Tournament: Binghamton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Binghamton | Judge: Freeman
Observation 1: Lights, Camera…

Our story begins with Topsy. An Indian Elephant brought to the United States from India. She was enslaved in the circus before being put to menial labor when she was no longer cute enough. She turned on her captors and killed three of them because of the abuse she had received. Her owners decided to kill her in response.

McNichol 06 (Tom McNichol, author, historian, and journalist. AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War  ISBN: 0787982679   P.143-144)  RJG 

The projected victim was an ill-tempered circus elephant that had been brought to
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scaffold was constructed for the improbable purpose of hanging Topsy by the neck. 

Her death was turned into a Spectacle. Filmed in the Movie “Electrocuting an Elephant” Thomas Edison made her a centerpiece in his popularization of the power of electricity. This death marked the beginning of modern electrical culture, and elided the murder of animals in favor of the spectacle and power of electricity. Making the disappearance of animals a constant state of affairs.

Shukin 09 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times” P. 150-152)RJG

As I have already mentioned, among the first early subjects to be immured on
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of an animal and her encryption within cinema’s spectral “economy of being.”

Topsy’s murder tied electricity in its productive force with its ability to kill painlessly. “Humanely”. While giving Electricity a seeming independent animus.

Shukin 09 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times” P. 159-161)RJG

However, although the ASPCA and other humane societies had denounced hanging, they were
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Topsy down, and it mystified his own motivated part in her death.

This show of force was a key part in the instantiation of modern biopower, giving sovereignty the complete and total productive control over life and death and moving and commanding populaces of all sorts, with the goal of creating a new, modern, “electric eden” where trouble makers like Topsy were put to death via a life-improving force.

Shukin 09 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times” P. 153-154)RJG

Edison had associated death by electrocution with cinematic communication prior to the ten seconds of
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for a mock fatal shock, constituted some of the park’s dizzying mimetics.

Topsy’s murder marks the beginning of animals being subjected to biopolitical control, which has strengthened itself immensely over the last century. But the recognition of agency and meaning in Topsy’s actions recognized shows a fundamental confusion in the institution of modern Speciesism. At the moment it solidified its control its rationale was most indistinct. It is this we explore.

Shukin 09 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times” P. 155-157)RJG

As animals like Topsy were being transfigured, through the fantastic convergences of money and
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human order, law and justice” from which they are excluded.66

Thus, we monstrate the murder of Topsy as a way to break down the restrictions we impose on and by electricity inside the United States. 

Observation 2: Action!

Our Monstration of Topsy lets us show how Animals like Topsy are barred from displaying any sense of Logos, by the effect of power and control, letting us challenge and break down the mimetic system of control they have been subjugated to and granting a recognition of agency back to them.

Shukin 09 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times” P. 140-142)RJG

The showdown with Topsy not only promoted the idea that corporal punishment had found its
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 at least in these instances, very much an effect of power.

By stripping language of its metaphysical constraits, and reconfigure it as a species-specific way of being that is originary in force and creation, we break down the “Human-Animal Divide”, fundamentally rupture speciesism, undoes the hierarchy of proximity and identity politics, and create a fundamentally new way to approach being, value, and community.

Iveson 12 (Richard Iveson. PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London; research interests include critical animal studies and animal liberation; continental philosophy (with focus on Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida); posthumanism amongst others.  “On the Importance of Heidegger’s Anthropogenesis, and of moving beyond it” http://zoogenesis.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/on-the-importance-of-heideggers-anthropogenesis-and-of-moving-beyond-it/)  RJG

Nonetheless, once we strip language
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posthumanist philosophy think both the finitude and the nonsubstitutable deaths of other animals.

Speciesism is the root cause of all oppression and identity based violence, and only by fighting speciesism first can we fight the logic of domination.

Wolfe 03 (Cary Wolfe, Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Albany. “Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Speciesism, and Postmodernist theory”. University Of Chicago Press, ISBN: 978-0226905143  P. 7-8)   RJG

The effective power of the discourse of species when applied to social others of whatever
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of domination”—all compressed in what Derrida’s recent work calls “carnophallogocentrism.”

Biopower gives total control over all life, and can only truly be challenged after consideration has been given to animal beings.

Shukin 12 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Tense Animals” The New Centennial Review, Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2012, pp. 143-167 (Article))RJG

What do these two anecdotes featuring Dolly and Bell—and the intimacy of metaphorical
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embarrassment of species talk that too referentially evokes the existence of other animals?

Observation 3: Stay until the Curtain Closes

Topsy’s murder is not just speciesism, but shows the intersectionality of the hierarchies of Species, Race, Colonialism, Capital, and Fabricated Otherness. We challenge all of these at once through Topsy.

Shukin 09 (Nicole Shukin, assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times” P. 154)RJG

The owners of Luna Park, Frederick Thompson and Skip Dundy, used Topsy and
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make a spectacle out of both an impudent animal and a racial chimera.

Policy Debate is uniquely key to bringing about change in regards to the oppression of animals. Weigh this evidence before anything else because it’s specific to policy debate and cites real world solvency.

Schatz 03 (Joe Leeson-Schatz, Professor of Feminist Evolutionary Theory and Director of Debate at Binghamton University. Remembering Meat: Reliving the Story of Tortue, Masters Thesis at Binghamton University. 2003)

On the ride home we realized how much the issue of silence really applied in
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top of her vegetarianism that had already become a part of her life.

Complex debate topics call for a variety of interpretations of how to meet the topic. Instead of forcing us down one road of what debate “should be” we must instead compare and weigh against each other multiple ways of relating to the topic.

Shively 97 (Ruth Lessl, yes it’s that  Shively. Compromised Goods: A Realist Critique of Constructionist Politics. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN: 0-299-15270-7 P. 47-48)RJG

Thus the above arguments appeal, respectively, to the criteria of consistency, coherence
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better accounts for all of the relevant information, considered as a whole.

Rigidly enforced political discourse destroys the meaning behind language, rendering it bankrupt. Rather than actually achieving something, it is a means that justifies no end. Instead of stating what we determine is acceptable discourse in the debate sphere, we should make free use of language to create new possibilities for meaningful discourse.

Agamben ’92 [Giorgio , Political Philosopher at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie, and the European Graduate School. “Notes of Politics” from Means without an End. pp. 114-118]
What is at stake in this experiment is not at all communication intended as destiny
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as sphere of pure means.