-trains  • Advanced batteries that incorporate REEs in their electrodes or are based on Li-ion chemistries   used in bicycles and advanced vehicles with electric drive-trains  • PV power systems using thin-film semiconductors   • Rare earth phosphors used in high-efficiency fluorescent lighting systems  Efforts to accelerate the commercialization and deployment of these four clean energy technologies   face considerable risks of supply-demand imbalances that could lead to increased price volatility and   supply chain disruption. The character and severity of these risks vary among the REEs and other key   materials evaluated in this Strategy. The projected supply and demand calculations have changed from   the 2010 Critical Materials Strategy, but they continue to highlight the potential for supply-demand   mismatches for some elements.

A Rapid demand increase means China cuts us off from RERs

Moss et al 11 (R.L.Moss1, E.Tzimas1, H.Kara2, P.Willis2 and J.Kooroshy3, Institute for Energy and Transport The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, “Critical Metals in Strategic Energy Technologies”, (http://www.google.com/url?sa=tandrct=jandq=andesrc=sandsource=webandcd=1andved=0CCIQFjAAandurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsetis.ec.europa.eu%2Fnewsroom-items-folder%2Fjrc-report-on-criticalmetals-in-strategic-energy-technologies%2Fat_download%2FDocumentandei=9pJLUJivPILjrAH-0YGIAQandusg=AFQjCNFBM7mcUSAU32qKzIavrlOX_oPQegandsig2=s95qFovTbsP8mTqkFiAPqw)CD)

Such bottlenecks could disrupt a timely and affordable supply of these metals to Europe in the future and  potentially hinder the smooth deployment of SET Plan technologies and the realisation of the EU 2020  targets. In this context, it is important to note that significant SET Plan demands for a specific metal on  itself do not necessarily constitute a problem. Demand for raw materials changes constantly as  technologies and consumption patterns change over time. This creates incentives for adapting supply, so  that the market balance is restored.   However, such adaptation processes can be very time consuming, for example, when it takes many years  to open new mines. If demand expands rapidly and supply is unable to keep pace in the short to medium  term, bottlenecks in the form of price rises and supply shortages can be the consequence.a In cases  where only a few countries control the production of an individual metal under tight market conditions,  bottlenecks can also be exacerbated through political interventions by governments. Dominant producers  may, for example, use their market power to gain political or commercial advantages through influencing  supply and prices or imposing trade restrictions.   A good example of how disruptive such bottlenecks can be is the case of rare earths. Given the  challenging economic and technical obstacles involved in opening new rare earths mines, supply has  struggled to grow considerably even though demand has been booming over the past decade.b In  parallel, China has been systematically tightening export quotas that favour domestic rare earth  consuming industries over competitors in the rest of the world, resulting in 2010, in a tight market and  driving up prices. China implemented strict measures to consolidate a weakly regulated industry with  many small scale operations that routinely ignore safety, environmental and export regulations; and a  temporary halt of rare earth exports to Japan was imposed to exert political pressure in the context of a  diplomatic dispute. Taken together, this combination of political and market factors have resulted in  considerable supply shortages and price rises for rare earths over the course of 2010.c Indeed, even at  the time of writing, there have been further substantial increases in the price of some rare earth oxides  (especially dysprosium oxide) in 2011 alone.d  

RERs are key to heg- the impact is extinction

Trigaux 12 (David, University Honors Program University of South Florida St. Petersburg, “The U.S., China and Rare Earth Metals” The Future Of Green Technology, Military Tech, and a Potential Achilles‟ Heel to  American Hegemony.”,(http://dspace.nelson.usf.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10806/4632/David%20Trigaux%20Honors%20Thesis%5B1%5D.pdf?sequence=1)CD)

The implications of a rare earth shortage aren‟t strictly related to the   environment, and energy dependence, but have distinct military implications as well   that could threaten the position of the United States world‟s strongest military. The   United States place in the world was assured by powerful and decisive deployments in   World War One and World War Two. Our military expansion was built upon a large,   powerful industrial base that created more, better weapons of war for our soldiers.   During the World Wars, a well-organized draft that sent millions of men into battle in a 19  short amount of time proved decisive, but as the war ended, and soldiers drafted into   service returned to civilian life, the U.S. technological superiority over its opponents   provided it with sustained dominance over its enemies, even as the numerical size of the   army declined. New technologies, such as the use of the airplane in combat, rocket   launched missiles, radar systems, and later, GPS, precision guided missiles, missile   defense systems, high tech tanks, lasers, and other technologies now make the   difference between victory and defeat.  66  The United States military now serves many important functions, deterring   threats across the world. The United States projects its power internationally, through a   network of bases and allied nations. Thus, the United States is a powerful player in all   regions of the world, and often serves as a buffer against conflict in these regions.  67 US   military presence serves as a buffer against Chinese military modernization in Eastern   Asia, against an increasingly nationalist Russia in Europe, and smaller regional actors,   such as Venezuela in South America and Iran in the Middle East.   68 The U.S. Navy is   deployed all over the world, as the guarantor of international maritime trade routes.  69  The US Navy leads action against challenges to its maritime sovereignty on the other   side of the globe, such as current action against Somali piracy.  70 Presence in regions   across the world prevents escalation of potential crisis.  71 These could result in either a   larger power fighting a smaller nation or nations (Russia and Georgia, Taiwan and   China), religious opponents (Israel and Iran), or traditional foes (Ethiopia and Eretria,   Venezuela and Colombia, India and Pakistan).   72 US projection is also key deterring emerging threats such as terrorism and nuclear proliferation.  73While not direct   challenges to US primacy, both terrorism and nuclear proliferation can kill thousands. 

CAP K

Solar power is a means to create an excess of energy that will be used to destroy our environment and increase capitalist consumption under the guise we can recover from the inevitability of the system’s end.

Stein August 2012 (Steve is a writer and financial adviser Policy Review, Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, “The Environmentalist’s Dilemma”,¶ http:~/~/www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123656url:http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123656, Vance)

In addition to preservationists and minimalists, yet another environmental faction has curbed its enthusiasm for renewable energy. This is the no-growth contingent, who see population growth and resource development as weaknesses of the capitalist system. One surprising name that shows up here is Amory Lovins. He surely wasn’t speaking for his corporate clients when he wrote in a 1977 article in Mother Jones:¶ If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.¶ Lovins wrote those words only two years after Paul Ehrlich made the point even more harshly: “Giving society cheap energy at this point would be equivalent to giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Ehrlich, best known as the author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, had been touring the country heralding the twin dangers of population growth and nuclear energy. While Lovins’s views may have moderated somewhat since the 1970s, there is little evidence that Ehrlich’s have. Ehrlich’s bête noire at the time was nuclear energy, but no source of energy that enabled rapid population expansion was any better. Indeed, he saw mass starvation on the horizon. Today, there are environmentalists for whom Ehrlich’s pessimistic predictions haven’t been proven wrong, only delayed. Richard Heinberg, in a 2011 book, The End of Growth, writes that “resumption of conventional economic growth is a near-impossibility. This is not a temporary condition; it is essentially permanent” (Heinberg’s emphasis). He lists the factors that make this so: resource depletion, negative environmental impacts, and continued financial disruptions. In an earlier book, Powerdown, Heinberg explains how this relates to the false promise of cheap energy, renewable or otherwise:¶ Every time we humans have found a way to harvest a dramatically increased amount of food or fuel from the environment, we have been presented with a quantity of energy that is, if not entirely free, at least cheap and abundant relative to what we had previously. Each time we have responded by increasing our population, and correspondingly, the load on the environmental systems that sustain us. Each time we have ended up degrading the environment and creating the conditions for a crash.¶ Would environmental organizations that follow the Ehrlich-Heinberg philosophy ever support a Scientific American plan to develop an entirely solar-powered electrical system by 2050? Hardly. The anti-growth contingent is inclined to raise increasingly novel objections to any massive plan for a lasting source of cheap energy. Their goal is less energy, not cheaper; and the way to ensure less energy is by making it more dear.

The affirmative only makes energy production easier and thus cheaper, the logic of capitalism dictates that this only increases consumption resulting in extinction of the planet

Foster et al 2010 (John Bellamy prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, Brett Clark Assistant prof of sociology @ NC State U and Richard York assoc. prof of sociology @ U of Oregon; Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency; Nov 1; http:~/~/monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/org/2010/11/01/capitalism-and-the-curse-of-energy-efficiency; kdf)

The Jevons Paradox was forgotten in the heyday of the age of petroleum during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, but reappeared in the 1970s due to increasing concerns over resource scarcity associated with the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth analysis, heightened by the oil-energy crisis of 1973-74. As energy efficiency measures were introduced, economists became concerned with their effectiveness. This led to the resurrection, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, of the general question posed by the Jevons Paradox, in the form of what was called the “rebound effect.” This was the fairly straightforward notion that engineering efficiency gains normally led to a decrease in the effective price of a commodity, thereby generating increased demand, so that the gains in efficiency did not produce a decrease in consumption to an equal extent. The Jevons Paradox has often been relegated to a more extreme version of the rebound effect, in which there is a backfire, or a rebound of more than 100 percent of “engineering savings,” resulting in an increase rather than decrease in the consumption of a given resource.30¶ Technological optimists have tried to argue that the rebound effect is small, and therefore environmental problems can be solved largely by technological innovation alone, with the efficiency gains translating into lower throughput of energy and materials (dematerialization). Empirical evidence of a substantial rebound effect is, however, strong. For example, technological advancements in motor vehicles, which have increased the average miles per gallon of vehicles by 30 percent in the United States since 1980, have not reduced the overall energy used by motor vehicles. Fuel consumption per vehicle stayed constant while the efficiency gains led to the augmentation, not only of the numbers of cars and trucks on the roads (and the miles driven), but also their size and “performance” (acceleration rate, cruising speed, etc.)—so that SUVs and minivans now dot U.S. highways. At the macro level, the Jevons Paradox can be seen in the fact that, even though the United States has managed to double its energy efficiency since 1975, its energy consumption has risen dramatically. Juliet Schor notes that over the last thirty-five years:¶ energy expended per dollar of GDP has been cut in half. But rather than falling, energy demand has increased, by roughly 40 percent. Moreover, demand is rising fastest in those sectors that have had the biggest efficiency gains—transport and residential energy use. Refrigerator efficiency improved by 10 percent, but the number of refrigerators in use rose by 20 percent. In aviation, fuel consumption per mile fell by more than 40 percent, but total fuel use grew by 150 percent because passenger miles rose. Vehicles are a similar story. And with soaring demand, we’ve had soaring emissions. Carbon dioxide from these two sectors has risen 40 percent, twice the rate of the larger economy.¶ Economists and environmentalists who try to measure the direct effects of efficiency on the lowering of price and the immediate rebound effect generally tend to see the rebound effect as relatively small, in the range of 10 to 30 percent in high-energy consumption areas such as home heating and cooling and cars. But once the indirect effects, apparent at the macro level, are incorporated, the Jevons Paradox remains extremely significant. It is here at the macro level that scale effects come to bear: improvements in energy efficiency can lower the effective cost of various products, propelling the overall economy and expanding overall energy use.31 Ecological economists Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi argue that the Jevons Paradox can only be understood in a macro-evolutionary model, where improvements in efficiency result in changes in the matrices of the economy, such that the overall effect is to increase scale and tempo of the system as a whole.32¶ Most analyses of the Jevons Paradox remain abstract, based on isolated technological effects, and removed from the historical process. They fail to examine, as Jevons himself did, the character of industrialization. Moreover, they are still further removed from a realistic understanding of the accumulation-driven character of capitalist development. An economic system devoted to profits, accumulation, and economic expansion without end will tend to use any efficiency gains or cost reductions to expand the overall scale of production. Technological innovation will therefore be heavily geared to these same expansive ends. It is no mere coincidence that each of the epoch-making innovations (namely, the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile) that dominated the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were characterized by their importance in driving capital accumulation and the positive feedback they generated with respect to economic growth as a whole—so that the scale effects on the economy arising from their development necessarily overshot improvements in technological efficiency.33 Conservation in the aggregate is impossible for capitalism, however much the output/input ratio may be increased in the engineering of a given product. This is because all savings tend to spur further capital formation (provided that investment outlets are available). This is especially the case where core industrial resources—what Jevons called “central materials” or “staple products”—are concerned.¶ The Fallacy of Dematerialization¶ The Jevons Paradox is the product of a capitalist economic system that is unable to conserve on a macro scale, geared, as it is, to maximizing the throughput of energy and materials from resource tap to final waste sink. Energy savings in such a system tend to be used as a means for further development of the economic order, generating what Alfred Lotka called the “maximum energy flux,” rather than minimum energy production.34 The deemphasis on absolute (as opposed to relative) energy conservation is built into the nature and logic of capitalism as a system unreservedly devoted to the gods of production and profit. As Marx put it: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”35¶ Seen in the context of a capitalist society, the Jevons Paradox therefore demonstrates the fallacy of current notions that the environmental problems facing society can be solved by purely technological means. Mainstream environmental economists often refer to “dematerialization,” or the “decoupling” of economic growth, from consumption of greater energy and resources. Growth in energy efficiency is often taken as a concrete indication that the environmental problem is being solved. Yet savings in materials and energy, in the context of a given process of production, as we have seen, are nothing new; they are part of the everyday history of capitalist development.36 Each new steam engine, as Jevons emphasized, was more efficient than the one before. “Raw materials-savings processes,” environmental sociologist Stephen Bunker noted, “are older than the Industrial Revolution, and they have been dynamic throughout the history of capitalism.” Any notion that reduction in material throughput, per unit of national income, is a new phenomenon is therefore “profoundly ahistorical.”37¶ What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to increased energy savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationship—through which energy savings are used to promote new capital formation and the proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources. Rather than an anomaly, the rule that efficiency increases energy and material use is integral to the “regime of capital” itself.38 As stated in The Weight of Nations, an important empirical study of material outflows in recent decades in five industrial nations (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan): “Efficiency gains brought by technology and new management practices have been offset by increases in the scale of economic growth.”39¶ The result is the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities, cheapening unit costs and leading to greater squandering of material resources. Under monopoly capitalism, moreover, such commodities increasingly take the form of artificial use values, promoted by a vast marketing system and designed to instill ever more demand for commodities and the exchange values they represent—as a substitute for the fulfillment of genuine human needs. Unnecessary, wasteful goods are produced by useless toil to enhance purely economic values at the expense of the environment. Any slowdown in this process of ecological destruction, under the present system, spells economic disaster.¶ In Jevons’s eyes, the “momentous choice” raised by a continuation of business as usual was simply “between brief but true national greatness and longer continued mediocrity.” He opted for the former—the maximum energy flux. A century and a half later, in our much bigger, more global—but no less expansive—economy, it is no longer simply national supremacy that is at stake, but the fate of the planet itself. To be sure, there are those who maintain that we should “live high now and let the future take care of itself.” To choose this course, though, is to court planetary disaster. The only real answer for humanity (including future generations) and the earth as a whole is to alter the social relations of production, to create a system in which efficiency is no longer a curse—a higher system in which equality, human development, community, and sustainability are the explicit goals.

Capitalism’s naturalization of the process of subjugation creates social exclusion on a global scale – the ultimate ethico-political responsibility is to challenge the foundations of this system’s organization principles. This makes reaching the Universal impossible.

Zizek and Daly 2004 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek, 14-6)

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gord¬ian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties con¬cerning 'multiculturalist' etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called 'radically incorrect' in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions' and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety.

For far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political mor¬bidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary

This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose 'universalism' fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral marketplace.

Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded 'life-chances' cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the 'developing world'). And Zizek's point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle.

Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-par¬ticular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix.

Thus the Alternative: Vote negative to do nothing

Doing nothing is not just sitting and waiting for the moment to attack—it is the only genuine political act--it is an act of abstaining from the depoliticized gameboard of capitalism by refusing to play their game—ultimately withdrawing past the point of commodification

Zizek 2008 (Slavoj, Senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Violence: Big Ideas// small books. Picador, pg(s) 213-7, kdf)

Last but not least, the lesson of the intricate rela­tionship between subjective and systemic violence is that violence is not a direct property of some acts, but is distributed between acts and their contexts, between activity and inactivity. The same act can count as vio­lent or non-violent, depending on its context; some­times a polite smile can be more violent than a brutal outburst. A brief reference to quantum physics might be of some help here; one of the most unsettling no­tions in quantum physics is that of the Higgs field. Left to their own devices in an environment to which they can pass their energy, all physical systems will eventu­ally assume a state of lowest energy. To put it in another way, the more mass we take from a system, the more we lower its energy, till we reach the vacuum state at which the energy is zero. There are, however, phenomena which compel us to posit the hypothesis that there has to be something (some substance) that we cannot take away from a given system without RAISING that sys­tem's energy—this "something" is called the Higgs field: once this field appears in a vessel that has been pumped empty and whose temperature has been lowered as much as possible, its energy will be further lowered. The "something" which thus appears is a something that contains less energy than nothing. In short, sometimes zero is not the "cheapest" state of a system, so that, paradoxically, "nothing" costs more than "something." In a crude analogy, the social "nothing" (the stasis of a system, its mere reproduction without any changes)"costs more than something" (a change), that is, it de­mands a lot of energy, so that the first gesture to pro­voke a change in the system is to withdraw activity, to do nothing.¶ Jose Saramago's novel Seeing (the literal translation of the original title is An Essay on Lucidity)³ can effec­tively be perceived as a mental experiment in Bartlebian politics.⁴ It tells the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by torrential rain, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The govern­ment's relief is short lived, however, when vote counting reveals that over 7o per cent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make amends just one week later with another elec­tion day. The results are worse: now 83 per cent of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties-the ruling party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adver­sary, the party of the middle (p.o.t.m.)-are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalised party of the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are essentially a vote for their progressive agenda.¶ Is this an organised conspiracy to overthrow not just the ruling government but the entire democratic sys­tem? If so, who is behind it, and how did they manage to organise hundreds of thousands of people into such subversion without being noticed? When asked how they voted, ordinary citizens simply respond that such information is private, and besides, is not leaving the ballot blank their right? Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic con­spiracy exists, the government quickly labels the move­ment "terrorism, pure and unadulterated" and declares a state of emergency, allowing the government to sus­pend all constitutional guarantees. Five hundred citizens are seized at random and dis­appear into secret interrogation sites, and their status is coded red for secrecy. Their families are informed in Orwellian style not to worry about the lack of informa­tion concerning their loved ones, since "in that very si­lence lay the key that could guarantee their personal safety." When these moves bear no fruit, the right-wing government adopts a series of increasingly drastic steps, from declaring a state of siege and concocting plots to create disorder to withdrawing the police and seat of government from the capital, sealing all the city's en­trances and exits, and finally manufacturing its own terrorist ringleader. The city continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government's thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian level of non-violent resistance. In his perspicacious review of the novel, Michael Wood noted a Brechtian parallel:In a famous poem, written in East Germany in 1953, Brecht quotes a contemporary as saying that the people have lost the trust of the government. Would it not therefore be easier, Brecht slyly asks, to dissolve the people and have the government elect another one? Saramago's novel is a parable of what happens when neither government nor people can be dissolved. While the parallel holds, the concluding characterisa­tion seems to fall short: the unsettling message of See­ing is not so much the indissolubility of both people and government as the compulsive nature of democratic rit­uals of freedom. What happens is that by abstaining from voting, people effectively dissolve the government-not only in the limited sense of overthrowing the existing government, but more radically. Why is the government thrown into such a panic by the voters' abstention? It is compelled to confront the fact that it exists, that it ex­erts power, only insofar as it is accepted as such by its subjects- accepted even in the mode of rejection. The voters' abstention goes further than the intra-political negation, the vote of no confidence: it rejects the very frame of decision. In psychoanalytic terms, the voters' abstention is something like the psychotic Verwerfung (foreclosure, rejection/repudiation), which is a more radical move than repression (Verdrangung). According to Freud, the repressed is intellectually accepted by the subject, since it is named, and at the same time is negated because the subject refuses to recognise it, refuses to rec­ognise him or herself in it. In contrast to this, foreclo­sure rejects the term from the symbolic tout court. To circumscribe the contours of this radical rejection, one is tempted to evoke Badiou's provocative thesis: "It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.' Better to do nothing than to engage in localised acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly (acts such as providing space for the multitude of new subectivities). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active_' to "participate," to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "do something"; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a "critical" participation, a dialogue, to silence-just to engage us in "dialogue," to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters' abstention is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today's democracies.

Tournament: KY | Round: 6 | Opponent: Louisville  | Judge:
 

1.    Their notion of debate produces antagonisms between becoming complicit with the status quo and being producers of expert knowledge causing their calls for openness to fail

Welsh 12 Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency Scott Welsh Department of Communication Appalachian State University Philosophy and Rhetoric  Volume 45, Number 1, 2012

I argue that the ongoing debate in rhetorical studies about the relationship between scholarly reflection and political agency is illuminated by Žižek’s account of ideology, identity, and desire. In this debate, references to the factual, the empirical, or the material are deployed, not incidentally, to address the impossible subject position that academics inhabit. Often pursuing lines of research motivated by a desire to create wholeness amid End Page 2 social, cultural, political, or institutional brokenness, rhetoric scholars nevertheless become, in the sustained act of academic investigation, significantly alienated from motivating practical concerns. Moreover, because rhetoric scholars spend a large majority of their time in faculty offices, classrooms, and archives of one kind or another, by necessity, mostly talking, reading, and writing about political action, the felt alienation from public life can feel like hypocrisy or, even worse, complicity in the perpetuation of brokenness.

The subject position inhabited by many rhetoric scholars is not only structured by a fundamental antagonism between scholarly reflection and political agency but also by an antagonism between the production of expert knowledge and a democratic faith in the judgment of the people. An academic produces accounts or recommendations that are intended to enlighten, supplement, or replace those currently accepted by a public imagined to be, at its best, democratic. At the same time, the rhetoric scholar committed to democracy often imagines that the academic’s role is to resist the expert control of publics. Taken together, the two antagonisms yield a deeply conflicted scholarly identity: the suspension of immediate action in favor of reflection can be reduced to an act of complicity in the status quo, just as the act of producing expert accounts can be reduced to the demonstration of a lack of trust in democratic publics. The challenge is to resist synthetically resolving these antagonisms, whether in confirming or disconfirming ways. Rather, as Žižek might suggest, the aim should be to “come to terms” with these antagonisms by articulating academic identities less invested in reparative fantasies that imagine a material resolution of them (1989, 3, 5, 133; 2005, 242–43). Accounts that fail to come to terms with the impossibility of closure and continue to invest in such fantasies yield either indignant calls for activism or too-easy assurance of the potential consequence of one’s work, neither of which is well suited to scholar-citizen engagement.

2.    Their mode of advocacy should be rejected – it only results in ideological fantasies

Welsh 12 Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency Scott Welsh Department of Communication Appalachian State University Philosophy and Rhetoric  Volume 45, Number 1, 2012

In light of Žižek’s account of antagonism, one should not be surprised, however, by the conclusion that broadly effective activism is only possible outside of academia. The failure to unify scholarship and politics was predestined in the symbolic imagination that rendered them unified. Instead, effectively coming to terms with an antagonism means finding ways to keep the competing elements of the antagonism in view—and not simply as “bad” academic pretensions in conflict with “good” political motives. Rather, the two elements that constitute the scholarly subject position, reflective investigation and the production of unavoidable consequences, must be constantly present, each vying for our attention. And, insofar as the two elements are not kept in tension with each other, the scholarly subject position becomes increasingly unbearable, leading to the production of what Žižek calls supplemental ideological fantasies or ready explanations for the gap.

3.    The aff’s form of criticism becomes a never ending trap of self-criticism- makes moving beyond the criticism impossible

Ono and Sloop 92 COMMITMENT TO TELOS—A SUSTAINED CRITICAL RHETORIC KENT A. ONO AND JOHN M. SLOOP KentA. Ono and John M. Sloop are doctoral candidates at the University of Iowa COMMUNICATION MONOGRAPHS, Volume 59, March

By persistently acknowledging and reflecting on the social aspect of a "critical rhetoric," one is able to escape the dogmatic traps that accompany a stress on the critique of domination. Rorty (1989) notes this very problem when he suggests that, "Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seem to me invaluable in our attempt to form a private self-image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics" (p. 83). Rorty is pointing to the tension between accepting the poststructural displacement of an absolute grounding of knowledge and creating a position of "play," of aestheticizing being, for the scholar. That is, he is concerned that all too often those theorists who have broken the philosopher's stone have shattered personal and social responsibility with it. Rather than turning their attention to social and political conditions. such theorists have often given up any responsibility except for the creation of their "self and the cultivation of the type of play one can engage in if one gives up absolute morals. Such a critique can be levelled at Baudrillard, a theorist who moves from a period in which he shows an expressed interest in changing the social conditions and codes of oppression in The Mirror of Production (1975) to his more recent work (Baudrillard, 1977/1987) in which he takes on the role of a describer, rather than transformer, of postmodern society. Our attempt here is both to accept the stance of the ironist, indeed to accept that one could choose, like Baudrillard, to be "giddy" in the face of reality, while simultaneously urging the critical rhetorician to choose not to play but to create an end which could guide us in attempting to effect social change.** As Rorty (1989) notes, "A belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worthy of dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance" (p. 189). In sum, then, a stress on McKerrow's critique of freedom has the potential to lead to a shedding of every vestige of commitment and predisposition to a particular viewpoint for the sake of constant self-reflection and self-criticism. Such a position necessarily commits a critic to a self-criticism from which the critic could not escape long enough to provide direction. It is just this potential whirlpool of criticism brought about by the critique of freedom that we hope to amend. The remainder of this essay will be an attempt to conceptualize and identify an arena for commitment within a critical rhetoric. The critic in our conception maintains a commitment toward telos through which criticism is directed, while simultaneously recognizing the contingencies of this goal. One of the results of this configuration of a critical rhetoric will be the transcendence of the critiques of domination and of freedom; our critic will recognize that all criticism, because it shifts the current relations of power, critiques forms of domination by transforming them into new forms of power.^ The critique of domination and critique of freedom are effectively one, and are little more than different perspectives about a single discursive struggle.

4.    The relativist approach undermines open academic debate which fuels public disenfranchisement from the political process

Furedi 6 Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Where have all the intellectuals gone? 2^nd edition, p. 76-77

The powerful influence of relativist currents has made it difficult to debate matters of substance. As Russell Berman and Stephen Haber argue, 'the shared beliefs that allowed debate to take place have now largely been erodcd'.6 Without a common intellectual language and a minimalist consensus about standards, real debate becomes difficult to conduct. The estrangement of academia from the intense and creative experience of debates that have consequences has encouraged a cultural style that celebrates intellectual disengagement. Public debate, controversy and the single-minded pursuit of ideas, once seen as fundamental features of academic life, are no longer accorded automatic respect. Academic freedom is no longer an inviolable right that people are prepared to defend. Traditionally academics, particularly social scientists, have been in the forefront of asserting the principle of freedom of speech. These days academics attempt to deny their colleagues the right to free speech. The campaign to ban Tom Paulin from speaking at Harvard for being anti-Semitic, and the censoring of Israeli academics by the editor of an academic journal based in Manchester on the grounds that they are Israeli, is a testimony to the illiberal tendencies that prevail in academia. Academic freedom has become negotiable. In the US there has been little opposition to the introduction of campus speech codes that prohibit speech that 'offends'. In the UK, academics have barely raised a murmur about the introduction of processes and regulations that compromise the free pursuit of knowledge and research. Lecturers now need to ensure that their teaching is consistent with bureaucratically devised 'learning outcomes' that meet the requirements of externally imposed benchmarking criteria. Lecturers are no longer supposed to teach what they think needs to be taught, and they certainly do not have the right to lecture material for which the learning outcome cannot be demonstrated in advance. Fortunately, despite these formalities, scholars still teach what they think they should teach, but the acceptance of these bureaucratic codes underlines the fragile foundation for academic freedom. Of course words can offend. But one of the roles of a university is to question conventional truths. The pursuit of ideas has always demanded that intellectuals question the sacred and mention the unmentionable. A civilized intellectual institution teaches its members how not to take criticisms personally, and how not to be offended by uncomfortable ideas. It also teaches its members how to deal with being offended. Cavalier attitudes towards free and unfettered debate, and lack of enthusiasm for engagement in controversy, contribute towards the wider sense of political malaise. Instead of countering the public's mood of disengagement, such attitudes provide cultural affirmation for it. The absence of a cultural commitment to debate does not cause the disengagement of the public from the political process, but these two things are inextricably linked. More importantly, the diminishing status of debate underlines the lack of respect that society accords to intellectual clarification.

5.    Mass public disenfranchisement causes war, slavery, and authoritarianism

Boggs 2k (CAROL BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 00, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1)

But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism.  While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique.  In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo.  Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible.  The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action.  If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”.  Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare.  A belief that totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises.  Oakeshott’s minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people’s lives.  Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege.  Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration.  Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system.  In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories. 

Counterplan

Text: As members of the debate community we should act as allies by not engaging in the harmful practices of traditional debate.

The aff uses the social construction of the “United States Federal Government”—this entity does not exist—their recognition of the state forces them to ignore what they can do within the everyday as individuals while empowering capitalism making all of their impacts inevitable

Hallward in 2k3 (Peter, French Department @ Kings College, Badiou a Subject to Truth, p. 96-99, kdf)

The state is thus a kind of primordial response to anarchy. The violent imposition of order, we might say, is itself an intrinsic feature of being as such. The state maintains order among the subsets, that is, it groups elements in the various ways required to keep them, ultimately, in their proper, established places in the situation. The state does not present things, nor does it merely copy their presentation, but instead, “through an entirely new counting operation, re-presents them, ” and re-presents them in a way that groups them in relatively fixed, clearly identifiable, categories. 44

Because the state is itself the immeasurable excess of parts over elements made ordered or objective, under normal or “natural” circumstances there is a literally “immeasurable excess of state power” over the individuals it governs (namely, the infinite excess of 2ℵ0 over ℵ 0 ). Within the situational routine, within business as usual, it is strictly impossible to know by how much the state exceeds its elements. In normal circumstances, there can indeed be no serious question of resisting the “state of things as they are.” This excess is essential to the efficient everyday operation of state business. By the same token, the first task of any political intervention is to interrupt the indetermination of state power and force the state to declare itself, to  show its hand—normally in the form of repression (AM, 158–60). From a revolutionary perspective, if the excess of the state appears “very weak, you prepare an insurrection; if you think it is very large, you establish yourselves in the idea of a 'long march.'” 45 Today, of course, the power of the state is chiefly a function of the neoliberal economy. As far as any given individual or group of individuals is concerned, the blind power of capital is certainly more than immeasurable, and so “prevails absolutely over the subjective destiny of the collective” (AM, 164). One thing that any contemporary political intervention must do, then, is to keep the economy at a principled distance from politics as such.

Whatever the circumstances, the struggle for truth takes place on the terrain first occupied by the state. It involves a way of conceiving and realizing the excess of parts over elements in a properly revolutionary (or disordered, or inconsistent) way, a way that will allow the open equality of free association to prevail over an integration designed to preserve a transcendent unity. So while the distinction between structure and metastructure, or between presentation and re-presentation, might suggest that analysis begins with the first term in each pair, in actual practice (i.e., from within any given situation) the members of a situation always begin with the second term, with the normality regulated by state-brokered distinction and divisions. From within the situation, it is impossible immediately to grasp the “intrinsic, ” presented individuality of particular elements belonging to the situation. If any such grasp is to have a chance of success, the state's mechanisms of classification and re-presentation must first be suspended.

There are many different kinds of states. The communist-totalitarian state, for instance—in this respect like the state of the ancien régime—is one that organizes the way it counts its parts around the explicit interests of one particular privileged part, the party (or aristocracy). Our liberal état de droit, by contrast, counts without direct reference to a privileged part per se, but rather according to a perspective that works indirectly but efficiently in the interests of such a part (C, 239–40; DO, 45). The state can re-present only what has already been presented, but it does so in a certain way. In a capitalist society, of course, the state represents its elements—including and especially its “laboring elements”—as commodities, in the interests of those who own commodities. The chief task of such a state, then, is to arrange these commodity-elements into parts whose relations are governed as much as possible by the rules that preserve and regulate the ownership of property. What such a state counts is only capital itself; how people are in turn counted or re-presented normally depends upon how much they themselves count(in terms of capital or property). Like all states, the liberal-capitalist state defends itself against any attack on its way of arranging parts, that is, it is designed to foreclose the possibility of an uprising against property. The true alternative to our state, then, is not the invention of (or regression to) pre state forms of social ties or community, but the dissolution of all links specifically based on a binding respect of property or capital: “The state is founded not on the social bond lien that it would express, but on unbonding dé-liaison, which it forbids” (EE, 125). The dé-liaison, or unbonding, forbidden by the state, is itself the very operation of a truth. It is in this way that Badiou's mature work has continued the Maoist war against the state by other, more measured, means: “To think a situation penser une situation is always to go toward that which, in it, is the least covered or protected by the shelter the general regime of things provides.” For example, in contemporary France, the political situation (the situation that structures the nature of a specifically French democracy) is to be thought from the point of view of the vulnerability of the sans-papiers (D, 126); in Israel, the political situation must be thought from the point of view of the dispossessed Palestinians. “To count finally as One that which is not even counted in a situation is what is at stake in any genuinely political thought” (AM, 165). But we know, too, that Badiou is no longer waging a struggle for the strict elimination of the state. L'Etre et l'événement provides a properly ontological reason for Maoism's historical defeat: the state is co-original with any situation. It is objectively irreducible. If “there is always toujours both presentation and representation” (EE, 110), the task is indeed to find an alternative to this toujours, this everyday. Simply, such an alternative can no longer be a once-and-for-all transformation, a destructive redemption from historical time, so much as a rigorous conception of the exceptional as such, a basis for a notion of time that transcends, without terminating, the toujours and the tous-les-jours.

Badiou's goal, early and late, has been to “outline in the world an imperative that is able to subtract us from the grip of the state.” 46 What has always been “invariant” about the communist ideal is precisely the “conflict between the masses and the state” (DI, 67; cf. DO, 15–19). Marxists have always sought “the end of representation, and the universality of simple presentation, ” an egalitarian counting for one and the unrestricted reign of the individual qua individual (EE, 125–26). To this day, “the heart of the question is indeed the reaffirmation of the state réassurance étatique,”“the disjunction between presentation and representation” (EE, 149). But the whole point is that this disjunction can be tackled only subjectively and not objectively. Badiou's project persists as the “destatification of thought désétatisation de la pensée,” the subtraction of subject from state. 47 For as long as his philosophy remains a philosophy of the subject, it will remain a philosophy written against the state.

Ethics begin with the self not state—they can have no valid explanation for calling on the state—instead prefer the counterplan which is an act of everydayness—our dissent ultimately shatters the pillars of the system that created the necessity of factory farms allowing us to live within the truth rather than a façade

Vaclav Havel, ’90                                 THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS, p. 39-40, JT

***The “green grocer” referred to here is a specific man…hence the “he”/”him”…

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans inertly to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections be knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identify and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the green-grocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the green­grocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the post-totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.

Thus the power structure through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, through its alien­ating presence in people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self defence dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offence, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the egalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shows everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist wish living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all­inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. After all, the greengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course. because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination. In the post-­totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.

CAP K

Capitalism’s naturalization of the process of subjugation creates social exclusion on a global scale – the ultimate ethico-political responsibility is to challenge the foundations of this system’s organization principles. This makes reaching the Universal impossible.

Zizek and Daly 2004 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek, 14-6)

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gord¬ian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties con¬cerning 'multiculturalist' etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called 'radically incorrect' in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions' and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety.

For far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political mor¬bidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary

This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose 'universalism' fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral marketplace.

Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded 'life-chances' cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the 'developing world'). And Zizek's point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle.

Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-par¬ticular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix.

Thus the Alternative: Vote negative to do nothing

Doing nothing is not just sitting and waiting for the moment to attack—it is the only genuine political act--it is an act of abstaining from the depoliticized gameboard of capitalism by refusing to play their game—ultimately withdrawing past the point of commodification

Zizek 2008 (Slavoj, Senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Violence: Big Ideas// small books. Picador, pg(s) 213-7, kdf)

Last but not least, the lesson of the intricate rela­tionship between subjective and systemic violence is that violence is not a direct property of some acts, but is distributed between acts and their contexts, between activity and inactivity. The same act can count as vio­lent or non-violent, depending on its context; some­times a polite smile can be more violent than a brutal outburst. A brief reference to quantum physics might be of some help here; one of the most unsettling no­tions in quantum physics is that of the Higgs field. Left to their own devices in an environment to which they can pass their energy, all physical systems will eventu­ally assume a state of lowest energy. To put it in another way, the more mass we take from a system, the more we lower its energy, till we reach the vacuum state at which the energy is zero. There are, however, phenomena which compel us to posit the hypothesis that there has to be something (some substance) that we cannot take away from a given system without RAISING that sys­tem's energy—this "something" is called the Higgs field: once this field appears in a vessel that has been pumped empty and whose temperature has been lowered as much as possible, its energy will be further lowered. The "something" which thus appears is a something that contains less energy than nothing. In short, sometimes zero is not the "cheapest" state of a system, so that, paradoxically, "nothing" costs more than "something." In a crude analogy, the social "nothing" (the stasis of a system, its mere reproduction without any changes)"costs more than something" (a change), that is, it de­mands a lot of energy, so that the first gesture to pro­voke a change in the system is to withdraw activity, to do nothing.¶ Jose Saramago's novel Seeing (the literal translation of the original title is An Essay on Lucidity)³ can effec­tively be perceived as a mental experiment in Bartlebian politics.⁴ It tells the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by torrential rain, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The govern­ment's relief is short lived, however, when vote counting reveals that over 7o per cent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make amends just one week later with another elec­tion day. The results are worse: now 83 per cent of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties-the ruling party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adver­sary, the party of the middle (p.o.t.m.)-are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalised party of the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are essentially a vote for their progressive agenda.¶ Is this an organised conspiracy to overthrow not just the ruling government but the entire democratic sys­tem? If so, who is behind it, and how did they manage to organise hundreds of thousands of people into such subversion without being noticed? When asked how they voted, ordinary citizens simply respond that such information is private, and besides, is not leaving the ballot blank their right? Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic con­spiracy exists, the government quickly labels the move­ment "terrorism, pure and unadulterated" and declares a state of emergency, allowing the government to sus­pend all constitutional guarantees. Five hundred citizens are seized at random and dis­appear into secret interrogation sites, and their status is coded red for secrecy. Their families are informed in Orwellian style not to worry about the lack of informa­tion concerning their loved ones, since "in that very si­lence lay the key that could guarantee their personal safety." When these moves bear no fruit, the right-wing government adopts a series of increasingly drastic steps, from declaring a state of siege and concocting plots to create disorder to withdrawing the police and seat of government from the capital, sealing all the city's en­trances and exits, and finally manufacturing its own terrorist ringleader. The city continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government's thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian level of non-violent resistance. In his perspicacious review of the novel, Michael Wood noted a Brechtian parallel:In a famous poem, written in East Germany in 1953, Brecht quotes a contemporary as saying that the people have lost the trust of the government. Would it not therefore be easier, Brecht slyly asks, to dissolve the people and have the government elect another one? Saramago's novel is a parable of what happens when neither government nor people can be dissolved. While the parallel holds, the concluding characterisa­tion seems to fall short: the unsettling message of See­ing is not so much the indissolubility of both people and government as the compulsive nature of democratic rit­uals of freedom. What happens is that by abstaining from voting, people effectively dissolve the government-not only in the limited sense of overthrowing the existing government, but more radically. Why is the government thrown into such a panic by the voters' abstention? It is compelled to confront the fact that it exists, that it ex­erts power, only insofar as it is accepted as such by its subjects- accepted even in the mode of rejection. The voters' abstention goes further than the intra-political negation, the vote of no confidence: it rejects the very frame of decision. In psychoanalytic terms, the voters' abstention is something like the psychotic Verwerfung (foreclosure, rejection/repudiation), which is a more radical move than repression (Verdrangung). According to Freud, the repressed is intellectually accepted by the subject, since it is named, and at the same time is negated because the subject refuses to recognise it, refuses to rec­ognise him or herself in it. In contrast to this, foreclo­sure rejects the term from the symbolic tout court. To circumscribe the contours of this radical rejection, one is tempted to evoke Badiou's provocative thesis: "It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.' Better to do nothing than to engage in localised acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly (acts such as providing space for the multitude of new subectivities). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active_' to "participate," to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "do something"; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a "critical" participation, a dialogue, to silence-just to engage us in "dialogue," to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters' abstention is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today's democracies.