Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 1 | Opponent: Weber RaSh | Judge: Peters, Donny

Off

The energy future of the 1ac is lock-in. Challenges to commonality happen at huge systemic levels, and constraining our thought to a simple problem/solution mindset risks incredible suffering.

Korowicz 2011(David, Physicist and lecturer, Theoretical Astrophysics University of London, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, http://goo.gl/AI3IZ \\stroud)

Our daily lives are dependent upon the coherence of thousands of direct interactions, which are themselves dependent upon trillions more interactions between things, businesses, institutions and individuals across the world. Following just one track; each morning I have coffee near where I work. The woman who serves me need not know who picked the berries, who moulded the polymer for the coffee maker, how the municipal system delivered the water to the café, how the beans made their journey or who designed the mug. The captain of the ship that transported the beans would have had no knowledge of who provided the export credit insurance for the shipment, who made the steel for the hull, or the steps in the complex processes that allow him the use of satellite navigation. And the steel-maker need not have known who built the pumps for the iron-ore mine, or how the oxygen for the furnace was refined. Every café has customers like me who can only buy coffee because we are exchanging our labours across the world in ways that are dependent upon the globalised infrastructure of IT systems, transport and banking. The systems and the myriad businesses upon which they depend are only viable because there are economies of scale. Our global infrastructure requires millions of users across the world, the ship needs to carry more than coffee beans, and my café needs more than a single customer. The viability of my morning coffee requires the interactive economic and productive efforts of the globalised economy. Thinking this way enables us to see that the global economy, and thus our civilisation, is a single system. This system’s structure and dynamics are therefore central to understanding the implications of ecological constraints and, in particular for this analysis, peak oil.[2] Here are some of its principal features. The global economy is self-organising The usually seamless choreography of the global economy is self-organising. The complexity of understanding, designing and managing such a system is far beyond our abilities. Self-organisation can be a feature of all complex adaptive systems, as opposed to ‘just’ complex systems such as a watch. Birds do not ‘agree’ together that arrow shapes make good sense aerodynamically, and then work out who flies where. Each bird simply adapts to its local environment and path of least effort, with some innate sense of desire and hierarchy, and what emerges is a macro-structure without intentional design. Similarly, our global system emerges as a result of each person, company and institution, with their common and distinctive histories, playing their own part in their own niche, and interacting together through biological, cultural and structural channels. The self-organisation reminds us that governments do not control their own economies. Nor does civil society. The corporate or financial sectors do not control the economies within which they operate. That they can destroy the economy should not be taken as evidence that they can control it.The global economy has growth-dependent dynamics We have come to regard continued economic growth as normal, part of the natural order of things. Recessions are viewed as an aberration caused by human and institutional weakness, the resumption of economic growth being only a matter of time. However, in historical terms, economic growth is a recent phenomenon. Angus Maddison has estimated that Gross World Product (GWP) grew 0.32% per annum between 1500 and 1820; 0.94% (1820-1870); 2.12% (1870-1913); 1.82% (1913-1950); 4.9% (1950-1973); 3.17% (1973-2003), and 2.25% (1820-2003). [3] We tend to see global economic growth in terms of change. We can observe it through increasing energy and resource flows, population, material wealth, complexity and, as a general proxy, GWP. This can be viewed from another angle. We could say that the globalising growth economy has experienced a remarkably stable phase for the last 150 years. For example, it did not grow linearly by any percentage rate for any time, decline exponentially, oscillate periodically, or swing chaotically. What we see is a tendency to compound growth of a few percent per annum, with fluctuations around a very narrow band. At this growth rate, the system could evolve, unsurprisingly, at a rate to which we could adapt. The sensitivity felt by governments and society in general to very small changes in GDP growth shows that our systems have adapted to a narrow range of variation. Moving outside that range can provoke major stresses. Of course small differences in aggregate exponential growth have major effects over time, but here we are concentrating upon the stability issue only. The growth process itself has many push-pull drivers: in human behaviour; in population growth; in the need to maintain existing infrastructure and wealth against entropic decay; in the need to employ those displaced by technology; in the response to new problems; and in the need to service debt that forms the basis of our economic system. The global economy grows in complexity Complexity can be measured in several ways — as the number of connections between people and institutions, the intensity of hierarchical networks, the number of distinct products produced and the extent of the supply-chain networks required to produce them, the number of specialised occupations, the amount of effort required to manage systems, the amount of information available and the energy flows required to maintain them. By all these measures, economic growth has been associated with increasing complexity. [4] As a species, we had to become problem solvers to meet our basic needs, deal with status anxiety and respond to the new challenges presented by a dynamic environment. The problem to be solved could be simple such as getting a bus or buying bread; or it could be complex, such as developing an economy’s energy infrastructure. We tend to exploit the easiest and least costly solutions first. We pick the lowest hanging fruit or the easiest extractable oil first. As problems are solved new ones tend to require more effort and complex solutions. A solution is framed within a network of constraints. One of the system constraints is set by the operational fabric, comprising the given conditions at any time and place which support system wide functionality. For modern developed economies this includes functioning markets, financing, monetary stability, operational supply-chains, transport, digital infrastructure, command and control, health services, research and development infrastructure, institutions of trust and socio-political stability. It is what we casually assume does and will exist, and which provide structural foundation for any project we wish to develop. Our solutions are also limited by knowledge and culture, and by the available energetic, material, and economic resources available to us. The formation of solutions is also shaped by the interactions with the myriad other interacting agents such as people, businesses and institutions. These add to the dynamic complexity of the environment in which the solution is formed, and thus the growing complexity is likely to be reinforced as elements co-evolve together. As a result, the process of economic growth and complexity has been self-reinforcing. The growth in the size of the networks of exchange, the operational fabric and economic efficiencies all provided a basis for further growth. Growing complexity provided the foundation for developing even more complex integration. In aggregate, as the operational fabric evolves in complexity it provides the basis to build more complex solutions. The net benefits of increasing complexity are subject to declining marginal returns — in other words, the benefit of rising complexity is eventually outweighed by its cost. A major cost is environmental destruction and resource depletion. There is also the cost of complexity itself. We can see this in the costs of managing more complex systems, and the increasing cost of the research and development process. [5] When increased complexity begins to have a net cost, then responding to new problems arising by further increasing complexity may be no longer viable. An economy becomes locked into established processes and infrastructures, but can no longer respond to shocks or adapt to change. For the historian Joseph Tainter, this is the context in which earlier civilisations have collapsed. [6] The global economy is increasing co-dependence and integration As the globalising economy grows, increased population, wealth and integration opens up the possibility of greater economies of scale and more diverse productive niches. When new technologies and business models (solutions or sets of solutions) emerge, they co-adapt and co-evolve with what is already present. Their adoption and spread through wider networks depends on the efficiencies they provide in terms of lower costs and new market opportunities. One of the principal ways of gaining overall efficiency is by letting individual parts of the system share the costs of transactions by sharing common infrastructure platforms (information and transport networks, electric grid, water/sewage systems, financial systems), and integrating more. Thus there is a reinforcing trend of benefits for those who build the platform and the users of the platform, which grows as the number of users grows. In time, the scale of the system becomes a barrier to a diversity of alternative systems as the upfront cost and the embedded economies of scale become a greater barrier to new entrants, especially where there is a complex hub infrastructure. The lack of system diversity is not necessarily due to corporate monopolies. There is vigorous competition between mobile phone service providers but they share common information platforms and depend on electricity networks and the monetary system, both of which have little or no system diversity. Our operational systems are integrated into the wider economy. Expensive infrastructure and continual need for replacement components mean that economies of scale and a large number of economically connected people are necessary to make them viable. For example, the resources required to maintain the IT infrastructure on which we rely for critical services demand that we also buy games consoles, send superfluous text messages and watch YouTube. In other words, our non-discretionary needs and the critical systems that support them are affordable because they are being cross-subsidised by discretionary spending, which itself depends on further economies of scale being generated by the globalised economy that provides us with our discretionary income in the first place. From this perspective, asking about the resource requirements for individual products of the economy (a computer or my morning coffee, say) is akin to asking about the resource requirements for your finger; it only makes sense if the rest of the body is properly resourced. Each new level of infrastructural complexity implies a new fixed cost in terms of energy flows and resources required for maintenance and operation, and an economy of scale that can support such flows. It also locks into place co-dependence amongst components of our critical infrastructure that integrate the operational fabric. For example, if our IT platform failed, so too would our financial, knowledge and energy systems. Similarly, if our financial system collapsed, it would not take long for our IT and supply-chains to collapse too. The UK-based Institute of Civil Engineers acknowledges that the complex relationships between co-dependent critical infrastructures are not understood. [7] Finally, as new infrastructural platforms become established, legacy systems are left to shrink or decay. Thus, if suddenly we all were to lose the communications infrastructure introduced over the past ten years, we would not return to the system we had before that infrastructure was introduced. Instead, most of us would be left without any fall-back communication system at all. The global economy has bounded resilience An isolated, poor and self-sufficient community is vulnerable to severe risk of a general failure of food production due to flooding or pestilence, say. Even comparatively rich France had 18 general famines in the eighteenth century and hundreds of local ones [8]. Without access to money, weak transport links, markets and communications, surplus production from elsewhere could not relieve local starvation. The growth in the interconnectedness, infrastructure and institutions of the globalising economy meant local risks could be shared over wide networks, and this enhanced local resilience. One of the great virtues of the global economy is that while factories may fail and links in a supply-chain break, the economy can quickly adapt by fulfilling its needs elsewhere or finding substitutes. This is a measure of the resilience within the globalised economy and is a natural feature of a de-localised and networked complex adaptive system. But it is true only within a certain context. There are common platforms or ‘hub infrastructure’ that maintain the operation of the global economy and the operational fabric as a whole, and the collapse of such hubs is likely to induce systemic failure. Principal among these are the monetary and financial system, accessible energy flows, transport infrastructure, economies of scale and the integrated infrastructures of information technology and electricity. Our freedom to change can be limited by lock-in Lock-in can be defined broadly as an inability to deal with one problem by changing a sub-system in the economy without negatively modifying others upon which we depend. For example, our current just-in-time food system and agricultural practices are hugely risky. As the current economic crisis tightens, those involved in food production and distribution strive for further efficiencies and economies of scale as deflation drives their prices down. The lower prices help maintain welfare and social peace, and make it easier for consumers to service their debts, which in turn supports our battered banks, whose health must be preserved or the bond market might not show up at a government auction. As a result, it is very hard to do major surgery on our food systems if doing so required higher food prices, decreased productivity and gave a poor investment return. However, the primary lock-in process is the growth economy itself. We are attempting to solve systemic ecological problems within systems that are themselves dependent upon increasing resource depletion and waste. We are embedded within economic and social systems whose operation we require for our immediate welfare. But those systems are too optimized, interconnected and complex to comprehend, control and manage in any systemic way that would allow a controlled contraction while still maintaining our welfare. The problem of lock-in is part of the reason why there is no possibility of a managed degrowth. The global economy’s adaption to ecological constraints displaces and magnifies stresses Peak oil is expected to be the first ecological constraint to impact significantly on the advanced infrastructure of the globalised economy. However, it is only one part of an increasingly integrated web of constraints including fresh-water shortages, bio-diversity loss, soil erosion and reduced soil fertility, shortages of key minerals and climate change. As a result, it makes little sense to compartmentalise our focus as we do through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, for example. The interwoven nature of our predicament is clearly shown by the Green Revolution of the 1960s that supposedly ‘solved’ the increasing pressure on food production from a growing population. Technology was marshalled to put food production onto a fossil-fuel platform, which allowed further population overshoot and thus a more general growth in resource and sink demands. The result is that even more people are more vulnerable as their increased welfare demands are dependent upon a less diverse and more fragile resource base. As limits tighten, we are responding to stress on one key resource (by, say, reducing greenhouse gas emissions or getting around fuel constraints by using biofuels) by placing stresses on other key resources that are themselves already under strain (food, water). That we have to do so demonstrates how little adaptive capacity we have left. Our local needs depend on the global economy Our basic and discretionary needs are dependent on a globalised fabric of exchange. So too is our ability to exchange our labour for the means to pay those needs. The conditions that maintain our welfare are smeared over the globe. We have adapted to the stability of globalising growth over the decades. Our skills and knowledge have become ever more refined so as to contribute to the diverse niches within the global economy. The tools we interact with — computers and software, mobile phones, machines and payment systems — maintain our productivity. So too do the supply-chains that feed us, provide inputs to our production process and maintain the operation of the systems we depend upon. Our productivity also depends upon the global economy of scale, not just those reaped by our direct customers, but also the conditions that support their economic activity in the wider economy. We are all of us intertwined. For this reason we can say that there is no longer any wholly indigenous production. Money and credit integrate the global economy If one side of the global economy is goods and services, the other side is money and credit. Money has no intrinsic value; it is a piece of paper or charged capacitors in an integrated circuit. It represents not wealth, but a claim on wealth (money is not the house or food we can buy with it). Across the globe we exchange something intrinsically valuable for something intrinsically useless. This only works if we all play the game, governments mandate legal tender and monetary stability and trust are maintained. The hyper-inflation in Weimar Germany and in Zimbabwe until it adopted the US dollar shows what happens when trust is lost. The thermodynamics of the global economy Like human beings and life on earth, economies require flows of energy through them to function and maintain their structure. If we do not maintain flows of energy (directly, or by maintenance and replacement) through systems we depend upon, they decay. Humans get their energy when they transform the concentrated energy stores in food into metabolising, thinking and physical labour, and into the dispersed energy of heat and excreta. Our globalising economy is no less energy constrained, but with one crucial difference. When humans reach maturity they stop growing and their energy intake stabilises. Our economy has adapted to continual growth, and that means rising energy flows. The self-organisation and biodiversity of life on earth is maintained by the flows of low-entropy solar energy that irradiate our planet as it is transformed into high-entropy heat radiating into space. Our complex civilisation was formed by the transformation of the living bio-sphere and the fossil reserves of ancient solar energy into useful work, and the entropy of waste heat energy, greenhouse gases and pollution that are the necessary consequences of the fact that no process is perfectly efficient. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. But energy can be transformed. The second law of thermodynamics tells us how it is transformed. All processes are winding down from a more concentrated and organised state to a more disorganised one, or from low to higher entropy. We see this when our cup of hot coffee cools to the room’s ambient temperature, and when humans and their artefacts decay to dust. The second law defines the direction in which processes happen. In transforming energy from a low-entropy to a higher-entropy state, work can be done, but this process is never 100% efficient. Some heat will always be wasted and be unavailable for work. This work is what has built and maintains life on earth and our civilisation. So how is it that an island of locally concentrated and complex low-entropy civilisation can form out of the universal tendency to disorder? The answer is that more and more concentrated energy has to flow through it so as to keep the local system further and further away from the disorder to which it tends. The evolution and emergence of complex structures maximises the production of entropy in the universe (local system plus everywhere else) as a whole. Clearly, if growing and maintaining complexity costs energy, then energy supply is the master platform upon which all forms of complexity depends. [9] The operational fabric evolves with new levels of complexity. As integration and co-dependency rise, and economies of scale become established, higher and higher fixed costs are required to maintain the operational fabric. That cost is in energy and resource flows. Furthermore, as the infrastructure, plant and machinery that are required to maintain economic production at each level expand, they are open to greater depreciation costs or, in thermodynamic terms, entropic decay. The correlation between energy use and economic and social change should therefore come as no surprise. The major transitions in the evolution of human civilisation, from hunter-gatherers through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, have been predicated on revolutions in the quality and quantity of energy sources used. We can see this through an example. According to the 1911 Census of England and Wales, the three largest occupational groups were domestic service, agriculture and coal mining. By 2008, the three largest groups were sales personnel, middle managers and teachers. [10] What we can first notice is 100 years ago much of the work done in the economy was direct human labour. And much of that labour was associated directly with harnessing energy in the form of food or fossil fuels. Today, the largest groups have little to do with production, but are more focused upon the management of complexity directly, or indirectly through providing the knowledge base required by people living in a world of more specialised and diverse occupational roles. What evolved in the intervening century was that human effort in direct energy production was replaced by fossil fuels. The energy content of a barrel of oil is equivalent to 12 years of adult labour at 40 hours a week. Even at $100 a barrel, oil is remarkably cheap compared with human labour! As fossil-fuel use increased, human effort in agriculture and energy extraction fell, as did the real price of food and fuel. These price falls freed up discretionary income, making people richer. And the freed-up workers could provide the more sophisticated skills required to build the complex modern economy which itself rested upon fossil-fuel inputs, other resources and innovation. In energy terms a number of things happened. Firstly, we were accessing large, highly concentrated energy stores in growing quantities. Secondly, fossil fuels required little energy to extract and process; that is, the net energy remaining after the energy cost of obtaining the energy was very high. Thirdly, the fuels used were high quality, especially oil, which was concentrated and easy to transport at room temperature; or the fuels could be converted to provide very versatile electricity. Finally, our dependencies co-evolved with fossil-fuel growth, so our road networks, supply-chains, settlement patterns and consumer behaviour, for example, became adaptive to particular energy vectors and the assumption of their future availability. The growth and complexity of our civilisation, of which the growing GWP is a primary economic indicator, is by necessity a thermodynamic system and thus subject to fundamental laws. Inneo-classical models of economic growth, energy is not considered a factor of production. It is assumed that energy is non-essential and will always substitute with capital. This assumption has been challenged by researchers who recognise that the laws of physics must apply to the economy and that substitution cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world. Such studies support a very close energy-growth relationship. They see rising energy flows as a necessary condition for economic growth, which they have demonstrated historically and in theory. [11] [12] [13] It has been noted that there has been some decoupling of GWP from total primary energy supply since 1979 but much of this perceived decoupling is removed when higher energy quality is allowed for. [14] It is sometimes suggested that energy intensity (energy/unit GDP) is stabilising, or declining a little in advanced economies, a sign to some that local decoupling can occur. This confuses what are local effects with the functioning of an increasingly integrated global economy. Advanced knowledge and service economies do not do as much of the energy-intensive raw materials production and manufacturing as before, but their economies are dependent upon the use of energy-intensive products manufactured elsewhere, and the prosperity of the manufacturers to whom they sell their services.

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Existential risk is systemic, not a flash of instability to be predicted and controlled. The 1AC brackets the full complexity of crisis and the value questions behind their scenarios—Preventing the ADAPTATION and RESILIENCE which is our only own hope for a viable future.

Mangalagiu 2011 [Diana Mangalagiu, Prof of Strategy at Smith School of Enterprise and Environment-University of Oxford “Risk and resilience in times of globalization” An emerging research program for Global Systems Science: Assessing the state of the art, 10/4/11, http://www.gsdp.eu/]

1. Introduction The recent financial crisis highlights the challenges of, and the potential of catastrophic impacts from the failure to address global, systemic and long term risks. The crisis was neither prevented, nor effectively anticipated, by the hosts of experts in risks and futures employed by the industry. Despite the sophisticated strategic planning and risk management approaches adopted by individual banks and regulators, the lack of reflexivity in anticipatory knowledge processes, coupled with overconfidence in calculable and manageable risks, contributed to the denial, dismissal and ignorance of new forms of vulnerability and, in particular, systemic risk (Wilkinson and Ramirez, 2010; Selsky et al, 2008). It also highlights that risk management approaches that focus on stress testing the parts (e.g. individual banks, companies, governments, cities etc.) of a system are no longer enough. The notion of systemic risk and practices of systemic risk management are being influenced by multiple traditions in scholarship (e.g. complexity science, resilience concepts), contesting theories of risk (e.g. social, mathematical, psychological) and the practical experiences harvested through professional bodies focused on risk management in banking and financial services, environmental management, urban planning, insurance and reinsurance, etc. In this WP, we focus on identifying and comparing how risk management, the search for resilience and their respective approaches to strategic foresight and anticipatory knowledge might be better related and more effectively practiced in a range of different contexts such as at the organizational, sectoral-, national- and international-systems levels. Our aim is to: - Unpack what systemic risk means and how it is shaped by different disciplines and different traditions of risk management; also unpack what resilience means; - Reveal and clarify how systemic risk and resilience are being operationalized in a range of settings and situations; - Formulate research questions and develop knowledge, methodologies and guidance in order to reveal, inform and create so-called best and next practices in systemic risk management and governance and search for resilience. Our first year deliverable is the state of the art concerning risk, systemic risk and resilience in times of globalization. 2. Preliminary state of the art on risk and systemic risk 2.a. General conceptions of risk 4 The conventional risk management paradigm assumes that a loss event is relatively limited, specific and isolated and with proper analysis can be anticipated and thus, avoided or contained and mitigated. In the conventional risk management paradigm the default is to forecast the future - or a probabilistic analysis – i.e. the assumption that the future is knowable. Formal interest in risk and risk management originates from the fields of engineering and epidemiology in the 20th century (Kates and Kasperson, 1983) and from interdisciplinary studies of natural hazards (White and Haas, 1975). Since then the social sciences created significant independent contributions to risk research (Golding, 1992). Krimsky (1992) summarized the roles theory can take in risk analysis, which are quantitative laws, taxonomic frameworks, models, functionalist explanations, cognitive explanations, or analogical models and interpretive representations. Beck (1992, 1994) and Giddens (1991, 1999) pointed to the elaborate role risk plays in the macro organizational levels of modern society. Societies are self-reflective in the sense that they seek to govern their own behavior to avoid catastrophic consequences. As such, the concept of risk is also politically relevant (Lupton, 1999). Providing an overview of the different perspectives on risk research, Renn (1992) distinguishes the technical perspective on risk (expected or modeled value, probabilistic risk assessment), economic perspectives (risk-benefit analysis), psychological perspectives (psychometric and cognitive analyses), sociological perspectives (plurality of approaches), and cultural perspectives (grid-group analysis). While economic and technical risk assessments are similar with regard to their reductionist and one-dimensional view of the world, narrowing down risk analysis to a form of quantifiable expected value, psychometric, sociological, and cultural views take a multi-dimensional view that is concerned with 5 the myriad forms of risk perception. In Renn’s (1992) systemic classification of risk perspectives the main applications of the latter group are therefore seen in policy making, regulations, mediation, and risk communication, whereas the former be applicable for decision making (insurance, health, environmental protection, and safety engineering). The different research strands can further be summarized regarding their theoretical focus on either the actual assessment of risk, the perception of risk, or blended approaches. Technical, economic, and quantitative social benefit approaches to measure risk can be counted towards those perspectives concerned with practical risk assessment (see e.g. Just, Heuth, and Schmitz, 1982; Lowrance, 1976; Starr, 1969), also apparent in the broad use of the value at risk concept in finance, which basically attempts to calculate an expected value of losses (see e.g. Jorion, 2007). The psychological perspectives look into the perception of risk at an individual level (see e.g. Boholm, 1998; Slovic, 1987; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) while the cultural theories of risk are concerned with the perception of risk at a collective level, as they see risk as the result of what different groups within a society – shaped by their social norms, values, and ontological assumptions – perceive as potential hazards (see Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Rayner, 1992; Thompson et al, 1990). In a way, cultural theories of risk attempt a form of risk assessment in a qualitative and social constructivist manner, while psychological theory examines the different perceptions of objective risks. Cultural theory has been criticized for seeing individuals only in aggregate, as being too simplistic, rather descriptive, and as being difficult to measure empirically (Renn, 1992). Marris et al. (1998) find some support for both the psychological and the cultural theory paradigms, although the cultural theory explains only very little variance in risk perception. As the only common denominator of sociological theories of risk is their awareness that human actors can only perceive the world through subjective social and cultural influences (Renn, 1992), they may best be seen as blended approaches leaning towards either weak or strong constructivist positions. Sociological perspectives further take into account what consequences arise from risk for the society (see e.g. Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1999) and bring fairness and competences into the picture, which can provide a basis for normative conclusions regarding risk policies (Renn, 1992). The different theoretical conceptions of risk are non‐exclusive and can nurture each other. One attempt to integrate different perspectives consists in the Amplification of Risk framework, which builds on the analogy of signaling theory and sees risks to emerge from signals of initial real risks amplified in several steps of social interaction processes influenced by cultural setting (see Kasperson, et al., 1988; Kasperson, 1992; Kasperson, et al, 2003; Renn, et al, 1992). 2.b Systemic risk in the futures literature In the futures literature2, the term ‘systemic risk’ is not featured frequently and has only been used recently (Checkley 2009). Other terms akin to systemic risk are in more frequent use. They comprise complex hazards (de Souza Porto and De Freitas 2003), extreme risks (Nakau 2004), emerging risks from science and technology (Wiedemann et al. 2005), catastrophic risk (Geiger 2005), natural disaster-triggered technological (natech) disasters (Cruz et al. 2006), extreme risks and human extinction (Tonn and MacGregor 2009), and high impact low probability events (Ord et al. 2010). While the last view of systemic risk (high impact with low probability event) comes closest to a definition, no coherent understanding of systemic risk yet exists. Arguments for post-normal approaches to science and decision-making have been made in the literature, especially so for systemic risk (or close terms), but the explicit treatment of systemic risk so far is limited to case studies and selective areas of threats in the future. It seems that catastrophic or systemic risks per se have been of greater interest in the futures literature so far than the methods and tools to deal with them. One stream of literature focuses on a conceptual approach to systemic risk. In this stream, three groups can be distinguished. The first follows a positivistic endeavor akin to classic risk management approaches quantifying systemic risk to make it measurable and in consequence manageable. The second group applies narrative scenario techniques and describes possible future systemic risks. The third class of works considers a classification of the severity of threats to mankind, and aims to identify the most threatening ones. In an attempt to answer the question how much costs are bearable to protect against a catastrophic event, Nakau (2004) proposed a risk evaluation model, which classifies extreme events quantitatively. Based on stochastic probability he introduces tolerable levels of failure probabilities as a sustainability criterion, i.e. how many victims constitute a certain level of impact. Checkley (2009) employed an empirical test that explains the creation of systemic risk in a venture capitalist context, seeing systemic risk as risks affecting all parties. They argue that such risk occurs as mutual funds diversify their investment among several venture capitalists, but those syndicate for investment projects – so, diversification effects are unmade and are thus pseudo, which in turn gives rise to systemic risk. A series of scenario works in 2009 have considered narratives explaining possible paths to the extinction of the human race (see Coates 2009; Goux-Baudiment 2009; Tonn and MacGregor 2009). Tonn and MacGregor (2009) describe a chain of events that can lead to the extinction of the human race over the next 1000 years. Goux-Baudiment (2009) on the other hand imagines a chain of events that could lead to human extinction in only 150 years. He further investigates the human agency in this scenario, and whether and how human interaction could break this disastrous chain of events. Tonn (2009) adds to those perspectives as he derives a theoretically acceptable risk level of human extinction from qualitative criteria (i.e. fairness, unfinished business, and maintaining options). He finds that the objectively acceptable level is lower than the currently (subjectively) expected level and concludes that risk must therefore be reduced. In a different approach, Coates (2009) discussed extreme risks that humankind faces. He developed a classification system for those events, which centers on the severity of extreme events. The approach is similar to Nakau (2004) as it attempts to evaluate severity of risks, but different as it does not rely on quantitative criteria. Coates concludes that a nuclear winter, the use of nuclear weapons, and the eruption of a super-volcano are the most severe threats to civilization and humankind, but that other events such as asteroids also bear some risk. Another stream of literature focuses on the perception and social construction of systemic risk. First, studies look into the paradoxical situation of policy makers to stimulate innovation but also to regulate risks arising from accelerating innovation. This argument is put forward to support post-normal science and decision-making as the appropriate approach to modern (systemic) risk management situations. Then, risk perception biases for catastrophic risk have been examined and ultimately, the classic reductionist treatment of risk management was held responsible for rising occupation with risk in society. Public actors play a paradoxical role in the relationship between risk and innovation, between the interests of the public and private actors (Ravetz, 2003). Ravetz sees accelerating innovation as a necessary tool for private companies to compete in a ‘globalizing knowledge economy’ and the role of the public to ensure an environment in which speedy innovation can take place. On the other hand, public actors need to ensure the safety of new technologies and innovation acting as an agent for their citizens, remaining the source of public trust and safety provider for citizens. Besides this paradoxical role, technological innovation threatens the global environmental system; so, how much technological 7 innovation is desirable and how much risk in it acceptable? Ravetz argues that finding appropriate answers to this question can only be found in a policy-making process that involves the public in dialogues about scientific findings and by disclosing ambiguities in scientific finding, thus embracing policy principles for a post-normal world of science… continues 8 ages later4. Preliminary state of the art on resilience In contrast to the conventional risk management approach and linear risk paradigm, the search for resilience tends to emphasize that there is no such thing as a ‘zero risk society’ and suggests, instead, that there is a need for groups and organizations to collaborate in building the adaptive capacity that enables the whole system to organize and re-organize in the face of inherent uncertainty, emergence and inevitable surprise. The resilience approach accepts change as inevitable and endemic and focuses on building the adaptive capacity of the system and its ability to re-organize and transform after a disturbance. Resilience is most commonly used to describe the ability of an entity to withstand and respond to shocks in the external environment. The concept of resilience is becoming a core concept in the social and physical sciences and in matters of public policy. Definitions of resilience, however, vary. There is neither scientific nor professional agreement on what constitutes resilience principles and the operationalization of these principles in practice. However, as a general definition of the resilience of a particular system – the ability to maintain critical functions in the face of regular disturbance from a range of shocks (threats) combined with ability to adopt adaptive behavior when facing unknowable or unexampled disturbances – is the commonly used one. Intellectual traditions on resilience are a still emerging and chaotic field, fragmented across different disciplines and professional practices. The concept of 'resilience' has already been constructed in a 10 variety of fields and traditions, including engineering, systems ecology, political sciences, management and organization theory, cultural theory, complex adaptive systems, cybernetics and psychology. An initial review of the literatures relating to resilience reveals a fragmented field. In social ecology, resilience is concerned with the longer-term survival and functioning of ecosystems – species, populations and services in a changing or fluctuating operating environment. The social ecology approach introduced by Holling (1973) argues ecological systems are non-deterministic because of inherent complexity. characterizes the ecosystem as complex set of elements and parts existing in dynamic interrelationship and interdependency. The key contribution of the ecological view of resilience is to provide a focus on the systemic nature of the problems and on the longer-term demands on policy and management. It emphasizes the need to keep options open, while appreciating heterogeneity and keeping a broader than local view organization – this is in contrast to dominant management approaches which are concerned with compartmentalizing issues, limiting change to the margins and views of the future rooted in attempt to preserve the present. The critical distinction is that between resilience and stability. The stability/equilibrium paradigm approaches the future with the aim of strengthening the status quo by making the present system “resilient to change” and aiming to achieve stability and constancy. In the management literature, the focus when using the resilience concept is on the persistence and survival of individual businesses and institutions in face of change. A bulk of the management literature on organizations focuses on the strategies for individual businesses to be ‘resilient’ to change -- on innovation, experimentation and leadership to ensure survival and growth of a specific institution/business -- however the ecosystem perspective requires us to think about the health and of the forest and the services its provides rather than the role of individual species! What are the sources of resilience in the system and or an organization? The process of increasing resilience is different from optimization and improving system performance in existing conditions – what organizational characteristics build resilience. Successful adaptation requires for individual organizations, agents and businesses to continue to full fill their own goal and function but must also include measures of promoting adaptive capacity of the system. Despite the richness in conceptual thinking underpinning the concept of resilience, there is limited evidence of how groups, organizations are societies are translating the notion of resilience into practice. The constructivist tradition in social theory argues that social response is non- deterministic because of plural perception and the negotiations of values, cultures, choices and epistemologies. The managers are part of the system that is being managed and define the system and its characteristics in different ways. Understanding the loss, creation and maintenance of resilience through the process of co-discovery – scientists, policy makers, practitioners, stakeholders and citizens is at the heart of building the capacity to deal with whatever the future might bring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some societies are organizing for resilience. For example, both the governments of Canada and Singapore have resilience as the goal of their national strategic plans. There is a nascent literature emerging, as yet unmapped, on operationalizing resilience beyond the organizational level. For example, in an approach to adapting an urban delta to uncertain climate change, Wardekkar et al. (2009) identify five options for resilience: (1) homeostasis: incorporation of feedback loops; (2) omnivory: having several different ways of fulfilling needs; (3) flatness: preventing a system from becoming too top heavy enables more effective localized responses, self-reliance and self-organization; (4) buffering: the ability to absorb disturbances to a certain extent and (5) redundancy: having multiple options – routes, supply chains, etc – so that if one fails, others can be used. 11 The resilience frame opens the opportunity to think in terms of nonlinear and non-deterministic futures and, in doing so, to displace practices in probable futures with plausible and preferable futures. The resilience frame also invites attention to realizing transformation, rather than future proofing of established structures, identities and values. It invites consideration of the uncertainty as irreducible and inherent, going beyond the lack of knowledge and encompassing ambiguity and ignorance.

Debate is a key space to challenge deterministic interpretations of systems. A complexity-consistent understanding of policy is key to challenging the hegemony of linearity.

Callaghan 08 (Gill, Research Fellow at Durham University, Evaluation and Negotiated Order : Developing the Application of Complexity Theory, Evaluation 2008 14: 399 \\stroud)

A central absence in the practice of social science has been in applying the implications of these understandings to direct policy research. The separation between those working with theory in the social sciences and institutionalized empiricist social research has its most damaging impact here. Questioning a technical-rational approach based on objectivism is fundamental and implies rethinking the nature and meaning of the process and research undertaken to examine it. One particular, and hugely consequential, implication of complexity theory for evaluation studies is that the transferable knowledge to be gained is not direct and cannot be based on extracting factors from context. What is of much greater value is the contextrich explanation that can be derived. The simple idea of ‘roll out’ from pilot studies becomes problematic. The promise of theory-based approach however is much greater. In moving away from objectivist, determinist explanations we can actually begin to make space for human agency. This understanding begins from a recognition that human individuals are not the ‘cultural dopes’ problematized by Garfi nkel (1967) in his reaction to Parsonian systems theory, rather they act upon a material world to transform it. We can return to Weber for insights into the importance of refl exivity as a central feature of such human action (Shils, 1949). Nicolis and Prigogine (1989) put this in far-from-equilibrium terms recognizing the impact of individual projects and desires, often based on anticipated futures, which in combination with environment shapes the dynamics of the system. It is the refl exivity of agents and their ability to anticipate and act accordingly that prevents the narrative of history from being a deterministic story. The role of agency is less often theorized in studies that purport to understand the manifestation of cause and process in policy implementation because of implicit linear logic. Frequently the roles of ‘champions’ and ‘reticulists’ (Friend et al., 1974) are treated in unproblematically voluntaristic terms. To develop that lens we can draw on the concept of negotiated order to suggest the value of insights from social theory to understanding policy processes. This theory allows a fi t between a complexity-consistent understanding of structure and action at the local level and from this foundation it becomes possible to identify ways of exploring and understanding the system and which can access meaning, individual and collective action. The notion of negotiated order is premised in understanding how systems are not only structural entities, but are also fundamentally shaped in the context of the forces and conditions pertaining at the ‘bottom’ of the hierarchy, being created and recreated by the actors located there. Strauss et al. (1933) developed the concept from fieldwork in organizations in response to the clash between the perspectives of Parsons (primacy of order) and Dewey (primacy of change). Strauss argued that within organizations order is negotiated and that this is an ongoing production of the actors involved. Organizational relations, therefore, although having a structural quality, are the product of this continual process of making and remaking. The existence of structure is important in setting the positions from which individuals negotiate and, in turn, which give these negotiations their patterned quality, but these products are historical and temporally shaped, always open to review and revision. The order that is produced is best described as negotiated because it relies on the daily decisions of actors within this context. In a later article Strauss corrected an early overemphasis on the role of actors: What was omitted [from our fi rst formulation of the negotiated order was] actors’ theories of negotiation [and] detailing of negotiation subprocesses. Hence . . . no explicit specifying of conditions and consequences associated with these subprocesses . . . no working out of a paradigmatic analysis in terms of structural contexts and negotiation contexts . . . virtually no references to the options for alternatives to negotiation: coercion, persuasion, manipulation of contingencies, and so on. Issues relating to rules, norms, and the like were handled explicitly, but others, relating to power, coalition, politics, and the like, were touched on only implicitly. (Strauss, 1993: 249–50) In negotiated order we can understand the structures as created but also as creating the context for action. This has echoes through Marx (2005: 1): Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he fi nds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp on the brain of the living. and Bourdieu (1990), whose concept of habitus is the pre-conscious embodiment of this interactive relationship. For Strauss the negotiation of order within organizations is essential to its operation. If we substitute the notion of system for organization, these negotiations have particular characteristics that render them useful to complexity-based evaluation. They involve a crucial temporal dimension, being constituted and reorganized over time in relation to the regularities established by the structures, the essentially patterned nature of relationships and forms of interaction. Interestingly Fine, in his discussion of negotiated order, described it as a metaphor rather than a theory because it provides a ‘way of looking at the world’ rather than testable propositions (1984: 240). The same comment has commonly been made in introducing complexity theory to the social sciences. This article is seeking to consider how these ‘ways of looking’ can be used to inform evaluation practice. The four tenets of negotiated order are usefully summarized by Fine: First Strauss argued provocatively that all social order is negotiated order: organization is not possible without some form of negotiation. Second, he asserted that specific negotiations are contingent on the structural conditions of organization (a point occasionally deemphasized by his followers). Negotiations follow lines of communication, i.e. they are patterned, not random. Third, negotiations have temporal limits, and they are renewed, revised and reconstituted over time. Fourth structural changes in organization require a revision of the negotiated order. In other words, the structure of the organization and the micropolitics of the negotiated order are closely connected. (Fine, 1984: 241) Each of these tenets can be found in complexity terms, recognizing the importance of interaction, history and contingency. Positing the negotiated nature of order recognizes the signifi cance of local action in shaping the system and the rele vance of interaction in bringing about change, whose nature may have been anticipated by none of the participants. Such negotiations are regularly observable in the compromises and reformulations of policy at the local level. They are based on pre-existing structures which have formed historically through a sedimentation process. This has been recognized as signifi cantly shaping the actual nature of policy implementation based on the interaction of new initiatives with preexisting confi gurations and organizational relations. Studies of such initiatives have recognized the signifi cance of history (Hudson et al., 1999). Closely associated with structures are patterned ways of communicating within and between organizations which can be explored through the formal and the informal processes that each have their impact on its nature. In identifying the relationship between structure and micro-politics Strauss begins to identify what it is relevant to know. Together they provide a basis for evidence of why, for example, target-driven approaches are seen by complexity theory as undermining (Medd, 2001), and more broadly as distorting, the systems that they try to control (Bevan and Hood, 2006). These external interventions disrupt or reshape the negotiations that take place, bringing with them both intended and unintended consequences. In evaluating policy Sanderson (2002) has pointed to the problem of attributing cause in complex, cross-cutting and multiple interventions. Such policy initiatives operate within the context a relationship of structure and agency in which negotiation plays a signifi cant role. Negotiated order is complexity consistent, drawing attention to the multiplicity of perspectives which ‘derives from differential statuses, experiences, and memberships in groups, organizations and local worlds’ (Strauss, 1993: 252). These negotiated elements can often be identifi ed in the process of implementing rules and policies, originating from the centre, but taking specifi c local form. Using negotiated order, we can identify the impact of different organizational cultures and levels of professional power as well as the roles and legitimacies of other actors in the system. In examining the impact of policy at the local level we are trying to grasp interactions between a range of, not always congruent, interests based in historical actions, which set the conditions and boundaries around what is considered possible. An appeal to negotiated order theory allows us to identify a strong role for social science knowledge and, within this context, the relevance and possibility of building knowledge in successive evaluations across contexts. Rather than ‘judging’ outcomes as dysfunctional we can understand the particular order that has been, and is being, negotiated and to bring theories of power to bear upon that understanding. We can then revisitthe kind of learning that can take place. Here several questions emerge once we reject the Newtonian version of science based on reductionism, determinism and objective knowledge. If an existing order is a negotiated order in Strauss’s terms then an evaluation of a new policy initiative seeks to examine these negotiations, informed by the interests of actors, based on the philosophies and ideologies of their professional practice and the organizational constraints within which they work. In evaluating cross-cutting and multiple interventions signifi cant knowledge arises through understanding these negotiations. Constructionism is helpful in reminding us that these issues and the objectives of policy may be defi ned differently according to the standpoint of the actors involved. We need to go beyond that to understand the interaction of these elements to explain action at the local level, based in local histories and the contingency of causation. Thus, for example, instead of bemoaning individual failures or suggesting professional intransigence in the face of new policy, we would develop an understanding of the persistence of the demarcation disputes and boundary-setting activity that frustrates attempts to secure ‘joined up’ working (Alaszewski et al., 2003). Professional and organizational boundaries within the sphere of health and social care can be understood as negotiations in the context of structural conditions which may be embedded in, but extend beyond, the organizational or professional remit to the wider systemic level (Callaghan and Wistow, 2006). While it might be claimed that this knowledge could be deployed within a positive framework the point here is that this approach is epistemologically consistent with an understanding based in complexity theory. The latter sensitizes us to what is the important information to seek. We are, then, looking for information about a world that is not at equilibrium but one in which small local variations can be decisive in both the magnitude and form of change in an intervention. Complexity theory helps us to understand what to look for. Negotiated order theory suggests ways of investigating these issues and identifying the processes and negotiations that shape policy. Rather than discounting local variation, it acknowledges that systems are characterized by local action and that such action forms a sedimentation of practices that gives the system history. The crucial thing then is to understand it. The value of this theory lies in taking us one stage further in applying complexity theory to creating researchable questions.

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 3 | Opponent: UNLV EP | Judge: Cheek, Ryan
Wind farms bad for Bats
Walz 2010 (Gene, prof @ Univ Manitoba, “Bats in Trouble”, 11/10/10, http://goo.gl/Dxeng
stroud)
Wind farms are killing migratory bats; those giant wind turbines cropping up everywhere are more of a threat to bats than to birds. Prof. Willis has discovered that bats that travel through the prairies, especially in the fall, are attracted to tall structures like wind turbines (also radio towers) during migration. Hundreds of thousands of dead bats have been discovered near them over the past ten years or so. With blades that spin at fourteen times per minute (or 210 kilometers – 140 miles — per hour at the tips) bat deaths are caused not just by collisions but from decompression of the flying mammals’ lungs as well. Hibernating, non-migratory bats are dying at alarming rates in Quebec, Ontario, and the northeastern US. In the past four years over one million bats have died from White Nose Syndrome (WNS), a fungus that affects bats’ ability to survive hibernation. This is perhaps the fastest decline of a wildlife species ever.
MASSIVE WIND POWER EXPANSION WOULD ANNIHILATE BATS, PUSHING NEW SPECIES TOWARDS EXTINCTION
The Electricity Daily 2004
["Wind Power Moves to Address Bat Mortality," March 10, 2004, LN]
FWS biologist Alex Hoar said that bat mortality as a result of collisions with wind turbines has been reported in West Virginia, Tennessee, Minnesota and Wyoming. Nine of the 46 U.S. bat species account for almost 90 percent of the bat deaths at wind projects, said Hoar, and several of those species are in decline. None, however, are on the endangered species list, but the likelihood of that will increase as wind expands.
POLLENATION OF AGAVE PLANTS BY LONG-NOSED BATS MIGRATING FROM THE SOUTHWEST US IS NECESSARY FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE TEQUILA INDUSTRY BECAUSE OF WILD CACTII'S GENETIC VARIABILITY
Pederson and Montana 2004
[Scott and Susan, pro-bat activists, "Bats, Forgotten Pollinators, and Margaritaville," Bats Northwest, 2004, www.batsnorthwest.org/batsArticle.asp?ID=57,]
The Tequila Connection (Arita and Wilson, 1987) - The relationship between humans and Agave plants (magueyes) took an interesting turn when the squeezed-juices of several species of Agave were found to spontaneously ferment into an alcoholic beverage that the Aztecs called "octli". In particular, the Blue Agave (A. tequilana - native to Tequila, Mexico), provided an Agave-distillate of such exceptional quality that it came to be known simply as "tequila". Finally, through the judicious addition of lime juice and salt, one has a Margarita! The relationship between bats and Margaritas may seem obscure at first, but during their yearly migrations between Central Mexico and the Southwestern United States, Sanborn's Long-nosed Bat (Leptonycteris sanborni) and the Mexican Long-nosed Bat (L. nivalis) depend upon the nectar/pollen of Saguaro, Organ Pipe cacti, and several species of Agave as a food source on these long journeys. These nectar-feeding bats have elongate tongues and muzzles specially adapted for drinking/lapping nectar that accumulates in the bottom of these specially adapted desert flowers that open only at night. While feeding, the bat's heads are coated with pollen which they transfer to other flowers thereby cross-fertilizing other plants. Long-nosed bats and Agaves are the products of thousands of years of coevolution and have developed special adaptations for living together. This bat-plant relationship is extremely sensitive to disturbance: destruction of cave roosts, pesticides, and land-development. Surveys have shown that populations of long-nosed bats have declined, but the possible impact on the Agaves/tequila industry is unknown. Until recently Mexicans did not fully appreciate that the genetic variability of their indispensable wild populations of "maguey pulqero" (Agave) depend on pollination by a silent, nocturnal ally - the long-nosed bats.

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 3 | Opponent: UNLV EP | Judge: Cheek, Ryan
Text: The United States Federal Government Should Make Permanent the Wind Production Tax Credit for thing-like wind technology.

Thing like wind turbines solve.  They are more efficient and more economic than normative wind turbines.  Furthermore, they are locally determined and controlled which overcomes all attitudinal inherency problems.  Finally, device driven wind turbines destroy local environmental aesthetics and communities.  Thing like technology solves these problems.  
Brittan Jr.  2001.  Gordon G. Brittan Jr.  Philosophy Professor at Montana State University.  “Wind, Energy, Landscape: Reconciling Nature and Technology,” Philosophy and Geography.  Volume 4.  No. 2.  2001 – M.E.

What, then, do I propose? A very different sort of wind turbine. A group of us have been working on its development for the past twenty years, although in fact the idea can be traced back to Crete, where thousands of windmills have been spinning for generations on the Lesithi Plain.37
In a very schematic way, let me draw your attention to its main features. The design parameters are traditional—high solidity, low r.p.m., high torque. The rotor consists of sails, furled when the wind blows hard, unfurled when it does not. The machinery is exposed and thoroughly accessible, clear and comprehensible. All of it can be repaired by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of electronics and mechanics, with the sort of tools used to fix farm machinery. The generators, gear boxes, and brakes are situated at ground level and the turbine does not require a crane for either its installation or repair, or any sort of tower.38 It is a down-wind machine and tracks easily and freely. In two words, it is a “thing” and not a “device.”39 All of Borgmann’s criteria are satisfied.
Sails, of course, have a very long history. They were the first way in which humans captured the energy of the wind. The context they supply has to do with long voyages and the hopes and fears that attended them, with naval battles fought and races won. Long central in human life, they are well-integrated and for this reason, among others, beautiful.
Sails also allow for engagement and skill. Anyone who has ever sailed knows what it is like to feel the power of the wind in his hands and to take full advantage of it by shaping the sails in the right sort of way and choosing the best angle of attack. But you do not have to have sailed to use this windmill. All that is necessary is that you have experienced putting up a sheet to dry in the wind or have tried to fold an umbrella. How different this experience is from holding up a toy plastic windmill, an experience significant only for young children.
A sail turbine is sensitive to the wind, turning at lower speeds, moved by it alone and not by gears and motors, furling and unfurling as needs be. Even at top speed, it turns more slowly than conventional wind turbines (at less than a third their rate) and is never merely a distracting blur. Even in large arrays, the water-pumping sail machines on the Lesithi Plain have a very pleasing appearance.
All very well, but what about the efficiency and economy of the sail turbine? Whatever intrinsic characteristics it might have, however beautiful it might be, it still has to perform. We have always been able to generate power curves comparable to conventional turbines, with this exception, that we begin to generate electricity at lower wind speeds.40 Our problem up to this point has been the mechanical reliability of the turbine, principally with respect to the furling device. We think we have at long last solved this problem. Otherwise, the cost per kilowatt-hour is projected to be somewhere in the vicinity of $0.03, competitive with other, more conventional forms of generation.
The comparatively small size and relative simplicity of the sail turbine means that it can be locally owned and operated, one machine at a time. Changes taking place in the American power industry have made this more feasible than ever. Much of the early resistance to wind energy came from the utilities; in addition to the unreliability of the turbines then available, wind energy did not very well fit the utilities’ “industrial model,” however many efforts were made to conform to that model on the part of the wind energy companies themselves.41 But we have entered a phase in which electrical energy is being de-regulated and de-centralized, just the sort of development that Schumacher and others had in mind. It will, I believe, be more and more possible for owners of small numbers of wind turbines, and of the co-operatives into which I see themselves forming, to put their power on the grid, particularly since wind-generated electricity on even the most optimistic projections will never amount to more than ten percent of the total.
There are, of course, a number of problems with the analogy; but I think that in important respects a number of relatively small machines, working together, will ultimately prove to be more efficient, as well as more beautiful, than a single very large machine, in the same way that a number of smaller processors, operating in parallel, surpass the capacity of very large main frame computers.
Finally, and again following Leopold’s lead, I want to urge a pluralistic approach. If we pay the kind of detailed attention to landscapes to first uncover and then appreciate their beauty, then we must conclude that certain kinds of turbines will “fit” some of these landscapes better than others. I have tried to make a case for our own soft foil turbine, the Windjammer. In fact, just as not all sails and sailboats are of the same shape and size, varying as a function of the winds and the seas in which they are found and the purposes to which they are put, it seems to me that the Windjammer can be adapted in a variety of ways. But there are other turbine designs, some of them not yet imagined, that will “fit” their own landscapes better. To this point, governments and utilities, and the engineers they fund, have presupposed almost from the outset the viability of a particular design, and devoted almost all of their resources to “improving” it. In the process, they have discounted plans and ideas that might be more acceptable aesthetically. One central result is that they have also created large-scale and determined resistance to wind energy.
Along the same lines, too much effort has been devoted to making the conventional large, bladed turbine palatable to the general public. This effort has been predicated on the essential subjectivity of aesthetic considerations and the thought that taste can be manipulated. I have argued that the aesthetic ideals taken as normative in our own cultural tradition have at the very least an important objective component. It follows from the nature of these ideals, however they are further to be construed, that only “things,” in their depth and complexity, can be beautiful. Rather than relapse into subjectivity or manipulate taste, we need to re-open the basic design and aesthetic questions, questions which, I have tried to suggest, cannot very well be separated from the character of contemporary technology or the ways in which we take up with the world. Perhaps raising these sorts of questions about human and natural landscapes is a main task of philosophers interested in geography.

Wind turbines are technological devices that don’t fit the environment.  They separate our experience from the actual production of energy.
Brittan Jr.  2001.  Gordon G. Brittan Jr.  Philosophy Professor at Montana State University.  “Wind, Energy, Landscape: Reconciling Nature and Technology,” Philosophy and Geography.  Volume 4.  No. 2.  2001 – M.E.
Despite the fact that they are in most respects environmentally benign, electricity- generating wind turbines frequently encounter a great deal of resistance. Much of this resistance is aesthetic in character; wind turbines somehow do not “fit” in the landscape. On one (classical) view, landscapes are beautiful to the extent that they are “scenic,” well-balanced compositions. But wind turbines introduce a discordant note, they are out of “scale.” On another (ecological) view, landscapes are beautiful if their various elements form a stable and integrated organic whole. But wind turbines are difficult to integrate into the biotic community; at least in certain respects, they are like “weeds.” Moreover, there is a reason why the 100-meter, three bladed wind turbines now favored by the industry cannot very well be accommodated to any landscape view. They are, as Albert Borgmann would put it, characteristic of contemporary technology, distanced “devices” for the production of a commodity rather than “things” with which one can engage. It follows that the only way in which the aesthetic resistance to wind turbines can be overcome is to make them more “thing-like.” One such “thing-like” turbine is discussed.

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 3 | Opponent: UNLV EP | Judge: Cheek, Ryan
Text: The United States federal government should immediately implement a smart grid system in the united states.

Existing grid is stretched to the max
Department of Energy (http://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid#smart_grid
stroud)
Maybe you have heard of the Smart Grid on the news or from your energy provider. But not everyone knows what the grid is, let alone the Smart Grid. "The grid," refers to the electric grid, a network of transmission lines, substations, transformers and more that deliver electricity from the power plant to your home or business. It’s what you plug into when you flip on your light switch or power up your computer. Our current electric grid was built in the 1890s and improved upon as technology advanced through each decade. Today, it consists of more than 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1 million megawatts of generating capacity connected to more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines. Although the electric grid is considered an engineering marvel, we are stretching its patchwork nature to its capacity. To move forward, we need a new kind of electric grid, one that is built from the bottom up to handle the groundswell of digital and computerized equipment and technology dependent on it—and one that can automate and manage the increasing complexity and needs of electricity in the 21st Century.

Smart grid solves terrorism, the impact of natural disasters, and efficiency.
Department of Energy (http://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid#smart_grid
stroud)
The Smart Grid represents an unprecedented opportunity to move the energy industry into a new era of reliability, availability, and efficiency that will contribute to our economic and environmental health. During the transition period, it will be critical to carry out testing, technology improvements, consumer education, development of standards and regulations, and information sharing between projects to ensure that the benefits we envision from the Smart Grid become a reality. The benefits associated with the Smart Grid include: More efficient transmission of electricity Quicker restoration of electricity after power disturbances Reduced operations and management costs for utilities, and ultimately lower power costs for consumers Reduced peak demand, which will also help lower electricity rates Increased integration of large-scale renewable energy systems Better integration of customer-owner power generation systems, including renewable energy systems Improved security Today, an electricity disruption such as a blackout can have a domino effect—a series of failures that can affect banking, communications, traffic, and security. This is a particular threat in the winter, when homeowners can be left without heat. A smarter grid will add resiliency to our electric power system and make it better prepared to address emergencies such as severe storms, earthquakes, large solar flares, and terrorist attacks. Because of its two-way interactive capacity, the Smart Grid will allow for automatic rerouting when equipment fails or outages occur. This will minimize outages and minimize the effects when they do happen. When a power outage occurs, Smart Grid technologies will detect and isolate the outages, containing them before they become large-scale blackouts. The new technologies will also help ensure that electricity recovery resumes quickly and strategically after an emergency—routing electricity to emergency services first, for example. In addition, the Smart Grid will take greater advantage of customer-owned power generators to produce power when it is not available from utilities. By combining these "distributed generation" resources, a community could keep its health center, police department, traffic lights, phone system, and grocery store operating during emergencies. In addition, the Smart Grid is a way to address an aging energy infrastructure that needs to be upgraded or replaced. It’s a way to address energy efficiency, to bring increased awareness to consumers about the connection between electricity use and the environment. And it’s a way to bring increased national security to our energy system—drawing on greater amounts of home-grown electricity that is more resistant to natural disasters and attack.

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 3 | Opponent: UNLV EP | Judge: Cheek, Ryan
Wind turbines are devices that separate us from our experience with the environment.  It is evaluated only on the basis of efficiency.
Brittan Jr.  2001.  Gordon G. Brittan Jr.  Philosophy Professor at Montana State University.  “Wind, Energy, Landscape: Reconciling Nature and Technology,” Philosophy and Geography.  Volume 4.  No. 2.  2001 – M.E.
Borgmann’s interpretation of technology and the character of contemporary life can be criticized in a number of different ways.26 Still, the distinction between “things” and “devices” reveals, I think, the essence of our inability to develop a landscape aesthetic on which contemporary wind turbines are or might be beautiful, and thereby explains the widespread resistance to placing them where they might be seen.27 For the fact of the matter is that contemporary wind turbines are for most of us merely devices. There is therefore no way to go beyond or beneath their conventionally uncomfortable appearance to the discovery of a latent mechanical or organic or what-have-you beauty. The attempt to do so is blocked from the outset by the character of the machine.28
Think about it for a moment: Except for the blades, virtually everything is shielded, including the towers of many turbines, hidden from view behind the same sort of stainless steel that sheathes many electronic devices. Moreover, the machinery is located a great distance away from anyone, save the mechanic who must first don climbing gear to access it and often, for liability reasons, behind chain-link fences and locked gates.
The lack of disclosure goes together with the fact that the turbines are merely producers of a commodity, electrical energy, and interchangeable in this respect with any other technology that produces the same commodity at least as cheaply and reliably. The only important differences between wind turbines and other energy-generating technologies are not intrinsic to what might be called their “design philosophies.” That is, while they differ with respect to their inputs, their “fuels,” and with respect to their environmental impacts, the same sort of description can be given of each. There is, as a result, but a single standard on the basis of which wind turbines are to be evaluated, efficiency. It is not to be wondered that they are, with only small modifications between them, so uniform.

Wind turbines are not only objectionable because they lack a context in the areas in which they are placed, but also because they are consistently owned and operated by large companies that do not feel responsibility to maintain them or the environment around them.  The use of large-scale wind turbines destroys local communities.
Brittan Jr.  2001.  Gordon G. Brittan Jr.  Philosophy Professor at Montana State University.  “Wind, Energy, Landscape: Reconciling Nature and Technology,” Philosophy and Geography.  Volume 4.  No. 2.  2001 – M.E.
So, in summary, there is not an immediately available aesthetic norm on which wind turbines are “landscape-beautiful,” i.e., there is not an immediately available and adequate conception of “landscape” on which they “fit in.” Furthermore, the “device- like” character of wind turbines forecloses the possibility that on a deeper analysis some new and more generous aesthetic norm might be developed. For in a straightforward sense these turbines are all “surface.”
At least so far as the American experience is concerned, the sheer complexity of contemporary wind turbines entails that they must be grouped in rather large arrays, so that installation, maintenance, and repair costs can be minimized. This entails, in turn, that they be owned and operated by large companies. Like other energy-generating technologies, their immediate context is “industrial.” But this fact is problematic for a variety of reasons.
To begin with, the immense size of the arrays standard in the United State is visually objectionable. Typically, they so completely dominate the horizon that it is difficult to integrate them in any sort of way with their landscape, even in a rather distant perspective.
Furthermore, the fact that these arrays are owned and operated by large companies, whose bankers and boards of directors live and work far away from the site, diminishes any sense of local connection and, more importantly, of local responsibility and control.32 Those who make the decisions regarding wind farms are not the same people who must live with them on a daily basis. It is a lesson we in this country have been slow to learn, but those “on the ground,” who have a sense of the bounds of both tradition and environment, in general make the best land-use decisions. E.F. Schumacher put it strongly, but in large perspective accurately, when he wrote that
It is ... obvious that men organized in small units will take better care of their land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.33
There are two points to be emphasized in this regard. One is that wind energy can grow out of local communities, in which case the turbines are for the most part sited, owned, and operated by local residents, or they can be imposed “from outside,” so to speak. In the former case, it begins to have that sort of “organic” connection to the whole which characterizes Leopold’s notion of “natural beauty.” In the same way, it begins to express the life of the people who live there, as something they have freely chosen.34
The question of local control, as of individual comprehension, is thus tied closely to aesthetic appreciation. What we cannot understand or control might be sublime, but it can never, for the same reason, be beautiful. There is always and necessarily the question of scale.
The other point to be emphasized is that local communities tend to have some sort of biological basis.35 They are defined at least in part by the plant and animal life of the region, the kind and quality of the soil, the available rainfall and adjacent watersheds. It is sometimes put by saying that communities are characterized not simply in abstract terms, in terms of mutual trust and a willingness to sacrifice for the common good, but also in terms of “place” and “history.” To the extent that standardized machines are plunked down in a standardized way, then no matter who owns them, the local character of the community is thereby weakened if not also destroyed, and with it the possibility of feeling “at home” in it. To feel oneself at home in the world, we first have to orient ourselves with respect to it, and this involves being able to recognize and distinguish between things.

The loss of authentic relation to Dasein intrinsic to the technological thought processes employed by the affirmative robs us of our humanity and damns us to a state of ontological damnation in which everything that makes life worth living is squandered in the name of material comfort. The endpoint of this mechanized society is a nuclear war and unbounded destruction.
Michael Zimmerman, 1994, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, “Contestinq Earth's Future” p. 119-120
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might "bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth. 1114 This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul by losing one's relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity's one dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already occurring. _{Modernity's background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material "happiness" for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity's slow motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise. Deep ecologists might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead.} 

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 3 | Opponent: UNLV  | Judge: Cheek, Ryan
Distribution Intelligence
Department of Energy (http://goo.gl/wiz4M
stroud)
"Distribution intelligence" refers to the part of the Smart Grid that applies to the utility distribution system, that is, the wires, switches, and transformers that connect the utility substation to you, the customers. The power lines that run through people's back yards are one part of the power distribution system. A key component of distribution intelligence is outage detection and response. Today, many utilities rely on customer phone calls to know which areas of their distribution system are being affected by a power outage. Along with smart meters, distribution intelligence will help to quickly pinpoint the source of a power outage so that repair crews can be immediately dispatched to the problem area. A utility's outage response can also improve. Most utilities count on complex power distribution schemes and manual switching to keep power flowing to most of their customers, even when power lines are damaged and destroyed. However, this approach has its limitations, and in many cases an automated system could respond more quickly and could keep the power flowing to more customers. By having sensors that can indicate when parts of the distribution system have lost power, and by combining automated switching with an intelligent system that determines how best to respond to an outage, power can be rerouted to most customers in a matter of seconds, or perhaps even milliseconds. It may even be possible to react quickly enough to power disturbances so that only those in the immediate neighborhood are affected, while other customers' power source are rerouted fast enough to avoid any interruption in power. This capability could be the first example of the highly touted "self-healing" aspect of the Smart Grid in action. The "Self-Healing" Power Distribution System Outage response is one aspect of distribution intelligence that is commonly referred to as distribution automation (DA). DA may actually be the oldest segment of the Smart Grid, because utilities have been automating their distribution systems since the 1960s. But while DA initially focused just on remote control of switches, the Electric Power Research Institute now considers distribution intelligence to mean a fully controllable and flexible distribution system. Combining DA components with a set of intelligent sensors, processors, and communication technologies will lead to distribution intelligence. When fully deployed, distribution intelligence will enable an electric utility to remotely monitor and coordinate its distribution assets, operating them in an optimal matter using either manual or automatic controls. Helping the Grid Run More Efficiently and Reliably Along with outage detection and response, another potential application of distribution intelligence is the ability to optimize the balance between real and reactive power. Devices that store and release energy, such as capacitors, or that use coils of wire to induce magnetic fields, such as electrical motors, have the ability to cause increased electrical currents without consuming real power; this is known as reactive power. A certain amount of reactive power is desirable within a power system, but too much reactive power can lead to large current flows that serve no purpose, causing efficiency losses as they heat up the distribution system wires. An intelligent distribution system can use power electronics to maintain the proper level of reactive power in the system. Distribution intelligence can also help to protect and control the feeder lines, the power lines that make up the distribution system. Most feeder lines are now protected by breakers or relays that trip when high currents flow through the line, a situation normally caused by a fault somewhere in the system. These relays sometimes incorporate time delays to allow for momentary flows of high current, which may be caused by industrial equipment powering up, rather than a fault. Protection systems are often a combination of instantaneous breakers with high current settings and time-delayed breakers or relays with lower settings. These systems of automated breakers and relays end up being a balancing act: they must allow the system to operate with high currents when needed but protect the system and the people around it from high current flows when a fault exists. Distribution intelligence can provide a more elegant approach to protecting the feeder lines, using sophisticated monitoring and controls to detect and correct for faults while maintaining the highest level of system reliability during non-fault conditions. An intelligent system could even detect and isolate faults in specific pieces of equipment and route power through a backup system instead, maintaining power reliability. Distribution intelligence can also incorporate more sophisticated ground-fault detectors to minimize the possibility that people can be shocked or electrocuted when encountering downed power lines.

Smart grid solves warming
Hertzog 2011 (Christine, active in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) privacy subgroup tasked with developing recommendations for management of residential, commercial, and industrial energy consumption data, author of the Smart Grid Dictionary and Managing Director: Smart Grid Library, How The Smart Grid Can Solve Climate Change, December 5, http://goo.gl/T0ktv
stroud)
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins its latest meeting today in Durban, South Africa. Only the sunniest of optimists expect real progress in forging a global agreement as developing and developed nations argue about voluntary versus legally binding emissions reductions and funding measures. There’s no single answer to the climate change mess we’re in, but Smart Grid advances will be primary contributors to the most effective reductions in CO2 emissions. Here are two incremental efforts that can reduce our use of fossil fuels and improve the odds of avoiding the severest impacts of climate change. Energy efficiency. Residential and commercial buildings account for 40% of energy consumed in the USA, according to the Department of Energy. Fossil fuels account for 77% of that energy expended to heat, cool, illuminate and operate those buildings. Innovative retrofit solutions for building envelopes (windows, walls, and ceilings) can reduce energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills. But energy efficiency innovations also extend into product designs and operations. For instance, the USA wisely instituted energy efficiency standards for refrigerators back in 1978, and since then, even as these appliances have increased in size and features, their electricity consumption has decreased by more than two thirds. The most recent round of refrigerator standards instituted in August of this year will trim another 25% of energy use by 2014. Similar expectations should be applied to every appliance and electronics component that reside in our homes and office buildings. Electric vehicles (EVs). This is truly disruptive in terms of technology, policies, services and even business models, and it couldn’t happen at a more opportune time. Electrification of personal transportation delivers beneficial impacts that range from environmental to economic to national security. There’s a good report from the Electrification Coalition that details the numerous benefits that we can enjoy through transitioning to EVs. This report recommends replacing traditional vehicle fleets to EVs as the first incremental step in that transition. EVs reduce petroleum products consumption, which accounts for 94% of our transportation needs today. A transition to EVs would eliminate a $1 billion per day transfer of wealth from the USA to countries that don’t like us. While these disruptions are most welcome to securing our energy security and refocusing investment within our borders, the Smart Grid offers strategic new uses of EVs beyond mere transportation. The most disruptive impact of all is that the energy stored in EVs can potentially be harnessed to modify electricity consumption patterns. EVs that are plugged into the grid during times of peak electricity use could be tapped to intelligently discharge just enough energy for utilities to ride-out those timeframes without building additional generation facilities or purchasing power at its most expensive price. Transitioning to EV-based transport will require upgrades to our electric infrastructure, which are needed anyway to support integration of renewables and distributed small to large scale generation. It will also require new software applications to manage EVs as mobile, temporary, and distributed energy sources. There are enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs to create innovations in technologies and services to manage what is commonly known as the V2G (vehicle to grid) connection. Even utilities and their regulatory agencies, typically cautious adopters of innovation, may develop EV business models that continue the focus on delivery of safe, reliable, and cost-effective electricity. The UN conference in Durban may not produce the game-changing agreements that we’d like to see, but in the USA we can challenge ourselves to be the leaders in the most dramatic reductions in carbon emissions through innovations in Smart Grid technologies, policies, and services. 

Smart Grid solves turbine over-implementation  (also possibly in texas – maybe bioD impact?)
King, 2011 (Chris, B.S. and an M.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, an M.S. in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a J.D. from Concord University School of Law, Too much wind energy? How the smart grid can help, http://goo.gl/L1siQ
stroud)
While many nations, states, and utilities are working hard to increase renewable energy production, managing these resources is a challenge. In particular, when it comes to managing wind energy, you really can have too much of a good thing. This week the World Wind Energy Association issued its 2011 half-year report, saying the world market “regained momentum after a weak year in 2010… This capacity can cover almost 3% of the electricity demand all over the world.” Though a small absolute number, this 3% is already too much — creating operational and financial challenges for the grid in Texas, the Pacific Northwest, Germany, and elsewhere. Fortunately the smart grid offers one potential (although partial) solution. The trouble with wind power Wind is a wonderful resource: It has no fuel cost, operating costs are minimal (mostly maintenance) and it has zero air emissions. Location is one of wind power’s main disadvantages. Wind farms tend to be far away from population centers, so existing transmission lines often quickly reach capacity quickly. And it’s expensive to build new transmission lines — especially given the challenges in obtaining rights-of-way. The smart grid can help power companies solve the location problem by enabling techniques such as dynamic line rating which can push more electrons through existing lines, effectively increasing transmission capacity. Intermittency is another problem. The grid has limited storage capability, which can make it hard for grid operators to accept wind energy when nature provides it. Hydro pumped storage is one good way to store extra energy. This means using off-peak wind power to pump water uphill, then letting the water flow downhill during peak hours to spin turbines. The downside is that it requires two reservoirs, and it can be tough on shoreline environments. In any case, potential sites for this strategy are very limited. Other grid-scale storage strategies remain cost-prohibitive. However, researchers are hopeful that over time the cost of grid-scale batteries and other storage technologies may drop. But for now, the lack of grid-scale storage means that when there is too much wind energy for the transmission grid to handle, or when there is no buyer in the market, grid operators order wind producers to “curtail” production — stop the turbines. In Texas last year these curtailments led to an estimated $57 million in generation losses, according to PBT Consulting. Curtailments in that state grew by 182% compared to 2009. Meanwhile, Texas keeps building more wind generation. Wind curtailments have additional costs — especially negative prices in wholesale power markets. Other generators usually end up paying this cost, through depressed prices for their production. Sometimes, generators operating nuclear, gas, or other plants actually pay other generators to shut down, since ultimately that’s cheaper than ramping down their own plants. In 2010, Texas wholesale power prices went negative 17% of the time. There’s a huge potential source of grid-scale energy storage: existing building thermal mass. Smart grid technologies can make this feasible to implement. By pre-cooling in summer and pre-heating in winter, homes and businesses can shift significant amounts of load — thereby using some of the excess wind power available. One study reported that “up to 51% of the total cooling load could be shifted to off-peak hours through optimal control.” Here’s what’s needed to turn existing buildings into a grid-scale energy storage system: Time-varying prices. This gives consumers a direct financial incentive to shift their loads. Of course, these should always be voluntary. Detailed energy information. Smart meters can supply this in real time via the home area network interface, and online via the web and smart phones (“backhauled” data). Consumers can use this data to understand how and when they use energy, and to decide how to save energy or shift when they use it. Recently California issued rules for how consumers can gain access to their data, while keeping it private and secure. Automated response. Smart thermostats are the key here for grid-scale energy storage. These devices are now widely available (for example, about $90 at Amazon.com). Customers want to “set and forget” their devices to shift load and save money automatically. The smart grid combines and capitalizes on all of these elements to make energy storage work as a system across the grid. Beyond their thermal mass, buildings offer other opportunities for grid-scale energy storage — especially electric water heaters, plug-in electric vehicles, and ice storage systems. We’ll be covering these technologies more in the future. The smart grid will make it possible to capture more benefits from wind power — and greatly reduce the problems that too many turbines currently can create.

Brittan Jr.  2001.  Gordon G. Brittan Jr.  Philosophy Professor at Montana State University.  “Wind, Energy, Landscape: Reconciling Nature and Technology,” Philosophy and Geography.  Volume 4.  No. 2.  2001 – M.E.
Many astute commentators would seem to disagree with this judgment. Thus, for example, Robert Thayer in Gray World, Green Heart, 274:
But wind energy’s visibility can also be seen as an advantage if functional transparency is valued. With wind energy plants, “what you see is what you get.” When the wind blows, turbines spin and energy is generated. When the wind doesn’t blow, the turbines are idle. This rather direct expression of function serves to reinforce wind energy’s sense of landscape appropriateness, clarity, and comprehensibility. In the long run, wind energy will contribute to a unique sense of place.
In fact, however, Thayer reinforces the device-like character of wind turbines. Only their function is transparent, wind in/electrical energy out; the “black box” where all the processing takes place remains unopened. This is roughly the same kind of “comprehensibility” that is involved when we note the correlation between punching numbers into our pocket calculators, hitting an operation key, and seeing the result as a digital read-out.
There are two more things to be said about Thayer’s position. One is that nothing can be “appropriate” to landscape per se; everything depends on the type of object and the type of landscape, at least if we think of landscapes, following Leopold, in something like biological terms, in terms of integration and compensation. It is a matter of context. But as is typical of “devices” generally, contemporary wind turbines are context-free; they do not relate in any specific way to the area in which they are placed (typically by someone who does not live in the area).
In particular, Leopold insists on the fact that the appropriateness of objects in landscapes has to do with their respective histories, the ways in which they evolved, or failed to evolve, together. But contemporary wind turbines have only a very brief history, and in terms of their basic design parameters—low solidity, high r.p.m., low torque— differ importantly from the windmills whose history goes back at least 1300 years. If wind turbines have any sort of context, it is by way of their blades and the development of airplanes, but it is difficult to see how airplanes fit as appropriate objects or symbols into a windswept and uninhabited landscape. Of course, “in the long run” wind turbines will contribute to a sense of place, but not simply in virtue of having been installed somewhere in massive arrays. They will first have to acquire particular histories.29

Ontology comes first – it’s key to all decision making.
Dillon, 99 (Michael, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, 1999, Moral Spaces Pg. 97-98)
Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything about any-thing that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other-regional-modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of moder-nity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietz-sche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies indeed applies most, to those mock -innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making

Technological thought causes a litany of impacts; environment destruction and nuclear war
Shrader-Frechette, 97 (Holds the O'Neill Chair in Philosophy and is also Concurrent Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, Google Books)
Heidegger's Ontological Approach to Technology As his thinking develops, however, Heidegger does not deny these are serious problems, but he comes to the surprising and provocative conclusion that focusing on loss and destruction is still technological. All attempts to reckon existing reality ... in terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior.' Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology 43 Seeing our situation as posing a problem that must be solved by appropriate action turns out to be technological too: lithe instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology.... The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.' Heidegger is clear this approach cannot work. No single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists. and technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and industry can break or direct the progress of history in the atomic age.' His view is both darker and more hopeful He thinks there is a more dangerous situation facing modern man than the technological destruction of nature and civilization, yet a situation about which something am be done—at least indirectly. The threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition from which we can be saved. Heidegger's concern is the human distress caused by the technological understanding of being, rather than the destruction caused by specific technologies. Consequently, Heidegger distinguishes the current problems caused by technology—ecological destruction, nuclear danger, consumerism, etc.-from the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems. What threatens man in his very nature is the...view that man by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition . . . tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.’ The "greatest danger" is that the approaching tide 

The question of action is irrelevant to what we are talking about and isn’t an answer because that is our link, fucking dumbass.
Catherine Frances Botha.  Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.  “Heidegger, Technology and Ecology,” South Africa Journal, Philosophy.  Volume 22.  No. 2.  2003.  Accessed from: http://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajpem/article/viewFile/31367/23340.  Pg. 157 – M.E.
This article investigates Heidegger's views on technology, specifically focusing on whether it is possible to fit Heidegger's ideas into an ecologically minded framework. The author concludes that the question of what we should do in the wake of the technological crisis we face is inappropriate in terms of Heidegger's philosophy, since he proposes that we should first tackle the question “What should we think?”. The question whether Heidegger's ideas on technology provide us with new paths of action, specifically in terms of ecological practice, is flawed.

The utilization of resources has endangered the natural environment.  We have to add a philosophical lens to the current debate in order to gain a more holistic understanding of our relationship with the environment.  
Hast.  2008.  Sanna Hast.  Master’s Programme in Philosophy at the University of Jyvuasyla.  “Releasing Upper Lapland: Martin Heidegger and the Question Concerning Nature,” August 2008.  Pg 5 – 6 – M.E. 

Upper Lapland consists of the municipalities of Enontekiö, Inari and Utsjoki. Together with the reindeer herding co-operative (Fin. Paliskunta) in the municipality of Sodankylä this part of northern Lapland makes up the Sámi homeland in Finland. Reindeer husbandry, forestry, particularly state forestry, and nature-based tourism are nowadays the main sources of livelihood in the area. Fishing, hunting, picking mushrooms and wild berries and other forms of gathering are also of considerable economic and cultural importance for the local population. However, utilization of the same natural resources for different purposes has lead to a situation where the livelihoods are forced to compete with each other. For this reason the area has not been free of conflict during recent years and a compromise is yet to be found. (Sandström et al. 2000, Vatanen et al. 2006, p.436) Main issues seem to revolve around deciding who have the rights to use and decide over the use of the natural resources. This involves controversy between property- and user-rights, indigenous peoples rights, participatory rights and planning, decision-making locally, nationally, and internationally. Also the differing values and conceptions of nature people are dealing with seem to be tangled in the discourse. Arguments bounce back and forth between these different aspects of the matter, between facts and values, legislative and moral rights. The dispute has been looked at from many different angles: economics, ecology, forestry, tourism studies and social sciences. However, a philosophical analysis would contribute to gaining a holistic understanding about the possibilities for a compromise that has not yet been found.
In Finland the history of humans and forests has been filled with controversy between different interest groups. During the last few decades such “disagreements” between especially state forestry and nature conservationists have often led to rather serious conflicts (see e.g. Roiko-Jokela 1997, 2003). In Lapland relationships have grown particularly tense between state forestry and reindeer husbandry, which is basically considered to be the traditional livelihood of the Sámi people. To further complicate the situation, in recent years tourism has had an increasing influence on the area and local economy, and has taken foothold in the competition over the last “real wilderness” in Europe.
The situation in Upper Lapland is just one example of how nature has become political. There is a difference between nature (in itself), our different conceptions of nature and how these relate (also, how we perceive they should relate) to each other. (see e.g. Haila and Lähde 2003) Forest or nature is understood differently when it is inseparable from one’s livelihood, when it is seen as something endangered or when it is used for so called recreational purposes. What is nature and how is it perceived through the eyes of the different parties in the case of Upper Lapland?

Attempts to design renewable energy systems for the world are locked into the same technological mindset of control the created those problems in the first place.  They are the driving force of the threat of planetary destruction precisely because they still see the Earth as an object for an ever present subject that can understand it.  
Hill.  2008.  Glen Hill.  Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.  
“Design without Causality: Heidegger’s Impossible Challenge for Ecologically Sustainable Architecture.”  Lecture given at Adelaide University.  September 9, 2008.  Accessed from: 

Using Martin Heidegger’s thinking on technology, this paper attempts to show an internal contradiction in our unquestioned assumption that design (as green design, sustainable design, and so on) can solve the current environmental crisis. The argument is simply this: that design, in its modern technological manifestation, is the engine driving, and accelerating, the environmental crisis, and can therefore never be its solution. Central to the argument is the unmasking of the flawed assumption of causality that grounds design in modernity. (so the argument is very simple: design is the problem, not the solution) For me, Heidegger’s most remarkable contribution to philosophy centres on his insistent explication of the absence that grounds all presence. (on board) It is the power of the recognition of this absence that continues to shake any pretence of the possibility of rationalist foundations (in every domain, including architecture). The mapping of this absence over the course of his work followed a rambling philosophical path. (in other words… Heidegger never made anything simple) Since Descartes (17c), rationalist philosophical explanations about how it is we can have knowledge of an object, have begun with two premises: a subject that is present to itself, and an object that is independently present. With this schism between self-present subject and ever-present object in place, the tradition has been left to construct shaky explanatory bridges showing how a subject present in its own ‘internal world’ could have certain knowledge of an object present in an ‘outside world’. (explain…so much philosophy is about how we know the outside world). Draw Picture 1. Heidegger’s early work, most famously Being and Time (1926), firstly undermines the priority given to a self-present subject. It shows that our noticing of something as something in the present is not on the basis of our being self aware subjects (thinking things), but is instead on the basis of an unnoticed background of, firstly, the everyday life-world that has constituted our past, and, secondly, an unnoticed projection of our everyday projects into the future. In other words, it shows how our absent past and absent projected future allows things come to presence as the present. (explain how something shows up as something…a chair. Absent past and future allow things to show up (presence) in present). Draw Picture 2. However, because its starting point was located in the everyday being of human beings, Heidegger’s early work contained an anthropocentric bias. Within his work lurked the problematic implication that humanity, in this case human projects and practices, still determines the way the world comes to presence. To redress this implication, Heidegger deployed a great deal of his later work toward demonstrating that neither human subjectivity nor human projects and practices determine the way the world comes to presence. Central to achieving this, Heidegger took the familiar concept of ‘earth’ and made it strange (Haar). On one reading, Heidegger’s earth names the totality of the universe, nature, the real, before it shows up in our world as something for us. (think about this…what is a tree prior to it showing up in our world? Is it a tree? Talk to neighbour.) For Heidegger, earth is never an object, a thing; it is instead the potential that is disclosed as things, or objects, in the encounter with our world of projects and practices. (this is the key…potential) Add to Picture 2. So, world is simply one disclosure of the potential we are calling earth, never its totality. Countering any implication of anthropocentrism, this disclosure is not a one-sided affair, dependent simply on our human projects and practices. Earth is a potentiality with its own force, its own trajectories, that struggles with the interpretive forces of our world that attempt to disclose it. Prior to its disclosure in our world, earth, as potential, is thus also an absence. Heidegger thus paints a profound and radical picture of struggle between two absences — the absence of the subject (remember…we are an absent past and an absent future…in the sense of not noticing them) and the absence of the object — between which our world comes to presence. (draw) 3 Regime of Modern Technology Heidegger’s discussion of technology, particularly the danger of modern technology, may initially appear disconnected from his critique of the rationalist separation of self-present subjects and ever-present objects. The two however emerge as intimately intertwined. In the text where technology is scrutinised most closely, The Question Concerning Technology (1955), Heidegger draws a distinction between modern and pre-modern technology. (nothing to do with type of technology). Heidegger points out that under the dominion of modern technology our relation with nature becomes one of demanding and challenging — a relation for which he uses the German neologism ‘Ge-stell’, sometimes translated as ‘enframe’ or ‘set-up’. Rather than being open to what nature offers to us, nature is instead forced to reveal itself in ways we have formulated in advance. For Heidegger the essence of modern technology is thus its enframing or setting up of nature in terms of human interests to the extent that nature is revealed one dimensionally as a resource for human use. (remember, nature as Earth/potential, could reveal itself in many ways, but we force it to reveal itself in one way…as a resource. River: source of water, source of power, or even…source of bio-diversity for our benefit, rarely for its own sake) 4 Causality in Modern Technology In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger makes the paradoxical claim that modern technology arrives before the appearance any actual modern technologies (22). Heiddegger’s chronology appears to be: firstly the arrival of the essence of technology, then the arrival of both modern science and the appearance of modern technologies, (quote) It is said that modern technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modern physics as an exact science. Meanwhile we have come to understand more clearly that the reverse holds true as well: Modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon the progress in the building of apparatus. The establishing of this mutual relation between technology and physics is correct. But it remains a merely historiographical establishing of facts and says nothing about that in which this mutual relationship is grounded. The decisive question still remains: Of what essence is modern technology that it happens to think of putting exact science to use? (endquote) (14) (eg Don Ihde: Chinese technologies… clock, fireworks, …) The essence of modern technology that I contend Heidegger is trying to show now enframes us is the product of the shift that initiates modernity itself: the radical new understanding of the self, and the radical new conception of the very stuff that constitutes the universe. This shift has come to be summarised in the now rather innocuous phrase, the separation of subject and object. (can’t exaggerate what a huge shift this was…) As discussed earlier, the separation of subject and object privileges an understanding of our relation to the world as one of a self-present subject located in a universe of ever-present objects. This understanding is evidenced in both the modern scientific apprehension of our universe, and our everyday apprehension of the world. For modern science, the entities that constitute the universe are a particular way (a position described as Classical Realism). Once it is understood that entities are a particular way, then it becomes possible that we can come to know the way they are — this is the orientation necessary to found modern science. (this is critical…atomic structure, gene sequences, etc) In a more everyday context, when we reflect on our own relation to the world the entities around us appear in much the same way as they do for science — as objectively and permanently present. For Heidegger, such reflection is secondary to unreflective coping, but in modernity it has been taken as primary. The consequence of this shift for our modern conception of self and world should not be underestimated. Understanding that the entities constituting our universe are a particular way (not flux, not transformable by the whim of God, or so on), brings with it the conviction that we can come to understand these entities, to understand nature, and as a consequence that we can come to understand the causality inherent in nature. Heidegger spends some time in The Question Concerning Technology discussing pre-modern and modern notions of causality. His assertion that (quote) ‘wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality’ (endquote) (6), identifies causality as being central to our instrumental relation to nature. Clearly, it is a small step from the belief that we can understand causality in nature to the conviction that we can control it. Understanding causality and controlling causality can be seen as the twin grounds of science and technology respectively. (expand…) 5 Design Hubris At this point, the implications for ecological sustainability and for design also become clearer. With modernity’s belief that causality in nature could be understood and therefore controlled, arrived the confidence that the outcomes of designed technological interventions could be predicted. The result of this confidence in causality is evidenced in the exponential increase in the deployment of designed technological interventions. While the design of each individual technologically mediated intervention would have been intended to cause a (local) beneficial outcome for some portion of humanity, their cumulative impact on the ecological systems of the planet is now considered by many to be potentially catastrophic. If this scenario is accepted, then design could be characterised as the well-intentioned engine driving the proliferation of technologies that now threatens the planet. Designers, not least architects, are enframed within a view of causality which instils confidence that design interventions have predictable outcomes. Confirming such a view of the designer, Heidegger refers to the (quote) ‘engineer in his drafting room’ (which could equally be the architect in his/her studio) as being part of an enframed system, ‘an executer, within Enframing’ (endquote) (Question, 29). This enframed confidence is no less evident in the responses to the perceived ecological crisis, where design is confidently being advocated to develop solutions to overcome the very problems that confident designing has created. Modernity’s understanding that the entities constituting our universe are a particular way and operate under the rule of causality, marks a momentous shift: in pre-modernity nature is apprehended as mysterious and marvellous (medieval chronicles/annals); in modernity nature is apprehended as systematic and operable. (image) This shift is, for me, no better illustrated than in the surreal (yet quite serious) design for a solar umbrella consisting of trillions of satellites launched from earth and intended to stop global warming (Brahic). The pre-modern understanding of the mystery and wonder of the sun’s warmth granting life to all beings on earth (remember, for many pre-modern cultures the sun and God were one), has shifted to a modern understanding where the sun’s warming of the earth is a calculable system that we do not merely believe we can understand, but have the hubris to believe that we can control. (did not have time for it in the talk, but in another version of the paper I provide examples (and they are endless) of design interventions that did not have the expected outcome: Dam projects, leaded petrol, contraception, any example you pick… The argument is always that we simply did not know enough. But the argument from Heidegger would be that it could never have been known til it occurred. 

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Windfarms are ugly and so is the 1AC “art object.” For that matter, neither of them are lookers either. They say everything is art, is beautiful, but it's all shit.

Jean Baudrillard. “Art Between Utopia and Anticipation.” The Conspiracy of Art. 2005. Page 51-53.

Indeed. It is absolutely parallel to the approach of modernity as a whole, be it social or scientific, and I wonder if one could not already find there a corruption of art by science, or at least by the spirit of objectivity.

           Reaching farther towards the basic structures of the object and the world, crossing through the looking-glass of representation and reaching the other side to provide a more elementary truth of the world is grandiose if you like, but also extremely dangerous to the extent that art is nonetheless a superior illusion (at least I hope sol) and not a progress towards analytical truths. This turn is therefore already a problem. But for me, the major turn began with Duchamp (although I don't insist on sacralizing him): the event of the readymade indicates a suspension of subjectivity where the artistic act is just the transposition of an object into an art object. Art is then only an almost magic operation: the object is transferred in its banality into an aesthetics that turns the entire world into a readymade. In itself Duchamp's act is infinitesimal, but starting with him, all the banality of the world passes into aesthetics, and inversely, all aesthetics becomes banal: a commutation takes place between the two fields of banality and aesthetics, one that truly brings aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end.

           And for me, the fact that the entire world becomes aesthetic signifies the end of art and aesthetics in a way. Everything that follows-including the resurgence of past forms of art-becomes readymade (a bottle, an event or its reenactment). The forms of the history of art can be taken up as such; they only need to be transferred into another dimension to make them readymades, like Martin O'Connors, for example, takes up Millet's Angelus in his own way. But this readymade is less pure than Duchamp's, whose act reaches a certain perfection in its bareness.

           Would the precursor Duchamp be one of the last artists to anticipate?

           In a certain way, he writes off all structures of representation and, in particular, expressive subjectivity, the theater of illusion: the world is a readymade and all we can do is to maintain the illusion or the superstition of art by means of a space in which objects are moved and which will necessarily become a museum. But the museum, as its name indicates, is a sarcophagus all the same.

           Now all is not over. Duchamp put a scenario in place, but within this generalized aesthetics-and therefore within this inaesthetics of things-very magical events can occur! Andy Warhol is an example, another artist who introduced nothingness into the heart of the image. That is also a fantastic experience, but one that seems to me to be outside the realm of art history.

           Hasn't art in the second half of our century largely renounced the pretensions it had to change life?

           Personally, I find art increasingly pretentious. It wants to become life.

           That is a different pretension than wanting to change it?

           There was a Hegelian perspective in which one day art would be brought to an end. As for Marx it was supposed to bring an end to economics or politics, because these would no longer have any reason to exist given the transformations in life. The destiny of art is therefore effectively to go beyond itself into something else, whereas life...! This glowing perspective evidently did not materialize.

           What happened is that art substituted itself for life in the form of a generalized aesthetics that finally led to a "Disneyfication" of the world: a Disney-form capable of atoning for everything by transforming it into Disneyland, takes the place of the world!

           What you call the simulacrum.

           Yes, but this term now covers so many things! The simulacrum was still a game with reality. Here, the world is literally taken as it is and "Disneyfied," in other words virtually sealed. And like Disney himself, who placed himself under "cryogenic seal" in liquid nitrogen.

           The Disney company is buying up 42nd Street in New York. It might turn it into an international Disney attraction, where prostitutes and pimps would merely be characters in the virtual reality of the Disney aesthetic! This mutation is more decisive than the simulacrum or simulation I have analyzed. In any case it is something  other than the Society of Spectacle Guy Debord spoke of (1967), which at the time was a powerful analysis but has lost its power because we are beyond it. There is no more spectacle, no more possible distance, no more alienation where you could be something other than yourself Not any more. The same is changed into the same and in so doing, the readymade has gone global.

This liberation and democratization of art is really the invasion of Art into all spheres of life.

Jean Baudrillard. “Art Between Utopia and Anticipation.” The Conspiracy of Art. 2005. Page 90-92.

The paradox of Abstraction is that by "liberating" the object from the constraints of figure to return it to the pure play of form, it chained the object down to a hidden structure, a stricter, more radical objectivity than the objectivity of resemblance. It strove to tear off the mask of resemblance and figure in order to reach the analytical truth of the object. Under the auspices of Abstraction, we paradoxically moved towards even more reality, towards an unveiling of the "elementary structures" of objectality, in other words towards something more real than real.

           Reciprocally, art has invested the entire realm of reality under the auspices of a general aesthetization.

           At the end of this history, the banality of art is mixed up with the banality of the real world-Duchamp's gesture, with the automatic transfer of the object, was the inaugural (and ironic) act. The transfer of all reality into aesthetics has become one of the dimensions of general exchange ...

           All of this in the name of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world.

           In fact, this "liberation" consisted in indexing one on the other-a deadly chiasmus for both art and the real world.

           The transfer of art has become a useless function in the now integral reality because reality has absorbed everything that negated, transcended or transfigured it. Impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else-it can only be exchanged with itself: repeating itself to infinity.

           What could miraculously reassure us about the essence of art today? Art is simply what is discussed in the art world, in the artistic community that frantically stares at itself. Even the "creative" act replicates itself to become nothing more than the sign of its own operation-the true subject of a painter is no longer what he or she paints but the very fact that he or she paints. The painter paints the fact that he or she paints. In that way, at least, the idea of art is saved.

           This is only one aspect of the conspiracy.

           The other aspect is the viewer who, most of the time, does not understand anything, and consumes his or her own culture twice removed. The viewer literally consumes the fact that he or she does not understand it and that it has no necessity to it other than the cultural imperative of belonging to the integrated circuit of culture. But culture itself is only an epiphenomenon of global circulation.

           The idea of art has become rarified and minimal even in conceptual art, where art ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries-the apotheosis of art as a non-event. Reciprocally, the consumer moves through it all to test his or her non-enjoyment of the works.

           Taking this conceptual and minimalist logic to the extreme, art could do no better than to disappear without any further discussion. At that point, it would no doubt become what it is: a false problem; every aesthetic theory would be a false solution. Yes, but here is the point: it is all the more necessary to talk about art now that there is nothing to say about it. Paradoxically, the movement to democratize art only reinforced the privilege of the idea of art, culminating in the banal tautology "art is art." Everything can supposedly be summed up in this circular definition.

           Marshall McLuhan: "We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art."

           The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world could exercise the same strange attraction and ask the same insoluble questions as those formerly reserved for a few rare aristocratic forms called art works.

           That was its true democracy, not in allowing everyone access to aesthetic pleasure but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which each object without distinction would have its fifteen minutes of fame (especially objects without distinction). Everyone is equal, everything is great. The upshot came in the transformation of art and the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting out, generating deconstructed objects that deconstruct us in turn.

           No more faces, no glances, no human figures or bodies there-organs without bodies, flows, molecules, fractals. The relationship to the "work" is on the level of contamination or contagion: you plug in, become, absorb, immerse yourself just like in flows or networks. Metonymical linkage, chain reactions.

           No more real objects at all: with readymades, the object is no longer there, only the idea of the object. And we no longer take pleasure in art, only in the idea of art. We are deep in ideology.

           The readymade holds the double curse of modern and contemporary art: the curse of immersion in reality and banality along with the curse of conceptual absorption in the idea of art.

The problem is that if everything is art, then nothing is art. If everything is beautiful, then nothing is beautiful. We are robbed of all sign posts, and plunged into a world of total indifference.

Fernando 2012 (Jeremy, Jean Baudrillard Fellow, Media and edu/Departments/Media_and_Communications(% style="font-size:8.0pt" %) at the European Graduate School, Writing Death, printed by lightning source, milton keynes in an endless edition (version 110606). ISBN 978-90-817091-0-1)

And it is not as if doing so comes without a price: once something is completely calculable, it is also completely exchangeable, completely transparent. Here, we might momentarily tune in to Jean Baudrillard and attend to his warning that total transparency is the point where "every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is total confusion of types:' Thus, "each category is general- ised to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual anymore, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears. This paradoxical state of affairs ... is simultaneously the complete actualisation of an idea, the perfect realisation of the whole tendency of modernity, and the negation of the idea and that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their very success, by virtue of their extension beyond their own bounds ... :'12 In order for any response to be possible, there have to be boundaries, borders, limits. For, without the separation, the space, one would not be able to even begin communicating with another; everything would just be the same. In other words, what has to be maintained is an exteriority, a finitude to all gestures of knowing. This also means that all responding, all response, is always already finite. If this were so, a question remains with us: what of the situation in which the call was made? The trouble is: if one can never be sure what the call even is, when, or even where, it came from-if one is blind to both the source and the object of the call-one is attempting to respond to a complete unknown, an absolute unknowability. However, even though there is no possibility of verification, one is still responding-this suggests that there is still a measure of exchange that is taking place. Whether this exchange can be measured is yet another question; one that perhaps can never be addressed. And since there is an exchange that takes place in spite of the fact that the exchange may be impossible, this suggests that the exchange is a symbolic exchangeritualistic, formal, nothing more-and nothing less-than a form; where the form of the exchange is everything-and in which each individual component is meaningless except for its role within the ritual itself. And it is this that Georges Bataille speaks of when he describes a general economy: everything has its role in relation with every other thing, but it has no inherent meaning. Thus, it is the significance of the object and not its signification that is of interest. This is why in Bataille's conception, sacrifice plays such a crucial role, where the "essence is to consume profitlessly .. : this is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself; "unsubordinated to the 'real' order and oc~upied only with the presenf'14 Bataille continues: "sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order:'15 Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice-"it does not have to destroy as fire does" -this suggests that the tie that is severed is ruptured symbolically. And here, we can re-open the earlier register of trans-substantiation when we consider sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change-this is the point at which all phenomenology fails-but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the "real order;' from logic, calculability, reason. The object 85 of sacrifice, "the victim, is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth ... Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things ... "16 And it is this tearing away from the order of things-the order of rationalitythat "restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane:'17 For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted-subjected, subsumed under-merely a use~value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; a singularity. It is perhaps ironic that only within a general economy is singularity preserved. However, one must remember that the object-or subject-of the sacrifice is never calculated; its worth is never in question, nor even taken into account. In fact, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. We find in The Accursed Share many tales of sacrifice and in each of them there is a sense of reversibility. For instance, in Aztec wars, all deaths were seen as a sacrifice to the gods: if victorious, the Aztecs would sacrifice the prisoners; however, "if the warrior had himself been overcome instead of returning a victor, his death on the field of battle would have had the same meaning as the ritual sacrifice of his prisoner: it would have satisfied the hungry gods:' 111 It is this reversibility that can also be found in the tale of Abraham and Isaac. 1 ~ When Abraham brings Isaac up to Mount Moriah as a sacrifice to the Lord, he is asked by Isaac, " ... where is the lamb for the sacrifice?" His answer is, "God himself will provide one:' Unknown to Abraham at the time, his response (if one can call it a response at all for it was an empty statement; it was neither a truth nor a lie to Isaac),21 ) is precisely what occurs: it is God who provides the object for the holocaust-the ram that is burnt in Isaac's place. At the point, in the moment, he raises his knife to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham has already killed him-this is the sacrifice that God required: it is an objectless sacrifice; the act of killing Isaac is the sacrifice; this is the kind of sacrifice that "does not have to destroy as fire does:' It does not matter whether Isaac, or the ram, dies: in either case it "would have satisfied the hungry gods:' The sacrifice itself is a ritual, is purely formal; the exact object-whether it is a warrior or the prisoner-is irrelevant.

Banality is the only impact in the round; it is the worst possible thing that can happen.

Baudrillard 11 jean. Yeah, he’s still writing books. Telemorphosis, read it its hilarious. Tell all your friends

The twentieth century has seen all sorts¶ of crimes - Auschwitz, Hiroshima, genocides¶ - but the lone true perfect crime,¶ is, according to Heideggerian terms, "the¶ second fall of man, the fall into banality".¶ There is a murderous violence of banality¶ that, precisely due to its indifference¶ and its monotony, is the subtlest form~¶ of extermination. A veritable theatre¶ of cruelty, of our cruelty to ourselves,¶ completely played down and without a¶ trace of blood. A perfect crime in that it¶ abolishes all stakes and erases its own¶ 45¶ traces - but above all in so far as in this¶ murder, we are both the murderers and¶ the victims. As long as this distinction¶ exists, the crime is not perfect. And yet in¶ all historical crimes that we know of, the¶ distinction is clear. It is only with suicide¶ that the murderer and the victim become¶ the same, and in this regard the immersion¶ into banality is indeed the equivalent¶ of the suicide of the species.¶ The other aspect of this murderous banality¶ is that it erases the theatre of operations¶ of the crime - it is from then on¶ everywhere within life, on every screen,¶ within the lack of distinction between¶ life and the screen. Here as well, we find¶ ourselves on both sides of the equation.¶ And while the other violent crimes¶ of history provided us with an image¶ (Shoah, Apocalypse Now) which at least¶ could be distinguished from the crime,¶ 46¶ with this other crime, this slow extermination¶ offered up for our viewing pleasure¶ via a spectacle like Loft Story and¶ others, is one in which both Loft Story¶ and ourselves all play a role.¶ We are dealing with a genuine Stockholm¶ syndrome on a mass scale - when the¶ hostage becomes the accomplice of the¶ hostage taker - as well as a revolution of¶ the concept of voluntary servitude and¶ master-slave relations. When the entire¶ society becomes an accomplice to those¶ who took it hostage, but just as much when¶ individuals split into, for themselves,¶ hostage and hostage taker.¶ There is a long history of this growing¶ promiscuity, from the glorification¶ of daily life and its irruption within the¶ historical dimension - up until the implacable¶ immersion into the real all too¶ real, into the human all too human, into¶ 47¶ the banal and residual. But the last decade¶ saw an extraordinary acceleration of this¶ banalization of the world, by the relay of¶ information and universal communication¶ - and above all by the fact that this banality¶ has become experimental. The field of¶ banality is no longer merely residual; it has¶ become a theatre of operations. Brought¶ to the screen, as is the case with Loft¶ Story, it becomes an object of experimental¶ leisure and desire. A verification¶ of what Marshall McLuhan stated about¶ television: that it is a perpetual test, and¶ we are subjected to it like guinea pigs, in¶ an automatic mental interaction.¶ But Loft Story is merely a detail. It is all¶ of "reality" which has passed over to the¶ other side like we see in the film The¶ Truman Show, where not only is the hero¶ telemorphosized, but everyone else¶ involved as well - accomplices and¶ prisoners caught in the spotlight of the¶ 48¶ same deception. There was a time - like in¶ the film, The Purple Rose of Cairo - where¶ the characters jumped off the screen¶ and entered into real life in order to be¶ embodied - a poetic situational reversal.¶ Today, reality massively transfuses itself¶ into the screen in order to become disembodied.¶ Nothing any longer separates¶ them. The osmosis, the telemorphosis, is¶ total.

This is particularly true of their perspectivism, which collapses into relativism.

Schlag, 2002 Pierre, Dheidt’s Real Father/BFF and Byron White Professor of Law, University of Colorado School of Law, “Commentary: The Aesthetics of American Law” 115 Harv. L. Rev. 1047

The perspectivist aesthetic has its own pathology. The attempt to see or understand everything from every place at once may, in the end, yield no understanding at all. It’s a fine line between collage and total garbage. The crimped and cramped gestures of some poststructuralist work, for example, display the contortions that result from trying to avoid any foundationalist or essentialist moment — an attempt that is, in an important sense, doomed to fail. Moreover, the attempt to take in all perspectives can simply lead to indecision or paralysis. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. A contrary pathology is also common: the celebration of perspectivism may turn out to be merely a vehicle for the privileging of just one perspective — namely, one’s own.

This only results in new and more violent partitions. Now, even disagreeing that windfarms are beautiful mean that we are nihilist douchebag priests.

Baudrillard '06 (The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized), International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, http:~/~/www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/htm(%%))

“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 introjection and rejection 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 reveling 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. 

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Aesthetic beauty cannot be found in modern wind turbines because they are devices and not things and therefore separate us from energy production itself.  Even if we attempted to find that beauty or were technically educated in the machinery of the device, the search would be blocked from the outset by their very character.

Brittain.  2001.  Their author.  Gordon G. Brittain Jr., “Wind, energy, landscape: reconciling nature and technology,” Geography and Philosophy, Vol. 4, 2001 – M.E.

We need to become clearer about the character of contemporary technology. No one has done more to clarify it, in my view, than Albert Borgmann.23 Borgmann begins with a distinction between “devices” (those characteristic inventions of our age, among which the pocket calculator, the CD sound system, and the jet plane might be taken as exemplary) and what Heidegger calls “things” (not only natural objects, but human artifacts such as the traditional windmills of Holland). The pattern of contemporary technology is the device paradigm, which is to say that technology has to do with “devices” as against “things.”¶ Things “engage” us, an engagement which is at once bodily, social, and demands skill. A device, by way of contrast, disengages and disburdens us. It makes no demands on skill, and is in this sense disburdening. It is defined in functional terms, i.e., a device is anything that serves a certain human-determined function. This largely involves the procurement of a commodity. That is, a device is a means to procure some human end. Since the end may be obtained in a variety of ways, i.e., since a variety of devices are functionally equivalent, a device has no intrinsic features.¶ But a device also “conceals,” and in the process disengages. The way in which the device obtains its ends is literally hidden from view. The more advanced the device, the more hidden from view it is, sheathed in plastic, stainless steel, or titanium. Moreover, concealment and disburdening go hand in hand. The concealment of the machinery, the fact that it is distanced from us, insures that it makes no demands on our faculties. The device is socially disburdening as well in its isolation and impersonality.¶ To make the analysis of “devices” more precise, an objection to it should be considered. “Is not ... the concealment of the machinery and the lack of engagement with our world,” Borgmann asks, “due to widespread scientific, economic, and technical illiteracy?”24 That is, why in principle can we not “go into” contemporary devices, “break through” their apparent concealments? Why should we not promote electrical engineering, for example, as a general course of study, and in the process come to know if not also to love contemporary technology?¶ Borgmann initially answers this objection along three main lines.¶ First, many devices, e.g., the pocket calculator, are in principle irreparable; they are designed to be thrown away when they fail. In this case, there is no point in “going into” the device.¶ Second, many devices, e.g., the CD sound system, are in principle carefree; they are designed so as not to need repair. It is not necessary to go into such devices.¶ Third, many devices, e.g., the jet plane, are in fact so complex that it is not really possible for anyone but a team of experts to go into them. Increasingly, this is true of older technologies as well, e.g., automobiles, where “fixing” has become tantamount to “replacing” their various computerized components.¶ Borgmann contends that even if technical education made much of the machinery of devices perspicuous, two differences between devices and “things” would remain.¶ Our engagement with devices would remain “entirely cerebral” since they resist “appropriation through care, repair, the exercise of skill, and bodily engagement.” Moreover, the machinery of a device is anonymous. It does not express its creator, “it does not reveal a region and its particular orientation within nature and culture.”25 On both counts, devices remain unfamiliar, distanced and distancing. Typing these words, looking at the monitor on which they appear, I have no real relation to the process or to the machinery involved, no context in which to place them, no knowledge of their origins or of their development. The only thing that really matters is the product.¶ We could summarize Borgmann’s position by referring to the familiar theoretical notion of a “black box.” In a “black box” commodity-producing machinery is concealed insofar as it is both hidden from view or shielded (literally), and conceptually opaque or incomprehensible (figuratively). Moreover, just those properties that Borgmann attributes to devices can be attributed equally well to “black boxes.” It is not possible to get inside them, since they are both sealed and opaque. It is not necessary to get inside them either, since in principle it is always possible to replace the three-termed function that includes input, “black box,” and output, with a two-termed function that links input to output directly. All we really care about is that manipulation of the former alters the latter.¶ Borgmann’s interpretation of technology and the character of contemporary life can be criticized in a number of different ways.26 Still, the distinction between “things” and “devices” reveals, I think, the essence of our inability to develop a landscape aesthetic on which contemporary wind turbines are or might be beautiful, and thereby explains the widespread resistance to placing them where they might be seen.27 For the fact of the matter is that contemporary wind turbines are for most of us merely devices. There is therefore no way to go beyond or beneath their conventionally uncomfortable appearance to the discovery of a latent mechanical or organic or what-have-you beauty. The attempt to do so is blocked from the outset by the character of the machine.28

Windmills are standardized no matter where they are produced or where they are installed.  This makes them devices completely cut off from the societal evolution of other types of buildings.  This is the real reason for their rejection, not a standard of beauty.  Their device like standardization forecloses the possibility of finding a new sense of beauty in them.

Brittain.  2001.  Their author.  Gordon G. Brittain Jr., “Wind, energy, landscape: reconciling nature and technology,” Geography and Philosophy, Vol. 4, 2001 – M.E.

It is interesting to note in this respect how unlike other architectural arrivals on the horizon, such as houses (and traditional windmills), contemporary wind turbines are. Different styles of architecture developed in different parts of the world in response to local geological and climatic conditions, to the availability of local materials, to the spiritual and philosophical patterns of the local culture. As a result, these buildings create a context. In Heidegger’s wonderful, dark expression, they “gather.” But there is nothing “local” or “gathering” about contemporary wind turbines; they are everywhere and anonymously the same, whether produced in Denmark or Japan, placed in India or Spain, alien objects impressed on a region and in no deeper way connected to it. They have nothing to say to us, nothing to express, no “inside;” they “conceal” rather than “reveal.” The sense of place that they might eventually engender cannot not, therefore, be unique. In this regard, the German landscape architect Christophe Schwann seems to catch just the right note:¶ Elements of technical civilization are very often standardized in their outfit. The more of them are placed into landscape, the less is the landmark effect. Because of standardization, wind generators can be very annoying in the marshes: formerly people could distinguish every church tower telling the name of the place. Today, wherever you look you always see the turning triblades. The inflation of standardized elements like high tension masts and wind generators puts down orientation and contributes to the landscape standardization caused by industrial agriculture.30¶ The other comment I want to make about Thayer’s position is this. Wind turbines are quintessential “devices” in that they preclude engagement. Or rather, the only way in which the vast majority of people can engage with them is visually (and occasionally by ear). They cannot climb over and around them, they cannot get inside them, they cannot tinker with them.31 They cannot even get close to them. There is no larger and non-trivial physical or biological way in which they can be appropriated or their beauty grasped. The irony, of course, is that precluded from any other sort of engagement with wind turbines, most people find them visually objectionable, however they might be willing to countenance their existence as the lesser of evils.¶ So, in summary, there is not an immediately available aesthetic norm on which wind turbines are “landscape-beautiful,” i.e., there is not an immediately available and adequate conception of “landscape” on which they “fit in.” Furthermore, the “device- like” character of wind turbines forecloses the possibility that on a deeper analysis some new and more generous aesthetic norm might be developed. For in a straightforward sense these turbines are all “surface.”

Wind turbines do not have a historical connection with the environment that they are in.  It is due to their uniform nature that they cannot be included into the modern environment.  This has less to do with beauty than it does their evolutionary character.  Even if they can one day be included, they first need to develop a connection to the places that they are in.

Brittain.  2001.  Their author.  Gordon G. Brittain Jr., “Wind, energy, landscape: reconciling nature and technology,” Geography and Philosophy, Vol. 4, 2001 – M.E.

Think about it for a moment: Except for the blades, virtually everything is shielded, including the towers of many turbines, hidden from view behind the same sort of stainless steel that sheathes many electronic devices. Moreover, the machinery is located a great distance away from anyone, save the mechanic who must first don climbing gear to access it and often, for liability reasons, behind chain-link fences and locked gates.¶ The lack of disclosure goes together with the fact that the turbines are merely producers of a commodity, electrical energy, and interchangeable in this respect with any other technology that produces the same commodity at least as cheaply and reliably. The only important differences between wind turbines and other energy-generating technologies are not intrinsic to what might be called their “design philosophies.” That is, while they differ with respect to their inputs, their “fuels,” and with respect to their environmental impacts, the same sort of description can be given of each. There is, as a result, but a single standard on the basis of which wind turbines are to be evaluated, efficiency. It is not to be wondered that they are, with only small modifications between them, so uniform.¶ Many astute commentators would seem to disagree with this judgment. Thus, for example, Robert Thayer in Gray World, Green Heart, 274:¶ But wind energy’s visibility can also be seen as an advantage if functional transparency is valued. With wind energy plants, “what you see is what you get.” When the wind blows, turbines spin and energy is generated. When the wind doesn’t blow, the turbines are idle. This rather direct expression of function serves to reinforce wind energy’s sense of landscape appropriateness, clarity, and comprehensibility. In the long run, wind energy will contribute to a unique sense of place.¶ In fact, however, Thayer reinforces the device-like character of wind turbines. Only their function is transparent, wind in/electrical energy out; the “black box” where all the processing takes place remains unopened. This is roughly the same kind of “comprehensibility” that is involved when we note the correlation between punching numbers into our pocket calculators, hitting an operation key, and seeing the result as a digital read-out.¶ There are two more things to be said about Thayer’s position. One is that nothing can be “appropriate” to landscape per se; everything depends on the type of object and the type of landscape, at least if we think of landscapes, following Leopold, in something like biological terms, in terms of integration and compensation. It is a matter of context. But as is typical of “devices” generally, contemporary wind turbines are context-free; they do not relate in any specific way to the area in which they are placed (typically by someone who does not live in the area).¶ In particular, Leopold insists on the fact that the appropriateness of objects in landscapes has to do with their respective histories, the ways in which they evolved, or failed to evolve, together. But contemporary wind turbines have only a very brief history, and in terms of their basic design parameters—low solidity, high r.p.m., low torque— differ importantly from the windmills whose history goes back at least 1300 years. If wind turbines have any sort of context, it is by way of their blades and the development of airplanes, but it is difficult to see how airplanes fit as appropriate objects or symbols into a windswept and uninhabited landscape. Of course, “in the long run” wind turbines will contribute to a sense of place, but not simply in virtue of having been installed somewhere in massive arrays. They will first have to acquire particular histories.29

We are winning three external impacts.  1.) The standardization of windmills means that they have to be financed by large-scale corporations that have no incentive to keep up with them.  This allows for environmental degradation.  2.) The standardization of the wind turbine destroys the character of the community itself which allows for its destruction.  3.) The standardization of wind itself turns it into standing reserve which allows for environmental exploitation.  Only the counterplan can solve the impacts the aff has identified.

Brittain.  2001.  Their author.  Gordon G. Brittain Jr., “Wind, energy, landscape: reconciling nature and technology,” Geography and Philosophy, Vol. 4, 2001 – M.E.

At least so far as the American experience is concerned, the sheer complexity of contemporary wind turbines entails that they must be grouped in rather large arrays, so that installation, maintenance, and repair costs can be minimized. This entails, in turn, that they be owned and operated by large companies. Like other energy-generating technologies, their immediate context is “industrial.” But this fact is problematic for a variety of reasons.¶ To begin with, the immense size of the arrays standard in the United State is visually objectionable. Typically, they so completely dominate the horizon that it is difficult to integrate them in any sort of way with their landscape, even in a rather distant perspective.¶ Furthermore, the fact that these arrays are owned and operated by large companies, whose bankers and boards of directors live and work far away from the site, diminishes any sense of local connection and, more importantly, of local responsibility and control.32 Those who make the decisions regarding wind farms are not the same people who must live with them on a daily basis. It is a lesson we in this country have been slow to learn, but those “on the ground,” who have a sense of the bounds of both tradition and environment, in general make the best land-use decisions. E.F. Schumacher put it strongly, but in large perspective accurately, when he wrote that¶ It is ... obvious that men organized in small units will take better care of their land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.33¶ There are two points to be emphasized in this regard. One is that wind energy can grow out of local communities, in which case the turbines are for the most part sited, owned, and operated by local residents, or they can be imposed “from outside,” so to speak. In the former case, it begins to have that sort of “organic” connection to the whole which characterizes Leopold’s notion of “natural beauty.” In the same way, it begins to express the life of the people who live there, as something they have freely chosen.34¶ The question of local control, as of individual comprehension, is thus tied closely to aesthetic appreciation. What we cannot understand or control might be sublime, but it can never, for the same reason, be beautiful. There is always and necessarily the question of scale.¶ The other point to be emphasized is that local communities tend to have some sort of biological basis.35 They are defined at least in part by the plant and animal life of the region, the kind and quality of the soil, the available rainfall and adjacent watersheds. It is sometimes put by saying that communities are characterized not simply in abstract terms, in terms of mutual trust and a willingness to sacrifice for the common good, but also in terms of “place” and “history.” To the extent that standardized machines are plunked down in a standardized way, then no matter who owns them, the local character of the community is thereby weakened if not also destroyed, and with it the possibility of feeling “at home” in it. To feel oneself at home in the world, we first have to orient ourselves with respect to it, and this involves being able to recognize and distinguish between things.¶ As just indicated, these “places” are often identified with an individual terrain and a particular watershed. But they could just as well be identified with a windshed. In my part of the country, the characteristic winds come in the middle of winter when we most need them, raising temperatures and blowing the snow off the ground and (at least potentially) providing the power to heat homes. We call them “chinooks.” They are part of our lives, in the same way that the “mistral” is part of the life of the Midi, the “bise” of the Lavaux, and the “foehn” of the Schwarzwald. There is even a playful and much noticed little wind that whirls around the church of the Gesu in Rome. To treat them as no more than another energy source, “standing reserve” as Heidegger would put it, is to disconnect them from the ways in which they have helped determine the character of local plant, animal, and human communities, and in the process to rob them of their individuality and their beauty. By the same token, they need to be connected in specific, and not simply “functional,” ways to wind turbines if the latter in turn are to share in this beauty.¶ I do not want to over-emphasize these communitarian and bioregional perspectives, although they should always be important elements in our thinking. The point is that these perspectives allow us to found an aesthetic that is not simply conventional or visual and on which both winds and the machines that capture their energy are beautiful.¶ In my view, these are two sides of the same coin. On one, machines small and simple and inexpensive enough to be locally owned and operated, without the intervention of highly specialized engineers, the creation of dense and extensive turbine arrays, and corporate financing. On the other, machines that have a history, that supply a context, that are sensitive to their sites, and that as a result integrate with at least some landscapes and hence with the communities that have grown up on them. Again to quote Schumacher, whose thinking has in so many ways shaped my own:¶ What is it that we really require from the scientists and technologists? I should answer: ¶ We need methods and equipment which are¶ —cheap enough so that they are accessible to everyone; ¶ —suitable for small-scale application;
¶ —compatible with man’s need for creativity.36

We affirm thing like wind energy.  It solves for a number of reasons.  It is locally contingent which does not efface the history of local communities that establish them.  It allows for more independent community oversight which halts environmental degradation.  It solves for the aff’s concept of beauty.  The aff is entrenched in the Western mindset of making the current model more palatable to the general public.  This, however, only manipulates tastes of contingent communities.  Instead, what is needed is to reopen the structure of wind turbines all together.  This is the critical task of the environmental geographer.  They only create their own resistance.

Brittain.  2001.  Their author.  Gordon G. Brittain Jr., “Wind, energy, landscape: reconciling nature and technology,” Geography and Philosophy, Vol. 4, 2001 – M.E.

What, then, do I propose? A very different sort of wind turbine. A group of us have been working on its development for the past twenty years, although in fact the idea can be traced back to Crete, where thousands of windmills have been spinning for generations on the Lesithi Plain.37¶ In a very schematic way, let me draw your attention to its main features. The design parameters are traditional—high solidity, low r.p.m., high torque. The rotor consists of sails, furled when the wind blows hard, unfurled when it does not. The machinery is exposed and thoroughly accessible, clear and comprehensible. All of it can be repaired by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of electronics and mechanics, with the sort of tools used to fix farm machinery. The generators, gear boxes, and brakes are situated at ground level and the turbine does not require a crane for either its installation or repair, or any sort of tower.38 It is a down-wind machine and tracks easily and freely. In two words, it is a “thing” and not a “device.”39 All of Borgmann’s criteria are satisfied.¶ Sails, of course, have a very long history. They were the first way in which humans captured the energy of the wind. The context they supply has to do with long voyages and the hopes and fears that attended them, with naval battles fought and races won. Long central in human life, they are well-integrated and for this reason, among others, beautiful.¶ Sails also allow for engagement and skill. Anyone who has ever sailed knows what it is like to feel the power of the wind in his hands and to take full advantage of it by shaping the sails in the right sort of way and choosing the best angle of attack. But you do not have to have sailed to use this windmill. All that is necessary is that you have experienced putting up a sheet to dry in the wind or have tried to fold an umbrella. How different this experience is from holding up a toy plastic windmill, an experience significant only for young children.¶ A sail turbine is sensitive to the wind, turning at lower speeds, moved by it alone and not by gears and motors, furling and unfurling as needs be. Even at top speed, it turns more slowly than conventional wind turbines (at less than a third their rate) and is never merely a distracting blur. Even in large arrays, the water-pumping sail machines on the Lesithi Plain have a very pleasing appearance.¶ All very well, but what about the efficiency and economy of the sail turbine? Whatever intrinsic characteristics it might have, however beautiful it might be, it still has to perform. We have always been able to generate power curves comparable to conventional turbines, with this exception, that we begin to generate electricity at lower wind speeds.40 Our problem up to this point has been the mechanical reliability of the turbine, principally with respect to the furling device. We think we have at long last solved this problem. Otherwise, the cost per kilowatt-hour is projected to be somewhere in the vicinity of $0.03, competitive with other, more conventional forms of generation.¶ The comparatively small size and relative simplicity of the sail turbine means that it can be locally owned and operated, one machine at a time. Changes taking place in the American power industry have made this more feasible than ever. Much of the early resistance to wind energy came from the utilities; in addition to the unreliability of the turbines then available, wind energy did not very well fit the utilities’ “industrial model,” however many efforts were made to conform to that model on the part of the wind energy companies themselves.41 But we have entered a phase in which electrical energy is being de-regulated and de-centralized, just the sort of development that Schumacher and others had in mind. It will, I believe, be more and more possible for owners of small numbers of wind turbines, and of the co-operatives into which I see themselves forming, to put their power on the grid, particularly since wind-generated electricity on even the most optimistic projections will never amount to more than ten percent of the total.¶ There are, of course, a number of problems with the analogy; but I think that in important respects a number of relatively small machines, working together, will ultimately prove to be more efficient, as well as more beautiful, than a single very large machine, in the same way that a number of smaller processors, operating in parallel, surpass the capacity of very large main frame computers.¶ Finally, and again following Leopold’s lead, I want to urge a pluralistic approach. If we pay the kind of detailed attention to landscapes to first uncover and then appreciate their beauty, then we must conclude that certain kinds of turbines will “fit” some of these landscapes better than others. I have tried to make a case for our own soft foil turbine, the Windjammer. In fact, just as not all sails and sailboats are of the same shape and size, varying as a function of the winds and the seas in which they are found and the purposes to which they are put, it seems to me that the Windjammer can be adapted in a variety of ways. But there are other turbine designs, some of them not yet imagined, that will “fit” their own landscapes better. To this point, governments and utilities, and the engineers they fund, have presupposed almost from the outset the viability of a particular design, and devoted almost all of their resources to “improving” it. In the process, they have discounted plans and ideas that might be more acceptable aesthetically. One central result is that they have also created large-scale and determined resistance to wind energy.¶ Along the same lines, too much effort has been devoted to making the conventional large, bladed turbine palatable to the general public. This effort has been predicated on the essential subjectivity of aesthetic considerations and the thought that taste can be manipulated. I have argued that the aesthetic ideals taken as normative in our own cultural tradition have at the very least an important objective component. It follows from the nature of these ideals, however they are further to be construed, that only “things,” in their depth and complexity, can be beautiful. Rather than relapse into subjectivity or manipulate taste, we need to re-open the basic design and aesthetic questions, questions which, I have tried to suggest, cannot very well be separated from the character of contemporary technology or the ways in which we take up with the world. Perhaps raising these sorts of questions about human and natural landscapes is a main task of philosophers interested in geography.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

They want unrestricted art. Proliferation of difference. Instead do art like Andy Warhol.

Waking life dream of a pimped, prostituted encounter; I recall the virtuous virgin “alterity” - before even able to speak her beautiful name - pure and passionate beyond comprehension and touch she still calls out to me in the melodramatic tones of a mute muse – a radical siren echoing from afar like a ray of light just now reaching, and then already past, reflecting from the screen of my retina - that star burned out several years ago just now seen in all its transparency – “what else could I do – I said I will see what I can do” –

“First as authentic event and then being repeated as farce.”1url:#_ftn1||name

"_ftnref1"  Where the Other once appeared the same now lies, faint and flaccid, infinitely repeating.  Difference - proliferating from all directions, every angle, coaxed from each corner, crawl space and corridor to concealment, now from, into the light… and hence Otherness nowhere to be found.  It seems: ====

Nowicki 2008 (Joanna Nowicki, Maître de Conférence and Dean of the Hannah Arendt Institute at Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée, France - The Man of Confluences : a Model of Education for the XXIst Century Gentleman ? -  “L'homme des confins, pour une anthropologie interculturelle", CNRS Edtions 2008.  Translated by Michaël Oustinoff)

The exploration of the New World has been completed to the point that some even think that travel has become impossible (and they sadly conclude that the only option left is tourism) and so has the encounter with radical alterity, for the Other has been reduced to an alter ego. Immigration, too, has changed its face, because the countries that used to supply unskilled labour are today in a position to export their highly-skilled workers, whose grey matter is sold on the same conditions as the West’s, something which considerably modifies the relationships between the people involved. More often than not, this corresponds to what is called expatriation, that is, living in a country different from the one where we were born but not in order to leave an emigrating country for traditional economic reasons. It cannot be equated to exile either, because the people under consideration may return to their native countries because they were not sentenced to banishment, another factor which changes their perception of those whom circumstances have brought them to live with.

If we bear in mind all these geopolitical, sociological and human upheavals, the time has probably come when it is legitimate to envisage another kind of intercultural anthropology which would be built on a new interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from the human and social sciences their most valid tools to enable us to assess the importance of the image, of discourse and representation, be it cultural or political, whose downside is the emergence of stereotypes which can never be done away with and which sometimes are dangerous insofar as they oversimplify issues and are easily instrumentalized by the ideologues of violent conflicts.

When you find yourself in Europe, there is no urgent need to look for examples of interculturality in remote, exotic lands. In point of fact, the issue of cultural cohabitation, which lies at the very heart of democratic debate today must be totally reassessed in the light of the recent reuniting of the European continent and the disappearance of the two-bloc confrontation which was, as it were, the dominant political analysis grid obliterating all the rest and obscuring the far greater complexity of the real relationships between cultures. 2url:#_ftn2||name="_ftnref2"

Jean Baudrillard. “Between Difference and Singularity: An Open Discussion with Jean Baudrillard.” June 2002. EGS. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/between-difference-and-singularity/.

Baudrillard: No, we are in a culture of difference, of culture as difference, a multicultural organization. Culture as singularity is more than difference. Difference can be easily organized into a system which generates structure and meaning. Culture as such has no finality, no meaning, it's a symbolic act and in this sense it's beyond differences which are only oppositional structures. Singularity is a symbolic acting, a collective acting. Primitive societies and cultures are not different, they're very singular, it's not the same. Today, all cultures of the world are in multicultural ensembles as differences, together as the megaculture of difference, which is very opposed to the original singularity of culture.

Schirmacher: They are more like different brands.

Baudrillard: They can be juxtaposed and collected altogether in a museum.

Audience: Do you think it's time that artists use their strengths for something else than making objects? Is there something an artist can do better than just contributing to the art market?

Baudrillard: An extension of art action today, in a very general sense, is performance. Maybe art is everywhere at this point, and as such it's possible to make art of everything. I'm afraid that's a pure extension of the readymade. As a game traditional art has a rule, it has to invent a scene other than reality. It must not work so much in the real world, to transform it in political, social, therapeutic ways, that's not art, art has a stronger, more radical definition for me. Today, it's a fact, art is an interacting, multi-directional activity, but that's a very degenerated art.

Schirmacher: What do you mean by radical?

Baudrillard: Radical would be the separation apart from any meaning, any finality, any causality. Art would be a thing itself, nothing but a singularity, and as such it cannot be anything in the real world. The art world would be anything else, it should be incompatible with reality. Traditional art was integrated in the symbolic order of the culture, but it was a radical illusion. In old times there wasn't reality. Now this illusion is lost, and art has lost its privileged position inside this symbolic order. Now we have to do with reality, and unfortunately contemporary art has fallen into the trap of reality, it becomes real, and soon it will be hyperreal in accordance with our surroundings. I would say rather than evolution it is an involution.

Ulfers: I agree with your notion with the singularity of culture, I'm wondering though if you are, I don't think you are, talking about a closed system here, because in order to have singularity you need to have, just for the sake of comparison, a relation to otherness. That otherness is not to be confused with globalism or globalization, but we need some way to be capable of differentiating yourself from another in order to be single.

Baudrillard: I agree that the singularity has paradoxically to do with alterity. It's a paradigm which is highly opposed to "identity/difference", which is our paradigm, I would say. Singularity and alterity is a double game, I agree.

Ulfers: But that's not to be confused with what you have defined as globalization, or multiculturalism.

Baudrillard: Yes because we can oppose this paradigm of the totality of globalization, where all differences can be integrated, but as differences, not as singularities. One of the strategies of this new order of the world is to transform singularities into differences. As differences they are able to be integrated into the global. As singularities they cannot. It's an immense attempt of this global world to reduce and annihilate all singularities in order to be integrated into an undifferentiated world. This world of differences, this culture of differences is an alibi for a culture of indifferentiation.

Audience: Regarding the stockpiling of culture, where is the room for the artist to have resistance? Do we go underground, like the rat? True culture, like evil, cannot truly be suppressed.

Baudrillard: Of course, you may, or can, or must, but you must create your underground, because now there's no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality. You can create your personal underground, your own black hole, your own singularity. The bad fate is that everyone can do that, but it will never create a collective symbolic order, it will be an exceptional, special creation, and today we can see that. Creative initiative maybe as a subjective act is very original but it doesn't create a symbolic movement. That's the problem.3url:#_ftn3||name="_ftnref3"

Yet, we continue to strive for this utopia achieved and an orgy concluded - more contact, clearer channels, total information and perfect communication.  Life long access to learning, better forms of knowledge and means of obtaining it - increased understanding and exposure to all worldly things, entities, and concepts – tolerance, acceptance, and the right to be different no matter how strange you seem.  “We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity”, A world absent suffering, and more importantly one that gives us the all ability to live another day, hopefully till the end of time which has been postponed indefinitely  – a world of rational animals, of political beings collectively working to bring about a brighter tomorrow by envisioning it today.  Don’t worry, even those who can’t read are encouraged to, and win debates today.  Nothing is greater than this, I fucking promise!  Now give me that Christian side-hug!

Jean Baudrillard. “The Conspiracy of Art.” The Conspiracy of Art. 2005. Page 25-27.

The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion. In porn, nothing is left to desire. After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity. Transsexual, in the sense that it now has nothing to do with the illusion of desire, only with the hyperreality of the image.

            The same is true for art, which has also lost the desire for illusion, and instead raises everything to aesthetic banality, becoming transaesthetic. For art, the orgy of modernity consisted in the heady deconstruction of the object and of representation. During that period, the aesthetic illusion remained very powerful, just as the illusion of desire was for sex. The energy of sexual difference, which moved through all the figures of desire, corresponded, in art, to the energy of dissociation from reality (cubism, abstraction, expressionism). Both, however, corresponded to the will to crack the secret of desire and the secret of the object. Up until the disappearance of these two powerful configurations-the scene of desire, the scene of illusion-in favor of the same transsexual, transaesthetic obscenity, the obscenity of visibility, the relentless transparency of all things. In reality, there is no longer any pornography, since it is virtually everywhere. The essence of pornography permeates all visual and televisual techniques.

            Maybe we are just acting out the comedy of art, just as other societies acted out the comedy of ideology, just as Italian society (though it is not alone) keeps acting out the comedy of power, just as we keep acting out the comedy of porn in the obscene advertising pictures of women's bodies. Perpetual striptease, fantasies of exposed organs, sexual blackmail: if all this were true, it would indeed be unbearable. Fortunately, it is all is too obvious to be true. The transparency is too good to be true. As for art, it is too superficial to be truly null and void. There must be some underlying mystery. Like for anamorphosis: there must be an angle from which all of this useless excess of sex and signs becomes meaningful, but, for the time being, we can only experience it with ironic indifference. In this unreality of porn, in this insignificance of art, is there a negative enigma, a mysterious thread, or, who knows, an ironic form of our destiny? If everything becomes too obvious to be true, maybe there still is a chance for illusion. What lies hidden behind this falsely transparent world? Another kind of intelligence or a terminal lobotomy? (Modern) art managed to be a part of the accursed share, a kind of dramatic alternative to reality, by translating the rush of unreality in reality. But what could art possibly mean in a world that has already become hyperrealist, cool, transparent, marketable? What can porn mean in a world made pornographic beforehand? All it can do is make a final, paradoxical wink-the wink of reality laughing at itself in its most hyperrealist form, of sex laughing at itself in its most exhibitionist form, of art laughing at itself and at its own disappearance in its most artificial form, irony. In any case, the dictatorship of images is an ironic dictatorship. Yet this irony itself is no longer part of the accursed share. It now belongs to insider trading, the shameful and hidden complicity binding the artist who uses his or her aura of derision against the bewildered and doubtful masses. Irony is also part of the conspiracy of art.

            As long as art was making use of its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object, it still was a major enterprise. But art trying to recycle itself indefinitely by storming reality? The majority of contemporary art has attempted to do precisely that by confiscating banality, waste and mediocrity as values and ideologies. These countless installations and performances are merely compromising with the state of things, and with all the past forms of art history. Raising originality, banality and nullity to the level of values or even to perverse aesthetic pleasure. Of course, all of this mediocrity claims to transcend itself by moving art to a second, ironic level. But it is just as empty and insignificant on the second as the first level. The passage to the aesthetic level salvages nothing; on the contrary, it is mediocrity squared. It claims to be null- "I am null! I am null!" -and it truly is null.

            Therein lies all the duplicity of contemporary art: asserting nullity, insignificance, meaninglessness, striving for nullity when already null and void. Striving for emptiness when already empty. Claiming superficiality in superficial terms. Nullity, however, is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by just anyone. Insignificance-real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning, the shedding of sense, the art of the disappearance of meaning-is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it. There is an initiatory form of Nothingness, or an initiatory form of Evil. And then there are the inside traders, the counterfeiters of nullity, the snobs of nullity, of all those who prostitute Nothingness to value, who prostitute Evil for useful ends. The counterfeiters must not be allowed free reign. When Nothing surfaces in signs, when Nothingness emerges at the very heart of the sign system, that is the fundamental event of art. The poetic operation is to make Nothingness rise from the power of signs-not banality or indifference toward reality but radical illusion. Warhol is thus truly null, in the sense that he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. He turns nullity and insignificance into an event that he changes into a fatal strategy of the image.

                  Other artists only have a commercial strategy of nullity, one to which they give a marketable form, the sentimental form of commodity, as Baudelaire said. They hide behind their own nullity and behind the metastases of the discourse on art, which generously promotes this nullity as a value (within the art market as well, obviously). In a way, it is worse than nothing, because it means nothing and it nonetheless exists, providing itself with all the right reasons to exist. This paranoia in collusion with art means that there is no longer any possible critical judgment, and only an amiable, necessarily genial sharing of nullity. Therein lies the conspiracy of art and its primal scene, transmitted by all of the openings, hangings, exhibitions, restorations, collections, donations and speculations, and that cannot be undone in any known universe, since it has hidden itself from thought behind the mystification of images.4url:#_ftn4||name="_ftnref4"

Utopia achieved, complete with empowering “a” – all distance transcended, borders and corresponding lands of separation eliminated, the barriers brought down, lines erased, and walls collapsed, reduced to rubble simultaneously smoothed out, leveled in a unified instant.

One must finally ask…

What are you doing after the orgy?

US individuals, us citizens, patriots, and politicians (or possibly politisans if you’re cool enough), us rational actors, and most aptly and universally us debaters - labor for such world, pursue, if not demand it to be.  Inclusion for all, maximize diversity, all voices heard and terms of such exchange agreed upon in advance – nsured fairness for all, a level playing field, equal opportunity to be, become, even fantasize about that person to be given your name. Let’s do it again ‘The imagination in power!’ ‘Take your desires for reality’  - No more barricades or barriers, even the attitudinally inherent appear tabled - Grant more visas, remove the caps, expand eligibility, benefits, admissibility – communication guarantees, and the right to productive deliberation. Come one, come all – Welcome to the greatest show on earth!  Inclusion for all at half the price of admission.

Close your eyes, give me your hand…

Do you feel my heart beating, do you understand…

Do you feel the same?

Or am I only dreaming?

Or is this..5url:#_ftn5||name

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A duel form: Carnival and Cannibal, Difference qua Otherness!  It seems we have mistaken the gape for the abyss: “These days everything is described in terms of difference, but otherness is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness” winking its beautiful brown eye if to quietly seduce us in believing it stares back.  Carnivalization - the hegemony, universality, and incorporation of all into of the good, the psychodrama of difference – an incestuous inception -“falling barriers and great reductions in real distance must of themselves compensate somewhere by means of new partitions and unanticipated gaps.”  The birth of Corky Lecter: “the corpse-like, viral Other: the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system”, “… an immigrant by force of circumstance or a voluntary immigrant but at some point, the question of the Other is no longer relevant because a kind of fusion occurs.”6url:#_ftn6||name

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“All good things to those who wait”7url:#_ftn7||name

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Jean Baudrillard. “Art Between Utopia and Anticipation.” The Conspiracy of Art. 2005. Page 95.

Ever since the 19th century, art has wanted to be useless. It turned this uselessness into a reason for praise (which was not true of classical art where, in a world that was not yet real or objective, usefulness was not even considered).

           By extension of this principle, making any object useless would be enough to make it a work of art. This is precisely what the readymade does when it merely divests an object of its function, without changing anything about it, to turn it into a museum piece. It is sufficient to make reality itself a useless function to turn it into an art object, prey to the all-consuming aesthetic of banality.

            By the same token, older things, coming from the past and therefore useless, automatically acquire an aesthetic aura. Their displacement in time is the equivalent of Duchamp's gesture; they become readymades as well, nostalgic vestiges resuscitated in our museum universe.

            One could extrapolate this aesthetic transformation to material production as a whole. As soon as it reaches a level where it can no longer be exchanged in terms of social wealth, it becomes a giant surrealist object, seized by an all-consuming aesthetic and is included everywhere in a sort of virtual museum. Like for the readymade, an in-situ museification in the form of dormant industry for every technical waste land.

           The logic of uselessness could only lead contemporary art to a predilection for waste-that which is useless by definition. Through refuse, the figuration of refuse, the obsession with refuse, art strives to display its own uselessness. It presents its non-use value, its non-exchange value-while still being sold at very high prices.

Tugg Speedman: There were times while I was playing Jack where I felt...

Tugg Speedman: ...retarded. Like, really retarded.

Kirk Lazarus: Damn!

Tugg Speedman: In a weird way I had to sort of just free myself up to believe that is was ok to be stupid or dumb.

Kirk Lazarus: To be a moron.

Tugg Speedman: Yeah!

Kirk Lazarus: To be moronical.

Tugg Speedman: Exactly, to be a moron.

Kirk Lazarus: An imbecile.

Tugg Speedman: Yeah!

Kirk Lazarus: Like the dumbest mother fucker that ever lived.

Tugg Speedman: pause When I was playing the character.

Kirk Lazarus: Everybody knows you never do a full retard.

Tugg Speedman: What do you mean?

Kirk Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Then there was Sean Penn in ‘I Am Sam.’ He went full retard. Left the Oscars empty-handed. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.

BAUDRILLARD 2010 (Jean, Carnival and Cannibal: Ventriloqous Evil.  Translated by Chris Turner.  Seagull Books 2010, pages 55-69)

This is the state of things in which the system has snaffled all the mechanisms of simulation, parody, irony and self-derision; it has snaffled the whole of the negative and, with it, critical thought, leaving the latter only the ghost of the truth.

All the same, things are perhaps not settled once and for all, since the rules have changed (or perhaps there are no rules nay longer) and the new situation is as follows: by denying the very existence of Evil (all the forms of radical, heterogeneous, irreconcilable otherness), by making the negative a kind of prehistoric vestige, Good has, in a way given Evil its freedom.  In seeking to be Absolute Good, it has freed Evil from all dependency and given it back its autonomous power, which is no longer simply the power of the negative but the power to change the rules of the game.  Something resurfaces here of the Manichaean heresy, which asserted the originality and singularity of Evil.  And one can feel something analogous playing itself out in the depths of this integral reality.  As the old forms of revolt that defied the dominant power find themselves swallowed up by the system itself, a new counter-finality is springing up from all the interstices of the system, a challenge to the supremacy of Good, infiltrating and breaking up that reality much more radically than the work of the negative did.

When the power of the negative fades, when the prohibitions, controls, inequalities and differences disappear one by one, the better to internalize themselves in the mental sphere, it is at this point that Evil, as undesirable alien, becomes Ventriloqous.

The Banque Nationale de Paris had a famous advertising slogan in the 1970s: ‘Your money interests me!’, which sums up better than any critical analysis can do, the ignominy of capital.  Denunciations of what ignominy were as old as the hills, but what was new and scandalous was having these words come direct from the bankers themselves, the truth coming straight from the mouth of Evil, so to speak.  The truth came straight from the mouth of the dominant power itself, and that power, secure in the knowledge of its total immunity, admitted its ‘crime’ quite openly.

The most recent profession of faith of this same kind was uttered by Patrick Le Lay, the CEO of the French TV channel TF1.  ‘Let’s be realistic’, he said, ‘TF1’s job is to help Coca-Cola shift product… For an advertising message to get through, the viewers brain has to be receptive to it.  It’s the aim of our programs to make that brain receptive, that is to say, to entertain it and relax it, to prepare it between two messages.  What we sell to Coca-Cola is receptive human brain time… Nothing is more difficult than obtaining that receptiveness’.

We have to pay tribute to this amazing declaration of principle for its outstanding professional cynicism (which it shares with many other similar declarations, such as that of the French post office: ‘Money has no sex, but that shouldn’t prevent it from reproducing’).

But this is not the point.  What struck people in the Le Lay case was the barefaced cheek of the statement, which fascinated even those who condemned it.  Isn’t this immoral offhandedness the mask of a greater freedom of expression than is shown in the eternal stereotyped language of critical protest?

And this is, in fact, the problem – that the truth has been stolen by an ‘arrogant’ discourse that thwarts any form of criticism by short circuiting it.  The real scandal doesn’t lie so much in technocratic cynicism as in the breaking of a rule of our social and political game, which says that the corruption is on one side and the protest against on the other.  If the corrupt no longer respect this protocol, if they lay out their hands for all to see, without even doing us the courtesy of hypocrisy, then the ritual mechanism of critical condemnation is taken from us.  This is capital laid bare by the capitalist themselves.

Le Lay is stealing from us the only power we have left; he is stealing condemnation!  This is where the scandal lies.  Otherwise, how are we to explain all these outraged reactions to someone spilling the beans on an open secret?

Instead of condemning Evil from the standpoint of Good – the eternal moral position – he is speaking Evil from the standpoint of Evil.  And immediately, all that excels in arrogance (Le Pen, cynicism (Le Lay), pornography (the Abu Ghraib pictures) and myth-o-mania (the fabulous story of Marie L.) is, by that very token, more effective at unmasking the truth of the system than traditional critique!

If the truth hits the mark and hits home with people, this is because it comes, paradoxically, from the horizon of Evil.  We always expect it to come from the side of Enlightenment and Reason – which was perhaps the case historically – but today it is from the horizon of Evil that the truth emerges as an unexpected event, deriving all its force from coming from the place one least expects it.

All the discourses of Good are ravaged by ambivalence.  This is particularly visible in the relationship to stupidity, which is the murkiest, but also the most direct and massive expression of this ventriloquousness of Evil.  Philippe Muray has magnificently described this beatification, this grotesque pacification of the real world, this festive reduction in perpetuity of the whole of modernity to a party.  Now, it is precisely here, in this extension of the domain of Farce, that Ventriloquous Evil advances on all sides, establishing the hegemony of stupidity – which is the equivalent of hegemony plain and simple.

Of all the modalities in which the proscribed negative can show through in ventriloquos mode, stupidity is both the most banal and the most mysterious.  Better, it becomes a source of energy – and a source of hidden truth – since, no longer expecting anything from a higher instance, we are reduced to this subterranean one, whose energy is inexhaustible, since it comes to us from the immensity of stupidity itself.  We must then – and Muray clearly saw this – draw from it all its innate energy, allow it to deploy itself in all its self-conceit; we must allow Evil to speak ‘through the belly’.  We have to let this masquerade, this banality of Evil work at its own derision.  This is the ‘intelligence of Evil’.  Moreover, in the absence now of an active power of the negative, where could we get energy from today if not from a violent abreaction to this ambient stupidity?

As soon as Good rules and claims to embody the truth, it is Evil that comes through.

Let us take the No to the European referendum.  It was clearly stupidity that voted No; it was statistically the most stupid (the backward, the retarded) who voted No, but that stupidity was precisely the intelligence of Evil.

It was Ventriloqous Evil that replied ‘No’ to the referendum.  Not the spirit of the Negative which, like the ‘Yes’, lends its assent to Political Reason.  But an illogical No, resistant to political Reason, and shot through with the exigency not to be annexed or taken hostage by any model whatever – even an ideal one (especially not an ideal one!) – the exigency not to lend itself to the dialectical stratagem: ‘Your No is a No to Europe as it is, but a Yes to Europe as it should be!’

There is no difference between the ‘free market’ Yes and the European ‘social’ No.  This is why the No, which is merely a No to a particular kind of Europe, isn’t really a No – the only No that genuinely constitutes an event is this strange, non-political, non-dialectical, elusive No, since it runs counter to enlightened self-interest.  It is a No that isn’t the opposite of a Yes (the No of the things that can exist without their opposites), but might be said to be closer to a silent rejection of the kind that makes Bartelby say, ‘I would prefer not to!  I am not playing the game! (But without aspiring to provide a reason)’

You have to be able to fight everything that wishes to do Good to you.

Jed Rasula. “Brutalities of the Vanguard.” Contemporary Literature, 35:4. Winter 1994.

The avant-garde exposes, at its own expense, the remorseless appetite of the bourgeoisie (or late capitalism, culture industry, and so on), its rapacious cannibalizing of otherness and remorseless endocolonization of itself. The appetite of capital is in turn replicated by the industry of commentary and metacommentary, in which there is no longer much difference between the frenzy of the press corps and the crowds at an MLA convention. So Mann arrives at the lugubrious spectacle of a “masocriticism endlessly postulating its own torment,” “an interminable discourse of termination.” His is itself an exemplary demonstration of masocriticism: is not the holographic style an inventive way of masochistically revisiting the same trauma center again and again? What does Mann intend by participating in, and perpetuating, a discursive momentum that he clearly sees expended in futility (or worse, in complicity with what it would oppose)? His sentiments are guided by Baudrillard, who reads a certain sullen resistance on the part of the masses' refusal to vote, for instance, not as indifference but a silent scorn at the stakes of the game. Mann would appear to recite a normative protocol in the conviction that the system will finally be overcome by the giddiness with which it processes and recuperates every possible position and voice. “It might be that the last task of theory is to exhaust theory itself, to push its terms until they disintegrate or, as Baudrillard would say, 'implode': 'my way it to make ideas appear, but as soon as they appear I try to make them disappear'.” Eventually (such is the hope) we stop paying attention to the fates of individual ideas and begin to see the larger picture, which is a cycle of appearance/disappearance, opposition/recuperation, perturbation/resolution – the cycle that reconfirms the priority of its own holomovement ( the expectoration of global capital) with every display of a normalized exception. The tradition of informed critique, Mann wants to say, has long since become a tradition that is most effective in demonstrating its own cancellation, or its own eventual accommodation to the hegemonic norms of a dominant culture. Even the most exhilarating acts of critical repudiation – and this is why the avant-garde is an exemplary case – are primarily excitations local to the grotesque and shameless body of capital, or they are the moments that circulate, since circulation as such is the holomovement of global capital. As the current spectacle of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh demonstrates (and they are the demonstration of prior demonstrations), it makes no difference whether sales are motivated by love or hate, adulation or revulsion: if it sells, it sells. And discourse cannot resist the tautology. “One must therefore proceed in the certainty that … criticism no longer speaks the voice of alterity, or speaks it only in order to cancel what is always left of it … and that if difference must be discovered it is precisely a difference from us.”

            The logical conclusion of Mann's views on the contamination of critical discourse is the necessity of abandoning its venues. He withholds the full disclosure of this aspect of his thesis until the final pages of the book, so one is tempted to read the end as an act of disappearance, a repudiation eloquently resonating in the silence or aftermath of The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. (But then, Mann troublingly reappears in the pages of Contemporary Literature reviewing further episodes of the avant-garde; which suggests that an interminable discourse on termination is not so easily disavowed for one whose sensibility and training have been nurtured for precisely such tasks.) We're left with the implication that the traditional avant-garde must, once again, lead the way; that exemplary nonproductive acts of disappearance must be pioneered by artists. “Without exception art that calls itself art, that is registered as art, that circulates within art contexts can never again pose as anything but systems-maintenance.” Nor does Mann expect staged repudiations, melodramatic scenarios in which the artist says, in effect, I despise you all and will no longer give you the satisfaction of opposing me (or siding with me): I no longer play the game. Nor will it be a Duchampian withdrawal without theatrics or denunciation. Instead what is required is to have never entered the lists in the first place. “What one must imagine is an unprecedented silence, exile, and cunning. … Not a critical theater in which to represent oneself but a hidden struggle to dismantle in oneself, in one's network, the entire theatrical apparatus. A fast for burning off discursive toxins.” The Artist, setting the pace for critics, disappears like Conchis in The Magus or Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Reducing restrictions on energy production opens the floodgates for biocapitalist expansion at the nexus of neoliberal development strategy and education.  Within this unique space of academic debate a prefigured knot is bound: the production of product producing products harboring the goal of both education and policy directed dominance in symbiotic harmony, all under the promissory value framework of a born again, salvation ethic.  All life becomes annexed under the sign of biocapitalist accumulation.

Pierce 2012 (Clayton, Department of Education, Culture,and Society, University of Utah.  “The Promissory Future(s) of Education: Rethinking scientific literacy in the era of biocapitalism.”  Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 7, 2012)

At the most superficial level, biocapitalism has evolved out of neoliberal economic restructuring that began in the late 1970s in the UK and US and is generally associated with the removal of restrictive barriers to markets and labor through governmental, military, and corporate intervention. Thus, the privatization of public infrastructure (schools, water, roads, forests), the individuation of risks (health care, natural disaster responses, waste management, admission and access to higher education, etc.), and the strategic use of military and corporate forces in responding to social and economic crises are all signature qualities of neoliberal governmentality (Harvey, 2005; Klein, 2007;¶ Foucault, 1978, 2008).6  Most relevant to this analysis, however, is the elimination of proprietary boundaries in key knowledge producing sites such as the university that became legally sanctioned through the passing of the landmark Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. In effect, the Bayh-Dole act legalized the partnering of publically funded academic research sites with corporate and governmental entities which, in turn, opened up new profitable places of production (and investment) in areas such as biomedicine, biotechnology, and biopharmaceutical while completely erasing the line between public/private sites of knowledge production (Haraway, 1997, 2007; Kleinman and Vallas, 2001; Rajan, 2006; Cooper, 2008).7 The coupling of academic science departments with the biotechnological and biomedical industries has helped push the neoliberal model of growth into entirely novel regions. Never before in the history of human civilization has an economic system tied so closely the fragile processes of life to a model of development. Vandana Shiva’s work on biopiracy, in particular, has been invaluable in mapping out the neocolonial phase of exploitation and proprietary ownership that has arisen with the institutionalization of transnational trade agreements such as the 1993 Trade Related Aspect of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) (Shiva, 1997, 2005). Other governmental/corporate bioprospecting entities like the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) have also blurred the line between free market ideology and academic research in troubling ways as it has been instrumental in ‘forgeing an initiative that would link drug discovery to sustainable development precisely through benefit sharing contracts’ that privilege corporations such as Merck and Wyeth-Ayerst while stripping local communities of their ecological and cultural biodiversity (Hayden, 2003, p. 66). The genealogical feature of biocapitalism most important to the present analysis is how the neoliberal revolution encoded within the sociology of science (thus reshaping what is needed from the educational system) an insatiable drive to overcome both institutional and biological limits to growth. As a consequence, one of the most important effects of the biotech revolution that followed the merging of private and public research was an opening up of ‘a whole series of legislative and regulatory measures designed to relocate economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 19). Indeed, one of the most far-reaching effects of the neoliberal project was its driving of economic development in areas of technoscientific research that made it possible to transform biological life into a zone of economic territorialization and commodification. It is this co-constructive relationship between neoliberalism as a developmental strategy and the life sciences that underpins biocapitalism and also contributes to the formation of one of its most pervasive characteristics: its promissory value framework.

This promissory and salvation ethic of biocapitalist accumulation results in the worst forms of American exceptionalism.

Pierce 2012 (Clayton, Department of Education, Culture,and Society, University of Utah.  “The Promissory Future(s) of Education: Rethinking scientific literacy in the era of biocapitalism.”  Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 7, 2012)
 What Rajan’s study of both US and Indian biotech actors uncovers is the emergence of a powerful discourse and practice he calls the ‘born again ethic’ of biocapitalism. Thus, in the case of human genome research, a sort of new logic of capital has developed that has a powerful effect on the production of subjectivities according to Rajan—a logic that is infused with an unfaltering belief in the biosciences and their ability to discover the next ripe market to be exploited for profit and glory of nation. Yet this salvationary ethic also points to a neo-Weberian melding of religious and capitalist values that is also shaping notions of citizenship through the belief system of neoliberal free market ideology and American exceptionalism. Here citizenship has more to do with saving one’s country through scientific and technological superiority than it does with traditional civic values such as rootedness in community, rational communication and debate between diverse members of society, or the cultivation of these general civic virtues through a system of public education. What emerges from Rajan’s analysis of the biocapitalist productive framework, therefore, is a model of citizenship that is tied to an idea of nation that mirrors the enterprise of high stakes technoscientific research that takes place in some of the most economically volatile environments in society. The salvationary character of biocapitalism has also been a large part of Rose’s work on charting the rise of the bioeconomy as a dominant sector of investment for governments around the globe. For example, Rose notes that ‘in 2003 the U.K. House¶ of Commons Trade and Industry Committee Report on Biotechnology identified biotechnology,¶ especially biomedical biotechnology, as a key economic driver and estimated¶ that, in 2002, the U.K. biotechnology industry had a market capitalization of £6.3¶ billion, accounting for 42 percent of the total market capitalization of European biotechnology’¶ (Rose, 2007, p. 35). The UK is not alone, however, as Rose also points out¶ that countries such as China, India, and South Korea share this salvationary vision in the¶ emergent bioeconomy. For Rose then ‘political investment to support the development¶ of the biotechnology sector in each country and region was driven, at least in part, by¶ fears of the consequences of losing out in this intense international competition’ (Rose,¶ 2007, p. 36). Given the amount of faith governments and nations have put into the¶ bioeconomy as the most important economic sector, it is not surprising that a corollary¶ notion of citizenship has also arisen in such a salvationary context. Here success in the labs and markets of the bioeconomy is directly related to the supply stream of highly technoscientifically literate subjects that a country can produce. In such a model civic duty is largely measured by one’s ability to help their country compete in ‘an intense international competition’ rather than a democratic political life. Here we have reached a key point where educational need and biocapitalism intersect. Coupled to the promissory and salvationary ethos of biocapitalism, as I argue below, is the need for educational subjectivities that retain the proper types of investment most useful to the productive framework of biocapitalism. Scientific literacy, and in particular how it is being defined in our neo-Sputnik moment, is the most important mechanism to view for understanding how the regime of biocapitalism is reshaping education into its own image. Yet key to making sense of how scientific literacy is at the center of such a project is seeing how the theory of human capital underlying science education reform instills the promissory and salvationary ethic as a primary mode of conduct for the educational subject. The relationship developing at the nexus of education and biocapital is one where the future-oriented individual who is perpetually investing in his or her life to increase levels of human capital and participate in a ‘race to the top’ mirrors the ethic of the biocapital actors of the lab.

American exceptionalism makes genocidal policies and mass military conquest inevitable and justified.
 Jacobs 2004 ( Ron, Writer for counterpunch) “American Exceptionalism, A disease of conceit” http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs07212004.html||style="font-style: inherit; outline: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration: initial;"

When it comes to the bottom line, though, the underlying cause for the US antiwar movement's current stasis is that most of its adherents believe in one of this country's basic tenets-a tenet that is ultimately religious in nature. For lack of a more descriptive phrase, we'll call this phenomenon American exceptionalism. On a basic political level, this phenomenon is the belief that, for some reason (America's system of democracy, or maybe its economic superiority), the United States system is not subject to the same contradictions and influences as those of the rest of the world. This belief in American superiority finds its foundation in some of our culture's basic religious and cultural constructs. It's there in the first settlers' belief that they were conducting a special errand into the wilderness to construct a city on a hill in the name of their heavenly father and every single president and wannabe always implores this same heavenly father to "bless America" at the end of every one of his speeches. This is no accident. It is this belief that gave the Pilgrims their heavenly go-ahead to murder Pequot women and children and it was this belief that gave General Custer his approval to kill as many Sioux as he could. It made the mass murder of Korean and Vietnamese civilians acceptable to the soldiers at No Gun Ri and  My Lai and exonerated the officers who tried to hide those and many other war crimes from the world. It gives George Bush the only rationale he needs to continue his crusade against the part of the world that stands in the way of the more mercenary men and women behind his throne as they pursue their project for a new American century. And, most importantly for us, it informs a goodly number of decent Americans in their tentative opposition to those men and women. Consequently, while they may oppose George Bush's approach to Washington's war on the world, they do not necessarily disagree with its goals. 

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The affirmative relies upon a theory rooted in the modern technological assumptions of causal determinism, lacking grounds for universality.  In attempting to posit a problem within the psyche, to be fixed by way of instrumental techniques of rationality – the alternative situates itself in the position of the active subject governing over the encapsulated object and fails to address the underlying socio-historical etiology perpetuating the exact social psychosis it attempts to rectify

 Aho 2007 (Kevin A. PhD University of South Florida, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University.  Acceleration and Time Pathologies: The critique of psychology in Heidegger's Beiträge.  Time Society 2007; 16; 25.  Sage Publications)

First of all, psychopharmacology, like psychoanalysis, presupposes a conception of the self that is, in no way, trans-historical. It is a conception rooted in uniquely modern assumptions of individualism and causal determinism (Taylor, 1988; Cushman, 1990). The therapist interprets the client as an encapsulated thing or object that needs to be fixed by means of instrumental techniques and fails to address the underlying socio-historical etiology that may be contributing to the client’s disorder. Furthermore, the therapist interprets the mental health of the client largely in terms of his/her competence in handling the frantic pace of modern life, and this has a tendency to perpetuate the very social conditions that manifested the feelings of indifference and emptiness in the first place. (Taylor, 1988; Cushman, 1990). In short, by ignoring the fact that the practice of psychology itself and the emotional conditions that it treats are shaped by our involvement in a particular social and historical situation, our own emptiness, as Heidegger (1995) says, continues to remain hidden from us.

The confrontation with trauma provocation participates in the misfortune and bad consciousness Nietzsche characterizes as the source of all backward worlds.  The alternative forces all the hidden obscenity of Oedipal relations to burst out in the form of murder, incest and the final blindness.  

Baudrillard 1990 (Jean, Fatal Strategies.  Translated by Phili Beitchman and W.G.J Niesluchowski, Edited by Jim Fleming.  Semiotext(e) page(s) 144)

Psychoanalysis is the bad conscience of the sign.  It transforms every sign into symptom, every act into a slip, every discourse into hidden meaning, every representation into an hallucination of desire.  This incredible near-sightedness of analytical interpretation!  Against the seductive power of thought, psychoanalysis incarnates the omnipotence of hidden motives.  Suspicion toward appearances, blackmail by symptom and hidden meaning, the solution of the enigma: psychoanalysis absolutely participates in the misfortune, in the bad conscience that Nietzsche identified as the source of all backward worlds…

           But seduction has its way of evening the score.  It ironically refashions the dream, appearing again in the well-known form of dreams healing that attempt to seduce the analyst and divert the analysis.  But this is nothing: the resolution of the enigma and the defeat of the Sphinx will allow all the hidden obscenity of Oedipal relations to burst out – murder, incest and the final blindness that always accompanies the unveiling of the truth.  We should never touch upon the enigma, under pain of falling into obscenity, and Oedipus will have no other resort but to become blind in order to escape this obscenity.  Yes, the Sphinx is avenged: it’s she who by her death locks Oedipus up into this whole murderous history, and she who locks up Freud into this whole case history of castration.

Arguments about the inherent violence or alienation in subjectivity ignore that oppression affects people differently on the basis of social position and therefore covers up privilege.

Oliver 2004 Kelly. W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression. Pg  1-2

Some contemporary cultural theorists maintain that forms of psychic domination are not unique to oppression but affect all human beings; or, oppression is the fate of all of us. Some have even suggested that alienation is inherent in the human condition and that oppression and violence are just repetitions of the founding violence at the core of subjectivity, nationality, and humanity.' If this is the case, then resistance to domination is futile. As I have argued elsewhere, to delineate the psychic and physical affects of oppression, it is crucial to distinguish constitutive violence inherent in subjectivity and human society from the violence of oppression, domination, and colonization, which may be necessary to the lifestyles of their beneficiaries but are not necessary to life itself.2 Indeed, I have tried to show that domination and subjection are not necessary to subjectivity but, to the contrary, undermine it. Here, I would like to take these arguments further by demonstrating that the European notion of an alienation inherent in subjectivity actually covers over a more treacherous form of alienation, the alienation unique to oppression. Existentialist and psychoanalytic notions of alienation as inherent in all subjectivity are constructed against a dark and invisible underside, the alienation of domination, slavery, and colonization. The late-nineteenth-century and early- to mid-twentieth century fixations on alienation, anxiety, and dread are much more than the result of modernization, urbanization, atomization, and mechanization. These theories of alienation (beginning with Hegel) were also born at a time when the practices of imperialism and the slave trade had been called into question as inhumane. The free-floating guilt and anxiety inherent in the human condition described by philosophers of alienation can in itself be diagnosed as a symptom of a concrete guilt over the oppression and domination that guaranteed white privilege. The thesis that alienation, guilt, and anxiety are inherent in the human condition works to cover over this guilt in the face of specific others against whom the white subject has constituted itself as privileged. Perhaps it is no accident that the heyday of Sartrean existentialist theories of alienation and freedom tied to the look of the other coincide with women's movements and civil rights movements in which women and blacks demanded freedom from sexist and racist alienation. Maintaining that alienation and subjection are inherent in the human condition and in the constitution of subjectivity not only covers over how, historically, subjectivity and humanity have been the privilege of a few but also levels different forms of alienation, subjection, and violence and thereby continues to render invisible forms of alienation, subjection and violence unique to oppression. Such theories, which maintain that alienation is inherent in the human condition and that all forms of alienation are merely versions of this primary sort, are symptomatic of an anxiety and guilt in the face of racial difference and racism and sexual difference and sexism. In the chapters that follow, I argue that European notions of alienation describe only a privileged subject and cannot account for the underside of that privilege, the alienation of those oppressed precisely in order to shore up such privilege. Of the so-called existentialist philosophers, only Frantz Fanon diagnoses the underside of privileged alienation by articulating another more dangerous and real form of alienation that cripples not only the body but also the psyche of those colonized and oppressed by the agency and arrogance of a privileged white subject.

The kritik is incestuous; only serving to satisfy its own self-obsession for reproduction in a delirium of useless conceptual production. 

Baudrillard 1993 (Jean, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, Edited by Mike Gane.  Page 45)

DG/DS  Could you tell us where you stand with regard to psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis has become useless, a burden.  It satisfies a sort of dizziness for explanations, for self-obsession and for reproducing itself.  The word was one of the fundamental tools of analysis, then everything began to spin round, and here too there was a delirium of conceptual production, which got more and more sophisticated.  Curiously, it has ceased to have any effect.  I am not talking about psychoanalysis in its early days.  But I do criticize the present-day variety because everything that’s at stake must go beyond it and cause it to shatter.

This incestuous knowledge gives rise to the original disgust and repulsion – to the Same which leads to self-annihilation.

Baudrillard 1993 (Jean, The Transparency of evil: essays on extreme phenomena / Jean Baudrillard; translated by James Benedict.  London: New York: Verso, 1993 Pages 121-122)

We no longer practice incest, but we have generalized it in all its derivative forms.  The difference is that our version of incest is no longer sexual and familiar, but rather scissiparous and protozoan.  This is how we have got around the prohibition: by subdividing the Same, through a copulation between One and the Same unmediated by the Other.  This is still incest, but without the tragedy.  All the same by giving material form – indeed, its most vulgar form – to this dangerous phantasy we have thereby also given material form to the curse that attends it, to the original repulsion and disgust, which are now on the increase in our societies as a function of the spread of this incestuous situation.  Perhaps even the hell of the other people would have been preferable to this return to the original form of an impossible kind of exchange.

        Inasmuch as the individual no longer confronts the other, he finds himself face to face with himself.  On account of an aggressive backlash on the part of his immune system, a dislocation of his own code and the destruction of his own defenses, the individual becomes in a sense an antibody to himself.  Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralizing otherness, to destroying the other as a natural point of reference in a vast flood of aseptic communication and interaction, of illusory exchange and contact.  By dint of communication, our society develops an allergy to itself.  By becoming transparent in its genetic, biological and cybernetic being, the body even develops an allergy to its own shadow.  Otherness denied becomes a spectre and returns in the form of a self-destructive process.  This, too, is the transparency of Evil.

This Halts Becoming - extinction

Baudrillard 2001 (Jean, The Impossible Exchange.  Pages 46-47)

The modern individual has crossed a critical threshold beyond which an original backlash occurs on the part of the species – denial of self becoming the las stage of individual consciousness, just as, according to Nietzsche, Ressentiment is the last stage of the geneaology of morals.  This is where the paradox and the perverse effects of all liberation – of what we call the advance of reason and civilization – crystallize.  For this to happen, there is no need for a death drive, a biological nostalgia for a state prior to individuation and sex: it is our modern, paradoxical condition which produces this denial of self, this mortiferous repulsion.  And indeed, death drive or no death drive (that immortality of protozoa), we are not far from rediscovering its equivalent today in the dimension of the clone as degree Xerox of the individual and degree Zero of evolution.

The affirmative’s framing mechanism doesn’t assume the world of debate – The alternative requires bring together the Symbolic and the Real in the game of debate resulting in the same psychosis they seek to solve

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”.

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Distribution Intelligence
 Department of Energy (http:~/~/goo.gl/gl/wiz4M(%%) stroud)
 "Distribution intelligence" refers to the part of the Smart Grid that applies to the utility distribution system, that is, the wires, switches, and transformers that connect the utility substation to you, the customers. The power lines that run through people's back yards are one part of the power distribution system. A key component of distribution intelligence is outage detection and response. Today, many utilities rely on customer phone calls to know which areas of their distribution system are being affected by a power outage. Along with smart meters, distribution intelligence will help to quickly pinpoint the source of a power outage so that repair crews can be immediately dispatched to the problem area. A utility's outage response can also improve. Most utilities count on complex power distribution schemes and manual switching to keep power flowing to most of their customers, even when power lines are damaged and destroyed. However, this approach has its limitations, and in many cases an automated system could respond more quickly and could keep the power flowing to more customers. By having sensors that can indicate when parts of the distribution system have lost power, and by combining automated switching with an intelligent system that determines how best to respond to an outage, power can be rerouted to most customers in a matter of seconds, or perhaps even milliseconds. It may even be possible to react quickly enough to power disturbances so that only those in the immediate neighborhood are affected, while other customers' power source are rerouted fast enough to avoid any interruption in power. This capability could be the first example of the highly touted "self-healing" aspect of the Smart Grid in action. The "Self-Healing" Power Distribution System Outage response is one aspect of distribution intelligence that is commonly referred to as distribution automation (DA). DA may actually be the oldest segment of the Smart Grid, because utilities have been automating their distribution systems since the 1960s. But while DA initially focused just on remote control of switches, the Electric Power Research Institute now considers distribution intelligence to mean a fully controllable and flexible distribution system. Combining DA components with a set of intelligent sensors, processors, and communication technologies will lead to distribution intelligence. When fully deployed, distribution intelligence will enable an electric utility to remotely monitor and coordinate its distribution assets, operating them in an optimal matter using either manual or automatic controls. Helping the Grid Run More Efficiently and Reliably Along with outage detection and response, another potential application of distribution intelligence is the ability to optimize the balance between real and reactive power. Devices that store and release energy, such as capacitors, or that use coils of wire to induce magnetic fields, such as electrical motors, have the ability to cause increased electrical currents without consuming real power; this is known as reactive power. A certain amount of reactive power is desirable within a power system, but too much reactive power can lead to large current flows that serve no purpose, causing efficiency losses as they heat up the distribution system wires. An intelligent distribution system can use power electronics to maintain the proper level of reactive power in the system. Distribution intelligence can also help to protect and control the feeder lines, the power lines that make up the distribution system. Most feeder lines are now protected by breakers or relays that trip when high currents flow through the line, a situation normally caused by a fault somewhere in the system. These relays sometimes incorporate time delays to allow for momentary flows of high current, which may be caused by industrial equipment powering up, rather than a fault. Protection systems are often a combination of instantaneous breakers with high current settings and time-delayed breakers or relays with lower settings. These systems of automated breakers and relays end up being a balancing act: they must allow the system to operate with high currents when needed but protect the system and the people around it from high current flows when a fault exists. Distribution intelligence can provide a more elegant approach to protecting the feeder lines, using sophisticated monitoring and controls to detect and correct for faults while maintaining the highest level of system reliability during non-fault conditions. An intelligent system could even detect and isolate faults in specific pieces of equipment and route power through a backup system instead, maintaining power reliability. Distribution intelligence can also incorporate more sophisticated ground-fault detectors to minimize the possibility that people can be shocked or electrocuted when encountering downed power lines.

Smart grid solves warming

Hertzog 2011 (Christine, active in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) privacy subgroup tasked with developing recommendations for management of residential, commercial, and industrial energy consumption data, author of the Smart Grid Dictionary and Managing Director: Smart Grid Library, How The Smart Grid Can Solve Climate Change, December 5, http:~/~/goo.gl/gl/T0ktv(%%) stroud)

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins its latest meeting today in Durban, South Africa. Only the sunniest of optimists expect real progress in forging a global agreement as developing and developed nations argue about voluntary versus legally binding emissions reductions and funding measures. There’s no single answer to the climate change mess we’re in, but Smart Grid advances will be primary contributors to the most effective reductions in CO2 emissions. Here are two incremental efforts that can reduce our use of fossil fuels and improve the odds of avoiding the severest impacts of climate change. Energy efficiency. Residential and commercial buildings account for 40% of energy consumed in the USA, according to the Department of Energy. Fossil fuels account for 77% of that energy expended to heat, cool, illuminate and operate those buildings. Innovative retrofit solutions for building envelopes (windows, walls, and ceilings) can reduce energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills. But energy efficiency innovations also extend into product designs and operations. For instance, the USA wisely instituted energy efficiency standards for refrigerators back in 1978, and since then, even as these appliances have increased in size and features, their electricity consumption has decreased by more than two thirds. The most recent round of refrigerator standards instituted in August of this year will trim another 25% of energy use by 2014. Similar expectations should be applied to every appliance and electronics component that reside in our homes and office buildings. Electric vehicles (EVs). This is truly disruptive in terms of technology, policies, services and even business models, and it couldn’t happen at a more opportune time. Electrification of personal transportation delivers beneficial impacts that range from environmental to economic to national security. There’s a good report from the Electrification Coalition that details the numerous benefits that we can enjoy through transitioning to EVs. This report recommends replacing traditional vehicle fleets to EVs as the first incremental step in that transition. EVs reduce petroleum products consumption, which accounts for 94% of our transportation needs today. A transition to EVs would eliminate a $1 billion per day transfer of wealth from the USA to countries that don’t like us. While these disruptions are most welcome to securing our energy security and refocusing investment within our borders, the Smart Grid offers strategic new uses of EVs beyond mere transportation. The most disruptive impact of all is that the energy stored in EVs can potentially be harnessed to modify electricity consumption patterns. EVs that are plugged into the grid during times of peak electricity use could be tapped to intelligently discharge just enough energy for utilities to ride-out those timeframes without building additional generation facilities or purchasing power at its most expensive price. Transitioning to EV-based transport will require upgrades to our electric infrastructure, which are needed anyway to support integration of renewables and distributed small to large scale generation. It will also require new software applications to manage EVs as mobile, temporary, and distributed energy sources. There are enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs to create innovations in technologies and services to manage what is commonly known as the V2G (vehicle to grid) connection. Even utilities and their regulatory agencies, typically cautious adopters of innovation, may develop EV business models that continue the focus on delivery of safe, reliable, and cost-effective electricity. The UN conference in Durban may not produce the game-changing agreements that we’d like to see, but in the USA we can challenge ourselves to be the leaders in the most dramatic reductions in carbon emissions through innovations in Smart Grid technologies, policies, and services. 

Smart Grid solves turbine over-implementation  (also possibly in texas – maybe bioD impact?)

King, 2011 (Chris, B.S. and an M.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, an M.S. in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a J.D. from Concord University School of Law, Too much wind energy? How the smart grid can help, http:~/~/goo.gl/gl/L1siQ(%%) stroud)

While many nations, states, and utilities are working hard to increase renewable energy production, managing these resources is a challenge. In particular, when it comes to managing wind energy, you really can have too much of a good thing. This week the World Wind Energy Association issued its 2011 half-year report, saying the world market “regained momentum after a weak year in 2010… This capacity can cover almost 3% of the electricity demand all over the world.” Though a small absolute number, this 3% is already too much — creating operational and financial challenges for the grid in Texas, the Pacific Northwest, Germany, and elsewhere. Fortunately the smart grid offers one potential (although partial) solution. The trouble with wind power Wind is a wonderful resource: It has no fuel cost, operating costs are minimal (mostly maintenance) and it has zero air emissions. Location is one of wind power’s main disadvantages. Wind farms tend to be far away from population centers, so existing transmission lines often quickly reach capacity quickly. And it’s expensive to build new transmission lines — especially given the challenges in obtaining rights-of-way. The smart grid can help power companies solve the location problem by enabling techniques such as dynamic line rating which can push more electrons through existing lines, effectively increasing transmission capacity. Intermittency is another problem. The grid has limited storage capability, which can make it hard for grid operators to accept wind energy when nature provides it. Hydro pumped storage is one good way to store extra energy. This means using off-peak wind power to pump water uphill, then letting the water flow downhill during peak hours to spin turbines. The downside is that it requires two reservoirs, and it can be tough on shoreline environments. In any case, potential sites for this strategy are very limited. Other grid-scale storage strategies remain cost-prohibitive. However, researchers are hopeful that over time the cost of grid-scale batteries and other storage technologies may drop. But for now, the lack of grid-scale storage means that when there is too much wind energy for the transmission grid to handle, or when there is no buyer in the market, grid operators order wind producers to “curtail” production — stop the turbines. In Texas last year these curtailments led to an estimated $57 million in generation losses, according to PBT Consulting. Curtailments in that state grew by 182% compared to 2009. Meanwhile, Texas keeps building more wind generation. Wind curtailments have additional costs — especially negative prices in wholesale power markets. Other generators usually end up paying this cost, through depressed prices for their production. Sometimes, generators operating nuclear, gas, or other plants actually pay other generators to shut down, since ultimately that’s cheaper than ramping down their own plants. In 2010, Texas wholesale power prices went negative 17% of the time. There’s a huge potential source of grid-scale energy storage: existing building thermal mass. Smart grid technologies can make this feasible to implement. By pre-cooling in summer and pre-heating in winter, homes and businesses can shift significant amounts of load — thereby using some of the excess wind power available. One study reported that “up to 51% of the total cooling load could be shifted to off-peak hours through optimal control.” Here’s what’s needed to turn existing buildings into a grid-scale energy storage system: Time-varying prices. This gives consumers a direct financial incentive to shift their loads. Of course, these should always be voluntary. Detailed energy information. Smart meters can supply this in real time via the home area network interface, and online via the web and smart phones (“backhauled” data). Consumers can use this data to understand how and when they use energy, and to decide how to save energy or shift when they use it. Recently California issued rules for how consumers can gain access to their data, while keeping it private and secure. Automated response. Smart thermostats are the key here for grid-scale energy storage. These devices are now widely available (for example, about $90 at Amazon.com). Customers want to “set and forget” their devices to shift load and save money automatically. The smart grid combines and capitalizes on all of these elements to make energy storage work as a system across the grid. Beyond their thermal mass, buildings offer other opportunities for grid-scale energy storage — especially electric water heaters, plug-in electric vehicles, and ice storage systems. We’ll be covering these technologies more in the future. The smart grid will make it possible to capture more benefits from wind power — and greatly reduce the problems that too many turbines currently can create.

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1NC
They harken back to a long-ago time when indigenous people were victimized, memorialize the losses and try to move forward, proven when they begin the 1AC by talking about the Trail of Tears. But memory doesn’t work so simply, we cannot just recall the past unproblematically. What we do is recreate and then simulate our imagination of the past, so we’re left with little Indian boys dancing in chicken feathers for our amusement.

Gerald Vizenor (be afraid, be very afraid).  Manifest Manners.  1994.  Page 41.

The Wahpeton Indian School in North Dakota was conceived in the assimilation vein of manifest
AND
solace. How could we be the assassins of his dreams and survivance?

Natives say "No" to the plan – any risk of Native compliance results in the extermination of both Indigenous culture and the planet

Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury.  "Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading.")

Baudrillard writes that the radical Other is intolerable to the west, which is reliant
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that matter ’Maori development’) furthers the demise of their symbolic power.

Rejecting the psychodrama of re-appropriating autonomy is critical for the Native in maintaining their position of radical foreignness – the position in which all their power to destabilize western rule lies.

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
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no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter.

Monumentalizing – they monumentalize a lost indigenous culture and read Indian history as obituary. This causes what Vizenor calls manifest manners and Baudrillard calls viral difference – we force the other into our preconcieved frame so that we can know, understand, and interact with them more smoothly, so that there is no resistance from those living Indian people.

Gerald Vizenor (be afraid, be very afraid).  Manifest Manners.  1994.  Page 8.

Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and other
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annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers began representing their own culture."

Fuck Ward Churchill – Their Churchill evidence says that Indians lived in this idyllic,
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even if they’re given the equivalent of their four acres and a mule.

Gerald Vizenor (be afraid, be very afraid).  Manifest Manners.  1994.  Page 24-25.

President Ronald Reagan, for instance, told university students on his official visit to
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of the noble savage and the unattainable salvation of absolute boredom and melancholy.

Politics is already dead, means there’s only a risk they make Indians care about the government because they want their 4 acres and a mule too. Only this can revive politics and make us invest in the logic of colonization.

Jean Baudrillard. Forget Foucault. Translated by Nicole Dufresne. 1977. Page 50-54.

With Foucault, we always brush against political determination in its last instance. One
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now that’s real, that’s substantial, that’s prospective stock. That’s power.

Even if they do solve colonization, this only makes Indian people responsible for themselves.

Baudrillard ’05 (The Intelligence of Evil)

Freedom? A dream%21 Everyone aspires to it, or at least gives the
AND
of law. Nore of duty, nor of moral and psychological law.

This also means there’s only a risk they cause tyranny of the self, which is comparatively the worst form of violence.

Baudrillard ’93 (Jean, The transparency of evil : essays on extreme phenomena / Jean Baudrillard ; translated by James Benedict.  London : New York : Verso, 1993.  P. 167-168)

At all events, it is better to be controlled by someone else than by
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us. That which is Other, that which we have to seduce. 

Victimization – representing indigenous victimization feeds the idea that the real Indians are dead, and all that remains are essentially victims, nothing more than alcoholics and casino-owners in need of the gifts of the West. This turns the case.

Sandy Grande. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. 2004. Page 93-94.

Indeed, the marketplace is flooded with the tragic stories of American Indians as lost
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first century-that Americas "Indian problem" has long been solved.

Accommodation – Their affirmative creates an Indian theme park, where you can vote for Indians and be a good liberal for 2 hours at a time. However, this is enacted without ever dealing meaningfully with Indian scholarship – it’s what Churchill describes when he says liberals say "Yes, that’s important too" but then puts indigenous issues on the back-burner. Within the debate context, this is nothing more than accommodation.

Sandy Grande. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. 2004. Page 92-93.

Indeed, various critical scholars have revealed "essentialism" as an integral part of
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the First Universal Races Conference with W.E.B. Dubois."

The affirmative’s reduction of radical alterity to difference points to a complicity in a system of accommodate or banish – in this paradigm, the radical other must be exterminated. They can either destroy themselves by assimilating into the system of difference, the flows of affect, or they will face destruction at the hands of those who wish to integrate them.

Baudrillard 90
(Jean, French philosopher and writer) "The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon" Pg. 146 

To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the  world.
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their own extermination  represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.  

And only refusing the aff’s action and encounter with natives people allows us to evade colonization. You cannot colonize that which you never come in contact with.

Baudrillard 1993 (Jean, Transparency of Evil, page 193-6)

The very scale of the efforts made to exterminate the Other is testimony to the
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rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.

2NC
The Buffalo is their golden cow, an animal ritualistically sacrificed with no expectation of relationship or subjectivity.  We no longer need it as a beast, as humanized – we need to add more space or market improvements to force subjectivity upon it as a site of production – more and more buffalo narratives… it’s a beast and we should leave it that way.
Baudrillard 1995 (Jean, Simulacra Simulations, from the chapter "The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses")
Once animals had a more sacred, more divine character than men. There is
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alliance with men, resides in the fact that they do not speak.

Purging animality from our world in this fashion is the starting point of total extinction

Baudrillard 1999 (Transparency of Evil, p. 61)

The Boy in the Bubble is a prefigurement of the future - of that total
AND
and, at the slightest contact with the world outside, instant death.

1NR
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%21) 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=q3kgjjTE0dk%26feature=list_related%26playnext=1%26list=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 %2410 – but, more likely, the right to wear Nike running shoes going for %24300. 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.

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"

In order to be responsible, one must be able to respond to the needs
AND
utterly replaceable, exchangeable. Each person is individual, but not singular.

Tournament: Northwestern | Round: 7 | Opponent: Boston College KM | Judge: Lundeen

1

A - - Death is a rendezvous, not an objective destiny. The more we try to escape fate, the more we seem to run to it.  Baudrillard explains in 2001  (Seduction, 2001, p. 72-74)

An ellipsis of the sign, an eclipse of meaning: an, illusion. The mortal distraction that a single sign can cause instantaneously. Consider the story of the soldier who meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace, and believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king's palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. ; But Death, astonished, replies: "I didn't mean to frighten him . It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand. " Yes, one runs towards one's fate all the more surely by seeking to escape it . Yes, everyone seeks his own death, and the failed acts are the most successful . Yes, signs follow an unconscious course. But all this concerns the truth of the rendez-vous in Samarkand; it does not account for the seduction of the story, which is in no way an apologue of truth. What is astounding about the story is that this seemingly inevitable rendez-vous need not have taken place. There is nothing to suggest that the soldier would have been in Samarkand without this chance encounter, and without the ill-luck of Death's naive gesture, which acted in spite of itself as a gesture of seduction. Had Death been content to call the soldier back to order, the story would lose its charm. Everything here is hinged on a single, involuntary sign. The gesture does not appear to be part of a strategy, nor even an unconscious ruse; yet it takes on the unexpected depth of seduction, that is, it appears as something that moves laterally, as a sign that, unbeknownst to the protagonists (including Death, as well as the soldier), advances a deadly command, an aleatory sign behind which another conjunction, marvelous or disastrous, is being enacted. A conjunction that gives the sign's trajectory all the characteristics of a witticism . No one in the story has anything to reproach himself with -or else the king who lent his horse, is as guilty as anyone else. No. Behind the apparent liberty of the two central characters (Death was free to make his gesture, the soldier to flee), they were both following a rule of which neither were aware. The rule of this game, which, like every fundamental rule, must remain secret, is that death is not a brute event, but only occurs through seduction, that is, by way of an instantaneous, indecipherable complicity, by a sign or signs that will not be deciphered in time. Death is a rendez-vous, not an objective destiny. Death cannot fail to go since he is this rendez-vous, that is, the allusive conjunction of signs and rules which make up the-game. At the same time, Death is an innocent player in the game. This is what gives the story its secret irony, whose resolution appears as a stroke of wit trait d esprit, and provides us with such sublime pleasure - and distinguishes it from a moral fable or a vulgar tale about the death instinct. The spiritual character trait spirituel of the story extends the spirited character trait d espritgestuel of Death's gesture, and the two seductions, that of Death and of the story, fuse together. Death's astonishment is delightful, an astonishment at the frivolity of an arrangement where things proceed by chance : "But this soldier should have known that he was expected in Samarkand tomorrow, and taken his time to get there. . ." However Death shows only surprise, as if his existence did not depend as much as the soldier's on the fact that they were to meet in Samarkand. Death lets things happen, and it is his casualness that makes him appealing - this is why the soldier hastens to join him. None of this involves the unconscious, metaphysics or psychology. Or even strategy. Death has no plan. He restores chance with a chance gesture; this is how he works, yet everything still gets done. There is nothing that cannot not be done, yet everything still preserves the lightness of chance, of a furtive gesture, an accidental encounter or an illegible sign. That's how it is with seduction. . . Moreover, the soldier went to meet death because he gave meaning to a meaningless gesture which did not even concern him. He took personally something that was not addressed to him, as one might mistake for oneself a smile meant for someone else. The height of seduction is to be without seduction. The man seduced is caught in spite of himself in a web of stray signs. And it is because the sign has been turned from its meaning or "seduced," that the story itself is seductive. It is when signs are seduced that they become seductive.

B: Our interpretation is that the aff should have to defend that “death” is an impact that should be avoided or even evaluated. AND,

“Should” expreses practical reasons. 

WordNet in ‘97 Princeton University, 1.6

Should v 1 : be expected to: “Parties should be fun” 2 : expresses an emotional, practical, or other reason for doing something: “You had better put on warm clothes”; “You should call your mother-in-law”; “The State ought to repair bridges” syn: had better, ought

C: because they fail to distinguish life from death, the affirmative doesn’t provide a justification for plan passage, and you vote negative on presumption. 

It's a prereq to debate.

Shively, 2000 Ruth Lessl Shively, Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas AandM, POLITICAL THEORY AND PARTISAN POLITICS, 2000, p. 181-2. (DRGNS/E614)

The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to—they must reject and limit—some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest—that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

2

Their aff participates in economic exchange, hoping that the pendulum that is the global economy swings their direction. This never acknowledges that this system of transnational capitalism is what made human lives in Africa less valuble than the profit of natural gas sold in america, and allows us to liquidate the world down to its exchange value.

Baudrillard 93 jean, frenchie French man, transparency of evil ,p 8 – 11

Thus every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types. Sex is no longer located in sex itself, but elsewhere - everywhere else, in fact. Politics is no longer restricted to the political sphere, but infects every sphere - economics, science, art, sport . . . Sport itself, meanwhile, is no longer located in sport as such, but instead in business, in sex, in politics, in the general style of performance. These domains are affected by sport's criteria of  'excellence', effort and record-breaking as by its childish notion of self-transcendence. Each category thus passes through a phase transition during which its essence is diluted in homeopathic doses, infinitesimal relative to the total solution, until it finally disappears, leaving a trace so small as to be indiscernible, like the 'memory of water'. AIDS is the reflection not so much of an excess of sex or sexual pleasure as of sex's decompensation through its general spread into all areas of life, its venting through all the trivial variants of sexual incantation. The real loss of immunity concerns sex as a whole, with the disappearance of sexual difference and hence of sexualitv per se. It is in this diffraction of the sexual reality AFTERTHEORGY principle, at the fractal, micrological and non-human level, that the essential confusion of the epidemic takes hold. Perhaps we still have a memory of sex, rather as water 'remembers' molecules no matter how diluted. But that is the whole point: this is only a molecular memory, the corpuscular memory of an earlier life, and not a memory of forms or singularities (water, after all, can hardly retain the features of a face, or the colour of someone's eyes). so what we are left with is the simple imprint of a faceless sexuality infinitely watered down in a broth of politics, media and communications, and eventually manifested in the viral explosion of AIDS. The law that is imposed on us is the law of the confusion of categories. Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once. Everything has acquired a political meaning, especially since 1968; and it is not just everyday life but also madness, language, the media, even desire, that are politicized as they enter the sphere of liberation, the sphere of mass processes. Likewise everything has become sexual, anything can be an object of desire: power, knowledge - everything is interpreted in terms of phantasies, in terms of repression, and sexual stereotypy reigns in every last corner. Likewise, too, everything is now aestheticized: politics is aestheticized in the spectacle, sex in advertising and porn, and all kinds of activity in what is conventionally referred to as culture - a sort of all-pervasive media- and advertising-led semiologization: 'culture degree Xerox'. Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political any more, the word itself is meaningless. when everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its deterr,ninants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears. This paradoxical state of affairs, which is simultaneously the complete actualization of an idea, the perfect realization of the whole tendency of modernity, and the negation of that idea and that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their very success, by virtue of their extension beyond their own bounds - this state of affairs is epitomized by a single figure: the transpolitical, the transsexual, the transaesthetic. There is no longer an avant-garde, political, sexual or artistic, embodying a capacity for anticipation; hence the possibility of any radical critique - whether in the name of desire, of revolution, or of the liberation of forms - no longer exists. The days of that revolutionary movement are gone. The glorious march of modernity has not led to the transformation of all values, as we once dreamed it would, but instead to a dispersal and involution of value whose upshot for us is total confusion - the impossibility of apprehending any determining principle, whether of an aesthetic, a sexual or a political kind. The proletariat has not succeeded in negating itself as such - the century and a half since Marx has made that clear. The proletariat has failed to negate ltseIf qua class and thereby abolish class society per se. Perhaps this is because the proletariat never was a class, as had been supposed - because only the bourgeoisie was a true class, and therefore the only one capable of negating itself as such. For it has indeed negated itself, along with capital, and so generated a classless society, albeit one which has nothing to do with the classless society that was supposed to arise from a revolution and from a negation of the proletariat as such. As for the proletariat, it has simply disappeared - vanished along with the class struggle itself. There can be no doubt that had capitalism developed in accordance with its own contradictory logic, it would have been defeated by the proletariat. In an ideal sense, Matx's analysis is still irreproachable. But Marx simply did not foresee that it would be possible for capital, in the face of the imminent threat to its existence, to transpoliticize itself, as it were: to launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazardforrn, and thus to totalize the world in its own image. Capital (if it may still be so called) has barred the way of political economy and the law of value; it is in this sense that it has successfully escaped its own end. Henceforward it can function independently of its own former aims, and absolutely without reference to any aims whatsoever. The inaugural event of this mutation was undoubtedly the Great Crash of 1929; the stockmarket crisis of 1987 was merely an aftershock.

In the way that politics is dead, the market is also dead, and it its current existence speculations on speculations, abstracted to the nth degree from any basis in reality. Sure, economic crisises come up, but only as the preventative electroshocks that show us things could be so much worse if we were to seriously upset the global balance of power and exchange of commodity. The aff is part and parcel of this system of global deterrence that lets small states and small markets fail in order to maintain a larger fiction about money meaning something.

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 ...

This financial speculation will eventually run its course and collapse itself; this is our only way out of this rigged game, to accelerate speculation past a point of use value, and to a point where this financial system literally collapses.

Fernando, 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). “Waking up with Obama; or the morning after ...”, February 10, 2010, http://www.jeremyfernando.com/art_12.html

The logic of "all under one idea" is terror , for what is captured is the space of public opinion. As Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud never let us forget, terror is "a blow that is not struck on the adversary but it is hoped that the blow will be borne by the third party, the witness."2 The events of September 11 were terroristic, not because two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, but because we are no longer allowed to read that date in any other way. The fact that the year, 2001, no longer has to be mentioned, suggests that every other year has been sucked into it, has already been effaced. What has been taken hostage is the ability to negotiate, the ability for thought. As Lyotard and Thébaud continue, "Whereas in a two-sided battle, my opponent thinks that what I think and do is unjust, and I think that what he does and thinks is unjust. Well, his freedom is complete and so is mine. With a hostage, I am applying . . . not even "pressure." It is much more than that. It is the social bond taken as a fact of nature."3 What has been taken away is choice: one no longer can do anything but constitute "September 11" as a "terror attack on the United States "; your only other option, alternative, is to refuse this interpretation. This is hardly a space for negotiation—all you can say is "yes" or "no." Here, one can hear an echo of the Obama rally cry—"yes we can." Most of the focus has been on the emphasis of the affirmation that "we can." However what has been driven aside—rather forcefully at that—is the notion of the "no"; what seems to have been discounted completely is the choice to not do something, even though one can. This suggests that all potentiality has to be translated into actuality; in other words, potentiality is only a phase before actuality—if this particular translation is not made, there might as well have been none to begin with. But as Giorgio Agamben has taught us, potentiality as such always already brings with it the potentiality not-to-be. Hence, the implication of this call is that only results matter—by extension, you are only as good as your productivity, as what you produce; "you as such do not matter, unless you can." Clearly in the Obama world, there would be no place for Bartleby. When Barack Obama said, "for we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth," he was met with thunderous applause, for this sounds like a reiteration of the American Dream, where regardless of race, language, or religion, anyone has a chance of success. In many ways, he is the very embodiment of this philosophy of meritocracy: the entire Obama campaign was run on the premise that Americans should vote for him not as a black man, but as the most competent candidate, the one that met all the conditions to be the leader. However, this also reiterates the fact that "as long as you fulfill the set criteria, you will be rewarded." It is precisely this understanding—the knowledge that power rests in forms—that Barack Obama possesses. This is why anyone and everyone can gain recognition under the new regime: no longer is the banal binary of "you are either with us or against us" at play; instead we are now faced with the far more insidious challenge of the "patchwork." On the surface, it would seem that a patchwork is fluid and welcoming to all differences. However, anyone who has done any sewing would know that patchworks run on strict logics: anything that does not fall within the overall scheme is cut out and thrown away. In this "patchwork" world that Obama is invoking, every American—and since he never lets the rest of the world forget that the US "remains the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth"—by extension everyone in the world, is now a unit for exchange; a calculable entity which has to choose between fitting the master-plan or being cut out. You are no longer even given the choice to be "against us," to resist, for if you are assimilated, you no longer even exist. In this sense, one is no longer allowed to be the enemy; the only option that remains is to either play (unconditionally accepting the rules of the game) or leave. This is of course nothing more than capitalism at its purest: everything is equal, flattened—channeling the spectre of Jean Baudrillard, everything has been "liberated so that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit,"4 in the precise sense that everyone and everything is completely and utterly exchangeable. However, it is not as if this complete exchangeability comes without a price. If everything is equivalent to everything else, this also means that nothing is inherent any longer; there are no longer any secrets, any unknowns. Everything is completely and utterly knowable, calculable, disseminable. And as Baudrillard has warned us time and time again, when "each individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is total confusion of types. . . . Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories."5 In other words, it can be found everywhere; and by extension, nowhere at exactly the same time. If everything is political, then politics itself is meaningless; if economics is everything, the economy as such ceases to have any meaning. In terms of humans, if we are all exactly the same as the next person, this means that none of us are singular. Perhaps this was already apparent by the increasing importance of "human resource management" over the last few decades: by this logic, humans are nothing more than resources; constantly depreciating, and more importantly, completely replaceable. Here we find ourselves in an almost Beckettian situation; one where we can no longer go on (after all what is the point), but have to at the same time. Perhaps at this point we have to attempt to find hope in the perfection of the system itself, in the fact that no system can be perfect, in the fact that the absolute perfection of the system is its own failing point. The only way to face this absurd premise (where perfection and imperfection are exactly the same) is to be completely ironic; not in the traditional sense of keeping a distance from it (the distance of analysis) but the very opposite—the absurd position of utterly plunging into the very absurdity itself. When faced with an utterly indifferent system—governed by a single Idea without any regard for the followers of that Idea—one has no choice but to be even more indifferent. For this is the nightmare of any disciplinary mechanism: what power would it have over the subject if the subject did not mind being disciplined in the first place? In this sense, not only is resistance to the disciplining expected, it is absolutely required: one can even go so far as to say that resistance is the very crux of the disciplinary mechanism. Without this assumption, the entire disciplinary system would collapse on itself. When faced with a system that attempts to objectify (to flatten everyone into variations of each other), instead of resisting—insisting on our subjectivity and uniqueness—we must take the plunge and embrace our status as pure object(s). The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is an apt metaphor for this: it spreads, not by combating the defenses of the host, but by doing the exact opposite; HIV attaches itself to its host precisely by using the host's defenses. In this manner, the more the host body attempts to defend itself, the more it attempts to combat the HIV, the more the virus spreads. In this sense, a position of hyper-conformity may potentially short-circuit the entire logic. Capitalism—and economics as a whole—is hinged on the fact that its subjects attach personal meaning to their consumption. Thus we must abandon the age old strategy of "finding meaning" in our own lives. By plunging ourselves into infinite circulation, by embracing utter and absolute meaninglessness, we will not face up to capitalism, but instead take it on its own terms. Forget revolutions: they move around in circles and eventually end up in the same place. In the Year of the Ox, we must embrace the fact that we are castrated beings, all lined up and facing the same direction. Perhaps even embracing the ironic advantage of being a slave—remembering always Georges Bataille's teaching that slaves cannot be sacrificed. After all, why must we read "yes we can" as a strong affirmation—it can also be a question, an empty claim, or even better, a plea; soft, weak, whimpering.6 And perhaps, in this absolute indifference, not just to the system, but to ourselves, we might be able to seduce the totalizing logic of capitalism itself. Thus, we offer it the challenge of our own emptiness, our own absence, in fact, our own deaths. Perhaps it might respond with its own …

3

The USFG should base the value of our currency on the TI-89 series of calculators

Case

Natural Gas Prices low now, there is prime opportunity to keep the price low

Richard Thompson 2012 reporter, New Orleans Times-Picayune

(Low natural gas prices may draw industries to Louisiana, http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2012/07/low_natural_gas_prices_may_dra.html)

With natural gas at decade-low prices, state economic officials are working to catch a wave of new investment interest from industries eager to tap into the abundant supply of the clean-burning fuel to power their plants. "We're working hard to position ourselves to get a disproportionate share of that new activity," Stephen Moret, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development, said in an interview last week. A wellspring of inexpensive natural gas has helped drive down electricity rates for some industrial users, particularly those in the chemical industry. Competitive fuel prices have already been at least partially responsible for several new industrial projects in the state, including a new natural gas-fired power plant Entergy Louisiana plans to build in Westwego and a methanol plant that Vancouver-based Methanex Corp. may build in Geismar. Royal Dutch Shell PLC is reportedly considering building a $10 billion gas-to-diesel processing plant in Louisiana. That plant, still years away from reality, would convert enough natural gas into diesel fuel to fill more than 160,000 cars a day.

We haven’t reached a peak in Natural Gas, new techniques and new wells are fruitful

Nolan Hart 2010 Energy Industry, self employed. To pay the bills I work in the oil and gas industry, on drilling rigs in a technical position related to directional drilling (http://doodlebugs.xomba.com/how_long_until_peak_natural_gas. Author of works in Horizontal drilling industry and blogs about the energy industry)

What About Peak Natural Gas? So, does that mean a peak in natural gas too? After all both are fossil fuels and both come from wells, often from the same well in some areas. In the past prices of natural gas and oil moved in unison. The natural gas paradox is this: In the past decade a technology called horizontal drilling was perfected and now shale rock, which was never before seen as a reservoir of natural gas or oil, is being exploited all across the country. This revolution is going full swing in the United States with areas like the vast Marcellus shale in the Northeast and the Haynesville shale in Louisiana, proving to hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. Even the die hard prophets of peak oil doom are finally waking up to the fact that we have many more years worth of this resource left. We suddenly have over a one hundred year supply of natural gas at current consumption rates and that number has been growing by about one decade more each year since 2005. New discoveries such as the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas are adding trillions more cubic feet to the natural gas inventory. So, peak oil, yes. Peak natural gas, no way. Shale Everywhere, A Worldwide Glut Of Natural Gas Coming By the way, those shale beds that are full of natural gas don't just exist here. There are dozens of such areas around the world. Only because the U.S. pioneered horizontal drilling has the majority of drilling been done here. As we begin to export horizontal drilling to China, Australia and Western Europe, the worldwide glut of natural gas supply will only get bigger.

There is no real way of predicting what is going to happen if LNG exportation comes through – there is too much risk in adopting an LNG export policy

Michael Levi 2012 David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he is also director of its Program on Energy Security and Climate Change

(The Hamilton Project, A strategy for U.S. Natural Gas Exports June 2012 http:~/~/www.brookings.edu/~~/media/research/files/papers/2012/6/13%20exports%20levi/06_exports_edu/~~/media/research/files/papers/2012/6/13%20exports%20levi/06_exports_levi)

The first way that prices could converge is through U.S. LNG exports, which could ultimately bring the various prices together, net of transport costs (including an indeterminate risk premium paid to investors in risky LNG projects). Indeed initial natural gas exports themselves will tend to shrink opportunities for subsequent exports. A recent DOE study projects that with moderate U.S. gas resources and twelve billion cubic feet a day of exports, U.S. benchmark prices would rise to more than $8 per thousand cubic feet by the middle of the next decade (EIA 2012c). When combined with the cost of moving natural gas from the United States to overseas markets, there is a strong chance that some exports would be unprofitable at that price. The same analysis found that if U.S. resources were lower than anticipated, prices could reach $14 per thousand cubic feet by 2020, making exports undoubtedly uneconomic at the margin. All that said, assuming U.S. LNG exports at the outset of this analysis would make no sense, since their very existence depends on the particular export policy that is adopted.

Smooth transitions fail – technological overshoot impossible to overcome, the aff will fail

Samuel Alexander 2012 lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia, and editor of Voluntary Simplicity Ted Trainer and the Simpler Way, Simplicity Institute Report 12d, 2012  http:~/~/simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/pdf%5D)

Trainer’s general point on technology is that the extent of ecological overshoot is already so great that technology will never be able to solve the ecological crises of our age, certainly not in a world based on economic growth and with a growing global population. Amory Lovins (1998) is probably the best--‐known advocate of technological solutions to ecological problems, most famous for his ‘factor four’ thesis. He argues that if we exploit technology we could have four times the economic output without increasing environmental impact (or maintain current economic output and reduce environmental impact by a factor of four). But as we have already seen, if the rich world continues to grow at 3% per year until 2070 and by that stage the poorest nations have attained similarly high living standards – which is the aim of the global development agenda – total world economic output (and impact) could well be as much as 60 times larger than it is today. If we assume that sustainability requires that fossil fuel use and other resource consumption must be half of what they are today (and the greenhouse problem would require a larger reduction than this), then what is needed is something like a factor 120 reduction in the per unit impact of GDP, not merely a factor 4 reduction (Trainer, 2007: 117). Again, even allowing for some uncertainty in these calculations, the claim that technological solutions can solve the ecological crises and sustain the growth paradigm is simply not credible. Trainer has shown that the absolute decoupling necessary is just beyond what is remotely possible. The final nail in the coffin of techno--‐ optimists is the fact that despite decades of extraordinary technological advance, the overall ecological impact of the global economy is still increasing (Jackson, 2009: Ch. 4), making even a factor four reduction through technological advance seem wildly optimistic.

Environmental racism is too narrow a focus.  3 impacts: they disregard structural racism, can't understand how racism becomes pervasive in defining space and reincorporate racism into society.  Turns case.

Laura Pulido.  “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California”.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1), 12-40.  2000.  Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.  Accessed from: www.praxis-epress.org/CGR/30-pdf(% class="StyleStyleBold12pt" style="font-size:13.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; line-height:115%" %) – M.E.

Although the study of racial inequality is not new to geographers (Anderson, 1987; Gilmore, 1998; Jackson and Penrose, 1994; Kobayashi and Peake, 1994; S. Smith, 1993; Woods, 1998), environmental racism offers us new insights into the subject, particularly its spatiality. Unfortunately, scholars of environmental racism have not seriously problematized racism, opting instead for a de facto conception based on malicious, individual acts. There are several problems with this approach. First, by reducing racism to a hostile, discriminatory act, many researchers, with the notable exception of Bullard (1990), miss the role of structural and hegemonic forms of racism in contributing to such inequalities. Indeed, structural racism has been the dominant mode of analysis in other substantive areas of social research, such as residential segregation (Massey and Denton, 1993) and employment patterns (Kirschenman and Neckerman, 1991), since at least Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944). Not only has the environmental racism literature become estranged from social science discussions of race, but, in the case of urban-based research, it is divorced from contemporary urban geography. A second and related concern is that racism is not conceptualized as the dynamic sociospatial process that it is. Because racism is understood as a discrete act that may be spatially expressed, it is not seen as a sociospatial relation both constitutive of the city and produced by it. As a result, the spatiality of racism is not understood, particularly the relationship between places. Yet pollution concentrations are inevitably the product of relationships between distinct places, including industrial zones, affluent suburbs, working-class suburbs, and downtown areas, all of which are racialized. A final problem with a narrow understanding of racism is that it limits claims, thereby reproducing a racist social order. By defining racism so narrowly, racial inequalities that cannot be attributed directly to a hostile, discriminatory act are not acknowledged as such, but perhaps as evidence of individual deficiencies or choices. Yet if we wish to create a more just society, we must acknowledge the breadth and depth of racism.

Impact Takeout – No risk of an impact.  Environmental racism isn't happening now.  Studies prove.

Glasgow 5 (Joshua, Yale Law School JD candidate, Buffalo Environmental Law Journal, 13 Buff. Envt’l L.J. 69, Fall, ln).

In addition to courtroom difficulties, the environmental justice movement was challenged by a number of studies in the mid-1990s challenging the evidence of discriminatory siting and exposure. *76 An influential University of Massachusetts study conducted in 1994 examined over five hundred hazardous waste facilities and found no evidence of discriminatory siting. 27 Additionally, scholars challenged the earlier studies' methodologies, including the sample selection, the definition of minority, the geographic scope examined, and the failure to control for other variables. 28 In a series of articles, Vicki Been set forth a particularly powerful critique of environmental justice studies. 29 Been notes that most studies examined the contemporary makeup of a neighborhood impacted by a LULU, not its makeup at the time of siting. 30 This method ignores the possibility that a LULU would lower nearby housing prices, causing affluent residents to move away. These residents would be replaced by lower-income individuals, attracted by the lower housing prices. As a result of these market dynamics, even LULUs located in a wealthy neighborhood could later become surrounded by the poor. 31 2. This "chicken-or-the-egg" dilemma has plagued the environmental justice literature. 32

Reconceptualizing democracy traps us in false hope.

Baudrillard 2008 (Jean, Interviewed by Philippe Petit.  Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems.  International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 1 (January, 2008).)

Petit: Listening to you, that destiny seems inescapable. It's no use asking what you think of those who are intent on refounding democratic citizenship.
 
Baudrillard: At the current time, democracy is a social form that's about as ancestral as the symbolic exchange of primitive societies. And we dream of it in the same way. The political in general continues to be the waking dream of Western societies – of the exoteric societies where everything is expressed by technics. The esoteric societies, for their part (whether they are disinherited or traditional societies), long since brought politics into line with tribal arrangements. They have trapped and tamed the Western machinery of politics, law, democracy and the universal in their per­sonal structures and relations; they have integrated linearity and history into their own cycle. We may ask ourselves whether, on a much vaster scale and by the roundabout route of rationality, it isn't the same with our Western societies. Doesn't the political sphere obey impulses, obligations, challenges and fantasies that have lit­tle to do with public affairs? This incorruptible truth of evil, of the irrational, shows through in the very corruption of the political, which must therefore be interpreted positively as the impossibility of Political Reason realizing itself. This is what explains why the more imperative transparency becomes, the greater the corrup­tion. By wishing merely to take into account a politically correct human nature ­a fundamentally Rousseauist vision – the militants of the good democratic cause – of those who, more subtly, wish to rehabilitate the “essence” of the political – merely feed this corrupt form of the social. What is the point of setting a purpose for an enlightened dimension of the political and the social spheres, when it's becoming increasingly obvious, most particularly in the economic sphere, that these things are caught up with much stranger purposes, if not indeed with no purpose at all? There's a kind of savage delusion and – not to put too fine a point on it – stupid­ity, in stubbornly pressing on in the right direction when there is no direction, in wishing to change the form of the equation when it's equal to zero.
           Just look at all the battles everywhere on corrupt fronts: in the electoral system, where people are led to fight for equivalent castes; in the employment field, where everyone has to fight to find a place in a system of exploitation, a relatively favoured spot in a labour market which simultaneously serves the government as a black-mailing technique. Everywhere we're trapped in false problems, false alternatives, false issues, in which we lose out come what may.

This conception of liberatory politics is rooted in the textual utopia of oppressive mobility which denies true liberation while perpetuating colonialism, patriarchy, and otherization.

Pritchard 2000 (Elizabeth A. doctorate from Harvard University.  The Way Out West: Development and the Rhetoric of Mobility in Postmodern Feminist Theory.  Hypatia 15.3 (2000) 45-72.  Project Muse.)

Michel Foucault's analysis of Immanuel Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?" casts a brilliant light on the complexity and possible continuity of a strand of Enlightenment thought. Foucault observes that Kant provides no substantive rendering of the Enlightenment. Kant defines Enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity or tutelage" (Kant 1970, 54). Kant's Enlightenment consists in a movement away from a lesser state. He does not supply, however, a fleshed-out description of what the better state is into which one is to enter. Kant writes of human nature that our "original destiny lies precisely in such progress" (Kant 1970, 57; italics added). A destiny of progress is no destiny. Destiny--which suggests fate--is derived from the End Page 48 Latin destinare which mean "to fasten down or secure." 6url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT6 The point, for Kant, is to become unfastened. Kant's Enlightenment is signified by open-endedness, metaphors of which are sprinkled throughout his writings. For instance, he asserts, "Men will of their own accord gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately adopted to keep them in it," (Kant 1970, 59; italics added). Foucault argues, therefore, that Kant sees Enlightenment as an "exit," a "way out." Foucault also asserts that this discourse of an exit or way out is part of what he describes as the Enlightenment "attitude" of being "at the frontiers"--of analyzing the limits imposed upon us and experimenting with going beyond them. And it is this attitude, he offers, that may be "the thread that . . . connects us with the Enlightenment" (Foucault 1984, 43, 42, 50).

Foucault's analysis of the Enlightenment correlates progress (read: development) with a spatial story of mobility. To become enlightened is to exit from a kind of bondage; it is to cross a frontier, a border. Kant does insist that what is necessary for Enlightenment is freedom. Foucault notes that an alternate "rendering" of Kant's Enlightenment would be the "undefined work of freedom" (Foucault 1984, 46; italics added). Kant does provide some contours to his understanding of freedom. But I would argue that they only bolster Foucault's reading of Kant's emphasis upon "exiting." Freedom is the "public use of one's reason." Kant compares the private and public distinction to the difference between being caught up in a machine and addressing the world in a cosmopolitan society, respectively. The private use of reason is restricted; one performs a role in private, that is, as officer, minister, taxpayer, etc. and must up-hold the contractual duties of this role. One can only speak and act from the authorized scripts that are apportioned to these roles. In the private use of reason one is "acting on a commission imposed from outside" (Kant 1970, 57). Through the public use of reason, one steps out of a restrictive private role and addresses the "world at large," that is, the reading public, linked across national frontiers. In this textual utopia, the terms of relationships and institutions are continuously subject to debate and revision. In this open-ended global space there can be no restrictions or barriers to argument. The private sphere is "domestic" and constraining; the public is "cosmopolitan" and dynamic (Kant 1970, 57). 7url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT7

To be free, to be modern, to develop is to get out of a situation of confinement. The modern West's understanding of liberty relies upon a narrative of mobility, of openness and dynamism. Even before Kant, at the threshold of the period of the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes wrote, "Liberty, that we may define it, is nothing else but an absence of the lets and hindrances of motion. . . . Every man hath more or less liberty, as he hath more or less space in which he employs himself. . . . The more ways a man may move himself, the more liberty he hath" (Hobbes 1949, 109-10). 8url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT8 This reflexivity of freedom and End Page 49 mobility constitutes the central metaphor of modern liberalism's doctrine of negative freedom. This is freedom as the "absence of constraints." 9url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT9 Negative freedom is freedom from hindrance or restriction. To be free is to be mobile; it is to be unencumbered by borders of place or location.

This emphasis upon mobility as the measure of freedom, and thus of progress and development, is also reflected in Enlightenment economic theory. The economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo advocated free trade as the engine of growth for the English economy; otherwise, they cautioned, the English economy would remain "closed" (Nehmet 1995, 40). According to Smith's "vent-for-surplus" theory, "foreign" markets were to act as vents, allowing for the escape or exit of the surplus of European nations (Nehmet 1995, 40). There can be no doubt that trade designed to open up and expand the markets of Europe was an engine of colonialism and its spin-off, "development."

This Enlightenment equation of mobility, modernity, and the West has had a profound influence on the construction of "development" as both a social science and foreign policy of the West. The U.S. policy of "development" was announced by President Harry S. Truman in 1949: "We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half of the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. . . . Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. . . . Our imponderable resources in the technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible" (Truman 1950, 1366; Porter 1995, 66-67; italics added). Truman supplied no destination or fixed horizon of development as a goal to be reached. Rather, Truman's rhetoric betrays a binary opposition that exalted the mobility of the modern West and deplored the stasis of the underdeveloped world.

One of the earliest development economists wrote that the task of Western development was "To break through the barriers of stagnation in a backward country, to ignite the imaginations of men, and to place their energies in the service of economic development. . . . What is needed is to remove the mountains of routine and prejudice" (Gerschenkron 1992, 87; Cowen and Shenton 1995, 44). This same binary of stasis and mobility is evident in W. W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth (Rostow 1990), the most influential blue-print of the early development programs. His outline sketches a transition from the fatalistic production "ceiling" of traditionalism through the stages of "take-off," the drive to maturity, and finally, the arrival at high mass consumption. Rowstow's reference to "high mass consumption" suggests that a goal of development is material satiation. Nonetheless, even this "goal" belies the logic of development I have identified insofar as capitalist development is predicated upon schooling traditional societies, perhaps engaged in small-scale sustainable economies, in an everexpanding consumerism. Backward, End Page 50 stagnant societies are hemmed in, in part, due to the finitude of their desires; their wants and their concomitant production levels have a fatalistic "ceiling." 10url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT10__

This development binary of mobility and stasis is, of course, also gendered. Catherine Scott argues that "Modernity has been envisioned, particularly by modernization theorists, in opposition to a feminized and traditional household" (Scott 1995, 5). 11url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT11 She elaborates this oppositional framework as follows: The dependent or underdeveloped entity is depicted as a soft and undifferentiated economy of affective kin relations enveloped within tradition (read: feminine); in contrast, the modern state is a market economy of impersonal relations entailing hard, articulated, and universal rules (read: masculine). The first is static, the second dynamic. The role of the latter is to assist in the severing of affective ties which keep underdeveloped entities (they can scarcely be called "states") in a perpetual state of immaturity. Scott's analysis employs aspects of feminist object-relations theory. Whatever one may think of these theories, a concrete indicator that a predominant strand of the Western tale of development is a story of mobility, more specifically of "exits" and "ways out" (of households), is that shelter only became a development issue in 1985 (Tinker 1993).

A careful reading of the rhetoric that informs the equation of development, modernity, and the West reveals that various spokespersons for development do not, contra Slater, supply a "final destination" for development. Rather, it is the repudiation of location and its concomitant attributes of closure and stasis that characterize a particular Enlightenment discourse of "development." This repudiation of location is characterized as a matter of breaking out of the confines of a feminized household and the cycles of a tradition-bound culture. Traditional society is homogeneous, feminine, and static, whereas modern society is highly differentiated and dynamic. Jonathan Crush's observation captures the rhetorical gesture that I have insisted is an Enlightenment legacy: "Collectivities . . . were assigned a set of characteristics which suggested not only a low place in the hierarchy of achievement but a terminal condition of stasis, forever becalmed until the healing winds of modernity and development begin to blow. . . . Development animates the static" (Crush 1995, 9-10). 12url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT12

Other scholars of the modern West have remarked upon the significance of this binary of closure and openness as a shorthand for what it is that distinguishes the modern West from the times and places that are neither. Peter Gay insists that the Enlightenment entailed a profound shift from a near universal fear of change to a fear of stagnation (Gay 1966, 2:3). Similarly, Jonathan Z. Smith argues that it is a peculiar feature of the modern West that it identifies itself as the diasporic culture as opposed to the stasis of archaic cultures. Smith writes: "The West is active, it makes history, it is visible, it is human. The non-Western world is static, it undergoes history, it is invisible, it is non-human" End Page 51 (Smith 1993, 295). And Jean Baudrillard recalls that during the Cold War, which is when the project of U.S. development of the Third World began, the "congealed" state was the recurrent metaphor of the "East," and "fluidity" that of the "West" (Baudrillard 1990, 100).

Despite the preponderance of this rhetoric of mobility in Enlightenment discourses, a number of postmodern feminists deploy this same rhetoric in their critiques of patriarchy, Enlightenment, and modernity. This is the case despite their various insights into the politics of location. Hélène Cixous, for instance, is wise to patriarchy's tendency to feminize bounded space. She writes, "You women represent the eternal threat, the anticulture for us. We don't stay in your houses; we are not going to remain in your beds. We wander. . . ." Cixous then turns around and borrows this sense of progressivity as consisting in a way out, only she is careful to reverse its gender. Speaking of the impossibility of "enclosing" a feminine practice of writing, Cixous writes, " the feminine practice of writing takes place and will take place somewhere other than in the territories subordinated to philosophical theoretical domination. It will not let itself think except through subjects that break automatic functions, border runners never subjugated by any authority" (Cixous 1986, 67, 92).

Similarly, Luce Irigaray describes the claustrophobic space of phallogocentric discourse as follows: "From this encircling projective machinery, no reality escapes unscathed. . . . The whole is already circumscribed and determined by his discourse" (Irigaray 1985, 203-4). Hence, Irigaray is intent upon ". . . starting from an 'outside' that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law" (Irigaray 1985, 68). Irigiray is looking for a way out of the closure that is patriarchy. Kant was looking for an "exit"; Irigaray is looking for an "outside." Correlative to the modern man whose development consists in his exiting the feminine household, Cixous admonishes women to become "border-runners," and Irigaray advocates homelessness for women: "No longer spellbound by the fear of being without shelter. Unreservedly abandoning themselves to the unbounded open, holding nothing back" (Irigaray 1991, 216).

There is, then, a deep irony lurking in these critiques of patriarchy. Whereas the modern man of the Enlightenment attempts to escape the bounded and undifferentiated feminine household, Cixous and Irigaray wish to exit the enclosure of sameness that is patriarchy. This implies, of course, that these feminists are redeploying a patriarchal trope, that is, the repudiation, and perhaps violation, of the boundaries of location.

This implicit equation between advancement/development and mobility continues in more recent postmodern feminist theory that addresses the fashioning of subjectivity. These feminists do not explicitly reject locatedness; rather they set out to problematize locatedness. These feminists acknowledge the fact that one cannot simply disown boundaries of association (a move which may be seen as attempting to evade all responsibility and guilt). Nonetheless, I do wish to encourage these postmodern feminists to scrutinize more End Page 52 carefully their rhetoric. Whereas they problematize closure, fixity, boundaries, and settlement in the making of subjects, they do not sufficiently problematize metaphors of mobility. Hence, they do not own up to the (potentially troubling) echoes of Enlightenment which sound in their work.

For instance, Kathy Ferguson advocates "mobile subjectivities" that "trouble fixed boundaries" of identity. 13url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.baylor.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3pritchard.html#FOOT13 Ferguson argues that her advocacy of mobile subjectivities resists a globalizing move which seeks a unity based on sameness. I see, however, traces of a globalizing move in her account. Ferguson states that "Mobile subjectivities appear not just in discourse but in institutions as well; they are material as well as semiotic actors" (Ferguson 1993, 162). But do all subjectivities have equal amounts of mobility in institutions? Ferguson describes mobile subjectivities as "moving across and along axes of power" (154). I would counter that the discourse of mobility is itself an axis of power. Connected to this point, Ferguson observes that mobile subjectivities are "testy and argumentative (but need not be imperialistic)" (163). She might have explored why the connection between mobility and imperialism occured to her.

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 an

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.

Baudrillard explains in 89

The obsessive desire for survival (and not for life) is a symptom of this state of affairs and doubtless also the most worrying sign of the degradation of the species. If you think about the forms that desire currently takes –antinuclear shelters, cryogenization, high-pressure therapy - you see that they are exactly the forms of extermination. To avoid dying, one chooses to withdraw into some protective bubble or other. In this light, we should take it as a reassuring sign that people lost interest in antinuclear protection so quickly (the shelter market has become a mere prestige market, like the market for artworks or luxury yachts). It seems that people have become tired of nuclear blackmail and decided not to give in to it, leaving the threat of destruction hanging in mid-air over them, perhaps with an obscure sense of how unreal it is. A fine example of a vital reaction disguised as resignation. ‘If we have to die, better to die in the open air than in an underground sarcophagus.’ At a stroke an end is put to survival blackmail and life can go on.

Everyone is weary of these apocalyptic visions - the great scenario of the nuclear threat, the theatrical negotiations, ‘Star Wars’. In the end, they defend themselves with a lack of imagination. Even attempts to stimulate that imagination in films like The Last Day have not worked. Nothing has ever been able to make this nuclear scene - or obscenity - credible. With delicate matters like this (as with cancer), imagining death has the effect of bringing the fatal event closer. The masses’ silent indifference to nuclear pathos (whether it comes from the nuclear powers or from antinuclear campaigners) is therefore a great sign of hope and a political fact of the utmost importance.

This is Baudrillard in 05:

Freedom?  A dream!

           Everyone aspires to it, or at least gives the impression of aspiring fervently to it.

            If it is an illusion, it has become a vital illusion.

           In morality, mores and mentalities, this movement, which seems to well up from the depths of history, is towards irrevocable emancipation.

            And if some aspects may seem excessive or contradictory, we still experience the dizzying thrill of this emancipation.

            Better: the whole of our system turns this liberation into a duty, a moral obligation – to the point where it is difficult to distinguish this liberation compulsion from a ‘natural’ aspiration towards, a ‘natural’ demand for, freedom.

Now, it is clear that, where all forms of servitude are concerned, everyone wants to through them off; where all forms of constraint are concerned – physical constrains or constraints of law – everyone wishes to be free of them.  This is such a vital reaction that there is barely, in the end, any need of an idea of freedom to express it.

           Things become problematic when the prospect arises for the subject of being answerable solely for him/herself in an undifferentiated universe.  For this symbolic disobligation is accompanied by a general deregulation.  And it is in this universe of free electrons – free to become anything whatever in a system of generalized exchange – that we see growing. Simultaneously, a contradictory impulse, a resistance to this availability of everyone and everything that is every bit as deep as the desire for freedom.  A passion for rules of whatever kind that is equal to the passion for deregulation.

The politics they call for will inevitably be co-opted and can never achieve effective change.  Their link misunderstands our strategy of indifference as a passive form of nihilism without care – yet, our strategy is one of positive indifference which allows for true caring, resistance and political change

Bogard 1990 (William, professor at Whitman College.  Closing down the social: Baudrillard’s Challenge to Contemporary Sociology.  Sociological Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1. (Spring, 1990), pp. 1-15.)

For sociologists who have accepted the humanist premises of their discipline, such a project will appear as the height of irrationality and irresponsibility, and we can imagine their incredulity: Can Baudrillard really be serious about this? Is it rational to think that mass indifference, if this indeed truly characterizes the climate of modern culture, is a form of resistance which itself must be met with indifference? And if so, to what conceivable end? How can one remain indifferent to a world full of poverty, racism, and other forms of social injustice? Wouldn't this only make matters worse, or at best allow these problems to continue to fester? Doesn't Baudrillard, rather than creating theoretical possibilities for "conquering" a world which has become indifferent, in truth only succeed in making both himself and theory indifferent to, and thus at the mercy of, all possibilities? Baudrillard himself does not address, let alone ask, these kinds of questions, and rightly so, because they identify indifference with passive nihilism or a lack of caring, neither of which is intended in Baudrillard's meaning of the term. Baudrillard's indifference, I shall suggest, is of an altogether different type, and I can think of no better way of describing it other than as a positive indifference, a kind of stoic posture that invites attack by "playing dead." What he proposes is not passivity, but an active strategy designed to lure its opponent into making a self-defeating move, in effect turning the opponent's own force into a weapon against it. Contrary to what a literal reading of Baudrillard might infer, indifference does not signify an uncaring attitude, nor is it inauthentic (that is, Baudrillard is not just espousing a position he in fact does not hold). Rather, his indifference is an ironic-and, one might add, tragic-response to a world which he believes has closed off virtually all other forms of resistance. For Baudrillard, care, however highly we value this virtue, is sacrificed in order to oppose an enemy for whom care no longer has any meaning. At best, one can only challenge the present order-the simulated order-with a simulated indifference. Only such a strategy manages to avoid, for the time being at least, the overwhelming capacity of this order to coopt the power of resistance for its own ends.

Our strategy is one of maximum political energy – it does not deny politics, but rather interviews in the most effective manner

Chaloupka 1990 (William, Immodest Modesty: Antinuclear Discourse, Lifestyle Politics, and Intervention Strategies.  International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies. (Sep., 1990), pp. 341-351.)

 Baudrillard's idea of the social-some common ground of thought, action, coercion, and negotiation-is distinct from that presumed by any citizen attitude study. On one hand, the social is deconstructed when displaced by "the masses," a floating referent which could point to philosophical or physical substance, to a group, or even-in French-to geophysical or electrical properties.j But on the other hand, the mass can be subjected to commentary, an opportunity opened, for example, by Nixonian references to a "silent majority." In either case, "the mass is what remains when the social has been completely removed" (Baudrillard, 1983:6-7). Opportunity for action may remain, but it would not be informed by a society which understands itself to be a society, capable of concerted action.

If the social has been removed-or if it never existed-what we have called "sociality" may actually be its simulation. Without a social model, we could no longer take for granted our assumption that the actions of a group or individual "reflect" or "represent" a position. In the realm of simulation-in the simulacrum-the terms usually attached to a politics of significance or signification can be reversed. Even more dramatically, these terms can disappear. In an important example of both of these effects, the apathy of the contemporary mass is, in Baudrillard's telling, an absorbing, unreflective "black hole." But that indifference is also a positive development, a sort of strategic refusal, the masses' "true, their only practice" (Baudrillard, 1983:14). If the masses have escaped signification and its political form, representation, this does not necessarily mean that they have "failed."

"As Nietzsche well knew, it is in this disregard for a social, psychological, historical truth, in this exercise of simulacra as such, that the maximum of political energy is found, where the political is a game and is not yet given a reason" (Baudrillard, 1983:16). Seen this way, the indifference of the masses escapes a politics which has been "dominated by representative mechanisms" for three centuries (Baudrillard, 1983:17). Marx suggested that the masses would represent social fact to political institutions, eventually dissolving the political, withering it away. In this sense, it may not be so strange to imagine that the social is what disappeared instead (Baudrillard, 1983:18). And without a signifiable "social," any politics based on representation begins to falter.

Marx also argued that the negation of the social-alienation-confirmed the social possibility, but Baudrillard (1981 :147-48) closes that escape route. The silent majorities still speak, but they refuse to be represented. "And in this sense, far from being a form of alienation, this silence is an absolute weapon. . . Tlhis is its mode of defense, its particular mode of retaliation" (1983:22-23). Still, Baudrillard is continually evasive on diagnosis. These strategies are dangerous, they require energy to maintain, but they also present opportunities for intervention. The masses join the media and terrorism in a "triangular affinity" (1983:58), but that affinity may only help us account for developments which otherwise seem merely brutal. This demise of representation, its removal from the center of all political acts, is an important development, but it does not necessarily end politics. An expressive practice could deny representation and intervene in politics instead through disruption and ironic juxtaposition. In our present case, we might begin to wonder whether lifestyle expressions represent a preferred future, as they sometimes claim. Perhaps, instead, the whole system of solemn expression of political positions is somehow undermined by these solemn substitute lifestyles.

Instead of making politics impossible, our position of artifice and recognition of the state of the social and of language allows us to achieve true political change and formulate the most effective strategies of resistance– the politics called for by the affirmative undermine all political speech

Chaloupka 1990 (William, Immodest Modesty: Antinuclear Discourse, Lifestyle Politics, and Intervention Strategies.  International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies. (Sep., 1990), pp. 341-351.)

Rather than solidifying our relations with events and their sequences, language introduces oscillation, dissembly, memory, and waiting. The attempt to solidify foreign policy positions thus runs counter to what occurs within those positions at their most fundamental level. But instead of making politics impossible, our recognition of language's shifting, contradictory role enables responses, even if those responses will differ from those enabled by the enlightenment. At this point "the self" becomes important to the post-structuralist position as well as to my present misreading of the lifestyle position. The oscillation and contradiction rearrange the role of the speaker, that most central role in any politics which could emerge from the enlightenment. Even "the simple assertion 'I speak,"' contains the speaker's (and the statement's) "threatening promise of its own disappearance, its future appearance" (Foucault, 1987:58). As the authorial self loses its status, an oscillation begins in politics as well as language. Political speech is undermined; the exterior, moral, critical distance promised by Habermas cannot hold. Neither can our commitment to reenact the world we prefer through alterations of grammar and syntax. But the same undermining has happened to structures and authorities who have imposed political forms. Those structures cannot be justified by the web of relationship to (the words) nature and necessity. The "future appearance" is uncertain, to be sure, but it also threatens all political forms justified in this manner. They are exposed by the lifestyle critique.

And their interpretation causes the very political paralysis they fight against.

Antonio 95 (Robert, Nietzsche’s Antisociology, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43 \\stroud)

The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integrity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . Or no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring net- works of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others."

No risk of the implication: our policy discourse is unable to spill over to construct broader social meanings or further political programs.

Chandler 2007 (Dr. David, Professor of International Relations, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.  ‘Baudrillard and IR’ Panel: The EU’s Promotion of Democracy in the Balkans: The Power of Simulation and the Simulation of Power.  Draft paper prepared for the British International Studies Association Annual Conference 2007 Cambridge 17-19 December.)

This paper follows Baudrillard’s view that the ‘dissolution of the political subject’, i.e. the end of political projects of Left and Right, has created a crisis of representation and that the location of power is no longer clear, that in fact, political elites can no longer generate and externally project power, only simulate it.1 In the absence of any connection with the masses, with their own society, elites are unable to give policy-making a broader social meaning, enabling them to engage and mobilize social support for a political programme.2 Baudrillard’s framework enables the articulation of a critique of traditional Realist or Critical understandings of democracy export as dissimulation, feigning ‘not to have what one has’, i.e., as a pretence that policy is not driven by self-interest or the needs of capital accumulation, through an understanding of policy practice in terms of simulation, which ‘is to feign to have what one hasn’t’: i.e., the pretence that there are clear instrumental interests and ideological values being asserted by the EU.⁴

Coulter 12

…we live in a world where there is an increasing amount of information but less meaning while finding modernity collapsing under the weight of information with catastrophic implications for meaning: "where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs".  Meaning, truth, and the real are here reversed (divested of universal meaning) and restricted to local, partial objects This world, which we inhabit like living phantoms in the desert is a place where we may not have a politics, but we do have a strategy: One must push at the insane consumption of energy in order to exterminate its concept. One must push at maximal repression in order to exterminate its concept. ...'One must push what is collapsing', said Nietzsche ... .I am a terrorist and a nihilist in theory as the others are in weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource we have left us.”

The alternative is acceleration. The counterplan is this farcical acceleration, we replace the speculation that holds into place money with an infinite string of speculations that have no endpoint, in order to collapse the economic system. If they try and make a permutation, it wouldn't make any sense, because we say financial collapse good, and they rely on the market to get to the impact of their aff. 100% of the argument is competitive.

Systems of speculation are the same ones that create the systems of collapse; the financial crisis came about in 2008 because of the market place speculation that exceeded its material counterpart, and collapsed.

McCallam 2012 (David, Department of French, SLC, University of Sheffield.  “The terrorist Earth? Some thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard.”  French Cultural Studies 23(3) 215–224)

This brings us to the final point of convergence between terrorism and natural disaster: their overlapping discursive orders – future-oriented and prophetic. These are less the discourses of earthquake and terrorist themselves, but of their adversaries, the seismologist and the counter-terrorism expert, extreme examples of a globalised culture of prediction and pre-emption, of weather forecasts, election polls, economic prognoses, climate-change models, etc. In fact, the terrorist works best when she acts most like the earthquake and says nothing, proclaims nothing in advance of the attack. Their terrible latency is their strength − that of the sleeper cell and dormant volcano: a latency that often leads forecasters to doubt the possibility of their ever happening. Hence what natural disaster and terrorist act share is a paradoxical entry into reality, the almost unimaginable nature of their ‘becoming possible’ (Dupuy, 2008: 486). The Lisbon disaster and the 9/11 terrorist¶ attacks appeared impossible before they came to be. Yet the very fact that they happened meant that they were possible; but their being possible also meant that they might not have happened. Their very singularity (real) combined with their potentiality (possible) means that terrorist acts and terrible acts of nature realise two temporalities simultaneously: they constitute at once the actual and the possible, oscillating mesmerically between the poles of being and coming to be. In the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot had already remarked on this particularity of terrible events when contemplating the sublime tableaux of natural catastrophes. He writes that¶ the human figures in these paintings alone inhabit two timeframes simultaneously, living at once their everyday routine and the singularity of the terrible event that befalls them (Diderot,¶ 1984: 386). Henri Bergson in turn attributed the dual temporality of the terrible event not to its imagined victims but to its imaginative creators. It is the artist, he writes, who ‘crée du possible en même temps que du réel quand il exécute son oeuvre’ (1934: 130−1). It is a small step from there to Baudrillard’s assertion that artists are thus terrorists and vice versa, since¶ both conspire in the creation of singularities – that which erupts as event, and which resists¶ any of the ruling system’s various devices of assimilation, be they universalist (Enlightenment rights) or globalising (generalised exchange and commodification) (Baudrillard, 2002b: 74−5).7 The true artist, just like the true terrorist, refuses to enter into systems of exchange. As¶ a result, it is the fate of both terrorist and writer to fail. But they dare to fail, as Beckett said¶ of the modernist artist, ‘as no other dare fail, that failure is their world’ (1965: 125). For¶ failure, like geological fault-lines, is the unavowed structuring principle of the globalised¶ world – although no one thanks the artist or the terrorist for revealing this to us any more than we thank the earthquake for reminding us of plate tectonics.

Extend the Baudrillard 93 ev; it says that money functions independently of its own aims. It is no longer a question of this computer is worth this much in gold, guaranteed by the value of the dolar, it is just speculation. Money doesn't ground commodities to a common denominator for exchange, it has proliferated the exchange value of commodities.

This means that financial crisises will be inevitable, but not on a cataclysmic scale, but in local, episodic ways. The current recession didn't loosen wall streets grip on the economy, it just hurt the American middle class. The same thing happens when we try and steer the market in a particular direction; theres no way to guarantee the outcome, but theres a higher risk we will not change a dman thing

The Baudrillard 95

We should let the markets collapse. Theres only a risk the aff would prevent that, and in the long run, poor people like the people in Africa, are the ones that are hurt the most.

Mead ‘9 - Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations  (Walter Russell, The New Republic, “Only Makes You Stronger”, 2/4)

But, in many other countries where capitalism rubs people the wrong way, this is not the case. On either side of the Atlantic, for example, the Latin world is often drawn to anti-capitalist movements and rulers on both the right and the left. Russia, too, has never really taken to capitalism and liberal society--whether during the time of the czars, the commissars, or the post-cold war leaders who so signally failed to build a stable, open system of liberal democratic capitalism even as many former Warsaw Pact nations were making rapid transitions. Partly as a result of these internal cultural pressures, and partly because, in much of the world, capitalism has appeared as an unwelcome interloper, imposed by foreign forces and shaped to fit foreign rather than domestic interests and preferences, many countries are only half-heartedly capitalist. When crisis strikes, they are quick to decide that capitalism is a failure and look for alternatives.So far,such half-hearted experiments not only have failed to work; they have left the societies that have tried them in a progressively worse position, farther behind the front-runners as time goes by. Argentina has lost ground to Chile; Russian development has fallen farther behind that of the Baltic states and Central Europe. Frequently, the crisis has weakened the power of the merchants, industrialists, financiers, and professionals who want to develop a liberal capitalist society integrated into the world. Crisis can also strengthen the hand of religious extremists, populist radicals, or authoritarian traditionalists who are determined to resist liberal capitalist society for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, the companies and banks based in these societies are often less established and more vulnerable to the consequences of a financial crisis than more established firms in wealthier societies.As a result, developing countries and countries where capitalism has relatively recent and shallow roots tend to suffer greater economic and political damage when crisis strikes--as, inevitably, it does. And, consequently, financial crises often reinforce rather than challenge the global distribution of power and wealth. This may be happening yet again. None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises.

Tournament: District 3 | Round: 1 | Opponent: Texas GM | Judge: Brian Lane
1

If they’re right about the nature of complexity as a way to frame policy decisions, at the moment when we decide we can make a value statement abut a particular kind of energy that we no longer have the possibility to evaluate the world through a complex lens.  

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”

For this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their natural vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. The moment a religion shifts from a movement, a constantly changing, morphing, and becoming, into stagnancy-being, a doctrine, a book (and, more precisely, a prescriptive book}-all "vitality and growth" are drained from it: it is the systematization of the movement into a linear series, "a sum total of historical events," into a logical sequence, a Socratic "knowledge by reason," which drains the movement and settles it into a structure, where it becomes lifeless, dead. By attempting to fully understand the religion-to move it from myths which are dynamic, ever-changing, constantly retold, altered, alive, becoming, to a set story, a history, linear, predictable, retraceable, uncontaminated by variation-what happens is the death of the religion itself into mere dogma and orthodoxy. In the same way, it is the attempt to fully grasp the meaning of the text-in order that words contain a totality of meaning, under a particular category of understanding-that ultimately destroys the text, that destroys the potentiality of a text. Considering that there is no logic which can sustain itself-"no proof can possibly exist determining the truth or falsity of the undecidable statement in the language of the system within which the statement was formulated"'8-in order for there to be any totality (in the form of a consistent logic that can prove itself within its own logical system), some form of exclusion, by way of the suppression of the axiom that does not conform to the internal logic of the system, must take place. In order for a text to transubstantiate itself into a book, some part(s) of it must be left out; in order that a text (which is a version, a single reading, a potential reading) is transformed into, becomes, a book (a complete reading, a consistent reading, or even the only reading), some parts of the text must always be either subsumed or suppressed.'9 In order for the "vitality and growth" of the text to remain, there must always be a measure of the unknown, of the unknowable, of the to-be-known. The only manner in which a book can be sustained (in its totality) is through the effacement of the text itself, or, more precisely, through the effacement of the potentiality of the text-for in its full potentiality, the text is always fragmented and never allows for a single reading, for just one reading. This is because every text relies on language as its medium, and since language is first and foremost figurative, it can never be a fully consistent logical system: the trope is what allows language to be, but at the same time is its failing point. The trope is the "undecidable statement" within the system, which is that grammar as tropes are not to be understood aesthetically, as ornament, nor are they understood semantically as a figurative meaning that derives from literal, proper denomination. Rather, the reverse is the case. The trope is not a derived, marginal , or aberrant form of language but the linguistic paradigm par excellence. The figurative structure is not one linguistic mode among others but it characterizes language as such.20 The trope is what allows a statement to be made-all statements require comparisons (even something as basic as naming something is a transference between the object as such and the object that is named as such, as if the property of one is the property of the other), and it is the trope that allows for these transferences of properties across terms-but is also the failing point of the same statement, as all transferences are appearances. All statements are hinged on the appearance of sameness between the term and the object as such, or, more precisely, on the appearance of a link between language and an external referent, and as such, all that the statement actually refers to is the fact that it is referring. Since all of language is an appearance and an illusion, there is then no meta-grounding for any interpretation of a text; each reading of a text unveils an opinion (or a potentiality) of the text and never its truth. In this way, each reading of the text is always haunted by the ghost of other readings-other possibilities, each of which is potentially as true as the first; the absent readings are the spectres-the phantoms-that continue to disturb the presence of the first reading. It is language that allows for the positing of a particular reading of a text, but it is also language that prevents the text from coming to a unitary interpretation, from being a totalizing book.

2
Energy has already surpassed finality. There are no longer risks of default, only of excess. In our new energy reality, there is only reversibility, the inseparability of good and evil.
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.
The plan doesn’t actually solve environmental crisis – it’s an illusory diversion that smooths out dirty energy production. What seems like a simple lifting of restrictions fails miserably to change the world and makes them the cynics
Zehner 12
Green illusions,
Ozzie Zehner is the author of Green Illusions and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Zehner attended Kettering University (BS -Engineering) and The University of Amsterdam (MS/Drs – Science and Technology Studies). His research was awarded with honors at both institutions. He lives in San Francisco.
If environmentalists suspected anything funny about the 20% Wind Energy by 2030 report, they didn't say anything about it in public. Instead, fifty environmental groups and research institutes, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory opted to double-down their windy bets by formally backing the study. When the nation's smartest and most dedicated research scientists, physicists, and environmentalists roll over to look up googly-eyed at any corporate energy production report, it's worthy of our attention. This love affair, however, is harmful to the environmentalists' cause for a number of reasons. First, fetishizing overly optimistic expectations for wind power takes attention away from another grave concern of environmental groups—reducing dirty coal use. Even if the United States could attain 20 percent wind energy by 2030, the achievement alone might not remove a single fossil-fuel plant from the grid. There is a common misconception that building additional alternative-energy capacity will displace fossil-fuel use; however, over past years, this hasn't been the case. Producing more energy simply increases supply, lowers cost, and stimulates additional energy consumption. Incidentally, some analysts argue that the mass deployment of wind turbines in Europe has not decreased the region's carbon footprint by even a single gram. They point to Spain, which prided itself on being a solar and wind power leader over the last two decades only to see its greenhouse gas emissions rise 40 percent over the same period. Second, the pomp and circumstance around wind diverts attention from competing solutions that possess promising social and ecological value. In a cash-strapped economy, we have to consider the trade-offs. As journalist Anselm Waldermann points out, "when it comes to climate change, investments in wind and solar energy are not very efficient. Preventing one ton of co2 emissions requires a relatively large amount of money. Other measures, especially building renovations, cost much less—and have the same effect."45 The third problem is the problem with all myths. When they don't come true, people grow cynical. Inflated projections today endanger the very legitimacy of the environmental movement tomorrow. Every energy-production technology carries its own yoke of drawbacks and limitations. However, the allure of a magical silver bullet can bring harms one step closer. Illusory diversions act to prop up and stabilize a system of extreme energy consumption and waste. Hype surrounding wind energy might even shield the fossil-fuel establishment—if clean and abundant energy is just over the horizon, then there is less motivation to clean up existing energy production or use energy more wisely. It doesn't help when the government maintains two ledgers of incompatible expectations. One set, based on fieldwork and historical trends, is used internally by people in the know. The second set, crafted from industry speculation and "unconstrained" by history, is disseminated via press releases, websites, and even by the president himself to an unwitting public. It may be time for mainstream environmental organizations to take note of this incongruence, put away the clean energy pom-poms, and get back to work speaking up for global ecosystems, which are hurt, not helped, by additional energy production. Because as we shall see, the United States doesn't have an energy crisis. It has a consumption crisis. Flashy diversions created through the disingenuous grandstanding of alternative-energy mechanisms act to obscure this simple reality.

The affirmatives analysis of energy production and agency is interesting but irrelevant – this masturbatory gesture of empowerment seeks to recreate an orgy shut down long ago, hence resistance becomes yet another commodity in support of the global order.
  
Langman 2000 (Lauren, Professor of Sociology at Loyola University.  This paper was originally presented at the 2000 Socialist Scholars Conference, March 31--April 2, 2000.  http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/langfr1.html)

Baudrillard once noted that in the act of turning on a light, people felt empowered, after all it was God that had power to erase darkness. But the "power" of flicking a switch-connecting your room light to a vast complex of energy production that converts fuels (water flows, nuclear energy) to electricity, networks of distribution, factories that make the cables, wires, connecters, breaker boards etc belie the illusions of power. From what has been said, on the one hand, the more the power of techno-capital, the less the power of the person to influence his/her society, its economy or governance. In earlier epochs, authoritarianism and submission to a mass movement gave a sense of power. The bourgeois character had been socialized to submit to the power of the State but the "carnival character" is more anti-authoritarian-detached from the Nation State often seen as the chief prude and censor. But this is no longer possible. Rather, the popular culture of consumption in general, and its carnivalesque realms.¶ Carnival culture offers a number of sites where its people can find realms of empowerment and agency, where they can determine their own life outside the realms of political economy and can in no way impact social policy. In other words, the plurality of sites provided by the mass mediated popular culture allow, indeed demand agency. I would like to suggest that Foucault’s theory of power be recast, the carnivals of consumption provide encapsulated "microsphere’s of empowerment, place where people might demonstrate competence and control, perhaps in the virtues of French wines, Metallica lyrics or the ability to shoot alien space invaders.¶ For Bahktin, the carnival emerged as a form of resistance. The indulgence in the obscene, the vulgar and the grotesque provided a sense of empowerment through reversal and the movement of subjectivity from the harsh realities of feudal life to dreamworlds of empowerment and satisfaction In much the same way, the carnivals of Brazil serve to sustain the harsh inequalities of its economic system (Langman, 2000) . And some of these dreamworlds may be induced by various drugs. Thus I would suggest that while on the one hand our society is a more tolerant and open society than a generation ago, the valorization of pornography and the sex industry that includes everything from vibrators and leather accouterments to gay and TV bars or cruise ship, are forms of resistance again the dominant culture- or at least as it is often portrayed. The commercialization of the vulgar has now become a major industry, and in the case of WWF, it is now a publically traded corporation. What had once been a resistance to feudal power is now a commodity in the global market.

The proliferation of deterrence that lies at the heart of the affirmative forcloses the possibility of becoming, crushing value to life.
Robinson 2012 (Andrew, political theorist, frenchy academic, Smart, Jean Baudrillard: aleatory power and deterrence, June 8, 2012
stroud)
Let us start with the third possibility. The system is aleatory. This means that it operates through the management of chance. It is determined in its broad outlines, but relies on chance for its details. It rests on probabilities. Because the system determines outcomes ‘genetically’ – generating the different options through the code – only certain things are possible. The variation by chance and probability allows the system to control phenomena at an aggregate level. An aleatory system also brings in and incorporates resistances as they occur. It assigns them a place in the code, as niche markets, questionnaire options, political parties, categories of deviance. It is a machine of total recuperation which doesn’t wait for movements to emerge before it assigns them a category – it catches them in their early stages and pre-empts them. For instance, a new social critique might rapidly give rise to a new party or NGO which is quickly recuperated. Or it might be articulated by corporations themselves, as a new niche market. Although this process is often effective, it also contains problems for the system, because ultimately, it means that the system is governed by chance. We are plunged into an abnormal uncertainty. In response, the system creates an excess of causality and finality. But this compounds the problem. Determined responses become hypertelic – they exceed their end. They become ends in themselves, pass the limits of their functions or use-values, and colonise the entire system. This process is also referred to as excrescence. It is similar to the proliferation of cancer cells in the body. For Baudrillard, this arrangement depends on a particular religious ontology. An accidental world implies an infinite will and energy, to keep all determinate connections from forming. According to Baudrillard, reason seeks to break the necessary connections among things which arise within cycles of symbolic exchange and conceptions of fate. Chance – the possibility of indeterminate, mutually indifferent elements relating ‘freely’ – is an effect of this decomposition of connections. It is an idea invented in modernity, along with the idea of a formless, unbonded world. It can only exist in a world without symbolic exchange. And it depends on the continued suppression of symbolic exchange. The idea of chance or the aleatory can be related to the elimination of symbolic exchange in various ways. Chance is actually impossible on a certain level. It is the perception we are left with after the destruction of causality. It is a world in which one wanders like a dead soul, with little chance of intense connections. Chance, and also statistical causality, remove both responsibility and seduction (or destiny). The dual rule of chance and necessity expresses a human desire for control over the metamorphosis of things. This control destroys the initiatory or ceremonial field. It thus paradoxically destroys any sense of mastery over our destiny. The order of production exists to make the order of metamorphosis impossible – to control flow and becoming. Simulation is also associated with a process Baudrillard terms deterrence. This term is a play on nuclear deterrence between the superpowers (before 1991), which Baudrillard saw as a telling case of deterrence in general, a simulated conflict which exists to preclude a real clash, a form of manipulation rather than destruction. Deterrence is not so much a power relation as a mindset. It holds people in check by making them feel powerless, disappointed, neutralised – 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.

The affs reconceptualization of democracy is a trap of the capitalist system, which only pulls us into false alternatives in which we think the power of subjectivity can save us.
Baudrillard 2008 (Jean, Interviewed by Philippe Petit.  Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems.  International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 1 (January, 2008).)
Petit: Listening to you, that destiny seems inescapable. It's no use asking what you think of those who are intent on refounding democratic citizenship. Baudrillard: At the current time, democracy is a social form that's about as ancestral as the symbolic exchange of primitive societies. And we dream of it in the same way. The political in general continues to be the waking dream of Western societies – of the exoteric societies where everything is expressed by technics. The esoteric societies, for their part (whether they are disinherited or traditional societies), long since brought politics into line with tribal arrangements. They have trapped and tamed the Western machinery of politics, law, democracy and the universal in their per¬sonal structures and relations; they have integrated linearity and history into their own cycle. We may ask ourselves whether, on a much vaster scale and by the roundabout route of rationality, it isn't the same with our Western societies. Doesn't the political sphere obey impulses, obligations, challenges and fantasies that have lit¬tle to do with public affairs? This incorruptible truth of evil, of the irrational, shows through in the very corruption of the political, which must therefore be interpreted positively as the impossibility of Political Reason realizing itself. This is what explains why the more imperative transparency becomes, the greater the corrup¬tion. By wishing merely to take into account a politically correct human nature ¬a fundamentally Rousseauist vision – the militants of the good democratic cause – of those who, more subtly, wish to rehabilitate the “essence” of the political – merely feed this corrupt form of the social. What is the point of setting a purpose for an enlightened dimension of the political and the social spheres, when it's becoming increasingly obvious, most particularly in the economic sphere, that these things are caught up with much stranger purposes, if not indeed with no purpose at all? There's a kind of savage delusion and – not to put too fine a point on it – stupid¬ity, in stubbornly pressing on in the right direction when there is no direction, in wishing to change the form of the equation when it's equal to zero. Just look at all the battles everywhere on corrupt fronts: in the electoral system, where people are led to fight for equivalent castes; in the employment field, where everyone has to fight to find a place in a system of exploitation, a relatively favoured spot in a labour market which simultaneously serves the government as a black-mailing technique. Everywhere we're trapped in false problems, false alternatives, false issues, in which we lose out come what may. 

3
That process begins with the banishment of death. Their logic of survivalism ensures that only the dominant products of modernity, violence, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism will continue.
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.

That is pure positivity:
Robinson 2012 (Andrew, political theorist, frenchy academic, Smart, Jean Baudrillard: aleatory power and deterrence, June 8, 2012
stroud)

Deterrence is directed against a range of phenomena such as complexity, finality, contradiction, accident, rupture, chance, and transversality. Yet paradoxically, events continue to happen ‘at ground level’, below the level of data-control. Misfortunes and personal crises multiply. The social becomes organised like a disaster-movie script, with constant struggles to survive, states of exception, discourses of risk-avoidance and risk-management – a situation of everyday precarity. The function of deterrence is not to prevent this permanent crisis. It is rather to prevent it from having system-level effects. Phenomena such as the Gulf War, Watergate, and other political/media events are treated by Baudrillard as instances of deterrence. They are based on a simulation of a situation where the old stakes still matter, keeping old antagonisms and lost phenomena artificially alive as simulacra. They thus exude ‘operational negativity’ – preventing the emergence of real antagonisms.

4

Finally, you never go full retard.
BAUDRILLARD 2010 (Jean, Carnival and Cannibal: Ventriloqous Evil.  Translated by Chris Turner.  Seagull Books 2010, pages 55-69)

This is the state of things in which the system has snaffled all the mechanisms of simulation, parody, irony and self-derision; it has snaffled the whole of the negative and, with it, critical thought, leaving the latter only the ghost of the truth.¶ All the same, things are perhaps not settled once and for all, since the rules have changed (or perhaps there are no rules nay longer) and the new situation is as follows: by denying the very existence of Evil (all the forms of radical, heterogeneous, irreconcilable otherness), by making the negative a kind of prehistoric vestige, Good has, in a way given Evil its freedom. In seeking to be Absolute Good, it has freed Evil from all dependency and given it back its autonomous power, which is no longer simply the power of the negative but the power to change the rules of the game. Something resurfaces here of the Manichaean heresy, which asserted the originality and singularity of Evil. And one can feel something analogous playing itself out in the depths of this integral reality. As the old forms of revolt that defied the dominant power find themselves swallowed up by the system itself, a new counter-finality is springing up from all the interstices of the system, a challenge to the supremacy of Good, infiltrating and breaking up that reality much more radically than the work of the negative did.¶ When the power of the negative fades, when the prohibitions, controls, inequalities and differences disappear one by one, the better to internalize themselves in the mental sphere, it is at this point that Evil, as undesirable alien, becomes Ventriloqous.¶ The Banque Nationale de Paris had a famous advertising slogan in the 1970s: ‘Your money interests me!’, which sums up better than any critical analysis can do, the ignominy of capital. Denunciations of what ignominy were as old as the hills, but what was new and scandalous was having these words come direct from the bankers themselves, the truth coming straight from the mouth of Evil, so to speak. The truth came straight from the mouth of the dominant power itself, and that power, secure in the knowledge of its total immunity, admitted its ‘crime’ quite openly.¶ The most recent profession of faith of this same kind was uttered by Patrick Le Lay, the CEO of the French TV channel TF1. ‘Let’s be realistic’, he said, ‘TF1’s job is to help Coca-Cola shift product… For an advertising message to get through, the viewers brain has to be receptive to it. It’s the aim of our programs to make that brain receptive, that is to say, to entertain it and relax it, to prepare it between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is receptive human brain time… Nothing is more difficult than obtaining that receptiveness’.¶ We have to pay tribute to this amazing declaration of principle for its outstanding professional cynicism (which it shares with many other similar declarations, such as that of the French post office: ‘Money has no sex, but that shouldn’t prevent it from reproducing’).¶ But this is not the point. What struck people in the Le Lay case was the barefaced cheek of the statement, which fascinated even those who condemned it. Isn’t this immoral offhandedness the mask of a greater freedom of expression than is shown in the eternal stereotyped language of critical protest?¶ And this is, in fact, the problem – that the truth has been stolen by an ‘arrogant’ discourse that thwarts any form of criticism by short circuiting it. The real scandal doesn’t lie so much in technocratic cynicism as in the breaking of a rule of our social and political game, which says that the corruption is on one side and the protest against on the other. If the corrupt no longer respect this protocol, if they lay out their hands for all to see, without even doing us the courtesy of hypocrisy, then the ritual mechanism of critical condemnation is taken from us. This is capital laid bare by the capitalist themselves.¶ Le Lay is stealing from us the only power we have left; he is stealing condemnation! This is where the scandal lies. Otherwise, how are we to explain all these outraged reactions to someone spilling the beans on an open secret?¶ Instead of condemning Evil from the standpoint of Good – the eternal moral position – he is speaking Evil from the standpoint of Evil. And immediately, all that excels in arrogance (Le Pen, cynicism (Le Lay), pornography (the Abu Ghraib pictures) and myth-o-mania (the fabulous story of Marie L.) is, by that very token, more effective at unmasking the truth of the system than traditional critique!¶ If the truth hits the mark and hits home with people, this is because it comes, paradoxically, from the horizon of Evil. We always expect it to come from the side of Enlightenment and Reason – which was perhaps the case historically – but today it is from the horizon of Evil that the truth emerges as an unexpected event, deriving all its force from coming from the place one least expects it.¶ All the discourses of Good are ravaged by ambivalence. This is particularly visible in the relationship to stupidity, which is the murkiest, but also the most direct and massive expression of this ventriloquousness of Evil. Philippe Muray has magnificently described this beatification, this grotesque pacification of the real world, this festive reduction in perpetuity of the whole of modernity to a party. Now, it is precisely here, in this extension of the domain of Farce, that Ventriloquous Evil advances on all sides, establishing the hegemony of stupidity – which is the equivalent of hegemony plain and simple.¶ Of all the modalities in which the proscribed negative can show through in ventriloquos mode, stupidity is both the most banal and the most mysterious. Better, it becomes a source of energy – and a source of hidden truth – since, no longer expecting anything from a higher instance, we are reduced to this subterranean one, whose energy is inexhaustible, since it comes to us from the immensity of stupidity itself. We must then – and Muray clearly saw this – draw from it all its innate energy, allow it to deploy itself in all its self-conceit; we must allow Evil to speak ‘through the belly’. We have to let this masquerade, this banality of Evil work at its own derision. This is the ‘intelligence of Evil’. Moreover, in the absence now of an active power of the negative, where could we get energy from today if not from a violent abreaction to this ambient stupidity?¶ As soon as Good rules and claims to embody the truth, it is Evil that comes through.¶ Let us take the No to the European referendum. It was clearly stupidity that voted No; it was statistically the most stupid (the backward, the retarded) who voted No, but that stupidity was precisely the intelligence of Evil.¶ It was Ventriloqous Evil that replied ‘No’ to the referendum. Not the spirit of the Negative which, like the ‘Yes’, lends its assent to Political Reason. But an illogical No, resistant to political Reason, and shot through with the exigency not to be annexed or taken hostage by any model whatever – even an ideal one (especially not an ideal one!) – the exigency not to lend itself to the dialectical stratagem: ‘Your No is a No to Europe as it is, but a Yes to Europe as it should be!’¶ There is no difference between the ‘free market’ Yes and the European ‘social’ No. This is why the No, which is merely a No to a particular kind of Europe, isn’t really a No – the only No that genuinely constitutes an event is this strange, non-political, non-dialectical, elusive No, since it runs counter to enlightened self-interest. It is a No that isn’t the opposite of a Yes (the No of the things that can exist without their opposites), but might be said to be closer to a silent rejection of the kind that makes Bartelby say, ‘I would prefer not to! I am not playing the game! (But without aspiring to provide a reason)’¶ You have to be able to fight everything that wishes to do Good to you.¶ Against the Axis of Good: the parallax of Evil¶ Gilmore (The Executioner’s Song) and his refusal of a pardon.¶ Bartleby and his tenacious rejection¶ Those who vote No to Divine Europe. ¶ The Immigrants who burn their schools.¶ They are all fighting against that which wishes to do them good.¶ This is what Gilmore does in The Executioner’s Song and it is what makes this mundane story of a condemned man funny and paradoxical. He fights – he is forced to fight – against his staunchest defenders (those who refuse to let him be executed in the name of the absolute principle of the right to life, a principle which does, however, show itself for what it is: the moral obligation to live at all costs, the categorical imperative to exist, that principle in whose name they hanged suicides, dead or alive, in the Middle Ages). It is against this ultimatum that Gilmore rebels – not that he is in favour of the death penalty, but he is equally opposed to the injunction that he must live, opposed to that institutional ‘human right’, against which he sets another – unconditional human right: the right to die. He thereby transcends his own crime and any idea of punishment and transforms his particular case into a metaphysical duel with the forces of Good. The very people who want to save him (despite himself) come to detest him for having demanded to die. This is quite a fetching contradiction of the whole system of moral values – and the fact is that, at bottom, 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’.¶ Gilmore doesn’t at all think he ‘deserves’ to die, nor does he think he must allow his life to be taken to expiate his crime. Having been condemned to death, he simply demands that the authorities face up to the sentence, as he is prepared to do. He thereby shows how every sentence is a double – edged sword and that it can be returned to the sender. It is a challenge which the price to be paid is his own death, but what is at stake is making the whole of a society lose face when that society, in its arrogance, reserves the right to grant him mercy against his own will (putting in play their own deaths, not suicidally but as a weapon of defiance, is also the terrorists’ strategy). If he wins out in this duel, then, admittedly, he loses his life, but he recovers a glorious image of himself – far from the paths of pardon and repentance which he despises. It is a bit like the Student of Prague who dies when he shoots the mirror from which his image has been stolen, but he finds himself in the fragments of the mirror in the moment of his death.¶ It is like the woman in the coma who was given a life-sentence of life – it is forbidden to unplug her. Gilmore wants to be unplugged. ¶ At issue here, as ever, is the gift. The gift you reject because it is inflicted on you unilaterally – which amounts to a humiliation and a symbolic dispossession. 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.¶ They have no other outlet than a liberatory violence, a violence of protest and demands. Quite different is the violence of those whom one gives, to whom one gives forcibly, or whose lives one spares. They have only symbolic revenge left to them.¶ Now, for want of anything better, this revenge crystalizes in the unconditional withdrawal from the social order, from the planetary order, from the conventional order, from the advantages of reason. This is why the case of Gilmore, who wants to be killed – to be unplugged – who rejects any leniency on the part of the law, which would cause him to lose face, is the reflection today of a universal situation and a universal challenge, a challenge to the ascendancy of all the networks, to that enframing by all the blessings of Reason, Technology and Science.¶ Must we accept this unconditional conditioning or not?¶ We are all reduced today to saving the little bit of singularity, the little bit of symbolic space and territory left to us, against the global machinery, a global enterprise of Doing-Good, which demands of us the sacrifice of any will and intellect (this is still the pact that was proposed by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: well-being and servitude).¶ And where might this ‘left-field’ energy comes from? From that impenetrable zone there is in every individual; from that ‘heart’ that is resistant to the injunction of all the apparatuses, of all the machinery of rationalization.¶ It is all this that is in play in Gilmore’s fantastic defense.

2NC
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).

Lindsey 2007 (Jason Royce Lindsey received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004 and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. His specialization is political theory though he also researches the politics of Eastern Europe and travels there extensively.  Rethinking the Political: Taking Baudrillard's “Silent Majorities” Seriously.  International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 2 (July, 2007).  ISSN: 1705-6411)   

What would a fundamentally pessimistic political strategy be like, one without illusions, cynical but energetic, one which would transform the fatal state of public affairs into an open challenge, instead of exhausting itself in trying to unmask it – unsuccessfully as it happens – though not without making its contribution to turning us into political morons?             
Today, there is a tendency to discuss Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities as his first examination of terrorism. However, this contemporary perspective on Baudrillard’s book obscures its other important theme. In addition to his conclusions about terrorism, Baudrillard questions many fundamental assumptions about what politics is and what value it possesses for contemporary societies. As a consequence, Baudrillard’s observations appear to pose a stark choice for political theorists and social scientists. We can either continue to debate political activity, as we have known it since the modern period – which will increasingly consign our field to elite studies – or we must redirect our focus toward the contemporary culture that occupies today’s majorities.             To understand why political thought and the social sciences face this choice, one must closely follow the path of Baudrillard’s argument. He begins the work with an observation most contemporary political theorists can sympathize with. Most of us lament the tendency in modern political thinking to reify the people, or the common man as some object of study. Throughout modern history political observers have always seen the masses as a potential source of power, or as a frustratingly passive subject. Or, as Baudrillard puts it: According to their imaginary representation, the masses drift somewhere between passivity and wild spontaneity, but always as a potential energy, a reservoir of the social and of social energy; today a mute referent, tomorrow when they speak up and cease to be the 'silent majority', a protagonist of history. Thus, for those with political agendas, the people are always the hero, the victim, or the chief obstacle. For the modern political left, the masses are the victim suffering from false consciousness but are also a latent hero. Thus, the revolutionary can awaken this fettered colossus and stride into the next stage of history. Or, when these projects fail, the people are the ignorant masses who remain enslaved due to their narrow vision of the world.  For the modern political right, the masses can be a useful political ally, but also an ignorant and dangerous one. Thus, they must be disciplined and talked to on a level they can comprehend like a child that does not know its own strength. This is the object that Baudrillard confronts us with: the crowd of Le Bon, subject to unpredictable spasms of violence, Burke’s decent but ignorant citizens, the rural idiocy that Marx laments, or the heroic everyman lacking proper consciousness, which must be supplied by Lenin's vanguard.             
Yet, Baudrillard does not intend to criticize this reification of the masses as a sloppy concept. Instead, the masses are useful to study as an endpoint. The deconstruction of class, socio-economic status, race, and other categories shows that these “better” tools of analysis, or better candidates for the idea of the masses: “have also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis”.
Instead, the idea of the masses is a useful endpoint, a solid immovable barrier that we cannot pass. Our inability to dissect the mass into classes or discernible categories shows the flaw in our idea of the social. According to Baudrillard, our desire to study society, to have a science about human life, meets its match here. Instead of finding a subject for study, the modern project of social science crashes into this unmovable, unknowable first particle, the masses. All of the work of social science is confronted with the fact that there is no discernible object of study, just, “a black hole which engulfs the social”.             
This impenetrability of the masses and their rejection of elite cajoling, is a rejection of meaning. This is a deeper point that Baudrillard argues is overlooked or deliberately ignored. The tendency in modernity has always been to lament the ignorance of the docile masses. Instead, Baudrillard argues that within the masses indifference to political events, history, art, and culture there is: “nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyze as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened”.6 Yet, social thinking does not take this observation as its starting point. Rather than facing what Baudrillard says is the truly important point, social and political philosophy ducks the issue by asking how to enlighten this poor victim.              
This quest to enlighten the masses has led to the social sciences inventing new forms of contact: surveys, polls, and tests. This maneuver has extended the life of the social and political because the masses do, after all, exist. However, Baudrillard argues that, “their representation is no longer possible”.7 Politics has been forced to rely on simulations of the people as a substitute. Thus, the media reports to us through newscasts what Americans, Britons, Germans, etc. are thinking. The masses that do exist are not engaged but simulated or at best probed by the technology of social science: “No Longer being under the reign of will or representation, it falls under the province of diagnosis, or divination, pure and simple – whence the universal reign of information and statistics”.8 No longer a participating subject, the masses are simulated for the political class to engage with through the media and probed for some sign of their desires, hopes, and fears by social scientists.             
In the political class's efforts to engage with the simulation of the silent majorities and with social science's attempts to study this silent mass, there is a transmission of information. However, the mass Baudrillard describes transmits and accepts all information. In the consumer preferences and demands detected within the mass we find all leanings and wants. Thus, the mass that contains traces of everything is in the end nothing intelligible to those wanting to objectify it. So the silent majorities, today on a global scale, contain a bit of everything. They are like a material in a laboratory that contains all elements and thus, becomes an unknowable, unclassifiable, and uncategorized lump.             
Those individuals still committed to the modern ideal of the political will tend to react to Baudrillard’s argument by discussing reality and the seriousness of the issues within the political domain. However, this again flows into Baudrillard's argument. The silent majorities in contemporary society are not interested in reality and seriousness. Although our society is good at creating consumer demand, Baudrillard argues that our technicians of social science and our political leaders have failed to stimulate demand for meaning. Or, perhaps we should say, demand for any particular meaning.9              
In the face of this looming silence, what are policymakers to do? What does it mean for politics if the majorities decline to participate? We have seen a real world example recently in Russia where the authorities have removed “against all candidates” from future election ballots. This action was taken precisely because they were alarmed at the growing number of the masses choosing this option. In the case of some Western democracies we have seen the introduction over the years of compulsory voting.10 Yet, compulsory voting or the limiting of choices to opt out is a mere administrative device for papering over this deep chasm in contemporary politics. If the silence of the majorities shows the hollowness of the social and the political, then what option is there for political thinking?             
Baudrillard encourages us to embrace the problem head on. We should seize upon his observations as a starting point for thinking about what is after the modern political. Yet, what would this look like? Baudrillard's, In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities, originally appeared in 1978, and in its English translation in 1983. Over 20 years later, we still find much contemporary (especially Anglo American) political theory and social science uninterested in the trajectory of Baudrillard's thought. If one accepts his argument, then is there a way to move forward? Or, does Baudrillard’s description of the political for contemporary society undermine any political thinking? The answer to this question is “not necessarily”. For Baudrillard, the silent majorities prove that politics is an artifact. It is and always has been an elite activity, despite the attempts of modern democracy to conservatively conceal or progressively transform this fact. The continuing silence shows that there is no ignorance to overcome, no mass Prometheus to unbind. Instead, the silent majorities decline participation because they do not want politics.  However, what is their alternative? As of yet, there is no new project of politics to replace the modern. No movement has emerged that expresses the dissatisfaction of our contemporary majorities. Without a choice of positive or kinetic action, the masses stockpile their potential energy. Given this situation, Baudrillard argues that silence is the best strategy: People do in fact defend themselves, they have their defensive and even offensive strategies; but this time, through indifference. ...There is still something at stake, there is still an antagonism, there is certainly a struggle between the strategy of simulation at the level of political power, or what is left of political power, and a strategy of indifference, which is to say that the masses also manage to neutralize power, but by their silence, by their indifference. It’s no longer a strategy of subversion. ...You up a bid of neutralization with more neutralization. So it becomes a game, at this point, it’s become something else. It is no longer exactly a historical or political space.11  This rejection undermines the pretension of political activity and its practitioner’s claims. Instead, what the masses actively engage with in contemporary life is elsewhere.              So, from this perspective, what should political theorists and social scientists think about? We should think more deeply about the history of political activity and its possible replacement. Maybe this replacement is politics in a new form. Perhaps its replacement is a different form of social activity for contemporary societies that addresses the questions once answered by politics. In either case, Baudrillard shows that our discipline should devote more effort to investigating what the masses are concerned with. Rather than maintaining this fiction that they are silent through ignorance, political observers should accept that the masses silence in politics is due to their engagement elsewhere. For political theorists and social scientists this shift would involve study of contemporary, popular culture. An activity they have often relegated to those interested in “postmodernism” or “cultural studies.”             Yet, studying popular culture and activities can arguably tell us more than traditional social science methods have. For example, the fact that consumers in America are saving at an “irrational” negative rate tells us much about what the masses really care about. Writing in an earlier context, Baudrillard describes this difficulty: To their amazement, economists have never been able to rationalize consumption, the seriousness of their ‘theory of need’ as the general consensus upon the discourse of utility being taken for granted. But this is because the practice of the masses very quickly had nothing (or perhaps never had anything) to do with needs. They have turned consumption into a dimension of status and prestige, of useless keeping up with the Joneses or simulation, of potlatch which surpassed use value in every way.13 One could study this phenomenon as a social scientist lamenting the ignorance of the American consumer. Or, one could probe deeper and think about what this activity proves about economic “science” and the actual desires of the majority.             
Similarly, a turn by political theorists and social scientists to what the masses are concerned with can serve as a starting point for criticizing and reconstructing contemporary politics. Baudrillard argues that: The people have become a public. It is the football match or film or cartoon which serve as models for their perception of the political sphere. The people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls. Nothing in all this engages any responsibility.14 Thus, we should look to these cultural models for help with our political thinking.  Baudrillard himself has provided an example of how the idea of the silent majorities is useful for understanding contemporary politics. In his analysis of the 2005 French referendum on the proposed European constitution, Baudrillard argues that the vigorous support for the no vote was not about the merits of the constitutional draft.15 Instead, we can understand the energy of the no campaign only when we look at this referendum as a chance for the silent majorities to lash out. In this case they seized the opportunity to say no to the whole range of politicians and political institutions attempting to guarantee this weak link. Thus, for Baudrillard the no vote is a “reflex” in that inert, unclassifiable lump that is the public. Written before the vote, Baudrillard’s cultural interpretation is very effective at capturing the sense of frustration that led to the no vote winning the day.              
On the other hand, Baudrillard's observations may be wrong. Perhaps he has misinterpreted or distorted the silent majorities. Arguably, the society that Baudrillard argues is the most post modern and thus, presumably, the most post political is the United States.16 Yet, we have seen in recent years very close elections in the United States with higher levels of voter participation than in the past. From this perspective, Baudrillard’s argument seems less convincing or perhaps more applicable to Europe.             
However, if we look at voting behavior in the United States more closely, we do find evidence for Baudrillard’s silent majorities. In the case of the United States, the best predictor of voting preferences at the moment is an individual’s religious leanings. Specifically, the dispensationalist, evangelical population has become a reliable voting block for the Republican Party.17 If one wanted to understand this group of the masses, the best place to start would arguably be the popular Left Behind bestsellers about the end of the world rather than any social science analysis.18 It is precisely this sort of observation that Baudrillard is talking about. In societies that are increasingly post political (in the modern sense), the areas of activity that engage the masses are to be found in this arena of mass culture. The forms of activity and interests that do engage these silent majorities are what they draw upon when confronted with the old political mechanisms of voting, campaigns, and political parties.               
In addition, the ferocity we see in some political behavior reflects Baudrillard’s description of “hyper-conformity”. For example, in the United States we find a very divided electorate despite surveys that show citizens less politically informed than ever. Thus, the masses do not reject politics, but instead display the zeal of hyper-conformity based on non political foundations such as religious leanings and cultural views. This behavior is similar to Baudrillard’s observations about the masses and economic activity. According to Baudrillard, mass behavior in the economy is to consume to the point of wrecking the economy. Or, in another example, he sees the masses conforming to healthcare injunctions to the point that they demand more and more health provision. “The masses alienated in medicine? Not at all: they are in the process of ruining its institution, of making Social Security explode, of putting the social itself in danger by craving always more of it, as with commodities”.19 Thus, we see national health services and health insurance schemes stretched to the breaking point in the developed world. Why, not because the majority is alienated from healthcare, but because it has taken medicine to heart and wants all the medicine it can get.  Now too in politics, when the masses are confronted with mechanisms of voting and questions of party allegiance we are beginning to see in the United States a vengeful conformism. To see this as aiding the manipulation practiced by elites is to fall again into the trap of modern politics with its script of heroes, victims, and false consciousness. Instead, it appears that Baudrillard is on to something. Baudrillard argues that the masses are: “far too conforming to every solicitation and with a hyperreal conformity which is the extreme form of non participation…”20 Thus, a well-documented sociological fact, one that challenges the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences, is still sitting there, silently, compelling a new trajectory of thought. Baudrillard’s main point remains – we should stop lamenting the indifference of the masses to politics and instead confront the meaning of this fact. The observations he confronts us with appear to compel a choice. Political observers can either study politics as an elite activity, alienated from the life of the majority, or work on transforming the political into an activity that has meaning for these silent majorities.  The first choice would relegate political theory and much social science to the field that best suits the interpretation of elite activity and motivation, history. Thus, the social sciences would become a discipline that looks backward at “serious” events and interprets their importance for observers already removed from the subject of study.              The second choice is a call for deeper investigation of everyday life and activity within our global, consumer, and media driven societies. This option is the one likely to provide some critical traction for contemporary politics. However, this turn must indeed be one of thick cultural exploration rather than the distant and thin observations of social science.  Instead of cajoling some percentage of the masses into choosing an answer from one of our ubiquitous surveys, thus creating the simulated public Baudrillard describes, we should be investigating what the masses are doing without such provocations. This task demands a more anthropological approach toward thinking about politics and society. With a methodology of thick description, we may find new intersections of social activity that can replace the modern political forms we have inherited. To revive politics, we need to find an alternative to the current, dominant strategy of mass political behavior – the looming silence Baudrillard describes. What would this application of Baudrillard’s thought to politics look like more specifically? It would criticize and reveal simulations of consent in a method similar to his deconstruction of the other simulacra that surround us in contemporary society. In the discussion above, I mentioned Baudrillard’s analysis of the no vote in France and what this rejection really meant to individuals in the no camp. Similarly, Baudrillard has applied his interpretative skills to explaining the persistent phenomenon of Le Pen and the Front National in France.
In his criticism of the French political elite’s failure to defeat the Front National once and for all,  Baudrillard sees again the reduction of politics to the binary. The political mainstream and left in France has taken on a moral discourse so that: The real question, then, becomes whether one can still open one’s mouth, utter anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist…21  Thus, we have again a simple binary function. Baudrillard argues that in their failure to engage and defeat the Front National on the terrain of politics, the elite in France opts for this absolutist discourse that simulates an ability to banish Le Pen and his followers from politics.              Yet, the Front National is still around, because this is not a real political victory but an attempt to simulate one by shifting the argument to a moral plane. Baudrillard argues that Le Pen and his group are used in a magical way. The racism and discriminatory attitudes found throughout contemporary French society are projected onto this convenient face of evil. This conjuring trick provides the political elite with a way to simulate their engagement with this problem (through their war of words with the Front National) rather than taking on the real challenge of confronting racism at its deeper level of infestation in French society.  This type of thick cultural analysis by Baudrillard suggests how we should think about the future of political activity. In our analysis of politics we need to break out of the 1 and 0 binary relations exposed by Baudrillard. These relationships simulate political activity by ineffectual elites and create simulations of consent despite a silent public. Instead, we need to expose these political simulacra and find forms of political activity that cannot be so easily hijacked by simulation. To do so we will have to emulate what Baudrillard does. We will have to expand our traditional categories of political analysis to include phenomena from contemporary mass culture. It is in this bewildering but provocative terrain that we are likely to find counterpoints to the political simulacra that the silent majorities disdain.  

The violence of the global is the result of a system which at all times attempts to avoid death and conflict

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.)

This is precisely where the violence of the global comes from. It is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. It is the violence of a society where conflict is forbidden, where death is not allowed. It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.
But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won. Against such a dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous forces -- not just different but clearly antagonistic ones -- are rising everywhere. Behind the increasingly strong reactions to globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to the global, we find more than simply nostalgic expressions of negation. We find instead a crushing revisionism vis-à-vis modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global techno-structure, but also of the mental system of globalization, which assumes a principle of equivalence between all cultures. This kind of reaction can take some violent, abnormal, and irrational aspects, at least they can be perceived as violent, abnormal, and irrational from the perspective of our traditional enlightened ways of thinking. This reaction can take collective ethnic, religious, and linguistic forms. But it can also take the form of individual emotional outbursts or neuroses even. In any case, it would be a mistake to berate those reactions as simply populist, archaic, or even terrorist. Everything that has the quality of event these days is engaged against the abstract universality of the global, 5 and this also includes Islam's own opposition to Western values (it is because Islam is the most forceful contestation of those values that it is today considered to be the West's number one enemy).

1NR
Baudrillard 2008 (Jean, Interviewed by Philippe Petit.  Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems.  International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 1 (January, 2008).)

Petit: Does this repentance condemn the political class to a walk-on part?
Baudrillard: The State and political power sit atop all this in a very, very fragile position; they are, so to speak, like filigree-work upon a translucent society, like a fiction woven from multiple complicities. They allow themselves to be regenerated by all who combat them. The political class gets itself investigated and regenerated by the examining magistrates. It's as though there were a strategy here (the government putting itself in the position of victim), but in fact there isn't any political will at the top any longer. There's merely an internal perversion, an internal convolution of the system, which means that one can no longer be in an oppositional position. There is, then, a dangerous pretension on the part of the government to govern when it hasn't either the means or the will to do so any longer; but there's an even more deceitful and dangerous pretension among those who think they can reverse or overthrow the system, for even if they have the will to do so, they do precisely the opposite of what they intended. Now, the worst thing today is the lack of lucid¬ity. When you're in a trap, you're in a trap. There's no point fighting on a terrain where the models for neutralizing opposition are strongest, where you're up against the spiralling trap of a system that is master both of the positive and of the negative. In that. Case you mustn’t look to some internal negativity any longer. You have to look either to the achievement, by saturation and concentration – by the system's excess of positivity – of a critical mass, and then it's no longer the negative but the more positive-than-positive that produces the upheaval; or to singularities, perfectly anomalous objects or events, which are neither inside nor outside. It's in this twisting of the system, in its automatic recycling by the negative, its absorption of all dysfunctions, that the essence of corruption and the baneful destiny of democracy lie.
Language can be re-appropriated to give us new understandings of the world and reveal alternate ways to engage the world.  There’s no reason to reject our use of the word savage – we can use it in a new way.
Ruffin 99 (Sandra, Postmodernism, Spirit Healing, and Proposed Amendments to the Indian Child Welfare Act, McGeorge Law Review, Ass. Prof. of Law at St Thomas Univ of Law, Harvard Law School, lexis) 

The constructive and destructive power of language  18  requires that I make a few prefatory remarks about linguistic and stylistic choices. Like Toni Morrison, I want to awaken and engage the "midwifery" 19 properties of language so that in the midst of the relational experience of text and interpreter, new possibilities of understanding are born. In that regard, I use old words in new ways, or at least, in different ways, and request your participation in the nuanced effects of the words in interaction to allow the alternative view to emerge.  Convention in thought is precisely that which I wish to lay aside in exchange for the opportunity to invent.  This is especially true in Parts II and III where the critical lens through which the Act is viewed is explained and where the vision of reality which drives the rationality of the Article is revealed. This is not to suggest that anything presented here is new, original, or true in any pure sense, but only that it is intended to resonate at a deeper, more submerged level of consciousness than a more conventional approach generally intends.

And the conception of freedom from racism as empowering is the kind of faux freedom that would re-enslave oppressed groups to their own identities.
Robinson 12 Andrew Robinson. “An A to Z of Theory: Jean Baudrillard: Critique of Alienation – Draft 1.” Ceasefire. April 14, 2012. http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-3/.

Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism amounts to liberation. It is true that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed. But the new regime is also a system of control. Repression persists, but it moves sideways. The image of a sterile, hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes desire from the body. The ranking of bodies in terms of status leads to a re-racialisation. Puritanism becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process. The body as locus of desire remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release. Sexuality is expressed in consumption so it can’t disrupt the status quo. What is now censored is the symbolic structure and the possibility of deep meaning. Living representations are turned into empty signs. Because of this change, the old resistances to repression no longer work. Similarly, groups supposedly liberated – such as women, black people, and young people – are denied the effects of liberation by being re-encoded in terms of myths. Once labeled as irresponsible, people’s liberation is attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars responsibility and social power. Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume – women are given the image of Woman, the young an image of Youth, technological change by Technology (gadgets), and so on. Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role and as narcissism. Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their reduction to a function or role. We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to ensure the system’s survival. They operate as its alibis. Even if income equality is encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere, to status, style, power and so on.

A decentralized position is just centralization by another name, because it just orients the world around another dogma, complexity or decentralization. It approaches the problem of solar with a solution pre-prepared in advance. 

Fernando 9 Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading (Google eBook)

In order to respond to, and with, the text as such, the reader needs to maintain the otherness of the text whilst responding. For this to happen, the text must always be approached but never subsumed. It is this gap-this space between the reader and the text, the space which is created and bound by the contract in which negotiation takes place. The gap-the skin between the parties on which communication takes place-is the place where there is the potentiality for reading. Only within the gap can the reader potentially respond to and with (for one must never forget that one is in a subjective position) the text whilst maintaining the radical otherness of the text. The centrality of the reader's position must be maintained, as it is only this position that allows one to take full accountability for and to the text. The Contract 59 If one adopts the false modesty of a decentralised position, one is actually saying that one is the absolute centre-I am afraid to take up a central position because I really believe that I affect everything, as everything actually revolves around me-which is the problem of the Levinasian position discussed earlier. In order to have a true response, a full understanding of the other must never be assumed, even as much as it is attempted. The text that is being read maintains its otherness from the reader (who is central) when the reader maintains a certain blindness to it. In other words, it is only when the reader does not claim full knowledge over the text but is in continual negotiation with it that the text remains fully other. It is the space, the gap, between the reader and the text that is the site of reading, for it is this gap that ensures that "understanding is always in want of understanding": the reader is responding to the text whilst acknowledging that it is impossible to fully understand the text, all the while realizing that understanding itself brings with it a non-understandability}6 It is this gap, between understanding and non-understandability, this gap within understanding itself, that ensures that reading can even begin to take place.