Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 2 | Opponent: Weber GO | Judge: Lemeul, Joel
“The earthquake hit. I spent some time in an emergency evacuation area, but things have calmed down, so I have returned […] to work. […]
Today is the sixth day since the disaster. My ways of looking at and thinking about things have changed.
Everywhere I go, there is nothing but tears. I want to write about this with all the ferocity of an Asura.
Radiation is falling. It is a quiet night.
What meaning could there be in harming us to this extent?
The meaning of all things is probably determined after the fact. If so, then what is the meaning of that period “after the fact”? Is there any meaning there at all?
[…]
We were told that when we come back in from outside, we should wash our hair, hands, and face. We don’t have any water to wash ourselves.
[…]
They say the radioactivity isn’t enough to immediately cause abnormalities in our health. If we turn the word “immediately” around, does it become “eventually”?
[…]
Maybe so. There is a clear border between things and meaning. Perhaps one could even say that the two are even opposed to one another.
[…]
As I was writing this just now, the earth rumbled again. Everything shook. I held my breath, got on my knees, and glared at the trembling until it was over. I am betting with my life. In the rain of radiation, I am all alone.
[…]
The high school gymnasium I loved so much has become a place to put all of the unidentified bodies. […]
Outside, radioactivity rains down.
[…]
There is no night without a dawn.”

-Wago Ryoichi. March 16, 2011. 

On March 11, 2011, the city of Fukushima, Japan suffered three disasters. First, an unheard-of earthquake, followed by an exceptionally large tsunami. The confluence of these extraordinary natural events caused a meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor. Alain-Marc Rieu explains that:

The Fukushima catastrophe is a turning point in the conception, role and management of technology in industrial societies. As did Hiroshima (on another dimension) after 1945, the Fukushima’s nuclear accident questions and transforms established conceptions and values concerning the relations between technology, politics, industry, society and the environment. It has become impossible to think after Fukushima as we did before. This catastrophe initiates a major epistemic and conceptual shift with long-term consequences. This paper focuses on a powerful conceptual complex associating the notions of risk, trust and knowledge society. This complex associates discourses, theories and policies. The objective is to criticize this conceptual complex in order to explore how to rethink after Fukushima the relations between technology, politics, industry and society.
 A year after the catastrophe, the time has come to evaluate its historical meaning. Fukushima is not a disaster like others. This is the reason why it is becoming a turning point in world history: relations between technology, politics, industry, society and ecology are forever transformed. Its long-term impact and meaning are impossible to repress: wherever they live, people will never see and understand nuclear energy and nuclear industry as they did before, on the same pattern. Many studies, reports, debates have poured over the victims, the dead, the missing and the displaced, on all Japanese, on the contaminated land and sea, on institutions, politicians, journalists, professors and experts, bureaucrats, managers and industrial companies (Japan focus 2012). At least, one thing is clear: the Fukushima catastrophe is an appeal for new knowledge. The goal of this paper is to understand how it changes the way we think. A paradox (a methodological challenge as well) has first to be solved: any discourse on Fukushima is an interpretation of the catastrophe. Accordingly it would not matter to start by the interpretation and then deduct from it an explanation of the event. But the catastrophe is a “scandal” of such magnitude and depth that it remains beyond its interpretations, indefinitely in excess. This excess is not a call for a metaphysical explanation but a call for new knowledge. To start by an interpretation or explanation would be part of the scandal because it would be an attempt to fall into an endless debate and close a real search. A description of the event has to come first because it drives all interpretations. Few events in world history have this rare property: in the recent past, the First World War, Nazism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Gulag and now Fukushima. It cannot be denied that the analysis of the event presupposes its interpretation. But the event overpowers and overshadows established interpretations in the humanities and social sciences. This explains why such events open a paradigm shift. 

William Kinsella furthers that all our interpretations become facile in the face of such a disaster. He says: “In the language of nuclear risk analysis and regulation, the earthquake was 'beyond the design basis' for the six reactors at Fukushima. The design basis, in turn, was based on the view of […] seismologists that an earthquake of that scale was highly unlikely at that location. For some nuclear professionals, this decision based on the 'best available science' […] shifted a technological disaster into the separate realm of unforeseeable natural disasters. The plant's design and construction had been appropriate, and the assumptions underlying the failure had come from outside the realm of engineering.”  In the language of the elites, nuclear power was free of blame. Fukushima was a “black swan” event, highly improbable and beyond reasonable design concerns.  It was an unforeseen and unforeseeable disaster, unheard of since Chernobyl. Yet: “What really happened at Fukushima was caused neither by the earthquake nor by the resulting tsunami: they just were the deadly trigger of a systemic catastrophe, all at once human, social, political, technological and industrial. […] the catastrophe was caused by the power structure, which […] decided where to build this […] plant […] the technology;[...] the standards for the plant’s construction, its maintenance and back up systems […] The dangers and mistakes were known, available on the public mantelpiece of the media, politicians, administrators, researchers and other experts. We all looked the other way.”  This is clear in the government's response. Given the power, the autonomy, the sovereignty of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Japanese government played no role in the actual containment, monitoring, or repairs of the plant.  They tried no one.  They never investigated the Tokyo Electric Power Company. In fact, the government lied to its citizens about the extent of the threat, under pressure from the nuclear lobby pressured.  Officials later said this was “murder” of its own people, but that they were powerless to challenge the nuclear industry.
 The response instead came from the citizens. On May 20, 2012, the people of Fukushima organized a people's court to try those nuclear executives. They aired their grievances, evaluated what limited evidence that could collect on their own, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company defended themselves. The case was tried by a panel of university professors. In the end, nothing came of it, no one ever thought anything would. The court had no power, was ignored by the government, could do nothing but issue an opinion. Yet the people of Fukushima pressed on, because they know this was the first step to challenging the nuclear bureaucracy.
 We will now shift our focus to our own nation, where nuclear power is granted the same impunity. Nuclear power is free from almost all over-sight and regulation. Under the Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, all nuclear information is secret.  Specifically, we take issue with the data restriction placed on nuclear power. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission states: “Information mandated by federal statute to be withheld from public disclosure: Restricted data includes technological details of uranium enrichment technologies […]”  And Joseph Masco explains that this goes far beyond nuclear weapons, extending to “the banal details of managing a large government bureaucracy” and the “health and environmental effects of nuclear production[.]”  Nuclear secrecy even extends to the EPA. The Atomic Energy Act exempts nuclear power from any environmental or other oversight, and the EPA find themselves helpless to control or even monitor nuclear waste.  Nuclear power is left scrubbed of all public censure, and free of most government regulation. They're above question, either by the people of the US or its government.
 Kinsella goes further, aligning secrecy with McCarthying and saying “secrecy [is] a fundamental principle of the nuclear discursive formation”  and “a 'culture of secrecy' […] still pervades the U.S. Department of Energy, long after the end of the Cold War.”  Charles Taylor adds that “Secrecy is perhaps the defining characteristic of nuclear-organizational cultures.”
 The perverse effect of this secrecy is that individuals are reduced from full persons to the agents of the nuclear bureaucracy. As in Fukushima, scientists and technicians become instruments of power, turning against their community and themselves. They become nothing more than agents of power. Simultaneously, the public are excluded from decision-making, democracy, or even consideration – they may be lied to and murder with impunity. Kinsella explains:

“Arney (1991), Masco (2002), and Taylor (1990,1992,2002) all addressed another aspect of secrecy: its disciplinary effects on individuals who are incorporated into nuclear institutional systems. These authors focused their attention on "organizational subjects" (Taylor, 1990) such as Robert Oppenheimer, Klaus Fuchs, and Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, whose identities, both public and personal, are products of institutional, investigative, historical, and biographical discourses. As members of nuclear organizations, these subjects are targets of disciplinary power as conceptualized by Foucault (1978,1979,1980,1982), produced through institutional processes of information collection, record keeping, and classification that simultaneously constrain and constitute their identities. One result is a depletion of personal efficacy; as Arney (1991) suggested, "Modern systems of expertise made the atomic scientist their agent and, in that violent process, made it difficult for anyone to speak any more about notions of responsibility, ethics, guilt, commitment, and the like" (p. 5). In this way, organizational subjects provide "biopower" or "docile bodies" (Foucault, 1978,1979) sustaining the nuclear institutional order. Like nature itself, they become part of a "standing reserve" (Heidegger, 1977), stockpiled for use like the weapons they invent.
 Extending this principle more broadly, it appears that the disciplinary effects of nuclear discourse extend well beyond these individual organizational subjects.
 The poststructuralist observations of Baudrillard, Derrida, and Nadel, examined earlier, suggest that the nuclear system has colonized not only members of nuclear organizations, but the entire polis; producing a phenomenon that might be called "docile citizenship." Through the system of meanings I have examined here, mystery, potency, and secrecy converge to disempower public participation and individual agency in the nuclear domain. More generally, that same meaning system valorizes technical expertise, military priorities, deference to authority, and narrow rather than broad participation in public policy decisions. As I have elaborated, these values and communicative norms, operating through the nuclear discursive formation, have important direct and indirect consequences for environmental communication. At the same time, environmental communication provides a discursive setting, a broad range of stakeholders, and a variety of topoi that enable challenges to the prevailing system of meanings.” 

William V. Spanos defines this as “the problematic.” He says:

One could supplement Ohmann’s damning critical analysis of the “can do” language and the deeply inscribed panoptic structure of this enormous archive of memoranda by pointing to their unerring and mind-numbing sameness: their systematic reliance on the quantitative measure, the abstracting and reductive cliché, the euphemisms, the short-hand structure of the sentences—what Eichmann called the “appropriate telegraphic style” in speaking of the “monthly reports” on the progress of the “Final Solution” he sent to the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler7—and, subsuming these, the “problem-solving” model. This model, like the “over-sight” or “super-vision” of the capitalist “problematic” brilliantly analyzed by Louis Althusser in “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” blinds the willful inquirer to any differential reality that would contradict and thus remain an obstacle to the end he/she desires from the beginning: in this case, “the suffering of the Vietnamese,” which “did not impinge on the consciousness of the policy makers,” that is, “had virtually no existence for them” (my emphasis). One could also mark the obliteration of conscience, which Arendt over-determines in her devastating analysis of Eichmann’s language, achieved in these Pentagon memoranda by the insistent identification of the realities instigating it as a neurosis—the “‘French defeat’ and ‘Korean syndromes,’” as well as pointing to the genealogy of what, in the aftermath of the war under the massive campaign of the American government and the culture industry to “forget Vietnam” in the name of resuming its mission in the world’s wilderness (specifically the Middle East), came to be called “the Vietnam syndrome.” But, for the purpose on my argument, I want to underscore what Ohmann long ago noted at the outset of his criticism, but did not adequately amplify about the “agents” of these memoranda. This deadly cliché-ridden and euphemistic “telegraphic” language, whose superficiality—is it inappropriate to call this symptom of these documents “banality”?—lent itself to the pervasive routinization of a murderous indiscriminate violence against America’s demonized “Others,” is not, as it is in a totalitarian society, that of a militarist mentality. It is, rather, the language of civilians, precisely those “ordinary” Americans who exist in democracies to protect society from the juggernaut mentality of the militaristic mind.

“We must let go of our reliance on 'the experts.' I am not advocating some kind of reactive, wholesale rejection of science. Some of the best contemporary science is not nearly as rigid and limiting as what we are presented with in the popular science and 'the studies' presented to us in the media. What I am suggesting is that we let go of […] our passive, unquestioning acceptance of anything that is presented to us as expert opinion, as authoritatively reflecting what 'they say.' […] Heidegger let us know some of the ways that we are shaped, constrained, closed in, and closed off by this 'they.' We can become and in fact ordinarily are so molded that our very 'self' becomes, effectively, a “they-self.” The they-self does not think, not in the sense in which we are now using that word. The theyself goes rather mindlessly about its business, business that has also been laid out for it by 'them.'” 

Martin Heidegger  poses the question: I was born, I lived, and I will die. Did I live a life that was mine? Of course, no debate round can bring you to a complete life, but your decision should be guided by this fundamental question: Did I truly ek-sist, or was I living everyone else's life? Was I a “they” – disappearing into the background and the crowd, wearing the same clothes, marching in the same step, thinking the same thoughts – or was I Myself?
 We've been hailed by both the world and the topic committee to turn our discussion to nuclear power. And in this round, we wish to open the question of nuclear science, and specifically the secrecy restriction. We prefer not to be answerable to this nuclear bureaucracy – shut out, lied to, manipulated, and disempowered – transformed from an “I” into a “they.” You won't be surprised we resist this same expert, top-down control within this debate round. We refuse the topic committees demands of proper education, fairness, and division of ground which molds students into “debaters”, which seek the proper political education, with all the thoughtless routine and formalism of a politics debate. Our affirmation flows from a different well-spring.
 We would envision this round like the people's court of Fukushima, Japan. The judges are not government officials, but university professors, and have no authority to implement their decision. We, the parties, have limited knowledge – only what is public or what we ourselves know, not the vast stores of classified materials. Yet, like the people of Fukushima, we nevertheless believe debating and teaching about this issue has the power to change worlds. With this frame in mind, we affirm: Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce restrictions on energy production in the United States of nuclear power. We are not interested in the outcomes of an instrumental policy action, rather our affirmation is guided by Heidegger's vision of resolved: rather than write an interpretation onto government policy, we remain open to transformation, as the people of Fukushima were. This profound gesture opens the space for a debate and ways of knowing that are precluded by secrecy.
 Most importantly, this opens a public debate about nuclear energy. Kinsella concludes: “Nuclear science, technologies, and policies, products of human discourse, are widely portrayed as arcane, difficult, and out of the intellectual reach of ordinary people. Paradoxically, in a world where nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons are pervasive presences, the legend persists that only a gifted few can understand these products of science and technology. […] This distancing of nuclear topics from the realm of public discourse constrains public participation in policy decisions, sustaining a culture of expertise and technocratic decision making. In this exclusionary mode, nuclear discourse is a site of ongoing rhetorical "boundary work" with important political effects: As cognitive boundaries are constructed between expert and public knowledge, political power is bounded as well. These effects extend to environmental communication more broadly when boundaries between experts and the public, modeled most persuasively in nuclear discourse, are replicated in other environmental policy settings[…] 'Public moral argument was thus overwhelmed by privileged argument.... Technical argument... denuded [the issue] of morality altogether, making the dispute one for “experts” alone to consider'. Thus, expert rationality colonized debate about one of the most public issues imaginable, the fate of the global commons.”
 In the words of Ian Ganassi: “'The dreadful has already happened,' prior to the atomic bomb. The bomb is only a punctuation mark ending a sentence that is already complete”  because never even opened. And we end by paraphrasing Martin Heidegger: The most thought-provoking thing about this thought-provoking science is that we are still not thinking about it.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
“The earthquake hit. I spent some time in an emergency evacuation area, but things have calmed down, so I have returned … to work.
Today is the sixth day since the disaster. My ways of looking at and thinking about things have changed.
Everywhere I go, there is nothing but tears. I want to write about this with all the ferocity of an Asura.
Radiation is falling. It is a quiet night.
What meaning could there be in harming us to this extent?
The meaning of all things is probably determined after the fact. If so, then what is the meaning of that period “after the fact”? Is there any meaning there at all?
[…]
We were told that when we come back in from outside, we should wash our hair, hands, and face. We don’t have any water to wash ourselves.
[…]
They say the radioactivity isn’t enough to immediately cause abnormalities in our health. If we turn the word “immediately” around, does it become “eventually”?
[…]
The high school gymnasium I loved so much has become a place to put all of the unidentified bodies. […]
Outside, radioactivity rains down.
[…]
There is no night without a dawn.”

-Wago Ryoichi. March 16, 2011.

On March 11, 2011, the city of Fukushima, Japan suffered three disasters. First, an unheard-of earthquake, followed by an exceptionally large tsunami. The confluence of these extraordinary natural events caused a meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor. Alain-Marc Rieu explains that:

The Fukushima catastrophe is a turning point in the conception, role and management of technology in industrial societies. As did Hiroshima (on another dimension) after 1945, the Fukushima’s nuclear accident questions and transforms established conceptions and values concerning the relations between technology, politics, industry, society and the environment. It has become impossible to think after Fukushima as we did before. This catastrophe initiates a major epistemic and conceptual shift with long-term consequences. This paper focuses on a powerful conceptual complex associating the notions of risk, trust and knowledge society. This complex associates discourses, theories and policies. The objective is to criticize this conceptual complex in order to explore how to rethink after Fukushima the relations between technology, politics, industry and society. A year after the catastrophe, the time has come to evaluate its historical meaning. Fukushima is not a disaster like others. This is the reason why it is becoming a turning point in world history: relations between technology, politics, industry, society and ecology are forever transformed. Its long-term impact and meaning are impossible to repress: wherever they live, people will never see and understand nuclear energy and nuclear industry as they did before, on the same pattern. Many studies, reports, debates have poured over the victims, the dead, the missing and the displaced, on all Japanese, on the contaminated land and sea, on institutions, politicians, journalists, professors and experts, bureaucrats, managers and industrial companies (Japan focus 2012). At least, one thing is clear: the Fukushima catastrophe is an appeal for new knowledge. The goal of this paper is to understand how it changes the way we think. A paradox (a methodological challenge as well) has first to be solved: any discourse on Fukushima is an interpretation of the catastrophe. Accordingly it would not matter to start by the interpretation and then deduct from it an explanation of the event. But the catastrophe is a “scandal” of such magnitude and depth that it remains beyond its interpretations, indefinitely in excess. This excess is not a call for a metaphysical explanation but a call for new knowledge. To start by an interpretation or explanation would be part of the scandal because it would be an attempt to fall into an endless debate and close a real search. A description of the event has to come first because it drives all interpretations. Few events in world history have this rare property: in the recent past, the First World War, Nazism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Gulag and now Fukushima. It cannot be denied that the analysis of the event presupposes its interpretation. But the event overpowers and overshadows established interpretations in the humanities and social sciences. This explains why such events open a paradigm shift. 

William Kinsella furthers that all our interpretations become facile in the face of such a disaster. He says: “In the language of nuclear risk analysis and regulation, the earthquake was 'beyond the design basis' for the six reactors at Fukushima. The design basis, in turn, was based on the view of […] seismologists that an earthquake of that scale was highly unlikely at that location. For some nuclear professionals, this decision based on the 'best available science' […] shifted a technological disaster into the separate realm of unforeseeable natural disasters. The plant's design and construction had been appropriate, and the assumptions underlying the failure had come from outside the realm of engineering.”  

In the language of the elites, nuclear power was free of blame. Fukushima was a rare event, highly improbable and beyond reasonable design concerns.  It was an unforeseen and unforeseeable disaster, unheard of since Chernobyl. Yet: “What really happened at Fukushima was caused neither by the earthquake nor by the resulting tsunami: they just were the deadly trigger of a systemic catastrophe, all at once human, social, political, technological and industrial. […] the catastrophe was caused by the power structure, which […] decided where to build this […] plant […] the technology;[...] the standards for the plant’s construction, its maintenance and back up systems […] The dangers and mistakes were known, available on the public mantelpiece of the media, politicians, administrators, researchers and other experts. We all looked the other way.”  

This is clear in the government's response. Given the power, the autonomy, the sovereignty of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Japanese government played no role in the actual containment, monitoring, or repairs of the plant.  They tried no one.  They never investigated the Tokyo Electric Power Company. In fact, the government lied to its citizens about the extent of the threat, under pressure from the nuclear lobby pressured.  Officials later said this was “murder” of its own people, but that they were powerless to challenge the nuclear industry.

The response instead came from the citizens. On May 20, 2012, the people of Fukushima organized a people's court to try those nuclear executives. They aired their grievances, evaluated what limited evidence that could collect on their own, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company defended themselves. The case was tried by a panel of university professors. In the end, nothing came of it, no one ever thought anything would. The court had no power, was ignored by the government, could do nothing but issue an opinion. Yet the people of Fukushima pressed on, because they know this was the first step to challenging the nuclear bureaucracy.

We will now shift our focus to our own nation, where nuclear power is granted the same impunity. Nuclear power is free from almost all over-sight and regulation. Under the Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, all nuclear information is secret.  Specifically, we take issue with the data restriction placed on nuclear power. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission states: “Information mandated by federal statute to be withheld from public disclosure: Restricted data includes technological details of uranium enrichment technologies […]”  

Nuclear power, while protected by a plutocracy that privileges big utility over people, remains unambiguously dangerous. Data flow is heavily restricted, to the detriment of thousands of communities who struggle with the reality of nuclear secrecy. 

New scientific knowledge was enthusiastically embraced and applied to political ends, driving domestic and international nuclear expansion, while scientific analyses of the full implications of that project were deficient  organizations at Energy Department sites are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain information on environmental, safety, and health issues. According to the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, Los Alamos and Sandia Laboratories are requiring all public information requests to be filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). At the same time the Energy Department is increasingly denying FOIA requests and refusing to waive copying fees.  Not all "nuclear secrets" [End Page 450] involve usable technological information about how to build a bomb. Indeed, nuclear secrecy can conceal the banal details of managing a large government bureaucracy as easily as more profound information regarding the health and environmental effects of nuclear production on U.S. citizens. This new post-Cold War fixation on security—at precisely the moment when the United States, by every measure, maintains the most powerful conventional and nuclear military presence on the planet—also demonstrates that secrecy is not merely a practical means of containing military technology in a world of competing nation-states. It is also a structural means of controlling the internal challenges and national cultural contradictions within the nuclear complex itself. 

Meanwhile, the threat of meltdown remains ambiguous, and safety continues to take a backseat to profitability; the situation state-side is synonymous with Fukushima.

Prospects for future accidents are not negligible. A common response to this scenario is that Fukushima can provide valuable "lessons learned" for improving nuclear safety, the principle on which the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission established a 90-day "review of insights" (USNRC, 2011). A potentially fatal flaw in this logic is that such a review is a limited representation based on the events that transpired at Fukushima; a future accident might involve drastically different triggering events and failure modes. If taken seriously, lessons from Fukushima may indeed protect nuclear plants against future earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters. Some improvements may also have broader protective value; as the review noted, previous precautions adopted to protect plants against terrorism have conferred additional benefits. Nevertheless, the essential lesson of Fukushima may be that, despite the best efforts of nuclear designers, regulators, and operators, prevailing representations are inevitably limited. Similarly, rhetorical characterizations of new reactor designs as ((inherently safe" assume that their risks have been fully represented in the design process, an assumption that also prevailed when the current generation of reactors was deployed. When the consequences of failure are so high, the limits of representation assume special significance.  
Alvin Weinberg. Weinberg was aware of both the promise and the dangers inherent in the reactor. During the 1960's Weinberg directed a series of tests at ORNL, designed to verify theoretical assumptions made about the safety of light water reactors being pushed by the AEC for the generation of electrical power. The results were disturbing to Weinberg and his staff. The standard design of light water reactors was shown to have serious safety flaws. Weinberg began to warn people within the industry about the problem. For Weinberg superior safety was one of the most important features of the Molten Salt Reactor design. Weinberg regarded the AEC's commitment to electrical power generation through light water reactors as irrational. Not only were they less safe than other designs, but also they could not be used to breed new fissionable materials, the Molten Salt Reactor could. It was an ideal atomic breeder that could produce more fuel than it consumed. A generation after the controversy, Weinberg's brilliance is fully appreciated, but at the time, Weinberg was a thorn in the side of the AEC establishment. Powerful congressman Chet Holifield had it in for Weinberg because he saw Weinberg's reactors safety concerns as threatening the development of a nuclear power industry, which Holifield viewed himself as nurturing. In retrospective, it was a mistake to build a nuclear power industry on Light Water Reactor technology. Holifield was guiding the nuclear power industry to a disaster, the consequences of which are still with us. A misguided Holifield confronted Weinberg and said, "Alvin, if you are concerned about the safety of reactors, then I think it might be time for you to leave nuclear energy." Holifield was powerful enough to have Weinberg fired from his position as Director of ORNL, but by doing so he demonstrated how out of control his exercise of power over the American Nuclear Establishment had become. Weinberg's reactor safety concerns were vindicated in 1979 when coolant loss in the Three Mile Island-2 power reactor, lead to a partial core meltdown.  Emergency decisions to shut down a nuclear plant are costly due to lost revenue, mandatory time off-line until the problem has been investigated and resolved, and follow-up reporting requirements.  

We can no longer trust our politicians to protect us from nameless scientists and bureaucrats at the highest levels of the government, because everyone is in on the nuclear scheme. The industry pays off local politicians and officials are fed misleading information, or to simply look the other way, such as: 

U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham even supported efforts to reclassify nuclear waste that would make it easier for SRS to accumulate even more high-level waste at the site. These politicians also enjoy political contributions and other favors from SRS contractors. Today, SRS is completely controlled by NNSA, a very powerful political force and independent agency inside DOE. In effect, SRS has oversight of itself. NNSA is responsible for all nuclear weapons activities. Created under the George W. Bush administration, NNSA controls about 85 percent of the entire DOE budget and can, in the name of national security, withstand any serious oversight. President Obama left the Bush NNSA management team in place and has allowed them to operate with no serious scrutiny. In internal battles inside DOE, the environmental side has repeatedly lost out to NNSA despite management blunders at SRS and Hanford that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. (A new version of the DWPF being built at Hanford has cost taxpayers billions of dollars and is nowhere close to being operational.) The Obama administration has allowed NNSA such freedom because during the Clinton administration initiatives to convert nuclear warheads into reactor fuel became popular in the nonproliferation community (swords into ploughshares). NNSA’s predecessor was instrumental in convincing U.S. diplomats and major peace and security foundations that turning surplus nuclear warheads into MOX fuel for civilian reactors was the best deposal method for the United States for nonproliferation treaties with the Russians. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues to support this policy that was first unveiled during her husband’s administration. What NNSA did not reveal to the policy community was that the technical capability of converting the warheads into fuel rods did not exist and came with its own set of problems, including converting whatever civilian reactors that used this fuel into militarized sites because the MOX fuel rods are much more dangerous than conventional fuel rods to control and store. France’s Areva, the SRS MOX contractor, loaded MOX fuel into Reactor Number 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant the fall before the March 2011explosion. This reprocessed fuel complicates the already complex natural disaster responses. Areva’s reactor and fuel sales have dropped dramatically since the Japanese reactor meltdowns. At a press briefing at the National Press Club this spring, the heads of two leading peace and security foundations, Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund and former State Department official Robert Gallucci of the MacArthur Foundation, came out against plutonium-based fuel for civilian reactors. However, the United States government has no policy alternative in development should the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility, the first of its kind, not meet safety and treaty requirements.   
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer. After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame. In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis. Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked. But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack. The material being sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder. Now, new research is raising greater concern about the implications of those tests. St. Louis Community College-Meramec sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor's research has raised the possibility that the Army performed radiation testing by mixing radioactive particles with the zinc cadmium sulfide, though she concedes there is no direct proof. But her report, released late last month, was troubling enough that both U.S. senators from Missouri wrote to Army Secretary John McHugh demanding answers. Aides to Sens. Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt said they have received no response. Army spokesman Dave Foster declined an interview request from The Associated Press, saying the Army would first respond to the senators. The area of the secret testing is described by the Army in documents obtained by Martino-Taylor through a Freedom of Information Act request as "a densely populated slum district."
About three-quarters of the residents were black. Spates, now 57 and retired, was born in 1955, delivered inside her family's apartment on the top floor of the since-demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing development in north St. Louis. Her family didn't know that on the roof, the Army was intentionally spewing hundreds of pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide into the air. Three months after her birth, her father died. Four of her 11 siblings succumbed to cancer at relatively young ages. "I'm wondering if it got into our system," Spates said. "When I heard about the testing, I thought, 'Oh my God. If they did that, there's no telling what else they're hiding.'" Mary Helen Brindell wonders, too. Now 68, her family lived in a working-class mixed-race neighborhood where spraying occurred. The Army has admitted only to using blowers to spread the chemical, but Brindell recalled a summer day playing baseball with other kids in the street when a squadron of green Army planes flew close to the ground and dropped a powdery substance. She went inside, washed it off her face and arms, then went back out to play. Over the years, Brindell has battled four types of cancer — breast, thyroid, skin and uterine. "I feel betrayed," said Brindell, who is white. "How could they do this? We pointed our fingers during the Holocaust, and we do something like this?" Martino-Taylor said she wasn't aware of any lawsuits filed by anyone affected by the military tests. She also said there have been no payouts "or even an apology" from the government to those affected. The secret testing in St. Louis was exposed to Congress in 1994, prompting a demand for a health study. A committee of the National Research Council determined in 1997 that the testing did not expose residents to harmful levels of the chemical. But the committee said research was sparse and the finding relied on limited data from animal testing. It also noted that high doses of cadmium over long periods of exposure could cause bone and kidney problems and lung cancer. The committee recommended that the Army conduct follow-up studies "to determine whether inhaled zinc cadmium sulfide breaks down into toxic cadmium compounds, which can be absorbed into the blood to produce toxicity in the lungs and other organs." But it isn't clear if follow-up studies were ever performed. Martino-Taylor said she has gotten no answer from the Army and her research has turned up no additional studies. Foster, the Army spokesman, declined comment. Martino-Taylor became involved years ago when a colleague who grew up in the targeted area wondered if the testing was the cause of her cancer. That same day, a second colleague confided to Martino-Taylor that she, too, lived in the test area and had cancer. Martino-Taylor decided to research the testing for her doctoral thesis at the University of Missouri. She believes the St. Louis study was linked to the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project and a small group of scientists from that project who were developing radiological weapons. A congressional study in 1993 confirmed radiological testing in Tennessee and parts of the West during the Cold War. "There are strong lines of evidence that there was a radiological component to the St. Louis study," Martino-Taylor said. Blunt, in his letter to the Army secretary, questioned whether radioactive testing was performed. "The idea that thousands of Missourians were unwillingly exposed to harmful materials in order to determine their health effects is absolutely shocking," the senator wrote. McCaskill agreed. "Given the nature of these experiments, it's not surprising that Missouri citizens still have questions and concerns about what exactly occurred and if there may have been any negative health effects," she said in a statement. Martino-Taylor said a follow-up health study should be performed in St. Louis, but it must involve direct input from people who lived in the targeted areas. "Their voices have not been heard," Martino-Taylor said.  The ugliest of America’s nuclear weapons history is the cavalier way in which the old Atomic Energy Commission and later Department of Energy management allowed African American workers to be deliberately exposed to radiation at the sprawling Savannah River Site while sparing white workers from the same dangers. The good-old-boy white management at SRS routinely released radiation into the Savannah River. While phone calls were made warning white towns downstream to close their town’s water intakes, often black towns did not get the same courtesy. The Lindsay Family African American workers were given the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs and told to drop their dosimeters, which measured their exposure to radiation, in a bucket before going into high-level radiation areas so there would be no cumulative record of dosage. They also were encouraged to bring contaminated food from farms on SRS property home to feed their families. Bobbie Paul, WAND Executive Director “The racial factors, black and white, are divided,” said Bobbie Paul, Executive Director for Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND). “There’s a power structure that goes on.” Robert Lindsay was among the first African Americans to experience racial discrimination at SRS during the cold war. He had been the principal for an all-black high school when he accepted an offer to work at “the bomb plant” in 1952 because he would make more money to support his wife and ten children. He, like many other African Americans at the time, was sent to work in the plant’s most hazardous areas, and he suffered grave consequences. “He was asked if he had been exposed to any radiation when, in fact, they knew that he couldn’t know that,” said his son Richard Lindsay. “But again, it was about working there. He wanted to be able to continue working. I’m sure he felt pressured to do that, to say that he actually wasn’t exposed.” Robert Lindsay Robert Lindsay began showing signs of illness as early as two year into working at SRS. His family and others were never told why their loved ones were dying. For white workers there was a nuclear laundry so that they did not bring home contaminated clothing to expose their families to radiation. But there was no such laundry for the African American workers so they returned home with radiation on their work clothes and exposed their wives and children. The only thing the families knew were that men like Robert Lindsay came home from work sicker and sicker until one day they could not go back to SRS. It took ten years for SRS to kill Robert Lindsay. He was driven home from work in 1964 for the last time and died soon after from cancer caused by radiation exposure. Beulah Lindsay “All I knew was that my father got cancer as a result of working at the bomb plant,” said Beulah Lindsay, Robert Lindsay’s daughter. “That’s all I knew. As Mom would often say, and she was very angry when she would talk about it, she said, ‘They killed Rob. They killed Rob.’” “A lot of them got exposed and some of them got exposed and exceeded the limit and they kept them in the job,” Aiken County Councilman Willar Hightower said. (Trento) South Carolina and Georgia politicians used the conservative and patriotic culture to make sure the health effects at SRS received no serious monitoring. The local hospitals and doctors did not establish tumor registries, and local physicians never spoke out about the effects of the plant on workers and residents. Like any other company town, Aiken and the surrounding communities did not dare challenge a federal government agency that provided high-paying jobs and enriched the communities with contributions and donations. Aiken was once blessed with northern wealth in the late 19th century, when “winter residents” built “cottages,” much like the mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. The mild winter climate was perfect for their polo matches, hunts, steeplechases and golf. But these estates fell into disrepair during the depression, so the rush of high paying technical and engineering jobs in the 1950s seemed like a blessing. But with the money came unspoken danger. Unannounced radiation releases into the air exposed children to the most toxic nuclear materials on a regular basis during the 1950s and 1960s. Local officials and residents made no effort to ask questions about what went on at SRS. As a result, today SRS is the most radioactively contaminated single site in the world. Though a Superfund Site, the EPA has no legal power to stop the National Nuclear Security Administration from creating more high-level nuclear waste. The NNSA continues to amass more high-level waste every day at SRS. Since the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility was abandoned, SRS has become the de facto high-level nuclear waste dump for the United States. In recent weeks, the DOE-appointed Citizens Advisory Board that does “outside environmental monitoring” at the Site has shown signs of abandoning its traditional DOE rubber stamp role and began asking hard questions that had been reserved for environmental critics of SRS. The reality that radioactivity cannot be mitigated, just segregated and stored for the thousands of years it takes to decay, makes the entire Savannah River Site and the communities near it what former DOE official Robert Alvarez says is “a national sacrifice zone.” Even South Carolina area political officials who have run for office again and again on the vast amounts of federal aid and contractor monies they enjoy are beginning to understand that the state’s reputation as a retirement haven may be less attractive if future retirees are reluctant to purchase homes adjoining the largest high-level waste nuclear dump site in the United States. The increased publicity and wariness toward SRS is making retirement and second homes from Aiken to Hilton Head less appealing. As the troubled history of SRS becomes more personal to people in the surrounding communities, the acceptance of DOE’s continued pollution may become politically untenable. “We were basically revisiting what transpired 46 years ago and yet this story is still being told again and it’s still a tragic story,” Richard Lindsay said. “The same elements are there. These are human beings whose lives are being affected and yet there are other people who seem to be indifferent to it. Sometimes I just get a sense that people don’t get it.” 

Like the people of Fukushima, the question of what to do about nuclear energy cannot remain in the hands of invisible bureaucrats. We've been hailed by both the world and the topic committee to turn our discussion to nuclear power. And in this round, we wish to open the question of nuclear science, and specifically the secrecy restriction. We prefer not to be answerable to this nuclear bureaucracy – shut out, lied to, manipulated. You won't be surprised we resist this same expert, top-down control within this debate round

We would envision this round like the people's court of Fukushima, Japan. The judges are not government officials, but university professors, and have no authority to implement their decision. We, the parties, have limited knowledge – only what is public or what we ourselves know, not the vast stores of classified materials. Yet, like the people of Fukushima, we nevertheless believe debating and teaching about this issue has the power to change worlds. We are not interested in the outcomes of an instrumental policy action, rather our affirmation is guided by the idea of a forensic investigation of what has lead to and made inaccessible the functioning of the nuclear bureaucracy. Enacting a peoples tribunal here in the round opens the space for a debate and ways of knowing that are precluded by secrecy and technocratic protocol. The form of the peoples, which use the law and theatre of the courtroom, subject law to the scrutiny of itself, and to reveal the blind spots and contradictions within the law as it is now, as Sally Merry advances:

Thus, the Tribunal appropriated legal forms and symbols in an effort to harness the power and legitimacy of law in a movement of resistance. The Tribunal took on the form of a trial, of criminal legality, without the sanctions or the authority of a state. There are some ironies here. The challenge to the legal takeover of Hawai'i was couched in terms of the same law that was used to seize land and water resources 140 years earlier. The Tribunal reinforced legal hegemony at the same time as it resisted particular relations of power through the law. But the prosecutor and judges continually redefined law, detaching it from the nation state context and linking it to a more global notion of justice. Law acquired a fundamental pluralism. This move appears in the opening statement by the prosecutor, Glenn Morris, a Shawnee attorney at the University of Colorado at Denver and Director of the Denver chapter of AIM. He begins by linking this tribunal to the struggles by Native Americans in the continental United States and Canada, then moves to redefining law: ...it is our responsibility to tell the world that justice cannot be employed without also including an indigenous vision of what justice means. And so the proceedings for this Tribunal will not look necessarily like the proceedings from other kinds of tribunals that have been held that people might be accustomed to. Because we don't believe, and I will speak for myself now as part of the advocate team, that the legitimacy of law comes only from the Western model. We believe that as indigenous peoples we come from societies that had our own laws, that had our own understanding of the land and the sky and the ocean. And now it's time for the West to integrate those principals into their law. And it's time for the West to open up its ears and open up its jurisprudence to that wisdom. And so while this Tribunal will have some of the framework of Western law, it will also integrate much of the wisdom of Kanaka Maoli law and tradition and understanding.... The nine judges themselves represent the community of international indigenous rights groups and scholars. They include US professors who have worked on indigenous rights and international law, Native American leaders from the US and Canada, a Korean feminist theologian, an African-American law professor, a Maori attorney from New Zealand, a member of the Palestinian Rights Society, a human rights advocate at the UN who is a Cree from Canada, and a member of the Permanent People's Tribunal from Japan. The verdict, written by these judges at the close of the proceedings clearly articulates their position on law (Interim Report: 2-4):May 1996] Page 77 The Tribunal considers that it is applying the law as fully and as honestly as it knows how. It refuses, however, to define law in a formalistic or colonialist manner. It is guided by five mutually reinforcing conceptions of law from which it draws freely in developing its findings on the charges and its conclusions and recommendations for redress. These are: 1. Kanaka Maoli Law: "Embracing sets of convictions about right action and righteousness on political, economic, and social relations." 2. International Law: "The obligations of states and rights of peoples and their nations are outlined under international law, especially on matters of human rights, self-determination, sovereignty, democracy, and intervention in the internal affairs of foreign nations." The document points out that international law has often served as an instrument to validate colonial rule, but that it is "increasingly sensitive to the democratic claims of peoples and nations that insist on the accountability of states and their leaders." The 1992 version of the Draft Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN is referenced as an important source of authority. 3. The Constitution of the United States, the Laws and Judicial Decisions of the United States and of State of Hawai'i: the judges challenge US law as the basis of valid legal relationships with the Kanaka Maoli and for the failures of the federal government to uphold its very limited efforts to acknowledge certain Kanaka Maoli rights, especially with reference to land and water. 4. The Law of Peoples as Nations: "By initiative of peoples and nations, the experience of international people's tribunals has itself become a source of law." The text refers to the 1976 Algiers Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Peoples. The judges wish to strengthen this source of law. 5. The Inherent Law of Humanity: "In addition to other sources there exists a higher law based on the search for justice in the relation among persons and peoples and their nations; as well, there is a law establishing the conditions for harmony between human activity and nature, drawing on ideas of stewardship that exist in many of the world's great cultural traditions, and that are especially embodied in the cultures of indigenous peoples."Page 78 [PoLAR: Vol. 19, No. 1 The verdict concludes: Law is a great river that draws on these five sources as tributary rivers, and the Tribunal will apply law in this spirit. We have found indigenous Hawaiian understanding of law to be an indispensable and powerful background for this verdict, and we believe that law experience and wisdom of indigenous peoples generally is helping the democratic movement of peoples and nations to develop a more useful and equitable sense of law than has been evolved by modern governments and states which sit in judgment of the world's peoples in such organs of world order as the UN Security Council and the Group-of-Seven. Thus, the verdict and the tribunal itself appropriate the law and the legal form of the trial, but redefine law as multiple with references to violations of Kanaka Maoli law, US law, and UN conventions and international law. The panel of judges represents an international social network engaged transnationally in constructing a more plural law and are familiar with the developing law of indigenous rights. The UN was always considered an inspiration as well as an important audience by the tribunal committee, and there is currently in process a major report by the judges which will be submitted to the UN Working Group. It is important to note that the notion of law here articulated is reminiscent of natural law, including the use of the metaphor of the river. 2 Despite its powerful mobilization of the language of indigenous rights and Kanaka Maoli law, the Tribunal received relatively little media attention on the mainland. The Tribunal, and indeed the many facets of the sovereignty movement, have never gripped the world the way the events in Chiapas, Mexico held global attention early in 1994. As I write this paper one and a half years after the Tribunal, the sovereignty movement in its various manifestations continues to strengthen on the islands, but has made relatively little splash nationally or internationally. By and large, there is little awareness in the continental US of the plight of native Hawaiians or the demands they are asserting. I think the Hawaiian movement has had greater difficulty linking itself to the international flow of information and opinion than the Kiapo or the Penang, for example, because it contradicts powerful cultural images already circulating internationally about the meanings of Hawai'i. Travel ads constantly define Hawai'i as a paradise oppositionally constructed: the images of paradise are juxtaposed to the rational world of work, time discipline, and sexual control, creating a pungent combination of the exotic and the erotic. In this feminized imagined place, one is invited to step out of time into a world of sensuous pleasure, received by warm, welcoming Hawaiians. Anger and demands for reparations are jarring reminders ofMay 1996] Page 79 a world tourists yearn to leave behind. Statements such as "haoles go home" chill the welcome. These are not simply floating cultural images. They are created and disseminated through a powerful agency, the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau, which pours vast amounts of resources into marketing the islands to tourists, increasingly seen as the only economic option for the islands. Since tourism depends heavily on the construction of the welcoming exotic/erotic Hawaiian, local political demands and indications of anger and discontent are deeply threatening. Visitors were urged to stay away from the protest demonstrations marking the centennial of the 1893 coup staged by native Hawaiians by the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau, for example, even though these demonstrations occurred at the Iolani Palace (draped in black for the occasion), a central tourist attraction. Conclusions The Tribunal accepted the symbolic power of law. But, instead of working within the existing legal system, it seized the concept of justice and deployed it outside state law. Other parts of the sovereignty movement such as Ka Lahui Hawai'i also reflect the appropriation and redeployment of law as a basis for imagining a new social order. Law is taken from its nation-state context and redeployed as plural, as local and global as well as national. At the same time, it is blended with a "natural" concept of law conflated with justice. Law in its humanly formed version is joined, in the river, with natural law. Even as the signifiers are increasingly floating they are seen as more fixed. 3 Since law is constituted by social practices and meanings, such movements have larger implications for law's symbolic meanings. As law is used in indigenous rights movements, it becomes rethought as more plural, more globally understood, and more locally defined (see Santos 1987). This tribunal, as an instance of the wider practices of indigenous rights movements, is redefining law itself, promoting a legally plural notion of law in which state law is only one of many levels, without privileged centrality. The concept of law is extracted from the nation-state arena and linked to local cultural orders as well as to international legal orders such as those enunciated by the UN. This development indicates the shifting importance of local, national, and global legal systems in the late 20th century, and the emergence of a new kind of legal pluralism in which the critical questions are how these systems intersect with one another. The claims of state law to be the ultimate authority are themselves challenged. At the same time, identity is redefined from the subject of state law to an identity constituted by natural or transnational law. The Hawaiian is redefined as sovereign rather than an ethnic minority. The appropriated concept of law constitutes a space of resistance to a subordinate identity and to the hegemony of nation state law.Page 80 [PoLAR: Vol. 19, No. 1 At the same time, discourses of law are occupying an increasingly central space in debates about social justice. In other periods, debates about justice took place in terms of religious values or competing political systems, but in the late 20th century, since the fall of the Berlin wall, Western legality is the dominant cultural form for these debates. The florescence of an international human rights language, with its "four generations" of political and civil rights, socioeconomic and cultural rights, development rights, and now indigenous rights, provides the global terrain for these contemporary debates (Messer 1993:222-23). But, just as the English language has moved beyond the control of the metropole and is taking its own forms, so has the law. The process of vernacularization is one in which the global becomes localized, no longer simply a global imposition but something which is infused with the meanings, signs, and practices of local places. But vernacularization is resisted by those who claim that such tribunals and constitutions are not "really" law. Such contests over the symbolic capital of the concept of law underscore its centrality in debates about social justice in the late twentieth century. 

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

We are germane to the topic;  We remove interference with production; secrecy restrictions are a restriction

David 4 James David is a curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of Conducting Post-World War II National Security Research in Executive Branch Records: A Comprehensive Guide, published by Greenwood Press in 2001. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the National Air and Space Museum or the Smithsonian Institution. Progress and problems in declassifying U.S. government records James David National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA Available online 11 November 2004.

There have been three distinct and separate categories of information that have been classified over the years. The first is National Security Information (NSI). The current system of classification of NSI is set forth in E.O. 13292, signed by President Bush in March 2003. It is the latest in a series of executive orders on NSI that date back to World War II. In general conformance with its predecessors, E.O. 13292 preserves the classification of information under predecessor orders and mandates that newly created information in eight broad areas be classified, ranging from “military plans, weapons systems, or operations” to “scientific, technological, or economic matters relating to the national security, which includes defense against transnational terrorism.” The records containing the information are marked Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential, depending on the damage to national security reasonably expected to occur from its unauthorized disclosure. The order continues the provisions of E.O. 12958 that require personnel classifying information to set a date or event within twenty-five years for the automatic declassification of that information. If no such date or event can be determined, the information can be classified between ten and twenty-five years. Agencies can extend the duration of classification under certain circumstances.3 The second category of classified information is that generally relating to nuclear weapons and atomicenergy. The original authority in this area was the AtomicEnergyAct of 1946, which was superseded by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Among other things, this statute mandates information be classified as Restricted Data (RD) if it concerns (1) the design or manufacture of atomic weapons, (2) the production of special nuclear materials, (3) nuclear propulsion of aircraft, spacecraft, and naval vessels. It also requires information be classified as Formerly Restricted Data (FRD) if it concerns the military utilization of nuclear weapons.4 Any information that is classified as RD or FRD is also classified as NSI, but not vice versa. The third category is Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), which is information “concerning or derived from intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes, which is required to be handled with formal access controls established by the Director of Central Intelligence.”5 It is designated by codewords representing information in a broad area and additional codewords representing more specific types of information under each general area. The codeword themselves are classified, and only in recent years have a few been declassified (for example, “RUFF” which covers imagery from certain overhead platforms). Just as with RD and FRD, any information classified as SCI is also classified as NSI, but not vice versa.

And this restriction is on production

Von Mises Inst. (http://mises.org/humanaction/chap29sec1.asp)

Restriction of production means that the government either forbids or makes more difficult or more expensive the production, transportation, or distribution of definite articles, or the application of definite modes of production, transportation, or distribution. The authority thus eliminates some of the means available for the satisfaction of human wants. The effect of its interference is that people are prevented from using their knowledge and abilities, their labor and their material means of production in the way in which they would earn the highest returns and satisfy their needs as much as possible. Such interference makes people poorer and less satisfied.

Our counter interp is that we don't have to roleplay as the USFG, as long as we provide a method for how we interact with the law, and that method is testable.

We focus on the everydayness of law, specifically the use of peoples tribunals to scrutinize the USFG secrecy restrictions as enacted through our daily behavior, outside formal legal institutions.

Berman 05 (Paul Schiff.   Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law.  : From International Law to Law and Globalization.  Columbia Journal of Transnational Law)

In considering legal consciousness, moreover, we must remember that law is not simply the official texts of treaties, judicial opinions, and legislative acts that embody formal legal rules, nor is it just the formal legal institutions of courts, lawyers and police. Accordingly, instead of focusing solely on laws and official legal actors, legal consciousness research examines the wide variety of "quasi-legal" discourses, such as abstract (and often intuitive) ideas of street justice, due process, civil disobedience, retribution, deterrence, and rights, all of which are frequently invoked in public discussions and dinner-table conversations alike. Finally, the study of legal consciousness also makes clear that the relationship between law and culture is not unidirectional. While legal categories do shape broader social discourse, at the same time law talk, diffused throughout society, becomes a source of alternative conceptions of law: Legality operates through social life as persons and groups deliberately interpret and invoke law's language, authority, and procedures to organize their lives and manage their relationships. In short, the commonplace operation of law in daily life makes us all legal agents insofar as we actively make law, even when no formal legal agent is involved. This focus on law in everyday life n30 recognizes that people interpret their experiences by drawing on a collaboration of law and other social structures. These interpretations may be widely varied and will, of course, depend in part on each person's social class, previous contact with the law, and political standing. Nevertheless, legal consciousness constitutes an ongoing interaction between official norms as embodied in the common sense categories of daily life and each individual's ongoing participation in the process of constructing legality. Accordingly, legal consciousness includes the ways in which individuals themselves deploy, transform, or subvert official legal understandings and thereby "construct" law on the ground. We all always take part in the construction of legal consciousness, even as we are also inevitably affected by the legal categories of the social structures around us.

2). The topical demand is one that subjects debaters to the ultimate sovrign of the “USFG” in service to transnational capitalism. We can never have our aff through the lens of the USFg because of the way that always already situates our response

Kato, 2011 (Masahide T, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii, famous Hawaiian, baller, exposes the ontopolitical subjective gaze, interview with Christopher Spurlock, kdebate.com/kato.html \\stroud)

Kato: I am often asked to comment on high school debate topics. But every time I try to work on it, I encounter a tremendous difficulty in answering the question. And I apologize for those debaters who asked me the debate topic and never got my answer. I began to write a lengthy answer but I still haven’t been able to finish it. Hopefully one day I can finish it up and share with your readers. The hardest part is the grammar of the topic. The “USFG” is always and already the sovereign subject that takes a certain action or actions that may result in a positive or negative impact upon the US, other nation states, regions, and the planet (and perhaps beyond this planet in this case). But my question is what if the USFG is simply an effect of the biopolitical network that coordinates seemingly unrelated flows of capital, goods, information, services, labor, waste, etc for the profit maximization of transitional conglomerates. The popular will or popular sovereignty that had made the USFG as a collective representative of the constitutional subject may no longer be a valid grammar to capture the biopolitical regime of globalization. If seen from this angle, one can recognize how the space exploration originates in the shift of philosophy over the role of the nation state in the so-called neo-liberal economy. (Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics will be very useful here) The development of space exploration sets the tone of hyper-Keynesian policy where the public investment is not geared to the growth of national wealth but to the growth of transnational conglomerates as a form of corporate subsidies. The current US debt crisis is a cumulative result of this hyper-Keynesianism. As such if the space program is to survive, I suspect that it won’t be under the auspices of USFG but the transnational conglomerates.

3). More organic approaches to what it means to interact with the government are better for policy making, and it is a way to ensure that the development of science and technology end up serving the interest of the people and not the technobureautcrats and ceos of power companies.

Adams 2003 (Jason, The Evergreen State College, POPULAR DEFENSE IN THE EMPIRE OF SPEED: PAUL VIRILIO AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL BODY. THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS - In the Department Of Political Science - SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY - November 2003) 

Thus we can see that for Virilio for as long as technology has been allowed to become ever more autonomous, the deliberative basis on which politics rests has been undermined since it has exempted what is arguably the most important element of public administration from consideration. In order for the political to prevail over the technical then, the metadesign of society that results from the introduction of technique must be subjected to open and sustained debate and decision-making processes which directly involve the populations affected by them.I5 If this were to take place, he argues, the likely result would be the scaling back of large-scale authoritarian technologies such as nuclear power and the emergence of small-scale democratic technologies such as wind power, which is why it should not be taken from his pessimism about the present that he wants to turn back the clock to 'Year Zero', but rather that he would prefer to wait and see what might appear within the context of a society in which science and technology are transformed so as to serve the interest of the public rather than that of the elites who go to such great lengths to protect their autonomy.I6It is for this reason that it is rather difficult to place him within a particular tradition of technological thought since he is both negative about the short term future of technology and positive about its long term potentiality at one and the same time. While on the one hand he agrees with Ellul that the instrumental logic of technology as we know it today has become so pervasive that ours is more appropriately described as a 'technological society' than as a capitalist society, since even non-capitalist societies such as the Soviet Union held that 'communism is socialism plus electricity' and were thus in many way of a piece with our own, on the other hand he also takes from Heidegger that "we must take hold of the riddle of technology and lay it on the table as the ancient philosophers and scientists put the riddle of Nature out in the open.. .we must politicize speed, whether it be the metabolic speed (the speed of the living being, of reflexes) or technological speed. We must politicize speed, because we are both: we are moved, and we'move. To drive is also to be driven".In order to accomplish this, his suggestion is that citizens should immediately demand meetings with the engineers and technicians in order to really discuss both the positive and the negative implications of what is being brought into existence today, just as the developers of the railway system throughout Europe got together in Brussels in 1888 and came up with the 'block system' to prevent accidents as a result. What was unique in that instance, and what is unheard of today, as Virilio notes, is that "the starting point of the discussion in Brussels was on the negative, on what did not function. Contact switches and signals were devised, and these became the basis of a very sophisticated form of data management. But why are there no conferences nowadays on the damaging consequences of unemployment? On the wrong turns taken by urbanism? On the obverse side of technical progress?"

Impact turn.  They are the only risk of producing the thoughtless Eichmann their Miller evidence indicts.  Our indirection is key to solve.

Spurlock and Spanos.  2011.  “Interview Questions”.  Spurlock is a debate coach at the University of Texas at San Antonio.  William V. Spanos is professor emeritus of literature at the University of Binghamton, author and World War II veteran.  Accessed from: http:~/~/www.kdebate.com/html(%%) – M.E.

The danger of being a total insider is that the eye of such a person becomes blind to alternative possibilities. The extreme manifestation of this being at one with the system, of remaining inside the frame, as it were, is, as Hannah Arendt, decisively demonstrated long ago, Adolph Eichmann. That's why she and Said, among many poststructuralists, believed that to be an authentic intellectual --to see what disinterested inquiry can't see-- one has to be an exile (or a pariah) from a homeland-- one who is both apart of and apart from the dominant culture. Unlike Socrates, for example, Hippias, Socrates' interlocutor in the dialogue "Hippias Major" (he is, for Arendt, the model for Eichmann), is at one with himself. When he goes home at night "he remains one." He is, in other words, incapable of thinking. When Socrates, the exilic consciousness, goes home, on the other hand, he is not alone; he is "by himself." He is two-in-one. He has to face this other self. He has to think. Insofar as its logic is faithfully pursued, the framework of the debate system, to use your quite appropriate initial language, does, indeed, produce horrifically thoughtless Eichmanns, which is to say, a political class whose thinking, whether it's called Republican or Democratic, is thoughtless in that it is totally separated from and indifferent to the existential realities of the world it is representing. It's no accident, in my mind, that those who govern us in America --our alleged representatives, whether Republican, Neo-Con, or Democrat-- constitute such a "political class." This governing class has, in large part, their origins, in a preparatoary relay consisting of the high school and college debate circuit, political science departments, and the law profession. The moral of this story is that the debate world needs more outsiders -- or, rather, inside outsiders -- if its ultimate purpose is to prepare young people to change the world rather than to reproduce it.

This is bad education – it locks us into what Spanos calls the “problematic” where we're enacting the same formulaic CP and Politics debate every round, blind to the outcome of our framing or the violence it allows. Spanos explains;

One could supplement Ohmann’s damning critical analysis of the “can do” language and the deeply inscribed panoptic structure of this enormous archive of memoranda by pointing to their unerring and mind-numbing sameness: their systematic reliance on the quantitative measure, the abstracting and reductive cliché, the euphemisms, the short-hand structure of the sentences—what Eichmann called the “appropriate telegraphic style” in speaking of the “monthly reports” on the progress of the “Final Solution” he sent to the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler7—and, subsuming these, the “problem-solving” model. This model, like the “over-sight” or “super-vision” of the capitalist “problematic” brilliantly analyzed by Louis Althusser in “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” blinds the willful inquirer to any differential reality that would contradict and thus remain an obstacle to the end he/she desires from the beginning: in this case, “the suffering of the Vietnamese,” which “did not impinge on the consciousness of the policy makers,” that is, “had virtually no existence for them” (my emphasis). One could also mark the obliteration of conscience, which Arendt over-determines in her devastating analysis of Eichmann’s language, achieved in these Pentagon memoranda by the insistent identification of the realities instigating it as a neurosis—the “‘French defeat’ and ‘Korean syndromes,’” as well as pointing to the genealogy of what, in the aftermath of the war under the massive campaign of the American government and the culture industry to “forget Vietnam” in the name of resuming its mission in the world’s wilderness (specifically the Middle East), came to be called “the Vietnam syndrome.” But, for the purpose on my argument, I want to underscore what Ohmann long ago noted at the outset of his criticism, but did not adequately amplify about the “agents” of these memoranda. This deadly cliché-ridden and euphemistic “telegraphic” language, whose superficiality—is it inappropriate to call this symptom of these documents “banality”?—lent itself to the pervasive routinization of a murderous indiscriminate violence against America’s demonized “Others,” is not, as it is in a totalitarian society, that of a militarist mentality. It is, rather, the language of civilians, precisely those “ordinary” Americans who exist in democracies to protect society from the juggernaut mentality of the militaristic mind.

Secrecy within science doesn’t hold research to a high enough standard, and promotes “bad” scientific research methods.

Schrange 09Secrecy in science is a corrosive force, The writer researches the economics of innovation and technology transfer at MIT and is a visiting researcher at London's Imperial College¶ ¶ ¶ Schrage, Michael. FT.com (Nov 27, 2009)., http://pus.sagepub.com/content/1/3/281.short

With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck's most famous aphorism clearly requires updating. "Scientific research" is bidding furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see being made.¶ Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.¶ The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia's prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.¶ The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change.¶ Only recently in America, for example, have academic pharmaceutical researchers been required to disclose certain financial conflicts of interest they might have. On issues of the greatest importance for public policy, science researchers less transparent than they should be. That behaviour undermines science, policy and public trust.¶ Dubbed "climate-gate" by global warming sceptics, the most outrageous East Anglia email excerpts appear to suggest respected scientists misleadingly manipulated data and suppressed legitimate argument in peer-reviewed journals.¶ These claims are forcefully denied, but the correspondents do little to enhance confidence in either the integrity or the professionalism of the university's climatologists. What is more, there are no denials around the researchers' repeated efforts to avoid meaningful compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails. Secrecy, not privacy, is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior by ostensibly good scientists.¶ Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their research? Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed research where the submitting scientists have not made every reasonable effort to make their work - from raw data to sophisticated computer simulations - as transparent and accessible as possible? Why should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin America make decisions affecting people's health, wealth and future based on opaque and inaccessible science?¶ They should not. The issue here is not about good or bad science, it is about insisting that scientists and their work be open and transparent enough so that research can be effectively reviewed by broader communities of interest. Open science minimises the likelihood and consequences of bad science.¶ Debilitating and even fatal side-effects of new drugs might have been detected sooner if pharmaceutical companies had been compelled to share data on all the trials they ran, not just favourable ones. Similarly, the flawed and successfully overturned 1999 child murder conviction of Sally Clark might never have occurred if the statistical errors made by expert witness pediatrician Sir Roy Meadow had been questioned earlier. Data withholding played a distortive and destructive role in the cold fusion frenzy 20 years ago, when two scientists announced they had produced energy by cold fusion, only to be widely and quickly denounced by the scienitific community. Concealment and secrecy invites mischief; too many scientists seeking influence accept the invitation.¶ Achieving this is simple and inexpensive. It is not done by more rigorous enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act, although that would help. It comes from branding "openness" into every link of the scientific research value chain. Public or tax-deductible research funding should be contingent upon maximum transparency.¶ Scientists and affiliated institutions that will not make the research process as transparent as the end result will be asked to return the money or risk denial of future funds. University accreditation should be contingent not just upon faculty research and publication but by demonstrating policies and practices that champion data sharing. Professional societies and journals should make data sharing a condition of membership and publication. Researchers must be pushed to be more open at every step of their process.¶ The Royal Society not only makes data sharing a precondition of publication, it provides up to 10 megabytes of free space for supplementary data on its website. Unfortunately, too many scientific societies and publishers are less than rigorous or insistent about openness. Strip them of their tax-deductible status. Make opennes a condition of tax advantage. Of course commercial and proprietary issues can influence the manner of data sharing and transparency. But the East Anglia emails represent an individual and institutional imperative to err on the side of minimal disclosure even as researchers sought to maximise the academic and political impact of their work. That is perverse.¶ Public interest suggests scientists and their sponsoring institutions be made as legally, financially, professionally and ethically as uncomfortable as possible about concealing and withholding relevant research information.¶ If the University of East Anglia had been sharing more of its data and the computer models and statistical simulations running that data, the email hack would have been much ado about nothing.¶ When doing important research about the potential future of the planet, scientists should have nothing to hide. Their obligation to the truth is an obligation to openness.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

2ac; CAP

We win uniqueness; capitalism has a hand in nuclear decisions and is insulated from oversight.

Our 1ac outlines how dangers of Japanese reactors were well known to the public, politicians, and engineers, but the Tokyo Electric Power Company had complete sovereignty over the plant. Post meltdown, no one from the company was held responsible for what our Onishi and Fackler ev indicates was, “murder of its own people”.

The same situation exists in the US; Galison says “Under the Atomic Energy Acts…all nuclear information is secret.” And Masco explains this extends to “the banal details of managing a large government bureaucracy” and the “health and environmental effects of nuclear production”. The AEA exempts nuclear power from environmental or other oversight, and EPA is helpless to control nuclear waste, as per our Trento ev.

ALT:

The only way you should evaluate solvency for cap must be premised on which strat best dissipates this monopoly on nuclear info/decisions, because if the squo nuclear framework is left intact, privatized nuclear power will continue to remain unaccountable to anyone and will risk the well being of is constituents with or without their consent.

-The alt is in a double bind; either, the alt would eventually challenge nuclear expertism/secrecy and the links to the squo are better then the links to the aff, or they leave secrecy intact and can’t solve the K because;

1). Extend Kinsella 11; secrecy turns members of the nuclear institutional system into docile citizens who blindly replicate that order without the agency or responsibility to challenge and criticize it.

This control extends to the entire polis because nuclear secrecy necessitates that nuclear power keep “non-experts” from even accessing nuclear decisions. 

2). extend the last Kinsella card, it said this expert rationality, in privatizing nuclear debates that involve the fate of the global commons, then it can control and manage all other public policy debates.

3).  Current Nuclear discourse freezes all social possibilities.

Kinsella 11 One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and Their Implications for Environmental Communication William J. Kinsella PhD, Associate Professor At North Carolina State University, Director of the University's interdisciplinary program in Science, U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Institute for Nuclear Energy and Energy Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany. President of the National Communication Association’s Environmental Communication Division during 2009-2010.

Although the material catastrophe envisioned by Einstein has not (yet) occurred, arguably it bas been replaced by a social and political catastrophe, a catastrophe of public discourse. In an influential essay that helped inaugurate the "nuclear criticism" project ofthe mid-1980s (cf. Norris, 1994), Derrida (1984) suggested that the prospect of nuclear annihilation "through all the techno-scientific inventiveness that it motivates, structures not only the army, diplomacy, politics, but the whole of the human socius" (p. 23). In a Burkean reading of Derrida, consistent 58 KINSELLA with the preceding discussion of nuclear mystery, Williams (1989) suggested that the nuclear threat has acquired the status of a transcendental signified, a value or meaning that stands outside language. As an overarching presence beyond the hmits of linguistic representation, that threat appears mysterious and self-generating. Such an ontological or theological absolute can neither be changed nor ignored; it appears as if our only available response is to submit to its potent disciplinary effects. Examining a wide range of popular cultural texts from tbe Cold War era, Nadel (1995) demonstrated how these disciplinary effects extended well beyond the (explicitly) nuclear domain. Although the U.S. geopolitical strategy of "containment" through nuclear threat was directed at the Soviet Union, it motivated a parallel domestic containment of individual identities, social roles, cultural expression, and political discourse. Under the nuclear sign, operationalized as a binary opposition between the superpowers, the general population internalized behavioral and discursive boundaries modeled in countless mass media messages and in everyday social interaction. Thus, writing almost 4 decades after Einstein at an advanced stage ofthe Cold War, Baudrillard (1983) displayed an optimism regarding our basic survival but a pessimism regarding tbe conditions of tbat survival. Although his comment was directed at the Cold War deterrence regime, it now seems eerily relevant to emerging concerns about social control in an era marked by new fears of nuclear proliferation and terrorism: It isn't that the direct menace of atomic destruction paralyzes our lives....Deterrence excludes war—the antiquated violence of exploding systems. Deterrence is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable or involving systems. The risk of nuclear atomization only serves as a pretext... to the installation of a universal system of security, linkup, and control whose deterrent effect does not aim for atomic clash at all... but really the much larger probability of any real event, of anything which could disturb the general system and upset the balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance, (pp. 59-60) Ironically appropriating a term from nuclear weapons design, Baudrillard (1994) described an "implosion" of culture and politics around a narrow range of possibilities. The threat of material annihilation is transformed into a potent discursive annihilation encompassing public speech, cultural expression, and political process, as society's efforts are focused on sustaining the precarious nuclear order.

 4). Secrecy reinforces American political paranoia, which means the government can stop the rev anytime they want by deeming it a danger to national security.

Dean 11 Robert Dean, Associate Professor of History at Eastern Washington University Introduction: Cultures of Secrecy in Postwar America, the journal for the society of historians of foreign relations, Issue Diplomatic History, Volume 35, Issue 4, pages 611–613, September 2011

State secrecy creates an inevitable tension between the fundamental cultural¶ values and institutions of a democracy and the practices of the government.¶ Since the onset of the Cold War era, the United States has seen a huge growth¶ in secret “national security” bureaucracies designed to provide the executive¶ branch with intelligence concerning the intentions and capabilities of actual or¶ potential enemies, and to provide the capacity to wage covert campaigns against¶ those deemed to pose a threat to U.S. security. As American imperial ambitions¶ and institutions grew, the nature of “threats to national security” became an¶ ever-expanding category. Largely unbeknownst to the American public, at least¶ initially, and with the complicity of a Congress unwilling to inquire very deeply¶ into the actions of an increasingly imperial presidency, the CIA and other secret¶ bureaucracies repeatedly intervened to overthrow (or attempted to overthrow)¶ third world governments, conducted campaigns of sabotage and psychological¶ warfare, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders, abetted authoritarian regimes¶ in the murderous repression of their own people, and developed and disseminated techniques of “no-touch” torture. The newly vigorous national security¶ state rapidly insinuated itself into a range of civilian institutions. Technical,¶ scientific, and social science researchers, showered with federal funding, often¶ embraced the new culture of secrecy and “security.” In highly classified national¶ security memoranda, and other policy and doctrine, the executive branch arrogated to itself sweepingly broad powers to conduct policy in secret on behalf of¶ the governed but without the consent of the governed.¶ A culture of anticommunism justified and propelled the growth of this¶ massive institutionalization of militarized secrecy. The production and control¶ of national security secrets also shaped contests over power within and among¶ government agencies and among rivals for political power in Washington. The¶ apparent existential danger posed by an “expansionist” nuclear-armed imperial¶ rival combined with the fear generated by the presence of a small sect of¶ Communists and ideological sympathizers within American borders to produce¶ a virulent Red Scare.¶ The existence of a genuine, if already disabled, Soviet espionage network in¶ the wartime United States seemed to lend credence to the alarmist fulminations¶ of counter subversives of all stripes. The Red Scare (and the closely related¶ Lavender Scare) saw a profound assault on civil liberties and constitutional¶ protections of due process, largely orchestrated by the Right, and which targeted those deemed to be politically subversive or otherwise construed as a “security¶ threat.” The resulting loyalty-security inquisition went after left-leaning¶ Hollywood figures, academics and teachers, labor unions, State Department¶ diplomats, and even CIA employees. Blacklists, ritual confession and public¶ humiliation, and career destroying “separation” from the State Department and¶ other agencies, were tools central to this manifestation of the “paranoid style” of¶ American politics.¶ The institutionalization of Cold War secrecy and the partisan posturing¶ surrounding national security in the atomic age produced a cultural obsession¶ that played out in a variety of ways. The seeming dangers to the United States¶ posed by concealed political or sexual identities generated a kind of collective¶ hysteria, a “panic on the Potomac,” that drove the counter subversion and¶ counter perversion crusade. Conspiracy became a central trope in the discourse¶ of the politically disaffected or those out of power seeking to destroy the¶ legitimacy of their opponents. The rapidly growing peacetime culture of secrecy¶ in Washington lent plausibility to demagogic assertions of “immense” conspiracies undermining America from within. With large parts of the foreign policy¶ bureaucracy operating entirely outside the scrutiny of the public, and with black¶ budgets and other mechanisms to avoid any effective oversight by Congress,¶ citizens willing to do so could easily imagine cabals of subversive elites craftily¶ selling out the United States in the Manichean struggle against implacable¶ enemies.¶ While aspects of this kind of distrust have deep historical roots in American¶ political culture, the decades of the Cold War and the subsequent “war on¶ terror” that followed saw an entrenchment of these patterns. The assassination¶ of a president, the debacle of Vietnam, and its attendant deceptions set the stage¶ for the cultural and political shocks of the 1970s. The revelations of the Pentagon Papers demonstrated the bad faith of several administrations and, for¶ many on the Left, illustrated the danger of wars of choice managed covertly by¶ elites protected by all-encompassing schemes of national security classification.¶ Richard Nixon discredited the presidency itself by conducting a vendetta against¶ Daniel Ellsberg, who took it upon himself to declassify a secret history of the¶ American intervention in Vietnam and provide it to the press. Employing “black¶ ops” performed by erstwhile CIA and FBI figures and anti-Castro mercenaries¶ associated with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Nixon set off a chain of events leading to the Watergate scandal and forced resignation to avoid an impeachment trial. The subsequent hearings of the Church and Pike Committees aired¶ some of the covert operations of the CIA, the “family jewels,” including illegal¶ domestic spying on American citizens. The defense of national security took on¶ new cultural meanings, often producing a deep suspicion of the motives and¶ concealed practices of the state.¶ Cultures of secrecy exist in perpetual tension with a culture of democratic¶ openness. We live in a society that boasts of its commitment to human freedom¶ and dignity, yet culturally constructed “imperatives” of national security have been used to justify the (temporarily) secret use of “extraordinary rendition,” an¶ official euphemism for subcontracting torture in the so-called war on terror.¶ The American public has largely acquiesced in the use of torture by American¶ intelligence agencies in the failed imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The¶ so-called Patriot Act of 2001 was rushed into law by congressional legislators,¶ few of whom had read the document. Again justified by the imperatives of¶ national security, the act circumvented many of the constitutional protections¶ for basic civil liberties, putting the tools of a surveillance state in the hands of¶ federal secret policemen.¶ Rife with contradiction, pervasive government secrecy in a democracy presents historians with a wide range of questions about processes of cultural¶ transformation that accompany the massive institutionalization of covert action,¶ surveillance of perceived foreign and domestic enemies, and the accompanying¶ emergence of widespread suspicion concerning the purposes and morality of the¶ “secret government.” This forum was conceived as an initial step toward developing different strands of historical inquiry focused on “cultures of secrecy” in¶ the postwar United States. The essays that follow are the result of an openended request to three talented scholars to develop this theme in relation to¶ their own historical concerns.

LINK;

The K is founded in a relationship of negativity towards the capitalist – the moralistic stance precludes any political change as it refuses to escape from a singular conception of power

Gibson-Graham 6, JK; Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson; Post-Capitalist Politics; p. 5-6

To be a leftist is historically to be identified with the radical potential of the exploited and oppressed working class. Excluded from power yet fixated on the powerful, the radical subject is caught in the familiar ressentiment of the slave against the master. Feelings of hatred and revenge toward the powerful sit side by side with the moral superiority of the lowly (and therefore good) over the high and mighty (and therefore bad) (Newman 2000, 2 paraphrasing Nietzsche). Moralism provides an emotional shoring up of the reactive stance of the weak, “who define themselves in opposition to the strong” (3).11 With the dissolution in recent times of positive projects of socialist construction, left moralism has been energized by increasing investments in injury, failure, and victimhood (W. Brown 1995). When power is identified with what is ruthless and dominating, it becomes something the left must distance itself from, lest it be co-opted or compromised (Newman 2000). Fearing implication with those in power, we become attached to guarding and demonstrating our purity rather than mucking around in everyday politics. Those who engage in such work may find themselves accused of betraying their values, sleeping with the enemy, bargaining with the devil—all manner of transgressions and betrayals. A moralistic stance fuels doubts about whether local economic experimentation can do anything but shore up a repressive state apparatus, or whether action research reproduces the power of the manipulative academic over the passive community. Focused on the glass half empty rather than half full, this angry and skeptical political sensibility is seldom if ever satisfied. Successful political innovation seems perpetually blocked or postponed because it requires an entirely new relation to power. It will need to escape power, go beyond it, obliterate it, transform it, making the radical shift from a controlling, dominating power to an enabling, liberating one (Newman 2000). But since distance from power is the marker of authentic radicalism and desire is bound up in the purity of powerlessness, the move to reinhabit power is deferred. If we are to make the shift from victimhood to potency, from judgment to enactment, from protest to positive projects, we also need to work on the moralistic stance that clings to a singular conception of power and blocks experimentation with power in its many forms.

-we are concerned with the material reality of nuclear power and the way that it gives corporations immunity to do whatever they want because of fallacious concerns about national security; that is a material focus

-material focus would have the same blind-spots the fukishima engineers had; Kinsella 12 says the reactor was approved because the best science indicated an earthquake was unlikely. The cap link, based on the best evidence, indicates anything outside of material focus on cap is bad. This over-limits the alt, and gives it the same “kill to save” mentality that spanos describes as characteristic of the war in Vietnam; we were so focused on our goal of bringing democracy to the country, we ended up killing everything that didn't fit into our democratic end point in order to realize our plan, which included mass imperial violence. This is also what the Gibson-graham card describes as an ontological purity that keeps the alt from ever happening.

Fernando ’09 Jeremy, Jeremy, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “reading blindly”

But for a moment, let us consider this possibility: what if the movement is not from impossibility to possibility, then actuality (something is unknown, we figure it out, and then we do it), but rather from impossibility to actuality and then to possibility (we cannot conceive of it, it happens, and then we think of how it did so after the fact)? In this way, even though imagination requires a "skill in looking," it is not a purely cognitive gesture that is located in the self. For if the possibility (which is captured in the imagination) is only known after, or at best, during, the actualization of an event, it is then a gesture that cannot be known before the event. In effect, it is a gesture that is hidden from the knowledge of the self: it is a gesture that the self is blind to. As Jean Baudrillard never lets us forget, we must retain for the event its radical definition and its impact in the imagination. It is characterized entirely, in a paradoxical way, by its uncanniness, its troubling strangeness-it is the irruption of something improbable and impossible-and by its troubling familiarity: from the outset it seems totally self-explanatory, as though predestined, as though it could not but take place.55 In this manner, an event is the moment in which possibility and actuality coincide: the moment of its actualization is also the moment when its possibility is conceived; the possibility of the event could only be conceived of during its actualization. It was only at the moment Hannibal actually led his Carthaginian army across the Alps that the possibility of an army marching inland and actually attacking Rome itself could be conceived: at that moment, a previously impossible action occurred and The Contract 75 was conceived of at the same time. More importantly, it was only through Hannibal's imagination (not of the possible, but rather of the impossible) that this event occurred. It was only in the conceiving of the unknowable, a conceiving of something which the results of, or even the possibility of, Hannibal was blind to, that the event could take place. At the same time, the event could only become a possibility because Hannibal responded to a call that he was "predestined" to respond to. Legend has it that he swore that he would always be an enemy of Rome; when he took the vow, there was no way that he could have known that he would lead an attack on Rome, but once he had chosen to do so, the necessity of having to reach Roman soil before encountering the enemy almost forced him to go over the Alps, "as though the march over the mountains could not but have taken place." Hence, Hannibal's choice to lead his army over the mountains was either a sole result of his cognitive imagination or just a fulfillment of a vow. Perhaps if we consider reading from this light, or from this position of semidarkness, it is then a process of both "skilled looking" and a blindness at the same time. In stumbling around, the skilled reader begins to read; the skilled reader only can read by stumbling around. What is actually read is unknown till the moment it is read; what is read then becomes glaringly obvious to the person who has read it, but only because (s)he has read it. Just as the justness of each judgment can only be decided at the moment of judging, the truth of each reading lies in the singularity of the reading itself. Each reading is then a possible reading, a contingent reading, and also a true reading, as truth itself is contingent. This means that each reading is hence a positing, a hypothesis, a test site for both what is read and reading itself.

perm; non comp

perm; alt

IMPACT;

Stenstad 6 explains the biggest impact is what we do with our ekistance; did we live a life that was our own, or were we government autobots that followed orders, carried out commands, and blindly trusted experts to always make the right call for us?

As Kinsella said, “we become standing reserve, like the weapons we build”

When we become so constrained and shaped by technical expertism, we replicate the current order without feeling the responsibility to challenge it

This enslaves humanity to a technical thinking that blind us to our own self-worth

Rojcewicz 6 (Richard- Prof of philosophy at Pont Park University, translator of 3 Heidegger books, The Gods and Technology; A Reading of Heidegger p.141-142)

Heidegger now launches an extended discussion of the danger inherent in modern technology. It needs to be underlined that for Heidegger the threat is not simply to human existence. The prime danger is not that high-tech devices might get out of hand and wreck havoc on their creators by way of a radioactive spill or an all-encompassing nuclear holocaust. The danger is not that by disposing of so many disposables we will defile the planet and make it uninhabitable. For Heidegger the danger—the prime danger—does not lie in technological things but in the essence of technology. Technological things are indeed dangerous; the rampant exploitation of natural resources is deplorable; the contamination of the environment is tragic. We need to conserve and to keep high-tech things from disposing of us. Yet, for Heidegger, conservation, by itself, is not the answer. Conservation alone is not radical enough. Conservation is aimed at things, technological things and natural things, but it does not touch the outlook or basic attitude that is the essence of modern technology, and it is there that the danger lies. It may well be that conservation will succeed and that technology will solve its own problems by producing things that are safe and nonpolluting; nevertheless, the prime danger, which lies deeper down, will remain. For the danger is not primarily to the existence of humans but to their essence: “The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal effects of the machines and devices of technology. The genuine threat has already affected humans—in their essence” (FT, 29/28). In a sense, the threat inherent in modern technology has already been made good. Though we have thus far averted a nuclear disaster, that does not mean the genuine threat has been obviated. Humans still exist; they are not yet on the endangered species list. It would of course be tragic if humans made that list. Yet, for Heidegger, there could be something more tragic, namely for humans to go on living but to lose their human dignity, which stems from their essence. Here lies the prime danger, the one posed not by technological things but by the disclosive looking that constitutes the essence of modern technology. The prime danger is that humans could become (and in fact are already becoming) enslaved to this way of disclosive looking. Thus what is primarily in danger is human freedom; if humans went on living but allowed themselves to be turned into slaves—that would be the genuine tragedy. The danger in modern technology is that humans may fail to see themselves as free followers, fail to see the challenges directed at their freedom by the current guise of Being, and fail to see the genuine possibilities open to them to work out their destiny. Then, not seeing their freedom, humans will not protect it. They will let it slip away and will become mere followers, passively imposed on by modern technology, i.e., slaves to it, mere cogs in the machine. For Heidegger, there is an essential connection between seeing and freedom. The way out of slavery begins with seeing, insight. But it is the right thing that must be seen, namely, one’s own condition. The danger is that humans may perfect their powers of scientific seeing and yet be blind to that wherein their dignity and freedom lie, namely the entire domain of disclosedness and their role in it. Humans would then pose as “masters of the earth,” and yet their self-blindness would make them slaves.

AT Cap Bad
Current Nuclear discourse freezes all social possibilities, including the alt
Kinsella 11 One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and Their Implications for Environmental Communication William J. Kinsella PhD, Associate Professor At North Carolina State University, Director of the University's interdisciplinary program in Science, U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Institute for Nuclear Energy and Energy Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany. President of the National Communication Association’s Environmental Communication Division during 2009-2010.

Although the material catastrophe envisioned by Einstein has not (yet) occurred, arguably it bas been replaced by a social and political catastrophe, a catastrophe of public discourse. In an influential essay that helped inaugurate the "nuclear criticism" project ofthe mid-1980s (cf. Norris, 1994), Derrida (1984) suggested that the prospect of nuclear annihilation "through all the techno-scientific inventiveness that it motivates, structures not only the army, diplomacy, politics, but the whole of the human socius" (p. 23). In a Burkean reading of Derrida, consistent 58 KINSELLA with the preceding discussion of nuclear mystery, Williams (1989) suggested that the nuclear threat has acquired the status of a transcendental signified, a value or meaning that stands outside language. As an overarching presence beyond the hmits of linguistic representation, that threat appears mysterious and self-generating. Such an ontological or theological absolute can neither be changed nor ignored; it appears as if our only available response is to submit to its potent disciplinary effects. Examining a wide range of popular cultural texts from tbe Cold War era, Nadel (1995) demonstrated how these disciplinary effects extended well beyond the (explicitly) nuclear domain. Although the U.S. geopolitical strategy of "containment" through nuclear threat was directed at the Soviet Union, it motivated a parallel domestic containment of individual identities, social roles, cultural expression, and political discourse. Under the nuclear sign, operationalized as a binary opposition between the superpowers, the general population internalized behavioral and discursive boundaries modeled in countless mass media messages and in everyday social interaction. Thus, writing almost 4 decades after Einstein at an advanced stage ofthe Cold War, Baudrillard (1983) displayed an optimism regarding our basic survival but a pessimism regarding tbe conditions of tbat survival. Although his comment was directed at the Cold War deterrence regime, it now seems eerily relevant to emerging concerns about social control in an era marked by new fears of nuclear proliferation and terrorism: It isn't that the direct menace of atomic destruction paralyzes our lives....Deterrence excludes war—the antiquated violence of exploding systems. Deterrence is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable or involving systems. The risk of nuclear atomization only serves as a pretext... to the installation of a universal system of security, linkup, and control whose deterrent effect does not aim for atomic clash at all... but really the much larger probability of any real event, of anything which could disturb the general system and upset the balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance, (pp. 59-60) Ironically appropriating a term from nuclear weapons design, Baudrillard (1994) described an "implosion" of culture and politics around a narrow range of possibilities. The threat of material annihilation is transformed into a potent discursive annihilation encompassing public speech, cultural expression, and political process, as society's efforts are focused on sustaining the precarious nuclear order.

Secrecy reinforces American political paranoia, which means the government can stop the rev anytime they want by deeming it a danger to national security.

Dean 2011 Robert Dean, Associate Professor of History at Eastern Washington University Introduction: Cultures of Secrecy in Postwar America, the journal for the society of historians of foreign relations, Issue Diplomatic History, Volume 35, Issue 4, pages 611–613, September 2011

State secrecy creates an inevitable tension between the fundamental cultural¶ values and institutions of a democracy and the practices of the government.¶ Since the onset of the Cold War era, the United States has seen a huge growth¶ in secret “national security” bureaucracies designed to provide the executive¶ branch with intelligence concerning the intentions and capabilities of actual or¶ potential enemies, and to provide the capacity to wage covert campaigns against¶ those deemed to pose a threat to U.S. security. As American imperial ambitions¶ and institutions grew, the nature of “threats to national security” became an¶ ever-expanding category. Largely unbeknownst to the American public, at least¶ initially, and with the complicity of a Congress unwilling to inquire very deeply¶ into the actions of an increasingly imperial presidency, the CIA and other secret¶ bureaucracies repeatedly intervened to overthrow (or attempted to overthrow)¶ third world governments, conducted campaigns of sabotage and psychological¶ warfare, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders, abetted authoritarian regimes¶ in the murderous repression of their own people, and developed and disseminated techniques of “no-touch” torture. The newly vigorous national security¶ state rapidly insinuated itself into a range of civilian institutions. Technical,¶ scientific, and social science researchers, showered with federal funding, often¶ embraced the new culture of secrecy and “security.” In highly classified national¶ security memoranda, and other policy and doctrine, the executive branch arrogated to itself sweepingly broad powers to conduct policy in secret on behalf of¶ the governed but without the consent of the governed.¶ A culture of anticommunism justified and propelled the growth of this¶ massive institutionalization of militarized secrecy. The production and control¶ of national security secrets also shaped contests over power within and among¶ government agencies and among rivals for political power in Washington. The¶ apparent existential danger posed by an “expansionist” nuclear-armed imperial¶ rival combined with the fear generated by the presence of a small sect of¶ Communists and ideological sympathizers within American borders to produce¶ a virulent Red Scare.¶ The existence of a genuine, if already disabled, Soviet espionage network in¶ the wartime United States seemed to lend credence to the alarmist fulminations¶ of counter subversives of all stripes. The Red Scare (and the closely related¶ Lavender Scare) saw a profound assault on civil liberties and constitutional¶ protections of due process, largely orchestrated by the Right, and which targeted those deemed to be politically subversive or otherwise construed as a “security¶ threat.” The resulting loyalty-security inquisition went after left-leaning¶ Hollywood figures, academics and teachers, labor unions, State Department¶ diplomats, and even CIA employees. Blacklists, ritual confession and public¶ humiliation, and career destroying “separation” from the State Department and¶ other agencies, were tools central to this manifestation of the “paranoid style” of¶ American politics.¶ The institutionalization of Cold War secrecy and the partisan posturing¶ surrounding national security in the atomic age produced a cultural obsession¶ that played out in a variety of ways. The seeming dangers to the United States¶ posed by concealed political or sexual identities generated a kind of collective¶ hysteria, a “panic on the Potomac,” that drove the counter subversion and¶ counter perversion crusade. Conspiracy became a central trope in the discourse¶ of the politically disaffected or those out of power seeking to destroy the¶ legitimacy of their opponents. The rapidly growing peacetime culture of secrecy¶ in Washington lent plausibility to demagogic assertions of “immense” conspiracies undermining America from within. With large parts of the foreign policy¶ bureaucracy operating entirely outside the scrutiny of the public, and with black¶ budgets and other mechanisms to avoid any effective oversight by Congress,¶ citizens willing to do so could easily imagine cabals of subversive elites craftily¶ selling out the United States in the Manichean struggle against implacable¶ enemies.¶ While aspects of this kind of distrust have deep historical roots in American¶ political culture, the decades of the Cold War and the subsequent “war on¶ terror” that followed saw an entrenchment of these patterns. The assassination¶ of a president, the debacle of Vietnam, and its attendant deceptions set the stage¶ for the cultural and political shocks of the 1970s. The revelations of the Pentagon Papers demonstrated the bad faith of several administrations and, for¶ many on the Left, illustrated the danger of wars of choice managed covertly by¶ elites protected by all-encompassing schemes of national security classification.¶ Richard Nixon discredited the presidency itself by conducting a vendetta against¶ Daniel Ellsberg, who took it upon himself to declassify a secret history of the¶ American intervention in Vietnam and provide it to the press. Employing “black¶ ops” performed by erstwhile CIA and FBI figures and anti-Castro mercenaries¶ associated with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Nixon set off a chain of events leading to the Watergate scandal and forced resignation to avoid an impeachment trial. The subsequent hearings of the Church and Pike Committees aired¶ some of the covert operations of the CIA, the “family jewels,” including illegal¶ domestic spying on American citizens. The defense of national security took on¶ new cultural meanings, often producing a deep suspicion of the motives and¶ concealed practices of the state.¶ Cultures of secrecy exist in perpetual tension with a culture of democratic¶ openness. We live in a society that boasts of its commitment to human freedom¶ and dignity, yet culturally constructed “imperatives” of national security have been used to justify the (temporarily) secret use of “extraordinary rendition,” an¶ official euphemism for subcontracting torture in the so-called war on terror.¶ The American public has largely acquiesced in the use of torture by American¶ intelligence agencies in the failed imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The¶ so-called Patriot Act of 2001 was rushed into law by congressional legislators,¶ few of whom had read the document. Again justified by the imperatives of¶ national security, the act circumvented many of the constitutional protections¶ for basic civil liberties, putting the tools of a surveillance state in the hands of¶ federal secret policemen.¶ Rife with contradiction, pervasive government secrecy in a democracy presents historians with a wide range of questions about processes of cultural¶ transformation that accompany the massive institutionalization of covert action,¶ surveillance of perceived foreign and domestic enemies, and the accompanying¶ emergence of widespread suspicion concerning the purposes and morality of the¶ “secret government.” This forum was conceived as an initial step toward developing different strands of historical inquiry focused on “cultures of secrecy” in¶ the postwar United States. The essays that follow are the result of an openended request to three talented scholars to develop this theme in relation to¶ their own historical concerns.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Pltx

Links to the cp more then to the aff, bc we don't instrumentally aff the adv’y

1). Hold the link to a high threshold, they don't have evidence

2). Only reason it would be important for our president to seem “strong” on nuclear power is because national security has translated into a cultural obsession that generates hysteria when faced with anything “too subversive”; even if Obama is re-elected, it doesn't change the glass ceiling secrecy sets on politics; this is our dean evidence

3). Proliferation isnt as important as it used to be;

Heron and Smith 6 critical masses and critical choices; evolving public opinion on nuclear weapons, terrorism, and security, Kerry Herron adn Hank Jenkins-Smith, Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Another interesting aspect involves the relative trends in these two measures. In aggregate and across the entire survey period, the perceived difference in importance is modes!. Roughly 30 percent believe nuclear deterrence has become less important, 45 percent see no change, and 25 percent think deterrence has actually increased in importance since the Cold War. Over the period of our surveys, however, public opinion shifts noticeabl y. In 1995, respondents are roughly evenly divided on the question of whether deterrence has declined or increased in importance compared to the Cold War period (28 percent to 23 percent). By 2003, the balance shifts to 36 percent believing deterrence is less important now compared to only 21 percent who think deterrence is more important now. This shift is statist ically significant (chi-square p  .001). Thus, public views of the relative value of nuclear deterrence are evolving, with perceptions of its importance for preventing nuclear conflict during the Cold War increasing retrospectively, while perceptions of its contemporary importance are relatively lower and trending in the opposite direction.

If we don't do the plan because it seems like it would proliferate nuclear weapons to terrorists, even an Obama victory wouldn't change racist limitation of politics

Buzas 12 Race and International Politics: How Racial Prejudice Can Shape Discord and Cooperation among Great Powers DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Zoltán I. Búzás, M.A. Graduate Program in Political Science The Ohio State University 2012

I build on Ted Hopf’s social cognitive conception of identity where identities function as lenses of perception. 189 Identities are social, because they are the result of interactions with the social environment. At the most general level, identity refers to actors’ self-understanding acquired through social interactions. Identities are also cognitive heuristics which allow us, cognitive misers, to cope with the complexity of the world. They function as lenses of perception, or what Hopf calls “axis of interpretation” 187 Gause III 2003, 273. 188 Hopf 1998, 187. 189 Hopf 2002.57 and Linda Alcoff calls “interpretive horizons.” 190 They make “threats and opportunities, enemies and allies, intelligible, thinkable, and possible.” 191 Identities as lenses of perception do more than just tell us who we are. They also tell us who others are. Identities are “mutually constructed and evolving images of self and other.” 192 The insight that identities function as lenses of perception has provided a fruitful starting point for several different theories. John Owen built his explanation of democratic peace on the assumption that “people perceive their material environment through ‘lenses’, formed by the ideas they hold, that give that environment meaning.” 193 Richard Herrmann and Michael Fischerkeller provided an image theory of foreign policy where behavior is largely a function of actors’ strategic images of others. Based on judgments about relative power, culture, and threat or opportunity, the authors identify multiple images and strategic behaviors associated with them. 194 Although Herrmann and Fischerkeller briefly touch on race, they limit its relevance primarily to the asymmetrical power relations of the “colony” image. They assume that race is irrelevant in more symmetrical power relations such as that of the “enemy” image. As discussed in Chapter 1, the dissertation extends the relevance of race to the symmetrical relations of great power politics, including the “enemy” image. My contribution lies in applying the insight that identities function as lenses of threat perception to racial identities. Racial identities, like any identity, vary along two 190 Alcoff 2006; Hopf 2002,.5. 191 Cronin 1999,18; Hopf 2002, 16. 192 Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein 1996, 59. 193 Owen 1997, 18. 194 Herrmann and Fischerkeller 1995. 58 main dimensions: content and contestation. 195 Since, as explained in the introductory chapter, I use race as a cause rather than as an effect, I bracket contestation and focus on content. Racial identity shapes threat perception through the prejudices it contains. The visibility of racial identity facilitates the development of prejudices. Based on our limited experiences we form categories of others, attach various attributes to them, and then over-generalize these attributes to all members of the category. 196 Prejudices are primarily the consequence of our being cognitive misers, but they may also be reinforced by other needs and interests. They may satisfy humans’ need for positive self-esteem and may contribute in subtle but powerful ways to the maintenance of existing power relations. 197 Although their strength varies across levels of education, geographic location, age, gender, or level of income, prejudices are surprisingly widespread and resilient. One concern in the race literature regarding racial theorizing that relies on prejudices is that it reduces racism to individual idiosyncrasy and misses its broader structural aspects. 198 Indeed, a significant portion of the prejudice literature tends to embrace methodological and ontological individualism. Theodor Adorno’s classic study located prejudice in the “authoritarian personality,” and more recent cognitive-behavioral approaches locate it in the individual mind. 199 Nonetheless, there is no good reason to assume that prejudices are necessarily individual, rather than structural. The assumption 195 Abdelal et al. 2009. 196 Allport 1958 1954,147. 197 Maykovich 1971, 448; Mercer 1995. 198 Bourne 2001; Silliman 2003; Wight 2003. 199 Adorno 1950; Corlett 2003; Levine and Pataki 2004.59 that prejudices are individualist has recently come under attack in social psychology. 200 As mentioned earlier, social identity theory revealed the social origins of prejudices. In the same vein, I conceive of prejudices embedded in racial identities as the microstructures which help uphold larger material, institutional and legal macro-structures. They are embedded in the larger social structure, are relational, and are transmitted socially, which makes them as social as they are cognitive. By embedding them in racial identities, I hope to avoid the reductionist trap associated with theories of racial prejudices. Prejudices help racial identity shape threat perception in two ways. First, racial prejudices facilitate the activation of racial identities by providing the cognitive associations on which activation depends. Because agents have multiple identities, the activation of racial identities is necessary in order to perceive others through a racial lens. Activation is a cognitive process which can occur automatically, but can also be facilitated by a wide range of cues provided by the media and politicians. It depends on the prior existence of conscious or unconscious cognitive associations between racial others and particular characteristics, events, or policies. Such close associations usually take the form of prejudices. The literature on racial cues and on playing the “race card” provides strong evidence in this regard. 201 For example, the close connection in the American mind between crime and African Americans can activate racial perception if one is exposed to images or statements about crime, even if no direct reference to race is 200 Dixon and Levine 2012, 6-10. 201 Gilens 1996; Mendelberg 2001; White, 2007. 60 made. 202 This implicit activation is the more powerful because it can circumvent norms prohibiting racism by avoiding explicit reference to race. Similar activation of racial identities as a lens of perception can occur towards racial groups inhabiting other states if one is exposed to images or statements which focus on characteristics closely associated with that racial group. Although much of this literature in American politics emphasizes the instrumental role of manipulative elites and the media in activating racial prejudices, there is nothing in the logic of activation that requires instrumentalism. In practice it is often the manipulative elite and the media that provide racial cues, but sometimes they provide racial cues automatically, without being motivated by some self-interest.

Guarantees eventual conflict

Buzas 12 Race and International Politics: How Racial Prejudice Can Shape Discord and Cooperation among Great Powers DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Zoltán I. Búzás, M.A. Graduate Program in Political Science The Ohio State University 2012

Race is underappreciated in mainstream IR theory. Realist approaches pay attention to ethnicity and nationalism, but not to race and racism. Stephen Van Evera provides a systematic discussion of nationalism and war, while Barry Posen deploys the security dilemma to explain ethnic conflict. 58 Even John Mearsheimer makes a quick reference to “hypernationalism” as a factor which may shape patterns of conflict. 59 Democratic peace theory largely neglects race. According to liberalism race should not matter, but there are reasons to think that it does. A look at the list of imperialist conflicts and covert operations performed by white liberal democracies against non-white nondemocracies leaves one wondering whether race is indeed epiphenomenal. 60 While dyadic versions of democratic peace emphasize that democracies are peaceful only when dealing with other democracies, according to monadic versions liberal democracies 58 Posen 1993; Van Evera 1994. 59 Mearsheimer 1990. It is worth noting that Mearsheimer sees hypernationalism as the result of intense European security competition and so not independent of structural forces. 60 One study identifies thirty-three imperial wars involving white liberal democracies against non-white political entities between 1838 and 1920, and eight American covert operations in non-white countries during the Cold War. For further details see Rosato 2003, 589-590.17 should be peaceful regardless of the regime type of their counterparts. Yet Dan Reiter and Allan Stam note that “What makes imperial wars especially disturbing to the liberal conscience is that they demonstrate also that it is easier to generate public consent if the target is racially or ethnically different from the attacker.” 61 English School approaches incorporate nationalism as a fundamental institution of international society but reserve a less central role for race, despite its attention to the “standard of ‘civilization’” in international politics. 62 Race has always lurked in the background of international society, but only more recently started to receive some attention. 63 Constructivist approaches provide exciting accounts of how gender, religion, culture, or national identity matters in international politics. 64 Yet race regrettably receives less attention. A recent series of edited volumes on civilization in world politics constitutes an important exception. 6

Tournament: Wake Forest | Round: 3 | Opponent:  | Judge: Davis, Stephen

Nuclear reactors are designed to create and controlled nuclear reaction. A critical mass of Uranium 235 is bombarded with neutrons. These neutrons cause the Uranium to decay into krypton and barium, plus kinetic energy and a few spare neutrons. Those neutrons strike other uranium atoms, which decay and given off more neutrons striking more uranium atoms. This is the exact process of a fission bomb, in a cascading chain reaction that accelerates to release catastrophic energy. But in a reactor this is slowed down. We use a neutralizing medium to retard the speed of neutrons to prevent this catastrophic acceleration.

This sustained detonation heats water to super-heated levels, converting it into steam with a huge amount of force. We then drive the steam through a turbine, forcing it to spin and driving magnets past alternating magnets of opposite polarity. These magnets are where the electricity is produced. Our usable energy comes not from the nuclear reaction or the heat, not from detonation or radioactive decay or even steam, but by creating this resistance between alternative poles. So as the positive swings past negative, negative swings past positive, in an never-ending waltz of opposites, the means are produced for us to turn on our lights and charge our laptops.

Since 1945, when the US saw the awe-inspiring power of the nuclear bomb, we've been pursuing nuclear energy. Today the US has 104 nuclear reactors producing 807 billion kilo-Watt hours of power – 30% of global production.  The threat of that explosion still haunts our nuclear dreams, so restrictions proliferate. From the careful vetting of all reactors by the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to the careful control of the rate at which plants can produce energy, to the literally thousands of safety measures imposed, our society has become the nuclear reactor, slowly exploding while the government does everything in its power to slow the release of neutrons, to manage the chain reaction. The nuclear reactor typifies the model upon which these politics have been based.

Baudrillard 85 Jean Baudrillard.  Simulacra and Simulation.  1985.  Page 32-34.

The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media, of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the "strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us into survival, into a stake without stakes - not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no value). It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded - precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction. Deterrence precludes war - the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world. What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain. The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the space program was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence." Because what, ultimately, is the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment - nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm - the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness - it is this very perfection that is fascinating. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of landing on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and makes every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws. Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free - the whole world is satellized).

Caught up in this universe purged of meaning, of chance, of any eventuality, caught up in society like those neutrons striving to interact and explode but prevented by this banalizing medium of restrictions, we find that we are still not as safe as we'd hope.

The reactors only produce through the programmed resistance. The turbines spin from negative to positive to negative and an effect is produced: The US marches onwards! So we create catastrophe, we create resistance, we create the illusion of meaning so that the workers will continue to toil on. This is the history of the nuclear, demonstrated in our ever-accelerating race with the USSR. We've now spun past the USSR, yet the film strip continues to play, projecting spectacles of nuclear catastrophe upon our collective psyches. We'll suffice to focus on one: the Three Mile Island meltdown. In 1979 a water-pump broke down in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Of course, the plant had monitoring systems, fail-safe systems, and redundant controls to deal with such a problem. But those monitoring systems were malfunctioning, and when the staff dumped the excess water from the pump system, they exacerbated the problem. The pump was broken, but they were suffering from a lack of water, not an excess, and when they dumped the water they began a meltdown which flooded the containment building with radiation and threatened to poison all of Pennsylvania. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission came and falsely certified that disaster was averted, that all was safe. One can see the workings of deterrence here – the monomaniacal focus on one problem that in fact exacerbated the problem, or the insistence by the NRC that crisis was averted.         More interesting however, is the working of turbine-resistance. Just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident saw the release of the blockbuster movie The China Syndrome. Jane Fonda ventured to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to film a news story on nuclear safety. But the plant acts up to give a show to the cameras. Like in Three Mile Island, a water-pump malfunctions. Like in Three Mile Island, the operators thought there was too much pressure and dumped the water. Like in Three Mile Island, they were suffering from a lack of water, not an excess. Like in Three Mile Island, a Pennsylvanian plant was threatening all of Pennsylvania.  Baudrillard explains that: “The China Syndrome … is not a stranger to the "real" accident in Three Mile Island, … the real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum, including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is essential from the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself … to produce a simulation of catastrophe.”  Trapped within the turbine of politics, we must constantly produce simulated catastrophes, we must produces threats and resistance to drive politics onwards. Just view all the false, exaggerated emergencies, and the blind readiness to believe in them. Without resistance our fuel burns and burns, but nothing happens. With resistance, citizens voraciously fight for Liberal or Conservative, Democratic or Republican, spinning around and around in a protest which does nothing but elevate the government even more.

So, we find ourselves sitting along the slope of a huge energy system, accelerating exponentially in a nuclear chain reaction. This slope either leads to the chill or deterrence or the infinite growth of energy. Either way our delayed atomic bombs will explode, either way there will be catastrophe – the only question is whether that catastrophe will be positive or negative. Will we produce continual Three Mile Islands, paralyzed by deterrence, or will we move forward to a new and unpredictable energy future?

Baudrillard 2002 Jean Baudrillard. “The Fate of Energy.” The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. New York: Verso Books (2002). 100-105.

AII the events described here are susceptible to two kinds of diagnosis: physical and metaphysical. From the physical point of view, we are apparently dealing with a sort of massive phase transition in a human system in disequilibrium. As with physical systems proper, this phase transition remains largely mysterious for us, but the catastrophic development in question is in itself neither beneficial nor malignant: it is simply catastrophic, in the literal sense of the word. The prototype of this chaotic declination, of this hypersensitivity to initial conditions, is the fate of energy. Our culture has seen the development of the liberation of energy as an irreversible process. All previous cultures have depended on a reversible pact with the world, on a stable ordering of things in which energy release certainly played a role, but never on the liberation of energy as a basic principle. For us, energy is the first thing to be 'liberated', and all subsequent forms of liberation are founded on this model. Man himself is liberated as an energy source, so becoming the motor of a history and of a speeding-up of that history. Energy is a sort of fantasy projection which nourishes all modernity's industrial and technical dreams; energy is also what tends to give our conception of man the sense of a dynamics of the will. We know, however, thanks to the most recent findings of modern physics on the phenomena of turbulence, chaos and catastrophe, that any flow - indeed, any linear process - when it is speeded up is inflected in a curious way, a way that produces catastrophe. The catastrophe that lies in wait for us is not connected to a depletion of resources. Energy itself, in all its forms, will become more and more abundant (at any rate, within the broadest time frame that could conceivably concern us as humans). Nuclear energy is inexhaustible, as are solar energy, the force of the tides, of the great fluxes of nature, and indeed of natural catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanoes (and technological imagination may be relied on to find ways and means to harness them). What is alarming, by contrast, is the dynamics of disequilibrium, the uncontrollability of the energy system itself, which is capable of getting out of hand in deadly fashion in very short order. We have already had a few spectacular demonstrations of the consequences of the liberation of nuclear energy (Hiroshima, Chernobyl), but it must be remembered that any chain reaction at all, viral or radioactive, has catastrophic potential. Our degree of protection from pandemics is epitomized by the utterly useless glacis that often surrounds nuclear power stations. It is not impossible that the whole system of world-transformation through energy has already entered a virulent and epidemic stage corresponding to the most essential character of energy itself: a fall, a differential, an imbalance – a catastrophe in miniature which to begin with has positive effects but which, once overtaken by its own impetus, assumes the dimensions of a global catastrophe. Energy may be looked upon as a cause which produces effects, but it is also an effect which is self-reproducing, and can thus cease to obey any law of causality. The paradox of energy is that it implies a revolution on the level of causes and a revolution on the level of effects – each, practically speaking, independent of the other. It thus becomes the locus not only of a chain of causes but also of an unhindered flood of effects. Energy thus enters a state of superfusion. The whole system of world-transformation enters a state of superfusion. Formerly a material and productive variable, energy has now become a vertiginous process feeding upon itself (which is, incidentally, why there is no danger that we shall run out of it). Consider New York City. It is a miracle that everything starts afresh each morning, considering how much energy has been used up the day before. The phenomenon is indeed inexplicable until one realizes that no rational principle of energy loss is at work here, and that the functioning of a megalopolis such as New York contradicts the second law of thermodynamics: the city feeds on its own hubbub, its own waste, its own carbon-dioxide emissions – energy arising from the expenditure of energy, thanks to a sort of miracle of substitution. Experts who base their calculations solely on the quantitative aspects of an energy system inevitably underestimate the peculiar energy source contributed by energy discharge itself. In the case of New York this discharge is completely spectacularized – supercharged by its own image. In The Supermale, Alfred Jarry describes a superfused energy of this order in connection with sexual activity, but it may also occur in the cases of mental and mechanical energy: as Jarry's quintuplet crosses Siberia in the wake of the Trans-Siberian, some velocipedists die, yet carry on cycling. Rigor mortis is replaced by mobilitas mortis, and the dead rider pedals on indefinitely, even accelerating, as a function of inertia. The energy released is boosted by the inertia of the dead. Here we are reminded of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, according to which the splendor of a society derives from its vices, its ills, its excesses, and its shortcomings. This thesis is diametrically opposed to the economists' claim that if something is expended, it must obviously be produced. On the contrary, the more we spend, the more energy and wealth increase. The energy in question is, precisely, that of catastrophe - an energy that economic calculations can never take into account. A particular kind of exaltation familiar in mental processes is now to be encountered in material processes as well. All these considerations are quite unintelligible in terms of equivalence: they can be understood only in the context of reversibility and inordinacy. Thus the energy of New Yorkers flows from their fouled air, from their speeded-up pace of life, from the panic and asphyxia created by their unimaginably inhuman environment. It is even quite probable that drugs, and all the compulsive activities that drugs bring in their train, also contribute to the level of vitality and crudely metabolic vigor of the city. Everything plays a part - from the most refined activities to the most degraded: a total chain reaction. Any notion of normal functioning has evaporated. All beings conspire (as one might have said in the eighteenth century) in the same excess, the same dramatic over excitement, which, leaving the need to live far behind, has much more to do with an unreal obsession with survival - with that glacial passion for survival which seizes hold of everyone and feeds off its own ferocity. To try to wean New Yorkers away from their extravagance and wastefulness, or to get them to slow the inhuman rhythm at which they live, would be mistaken on two counts. In the first place, they do not find their activity exhausting, though it would be for normal people: on the contrary, they draw an abnormal energy from it. Secondly, it would be humiliating for them if they were obliged to slow down and economize on their energy flow; this would represent a lowering of their collective status and compromise their claim to an immoderation and urban mobility which are without equal in the world and of which they all partake, whether consciously or unconsciously. The dangers threatening the human species are thus less risks of default (exhaustion of natural resources, dilapidation of the environment, etc.) than risks of excess: runaway energy flows, chain reactions, or frenzied autonomous developments. This distinction is a vital one, for while risks of default can be addressed by a New Political Ecology, the basic assumptions of which are by now generally accepted (indeed, they are already written into the International Rights of the Species), there is absolutely nothing to counter this other immanent logic, this speeding-up of everything, which plays double or nothing with nature. In the first case, the restoration of equilibrium to our ecological niche is still possible, the energies in play could still be rebalanced; in the second case, however, we are confronted by a development that is irretrievably out of balance. In the first case ethical principles may be brought to bear: a teleology that transcends the material Process involved - even if merely the goal of survival – may come into play; in the second case, however, a process whose only goal is limitless proliferation will inevitably absorb all transcendence and devour all agents thereof. A full-blown and planet-wide schizophrenia, therefore, now rules: even as all sorts of ecological measures are being taken, even as a strategy for the proper use of the world, for an ideal interaction with the world, is being deployed, there is a simultaneous proliferation of enterprises of destruction, a total unleashing of the performance principle. And the very same forces often contribute to both trends. Furthermore, though the end-point of the first tendency seems fairly clear - to wit, the saving of our species by means of ecological conviviality – we know absolutely nothing about the secret destination of the second. But surely this acceleration, this excentric motion, must have an end, must imply a destiny for the human species, a different symbolic relationship with the world that is much more complex and ambiguous than a relationship of balance and interaction? This too would be a vital destination- but it would involve a total risk. If such a destination has indeed been chosen for us, it is obvious that ecology's rational deities will be powerless against the throwing of technology and energy into the struggle for an unpredictable goal, in a sort of Great Game whose rules are unknown to us. Even now we have no protection against the perverse effects of security, control and crime-prevention measures. We already know to what dangerous extremities we are led by prophylaxis in every sphere: social, medical, economic or political. In the name of the highest possible degree of security, an endemic terror may well be instituted that is in every way as dangerous as the epidemic threat of catastrophe. One thing is certain: in view of the complexity of the initial conditions and the potential reversibility of all the effects, we should entertain no illusions about the effectiveness of any kind of rational intervention. In the face of a process which so far surpasses the individual or collective will of the players, we have no choice but to accept that any distinction between good and evil (and by extension here any possibility of assessing the 'right level' of technological development) can have the slightest validity only within the tiny marginal sphere contributed by our rational model. Inside these bounds, ethical reflection and practical determinations are feasible; beyond them, at the level of the overall process which we have ourselves set in motion, but which from now on marches on independently of us with the ineluctability of a natural catastrophe, there reigns - for better or worse - the inseparability of good and evil, and hence the impossibility of mobilizing the one without the other. This is, properly speaking, the theorem of the accursed share. There is no point whatsoever in wondering whether things ought to be thus: they simply are thus, and to fail to acknowledge it is to fall utterly prey to illusion. None of this invalidates whatever may be possible in the ethical, ecological or economic sphere of our life - but it does totally relativize the impact of such efforts upon the symbolic level, which is the level of destiny.

We are confronted with the fate of energy, which is the fate of humanity. This deferred nuclear explosion will occur. We will be accelerated beyond all reason and control, and as the turbines of our power plants and as the wheels of society fall out of balance, the outcome will be catastrophic. We should no longer cling to rationality and restriction, producing continual Three Mile Islands or pragmatic alternatives, as these merely delay the catastrophe, but don't prevent it.

Tournament: Wake Forest | Round: 3 | Opponent:  | Judge: 

2AC Overview

• Acro dance
• Allemande
• Argentine Tango
• Azonto
• Ballet
• Ballroom
• barn dance
• Baroque
• Basse dance
• belly dance
• Bollywood
• Boogie woogie swing,
• Bop
• Bunny hop
• breakdance
• Cakewalk
• Calypso
• Can can
• Cheerleading
• Chicken dance
• Circle dance
• Clogging
• Disco
• East coast swing
• West coast swing
• Electro Dance
• Electric slide
• Flamenco
• Folk Dance
• The Freddy
• Funk
• Gallop
• G-Slide
• Hokey Pokey
• Hula
• Ice dancing
• Interpretive dance
• jig
• jitterbug
• jive
• lap dance
• latin dance
• locking, as well as popping
• macarena
• Mashed potato
• may pole dance
• minuet
• modern dance
• moonwalk
• mosh
• pole dancing
• pop, lock, and drop
• rain dance
• reggae
• The robot
• rumba, as well as Latin, Cuban, and American folk rumba
• salsa
• samba
• saunter
• shag
• shimmy sham
• swing
• skank
• slow dance
• social dance
• square dance
• step dance
• tango
• two step
• vintage
• volte
• vogue
• waltz
• whip
• YMCA
• And Zouk

Yes, today we all have our dance. We can all express ourselves.

They’re in a double bind. Either there is no signpost by which we can interpret good dancing from bad dancing, or they are simply a new marker of what constitutes acceptability in a certain forum, turning the 1NC.

Either they are saying that their dancing is radical break with the squo, but then everything counts as dancing; walking, running, falling, moving,

or 

Your dancing becomes the new standard of what dance is, and becomes as routinized and perfected and as alienated from criticism as the nutcracker.

Additionally, racism isnt anything that is based in biology or genetics but an arbitrary concept that we have imbed with meaning. While neither Baudrillard or me and stroud belive that means race isnt important, we think that the better response to people who are racist isnt to play by their rules and accept their terms of “a good relation with difference”. Instead, we would rather respond like muslim immigrants in france who brunt down schools, hospitals, and other things given to them by the French government as reparation for earlier injustices. We would respond like Gilmore, who was put on death row and instead of allowing the anti-capital punishment coalition to protest his execution, preferred to be executed. The aff is a withdrawl from the system writ large, and the neg is the insistence that we can have an authentic and proper relation to difference. 

Baudrillard 2004 jean, undefeated, undisputed, know for his wisdom, compassion, and relentless determination to get paid, intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact

Differences mean regulated exchange . But what is it that introduces disorder into exchange? What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has no place in the contract, or in the structural interaction of differences? What is founded on the impossibility of exchange? Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it. Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination. Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference. Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different - that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being. 'We may assume', wrote Victor Segalen, 'that fundamental differences will never resolve themselves into a truly seamless and unpatched fabric; increasing unity, falling barriers and great reductions in real distance must of themselves compensate somewhere by means of new partitions and unanticipated gaps: Racism is one such 'new partition' . An abreaction to the psychodrama of difference: a response to the phantasy of - and obsession with - becoming 'other' . A way out of the psychodrama of perpetual introj ection and rej ection of the other. So intolerable is this introjection of differences, in fact, that the other must be exorcized at all costs by making the differences materially manifest. The biological claims of racism are without foundation but, by making the racial reference clear, racism does reveal the logical temptation at the heart of every structural system: the temptation to fetishize difference. But differential systems can never achieve equilibrium: differences oscillate constantly between absolute highs and absolute lows. When it comes to the management of otherness and difference, the idea of a well-tempered balance is strictly utopian. Inasmuch as the humanist logic of difference is in some sense a universal simulation (one which culminates in the absurdity of a 'right to difference'), it leads directly, for all its benevolence, to that other desperate hallucination of difference known as racism. As differences and the cult of differences continue to grow, another, unprecedented kind of violence, anomalous and inaccessible to critical rationality, grows even faster. Segalen's 'unanticipated gaps' are not simply new differences: what springs up in order to combat the total homogenization of the world is the Alien - monstrous metaphor for the corpse-like, viral Other: the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system. This is a racism which, for lack of any biological underpinning, seizes on the very slightest variations in the order of signs; a racism which quickly takes on a viral and automatic character, and perpetuates itself while revelling in a generalized semiotics . And this racism can never be countered by any humanism of difference, for the simple reason that it is itself the virus of difference. Sermonizing on the internalization of the other and the introjection of differences can never resolve the problem of the monstrous forms of otherness, because these forms are the product, precisely, of this selfsame obsessional differentiation, this selfsame obsessional dialectic of ego and other. Herein lies the whole weakness of those 'dialectical' theories of otherness which aspire to promote the proper use of difference. For if racism in its viral, immanent, current and definitive form proves anything, it is that there is no such thing as the proper use of difference . This is why it may also be said that the critique of racism is subs tantially finished - just as Marx said that the critique of religion was substantially finished. Once the vacuousness of the metaphysical account of religion had been demonstrated, religion was supposed to disappear as the conditions of a more advanced mode of production became operative. Likewise, once the vacuousness of the biological theory of races has been demonstrated, racism is supposed to disappear as the conditions of a more advanced universal intermixture of differences become operative . But what if religion, for example, contrary to Marx' s predictions, had lost its metaphysical and transcendent form only to become an immanent force and fragment into countless ideological and practical variants under the conditions of a religious revival drawing sustenance from the progress of the very social order that was expected to eradicate even the memory of religion? For the signs of just such a turn of events are all around us today. And much the same goes for racism, which has also become an immanent, viral and everyday reality. The fact is that the 'scientific' and rational critique of racism is a purely formal one, which demolishes the argument from biology but remains caught in the racist trap because it addresses a biological illusion only, and fails to deal with biology itself qua illusion. Similarly, the political and ideological critique of racism is purely formal in that it tackles the racist obsession with difference without tackling difference itself qua illusion. It thus itself becomes an illusion of criticism, bearing on nothing, and in the end racism turns out to have survived critique by rationalism j ust as deftly as religion survived critique by materialism - which is why all such critiques are indeed substantially finished . There is no such thing as the proper use of difference - a fact revealed not only by racism itself but also by all anti-racist and humanitarian efforts to promote and protect differences. Humanitarian ecumenism, the ecumenism of differences, is in a cul-de-sac: the cul-de-sac of the concept of the universal itself. The most recent illustration of this, in France, was the brouhaha over the wearing of headscarves for religious reasons by North African schoolgirls. All the rational arguments mustered in this connection turned out to be nothing but hypocritical attempts to get rid of the simple fact that no solution is to be found in any moral or political theory of difference. It is difference itself that is a reversible illusion. We are the ones who brought difference to the four corners of the earth: that it should now be returned to us in unrecognizable, Islamic, fundamentalist and irreducible forms is no bad thing. The guilt we feel in this connection assumes gigantic proportions . Not long ago the organization Medecins Sans Frontieres became aware that the medical supplies it had been distributing in Afghanistan were being resold rather than used directly by their recipients. This precipitated a crisis of conscience for the programme' s organizers . Should donations be discontinued, or should this immoral and irregular commerce be tolerated out of respect for 'cultural differences'? After much soul-searching it was decided to sacrifice Western values on the altar of difference, and continue to underwrite the black market in medicines. Humanisme oblige. Another charming illustration of the confusion besetting our humanitarians concerns X, posted to the Sudan to study 'the communications needs of Sudanese peoples' . Seemingly, the Sudanese did not know how to communicate. But they were certainly hungry, and needed to learn how to grow sorghum. Sending agronomists being too expensive a prospect, the decision had been taken to teach by videocassette. The time had come for the Sudanese to join the communications revolution: sorghum via audio and video. No hook-up, no eat. It was not long before towns and villages were crammed with VCRs. A little longer, and the local mafia created a lucrative market for itself in pornographic videotapes which held a distinctly greater interest for the populace than educational cassettes on sorghum cultivation. Porno-SorghoVideo : The Same Struggle!

All movements to speak up and out against systems of oppression do not see they are moving directly in the direction that the system wants you to; you are aiming you criticism at reform instead of complete overhaul, which means you will never crystalize as a challenge to power, but something for it to accommodate

Baudrillard in 1981 (Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” p. 84-86)

With one caution.  We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind – exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute them selves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy; To the demand of being an object  he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately, and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy: Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive-just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning-precisely the practices of the masses-that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game - a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word-or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non- reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to re-turning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

Instead, when they make arguments about how we always have to answer to our privilege, and speak from our subject location, this makes us slaves to our identity which is the worst form of oppression

Baudrillard explains in 2001.

To be able to disobey moral rules and laws, to be able to disobey others, is a mark of freedom.  But the ability to disobey oneself marks the highest stage of freedom.  Obeying one’s own will is an even worse vice than being enslaved to one’s passions.  It is certainly worse than enslavement to the will of others.  And it is, indeed, those who submit themselves mercilessly to their own decisions who fill the greater part of the authoritarian ranks, alleging sacrifice on their own part to impose even greater sacrifices on others. Each stage of servitude is both more subtle and worse than the one which precedes it.  Involuntary servitude, the servitude of the slave, is overt violence.  Voluntary servitude is a violence consented to: a freedom to will, but not the will to be free.  Last comes voluntary self-servitude or enslavement to one’s own will: the individual possesses the faculty to will, but is no longer free in respect of it.  He is the automatic agent of that faculty.  He is the serf to no master but himself.

We’ll borrow from the magnetic fields and argue: perm-nothing matters when we’re dancing.

Tournament: Wake | Round: 2 | Opponent:  | Judge: 

AT: Transhumanism

Perm: Do Both.

Kinsella 2007 (William J, “Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve, Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory.” Environmental Communication - Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 194_217)

Additionally, and consistent with Rogers’ search for a ‘‘transhuman’’ approach, Heidegger’s phenomenology enables a powerful critique of humanism. By analogy with models of ‘‘bounded rationality’’ (March and Simon, 1958) and ‘‘bounded emotionality’’ (Mumby and Putnam, 1992) in organizational theory, such an approach might take the form of a ‘‘bounded constitutive’’ model of communication. In that model, humans have substantial power to constitute the world and its meanings, but that power is constrained by, and must be responsible to, the transcendental facticity of nature. Below, I outline the directions such a model might take, using as foundations Heidegger’s critique of humanism, the notion of ‘‘care’’ that emerges in his critique of enframing, and a recent philosophical reading of his phenomenology as a form of ‘‘ontic realism’’ (Carman, 2003, pp. 44ff). Consistent with Rogers’ liberatory goals, such an approach opens up the discursive space for a broader range of voices and arguments in public environmental discourse, environmental conflict, and environmental policy debate. In that spirit, I now examine some key ideas from Heidegger’s phenomenology and their potential for integrating concerns for nature, as conceptualized in radical ecology, with concerns for human welfare and emancipation.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Giving the land back continues the oppression of indigenous peoples; this humanist logic of difference is already the way that we have waged cultural genocide against these peoples, and denies them the revenge they are beginning to take upon us.

Jean Baudrillard (Paris, France). ISSN: 1705-6411 Volume 3, Number 1 (January 2006) The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized). Oh yeah, Baudrillard is totally an indian/native studies BALLER.

Does the other exist for the Savage or the Primitive? Some relationships are asymmetrical: the one may be the other for the other without this implying that the other is the other for the one. I may be other for him even though he is not the other for me. The Alakaluf of Tierra del Fuego were wiped out without ever having sought to understand the Whites, without ever even speaking to them or negotiating with them. They called themselves 'Men' - and there were no others. In their eyes the Whites were not even different: they were unintelligible. They evinced no surprise at the newcomers' vast wealth and amazing technology. Despite three centuries of contact, the Alakaluf adopted not a single Western technique, continuing, for instance, to row around in skiffs. The Whites might oppress and slaughter them, but it was for all the world as if they did not exist. The Alakaluf were to be annihilated without conceding anything of their otherness. They would never be assimilated - indeed, they would never even reach the stage of difference. They would perish without ever allowing the Whites the privilege of recognizing them as different. The Alakaluf were simply irrecuperable. For the Whites, nevertheless, they were 1 'others' - beings that were different yet still human, or at least human enough to be evangelized, exploited, and killed. As a sovereign people the Alakaluf called themselves 'Men'. Then the Whites applied to them the name that they had originally applied to the Whites: 'Foreigners'. They eventually came to refer to themselves as 'foreigners' in their own language. In later times they called themselves 'Alakaluf' - the only word that they still pronounced in front of Whites, meaning 'Give, give'. They thus ended up with a designation connoting the mendacity to which they had been reduced. First, then, they were themselves, then strangers to themselves, and finally absent from themselves: three names reflecting three stages of their extermination. Naturally their murder is to be attributed to those who possess the universalizing vision, those who manipulate otherness for their own profit. In their singularity, which could not even conceive of the Other, the Alakaluf were inevitably vanquished. But who can say that the elimination of this singularity will not turn out, in the long run, to be fatal for the Whites too? Who can say that radical foreignness will not have its revenge - that, though effectively conjured away by colonial humanism, it will not return in the form of a virus in the bloodstream of the Whites, dooming them to disappear themselves one day in much the same way as the Alakaluf. Everything is subservient to the system, yet at the same time escapes its control. Those groups around the world who adopt the Western lifestyle never really identify with it, and indeed are secretly contemptuous of it. They remain excentric with respect to this value system. Their way of assimilating, of often being more fanatical in their observance of Western manners than Westerners themselves, has an obviously parodic, aping quality: they are engaged in a sort of bricolage with the broken bits and pieces of the Enlightenment, of 'progress'. Even when they negotiate or ally themselves with the West, they continue to believe that their own way is fundamentally the right one. Perhaps, like the Alakalut these groups will disappear without ever having taken the Whites seriously. (For our part we take them very seriously indeed, whether our aim is to assimilate them or destroy them: they are even fast becoming the crucial - negative - reference point of our whole value system.) The Whites will perhaps themselves disappear one day without ever having understood that their whiteness is merely the result of the promiscuity and confusion of all races and cultures, just as the whiteness of white light is simply the resolution of the melodrama of all colours. And just as colours become comparable amongst themselves only when they are measured against a universal scale of wavelengths, so cultures become comparable only when they are set against a structural scale of differences. But there is a double standard here, for it is only for Western culture that other cultures are different. For those other cultures themselves, Whites are not even different - they are non-existent, phantoms from another world. Outward conversion to Western ways invariably conceals inward scoffing at Western hegemony. One is put in mind of those Dogons who made up dreams to humour their psychoanalysts and then offered these dreams to the analysts as gifts. Once we despised other cultures; now we respect them. They do not respect our culture, however; they feel nothing but an immense condescension for it. We may have won the right by conquest to exploit and subjugate these cultures, but they have offered themselves the luxury of mystifying us. The strangest feeling one is left with after reading Bruce Chatwin's Songlines is a lingering perplexity about the reality of the 'lines' themselves: do these poetic and musical itineraries, these songs, this 'dreamtime', really exist or not? In all these accounts there is a hint of mystification; a kind of mythic optical illusion seems to be operating. It is as though the Aboriginals were fobbing us off. While unveiling the profoundest and most authentic of truths (the Austral myth at its most mysterious), they also play up the most modern and hypothetical of considerations: the irresolvability of any narrative, absolute doubt as to the origins. For us to believe these fabulous things, we need to feel that they themselves believe them. But these Aboriginals seem to take a mischievous pleasure in being allusive and evasive. They give a few clues, but never tell us the rules of the game, and one cannot help getting the impression that they are improvising, pandering to our phantasies, but withholding any reassurance that what they are telling us is true. This is doubtless their way of keeping their secrets while at the same time poking fun at us - for in the end we are the only people who want to believe these tales. The Aboriginals' secret resides not in what they omit to say, however, but entirely within the thread, within the indecipherable filigree of the narrative; we are confronted by an ironic form here, by a mythology of appearances. And in the manipulation of this form the Aboriginals are far more adept than we are. We Whites are liable to remain mystified for a good while yet. The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab, fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with the same affectation and inner unconcern - and are we not ourselves equally unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas all other cultures have already given their own response - namely, universal indifference. It is not even remotely a matter of rehabilitating the Aboriginals, or finding them a place in the chorus of human rights, for their revenge lies elsewhere. It lies in their power to destabilize Western rule. It lies in their phantom presence, their viral, spectral presence in the synapses of our brains, in the circuitry of our rocketship, as 'Alien'; in the way in which the Whites have caught the virus of origins, of Indianness, of Aboriginality, of Patagonicity. We murdered all this, but now it infects our blood, into which it has been inexorably transfused and infiltrated. The revenge of the colonized is in no sense the reappropriation by Indians or Aboriginals of their lands, privileges or autonomy: that is our victory. Rather, that revenge may be seen in the way in which the Whites have been mysteriously made aware of the disarray of their own culture, the way in which they have been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor and are now succumbing little by little to the grip of 'dream time'. This reversal is a worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return - not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense - and to reach the very heart of our ultrasophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness - a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter.

Tournament: Northwestern | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

1AC – Fate of Energy

Nuclear reactors are designed to create and controlled nuclear reaction. A critical mass of Uranium 235 is bombarded with neutrons. These neutrons cause the Uranium to decay into krypton and barium, plus kinetic energy and a few spare neutrons. Those neutrons strike other uranium atoms, which decay and given off more neutrons striking more uranium atoms. This is the exact process of a fission bomb, in a cascading chain reaction that accelerates to release catastrophic energy. But in a reactor this is slowed down. We use a neutralizing medium to retard the speed of neutrons to prevent this catastrophic acceleration.

This sustained detonation heats water to super-heated levels, converting it into steam with a huge amount of force. We then drive the steam through a turbine, forcing it to spin and driving magnets past alternating magnets of opposite polarity. These magnets are where the electricity is produced. Our usable energy comes not from the nuclear reaction or the heat, not from detonation or radioactive decay or even steam, but by creating this resistance between alternative poles. So as the positive swings past negative, negative swings past positive, in an never-ending waltz of opposites, the means are produced for us to turn on our lights and charge our laptops.

Since 1945, when the US saw the awe-inspiring power of the nuclear bomb, we've been pursuing nuclear energy. Today the US has 104 nuclear reactors producing 807 billion kilo-Watt hours of power – 30% of global production.  The threat of that explosion still haunts our nuclear dreams, so restrictions proliferate. From the careful vetting of all reactors by the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to the careful control of the rate at which plants can produce energy, to the literally thousands of safety measures imposed, our society has become the nuclear reactor, slowly exploding while the government does everything in its power to slow the release of neutrons, to manage the chain reaction. The nuclear reactor typifies the model upon which these politics have been based.

Baudrillard 85 Jean Baudrillard.  Simulacra and Simulation.  1985.  Page 32-34.

The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media, of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the "strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us into survival, into a stake without stakes - not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no value). It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded - precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction. Deterrence precludes war - the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world. What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain. The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the space program was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence." Because what, ultimately, is the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment - nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm - the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness - it is this very perfection that is fascinating. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of landing on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and makes every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws. Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free - the whole world is satellized).

Caught up in this universe purged of meaning, of chance, of any eventuality, caught up in society like those neutrons striving to interact and explode but prevented by this banalizing medium of restrictions, we find that we are still not as safe as we'd hope.

The reactors only produce through the programmed resistance. The turbines spin from negative to positive to negative and an effect is produced: The US marches onwards! So we create catastrophe, we create resistance, we create the illusion of meaning so that the workers will continue to toil on. This is the history of the nuclear, demonstrated in our ever-accelerating race with the USSR. We've now spun past the USSR, yet the film strip continues to play, projecting spectacles of nuclear catastrophe upon our collective psyches. We'll suffice to focus on one: the Three Mile Island meltdown. In 1979 a water-pump broke down in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Of course, the plant had monitoring systems, fail-safe systems, and redundant controls to deal with such a problem. But those monitoring systems were malfunctioning, and when the staff dumped the excess water from the pump system, they exacerbated the problem. The pump was broken, but they were suffering from a lack of water, not an excess, and when they dumped the water they began a meltdown which flooded the containment building with radiation and threatened to poison all of Pennsylvania. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission came and falsely certified that disaster was averted, that all was safe. One can see the workings of deterrence here – the monomaniacal focus on one problem that in fact exacerbated the problem, or the insistence by the NRC that crisis was averted.         More interesting however, is the working of turbine-resistance. Just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident saw the release of the blockbuster movie The China Syndrome. Jane Fonda ventured to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to film a news story on nuclear safety. But the plant acts up to give a show to the cameras. Like in Three Mile Island, a water-pump malfunctions. Like in Three Mile Island, the operators thought there was too much pressure and dumped the water. Like in Three Mile Island, they were suffering from a lack of water, not an excess. Like in Three Mile Island, a Pennsylvanian plant was threatening all of Pennsylvania.  Baudrillard explains that: “The China Syndrome … is not a stranger to the "real" accident in Three Mile Island, … the real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum, including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is essential from the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself … to produce a simulation of catastrophe.”  Trapped within the turbine of politics, we must constantly produce simulated catastrophes, we must produces threats and resistance to drive politics onwards. Just view all the false, exaggerated emergencies, and the blind readiness to believe in them. Without resistance our fuel burns and burns, but nothing happens. With resistance, citizens voraciously fight for Liberal or Conservative, Democratic or Republican, spinning around and around in a protest which does nothing but elevate the government even more.

So, we find ourselves sitting along the slope of a huge energy system, accelerating exponentially in a nuclear chain reaction. This slope either leads to the chill or deterrence or the infinite growth of energy. Either way our delayed atomic bombs will explode, either way there will be catastrophe – the only question is whether that catastrophe will be positive or negative. Will we produce continual Three Mile Islands, paralyzed by deterrence, or will we move forward to a new and unpredictable energy future?

Baudrillard 2 Jean Baudrillard. “The Fate of Energy.” The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. New York: Verso Books (2002). 100-105.

AII the events described here are susceptible to two kinds of diagnosis: physical and metaphysical. From the physical point of view, we are apparently dealing with a sort of massive phase transition in a human system in disequilibrium. As with physical systems proper, this phase transition remains largely mysterious for us, but the catastrophic development in question is in itself neither beneficial nor malignant: it is simply catastrophic, in the literal sense of the word. The prototype of this chaotic declination, of this hypersensitivity to initial conditions, is the fate of energy. Our culture has seen the development of the liberation of energy as an irreversible process. All previous cultures have depended on a reversible pact with the world, on a stable ordering of things in which energy release certainly played a role, but never on the liberation of energy as a basic principle. For us, energy is the first thing to be 'liberated', and all subsequent forms of liberation are founded on this model. Man himself is liberated as an energy source, so becoming the motor of a history and of a speeding-up of that history. Energy is a sort of fantasy projection which nourishes all modernity's industrial and technical dreams; energy is also what tends to give our conception of man the sense of a dynamics of the will. We know, however, thanks to the most recent findings of modern physics on the phenomena of turbulence, chaos and catastrophe, that any flow - indeed, any linear process - when it is speeded up is inflected in a curious way, a way that produces catastrophe. The catastrophe that lies in wait for us is not connected to a depletion of resources. Energy itself, in all its forms, will become more and more abundant (at any rate, within the broadest time frame that could conceivably concern us as humans). Nuclear energy is inexhaustible, as are solar energy, the force of the tides, of the great fluxes of nature, and indeed of natural catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanoes (and technological imagination may be relied on to find ways and means to harness them). What is alarming, by contrast, is the dynamics of disequilibrium, the uncontrollability of the energy system itself, which is capable of getting out of hand in deadly fashion in very short order. We have already had a few spectacular demonstrations of the consequences of the liberation of nuclear energy (Hiroshima, Chernobyl), but it must be remembered that any chain reaction at all, viral or radioactive, has catastrophic potential. Our degree of protection from pandemics is epitomized by the utterly useless glacis that often surrounds nuclear power stations. It is not impossible that the whole system of world-transformation through energy has already entered a virulent and epidemic stage corresponding to the most essential character of energy itself: a fall, a differential, an imbalance – a catastrophe in miniature which to begin with has positive effects but which, once overtaken by its own impetus, assumes the dimensions of a global catastrophe. Energy may be looked upon as a cause which produces effects, but it is also an effect which is self-reproducing, and can thus cease to obey any law of causality. The paradox of energy is that it implies a revolution on the level of causes and a revolution on the level of effects – each, practically speaking, independent of the other. It thus becomes the locus not only of a chain of causes but also of an unhindered flood of effects. Energy thus enters a state of superfusion. The whole system of world-transformation enters a state of superfusion. Formerly a material and productive variable, energy has now become a vertiginous process feeding upon itself (which is, incidentally, why there is no danger that we shall run out of it). Consider New York City. It is a miracle that everything starts afresh each morning, considering how much energy has been used up the day before. The phenomenon is indeed inexplicable until one realizes that no rational principle of energy loss is at work here, and that the functioning of a megalopolis such as New York contradicts the second law of thermodynamics: the city feeds on its own hubbub, its own waste, its own carbon-dioxide emissions – energy arising from the expenditure of energy, thanks to a sort of miracle of substitution. Experts who base their calculations solely on the quantitative aspects of an energy system inevitably underestimate the peculiar energy source contributed by energy discharge itself. In the case of New York this discharge is completely spectacularized – supercharged by its own image. In The Supermale, Alfred Jarry describes a superfused energy of this order in connection with sexual activity, but it may also occur in the cases of mental and mechanical energy: as Jarry's quintuplet crosses Siberia in the wake of the Trans-Siberian, some velocipedists die, yet carry on cycling. Rigor mortis is replaced by mobilitas mortis, and the dead rider pedals on indefinitely, even accelerating, as a function of inertia. The energy released is boosted by the inertia of the dead. Here we are reminded of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, according to which the splendor of a society derives from its vices, its ills, its excesses, and its shortcomings. This thesis is diametrically opposed to the economists' claim that if something is expended, it must obviously be produced. On the contrary, the more we spend, the more energy and wealth increase. The energy in question is, precisely, that of catastrophe - an energy that economic calculations can never take into account. A particular kind of exaltation familiar in mental processes is now to be encountered in material processes as well. All these considerations are quite unintelligible in terms of equivalence: they can be understood only in the context of reversibility and inordinacy. Thus the energy of New Yorkers flows from their fouled air, from their speeded-up pace of life, from the panic and asphyxia created by their unimaginably inhuman environment. It is even quite probable that drugs, and all the compulsive activities that drugs bring in their train, also contribute to the level of vitality and crudely metabolic vigor of the city. Everything plays a part - from the most refined activities to the most degraded: a total chain reaction. Any notion of normal functioning has evaporated. All beings conspire (as one might have said in the eighteenth century) in the same excess, the same dramatic over excitement, which, leaving the need to live far behind, has much more to do with an unreal obsession with survival - with that glacial passion for survival which seizes hold of everyone and feeds off its own ferocity. To try to wean New Yorkers away from their extravagance and wastefulness, or to get them to slow the inhuman rhythm at which they live, would be mistaken on two counts. In the first place, they do not find their activity exhausting, though it would be for normal people: on the contrary, they draw an abnormal energy from it. Secondly, it would be humiliating for them if they were obliged to slow down and economize on their energy flow; this would represent a lowering of their collective status and compromise their claim to an immoderation and urban mobility which are without equal in the world and of which they all partake, whether consciously or unconsciously. The dangers threatening the human species are thus less risks of default (exhaustion of natural resources, dilapidation of the environment, etc.) than risks of excess: runaway energy flows, chain reactions, or frenzied autonomous developments. This distinction is a vital one, for while risks of default can be addressed by a New Political Ecology, the basic assumptions of which are by now generally accepted (indeed, they are already written into the International Rights of the Species), there is absolutely nothing to counter this other immanent logic, this speeding-up of everything, which plays double or nothing with nature. In the first case, the restoration of equilibrium to our ecological niche is still possible, the energies in play could still be rebalanced; in the second case, however, we are confronted by a development that is irretrievably out of balance. In the first case ethical principles may be brought to bear: a teleology that transcends the material Process involved - even if merely the goal of survival – may come into play; in the second case, however, a process whose only goal is limitless proliferation will inevitably absorb all transcendence and devour all agents thereof. A full-blown and planet-wide schizophrenia, therefore, now rules: even as all sorts of ecological measures are being taken, even as a strategy for the proper use of the world, for an ideal interaction with the world, is being deployed, there is a simultaneous proliferation of enterprises of destruction, a total unleashing of the performance principle. And the very same forces often contribute to both trends. Furthermore, though the end-point of the first tendency seems fairly clear - to wit, the saving of our species by means of ecological conviviality – we know absolutely nothing about the secret destination of the second. But surely this acceleration, this excentric motion, must have an end, must imply a destiny for the human species, a different symbolic relationship with the world that is much more complex and ambiguous than a relationship of balance and interaction? This too would be a vital destination- but it would involve a total risk. If such a destination has indeed been chosen for us, it is obvious that ecology's rational deities will be powerless against the throwing of technology and energy into the struggle for an unpredictable goal, in a sort of Great Game whose rules are unknown to us. Even now we have no protection against the perverse effects of security, control and crime-prevention measures. We already know to what dangerous extremities we are led by prophylaxis in every sphere: social, medical, economic or political. In the name of the highest possible degree of security, an endemic terror may well be instituted that is in every way as dangerous as the epidemic threat of catastrophe. One thing is certain: in view of the complexity of the initial conditions and the potential reversibility of all the effects, we should entertain no illusions about the effectiveness of any kind of rational intervention. In the face of a process which so far surpasses the individual or collective will of the players, we have no choice but to accept that any distinction between good and evil (and by extension here any possibility of assessing the 'right level' of technological development) can have the slightest validity only within the tiny marginal sphere contributed by our rational model. Inside these bounds, ethical reflection and practical determinations are feasible; beyond them, at the level of the overall process which we have ourselves set in motion, but which from now on marches on independently of us with the ineluctability of a natural catastrophe, there reigns - for better or worse - the inseparability of good and evil, and hence the impossibility of mobilizing the one without the other. This is, properly speaking, the theorem of the accursed share. There is no point whatsoever in wondering whether things ought to be thus: they simply are thus, and to fail to acknowledge it is to fall utterly prey to illusion. None of this invalidates whatever may be possible in the ethical, ecological or economic sphere of our life - but it does totally relativize the impact of such efforts upon the symbolic level, which is the level of destiny.

We are confronted with the fate of energy, which is the fate of humanity. This deferred nuclear explosion will occur. We will be accelerated beyond all reason and control, and as the turbines of our power plants and as the wheels of society fall out of balance, the outcome will be catastrophic. We should no longer cling to rationality and restriction, producing continual Three Mile Islands or pragmatic alternatives, as these merely delay the catastrophe, but don't prevent it.

We choose to embrace this unknowable energy future and cast off all restrictions. Thus, the plan:

RESOLVED: The United States federal government should substantially eliminate all topical restrictions on production of nuclear energy

We affirm our fate; regardless of what it might be.

Andrew Robinson. “An A to Z of Theory: Jean Baudrillard: Catastrophe and Terrorism.” Ceasefire. December 7, 2012. http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-13/.

Other possibilities of resistance arise around the issue of implosion. The system insulates itself against crisis by resisting explosion. It converts the explosive force of crisis into a homeopathic dose of simulated catastrophe. Against this constant drip-feed of simulated catastrophe, Baudrillard suggests, the only means of mitigation is to make a real catastrophe arrive. This is perhaps why events like Hurricane Katrina are almost euphoric for some survivors, though traumatic for others. Disaster unties the knots of anxiety and terror in which people are caught. This is also why terrorism is so fascinating. Real violence makes the invisible violence of security disappear. According to Baudrillard, power is collapsing. Institutions and “the social” are collapsing. Implosive events take this process further, speeding it up. They are necessarily incalculable in terms of their effects. The endpoint of this process is catastrophe. For Baudrillard, catastrophe is the abolition of causes and the creation of ‘pure, non-referential connections’. Such connections are inherently beautiful and seductive. Catastrophe is not necessarily disastrous as is usually assumed. It is a disaster only for meaning and power. Implosion offers possibilities because of the generalization of the remainder. When the system becomes saturated, everything turns to and becomes the remainder. The remainder – what is barred – continues to exist. Because the system has claimed to be everything, it comes back inside and shatters the system. This may be why the system now imagines itself under siege from enemies within. Without the imaginary, without a space beyond the system’s coded functioning, it can no longer keep what it excludes outside. He suggests, for instance, that architects could form a conception of cities based on their remainders, such as cemeteries and waste grounds. Such an act would be fatal to architecture. It is thus on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. For instance, sanity is refounded on the basis of madness (the theory of the unconscious). Metropolitan societies exclude the indigenous, only to find the indigenous at their foundation (urban ‘tribes’, gangs, subcultures…) Death is excluded, only to be seen or foreshadowed everywhere. Structures become unstable because the remainder is no longer in a specified place. It is everywhere. When everything is repressed or alienated, the entire field is repressed or alienated – so nothing is repressed or alienated, everything is within the visible field. Repressed energy is no longer available to be channeled by the system. The totalizing nature of power today makes it more vulnerable than ever. The more total the system seems, the more inspiring any little setback for it becomes. Every small defeat now carries the image of a chain reaction bringing down the system. Baudrillard proposes a strategy of forcing power to occupy its own place, so as to make itself obscene. By making power appear as power, its absence is made visible, and it disappears.

AT: Framework

Predictability is a bad standard when f/w is a strategy because it means that we either have to be 100% predictable so they can block out the debate to the 2nr, or we’ll never be predictable enough; we will either never get to a point of stasis, or we will and it will be at the point where we have killed effective communication;

Guillaume and Baudrillard 2008 (Jean and Marc, Translated by Ames Hodges, Radical Alterity, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, Page(s) 31-32)

To see what is new here, one must resist the temptation to picture spectral communication as partial, incomplete communication. What would be the Other, the absolute opposite of spectral communication?  One might think it is the face to face, body to body between two people who know each other intimately, which we would then call a real, total communication. In fact, this is not the Other of the spectral because if everything is shared, if everything is common between two people, then there is no more communication. It disappears in extreme intimacy. It is a classic aporia: the aim of communication is the very thing that renders it unnecessary. In other words, all communication relies on its opposite and on the separation of beings. That is why communication thrives on all forms of distancing, strangeness, and all the risks of miscomprehension and misunderstanding. It is no surprise that technical progress, by removing communication from reality and spectralizing it, has made it more complex and more prolific, more existent. Spectral communication realizes the ideal of communication by intensifying separation. It leads us to seek a more precise answer to a conundrum: the relationship between anonymity and anomie.

AT: DA’s

Their DA scenario is a preventative electroshock that, like a local war or a political scandal, that happens, so to prove we need the larger system of deterrence in the first place.

Baudrillard 95 jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, “The Gulf War Never Happened”, Translated by Paul Patton, Indiana University Press, p. 83-4

A variant on Clausewitz: non-war is the absence of politics pursued by other means ... It no longer proceeds from a political will to dominate or from a vital impulsion or an antagonistic violence, but from the will to impose a general consensus by deterrence. This consensual violence can be as deadly as conflictual violence, but its aim is to overcome any hegemonic rivalry, even when cold and balanced by terror, as it has been over the last forty years. It was already at work in all the democracies taken one by one; it operates today on a global level which is conceived as an immense democracy governed by a homogeneous order which has as its emblem the UN and the Rights of Man. The Gulf War is the first consensual war, the first war conducted legally and globally with a view to putting an end to war and liquidating any confrontation likely to threaten the hence forward unified system of control. This was already the aim of dualistic (East and West) deterrence; today we pass to the monopolistic stage under the aegis of American power. Logically, this democratic and consensual form should be able to dispense with war, but it will no doubt continue to have local and episodic need of it. The Gulf War is one of these transitive episodes. hesitating for this reason between hard and soft forms: virtual war or real war? But the balance is in the process of definitively inclining in one direction, and tomorrow there will be nothing but the virtual violence of consensus, the simultaneity in real time of the global consensus: this will happen tomorrow and it will be the beginning of a world with no tomorrow. Electronic war no longer has any political objective strictly speaking: it functions as a preventative electroshock against any future conflict. Just as in modern communication there is no longer any interlocutor, so in this electronic war there is no longer any enemy. there is only a refractory element which must be neutralised and consensualised. This is what the Americans seek to do, these missionary people bearing electroshocks which will shepherd everybody towards democracy. It is therefore pointless to question the political aims of this war: the only (transpolitical) aim is to align everybody with the global lowest common denominator. the democratic denominator (which, in its extension, approaches ever closer to the degree zero of politics). The lowest common multiplier being information in all its forms, which, as it extends towards infinity, also approaches ever closer to the degree zero of its content. In this sense. consensus as the degree zero of democracy and information as the degree zero of opinion are in total affinity: the New World Order will be both consensual and televisual. That is indeed why the targeted bombings carefully avoided the Iraqi television antennae (which stand out like a sore thumb in the sky over Baghdad). War is no lbnger what it used to be ...

Before they get to weigh the DA, they have to win why death I an impact; we’ll argue that extinction is inevitable (we all die) but also that it’s worse to try and exclude your own death by scenario

Robinson 2012 /Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism and the Exclusion of Death”, March 30,  http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence.¶ Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation.¶ According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly.¶ Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value.¶ Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code.¶ Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active.¶ Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.¶ Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined.¶ This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange.¶ Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability.¶ Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation.¶ The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange.¶ Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power.¶ It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups.¶ Death¶ Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death.¶ According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations. The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category.¶ The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death.¶ The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others.

AT: PIC out of the plan

We aren't an alt, we’re a singularity. A PIC would co-opt the singularity into just another facet of the system; it’d be like telling 9/11 terrorists to “do it for capitalism” or to explain bartleby’s “no” as “an unexplainable no, but ultimately for identity politics”.  

Per Herngren and Baudrillard 2007 (“Postprotest and Baudrillard” http://perherngren-resistance.blogspot.com/2007/10/jean-baudrillard-is-important-for.html)

Jean Baudrillard is important for the reflection on postprotest. Postprotest sometimes proposes a combination of civil disobedience and production of positive alternatives, to create some kind of constructive or proactive resistance. In this text, however, Baudrillard criticizes the focus on “alternatives” as a way to defeat a dominant system; instead he suggests singularities. Here he also criticizes reactive protest movements: “Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. 6 They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules.”

AT: Cap

Capitalism is no longer strictly material or grounded in steadfast notions of production but is not virtual and orbital; your k would have been relevant in the 70’s, but is now outdated.

Baldwin 12 Alec, lol jk,Volume 9, Number 3 (October 2012) Editorial Exacerbation, Singularity, Indifference: Baudrillard and Politics Jon Baldwin (London Metropolitan University, UK, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-baldwined.html)

In 1973 dollar-gold convertibility was abandoned once and for all. Enter now the play of borrowing and lending: all monetary debt since has been “mere paper promises” (Kunkel, 2012: 23). Overall indebtedness has grown faster than most national economies: “In the last forty years, the world has been more successful at creating claims on wealth than it has at creating wealth itself” (Coggan in Ibid.: 23). Marx’s circuit M – C – M’ (Money – Commodity – Money) becomes, as he anticipated, M – M’ (Money – Money). In the financial economy money (a ‘paper promise’, a ‘claim on wealth’) becomes a sign free of any reference to real wealth or production: this might be termed a financial simulacrum. In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard anticipates and summarises: “The sign no longer designates anything at all. It approaches its true structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs. All reality then becomes the place of a semiurgical manipulation, of a structural simulation” (Baudrillard, 1975: 128). A financial bubble, viewed through a Baudrillardian lens, could be conceived as one such simulation. Benjamin Noys proposes that the “prefigurative qualities of Baudrillard’s writing are, now, self-evident” (Noys, 2012). Problems with the symbolism of the disentangling of the gold-standard are emblematic and the seeds of the current crash are planted in the early 1970s. Baudrillard notes, in 1973, that this process culminates in the ‘virtual international autonomy of finance capital’, in the uncontrollable ‘play of floating capital’. When financial capital is extracted from ‘all productive cautions’, and even from ‘all reference to the gold standard’, then ‘general equivalence’ becomes the strategic place of the manipulation: “Real production is everywhere subordinated to it. This apogee of the system corresponds to the triumph of the code” (Baudrillard, 1975: 129). Here, in a characteristic motif, the economic real (of production for instance) is subordinated to economic simulation: simulation becomes more real than the real (hyper-real). The code now becomes the greater political problem than alienation, exploitation, inequality, and so on. The financial simulacrum should not be taken as having no effect on everyday economic life: the code, the model, precedes the real. The economy is hyper-real,4 a financial simulacrum.5 Capital freed in this way, has no obstacle to circulation and value radiates “endlessly in every direction” (Baudrillard, 1987: 25). Recently, trade in derivatives worldwide was one quadrillion US dollars, which is ten times the total production of goods on the planet over its entire history. This is one sense of what Baudrillard means by ‘floating capital’. There is no anchor in real production or wealth.6 Speculation is “without reference to production or its real conditions...it plays now on its own orbital circulation and revolution alone” (Baudrillard, 1998: 1). One result of this is the 'fictitious' nature of wealth, as Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy suggest. For instance, income is withdrawn against asset bubbles, and there are claims made on future wealth that neither can, nor will be produced. The signs engendered by the financial simulation cannot fully be converted into real wealth, as it seems the market is currently experiencing.7

The problem with Marxism is its analysis of production doesn't look at how we produce a system of production, but the way it is organized is problematic; the alt will only end up re-doing capitalism but not disrupting it.

Coulter 12 Gerry Coulter is the Founding Editor of IJBS. He has published widely on Baudrillard, and is one of the nicest people ever. Total baller. Volume 9, Number 3 (October 2012) Baudrillard’s Decisive Break With Marx. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-coulter.html

Baudrillard ultimately finds Marx able to offer a thoroughgoing critic of capitalism in his own time but one which lacks the kind of radicality we need today. And, even in his analysis of his own time, Marx is further charged with misunderstanding those capitalist formations (1973 1975: 106 ff). It is, in Baudrillard’s terms, the “production of the production system” which escapes Marx (Ibid.:66). Baudrillard has a very good point here as in Marx there is a constant assumption (it is intrinsic to his understanding of labour and nature), that production is taken for granted – what is wrong is merely how it is organized. So, Baudrillard quite rightly gets to the core of some very important implications of Marx’s thought – especially the obvious fact (to everyone but Marxists), that production (as a form) is not subjected by Marx to radical analysis (Ibid.:20). Baudrillard says that Marx has kind of “theoretical allergy to everything that isn’t material production and productive labour” (1972 1981:167). Marx’s theory is, for Baudrillard, one that “analyzes the social field that it produces” (1976 1993:221-22). This leads Baudrillard to a series of insights concerning Marx, which were for a time in the 1970’s and 1980’s, unique to him as a theorist. Baudrillard’s radical challenge to Marx is that his perspective suffers (along with a commitment to productivism and over-determination of man as producer 1972 1981:31-32), the same humanist virus which bourgeois thought shares (Ibid.:49). Marx’s very analysis, despite itself, is charged by Baudrillard with “assisting the cunning of capital”, “contributing to the capitalist mythology”, and “reproducing the system of political economy” (1973 1975:31; 1972 1981:134). In its commitment to continued productivism (post revolution), Marxism finds itself ironically in the same position as bourgeois economics (1972 1981:115). By centering itself (from the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 onwards (Marx 1844 1977) on “man’s productive vocation” (1973 1975:36), Marx’s assessment of capitalist society succumbs to a dialectic and Christian ethic which produces a critique which is not radical, but rather, plays a key role in reproducing the existing system of political economy (Ibid.:36-7). It is difficult to argue with Baudrillard on this point as every single authority which attempted to bring about a revolution based on Marx’s ideas did indeed reproduce a state-capitalist version of capitalist political economy (Ibid.:67). Beyond this devastating problem, Baudrillard says that Marx was unable to foresee “that capital would, in the face of an imminent threat to its existence, launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production, and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous, to totalize the world in its own image” (1990 1993b:10). Baudrillard refers to this as our contemporary transeconomic condition “where classical economics gets lost in pure speculation” (2000:52). For Baudrillard then, Marx makes the mistake of attempting to offer a radical critique of political economy in the form of political economy (1973 1975:50). What Marx does then, is to produce not a radical alternative to productivism – but merely the mirror of capitalist production (Ibid.:152). Marx’s illusion, and all writing ultimately succumbs to illusion for Baudrillard, is that he believed in the “possibility of revolution within the system” (1976 1993:35). This leaves us with the difficult fact that Marx’s theory, when we cut it to the bone as Baudrillard does, “never stopped being on the side of capitalism” (2001:95). This is because Marx’s thought “retains concepts which depend on the metaphysics of market economy” (1973 1975:59). This is why Baudrillard was able to go beyond Marx and to find, in places like California (or France), a form of revised Marxism functioning as advanced capitalism (1986 1988:46). Marx and his followers were thus never able to go beyond capitalism (some form of state capitalism based on productivism) and a range of neo-Christian and humanist understandings of labour. In the contemporary Baudrillard finds those who were to be the heroes of the revolution turned into the silent but tired anti-heroes of consumption (1970 1998:182)

The only true alternative is acceleration; capitalism is already orbital with credit, and financing value that isn’t based in reality, and accelerating this will cause capitalism to collapse the same way the financial crisis of 2008 happened.

Baldwin 12 Alec, lol jk,Volume 9, Number 3 (October 2012) Editorial Exacerbation, Singularity, Indifference: Baudrillard and Politics Jon Baldwin (London Metropolitan University, UK, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-baldwined.html)

For Baudrillard, one imagines that the crisis was an always already coming implosion impacted upon by the trans-economics of speculation. It is a flouting of the ‘law’ of value, of the market, production, surplus-value, and the’ very logic of capital’. The trans-economic develops into “a game with floating, arbitrary rules, a jeu de catastrophe” (Baudrillard, 1998: 1). Interestingly here, the crisis has come and traditional political economy has come to an end, “but not at all as we expected it to – it will have ended by becoming exacerbated to the point of parody” (Ibid.). The financial crisis has emerged and we witness one of the biggest threats to capitalism and neoliberalism thus far, through the exacerbation of simulation. Not - as much as it would have been desirable to be agents of change - through critique, or dialectics, or rational discussion, or insurrection, or event, or act, or the deconstruction of political concepts, or long-term revolution, or instant revolt, and so on.8 Regarding the crisis, there is no transcendent critique at play but immanent implosion.9 This is “a way of putting an end to the economy that is the most singular in style, ultimately more original than our political utopias” (Baudrillard 1998: 1-2). For Baudrillard, ecstasy is the process in play rather than dialectics. The only revolution in things today is no longer in their dialectical transcendence (Aufhebung), but in “their potentialization, in their elevation to the second power, in their elevation to the Nth power, whether that of terrorism, irony, or simulation” (Baudrillard 1990: 63). Baudrillard proposes that it is from the inside, by overreaching themselves, “that systems make bonfires of their own postulates, and fall into ruins” (Baudrillard, 2001: 6). The process at play in the movement towards the trans-economic is also evident in other spheres which lose their ‘gold-standard’ referent, such as power, sexuality, aesthetics, politics, and so on. In a methodological consideration Baudrillard writes that the only justification for “thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking” (Baudrillard, 2000: 83).

The link is the kind of “one answer fits all” solution that enables capitalism.

Andrew Robinson. “An A to Z of Theory: Jean Baudrillard: From Revolution to implosion.” Ceasefire. August 24, 2012. http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-10/.

Baudrillard also criticizes moral critique and scandal, such as Watergate. He argues that the system requires a moral superstructure to operate, and the revival of such a superstructure sustains the system. What is really scandalous is that capital is fundamentally immoral or amoral. Moral panics serve to avoid awareness of this repressed fact. Similarly, critiques of ideology risk reaffirming the system’s maintenance of the illusion of truth. This helps cover up the fact that truth no longer exists in the world of the code. Since there is no reality beneath the simulacrum, such analyses are flawed. It is now the left (or the Third Way) that tries to re-inject moral order and justice into a failing system, thereby protecting it from its own collapse. Baudrillard implicitly criticizes theories such as Laclau’s, which seek to re-inject meaning and intensity into politics. For Baudrillard, this task is both impossible and reactionary. Baudrillard sees the system as creating the illusion of its continued power by drawing on or simulating antagonisms and critique.There is thus a danger that critique actually sustains the system, by giving it a power it doesn’t have. Trying to confront and destroy the system thus inadvertently revives it, giving it back a little bit of symbolic power. He also sees conspiracy theories and current forms of Marxism as attempts to stave off awareness of the reality of a systematic code.

AT: Irigaray

Their construction of Patriarchy as an object of analysis only concretes the figure of Woman and props up sexism.

Ingrid M. Hoofd. “Feminist Aspirations Ground Zero: A Seductive Encounter With/For Jean Baudrillard.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9.3 (October 2012). http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-hoofd.html.

I suggest that, as an outdated politics of emancipation, representation, and voice, feminism has been one of Baudrillard’s main concerns because feminism is precisely so stridently against, yet so utterly imbricated in, this new phallic functionality of which Baudrillard is just as critical. At base, this imbrication, as well as the possibility of Baudrillard thwarting feminism at all, is due to the fact that feminism, as Jacques Derrida also illustrates in for instance Paper Machine (2005:154), inhabits a fundamentally aporetic structure: in order to mount the critique of patriarchal power, feminism needs to naturalize patriarchy first as an actually existing social reality. Elizabeth Grosz puts it rather nicely in ‘Ontology and Equivocation’ when she says that the feminist fantasy of overcoming patriarchy is essentially derived from the patriarchal fantasy of overcoming or a ‘saying-yes to patriarchy’ (1995:61). This is why Baudrillard exclaims in ‘The Ecliptic of Sex’ that there ‘is a strange and tenacious complicity of the feminist movement with the order of truth’ (1990:131). I will later on draw out this tenacity in some exemplary feminist works on deconstruction. In any case, if we follow this line of thought in Baudrillard’s work, feminism, and indeed all conventional critical, humanist, and political forms of thought and action, in being wrought from a fundamental internal contradiction or aporia – which it incessantly needs to cover over to keep its utopian project alive – sees its aporia as well as the compulsion to cover it over today getting accelerated by technocratic capitalism. In other words, the aporetic structure that feminism already inhabits due to its assumption of the total truth of patriarchy has become formalized to the extent that feminism itself now in fact produces anti-feminism. Feminism therefore appears to have imploded or entered a stage of regress due to the basic reversibility of the illusory and staged opposition between patriarchy and feminism. The difference between ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ feminism is today ever more imbricated with the circulation and expansion of capital due to the implosion of the semiotic realm with capitalism’s formal structures, and this is therefore why ‘deconstruction’ appears as an apparent methodological possibility on its horizon. So the moment when deconstruction arrives as a method in feminist theory marks the transition of power from phallic symbolism to phallic functionality – the moment when power effectively vacates the premises of media representation and content. In fact, one could perhaps even claim that the dissemination of the ‘method’ or ‘theory’ of deconstruction becomes possible as the Derridean surfacing of ‘play’ and its ‘traces’ ever more clearly emerge as effects of the acceleration and multiplication of signs. This insight is wholly in line with for instance Martin Heidegger's ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking’ which predicts that contemporary technology will mark the completion of philosophy into its logical culmination, the techno-sciences. This culmination is possible because philosophy has itself always, like the techno-sciences, assumed the ideal of transparent communication through the conceptualization of concepts as transcendental truths. The slippage that we can therefore expect many conceptions, whether celebratory or denunciatory, of ‘deconstructive feminism’ to make, is one from deconstruction as a socio-economic product or effect to a productivist and activist mobilization of deconstruction – effectively an illusion that covers over this fundamental aporia of feminism by reinstating the feminist subject as the illusory agent of feminist social change, just like the masculinist form or functionality of capitalism wants it to appear.

Continues

Alcoff’s article is a remarkable tour-de-force in its vigorous attempt at mobilizing cultural feminism and post-structuralist feminism as diametrical opposites, and then in turn arguing for a synthesis that supposedly transcends the problems of the former. Through the rather straw-man arguments of cultural feminism as downright essentialist, and post-structuralism as supposedly nihilist, she entirely ignores how both strands in fact rely on and work from exactly that positionality of the subject as constituted in historical experience that she in turn claims as her own conceptual invention – in fact, this ‘invention’ by Alcoff is and shows exactly what makes a limited ‘play’ at all possible. Her piece also faultily describes deconstruction as if it is something one does rather than something which always already happens in any political text or activity, which makes it seem as if deconstruction is something one can oppose or use at will. But I would argue in line with Derrida’s point in ‘Women in the Beehive,’ that deconstruction rather shows how politics and reflection are possible at all because one cannot eventually finalize feminism by way of any stable or ‘true’ opposition between ‘men’ and ‘women’ – the production and conception of these terms are always being ‘seduced’ by one another, to use Baudrillard’s terminology. The problematic validation of a subjective agency by Alcoff emerges especially in her argument, which in fact is simply the flip-side of the accusation of nihilism, that deconstruction leads to a ‘free play of a plurality of differences.’ This argument is its flip-side because it is indeed such a representation of deconstruction as method that is utterly implicated in speed-elitism by coining the incessant production and consumption of differences as ‘liberation’ for its illusory agent. Instead, I take it from Derrida that post-structuralism does not deny at all that ‘subjectivity can be reconstructed through a process of reflective practice’ (Alcoff, 1986: 343) but rather shows that this process is never innocent. And when she exclaims ‘how can we speak out against sexism as detrimental to the interests of women if the category is a fiction’ then she really shows very much in line with post-structuralist insights that apparently you can – the question is again what complicity makes this possible. So when Alcoff states as an alternative ‘the concept of woman as a relational term identifiable only within a constantly moving context, and the position that women find themselves in as being able to be actively utilized for politics,’ she is simply re-stating the insights of post-structuralism and cultural feminism while now dissimulating their internal tensions. Alcoff therefore in turn implicates her supposedly novel conception of women in speed-elitism by once more mobilizing another fake difference between these ‘inadequate’ and her ‘adequate’ conceptions (which are actually in tune with cultural feminist and post-structuralist insights), hence covering over the aporetic ‘inadequacy’ of feminism by way of finally rendering female ‘experience’ as an empirical reality (ibid.:347). This performance of the real via a representation of ‘the’ female works in turn to ‘camouflage’ the actual mechanism of power, namely the technico-logical repetition of the masculinist form of agentic control and enunciative authority. This is precisely the functioning of simulation Baudrillard describes in Simulacra and Simulation, and finally showcases how the tenacious adherence to truth and authority in feminism produces anti-feminism.

We control uniqueness – Modern sexism has shifted from patriarchy as an assailable object to phallocentrism which the AFF/NEG's feminism participates in. Hence, only our strategy remains.

Ingrid M. Hoofd. “Feminist Aspirations Ground Zero: A Seductive Encounter With/For Jean Baudrillard.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9.3 (October 2012). http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-hoofd.html.

All the above feminist engagements with post-structuralism in the 1980s and 1990s, in which deconstruction enters the feminist scene as ‘exercise’ or ‘method,’ mark the transition of power into the automation of patriarchal symbolism into phallic functionality. Feminism holds on to an image of female collectivity that is then finally a mirage as there is no such thing as women as one social group; rather all there is today are classes of speed. Worse even, the nostalgia for and insurrection of this collective female identity is a main mechanism for the increasing fragmentation and individualization of persons under late-capitalism. This is why Baudrillard holds in ‘The Ecliptic of Sex’ that gendered emancipation eventually ‘confines the feminine to … that strong, discriminating structure centered on the phallus’ (1990:130). The more tenacious feminism holds on to truth and liberation, the more it loses the radical edge that femininity always already had by constantly, and hence today even more so, being ‘elsewhere’ (ibid). This gap between the imaginary and the ‘real’ locus of femininity must lead to paradoxical results, because this confinement and its representation as liberation is after all only a mechanically-produced mirage that dissimulates the negative fallout that is actually happening on the ground with women. But does not this train of thought in Baudrillard itself display a critically fabricated gap between ‘hidden’ reality and ‘false’ representation, as well as reproduce eventually a bizarrely feminist-yet-patriarchal argument by positing that the actual reality of women, whose seductive powers are supposedly being denied, resides in the game of appearances? Does not his truth-claim that all the feminist arguments find themselves seduced by the mirage of liberation display itself an equally tenacious analysis? In fact, I suggest that the whole of ‘The Ecliptic of Sex’ itself really revolves around accelerating the very tenacity of feminism with the order of truth, and it does this to such extremes that the whole idea of patriarchy eventually spins out of masculinist-productivist control and unravels. ‘The Ecliptic of Sex’ works this undoing by doubling the feminist opposition between masculinity and femininity into a seemingly more radical opposition between production (as masculine) and seduction (as feminine), which at first glance seems to disentangle the feminine from the whole productivist system that sustains simulation. While this doubling on the surface appears to negate the reality of patriarchal oppression through questions like ‘through what aberrant complicity are we being asked that this repression is the history of the feminine, if not precisely a complicity with the masculine?’ upon closer inspection, Baudrillard actually re-performs the feminist staging of sexual opposition by a kind of peculiar one-upmanship; through positing that the whole project of unearthing ‘real’ female and feminist desire in diametrical opposition to the masculine results in unearthing ‘the psychic metaphor of capital’ (ibid.:154), the real state of affairs is supposedly finally that ‘the feminine is not what opposes the masculine, but what seduces the masculine’ (ibid.:131). The feminine then, we are told, ‘is elsewhere, it has always been elsewhere’ (130). What emerges from this text is again not only that Baudrillard seems very feminist, but also that feminism can be reborn by way of a negation on the level of its fundamental assumption – a form of ‘difference’ thinking – which is at the same time possible due to a revalidation of that same masculine performance – a form of ‘equality’ thinking. So parallel to his critique of feminism, one could claim that Baudrillard’s idea or image of ‘seduction’ likewise emerges as a symptom of the fake difference between his position and the feminist one; (radical) difference is indeed, always and once again, elsewhere. All this shows quite simply the form or function that Baudrillard’s as well as the feminist critique takes; its seduction is always part of production as much as it is its undoing, and no critical or political agency can either mobilize or ward that off – least of all the patriarch Baudrillard himself.

We control uniqueness, so what are you doing after the orgy?

James Lawler. “The King Must Die: Pataphysical Exegesis on the American Presidency.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9.3 (October 2012). http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-lawler.html.

Baudrillard might well respond along the lines of remarks he made during a conference: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3kgjjTE0dkandfeature=list_relatedandplaynext=1andlist=SP2B53370C61600BDA) in which he replies to a question regarding the political alternative to the rule of simulation and spectacle, in essence: You are already liberated. Liberation is no longer a messianic dream. It has already happened, or is in the process of happening, thanks precisely to the System’s globalization. There is therefore no need therefore to provide the System with an alibi from the left for what it has already achieved, or is in the process of achieving. Of course this “liberation” takes place along the lines of the System itself. It is, by comparison with “European” and traditional liberal thought, a degraded, American form of liberation. It is not the right to read Proust – nevertheless readily available on Kindle in one minute for $10 – but, more likely, the right to wear Nike running shoes going for $300. But for all the degradation, this is an historical advance for millions of people who had been living in abject poverty and under oppressive regimes and are now climbing into the brave new world. But this perspective opens up the crucial question: what to do after the orgy? Once liberation has been achieved, then what? And if the answer is – address the inequalities that still exist in the world, because not everyone has as yet been liberated – this not only postpones the inevitable posing of the question, but fails to address the degradation of the realization of liberation itself.

AT: Wilderson

We have offered a counter-reading of Modernity after the explosion of a false sun; perhaps the largest hiccup in the linearity of modernity ever known. That recently culminated in fukushima, an effect of nuclear uncanny that has repeatedly

Kinsella 11 One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and Their Implications for Environmental Communication William J. Kinsella PhD, Associate Professor At North Carolina State University, Director of the University's interdisciplinary program in Science, U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Institute for Nuclear Energy and Energy Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany. President of the National Communication Association’s Environmental Communication Division during 2009-2010.

Although the material catastrophe envisioned by Einstein has not (yet) occurred, arguably it bas been replaced by a social and political catastrophe, a catastrophe of public discourse. In an influential essay that helped inaugurate the "nuclear criticism" project ofthe mid-1980s (cf. Norris, 1994), Derrida (1984) suggested that the prospect of nuclear annihilation "through all the techno-scientific inventiveness that it motivates, structures not only the army, diplomacy, politics, but the whole of the human socius" (p. 23). In a Burkean reading of Derrida, consistent 58 KINSELLA with the preceding discussion of nuclear mystery, Williams (1989) suggested that the nuclear threat has acquired the status of a transcendental signified, a value or meaning that stands outside language. As an overarching presence beyond the hmits of linguistic representation, that threat appears mysterious and self-generating. Such an ontological or theological absolute can neither be changed nor ignored; it appears as if our only available response is to submit to its potent disciplinary effects. Examining a wide range of popular cultural texts from tbe Cold War era, Nadel (1995) demonstrated how these disciplinary effects extended well beyond the (explicitly) nuclear domain. Although the U.S. geopolitical strategy of "containment" through nuclear threat was directed at the Soviet Union, it motivated a parallel domestic containment of individual identities, social roles, cultural expression, and political discourse. Under the nuclear sign, operationalized as a binary opposition between the superpowers, the general population internalized behavioral and discursive boundaries modeled in countless mass media messages and in everyday social interaction. Thus, writing almost 4 decades after Einstein at an advanced stage ofthe Cold War, Baudrillard (1983) displayed an optimism regarding our basic survival but a pessimism regarding tbe conditions of tbat survival. Although his comment was directed at the Cold War deterrence regime, it now seems eerily relevant to emerging concerns about social control in an era marked by new fears of nuclear proliferation and terrorism: It isn't that the direct menace of atomic destruction paralyzes our lives....Deterrence excludes war—the antiquated violence of exploding systems. Deterrence is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable or involving systems. The risk of nuclear atomization only serves as a pretext... to the installation of a universal system of security, linkup, and control whose deterrent effect does not aim for atomic clash at all... but really the much larger probability of any real event, of anything which could disturb the general system and upset the balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance, (pp. 59-60) Ironically appropriating a term from nuclear weapons design, Baudrillard (1994) described an "implosion" of culture and politics around a narrow range of possibilities. The threat of material annihilation is transformed into a potent discursive annihilation encompassing public speech, cultural expression, and political process, as society's efforts are focused on sustaining the precarious nuclear order.

Wilderson’s response to anti-blackness cannot be actualized within the conceptual framework of a debate. The symbols of the aff/neg/ballot/judge are too strong for the alt to solve.

Wilderson, 2010 (Frank, Assoc Prof of African Amerian Studies @ UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, pages 54-57)

This theoretical aphasia is symptomatic of a debilitated ensemble of questions regarding political ontology. At its heart are two registers of imaginative labor. The first register is that of description, the rhetorical labor aimed at explaining the way relations of power are named, categorized, and explored. The second register can be characterized as prescription, the rhetorical labor predicated on the notion that everyone can be emancipated through some form of discursive, or symbolic, intervention. But emancipation through some form of discursive or symbolic intervention is wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a subject position—what Marx calls "a speaking implement" or what Ronald Judy calls "an interdiction against subjectivity." In other words, the Black has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world, and so is his or her cultural "production." What does it mean—what are the stakes—when the world can whimsically transpose one's cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? Frantz Fanon echoes this question when he writes, "1 came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that 1 was an object in the midst of other objects." He clarifies this assertion and alerts us to the stakes which the optimistic assumptions of film studies and cultural studies, the counter hegemonic promise of alternative cinema, and the emancipatory project of coalition politics cannot account for, when he writes: "Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black." This presents a challenge to film production and to film studies given their cultivation and elaboration by the imaginative labor of cultural studies, underwritten by the assumptive logic of Humanism; because if everyone does not possess the dna of culture, that is, (a) time and space transformative capacity, (b) a relational status with other Humans through which one's time- and space-transformative capacity is recognized and incorporated, and (c) a relation to violence that is contingent and not gratuitous, then how do we theorize a sentient being who is positioned not by the dna of culture but by the structure of gratuitous violence? How do we think outside of the conceptual framework of subalternity—that is, outside of the explanatory power of cultural studies—and think beyond the pale of emancipatory agency by way of symbolic intervention? I am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the subject-effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology, a framework that allows us to substitute a culture of politics for a politics of culture.

… because reformism and revolution are ultimately the same strategy.

Winant 1997 (Howard, Director, UC Center for New Racial Studies. Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic. Research. University of California Santa Barbara, CA, Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary White Racial Politics, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/winant/whitness.html)

Drawing their inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, the social historians who have provided the core insights of the abolitionist project stress the "invention of whiteness" as a pivotal development in the rise of US capitalism. They have begun a process of historical reinterpretation which aims to set race -- or more properly, the gestation and evolution of white supremacy -- at the center of US politics and culture. Thus far, they have focused attention on a series of formative events and processes: the precedent of British colonial treatment of the Irish (Allen 1994, Ignatiev 1995); the early, multiracial resistance to indentured servitude and quasi-slavery, which culminated in the defeat of Bacon's Rebellion in late 17th century Virginia; the self-identification of "free" workers as white in the antebellum North (Roediger 1991); and the construction of a "white republic" in the late 19th century (Saxton 1990). These studies, in some cases quite prodigious intellectual efforts, have had a significant impact on how we understand not only racial formation, but also class formation and the developing forms of popular culture in US history. What they reveal above all is how crucial the construction of whiteness was, and remains, for the development and maintenance of capitalist class rule in the US. Furthermore, these studies also show how the meaning of whiteness, like that of race in general, has time and again proved flexible enough to adapt to shifts in the capitalist division of labor, to reform initiatives which extended democratic rights, and to changes in ideology and cultural representation. The core message of the abolitionist project is the imperative of repudiation of white identity and white privilege, the requirement that "the lie of whiteness" be exposed. This rejection of whiteness on the part of those who benefit from it, this "new abolitionism," it is argued, is a precondition for the establishment of substantive racial equality and social justice -- or more properly, socialism -- in the US. Whites must become "race traitors," as the new journal of the abolitionist project calls itself. Its motto: "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." How is this rejection of whiteness to be accomplished? Both analytical and practical measures are envisioned. On the intellectual level, the abolitionist project invites us to contemplate the emptiness, indeed vacuity, of the white category: It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.... It is the empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back (Roediger 1994, 13; emphasis original). In short, there is no white culture, no white politics, no whiteness, except in the sense of distancing and rejection of racially-defined "otherness." On the practical level, the argument goes, whites can become "race traitors" by rejecting their privilege, by refusing to collude with white supremacy. When you hear that racist joke, confront its teller. When you see the police harassing a nonwhite youth, try to intervene or at least bear witness. In short, recognize that white supremacy depends on the thousands of minute acts that reproduce it from moment to moment; it must "deliver" to whites a sense of their own security and superiority; it must make them feel that "I am different from those "others." Single gestures of this sort, Race Traitor's editors say, ...would not in all likelihood be of much consequence. But if enough of those who looked white broke the rules of the club to make the cops doubt their ability to recognize a white person merely by looking at him or her, how would it affect the cops' behavior (Editorial 1993, 4-5)? Thus the point is not that all whites recognize the lie of their privilege, but that enough whites do so, and act out their rejection of that lie, to disrupt the "white club's" ability to enforce its supremacy. It is easy to sympathize with this analysis, at least up to a point. The postwar black movement, which in the US context at least served as the point of origin for all the "new social movements" and the much-reviled "politics of identity," taught the valuable lesson that politics went "all the way down." That is, meaningful efforts to achieve greater social justice could not tolerate a public/private, or a collective/individual distinction. Trying to change society meant trying to change one's own life. The formula "the personal is political," commonly associated with feminism, had its early origins among the militants of the civil rights movement (Evans 1980). The problems come when deeper theoretical and practical problems are raised. Despite their explicit adherence to a "social construction" model of race (one which bears a significant resemblance to my own work), theorists of the abolitionist project do not take that insight as seriously as they should. They employ it chiefly to argue against biologistic conceptions of race, which is fine; but they fail to consider the complexities and rootedness of social construction, or as we would term it, racial formation. Is the social construction of whiteness so flimsy that it can be repudiated by a mere act of political will, or even by widespread and repeated acts aimed at rejecting white privilege? I think not; whiteness may not be a legitimate cultural identity in the sense of having a discrete, "positive" content, but it is certainly an overdetermined political and cultural category, having to do with socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, ideologies of individualism, opportunity, and citizenship, nationalism, etc

. Like any other complex of beliefs and practices, "whiteness" is imbedded in a highly articulated social structure and system of significations; rather than trying to repudiate it, we shall have to rearticulate it. That sounds like a daunting task, and of course it is, but it is not nearly as impossible as erasing whiteness altogether, as the abolitionist project seeks to do. Furthermore, because whiteness is a relational concept, unintelligible without reference to nonwhiteness -- note how this is true even of Roediger's formulation about "building an identity based on what one isn't" -- that rearticulation (or reinterpretation, or deconstruction) of whiteness can begin relatively easily, in the messy present, with the recognition that whiteness already contains substantial nonwhite elements. Of course, that recognition is only the beginning of a large and arduous process of political labor, which I shall address in the concluding section of this paper. Notwithstanding these criticisms of the abolitionist project, we consider many of its insights to be vital components in the process of reformulating, or synthesizing, a progressive approach to whiteness. Its attention is directed toward prescisely the place where the neo-liberal racial project is weak: the point at which white identity constitutes a crucial support to white supremacy, and a central obstacle to the achievement of substantive social equality and racial justice. CONCLUDING NOTES: WHITENESS AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS In a situation of racial dualism, as Du Bois observed more than 90 years ago, race operates both to assign us and to deny us our identity. It both makes the social world intelligible, and simultaneously renders it opaque and mysterious. Not only does it allocate resources, power, and privilege; it also provides means for challenging that allocation. The contradictory character of race provides the context in which racial dualism -or the "color-line," as Du Bois designated it, has developed as "the problem of the 20th century." So what's new? Only that, as a result of incalculable human effort, suffering, and sacrifice, we now realize that these truths apply across the board. Whites and whiteness can no longer be exempted from the comprehensive racialization process that is the hallmark of US history and social structure. This is the present-day context for racial conflict and thus for US politics in general, since race continues to play its designated role of crystallizing all the fundamental issues in US society. As always, we articulate our anxieties in racial terms: wealth and poverty, crime and punishment, gender and sexuality, nationality and citizenship, culture and power, are all articulated in the US primarily through race. So what's new? It's the problematic of whiteness that has emerged as the principal source of anxiety and conflict in the postwar US. Although this situation was anticipated or prefigured at earlier moments in the nation's past -- for example, in the "hour of eugenics" (Stepan 1991, Kevles 1985, Gould 1981) -- it is far more complicated now than ever before, largely due to the present unavailability of biologistic forms of racism as a convenient rationale for white supremacy.7 Whiteness -- visible whiteness, resurgent whiteness, whiteness as a color, whiteness as difference -- this is what's new, and newly problematic, in contemporary US politics. The reasons for this have already emerged in my discussion of the spectrum of racial projects and the particular representations these projects assign to whiteness. Most centrally, the problem of the meaning of whiteness appears as a direct consequence of the movement challenge posed in the 1960s to white supremacy. The battles of that period have not been resolved; they have not been won or lost; however battered and bruised, the demand for substantive racial equality and general social justice still lives. And while it lives, the strength of white supremacy is in doubt. The racial projects of the right are clear efforts to resist the challenge to white supremacy posed by the movements of the 1960s and their contemporary inheritors. Each of these projects has a particular relationship to the white supremacist legacy, ranging from the far right's efforts to justify and solidify white entitlements, through the new right's attempts to utilize the white supremacist tradition for more immediate and expedient political ends, to the neoconservative project's quixotic quest to surgically separate the liberal democratic tradition from the racism that traditionally underwrote it. The biologistic racism of the far right, the expedient and subtextual racism of the new right, and the bad-faith anti-racism of the neoconservatives have many differences from each other, but they have at least one thing in common. They all seek to maintain the long-standing association between whiteness and US political traditions, between whiteness and US nationalism, between whiteness and universalism. They all seek in different ways to preserve white identity from the particularity, the difference, which the 1960s movement challenge assigned to it. The racial projects of the left are the movements' successors (as is neoconservatism, in a somewhat perverse sense). Both the neoliberal racial project and the abolitionist project seek to fulfill the movement's thwarted dreams of a genuinely (i.e., substantively) egalitarian society, one in which significant redistribution of wealth and power has taken place, and race no longer serves as the most significant marker between winners and losers, haves and have nots, powerful and powerless. Although they diverge significantly -- since the neoliberals seek to accomplish their ends through a conscious diminution of the significance of race, and the abolitionists hope to achieve similar ends through a conscious reemphasizing of the importance of race -- they also have one very important thing in common. They both seek to rupture the barrier between whites and racially-defined minorities, the obstacle which prevents joint political action. They both seek to associate whites and nonwhites, to reinterpret the meaning of whiteness in such a way that it no longer has the power to impede class alliances. Although the differences and indeed the hostility -- between the neoliberal and abolitionist projects, between the reform-oriented and radical conceptions of whiteness -- are quite severe, we consider it vital that adherents of each project recognize that they hold part of the key to challenging white supremacy in the contemporary US, and that their counterpart project holds the other part of the key. Neoliberals rightfully argue that a pragmatic approach to transracial politics is vital if the momentum of racial reaction is to be halted or reversed. Abolitionists properly emphasize challenging the ongoing commitment to white supremacy on the part of many whites. Both of these positions need to draw on each other, not only in strategic terms, but in theoretical ones as well. The recognition that racial identities -- all racial identities, including whiteness -- have become implacably dualistic, could be far more liberating on the left than it has thus far been. For neoliberals, it could permit and indeed justify an acceptance of race-consciousness and even nationalism among racially-defined minorities as a necessary but partial response to disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and superexploitation. There is no inherent reason why such a political position could not coexist with a strategic awareness of the need for strong, class-conscious, transracial coalitions. We have seen many such examples in the past: in the anti-slavery movement, the communist movement of the 1930s (Kelley 1994), and in the 1988 presidential bid of Jesse Jackson, to name but a few. This is not to say that all would be peace and harmony if such alliances could come more permanently into being. But there is no excuse for not attempting to find the pragmatic "common ground" necessary to create them. Abolitionists could also benefit from a recognition that on a pragmatic basis, whites can ally with racially-defined minorities without renouncing their whiteness. If they truly agree that race is a socially constructed concept, as they claim, abolitionists should also be able to recognize that racial identities are not either-or matters, not closed concepts that must be upheld in a reactionary fashion or disavowed in a comprehensive act of renunciation. To use a postmodern language I dislike: racial identities are deeply "hybridized"; they are not "sutured," but remain open to rearticulation. "To be white in America is to be very black. If you don't know how black you are, you don't know how American you are" (Thompson 1995, 429).

They are already liberated; liberation now is no longer freedom from oppression, but the freedom to access the market as much as anyone else.

Lawler 12 Volume 9, Number 3 (October 2012) The King Must Die: Pataphysical Exegesis of an American Presidency Dr. James Lawler (James Lawler is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo)

I think that each of us can resist. I don’t get the impression there could be any organised political resistance as such. It would always be an exception, and whatever you do will always be ‘exceptional’ in that sense. A work of art is a singularity, and all these singularities can create holes, interstices, voids et cetera, in the metastatic fullness of culture. But I don’t see them coalescing, combining into a kind of anti-power that could invest the other (Baudrillard, 1996:2). In her article “Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida: At the limits of Thought” (2008), Sally Hart argues that Baudrillard offers two forms of practical political response to our Age of Simulation:the individual resistances described in the above passage, and “reversals” arising from the intrinsically excessive nature of the System, in such phenomena as AIDS, cancer, computer viruses, and terrorism. In this second category, Hart includes the passive resistance of the masses, the very silence of the silent majority, as a reversive strategy in the face of the System’s oppressive power. Hart writes: In the same context of the “obesity of the system,” Baudrillard also talks of the scandalous resistance of “the masses” as a nameless, faceless no-thing-ness which increases exponentially at the same time as the social and information, these masses “refusing to be spoken of as well as to speak,” forcing the system into overdrive, as “power” is revealed as nothing but an “empty simulacrum.” Hart is unhappy with Baudrillard’s restricted conception of the political alternatives. She argues that Jacques Derrida provides a framework for a return to mass political engagement in which the System itself can be seen to function in politically positive ways. The agency for such additional possibilities for resistance is provided by the traditional European liberal devotion to realizing universal values. Whereas for Baudrillard the rise of the “global” has put an end to the previous era of the “universal,” Derrida’s thought, Hart argues, reinvigorates the modern European project of achieving the universal values of democracy and human rights through the outreach of the global System itself: While at this point it is hard to argue with much of what Baudrillard has to say about Europe I cannot (will not!) accept that, after Derrida, we are unable to re-think the European spirit of the universal in a re-worked ethico-political space (albeit one transformed in our techno-media age) which might enable us to utilize the potential benefits of globalization while minimising its potentially harmful effects – indeed Derrida argues democracy and human rights stand a better chance of being realised where globalization occurs. For while Derrida recognises that a certain (European) Western capitalist, imperialist spirit (one reaching obesity in the American model it helped spawn) has indeed been destructive – leading to (World) wars, imperialism, colonization, genocides and the like – he cannot foreclose on another messianic (and most importantly) European spirit which promises not the elimination of all otherness but a new world order infinitely open to otherness. Baudrillard might well respond along the lines of remarks he made during a conference: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3kgjjTE0dkandfeature=list_relatedandplaynext=1andlist=SP2B53370C61600BDA) in which he replies to a question regarding the political alternative to the rule of simulation and spectacle, in essence: You are already liberated. Liberation is no longer a messianic dream. It has already happened, or is in the process of happening, thanks precisely to the System’s globalization. There is therefore no need therefore to provide the System with an alibi from the left for what it has already achieved, or is in the process of achieving. Of course this “liberation” takes place along the lines of the System itself. It is, by comparison with “European” and traditional liberal thought, a degraded, American form of liberation. It is not the right to read Proust – nevertheless readily available on Kindle in one minute for $10 – but, more likely, the right to wear Nike running shoes going for $300. But for all the degradation, this is an historical advance for millions of people who had been living in abject poverty and under oppressive regimes and are now climbing into the brave new world. But this perspective opens up the crucial question: what to do after the orgy? Once liberation has been achieved, then what? And if the answer is – address the inequalities that still exist in the world, because not everyone has as yet been liberated – this not only postpones the inevitable posing of the question, but fails to address the degradation of the realization of liberation itself.

Their focus on ethical imperative and liberatory politics creates a new metanarrative that we have to subordinate all of our actions to; this creates a new master, our own will, that exerts domination upon us.

Baudrillard 2001

To be able to disobey moral rules and laws, to be able to disobey others, is a mark of freedom.  But the ability to disobey oneself marks the highest stage of freedom.  Obeying one’s own will is an even worse vice than being enslaved to one’s passions.  It is certainly worse than enslavement to the will of others.  And it is, indeed, those who submit themselves mercilessly to their own decisions who fill the greater part of the authoritarian ranks, alleging sacrifice on their own part to impose even greater sacrifices on others. Each stage of servitude is both more subtle and worse than the one which precedes it.  Involuntary servitude, the servitude of the slave, is overt violence.  Voluntary servitude is a violence consented to: a freedom to will, but not the will to be free.  Last comes voluntary self-servitude or enslavement to one’s own will: the individual possesses the faculty to will, but is no longer free in respect of it.  He is the automatic agent of that faculty.  He is the serf to no master but himself.

Social death theory of slavery is wrong and outdated—attending to historical difference is crucial to moving beyond the essentializing and demeaning black pathology theory espoused by Wilderson

Brown 2009 (Vincent, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, December)

Although the deaths of slaves could inspire such active and dynamic practices of social reconnection, scholars in recent years have made too little of events like the funeral aboard the Hudibras and have too often followed Orlando Patterson’s mon- umental Slavery and Social Death (1982) in positing a metaphorical “social death” as the basic condition of slavery. In a comparative study of sixty-six slaveholding societies ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, precolonial Africa, and Asia, Patterson combined statistical analysis and voluminous research with brilliant theoretical insights drawn from Marxian theory, symbolic anthropology, law, philosophy, and literature in order to offer what he called a “preliminary definition of slavery on the level of personal relations.” Recognizing violence, violations of personhood, dishonor, and namelessness as the fundamental constituent elements of slavery, Patterson distilled a transhistorical characterization of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” In this way the institution of slavery was and is a “relation of domination,” in which slaveholders annihilated people socially by first extracting them from meaningful relationships that defined personal status and belonging, communal memory, and collective aspiration and then incorporating these socially dead persons into the masters’ world. As a work of historical sociology concerned primarily with the comparative analysis of institutions, the book illuminated the dynamics of a process whereby the “desocialized new slave” was subsumed within slave society.5 Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from Patterson’s breathtaking survey—a theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage.6 As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an “agentless abstraction” that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations.7 Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Patterson’s abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, “social death” fit comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in pat- terns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with Patterson’s work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black families, “social death” reflected sociology’s abiding concern with “social pathology”; the “pathological condition” of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery. University of Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-p`ere of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: “the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament.”8 Patterson’s distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States domi- nated the scholarship on human bondage, and Patterson’s expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as the in- stitution developed through time. Thus one might see “social death” as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concept’s reemergence in some im- portant new studies of slavery.9

we’ll argue that the way we understand death in the squo is one that is underpinned by capitalism, and henceforth all other oppositions, between races, gender, etc., are founded by the banishment and alienation of death.

Robinson 2012 /Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism and the Exclusion of Death”, March 30,  http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence.¶ Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation.¶ According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly.¶ Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value.¶ Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code.¶ Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active.¶ Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.¶ Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined.¶ This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange.¶ Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability.¶ Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation.¶ The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange.¶ Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power.¶ It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups.¶ Death¶ Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death.¶ According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations. The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category.¶ The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death.¶ The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others.

AT: Abelism

Sometimes we have to be able to speak evil, in order to avoid devolving into weak, leftist epistemologies that cant call out things like racism; their unflinching paradigmatic analysis evidence is on the same side as our author; sometimes you have to be able to call a cripple a cripple.

Baudrillard ‘4 jean, undefeated, undisputed, know for his wisdom, compassion, and relentless determination to get paid, intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact

Terrorism in all its forms is the transpolitical mirror of evil. For the real problem, the only problem, is: where did Evil go? And the answer is: everywhere - because the anamorphosis of modern f orms of Evil knows no bounds . I n a society which seeks - b y prophylactic measures, b y annihilating its own natural referents, by whitewashing violence, by exterminating all germs and all of the accursed share, by performing cosmetic surgery on the negative - to concern itself solely with quantified management and with the discourse of the Good, in a society where it is no longer possible to speak Evil, Evil has metamorphosed into all the viral and terroristic forms that obsess us. The force of anathema and the power of speaking Evil are no longer ours. But they have resurfaced elsewhere - witness Ayatollah Khomeini in the matter of Salman Rushdie . Quite apart from performing a tour de force whereby the West has been obliged to hold this particular hostage itself, whereby Rushdie has in a way been obliged to hold himself entirely hostage, the Ayatollah has offered spectacular proof of how it is possible to overturn all existing power relations through the symbolic force of an utterance. Confronting the entire world, his tally utterly negative in the distribution of political, military and economic forces, the Ayatollah had but one weapon at his disposal, yet that weapon, though it had no material reality, came close to being the absolute weapon: the principle of Evil. The negation of all Western values - of progress, rationality, political ethics, democracy, and so on. By rejecting- the universal consensus on all these Good Things, Khomeini became the recipient of the energy of Evil, the Satanic energy of the rejected, the glamour of the accursed share. He alone now holds the tribune because he alone has upheld against all comers the Machiavellian principle of Evil, because he alone is ready to speak Evil and exorcize Evil, because he alone allows himself to incarnate that principle on the basis of terror. His motivations are unintelligible to us. On the other hand, we cannot fail to recognize the superiority that his posture assures him over a West where the possibility of evoking Evil does not exist and every last trace of negativity is smothered by the virtual consensus that prevails. Our political authorities themselves are but mere shadows of their declared functions. For power exists solely by virtue of its symbolic ability to designate the Other, the Enemy, what is at stake, what threatens us, what is Evil. Today this ability has been lost, and, correspondingly, there exists no opposition able or willing to designate power as Evil. We have become very weak in terms of Satanic, ironic, polemical and antagonistic energy; our societies have become fanatically soft - or softly fanatical. By hunting down all of the accursed share in ourselves and allowing only positive values free rein, we have made ourselves dramatically vulnerable to even the mildest of viral attacks, including that of the Ayatollah - who, for one, is not suffering from immunodeficiency. What is more, we end up treating Khomeini, in the name of the rights of man, as 'Absolute Evil' (Mitterrand) - in other words, we respond to his imprecation in its own terms, something which runs counter to the rules of any enlightened discourse. (Do we now ever describe a mad person as 'mad'? As a matter of fact, we are so terrified of Evil, so greedy for euphemisms to denote the Other, misfortune, or other irreducibles, that we no longer even refer to a cripple as such.) Little wonder, then, that someone capable of speaking the language of Evil literally, even triumphantly, should have precipitated such an attack of weak knees among Western cultures (all the petitions of the intellectuals notwithstanding) . The fact is that legality, good conscience and even reason itself end up collaborating with the curse . They have no choice but to call down all the resources of anathema, but by that very fact they fall into the trap of the principle of Evil, which is contagious in its essence. So who won? The Ayatollah, unquestionably. Of course we still have the power to destroy him, but on the symbolic level he is the victor, and symbolic power is always superior to the power of arms and money. This is, in a way, the revenge of the Other World . The Third World has never been able to throw down a real challenge to the West. As for the USSR, which for several decades incarnated Evil for the West, it is obviously in the process of quietly lining up on the side of Good, on the side of an extremely moderate way of managing things . (By a marvellous irony the USSR has even put itself forward as mediator between the West and the Satan of Teheran, having defended Western values for five years in Afghanistan without anyone quite realizing it.) The reactions of fascination, attraction and worldwide repulsion unleashed by the Rushdie death sentence are reminiscent of the depressurization of an aircraft cabin that occurs when the plane's fuselage is breached or cracked . (Even when such an event is accidental, it resembles a terrorist act.) Everything is sucked violently out into the void as a result of the variation in pressure between inside and out. All that is needed is for a small rift or hole to be made in the ultra-thin envelope that separates two worlds. Terrorism, the taking of hostages, is par excellence an act that punches just such a hole in a universe (ours) that is both artificial and artificially protected. Islam as a whole - Islam as it is, not the Islam of the Middle Ages: the Islam that has to be evaluated in strategic terms, not moral or religious ones - is in the process of creating a vacuum around the Western system (including the countries of Eastern Europe) and from time to time puncturing this system with a single act or utterance, so that all our values are suddenly engulfed by the void. Islam exerts no revolutionary pressure upon the Western universe, nor is there any prospect of its converting or conquering the West: it is content to destabilize it by means of viral attacks of this kind, in the name of a principle of Evil against which we are defenceless and on the basis of the virtual catastrophe constituted by the difference in pressure between the two worlds, on the basis of the perpetual threat to a protected universe (ours), of a brutal depressurization of the atmosphere (the values) that we breathe. The fact is that a good deal of oxygen has already escaped from our Western world through all kinds of fissures and interstices. We would be well advised, therefore, to keep our oxygen masks on. The Ayatollah' s strategy is a remarkably modern one, whatever people might prefer to think. Far more modern than our own, in fact, because it consists in subtly injecting archaic elements into a modern context: a fatwa, a death sentence, an imprecation - no matter what. If only our Western universe were solid, all this would be meaningless. In the event, however, our whole system is swallowed up, and serves as a sound box - as a superconductor for the virus. What does this mean? Here again we see the revenge of the Other World: we have visited so many germs and sicknesses, so many epidemics and ideologies, upon the rest of the world, which was utterly defenceless against them, that our present defencelessness against a vile, archaic microorganism seems to be a truly ironic twist of fate.

Baudrillard uses language enigmatically

Baudrillard in 95 _{Jean, April 19, "Radical Thought"},

Our point is not to defend radical thought. Any idea that can be defended is presumed guilty. Any idea that does not sustain its own defense deserves to perish. But we have to fight against charges of unreality, lack of responsibility, nihilism, and despair. Radical thought is never depressing. This would be a complete misunderstanding. A moralizing and ideological critique, obsessed by meaning and content, obsessed by a political finality of discourse, never takes into account writing, the act of writing, the poetic, ironic, and allusive form of language, the play with meaning. This critique does not see that the resolution of meaning is right here, in the form itself, in the formal materiality of an expression. As for meaning, it is always unfortunate. Analysis is by its very definition unfortunate since it is born out of a critical disillusion. But language on the contrary is fortunate (happy), even when it designates a world with no illusion, with no hope. This would in fact be here the very definition of radical thought: an intelligence without hope, but a fortunate and happy form. Critics, always being unfortunate (unhappy) in their nature, choose the realm of ideas as their battle field. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing on the contrary are always a matter of illusion. Language and writing are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the misfortune of meaning operated through the good fortune of language. This is the only political or transpolitical act that a writer can accomplish. Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only this witz, this spirituality of language, can justify writing. Not a miserable critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. So the loneliness and sadness in Edward Hopper's paintings are transfigured by the timeless quality of light, a light which comes from some place else and gives to the whole picture a totally non-figurative meaning, an intensity which renders loneliness unreal. Hopper says: "I do not paint sadness or loneliness; I only seek to paint light on this wall." In any case, it is better to have a despairing analysis in a happy language than an optimistic analysis in despairingly boring and demoralizingly plain language. Which is too often the case. The formal boredom that is secreted by an idealist thought on values, or by a goal-oriented thought on culture, is the secret sign of despair for this thought – not despair with the world, but despair toward its own discourse. This is where the real depressing thought emerges. It emerges with those people who only talk about a transcendence or a transformation of the world, while they are totally unable to transfigure their own language. Radical thought is in no way different from radical usage of language. This thought is therefore alien to any resolution of the world which would take the direction of an objective reality and of its deciphering. Radical thought does not decipher. It anathematizes and "anagramatizes" concepts and ideas, exactly what poetic language does with words. Through its reversible chaining, it simultaneously gives an account of meaning and of its fundamental illusion. Language gives an account of the very illusion of language as a definite stratagem and through that notes the illusion of the world as an infinite trap, as a seduction of the mind, as a stealing away of all mental capacities. While being a transporter of meaning, language is at the same time a supra-conductor of illusion and of the absence of meaning. Language is only signification's unintentional accomplice. By its very force, it calls for the spiritual imagination of sounds and rhythms, for the dispersion of meaning in the event of language, similar to the role of the muscles in dance, similar to the role of reproduction in erotic games. Such a passion for the artificial, a passion for illusion, is the same thing as the seductive joy (jouissance) to undo a too perfect constellation of meaning. It is also a joy (jouissance) to render transparent the imposture of the world, that is to say the enigmatic function of the world, and its mystification which supposedly is its secret. Doing this while perhaps rendering its imposture transparent: deceiving rather than validating meaning. This passion "wins" in the free and spiritual usage of language, in the spiritual game of writing. And it only disappears when language is used for a limited finality, its most common usage perhaps, that of communication . No matter what, if language wants to "speak the language" of illusion, it must become a seduction. As for "speaking the language" of the real, it would not know how to do it (properly speaking) because language is never real . Whenever it appears to be able to designate things, it actually does so by following unreal, elliptic, and ironic paths. Objectivity and truth are metaphoric in language. Too bad for the apodicticians or the apodidacticians! This is how language is, even unconsciously, the carrier of radical thought, because it always starts from itself, as a trait d'esprit vis-a-vis the world, as an ellipse and a source of pleasure. Even the confusion of languages in the Tower of Babel, a powerful mechanism of illusion for the human race, a source of non-communication and an end to the possibility of a universal language, will have appeared, finally, not as a divine punishment but as a gift from God. Ciphering, not deciphering. Operating illusions. Being illusion to be event. Turning into an enigma what is clear. Making unintelligible what is far too intelligible. Rendering unreadable the event itself. Working all the events to make them unintelligible. Accentuating the fake transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion, to spread the germs or viruses of a radical illusion, that is to say operating a radical disillusion of the real. A viral and deleterious thought, which corrupts meaning, and is the accomplice of an erotic perception of reality's trouble. Erasing in oneself any remaining trace of the intellectual plot. Stealing the "reality file" to erase its conclusions. But, in fact, it is reality itself which foments its own contradiction, its own denial, its own loss through our lack of reality. Hence, the internal feeling that all this affair - the world, thought, and language - has emerged from some place else and could disappear as if by magic. The world does not seek to have more existence, nor does it seek to persist in its existence. On the contrary, it is looking for the most spiritual way to escape reality. Through thought, the world is looking for what could lead to its own loss.The absolute rule, that of symbolic exchange, is to return what you received. Never less, but always more. The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as we received it: unintelligible. And if it is possible, to return it a little bit more unintelligible. A little bit more enigmatic.”

AT: Deleuze

Ball Game – Desire does not exist

Baudrillard 1990 (Jean, Fatal Strategies.  Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J Niesluchowski, Edited by Jim Fleming.  Semiotext(e) page(s) 113-114)

Desire does not exist; the only desire is to be the destiny of the other, to become for him the event that exceeds all subjectivity, that checks, in its fatal advent, all possible subjectivity, that absolves the subject of its ends, its presence, and of all responsibility to itself and to the world, in a passion that is – finally, definitively – objective.

Capitalism has become Deleuzian in form, style and content – their old-ass Deleuze and/or Guattari alternative has lost any potential it once may have had – now easily predicted, captured and incorporated by that same system itself for its own ends of reification.  Today, the only true revolutionary task possible includes voting affirmative – accelerating the decadence of the present system so that the system is beaten at its own game

Vandenberghe 2008 (Frédéric Vandenberghe, Deleuzian capitalism, Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 877, vol 34 no 8 • pp. 877–903, Sage Publications)

The basic principle of rhizomatic sociology is that society is always en fuite, always leaking and fleeing, and may be understood in terms of the manner in which it deals with its lignes de fuite, or lines of flight.  There is always something that flees and escapes the system, something that is not controllable, or at least not yet controlled. With their machinic analysis of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari want to encourage leakages and ‘cause a run off – faire fuire – as when you drill a hole in the pipe or open up the abscess’ (Guattari, 1977: 120; Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 249; Deleuze, 1990: 32). The intention is obviously anti-systemic– draining the system, digging holes, continuing the work of the old mole.  Yet, today, the capitalistic system itself thrives on anti-systematicity, ‘artificial negativity’ (Adorno), or ‘repetition and difference’ (Deleuze).  It feeds, as it were, on its own problems and in the process it changes itself and mutates. The ‘repetition of the same’ eventually leads to ‘difference’, which is tantamount to saying that the survival of capitalism means ‘continuity with difference’. Capitalism explores and anticipates the de-territorializing lines of flight to capture them from without, enter into symbiosis with them, and redirect them from within, like a parasite, towards its own ends. Capitalism is inventive; its creativity knows no limits – ‘it is of the viral type’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 580).

Deleuze and Guattari put their anti-capitalist hopes in the guerrilla tactics of the schizoid minority that refuses to play the game (Marcuse’s nicht mitmachen) of the self-content majority. Although they know that the squirms of the dispersed minority accompany the war machine of the entrepreneurial companies like their ‘supplement’, although they realize that capitalism advances like a war machine that feeds on the lines of flight and indicated that capitalism knows no internal limits, they nevertheless believed that capitalism would find its logical conclusion in the schizophrenic production of a free flow of desire: ‘Schizophrenia is the external limit of capitalism itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 292). What they apparently meant by that mad statement is that the final crisis of capitalism would eventually be generated not by the regulation or domestication of capitalism but by the complete commodification of the desiring machines that we are. Only by accelerating the decadence of the present system, only through some kind of self-commodification in a consumerist potlatch, would the capitalist system be beaten by its own game: Which is the revolutionary path, if there’s one? To withdraw from the world market . . . in a curious renewal of the ‘economic solution’ of the fascists? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further in the movement of the market, of decoding and territorialisation? . . . Not withdraw from the process, but going further, ‘accelerating the process’, as Nietzsche said. As a matter of fact, we ain’t seen nothing yet. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 285)1

A quarter of a century later, the process of accumulation has accelerated to the point that capitalism itself has become Deleuzian in form, in style and in content. This junction is not accidental. As usual, an ironic and profoundly perverse relationship exists between the romantic ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Campbell, 1987: 202–27). Needless to say that I am not claiming that Deleuze’s libertarian critique of capitalism was anti-critical or phoney from the start and that Deleuze is somehow the Giddens of the 1970s: a neo-liberal disguised as a libertarian, or Thatcher on LSD. What I am claiming is, rather, that capitalism has progressively integrated the critique of capitalism into its mode of functioning, with the result that capitalism appears stronger than ever, whereas the critique of capitalism seems rather disarmed.

In their magisterial analysis of the new spirit of capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello (1999: 241–90) have convincingly demonstrated that capitalism has coopted the postmodernizing critique of the 1960s and 1970s and used it as a way to reorganize itself and expand infinitely. The industrially organized capitalism of the ‘golden thirties’ (1945–73) was essentially Fordist. Bureaucratic, hierarchical, pyramidal and centrally controlled, planned and taylorized, oriented to the mass production of standardized goods, it was elephantine, rigid and alienating. The neocorporatist arrangement between the state, the employers and the unions guaranteed job security, an indexed income, a steady career track and a pension, but this security hardly compensated for the employees’ lack of autonomy. Attacking the dehumanizing and disciplining, massifying and standardizing nature of the ‘capitalist-bureaucratic-technical-totalitarian society of planned exploitation and directed consumption’ (Lefebvre) in the name of spontaneity, creativity and authenticity, the libertarian left took over the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism of the bohemians and translated their grievances in a language that was inspired by surrealism and the ‘masters of suspicion’ (Marx, Freud and Nietzsche).

Do Both – As with the war machine, hyper-simulation offers two sides to every story – making it possible for us embrace the alternative’s conception of a productive form of Deleuzian desire, revolution, and becoming through the deceptive means of the embodied consumer

Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury.  “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading.”  Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000.  Page(s) 72-73)

What in Baudrillard’s terms is a characteristic of an order of hyper-real simulation, in Braidotti’s interpretation of Deleuze is one of ‘becoming’; ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘becoming-minority’, because the ‘lines of escape’ or the ‘lines of deterritorialisation’ are those of the minority position, the position of woman as ‘other’, of the nomad, the non-fixed. Braidotti is careful to clarify that Deleuze is not referring to ‘empirical females’ but to a position, or a mode of relation to the activity of thinking (1991: 116), a position that a person of any sex may assume. But it is Deleuze’s concept of the positivity of desire that is in the forefront of Braidotti’s interpretation of the liberatory potential of Deleuze’s work. She refers to his new vision of a body machine, a ‘body-without-organs’ where the body is reconceptualised as a material surface in constant transcendence, and not as a depth that can register, internally, social abstractions such as the Phallus. As a material surface where the codes of language interact, the body is no longer the embodiment of normalising forces in Foucault’s sense. The concept of the ‘body-without-organs’ rather emphasises the ‘positivity of desire’, ‘desire as production’, which opens the possibility of the emergence of the ‘non-oedipal woman’ who is revolutionary, subversive – ‘a new humanity which would function according to the model of free, positive desire’ (1991: 117). It is important to ask the same questions of this ‘new body’, and of the ‘positivity of desire’: in what ways might this depiction be any different from the embodied consumer constructed and required by the dictates of hyper-real simulation?

Embracing desire as a productive force, visa-a-vi the alternative, fails to achieve the revolutionary potential needed to subvert the inevitability of the current apparatus and its associated implications – ultimately, the alternative resembles nothing more than a reasserting of that same hegemonic rule of causal coordinates criticized

Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury.  “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading.”  Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000.  Page(s) 158)

I indicated at the concluding paragraph of the previous section that it would be useful to return to the question of the paradigm of ‘chance’ to discuss briefly Baudrillard’s critical commentary on Deleuze’s ‘ideal game’ in Logique du Sens. It is now possible to see how Baudrillard’s notion of seduction is the point of departure for a critique of the assumptions of both ‘chance’ and ‘desire’. In Deleuze’s ‘ideal game’, these two concepts converge to produce a basis for his ‘nomadic economy of desire’. In Baudrillard’s view, the attempt to liberate and multiply ‘chance’ as a revolutionary variable achieves nothing more than reasserting the mirror image of causality: it assumes that the world is either caused or aleatory. The hegemonic rule of causality or determinacy (non-contingency) is, of course, not subverted by the assertion of its opposite. Baudrillard condemns the idea that an increased indeterminacy would ‘give rise to the simultaneous play of every series, and, therefore, to the radical expression of becoming and desire’ (SEDN: 144–5). He contests the notion that ‘more’ chance leads to a more intense game, or that greater contingency necessarily provides the basis for a more enlightened view of the world. He notes that many cultures do not have a word or concept that corresponds to ‘chance’, as nothing for them is computed, not even in terms of probabilities. In fact, the more Baudrillard writes about this, the more the idea of an aleatory universe seems repugnant to him: ‘insane’, ‘demented’ (SEDN: 146). The unconditional ‘liberation’ of chance in Deleuze’s framing of a nomadic economy of desire is, in Baudrillard’s analysis, ‘part of the political and mystical economy of residues at work everywhere today, with its structural inversion of weak into strong terms’ (SEDN: 146).

Misunderstanding of debate in which the link is predicated results in psychosis, and the self-serving replication of those same structured coordinates from which the implication emerges

Murphy 2006 (Paula, Professor of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland.  Book Review: Zizek Live.  International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 3, Number 1, January 2006)

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the link that Butler makes between the symbolic and the real in Zizek’s writing.  In Plague of Fantasies, Butler tells us that he warns of “the potential psychosis that results in the bringing together of the Symbolic and the Real in such things as computer games”.11  This is because in Lacanian terms, the symbolic is already known as a virtual experience, because it removes the subject from the pre-linguistic real of fullness and wholeness and divides and ruptures the subject in language, creating a gap between being and meaning or ontology and epistemology.  In the interview at the end of the book, he makes this clear saying that virtual reality is simply a concretization of the reality already felt by subjects in language.  It simply “generalises this procedure of a product deprived of its substance: it produces reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real”.12  And although Baudrillard is in general critical of Freud and Lacan, this would seem to be a site of agreement between psychoanalysis and postmodernism.  If, as Baudrillard claims, “the very definition of the real becomes that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction”,13  in other words that reality itself is hyperreal, this coincides with Zizek’s analysis of the symbolic order as it is encapsulated in virtual reality.  Yet, as Butler acknowledges earlier in the book, Zizek is not suggesting as Baudrillard does, an end to the symbolic as it is constituted under the Law, but rather proposing that it should be thought of in its transcendentality; “the taking into account of that ‘outside’ that makes it possible”.14  This stance is reminiscent of the Derridean logic of supplementarity, and the importance of being aware that if a system of thought has a limit, that this necessitates that the system cannot be universal, but demands a supplement.  As Butler states, it is “only through the self-contradiction involved in identity that we are able to grasp its limit, and not through its simple impossibility or deferral”.

Other 2AC Cards/Exts.

…

“If we cannot lay our own lives on the line, this is because we are already dead”

With ressentiment as their orientation towards life it requires that we suppress will to power and deny our instincts. This first, kills value to life, and second, leads to outbreaks of revenge, turning their impacts.

Deleuze 1983 (Gilles Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 1983. Page 115-117)

Why is ressentiment the spirit of revenge? It might be thought that the man of ressentiment comes into being by accident: having experienced too strong an excitation (a pain), he would have had to abandon the attempt to react, not being strong enough to form a riposte. He would therefore experience a desire for revenge and, by a process of generalization, would want to take this out on the whole world. Such an interpretation is mistaken; it only takes quantities into account, the quantity of excitation received, "objectively" compared to the quantity of force of a receptive subject. But, for Nietzsche, what counts is not the quantity of force considered abstractly but a determinate relation in the subject itself between the different forces of which it is made up this is what he means by a type. Whatever the force of the excitation which is received, whatever the total force of the subject itself, the man of ressentiment only uses the latter to invest the trace of the former, so that he is incapable of acting and even of reacting to the excitation. There is therefore no need for him to have experienced an excessive excitation. This may happen, but it is not necessary. He does not need to generalize in order to see the whole world as the object of his ressentiment. As a result of his type the man of ressentiment does not "react": his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted. This reaction therefore blames its object, whatever it is, as an object on which revenge must be taken, which must be made to pay for this infinite delay. Excitation can be beautiful and good and the man of ressentiment can experience it as such; it can be less than the force of the man of ressentiment and he can possess an abstract quantity of force as great as that of anyone else. He will none the less feel the corresponding object as a personal offense and affront because he makes the object responsible for his own powerlessness to invest anything but the trace — a qualitative or typical powerlessness. The man of ressentiment experiences every being and object as an offense in exact proportion to its effect on him. Beauty and goodness are, for him, necessarily as outrageous as any pain or misfortune that he experiences. "One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything — everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound" (EH I 6 p. 320). The man of ressentiment in himself is a being full of pain: the sclerosis or hardening of his consciousness, the rapidity with which every excitation sets and freezes within him, the weight of the traces that invade him are so many cruel sufferings. And, more deeply, the memory of traces is full of hatred in itself and by itself. It is venomous and depreciative because it blames the object in order to compensate for its own inability to escape from the traces of the corresponding excitation. This is why ressentiment's revenge, even when it is realized, remains "spiritual", imaginary and symbolic in principle. This essential link between revenge and memory resembles the Freudian anal-sadistic complex. Nietzsche himself presents memory as an unfinished digestion and the type of ressentiment as an anal type.' This intestinal and venomous memory is what Nietzsche calls the spider, the tarantula, the spirit of revenge . . . We can see what Nietzsche's intention is: to produce a psychology that is really a typology, to put psychology "on the plane of the subject". Even the possibilities of a cure will be subordinated to the transformation of types (reversal and transmutation).

The idea that “extinction comes first”, that death ought be avoided at all costs, and that our “try or die” situation leaves us no other option but plan passage, that harbors a deal of misplaced anger, and is complicit in the very right to exterminate mentality allowing extinction to come to fruition.  This is Baudrillard 2010:

We can see this clearly in the rage of those who defend existence at any price, the same rage as shown by the advocates of the Yes against the No.  The extraordinary, misplaced anger of the well wishing against those who reject their overtures.  It is the anger of the people of God (of Devine Europe), of those who have universal right on their side and hence the right to exterminate the apostates.  This hatred on the part of the disposed, by those who have things taken from them, who are exploited and whose material means of life are snatched away from them.

This is because, as Baudrillard continues, “condemning someone to death and condemning them to life ‘on principle’ involves the same kind of legal violence.  And it must be rejected in every case, even when – especially when – the desire is to ‘do you good’.”

Attempting to combat this system of universalization frontally via criticism or positive political alternative inevitably fails, even the most subversive of energies are usurped and violently redeployed – it is only with singularities that we can confound this dual system of carnival and cannibal and avoid our own complicity in the violence we wish to eliminate.  It is the extinction of singularity itself that gives birth to all violent abreactions making physical extinction inevitable.

Baudrillard 2002 (Jean Baudrillard, Translated by François Debrix The Violence of the Global, Initially published as "La Violence du Mondial," in Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée, 2002), pp. 63-83.)

Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules. Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with their own extinction.

Comparatively, exchanging the vital illusion of evil for the affirmatives maximum good in minimum death equates to zero life, and makes extermination more probable

Baudrillard and Noailles 2008 (Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Translated by Chris Turner, Exiles from Dialog, Polity Press, Pages 33-34)

BAUDRILLARD: You've only to take the 'zero deaths' formula, a basic concept of the security order. It's clear that this equates mathematically to 'zero lives'. By warding off death at all costs (burdensome medical treatment, genetics, cloning), we're being turned, through security, into living dead. On the pretext of immortality, we're moving towards slow extermination. It's the destiny of maximum good, of absolute happiness, to lead to a zero outcome. Illusion, that is to say, evil, is vital. When you exchange this vital illusion for the unconditional promotion of Good, then you're heading for a blowback from the accursed share. This is how things are getting better and better and, at the same time, worse and worse.

Rejecting Empire is symbolically worthless and only serves to maintain the dominant system.  The alternative, by its very nature as alternative, is doomed to fail – our singularly is the only way to defeat the dominate thought of the global system they criticize

Per Herngren and Baudrillard 2007 (“Postprotest and Baudrillard” http://perherngren-resistance.blogspot.com/2007/10/jean-baudrillard-is-important-for.html)

Jean org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard(%%) is important for the reflection on htm(%%). Postprotest sometimes proposes a combination of civil disobedience and production of positive alternatives, to create some kind of constructive or proactive resistance. In this text, however, Baudrillard criticizes the focus on “alternatives” as a way to defeat a dominant system; instead he suggests singularities. Here he also criticizes reactive protest movements:

”Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. 6 They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules.”

Tournament: District 3 | Round: 2 | Opponent: MoSt BR | Judge: Eric Robinson
As the evolution of ancient human cultures progressed, so did their understandings of social stratification and labor relations. Independently, Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Caliphate, the Hebrews in Palestine, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas, all came to own other peoples as slaves. However, the distinction between a slave and non-slave wasn’t racialized; slavery was for people who were in debt, punishment for crime, or for prisoners of war. Ancient slavery was also much different from chattel slavery in the america’s: slaves could often marry who they wanted, their children weren’t born into slavery, they could participate in civil society, earn their freedom, and could not be beaten excessively.

During the middle ages, conflict between Muslim and Catholic societies provided another basis for taking prisoners of war as slaves; in 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull granting the kings of Spain and Portugal the right to reduce any "Pagans and any other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery, legitimizing the slave trade as a result of war. 

By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies, and the transatlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves was captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. The salience of European goods in African societies often compelled African nations to sell people from defeated kingdoms into slavery. 

The white citizens of Virginia decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servants, but in 1655, John Casor became the first legally recognized slave in the United States. This soon expanded, as slavery was the engine that drove the mercantile empires of Europe. Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended shortly after the American Revolution, slavery remained a central economic institution in the Southern states of the United States, from where slavery expanded with the westward movement of population. 

By 1860, 500,000 slaves had grown to 4 million, but by 1863 the emancipation proclamation outlawed slavery, and after the civil war the newly ratified 13th, 14th and 15th amendments codified into law that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”.

Penal servitude, a rarely used practice in the south at the time, was widely used in the north to fuel an industrial economy that relied on mining coal. However, it became incredibly significant in post-civil war America, as;
Infamous for the brutality with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly linked in popular memory (and popular culture) with images of the black chain gang in the American South, it is usually assumed to be a Southern invention. So apparently atavistic, it seems to fit naturally with the retrograde nature of Southern life and labor, its economic and cultural underdevelopment, its racial caste system, and its desperate attachment to the “lost cause.” As it happens, penal servitude — the leasing out of prisoners to private enterprise, either within prison walls or in outside workshops, factories, and fields — was originally known as a “Yankee invention.” First used at Auburn prison in New York State in the 1820s, the system spread widely and quickly throughout the North, the Midwest, and later the West. It developed alongside state-run prison workshops that produced goods for the public sector and sometimes the open market. A few Southern states also used it. Prisoners there, as elsewhere, however, were mainly white men, since slave masters, with a free hand to deal with the “infractions” of their chattel, had little need for prison. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery would, in fact, make an exception for penal servitude precisely because it had become the dominant form of punishment throughout the free states. Nor were those sentenced to “confinement at hard labor” restricted to digging ditches or other unskilled work; nor were they only men. Prisoners were employed at an enormous range of tasks from rope- and wagon-making to carpet, hat, and clothing manufacturing (where women prisoners were sometimes put to work), as well coal mining, carpentry, barrel-making, shoe production, house-building, and even the manufacture of rifles. The range of petty and larger workshops into which the felons were integrated made up the heart of the new American economy. Observing a free-labor textile mill and a convict-labor one on a visit to the United States, novelist Charles Dickens couldn’t tell the difference. State governments used the rental revenue garnered from their prisoners to meet budget needs, while entrepreneurs made outsized profits either by working the prisoners themselves or subleasing them to other businessmen. Convict Labor in the ‘New South’ After the Civil War, the convict-lease system metamorphosed. In the South, it became ubiquitous, one of several grim methods — including the black codes, debt peonage, the crop-lien system, lifetime labor contracts, and vigilante terror — used to control and fix in place the newly emancipated slave.  

In the same way slavery was essential for the economy of southern states, the prison industrial complex began to rely on slave labor to drive the industrialization of America. Even though we’ve all taken an American history class, many of us tend to forget,

African americans have been mining coal and fighting bosses for over 200 years. Slaves were working in coal mines around Richmond, Va., as early as 1760. During the civil War, a thousand slaves dug coal for 22 companies in the “Richmond Basin.” Black miners were expected to load four or five tons of coal. Slaves able to fill this quota were fed supper. Those who couldn’t were whipped. Slavery in the mines didn’t end after the war in 1865. For decades prisoners convicted of “vagrancy” and “loitering” ¶ worked as virtual slaves for private outfits in alabama, Georgia and tennessee. From 1880 to 1904, 10 percent of alabama’s ¶ state budget was paid by leasing prisoners to coal companies. african americans accounted from 83 percent to 90 percent of these slave miners in alabama. Sixty-nine percent of tennessee prisoners digging coal in 1891 were Black. Some poor whites were railroaded to jail too. conditions were horrendous in these convict mines. nearly one out of ten prisoners died annually at the tracy city, tenn. mine operated by the tennessee coal and ¶ iron company (tci). 

As industrialization ramped up, so did the prison industrial complex, and its insidious ties with the demands of the market. Slave labor not only made up the backbone of modern america, it was also the basis of a flexible economic system that is based on the boom and bust of the business cycle. 

Those “freedmen” were eager to pursue their new liberty either by setting up as small farmers or by exercising the right to move out of the region at will or from job to job as “free wage labor” was supposed to be able to do. If you assumed, however, that the convict-lease system was solely the brainchild of the apartheid all-white “Redeemer” governments that overthrew the Radical Republican regimes (which first ran the defeated Confederacy during Reconstruction) and used their power to introduce Jim Crow to Dixie, you would be wrong again. In Georgia, for instance, the Radical Republican state government took the initiative soon after the war ended. And this was because the convict-lease system was tied to the modernizing sectors of the post-war economy, no matter where in Dixie it was introduced or by whom. So convicts were leased to coal-mining, iron-forging, steel-making, and railroad companies, including Tennessee Coal and Iron (TCandI), a major producer across the South, especially in the booming region around Birmingham, Alabama. More than a quarter of the coal coming out of Birmingham’s pits was then mined by prisoners. By the turn of the century, TCandI had been folded into J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel complex, which also relied heavily on prison laborers. All the main extractive industries of the South were, in fact, wedded to the system. Turpentine and lumber camps deep in the fetid swamps and forest vastnesses of Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana commonly worked their convicts until they dropped dead from overwork or disease. The region’s plantation monocultures in cotton and sugar made regular use of imprisoned former slaves, including women. Among the leading families of Atlanta, Birmingham, and other “New South” metropolises were businessmen whose fortunes originated in the dank coal pits, malarial marshes, isolated forests, and squalid barracks in which their unfree peons worked, lived, and died. Because it tended to grant absolute authority to private commercial interests and because its racial make-up in the post-slavery era was overwhelmingly African-American, the South’s convict-lease system was distinctive. Its caste nature is not only impossible to forget, but should remind us of the unbalanced racial profile of America’s bloated prison population today. Moreover, this totalitarian-style control invited appalling brutalities in response to any sign of resistance: whippings, water torture, isolation in “dark cells,” dehydration, starvation, ice-baths, shackling with metal spurs riveted to the feet, and “tricing” (an excruciatingly painful process in which recalcitrant prisoners were strung up by the thumbs with fishing line attached to overhead pulleys). Even women in a hosiery mill in Tennessee were flogged, hung by the wrists, and placed in solitary confinement. Living quarters for prisoner-workers were usually rat-infested and disease-ridden. Work lasted at least from sunup to sundown and well past the point of exhaustion. Death came often enough and bodies were cast off in unmarked graves by the side of the road or by incineration in coke ovens. Injury rates averaged one per worker per month, including respiratory failure, burnings, disfigurement, and the loss of limbs. Prison mines were called “nurseries of death.” Among Southern convict laborers, the mortality rate (not even including high levels of suicides) was eight times that among similar workers in the North — and it was extraordinarily high there. The Southern system also stood out for the intimate collusion among industrial, commercial, and agricultural enterprises and every level of Southern law enforcement as well as the judicial system. Sheriffs, local justices of the peace, state police, judges, and state governments conspired to keep the convict-lease business humming. Indeed, local law officers depended on the leasing system for a substantial part of their income. (They pocketed the fines and fees associated with the “convictions,” a repayable sum that would be added on to the amount of time at “hard labor” demanded of the prisoner.) The arrest cycle was synchronized with the business cycle, timed to the rise and fall of the demand for fresh labor. County and state treasuries similarly counted on such revenues, since the post-war South was so capital-starved that only renting out convicts assured that prisons could be built and maintained. There was, then, every incentive to concoct charges or send people to jail for the most trivial offenses: vagrancy, gambling, drinking, partying, hopping a freight car, tarrying too long in town. A “pig law” in Mississippi assured you of five years as a prison laborer if you stole a farm animal worth more than $10. Theft of a fence rail could result in the same. Penal Servitude in the Gilded Age North All of this was only different in degree from prevailing practices everywhere else: the sale of prison labor power to private interests, corporal punishment, and the absence of all rights including civil liberties, the vote, and the right to protest or organize against terrible conditions. In the North, where 80% of all U.S. prison labor was employed after the Civil War and which accounted for over $35 billion in output (in current dollars), the system was reconfigured to meet the needs of modern industry and the pressures of “the long Depression.” Convict labor was increasingly leased out only to a handful of major manufacturers in each state. These textile mills, oven makers, mining operations, hat and shoe factories — one in Wisconsin leased that state’s entire population of convicted felons — were then installing the kind of mass production methods becoming standard in much of American industry. As organized markets for prison labor grew increasingly oligopolistic (like the rest of the economy), the Depression of 1873 and subsequent depressions in the following decades wiped out many smaller businesses that had once gone trawling for convicts. Today, we talk about a newly “flexible economy,” often a euphemism for the geometric growth of a precariously positioned, insecure workforce. The convict labor system of the nineteenth century offered an original specimen of perfect flexibility. Companies leasing convicts enjoyed authority to dispose of their rented labor power as they saw fit. Workers were compelled to labor in total silence. Even hand gestures and eye contact were prohibited for the purpose of creating “silent and insulated working machines.” Supervision of prison labor was ostensibly shared by employers and the prison authorities. In fact, many businesses did continue to conduct their operations within prison walls where they supplied the materials, power, and machinery, while the state provided guards, workshops, food, clothing, and what passed for medical care. As a matter of practice though, the foremen of the businesses called the shots. And there were certain states, including Nebraska, Washington, and New Mexico, that, like their Southern counterparts, ceded complete control to the lessee. As one observer put it, “Felons are mere machines held to labor by the dark cell and the scourge.” Free market industrial capitalism, then and now, invariably draws on the aid of the state. In that system’s formative phases, the state has regularly used its coercive powers of taxation, expropriation, and in this case incarceration to free up natural and human resources lying outside the orbit of capitalism proper. 

The prison system was also a really effective way to maintain a racialized America. Mining industries were so awful, and so many African Americans lived in perpetual fear of indentured servitude in the penal system, that the whole system served as the lynchpin in a widespread institution of racial intimidation, as Neil Blackmon explains:
FARAI CHIDEYA, host: Most people say American slavery ended in the 1800s, but Douglas Blackmon argues the practice endured into the 20th century through the nation's prisons. He's the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, and his new book is "Slavery by Another Name." It details secret sales of inmate labor to various industries, and how prisons cashed in on the incarcerated. Douglas, welcome. Mr. DOUGLAS BLACKMON (Author, "Slavery by Another Name"): Thanks for having me. CHIDEYA: So in your book you write about prisoners who you say were sold into slavery in the 1920s. Talk a little bit about the mining industry. Mr. BLACKMON: Well, mining was one of the industries which, in the South in the last years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, relied very extensively on the forced labor of thousands and thousands of men, nearly all of them black, and a great majority of whom had been arrested on what ultimately were specious charges or on the basis of laws passed by the Southern states specifically to re-impose a kind of coerced labor of freed slaves and their descendents. CHIDEYA: What kind of money are we talking about in today's dollars for some of these transactions over prison labor? Mr. BLACKMON: Well, in Alabama, for instance, which is the state where this particular form of the system took its largest form, by the beginning of the 20th century, the money that was being paid by U.S. Steel Corporation and a number of other major operators of coal mines to the state of Alabama amounted to tens of millions of dollars in modern-day currency, and was by far the single largest source of revenue to the state of Alabama. CHIDEYA: When you look at how race played a role in this, was this really driven around black prisoners, or was it white prisoners as well? Mr. BLACKMON: There were some white prisoners who were affected by this and caught up in this system, but this was overwhelmingly something about African-Americans. And it was also the lynchpin of a much larger system of racial intimidation that metastasized across the South right at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. And so what my book is about, "Slavery by Another Name," is not just the prison labor system and the roots of the prison - the private prison complex today, it's really a book about the whole spectrum of coerced labor that came to dominate the lives of really millions of African-Americans primarily. And the prison leasing system was the most terrifying hammer that was hanging over the lives of African-American men in the early 1900s. But sharecropping and tenant farming and many other forms of labor were effectively involuntary servitude, and African-Americans were compelled to go along with it for fear of being sucked into the more formal prison leasing system. CHIDEYA: We just spoke with a representative from Corrections Corporation of America, which runs some private prisons. Do you think - you really talk about this in the context of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now in the 21st century, we don't have the same leasing agreements for prisoners, but do you think that in some ways, private prisons have evolved out of the situations you talk about? Mr. BLACKMON: Well there's no doubt that the practice of inmates making license plates, you know, in prisons, the sort of classic pop culture image we have of that kind of work, that the images we have of "Cool Hand Luke" and of chain gangs and men being forced to work on railroads. All of that imagery of our culture is based on this kind of labor inside prisons. And there's no doubt that in one way or another, that led to some version of our society's comfort level, some parts of our society's comfort level, with the idea of privately operated prisons today. So there's no doubt there's some connection there. But it's not the same thing by any stretch. CHIDEYA: Let me ask you about something specific. Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona reinstituted chain gangs for men and women. What do you make of that? Mr. BLACKMON: Well, it may well - and I don't know the details of it - but it certainly sounds to me like sort of a throwback thing to do. And if it's being done in any manner in the way that the chain gangs and the predecessors to chain gangs worked 100 years ago, then it would be a terrible thing, because the chain gangs of 100 years ago were more like German death camps than they were any form of the modern penal system. At the same time, the key difference in all of this, the key factor to look for, is that what the book is about is that sheriffs in Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi and Florida were specifically compensated for the number of men they arrested and then sold into involuntary servitude. And so the economic incentives of the criminal justice system were explicit, that the more people you arrested, the less money you spent to feed them while they were in the county jail, those were the two ways the sheriff could become a wealthy man. And those economic incentives don't exist in the same explicit way today, I don't think, that they did 100 years ago. And that was the root, along with just white supremacy and bigotry, those were the roots of the horrifying brutality and atrocity that pervaded the system a century ago. 

Despite the role that convict-labor played in the development of the modern American economy, the history of African colonization and exploitation is largely missing from historical and modern accounts of US economic development, or even energy production. Not just colonists in 18th century America, but many of us today are reaping the benefits of unpaid African American labor. 

BUILDING WHITE WEALTH AND SABOTAGING BLACK WEALTH In his 1946 book The World and Africa, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the poverty¶ in Europe’s African colonies was “a main cause of wealth and luxury in Europe.¶ The results of this poverty were disease, ignorance, and crime.”¶ 3¶ Du Bois argued¶ that the history of African colonization is omitted from mainstream histories of European development and wealth. A serious understanding of European wealth must¶ center on the history of exploitation and oppression in Africa, for the resources of¶ Africans were taken to help create Europe’s wealth. To a substantial degree, Europeans were rich because Africans were poor. Africa’s economic development—its¶ resources, land, and labor—had been and was being sacrificed to spur European¶ economic progress. In our view, a similar argument is applicable to the development of the wealth¶ and affluence of the white population in the United States. From its first decades,¶ white-settler colonialism in North America involved the extreme exploitation of enslaved African Americans. European colonists built up much wealth by stealing the¶ labor of African Americans and the land of Native Americans. Racial oppression carried out by white Americans has lasted for nearly four centuries, and has done great damage to the lives, opportunities, communities, and futures of African Americans. The actions of white Americans over many generations sharply reduced the income of African Americans, and thus their economic and cultural capital. Legal segregation in the South, where most African Americans resided¶ until recent decades, forced black men and women into lower-paying jobs or into¶ unemployment, where they could not earn incomes sufficient to support their families adequately, much less to save. In the 1930s, two-thirds of African Americans¶ still lived in the South, and most were descendants of recently enslaved Americans.¶ They were still firmly entrenched in the semi-slavery of legal segregation, which did¶ not allow the accumulation of wealth. Significant property-holding was not even¶ available as a possibility to a majority of African Americans until the late 1960s. In addition to state and local governments, the federal government has contributed directly to the build-up of white American wealth. For example, after¶ World War II, new governmental programs such as the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration housing-loan programs, and the G.I. Bill¶ helped many white families advance into the middle class. These programs were¶ less available to, or unworkable for, the majority of African Americans because of¶ legal or de facto exclusion from virtually all traditional white areas and institutions. Legal segregation not only sharply reduced inherited wealth, it made government programs (even when they were available) of less utility for African Americans seeking to create wealth that could be passed down from generation to generation. In the 1970s, housing prices tripled and many whites saw their family wealth increase dramatically. Home ownership had become a key component of white¶ wealth. Today, buying a home is the “single most important way of accumulating assets” for Americans. Such assets are ordinarily handed down to one’s children¶ and grandchildren in a variety of forms, such as savings or trust accounts, “loans”¶ with no expectation of repayment, help with educational expenses, wedding gifts,¶ and partial or full home down payments. Children who recieve such wealth transfers become the well-off adults of the next generation. Without wealth, African Americans could not create as many successful businesses as whites, and those they did create were confined to black communities.¶ Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro have shown how difficult it has been for¶ African Americans to build up much family wealth because of legal and de facto¶ segregation. Until the mid-1960s, various forms of government-sanctioned or government-allowed discrimination and segregation kept African Americans from generating the family wealth necessary to compete effectively with whites in the economy. Some of these older discriminatory practices persist in various forms today.¶ Housing and insurance discrimination are just two examples. Such discrimination¶ continues to seriously limit the capital-formation ability of many black Americans,¶ particularly in building up housing equities that can be used to start a business or¶ help the next generation get a good education. Black parents often have lacked the economic capital to provide the educational¶ or other “cultural capital” advantages necessary for their children to compete with¶ advantaged whites. When African Americans were locked into a system of legal¶ segregation, they suffered both short-term and long-term consequences. Even¶ though the most brutal forms of oppression have been abolished, they still have¶ major and lingering effects. For example, today, African American families on average have less than onetenth the wealth of whites. Even middle-class African Americans, who are thought¶ by many whites to enjoy equal success and opportunity, have only fifteen cents to¶ every middle-class white’s dollar. The wealth disparity is even greater for working class African Americans.¶ 8¶ Such huge, lingering disparities are a very clear indicator¶ of the long-term costs of governmental and private business policies enforced during the days of de jure discrimination and segregation. Most whites do not understand the extent to which the racial oppression of the¶ past continues to fuel inequalities in the present. Although affirmative action programs (where they still exist) attempt to redress discrimination by increasing job or¶ educational opportunities for African Americans in a few organizations, such programs do little to address the large-scale wealth inequality between black and white¶ Americans. All the “equal opportunity” programs and policies one could envisage would not touch the assets of whites who long ago reaped the benefits of not being subjected to legal segregation during the United States’ most prosperous economic¶ times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

When it comes to the question of the topic, we think the issue of unpaid labor, and especially the magnitude to which the coal industry has benefitted from unpaid prison labor as a result of institutionalized slavery, should be the most pertinent issue. We are asked by the topic committee to think about how to expand production of energy via increasing incentives or reducing restrictions, but we completely gloss over how the imaginary passage of a plan mobilize bodies to do our work for us, and how these bodies are still never recognized.  
Fiatting coal production in a ‘business as usual’ fashion requires nothing from us as debaters, and only continues systems of privledge that disassociate the means of production from the benefits of production. 

Thus the Plan: The United States federal government should pay reparations for unpaid coal production labor in the United States.
This 1AC is about is about reparations as kritik, an evolving process, not closure, and attempts to connect it to contemporary problems with energy production and the debate community. A redeployment of fiat as critique reveals how whiteness is smuggled into the collective imagination of the debate community. Connected to material change, the call for reparations is our provocation designed to destabilize race and labor-blind accounts of US society.
Balfour 2005, Lawrie, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, “Reparations after Identity Politics,” Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6

A second reading of Baldwin's "for nothing," by contrast, shifts the ¶ weight of the sentence from the calculation of his unpaid suffering to his distress that the aspiration to remake the United States into something more genuinely democratic has been continually thwarted. By this reading, Baldwin's ¶ call to remembrance is not wielded as a weapon, intended to bludgeon a ¶ white audience with repeated invocations of his own and others' victimiza- ¶ tion. Rather, he fashions his history in order that the suffering and the achievements of the men and women working under the lash might not prove to be for nothing. Despite the labor of generations, he seems to say, too little has changed. And that is the crime. In this sense, a demand for reparations is a call to grapple with the ways the past is lived and its object is the transformation of society as a whole. It compels public witness to the fact that "the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew."72 In this sense, it corresponds to ¶ Brown's own arguments about redemptive uses of the past, and challenges ¶ her condemnation of reparations. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to do justice to Brown's ¶ recent writings on historical consciousness, and in particular to her extended ¶ readings of Derrida and Benjamin, I think it is possible to tease from them a sense of the way reparations might contribute to democratic politics in the United States. Crucially, Brown sketches the way the injustices of the past must be lived if they are to foster a different future: Suffering that is not yet finished is not only suffering that must still be endured but also suffering that can still be redeemed; it might develop another face through contemporary practices. Making a historical event or formation contemporary, making it "an outrage to the present" and thus exploding or reworking both the way in which it has been remembered and the way in which it is positioned in historical consciousness as "past," is precisely the opposite of bringing that phenomena to "closure" through reparation or apology (our most ubiquitous form of historical political thinking today). The former ¶ demands that we redeem the past through a specific and contemporary practice of justice; ¶ the latter gazes impotently at the past even as it attempts to establish history as irrelevant ¶ to the present or, at best, as a reproachful claim or grievance in the present.73 ¶ Like Toni Morrison's ambiguous admonition that the story of slavery's ¶ ghosts is "not a story to pass on," Brown's work shows how reckoning with ¶ the afterlife of even ancient crimes is both necessary and dangerous. ¶ Redemptive politics, she maintains, is not a matter of overcoming or domesti- ¶ cating the past. Instead, it requires "the connection of a particular political aim in the present with a particular formation of oppression in the past."'74 It disrupts both unthinkingly progressive narratives of history that presume the impotence of the past and business-as-usual politics that presume the impossibility of fundamental change. Reparations politics can "redeem the past through a specific and contemporary practice of justice" in two ways: first, by providing a critical discourse ¶ that serves as a counterweight to race-blind language and incorporates acknowledgment of the past into present practices; and, second, by offering an avenue for concrete social change. As Bill Lawson observes: "our moral/ ¶ political vocabulary is morally unsatisfactory and inadequate for characteriz- ¶ ing the plight of present-day black Americans.'7"" The most persuasive repa- ¶ rations claims derive their power from reworking that vocabulary in light of ¶ the history of slavery and Jim Crow. Thus Ogletree conceives of reparations ¶ lawsuits as a means of stimulating a national dialogue about the legacies of ¶ the past,76 and Marable similarly suggests that such a conversation may be the ¶ most significant contribution of the quest for reparations.77 Robin Kelley ¶ pushes the creative possibilities of reparations discourse further, likening it to ¶ poetry. In Kelley's view, the experience of activists working collectively to ¶ demand a reckoning with history can wed past horror to future promise in ¶ previously unimagined ways.78 Arguments for reparations might thus be seen ¶ as a kind of genealogical politics, a departure from liberal discourse in which ¶ equality is achieved through the suppression of the past.79 In this sense, they ¶ hold out the promise that American racial history might be put to the service ¶ of what Brown and Janet Halley call critique: Critique offers possibilities of analyzing existing discourses of power to understand how ¶ subjects are fabricated or positioned by them, what powers they secure (and disguise or ¶ veil), what assumptions they naturalize, what privileges they fix, what norms they mobi- ¶ lize, and what or whom these norms exclude. Critique is thus a practice that allows us to ¶ scrutinize the form, content, and possible reworking of our apparent political choices; we ¶ no longer have to take them as givens.80 Enacting such a practice, however, requires resisting the allure of closure. ¶ In this regard, my argument departs from Robert Westley's conclusion that ¶ "the closure afforded by reparations means that no more will be owed to ¶ Blacks than is owed to any citizen under the law. This is the effect of any final ¶ judgment on the merits. Once reparations are paid, Blacks will be able to ¶ function within American society on a footing of absolute equality."81 Given ¶ the depth of societal denial about the significance and effects of slavery and ¶ the pervasiveness of antiblack racism, about which Westley writes so elo- ¶ quently, it is unlikely that reparations alone could accomplish so much. And ¶ while my view is substantially informed by Marable's argument, I am wary ¶ of his reading of the etymological kinship of reparations and "repair" as a ¶ promise "to make whole again."82 The pursuit of final judgment or wholeness ¶ might well appeal to white Americans eager to put the ugliness of U.S. racial ¶ history permanently in the past. It might, furthermore, disallow what Martha ¶ Minow calls "a constant double move" between the salience of group-based ¶ claims and the recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives and identities ¶ that compose the groups in whose name the claims are made.83 By emphasiz- ¶ ing struggles rather than outcomes,84 by contrast, reparations discourse can ¶ provide an avenue for investigating the public meanings of a history long ¶ suppressed and contesting received explanations of present racial ¶ hierarchies. Arguments for reparations, in this sense, could constitute a language of "I ¶ want this for us." They can reveal the ways that whiteness is smuggled into ¶ the collective imagination by asking Americans to consider what democracy ¶ demands when the "us" is understood to be black. Yet in the pursuit of poli- ¶ cies and programs that focus specifically on the contributions of and crimes ¶ committed against African American citizens and their ancestors, repara- ¶ tions activism need not proceed by "rendering suspect the language and pos- ¶ sibilities of collectivity, common action, and shared purposes.""85 Instead, taking the reparations movement seriously requires attending to the question of ¶ whose interests can and cannot stand for the common good and shifts the bur- ¶ den of argument to those who would characterize all demands for redress as ¶ an outrage. Highlighting the historical imbalance between black Americans' ¶ sacrifices and their enjoyment of the benefits of citizenship exposes both the ¶ regularity with which all citizens are asked to subordinate their interests to ¶ the greater good and the disproportionate losses that African Americans have ¶ borne in the name of that good.86 For political theorists, grappling with the ¶ question of reparations may provoke a reorientation of vantage-point, dis- ¶ placing presumptively race-blind accounts of U.S. democracy and giving pri- ¶ ority to the perspectives of its black citizens.87 Reparations claims might even ¶ be a medium for the resurgence of the "black worldliness" that Nikhil Singh ¶ finds in the work of radical black activists of the 1940s. This democratic pro- ¶ ject builds from the specific experiences of African Americans a vision of ¶ democracy that not only criticizes multiple structures of domination in ¶ the United States but also challenges racial oppression beyond national ¶ borders.88 Crucially, the idea of reparations as a critical discourse is always linked to ¶ efforts to make material change in the lives of African Americans. Here too, it ¶ is important to note that specific commitments to African American commu- ¶ nities need not benefit them exclusively. The example of Reconstruction, ¶ which targeted the welfare of the freedmen and women but also created new ¶ educational possibilities, social welfare programs, and more democratic state ¶ constitutions throughout the South, indicates the broader democratic effects ¶ that might follow from attending to the lingering impact of slavery.89 Indeed, ¶ one of the central contributions of reparations activism is its capacity to ¶ undermine the idea that effecting improvement in some of the most neglected ¶ U.S. communities would somehow only be to the good of black citizens. As ¶ Kelley observes: "By looking at the reparations campaign in the United ¶ States as a social movement, we discover that it was never entirely, or even ¶ primarily, about the money. The demand for reparations was about social jus- ¶ tice, reconciliation, reconstructing the internal life of black America, and ¶ eliminating institutional racism."90 It is not necessary, finally, to see in the quest for reparations an example of ¶ "left melancholia," a brooding antipolitics that stands accusingly "to the left ¶ of the possible."91 Although Brown paints a recognizable picture of a kind of ¶ radical posturing that focuses on unsatisfiable grievances, and her account ¶ aptly captures some elements of the reparations movement, the dismissal of ¶ all reparations demands as examples of this kind of posturing disguises the ¶ ways in which the idea of redress for slavery has been, since the nineteenth ¶ century, figured as outside "the possible." It elides those reparations claims ¶ that go beyond good and evil, that contest the assumptions of liberal legal dis- ¶ course and imagine how to evoke the complex haunting of the American ¶ present, that aspire to obtain redress without requiring that African Ameri- ¶ cans present themselves as helpless victims or as super-Americans, and that ¶ attempt to harness state power and criticize it simultaneously. Thus, one ¶ might ask why critics are so quick to dismiss a movement that has galvanized ¶ a range of actors, including grassroots activists as well as lawyers, lawmak- ¶ ers, and academics. The rejection of reparations per se--rather than critical ¶ assessment of different, specific arguments for reparations-and the desire ¶ to eschew any complicity with state power raise unsettling questions about ¶ whose left melancholia pervades the most acute political theorizing today. If ¶ the political energy and purpose generated in the pursuit of reparations does ¶ not represent a promising example of democratic politics, then what does? 

  Fraser and Freeman 2012, Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, co-founder of the American Empire Project and teaches history at Columbia University; Joshua B. Freeman teaches history at Queens College and the City University of New York; “Locking Down an American Workforce, The Prison Labor Complex,” Counter Punch, April 19, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/19/the-prison-labor-complex/

  Millies 2006, Stephen, Workers World, “Black Coal Miners: A Long Legacy of Struggle,” Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle: From the pages of Workers World; p. 182
  Fraser and Freeman 2012, Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, co-founder of the American Empire Project and teaches history at Columbia University; Joshua B. Freeman teaches history at Queens College and the City University of New York; “Locking Down an American Workforce, The Prison Labor Complex,” Counter Punch, April 19, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/19/the-prison-labor-complex/

  Blackmon 08 Neil, author of Slavery by Another Name, “Breaking Out of the Prison Industrial Complex,” National public Radio, May 22

  Feagin and O’Brien 99, Joe R. Feagin is a Graduate Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Florida, has done extensive research on racism and sexism issues available in three dozen books, former scholar-in-residence at the US Commission on Civil Rights 1974-75; Eileen O’Brien is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Florida specializing in race and ethnic relations, has contributed to two edited volumes; “The Long-Overdue Reparations for African Americans: Necessary for Societal Survival?” When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks, New York University Press

Tournament: D3 | Round: 4 | Opponent: KSU | Judge: D Stout
It was early springtime when the strike was on,
They drove us miners out of doors,
Out from the houses that the Company owned,
We moved into tents up at old Ludlow.
I was worried bad about my children,
Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge,
Every once in a while a bullet would fly,
Kick up gravel under my feet.
We were so afraid you would kill our children,
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep,
Carried our young ones and pregnant women
Down inside the cave to sleep.
That very night your soldiers waited,
Until all us miners were asleep,
You snuck around our little tent town,
Soaked our tents with your kerosene.
You struck a march and in the blaze that started,
You pulled the triggers of your Gatling guns,
I made a run for the children but the firewall stopped me.
Thirteen children died from your guns.
I carried my blanket to a wire fence corner,
Watched the fire till the blaze died down,
I helped some people drag their belongings,
While your bullets killed us all around.
I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.
Our women from Trinidad they hauled some potatoes,
Up to Walsenburg in a little can,
They sold their potatoes and brought some guns back,
And they put a gun in every hand.
The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners,
They did not know we had these guns,
And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers,
You should have seen those poor boys run.
We took some cement and walled that cave up,
Where you killed these thirteen children inside,
I said, "God bless the Mine Workers' Union,"
And then I hung my head and cried.
 

Several years ago I heard the late social historian Howard Zinn recount his surprise when he listened to a Woody Guthrie song describing an event in American history referred to as the Ludlow Massacre. What surprised him was that despite several years studying history in high school and at university, he had never heard of this event, one that Zinn considers to be particularly important in understanding worker exploitation and in illuminating the alliance within privileged circles to brutally suppress nonviolent dissent. One interesting aspect to this sad and tragic event was that it occurred with the U.S. government using the military to protect corporate profits on American soil.
In April 1914, the murder of a coal miner union organizer led to 11,000 miners in southern Colorado going on strike. They were employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family, and most were born in Greece, Italy, and Serbia. The strike was against “low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies” (Zinn, 2003, p. 72).
The chain of events of led to the actual massacre of men, women, and children included the arrest of union organizer and a powerful voice for social justice, Mother Jones. As well, after the miners were evicted from their homes they set up a tent colony in the nearby hills, prompting hired gunmen to use Gatling guns and rifles on the tents, killing many miners in the process. The Colorado governor called on the National Guard to help quell the situation. At first, the miners cheered the arrival of the Guard, thinking they had been called to protect the miners and their families from the hired guns. They quickly discovered that the Guard was there to protect the interests of the mine owners, especially after many miners were beaten and arrested.
The stalemate included the Guard bringing in strikebreakers, inviting a leader of the miners into their camp to discuss a truce only to be murdered, and the tragic climax – torch-carrying Guardsmen going into the miners’ camp and setting their tents on fire, resulting in eleven children and two women being burned alive. Workers from the United Garment Workers Union, the Denver Cigar Makers Union, and other miner unions went to the site of the murders to lend support. The New York Times responded with an editorial that said, “With the deadliest weapons of civilization in the hands of savage-minded men, there can be no telling to what lengths the war in Colorado will go unless it is quelled by force” (Zinn, 2003, p. 75). Woodrow Wilson complied with the request from the media to take action against the miners and sent federal troops to end the miners’ resistance, a resistance that resulted in the deaths of 66 miners and their families, and not one militiaman or mine guard being indicted.
The Ludlow Massacre illuminates the vulnerability of workers, especially those from cultures not considered desirable, in countries perceived to be progressive such as the United States and Canada. Moreover, it casts a light on the alliance between the various levels of government, the military, the capitalists, and their mainstream media outlets, an alliance formed to protect the massive profits of the capitalist class over the human and working rights of laborers. It also highlights the very effective strategy of hiding the partnerships between capital and the state apparatus. After all, Professor Zinn learned of the Ludlow Massacre not from one of the many books he had read or from myriad history classes he had taken, but from a song by the folksinger Woody Guthrie. The questions that progressive educators should speculate upon are these: What effect does keeping such knowledge from the public have on their sense of patriotism, on their class consciousness, on their respect for government and related institutions? Why are tragic events kept out of sight from American citizens? In this situation, do the ends justify the means? Why? 

The specter of Ludlow continues to haunt us…
Woody Guthrie’s unnerving account of a space located within the unique intersection of time and space we today commonly refer to as the Ludlow massacre confronts us with the issue of place, or rather non-place, “spaces that resist attempts to intellectually contain or penetrate them.”  The place where the coal miners became physically uprooted, unhomed, and displaced - exiled to the hills, tent town refugee camps where the only conception of security that remained existed within spaces of absence - caves and caverns, hollowed out spaces of shelter while the kerosene fire-bombing continued (from) above.
This non-place, zero-zone, or at least somewhere (if anywhere) within the neighborhood of zero, situates a view from below where we bare witness to class warfare reaching a point of paroxysm, corporate ruling class ideology coupling with state fantasies ushering a united moment of logical fulfillment; the extermination of the very individuals interpolated as raw materials required for the machines operation, and whose bodies continue to fall upon it’s levers in the process.
Spaces are never neutral…
“Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicenter of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.” 

Yet, the terror we face today is a rather amnesiastic one.   The smiling face placed on plantation architecture, claims of a “new day” touted by program directors gaining foothold upon stolen land, and recuperative gestures of hosting these events of collective forgetting are all interlocking directories in a narrative plot that seeks to gloss over socio-political sites of rupture, lull us into complicity, and force us to take part in the very concretization of our erasure.
Spaces are never neutral…
Archeologist Mark Walker lends thought on the space of debate in relation to the non-places we negotiate…

The historical public sphere is an arena for debate but debates that are often structured by inequalities (Bodnar 1992:15-19). These structuring inequalities can be as crass as flows of money or interlocking directorates between corporate and historical boards, and as subtle as the attitudes of the middle-class professionals who largely referee the debates (Bodnar 1992: 15; Beik 1998). There are broad similarities in the narratives that tend to dominate in the end. These narratives are nationalistic and patriotic, emphasizing citizen duties over citizen rights. They emphasize social unity, the continuity of the social order, and gloss over periods of transformation and rupture (Bodnar 1992:13-19). Public memory is still the result of negotiation and debate, albeit between opponents who are often mismatched. The domination of official histories is not total. The same historical event will be experienced, perceived, and interpreted in many ways, generating pasts as contradictory and heterogeneous as the social relations that ultimately spawned them (McGuire 1992: 816-817). Some of these pasts flourish, propagating through official commemorations and interpretations, school textbooks, and the mass media (Trouillot 1995). But the other pasts do not necessarily disappear. The past is remembered through many means?photo albums, family conversations, and local commemorations of histories that have been excluded or marginalized within official history (Popular Memory Group 1982; Bodnar 1992; Funari 1993; Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998).
Remembering Ludlow
As early as 1916, letters, editorials, and cartoons in the United Mine Workers Journal were expressing the not unjustified concern that Ludlow would be erased from public memory. The memory of Ludlow became a battleground almost immediately after the massacre. In addition to Ludlow's seminal role in labor history, Rockefeller's campaign to rehabilitate his image afterwards and to control the public perception of Ludlow led to its gaining a special place in U.S. history as a birthplace of professional public relations (Gitelman 1988; Cockburn 1996; Martinson 1996). The response of the mine workers was immediate and effective. The pamphlet they put out in 1914 (Fink 1914) fixed the name as the "Ludlow Massacre," rather than the "Battle of Ludlow," or the "Ludlow Incident." At the time, defending the idea that Ludlow was an atrocity committed by people as opposed to a battle between evenly matched sides or an unfortunate accident that just happened was not a difficult argument. The UMWA bought the 40 acres surround ing the site of the Ludlow colony before 1916 (Hayes 1916). John White, the president of the UMWA, officially proposed a memorial for the site at the 1916 UMWA convention (White 1916: 35). The convention passed the proposal. Later that year several hundred coalminers met at the site of Ludlow and joined the union {United Mine Workers Journal UMWJ 1916). Regular commemorations seem to have been held at the site thereafter. The monument was finally dedi cated 30 May 1918 (UMWJ 1918b) (Figure 4). The Death Pit was also preserved and consists of a concrete-lined pit into which people can still descend. In subsequent strikes in Southern Colorado, the memory of Ludlow was invoked in mass meetings at the site. For one thing, being owned by the UMWA made it safe ground for miners to meet during strikes. During a strike in 1921, the UMWA erected four tents on the site of Ludlow in symbolic defiance of an order by the Colorado Rangers not to erect tent colonies (Pogliano 1921). The Rangers were aware of the inflammatory symbolism of the tent colony. The International Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies), a rival union to the UMWA, also legitimated a major strike in 1927 by hold ing a meeting at the site of Ludlow (Whiteside 1990:129). In the time work has been done at Ludlow, the United Steelworkers have been participating in the UMWA annual memorial service at Ludlow. They are currently on strike at the CFandI (now Oregon Steel) plant in Pueblo. The steelworkers obviously delight in the historical parallels between the strike of 1913 and today's. In 1998 and 1999 about 400 of them marched to Ludlow carrying a banner listing all the strikers killed there. In 1999 they also held a week-long series of community educational events prior to the memorial service, with speakers, exhibits, and labor-related movies. he memory of Ludlow remains an important one to working-class people and organized labor and is still annually commemorated. But Ludlow is vulnerable to forgetting for precisely the reason that its memory is important to organized labor. It flies in the face of dominant middle-class conceptions of American society. Many of the cover illustrations and the correspondence from the United Mine Workers Journal after the Ludlow Massacre revolve around the contradiction between what happened at Ludlow and dominant conceptions of U.S. society. For example, the cartoon in Figure 5 critiques the idea of the U.S. as a classless society. The heading on this cartoon, "Oh yes, we are partners," refers to one of the reforms that came out of the massacre and its aftermath. Under the influence of his advisor, Mackenzie King (who later became Prime Minister of Canada), Rockefeller argued that labor and capital were, in fact, equal partners in industrial enterprises and should cooperate, an argument that still has resonance today, even among the leadership of some unions… 

Hence, we have seen a renewed wave of spectral purg-ification erupting in contested spaces of haunts.  Professor Walker, amongst others, continue to explain the amnesiastic danger in our current socio-political occasion

Our research at Ludlow engages class conflict in both the past and present. Archaeological fieldwork is contributing new insights about the Colorado Coalfield strike, especially as it concerns the day-to-day existential realities for miners in the shafts and families in the home. Our scholarly contributions are of a piece with wider disciplinary concerns to illuminate agency in the past. By producing knowledge about Labor’s history and significant contributions to national life, we add to archaeology’s body of descriptive and explanatory knowledge. These additions promise to expand the cast of characters involved in the making of America, thereby contributing to more democratic histories.
The other battle is to more broadly disseminate this knowledge in the public arena in an effort to show that the taken-for-granted workplace rights and privileges that Americans enjoy today have a history—and a bloody one at that (e.g. McGuire 2004; Saitta 2005). Recent vandalism at the Ludlow Massacre Memorial, regardless of that event’s immediate causes, gives this public interpretive work a new relevance and immediacy. It suggests that, in one sense, things haven’t changed that much after all. Post-9/11 resurgence of progressivist and triumphalist thought about American history—transparently offered as an antidote to criticisms of American exceptionalism—threaten to swamp recent democratizing trends in public history and memory. The battle today is first and foremost for hearts and minds, yet we are still balanced on the edge of a precipice. A better understanding of class conflict in history— one enhanced by archaeology, and better translated as a piece of national memory—might allow useful interventions before we experience new waves of workplace terrorism and bloodshed. 

Start Giroux 2013

"…stories provide us with a moral sense of the need to keep examining the past in order to ... build a space for self-reflection and define the process of establishing a connection between the collective critical examination of past catastrophes and the learning processes in which societies engage." At a time in history when American society is overtly subject to the quasi militarization of everyday life and endlessly exposed to mass-produced spectacles of commodified and ritualized violence, a culture of cruelty and barbarism has become deeply entrenched and more easily tolerated.
…The civic imagination is in retreat in American society and the public spheres that make it possible are disappearing…
…The United States has become a lockdown state, or more appropriately an authoritarian state, as evidenced by the fact that the Obama administration can: torture at will; imprison at will, indefinitely … make war perpetually on their own say-so; and transform whistleblowing - that is, revealing anything about the inner workings of the lockdown state to other Americans - into the only prosecutable crime that anyone in the complex can commit.  The fateful consolidation of an authoritarian state reaches its tipping point when a government engages in these practices along with the claim that it can kill its own citizens anywhere in the world without recourse …Such policies point to more than an ethically empty space and the atrophy of democratic modes of governance, politics and culture, they point inexorably to the dark caverns of a society that has embraced the foundations of authoritarianism. Democracy has been hijacked in the United States by right-wing extremists, the financial elite, the military-industrial-academic complex and a demagogic cultural apparatus that has created a state of emergency that appears to "lack the kind of collective sense of urgency that would prompt us to fundamentally question our own ways of thinking and acting, and form new spaces of operation." All of us are now in the shooting gallery and we are all potentially the targets. 

We labor in a landmark; confronted by the question, the interregnum or more specifically the non-place of a resolution.  As Spanos writes this space is “a realm of in-between – the No more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.”
Here we must recall…
Spaces are never neutral…
More specifically, the African research group reminds us:

To be certain, American universities, particularly Harvard, do not contain the systematic and coordinated terror and regimentation of military barracks, concentration camps, or industrial factories. Universities are, most of them, "liberal institutions." .. . Universities do indeed function as forums of intellectual debate, dissent, and critical thinking. To equate this latter set of facts with "the University," however, is to confuse a part with the whole—the whole which students are educated to be blind to. For one of the central functions of the forum-dialogue-criticism aspect of the university is to weave a democratic veil which enshrouds a concentrated, highly organized, and undemocratic system of wealth and power. From the point of view of the university as a structure of power and control, debate, dissent, and criticism are healthy and productive only so long as they leave the power structure intact. This is a system of dual power in which one side has no power. It is the truth of the phrase "the marketplace of ideas," in which ideas and men people of ideas are transformed into commodities. 

“Where were you when the topic was announced ”
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce restrictions on and/or substantially increase financial incentives for energy production in the United States of one or more of the following: coal, crude oil, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, wind power.”

“In keeping with this haunting and dislocating reality … I want to say at the outset that the young boy I write about… years after the event, is in some fundamental way foreign to me. This is not only because the minute particulars of his thoughts, feelings, and actions in the seemingly unending midst of that infernal moment has been obscured by the great lapse of time. It is also and primarily because the interim between that time and this, not least the long and arduous process of "education" out of the darkness of ignorance- which is to say, the illusions of "disinterested" truth-has rendered my identity radically different from his. In the painful process of writing about him, I was often taken aback by a sense of alienation not only from his physical appearance but from his mind and soul.” 

“When confronting such spaces, spaces that resist attempts to intellectually contain or penetrate them, the post-Enlightenment reflex has been to continue to try to solve them, to seek solutions detective style. …attempts to construct utopian spaces… hope of restoring the world, of making it "whole" again, by resurrecting a "new Babel" …Yet… such a construction leads not to lucidity but rather to more Babel… another space designed to produce a moment of knowledge that never arrives, the dark room remains locked as it were, allowing neither exit nor entrance.
Despite this resistance to spatial solutions, the narrator/author does, nonetheless, arrive at a discovery of sorts. In The Locked Room, he realizes, "My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world". This does not mean that he has found a way out: "I don't claim to have solved any problems. I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened". The metaphysical detective's conclusion is yet another non-conclusion; he locates a place that is a no-place, that resists the proper. … freeing him from some of the terror of losing the very spatial certainties upon which he once comfortably relied. In short, the narrator comes to a point at which he resists the detective-like compulsion to suppose a place, accepting rather a non-place, a "neither here nor there" as Alford has it, to which he has no access. Unlike the detective, he accepts not knowing as part of the business of living in the space of the postmodern city.” 

It is from this location that we affirm the topical non-place of this year’s resolution – a place simultaneously a-part of, yet imperialistically constructed a-part from resolutional space itself. “Ludlow has been written out of the ‘space’ of national memory, but remains a vital and living ‘place’ in the memory of organized labor. The question now is what politically engaged archaeologists can do to reclaim and expand the space for labor history in national memory.”
Our-part is a situated affirmation of Ludlow’s ghostly presence - a reconstellation of…

“…this specter that refuses to be accommodated to the imperial exceptionalist discourse… By retriev¬ing a number of representative works that bore acute witness, even against themselves, to the singularity of a war America waged against a people seeking liberation from colonial rule and by reconstellating them into the post-9/11 occasion, such a project can contribute a new dimen¬sion not only to that shameful decade of American history, but also, ...provide directives for resisting an American momentum that threatens to destabilize the en¬tire planet, if not to annihilate the human species itself, and also for rethinking the very idea of America.”

This decision is always already, at once, political and inherently rendered within the unique socio-political occasion and negotiated space of debate we find ourselves. “From this exilic perspective also one can see ‘the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally” - an entire relay of paroxyic and incommensurable traces haunting the narration of class imperialisms collective fulfillment.
We are thus interpellated to answer this call from the ab-grounded positionality of in-betweenness in which it emerges, and hence the ongoing struggles and alliances of class warfare itself, as interested participants.

Ludlow is very recent for an archaeological study, for many archaeologists shockingly so. But Ludlow does confront us with a site where archaeologists are forced to engage with audiences, audiences who will take our findings quite seriously. Ludlow highlights the political nature of history and archaeology. It is obvious that just looking at a site like this is a political statement. But what is less obvious is that it is just as much a political statement to not look at sites like this. The silencing of labor history sites and events, such as Ludlow, Blair Mountain, Lattimer, and Homestead, as well as their commemoration is bound up with historical struggles and class interests. Histories are themselves historical, changing as struggles and alliances between interest groups shift as they change and are changed by the social terrain on which their struggles take place. The erasing or trivialization of labor struggle within the historical public sphere involves a number of related processes and interests at local and national scales, from the conscious public relations campaigns of wealthy capitalists to middle-class attitudes towards labor and labor unions, from the disciplinary practices of academic professionals to the anxiousness of civic leaders anticipating tourist interests and desires. Archaeology is an act of commemoration. It participates in the creation of historical memory, creating visions of the past that are rooted in present-day interests: not just our interests but also those of our audiences (Shanks and McGuire 1996). Engaging in dialogues with those outside the guild enriches archaeological and historical discourse by making us aware of the silences in the pasts we have been creating; thus, we open up new directions of research. This is not to deny the existence of a real past. Ludlow did happen. And as archaeologists, the skills and specialized knowledge we bring will provide important information on what happened at Ludlow. But the carefully mapped, expended bullets scattered among the charcoal staining, broken plates, toys, and buttons touch us in ways that go beyond the evidence. Knowing the importance of the past lies in knowing what these "ways" are and why they came to be. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes, the authenticity of the past lies in the struggles of the present. An authentic past is one that engages us as witnesses, actors, and commentators (Trouillot 1995:150-151). 

  Woody Guthrie, “Ludlow Massacre”
  Orlowski 2011 (Paul, Teaching About Hegemony, Ideology and the Purpose of Schools: Then and Now - The Purpose of Schooling: Ideology in the Formal and “Enacted” Curriculum. P50-57)
  Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil: Essay’s on Extreme Phenomenon. Page 128
  Walker 2003 (Mark, The Ludlow Massacre: Class, Warfare, and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado. Historical Archaeology, Vol. 37, No. 3, Remembering Landscapes of Conflict (2003), pp.66-80)
  Saitta, Walker, and Reckner 2005 (DEAN SAITTA, MARK WALKER AND PAUL RECKNER, BATTLEFIELDS OF CLASS CONFLICT: LUDLOW THEN AND NOW.  Pages 210-212. JCA, 15072_F10_197-213 6/24/05)
  Giroux 2/12/13 Henry. “The Shooting Gallery: Obama and the Vanishing Point of Democracy” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/14483-the-shooting-gallery-obama-and-the-vanishing-point-of-democracy
  How Harvard Rules, a critique compiled by the African Research, Group in Cambridge, Mass., and the Old Mole, a radical newspaper, 1969
  William V. Spanos, Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University.  In the Neighborhood of Zero A World War II Memoir.  Page xiv, Preface
  Richard Swope, Professor of English, West Virgina University.  Supposing a Space: The Detecting Subject in Paul Auster's City of Glass.
  Saitta, Walker, and Reckner 2005 (DEAN SAITTA, MARK WALKER AND PAUL RECKNER, BATTLEFIELDS OF CLASS CONFLICT: LUDLOW THEN AND NOW.  Pages 210-212. JCA, 15072_F10_197-213 6/24/05)
  Walker 2003 (Mark, The Ludlow Massacre: Class, Warfare, and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado. Historical Archaeology, Vol. 37, No. 3, Remembering Landscapes of Conflict (2003), pp.66-80)

  Richard Swope, Professor of English, West Virgina University.  Supposing a Space: The Detecting Subject in Paul Auster's City of Glass.

Tournament: Districts | Round: N/A | Opponent: N/A | Judge: N/A
The fundamental premise of the world is not that it is given to us with a set purpose, or endpoint, but that we are given a world that is utterly unintelligible, where reversion and one-upmanship are constantly in play; we’ll call this the principle of reversibility.

The same as in physics or chemistry, for every forward reaction there is an equal reaction in the opposite direction; every equilibrium is only achieved by causing the same amount of disequilibrium elsewhere. This exchange between order and chaos cannot be directed, it can only be expanded or sped up, and in our never-ending attempt to liberate energy, make it more and more productive, we have made ourselves increasingly more vulnerable to the catastrophe of energy.

AII the events described here are susceptible to two kinds of diagnosis: physical and metaphysical. From the physical point of view, we are apparently dealing with a sort of massive phase transition in a human system in disequilibrium. As with physical systems proper, this phase transition remains largely mysterious for us, but the catastrophic development in question is in itself neither beneficial nor malignant: it is simply catastrophic, in the literal sense of the word. The prototype of this chaotic declination, of this hypersensitivity to initial conditions, is the fate of energy. Our culture has seen the development of the liberation of energy as an irreversible process. All previous cultures have depended on a reversible pact with the world, on a stable ordering of things in which energy release certainly played a role, but never on the liberation of energy as a basic principle. For us, energy is the first thing to be 'liberated', and all subsequent forms of liberation are founded on this model. Man himself is liberated as an energy source, so becoming the motor of a history and of a speeding-up of that history. Energy is a sort of fantasy projection which nourishes all modernity's industrial and technical dreams; energy is also what tends to give our conception of man the sense of a dynamics of the will. We know, however, thanks to the most recent findings of modern physics on the phenomena of turbulence, chaos and catastrophe, that any flow - indeed, any linear process - when it is speeded up is inflected in a curious way, a way that produces catastrophe. The catastrophe that lies in wait for us is not connected to a depletion of resources. Energy itself, in all its forms, will become more and more abundant (at any rate, within the broadest time frame that could conceivably concern us as humans). Nuclear energy is inexhaustible, as are solar energy, the force of the tides, of the great fluxes of nature, and indeed of natural catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanoes (and technological imagination may be relied on to find ways and means to harness them). What is alarming, by contrast, is the dynamics of disequilibrium, the uncontrollability of the energy system itself, which is capable of getting out of hand in deadly fashion in very short order.  

We, of course, have a different understanding of energy; energy to us is benign, its a controllable process that we can use to make cars go, lights turn on, and reactors spin around and around, while neutralizing medium keeps the chain reaction of combustion or fission from spiraling out of control. We have liberated energy in all its attending forms; we derive power from the breakdown of atoms, from the explosion of hydrogen atoms in the sun, from all manners of natural disasters in their smallest scales.
 “We have already had a few spectacular demonstrations of the consequences of the liberation of nuclear energy (Hiroshima, Chernobyl), but it must be remembered that any chain reaction at all, viral or radioactive, has catastrophic potential. Our degree of protection from pandemics is epitomized by the utterly useless glacis that often surrounds nuclear power stations. It is not impossible that the whole system of world-transformation through energy has already entered a virulent and epidemic stage corresponding to the most essential character of energy itself: a fall, a differential, an imbalance – a catastrophe in miniature which to begin with has positive effects but which, once overtaken by its own impetus, assumes the dimensions of a global catastrophe. Energy may be looked upon as a cause which produces effects, but it is also an effect which is self-reproducing, and can thus cease to obey any law of causality. The paradox of energy is that it implies a revolution on the level of causes and a revolution on the level of effects – each, practically speaking, independent of the other. It thus becomes the locus not only of a chain of causes but also of an unhindered flood of effects. Energy thus enters a state of superfusion. The whole system of world-transformation enters a state of superfusion. Formerly a material and productive variable, energy has now become a vertiginous process feeding upon itself (which is, incidentally, why there is no danger that we shall run out of it) 

There is a very clear divide between what we believe we can do with nuclear energy and the reality of the matter. We aren’t told how dangerous nuclear energy is, we aren’t even privy to thousands of classified documents about how our reactors work. Congress doesn’t care about all the nuclear waste we’ve dumped, and the press is more interested in who Obama goes golfing with than anything substantial. All the decisions about the nuclear are in the hands of the people least interested in making it safe or effective, the government. Ever since the cold war, The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world. What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain .

The nuclear reactor has become the material manifestation of the political model, where the neutralizing medium of deterrence keeps the whole thing from spinning out of control, making local and episodic episodes of war, or sacrifice, as much of its power source as its undoing. The political aims only to continue the political the same way deterrence makes use of war to underscore the importance of deterrence. In our attempts to manage and control the threat of nuclear annihilation, we have made the balance of terror into the terror of balance. 

The careful vetting of all reactors by the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to the careful control of the rate at which plants can produce energy, to the literally thousands of safety measures imposed, nuclear deterrence today is no different than Mutually Assured Destruction in the 80’s; both have completely reduced everyone to pure exchangeability, both forms of deterrence are based exclusively on appearances, and both of them completely encroach the planet, and both make life insufferable

Deterrence is not so much a power relation as a mindset. It holds people in check by making them feel powerless, disappointed, neutralized – deterred. When it is strong enough, it no longer needs violent repression or war – it precludes conflict in advance. In nuclear deterrence for instance, life is reduced to survival and conflicts become pointless, as they can’t reach the ultimate stakes. Simulation feigns reality and thereby deters or prevents reality. But this feigned reality is not entirely unreal, because it produces effects of reality – it is like a faked illness which produces real symptoms. Think for instance of punishments applied in response to acts: they’re neither an objectively real consequence, since they’re invented, nor an imagined consequence, since they actually happen. They’re a simulated consequence, an artificially created hyper-reality. According to Baudrillard, there is no true reality against which simulation can be compared. It is therefore more subversive of reality than a simple appearance or falsehood. It controls people in a different way – through persuasion or modeling. Instead of demanding that people submit to a prior model or norm, it interpellates people as already being the model or the majority. It thereby destroys the distance between the self and the norm, making transgression more difficult. It creates a doubled self from which it is hard to extract oneself. The question “from where do you speak, how do you know?” is silenced by the response, “but it is from your position that I speak”. Everything appears to come from and return to the people. The doubled self is portrayed and displayed in forms such as CCTV images, without a gap between representation and what is represented. This same doubling happens across different spheres – the model is truer than the true, fashion is more beautiful than the beautiful, hyperreality is more real than the real, and so on. The effect of excess comes from the lack of depth (of the imaginary, but also perhaps of relations and of context). Doubles are inherently fascinating. They’re very different from the seduction of effective images and illusions, such as trompe l’oeil (a type of art which can be mistaken for a real object). The double allows a kind of manipulation or blackmail in which the system takes hostage a part of the self – affect, desire, a secret – and uses it for control. Baudrillard thinks we are stalked by our doubles, like in the film The Student of Prague. Yet doubles are also insufficient. People don’t like being ‘verified’ and predicted in advance. People prefer ideas of destiny to random probability. Deterrence is a barrier between ourselves and our drive for the symbolic. Deterrence also has an effect of deterring thought, of ‘mental deterrence’. It discourages people from thinking critically, hence feeding unreality. Disempowerment feeds into this deterrence of thought, as do the media, and the promotion of superficial sociality. At the same time, the system also creates a kind of generalized social lockdown or universal security system. This ‘lockup and control system’ is designed to prevent any real event from happening. This system, based on norms, replaces older systems of violence, war and law, creating a social desert around itself. It tries to pre-plan everything, to leave nothing to contingencies or chance. It tries to make everything manageable through statistics and predetermined responses. The system tries to prevent accidental death through systematic, organized death. For Baudrillard, this is the culmination of years of civilizing process and socialization. It is the culmination of the evolution of the dominant system. The failure of progressive teleologies has occurred because powers to lock-down and control have increased faster than powers to emancipate. The result is a kind of generalized nihilism. Deterrence induces general mobilization, pacification and dissuasion – a death or incorporation of active energies. The state dreams of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism pre-emptively, through a generalized terror on every level. This is the price of the security of which people now dream, as Baudrillard already observed in 1983 – eighteen years before the state’s dream was realized. Overt and selective repression transmutes over time into generalized preventive repression. For instance, the police according to Baudrillard do not reduce violence – they simply take it over from crime and and become even more dangerous. The code deters every real process by means of its operational double. For instance, it prevents real revolutions by means of simulated revolutions, real wars by means of simulated wars, and so on. This leaves no space for the real to unfold of its own accord or for events to happen. Baudrillard thinks prisons and death are being replaced by a more subtle regime of control based on therapy, reform and normalization. The right and left are now represented mainly by the split between direct repression and indirect pacification. Baudrillard sees these options corresponding to the early, violent phase of capitalism, with its emphasis on conscious psychology and responsibility, and its more advanced, ‘neo-capitalist’ form, which draws on psychoanalysis and offers tolerance and reform. A therapeutic model of society, promoted by advertisers, politicians and modern experts, actually covers up real conflicts and contradictions. It seeks to solve social problems by re-injecting simulations such as controlled smiles and regulated communication. He also refers to a regime of social control through security and safety, blackmailing people into conformity with the threat of their own death. He sees this as surrounding people with a sarcophagus to prevent them from dying – a kind of living death. 

Now, everything is finally coming full circle, and the principle of reversibility rears its ugly face at us, while Energy begins to take its revenge, becoming “the walking exigent circumstance we’ve created,” and reducing the planet to one giant chain reaction of combustible components that are all set, just waiting to blow. Nuclear plants sitting on fault lines, years of nuclear waste piled up in yucca mountain, barely able to stop the decay of isotopes, are just time-bombs waiting to infect the entirety of the globe with its unstoppable rate of proliferation, decay, frenzied exchange of electrons across atoms in a planet wide melt-down. 

The dangers threatening the human species are thus less risks of default (exhaustion of natural resources, dilapidation of the environment, etc.) than risks of excess: runaway energy flows, chain reactions, or frenzied autonomous developments. This distinction is a vital one, for while risks of default can be addressed by a New Political Ecology, the basic assumptions of which are by now generally accepted (indeed, they are already written into the International Rights of the Species), there is absolutely nothing to counter this other immanent logic, this speeding-up of everything, which plays double or nothing with nature. In the first case, the restoration of equilibrium to our ecological niche is still possible, the energies in play could still be rebalanced; in the second case, however, we are confronted by a development that is irretrievably out of balance. In the first case ethical principles may be brought to bear: a teleology that transcends the material Process involved - even if merely the goal of survival – may come into play; in the second case, however, a process whose only goal is limitless proliferation will inevitably absorb all transcendence and devour all agents thereof. A full-blown and planet-wide schizophrenia, therefore, now rules: even as all sorts of ecological measures are being taken, even as a strategy for the proper use of the world, for an ideal interaction with the world, is being deployed, there is a simultaneous proliferation of enterprises of destruction, a total unleashing of the performance principle. And the very same forces often contribute to both trends. 

Surely the experts, our scientists and politicians, have a back-up plan for us, but back-ups of back-up plans, safety checkpoints, have become as useless as the trenches people used to dig around nuclear power plants. The same way an unexpected asteroid hit Russia the same day we were all transfixed on 2012-DA14, or that the greenest superbowl to date, where fans were offered to buy carbon credits, couldn’t keep the lights on; these experts cannot be expected to plan for disaster, because all their stock is premised on a disaster never happening. Dmitry Medvedev, in response to the surprise asteroid, perhaps said it best, "It's proof that not only are economies vulnerable, but the whole planet" is as well.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to read Baudrillard as a deep ecologist here. Instead, his preoccupation is with the highly tuned man-made systems of globalised exchange and commodification. These systems are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms of prediction and prevention against both terrorism and natural catastrophe. Yet the very level of technological integration of these mechanisms paradoxically means that the smallest incident has a potentially destabilising effect on the whole system. Extreme vulnerability and technological hubris go hand in hand, creating a situation in which the slightest thing ‘concourt à la défaillance d’un système qui se voudrait infaillible’¶ (2002b: 77). Again a geological reading of this situation is possible: to be ‘infallible’ is to believe that we have eradicated all flaws or failings in the system, terms that derive from the low Latin ‘fallere’ (to¶ deceive), sharing this etymological root with geological ‘faults’. This is made all the clearer in the¶ French where ‘faille’ is precisely the common term for both fault-lines in the Earth’s crust and¶ failings within artificial systems. It is as though the globalised technological system of power was claiming to have gone one better than the global geological system of power (plate tectonics) by having erased all its own fault-lines. Yet what the geological system might teach the man-made one is that the global and globalised systems of power are necessarily composed of fault-lines; that the tectonic and the technological are both structured by their faults and work because, not in spite of, them. The whole point of the plate-tectonic system is that it is integrated by its fault-lines – they are precisely what make it work as a system. As Kennedy (2002) noted after 9/11, the West has¶ built itself on a series of its own fault-lines but has failed to see them as such – until they reveal their integrity to the system, their intrinsic necessity in all major spheres of activity. This is best summed up in the instances of defaulting that periodically beset both global financial institutions and national governments. They default on their debts and on their constitutional duties in a dual¶ display of economic and moral bankruptcy, not despite their best efforts but because defaulting is¶ integral to their systems of governance. What then have terrorists to do with all of this? They are precisely the ones who see the faultlines for what they are, who show the system to be necessarily fallible. They are Sade’s libertines planting their little bombs around Etna, not making but exacerbating and exploiting fault-lines (‘failles’) that already exist, indeed that are integral to the system they challenge. They are the 9/11 bombers turning the system’s symbols of omnipotence against it – its high-tech planes, gleaming architecture, stock-market speculation, media networks, etc. (Baudrillard, 2002a: 27−8). And as is the case with their geological models of earthquake, volcano or tsunami, the question is never really if the bombing or the attack will happen but when. 

The impending disaster of planet-wide nuclear meltdown should hardly give us pause; if anything, the possibility of a real disaster should come to us as a relief from the perfectly preserved lives that we live now. 

Intercept the energy behind earthquakes: sheer madness; it would be just as mad to win energy from road accidents, runover dogs, from everything that perishes and breaks down. A new perspective, perhaps even a new hypothesis: if all things tend towards perishing and breaking down, then accidents and catastrophies could become the main source of energy in the future. One thing is certain: if we can't even manage to intercept seismic energy, we can never manage to calm the symbolic wave: symbolic energy (if one can term it as such), i. e. the power of fascination and irony, produced by such an occurrence is in no proportion to the destructive material energy potential it releases. And it is precisely this symbolic power, the bursting energy of a catastrophe that we want to harness in one mad plan, and in an even more direct plan we will want to foresee earthquakes, to be able to beat them with evacuation schemes. The ridiculous thing is that the experts from San Francisco who are most proficient  in this field have figured out that calling a state of emergency with evacuation because of an imminent earthquake would create a panic, the effects of which would be more devastating than the catastrophy itself. Here, too, a complete farce (of the system: but not an irony of fate). For want of a real catastrophe it should at least be permitted to trigger off a catastrophe by means of simulation. A catastrophe which will be just as good as the real thing and which will make an even better substitute for it, too. 

We choose to embrace this unknowable energy future and cast off all restrictions.
Thus, the plan: RESOLVED: The United States federal government should substantially eliminate all topical restrictions on production of nuclear energy.

We use the debate space to accelerate the simulation of the nuclear, and push these representations to their point of collapse; nothing we say in the round necessarily permeates the real, it is only a question of withdrawing our symbolic stake in a system of deterrence to deconstruct the way that system operates and generates itself. In the face of impending disaster, we would prefer to keep calm, and carry on instead of losing our heads. 

Other possibilities of resistance arise around the issue of implosion. The system insulates itself against crisis by resisting explosion. It converts the explosive force of crisis into a homeopathic dose of simulated catastrophe. Against this constant drip-feed of simulated catastrophe, Baudrillard suggests, the only means of mitigation is to make a real catastrophe arrive. This is perhaps why events like Hurricane Katrina are almost euphoric for some survivors, though traumatic for others. Disaster unties the knots of anxiety and terror in which people are caught. This is also why terrorism is so fascinating. Real violence makes the invisible violence of security disappear. According to Baudrillard, power is collapsing. Institutions and “the social” are collapsing. Implosive events take this process further, speeding it up. They are necessarily incalculable in terms of their effects. The endpoint of this process is catastrophe. For Baudrillard, catastrophe is the abolition of causes and the creation of ‘pure, non-referential connections’. Such connections are inherently beautiful and seductive. Catastrophe is not necessarily disastrous as is usually assumed. It is a disaster only for meaning and power. Implosion offers possibilities because of the generalization of the remainder. When the system becomes saturated, everything turns to and becomes the remainder. The remainder – what is barred – continues to exist. Because the system has claimed to be everything, it comes back inside and shatters the system. This may be why the system now imagines itself under siege from enemies within. Without the imaginary, without a space beyond the system’s coded functioning, it can no longer keep what it excludes outside. He suggests, for instance, that architects could form a conception of cities based on their remainders, such as cemeteries and waste grounds. Such an act would be fatal to architecture. It is thus on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. For instance, sanity is refounded on the basis of madness (the theory of the unconscious). Metropolitan societies exclude the indigenous, only to find the indigenous at their foundation (urban ‘tribes’, gangs, subcultures…) Death is excluded, only to be seen or foreshadowed everywhere. Structures become unstable because the remainder is no longer in a specified place. It is everywhere. When everything is repressed or alienated, the entire field is repressed or alienated – so nothing is repressed or alienated, everything is within the visible field. Repressed energy is no longer available to be channeled by the system. The totalizing nature of power today makes it more vulnerable than ever. The more total the system seems, the more inspiring any little setback for it becomes. Every small defeat now carries the image of a chain reaction bringing down the system. Baudrillard proposes a strategy of forcing power to occupy its own place, so as to make itself obscene. By making power appear as power, its absence is made visible, and it disappears.