arizona debate institute 2009

Arizona Debate Institute 2009 1Fellows Apocalyptic Rhetoric K

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC K - INDEX

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC K - INDEX................................................................................................................1SHELL 1/4..................................................................................................................................................................2SHELL 2/4..................................................................................................................................................................3SHELL 3/4..................................................................................................................................................................4SHELL 4/4..................................................................................................................................................................5LINK – APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 1/2................................................................................................................7LINK – APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 2/2................................................................................................................8LINK - BIOTERRORISM........................................................................................................................................11LINK - IRANIAN PROLIF......................................................................................................................................12INTERNAL LINK – ETHICS..................................................................................................................................13MOURNING DA......................................................................................................................................................15RAINFOREST ABJECTION DA............................................................................................................................16IMPACT – VIOLENT EXCLUSION......................................................................................................................17IMPACT – NUCLEAR BIOPOLITICS DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE...............................................................18ALT - QUEER APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC.........................................................................................................19APOC. RHETORIC -> POLICY..............................................................................................................................20AT: FRAMEWORK 1/3...........................................................................................................................................21AT: FRAMEWORK 2/3...........................................................................................................................................22AT: FRAMEWORK 3/3...........................................................................................................................................23AT: PERM – CO-OPTION DA................................................................................................................................24ALT SOLVE – PROBLEMATIZATION................................................................................................................25AT: ACTION GOOD...............................................................................................................................................26AT: INDIVIDUATION DA/ GENERIC LINK.......................................................................................................27IMPACT TURN – APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 1/2................................................................................................29IMPACT TURN – APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 2/2................................................................................................30IMPACT TURN – BIOPOWER GOOD 1/2............................................................................................................31IMPACT TURN – BIOPOWER GOOD 2/2............................................................................................................32ALT NO SOLVE......................................................................................................................................................33INDIVIDUATION DA 1/2.......................................................................................................................................34INDIVIDUATION DA 2/2.......................................................................................................................................35AT: IRANIAN PROLIF LINK.................................................................................................................................36AT: BIOTERRORISM LINK...................................................................................................................................37PERM SOLVENCY.................................................................................................................................................38AT: MOURNING/RAINFOREST DA....................................................................................................................39


SHELL 1/4

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC EXERTS BIOPOLITIAL CONTROL OVER LIFE BY EXPOSING IT TO DEATH, USING THE IMAGE OF APOCALYPSE TO JUSTIFY THE EXTERMINATION OF THOSE OBJECTS OF POWER ISOLATED AS THREATS.

COVIELLO, assistant professor of English, 2000[peter, “Apocalypse From Now On”, PG. 40-1, JC]

Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed - it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear mhm of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing phrase) "remainderless and a-symbolic destruction," then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an "other" people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished "general population." This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag's incisive observation, from 1989, that, "Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now' but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'" The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful . That is, though the perpetual threat of destruction - through the constant reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse - the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population . No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than , in his words, "life-administering." Power, he contends, "exerts a positive influence on life … [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." In his brief comments on what he calls "the atomic situation," however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as "managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race," agencies of modern power presume to act "on the behalf of the existence of everyone." Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating. "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, "this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill' it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.


SHELL 2/4

BIOPOLITICS NORMALIZES THE CREATION OF POPULATIONS AND THEIR EXPOSURE TO DEATH. THIS ENSURES THE SOVERIEGN APPARTUS’S RIGHT TO KILL.

Stohler 95[Anne, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 81-82]

Biopower was defined as a power organized around the management of life, where wars were waged on behalf of the existence of everyone, entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity, massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so may to be killed. at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large scale phenomena of the population. The sovereign right to kill appears as an "excess" of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it. How does this power over life permit the right to kill, if this is a power invested in augmenting life and the quality of it? How is it possible for this political power to expose to death not only its enemies, but even its own citizens. This is the point where racism intervenes. "What inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is the mergence of biopower.. . . racism inscribes itself as a fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states" racist discourse it is a "means of introduction a fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die. It fragments the biological field it establishes a break inside the biological field, it establishes a break inside the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as "good." fit, and superior.& establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life. It posits that the more you kill and let die, the more you will live." It is neither racism nor that state that invented this connection, but the permanency of war-like relations inside the social body. Racism now activates this discourse in a novel way, establishing a biological confrontation between "my life and the death of others" The enemies are those identified as external and internal threats to the population. "Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put certain people to death in a society of normalization" The murderous function of the biopolitical state can only be assured by racism. which is indispensable to it. Racism will develop in modem societies where biopower is prevalent and with colonizing genocide." How else, could a biopolitical state kill civilizations if not by activating the themes of evolutionism and racism. War ''regenerates" one's own race. In conditions of war proper, the right to kill and the affirmation of life productively converge. Discourse has concrete effects; its practices are prescribed and motivated by the biological taxonomies of the racist state.


SHELL 3/4

ALTERNATIVE: VOTE NEGATIVE TO REJECT THE 1AC’S RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION LEGITIMATING NUCLEAR STRATEGIC THOUGHT IN THE NAME OF APOCALYPTIC DANGER.

Taylor 2k7[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, “the means to match their hatred”: nuclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse”, University of Colorado–Boulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]

This interdependency between security and rhetoric is further clarified in arguments conceptualizing nuclear weapons as a legitimation crisis for the liberal-democratic nation-state (Deudney 1995, 209). Rosow (1989) argues that traditional conceptualization of nuclear deterrence as a strategic issue obscures its status as "a system of social relations" (564). In adopting this alternate perspective, Rosow argues, we may reclaim nuclear weapons from official discourses that have sheared off from their necessary grounding in—and authorization by—the discourses of the nuclear life world: "[Strategic] debate scarcely touches on the experience of nuclear deterrence as a cultural and political-economic production. . . . The result is a serious discontinuity between the claims on which the validity of nuclear policy rests . . . and the actual effects of nuclear deterrence on the material well-being and consciousness in the advanced capitalist West" (564). Rosow's argument establishes the democratic status of nuclear weapons as a rhetorical problem: he conceptualizes nuclear deterrence as a discourse composed of "interpretive claims" and imperative expressions and theorizes its mediation of both institutional structures and forms of identity. Viewed in this light, we can recognize how, as artifacts, nuclear weapons clarify a fundamental contradiction between their destructive potential and their legitimating cultural discourses: "The same forces that are to produce peace and prosperity, i.e., science, knowledge, rationality, also produce the tools for destroying the very civilization they are designed to protect and whose values and future they embody."Richard Falk (1982, 9) has suggested the implications of this condition for a nuclear-rhetorical democracy: "Normative opposition to nuclear weapons or doctrines inevitably draws into question the legitimacy of state power and is, therefore, more threatening to governmental process than a mere debate about the property of nuclear weapons as instruments of statecraft." As a result, Rosow concludes, changes in nuclear policy may exacerbate inherent conflict between "the [cultural] consciousness of democratic citizenship" and the legitimacy of the state (1989, 581). As the state increasingly rests its security on weapons systems requiring centralized control and automated decision making, it becomes increasingly difficult to assert that the legitimacy of those weapons arises from authentic popular consent. Fault lines in this hegemony are opened when public rhetoric informs Americans about the international consequences of nuclear imperialism and encourages their identification with negatively affected groups. In the post-Cold War era, Rosow predicted, it will become increasingly difficult for the state to normalize nuclear weapons as a familiar and legitimate icon.


SHELL 4/4

RHETORICAL CRITICISM EXPOSES ASSUMPTIONS AND DISCOURSES WHICH PRECLUDE CO-OPERATIVE AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT.

TAYLOR 2K7[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, “the means to match their hatred”: nuclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse”, University of Colorado–Boulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]

Rhetorical scholars thus view speech in democracy as "the medium within which the ethical self-government of autonomous individuals can be articulated with the imperatives of democratic governance" (Hicks 2002, 224). They reconceptualize ideals of deliberative democracy such as inclusion, equality, and reason to rigorously assess their associated discursive practices. They raise questions about how these practices hail citizens to participate in the democratic process as particular kinds of acting subjects, endow them with a sense of entitlement and agency, mediate their understanding of others' interests and the effects of their actions upon those interests, and develop their ability to not only competently reason together means do not subvert democratic ends (Cloud 2004, 79). Of particular concern here is the hegemony in democracy of "reason" as a framing standard (i.e., of rationality) and a conventional practice of accountability that constrains deliberation through normalized assumptions concerning the source and range of legitimate support for expression and the ontological status of political interests in relation to language (Welsh 2002). In challenging those assumptions, rhetorical scholars rigorously critique the ethics and politics of self-described democratic discourse. They ensure that it does not prematurely foreclose the expression of relevant interests and that it encourages their patient and ethical cultivation as a resource for innovative transformation of self and other. Finally, rhetorical scholars of democracy oppose corrosive discourse which forecloses the possibility of achieving mutual identification between opponents and thus cooperation.


LINK – APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 1/2

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC CREATES A DOCILE PUBLIC AND ENABLES MILITARY INTERVENTION AND GLOBAL WAR.

DR. GAY 2K6[William c., PhD Philosophy @ Boston, prof of phil. @ university of north Carolina, ‘apocalyptic thinking versus nonviolent action’, in ‘spiritual dimensions of nonviolence and peace” edit by David Boersema,]

Even when fear is not suppressed, it can be misdirected. The political risk resulting from apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears is that these concerns can get co-opted. How are we to fight off apocalyptic or global terrorism? Nuclear prophets like Jonathan Schell say we must rid the world of nuclear weapons. Current anti-terrorist politicians say we must rid the world of terrorists; we must wage a war against terrorism. Ironically, political leaders argue that the possession of nuclear weapons is the means for preventing the apocalyptic horrors of nuclear war. Just in case deterrence fails, government officials now tell us a missile defense system should be in place. Six months after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the George W. Bush administration announced plans to use modified nuclear weapons to destroy terrorist strong- hold stashes of weapons of mass destruction, or to respond to terrorist attacks that make use of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Officials have told us for quite some time that governmental possession of chemical and biological weapons is one of the means of preventing evil governments or terrorist organizations from using weapons of mass destruction. Now, the claim is also made that the modified nuclear weapons being urged by the Bush administration for possible use in the “war on terrorism” will also function to deter terrorism. In the past, and again currently, governmental leaders, by preying on public fears, achieve acquiesce to an ideology that portrays international adver- saries as totally diabolical and completely untrustworthy. Under these conditions, and supposedly in order to “save” their citizens from the “absolute evils,” military and political leaders present military preparedness and military actions as the only, or best, insurance against nuclear apocalypse and terrorist attacks.


LINK – APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 2/2

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC DEMOBILIZES DEMOCRATIC CONSTRAINTS ON GOVERNMENTAL EXERCISE OF POWER AND PROMOTES GLOBAL WARFARE.


In the first part of this essay, I will argue against the utility of fear and apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic prognosticators have a zero “accudoom” forecast record. By nature, only once could such a forecast be correct. In religious apocalyptic traditions, the rising of the sun on the proclaimed doomsday typically sends the sheet-enshrouded devotees back from the appointed hilltop to their everyday tasks. Instead of being taken up into the clouds, they find their feet firmly planted on the ground. The prophet may re-calculate and issue yet another warning of the beginning of the end on a still later date, but the ranks of the faithful tend to thin. In the nuclear doom tradition, the theoretical and experimental data of careful scientific research has often dispelled similar forecasts. A temporarily frightened public returns to business as usual. Will governmental assurances lull us into believing that, despite its great cost, a missile defense system will protect us for ballistic missiles launched at us by diabolical (and hardly comparably powerful) rogue states such as Iran, and North Korea or the “axis of evil,” as they are now termed? Now, will the Office of Homeland Security protect us from the various forms of attack that terrorists may employ? Or, could the Office of Homeland Security be propagating yet another myth of protection? Instead of bringing us security, the Office of Homeland Se- curity may be a threat to democracy by undercutting civil liberties and intensify- ing militaristic and warist attitudes at home, not just abroad.


LINK – CONTAINMENT RHETORICCONTAINMENT RHETORIC EMPLOYS A METAPHOR OF GAURDIANSHIP OVER WEAPONS WHICH POSES THE EXPERTS AND NUCLEAR POLICYMAKERS AGAINST DEMOCRATIC CONSTRAINTS AND PREVENTS MOBILIZATION AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONS.


In this way, rhetorical repression may be better conceptualized as containment of the nuclear public sphere. Here, scholars such as Alan Nadel (1995) and William Kinsella (2001) have argued that nuclear weapons created a traumatic exigency requiring the development of cultural narratives to control the associated public experience of fear and responsibility. The central motif of that narrative, Nadel argues, was "containment," a term which captures the conflation of declared foreign policy, informal domestic policy, and official rhetoric "that functioned to foreclose dissent, preempt dialogue, and preclude contradiction" (1995, 14). It is impossible here to miss the reflexive nuclear metaphor in this demophobic image: "containment" is also the technical process by which energetic "reactions" in fissile nuclear materials are stimulated to yield desired results, while minimizing operator exposure to dangerous "contamination," avoiding inconvenient "leaks," and preventing fatal and "explosive" breaches of control. This metaphor richly evokes, then, technocratic disregard for nuclear democracy (i.e., as a raw material for official manipulation) and suggests how "engineered" deliberation can reproduce the premises of nuclear guardianship (Farrell and Goodnight 1981, 298).


LINK - BIOTERRORISM

BIOTERRORISM SCENARIOS CREATE A DOCILE FORM OF POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY, EXPOSING LIFE TO POWER INCLUDING EXTERMINATION AND ‘LETTING DIE’ AND PRECLUDES POSITIVE POLITICAL SOLUTIONS TO ACTUAL THREATS.

Spana 2k4[monica sochoh, asst. professor of medicine at uPittsburgh, “bioterrorism: us public health and a secular apocalypse”, anthropology today, vol 20, issue 5, p.8-13, oct 21, jc]

Bioterrorism scenarios permit explorations into ‘governmentality’ – the institutions, processes and practices through which a population comprised of individuals is imagined, their conduct and well-being made meaningful, their sense of self nurtured in specific ways, and their efforts directed to some purposes over others (Ferguson & Gupta 2002; Foucault 1991[1978]). Bioterrorism scenarios are a symbolic structure through which a particular kind of danger is construed, and particular social identifications and relationships are made, with manifest political consequences (Campbell 1992, Weldes et al. 1999). As represented in official response scenarios, bioterrorism is an amalgam of dangers against which the US population must be made secure – the foreign terrorist, the replicating pathogen, and the panicky public. Around this definition, new networks of authorities in and out of government are coming together to protect the common good (cf. Trouillot 2001); their interests sometimes converge, at other times conflict. Bioterrorism scenarios – through their authorship, performance and dissemination – help to generate new political subjectivities. Arange of authorities find reinvigorated purpose in providing protection against bioterrorism. Political and military leaders reassert the duty to safeguard America from foreign enemies. Law enforcement professionals find new purpose in the goals of subverting terrorist attacks and containing disorderly publics. Medical and public health practitioners fulfil oaths to provide protection against bodily harm for patients and populations – the political boundaries of which may shrink or expand, from the local to the national to the global. Present concern with bioterrorism may signal novel forms of ‘biopower’(Foucault 1980[1976]), where the task of governing becomes enhancing the ability to fight off infection, i.e. building better ‘emergency response systems’ at the institutional level and better ‘immune systems’at the individual level (cf. Martin 1994). ‘While an evangelism of fear has been cardinal for the constitution of many states’ identity, the apocalyptic mode[…] has been conspicuous in the catalog of American statecraft’(Campbell 1992: 153). Bioterrorism imaginaries of professionals charged with ensuring preparedness are apparently secular: bioscience, technology and medicine are among the forces invoked to deliver the population from danger. Approaching counter-terrorism scenarios as non-religious, however, risks obscuring the complexity of US culture and politics. Religious and secular apocalypticisms frequently interpenetrate one another (Stewart & Harding 1999). Tens of millions of Americans, it is esti- mated, believe that the endtime prophesied in the Book of Revelation is soon to be realized: biological weapons are singled out by some as the means of final destruction.13The latest installment in the evangelical ‘Left Behind’series – the best-selling adult novels in the US – presents a ‘war-like’ Jesus in the Second Coming, an image that resonates with President Bush’s portrayals of military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of ‘godly purpose’.14 Whether and why various ‘publics’in the US (and else- where) embrace the vision of a bioterrorized future is an open question. Prevalent in US popular culture, scenarios may constitute a modality of power through which current political leaders produce consent for their counter-terrorist activities and professionals reproduce their expert status. Mass culture effects, however, are uncertain, unstable and contradictory (Traube 1996). More ethnographic study is thus needed to understand whether and under what conditions various ‘publics’ internalize dominant images of themselves as being at risk of bioattack, and as legiti- mately protected by current domestic and foreign policy and professional practices (cf. Skidmore 2003). An additional ethnographic and political question is what role bioterrorist narratives play in reinforcing apocalyptic scenarios in the minds of individuals and groups fantasizing about bringing them about. Bioterrorism scenarios embody ambitions of both antagonist and protagonist. Thinking hopefully about a future notthreatened by biological attacks is doubly difficult in the current environ- ment: apocalyptic rhetoric of an incontrovertible, impending doom ‘all too easily


overwhelm[s] the opti- mistic faith necessary for meaningful political action’ (O’Leary 1998: 412).


LINK - IRANIAN PROLIF

THEIR ARGUMENT ABOUT IRANIAN PROLIFERATION DISABLES DEMOCRATIC CHECKS ON U.S. POWER AND MASK THE INEQUITY OF NULEAR ARMS REDUCTIONS.

Taylor 2k7[byran, “the means to match their hatred”: muclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse”, University of Colorado–Boulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692]

Critical and cultural scholars are responding to this rapidly evolving nuclear landscape and in particular to the Bush administration's rhetorical depiction of international nuclear proliferation as a pretext for military intervention. Hecht (2003) characterizes this rigid and simplistic rhetoric as an instance of ahistorical and hyperbolic "nuclear rupture-talk" that legitimates neo-imperialism. In their indictment of the administration's pre-invasion allegations concerning Iraq's possession of WMD, Hartnett and Stengrim (2004) conclude that this rhetoric not only constitutes a grievous fabrication of evidence but also "amounts to a pattern of lying that poses a serious threat to the foundational principles of democracy" (152). And Rutledge (2007) has examined the administration's related rhetoric in its ongoing conflict with Iran over its nuclear development program. In her post-colonialist analysis, Rutledge (2007, 133) concludes that this rhetoric is suffused with irony, ambivalence, denial, and paradox. It reflects, for example, "America's continued attempts to protect the secret of nuclear power while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so." It allows U.S. rhetors to avoid acknowledging that nuclear domination has been achieved "at the cost of continued economic and political exploitation of nations like Iran." It suppresses the inconvenient truth that "America hypocritically builds bigger and more destructive nuclear weapons while expecting other nations to resist the temptation to develop those same weapons." And finally, it allows the nation to shift ambivalence about its own nuclear history onto enemies, thus "directing attention away from its own role in creating the horrible potentiality of . . . nuclear destruction."


INTERNAL LINK – ETHICS

NUCLEAR APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC MAKES ETHICAL DECISIONMAKING IMPOSSIBLE BY ENCOURAGING A FARSIGHTED SENSE OF POLITICAL IMPORTANCE WHICH IGNORE SYSTEMIC AND UNETHICAL VIOLENCE.


The final risk facing apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears is moral. Apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears are too farsighted. Farsightedness or hyperopia is the pathological condition in which vision is better for distant than near objects. For example, nuclear prophets do bring into sharp focus a hopefully distant object—the prospect that somewhere down the road we will reach an omega point where the destructiveness of war will in fact be apocalyptic. The judgment is surely correct that the precipitation of global doom would be a profoundly immoral act. But people who are farsighted fail to bring nearby objects into sharp focus. Even if nuclear apocalypse or further terrorist attacks of the magnitude of 11 September might not be very far down the road, numerous other war-like objects are much closer to us. In fact, they surround us. Since World War II, no year has passed in which fewer than four wars were being waged somewhere on this planet. When we devote too much of our attention to imagining the worst that could happen, we risk inflicting moral hyperopia on ourselves. Just as we are being myopic when we focus primarily on crime in the streets when confronting the problem of human violence, even so we are being hyperopic to focus predominantly on the threats of nuclear apocalypse and global terrorism when confronting the problems of large-scale violence. Apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears risk leaving us morally shortchanged when they lead us to fail to fight against the horrors of violence that are not distant or possible threats but everyday realities. We need to respond to on-going atrocities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that are on a scale quite adequate for moral outrage, and we need to seek feasible protection from devastating harms such as AIDS, hunger, and environmental degradation that actually are currently afflicting us.


INTERNAL LINK - GENDERED VIOLENCETHE APOCALYTPIC IMAGINATION ENTAILS GENDERED VIOLENCE BY REVEALING THE SECRET OF LIFE IMAGINED AS CREATION THROUGH DESTRUCTION OF THE FEMINIZED BODY.

WARREN 2K8[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalypticimagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]

A recurring staring point to defining what apocalypse, and the concepts so derived, is to look at its etymology. Jacques Derrida’s essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” (which serves as a starting point for much of the discussions of the apocalyptic character of post-modernity), begins with the assertion by André Chouraqui that the Greek apokalupsis is a translation of the Hebrew gala. He expands upon the similarities thusly: Apokaluptō no doubt was a good word [bon mot] for gala. Apokaluptō, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said, signified perhaps but that cannot be or must not first be delivered up to self-evidence (1984: 4). Keller finds the origins of the word apocalypse as gendered in that the unveiling of Apo-Kalypso “connotes the marital stripping of the veiled virgin… The moment of truth blinks with cosmic excitement” (1996: 1). Taken together, these two explanations of the origin of apocalypse reveal important aspects that are frequently overlooked in favor of spectacular destruction: the revelatory aspect, that apocalypse is concerned with epistemological concerns to as great an extent as metaphysical or ethical claims; and that construction, maintenance or subversion of gender roles are often, if not always at stake within the apocalyptic imagination.

http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/Warren%20Beckett.pdf?acc_num=bgsu1218993516



MOURNING DA

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC FORCLOSES A POLITICS OF MOURNING AND TURNS ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS INTO THEIR HOLLOW DOUBLES, OFFERING ONLY VIOLENCE, TURNING THE CASE.


For Jay, what those engaged with the apocalyptic imagination are unable to mourn is Kristevan mother figure. He contends “It is thus tempting to interpret the apocalyptic moment in the critique of technological and scientific hubris as a convoluted expression of distress at the matricidal underpinnings of the modernist project, indeed of the entire human attempt to uproot itself from its origins in something we might call mother nature” (1994: 42). The inability to mourn is not just that of the mother or a matricidal impulse of modernity; instead it is the inability to mourn the failure of the promises of the Enlightenment. We cannot mourn the passing of Enlightenment ideals because its institutions, having largely failed to deliver its promises, continue to move around like an animated corpse. To parallel Jay’s mourning of the loss of the mother, the Enlightenment on its legs of liberal democracy and scientific knowing, prattles forth like a parent suffering from severe dementia, offering abuse and little else. While some of the family knows that it is now in fact its “time,” most are unwilling to let go of pleasant memories from the past.




RAINFOREST ABJECTION DA

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC SUSTAINS A SENSE OF ABJECTION OR AN INCLINATION TO EXPECT THE SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION.


Jay finds this sullen disposition to be at the heart of “the apocalyptic imaginary as a whole, and not merely its postmodern variant” (1994: 36). While Jay also finds the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Jean Francois Lyotard to be indicative of this mode of thinking, the anglophone Anthony Giddens has written about this disposition in a way that proves useful. Giddens finds the “sense of foreboding which so many have noted as characteristic of the current age” (1990: 131) to be based upon the way in which risk has become globalized in the modern world. He finds seven points that characterize the “specific risk profile of modernity” (ibid: 124): 1) risk’s intensity, that there is a risk of nuclear war that could potentially end all human life on the planet; 2) contingent events that can effect extremely large numbers of people; 3) the impact of human knowledge on the natural world, particularly technology’s impact on environmental conditions; 4) institutionalization of risk in global market exchanges, of which the current global food crisis is representative; 5) the awareness of risk being risky, that is uncertain; 6) this awareness is held by many people; 7) and that no expert can be completely proficient in managing risk. Similar to this overwhelming position of risk, Keller identifies a feeling of pending apocalypse existing within society as a cryptoapocalypse, a sort of Kristevan abjection within the “subliminal margins” of human psyche. It makes people “inclined to expect the burning of the rainforests” by naturalizing feelings of foreboding and inevitability, “enabling their own numbed complicity in the economic system that is causing the end of the world for so many Amazonian species” (1996: 8). Taken together these factors help to explain the sense of pending cataclysm that is identified with adopting the apocalyptic imagination, but it is only one component.




IMPACT – VIOLENT EXCLUSION

SECURITY, JUSTIFIED BY THE IMAGE OF APOCALYPSE, IS USED TO UNDERMINE CONTRAINTS ON ELITE POWER AND THE EXECUTION OF THOSE DEEMED A THREAT TO THAT POWER.


The implications of this condition for nuclear democracy generally—and constitutional constraints on presidential war powers, specifically—are quite serious. The president is believed to be the only one who can authorize the launch of nuclear weapons and is commonly viewed as having the right to do so under conditions of attack. Although he is required to discuss options with advisors before transmitting his decision (and launch command codes) to military commanders, the president also has the right to predelegate launch authority to those commanders (Born 2006, 26-27). This right has been exercised throughout the Cold War in periods of crisis, and historians have demonstrated that those commanders have subsequently exercised their operational autonomy in ways that undermine declared policies (Nolan 1989; Rosenberg 1983). Additionally, Falk notes (1982, 3), "Political leaders in the United States have failed throughout the nuclear age to consult with, or disclose to, the public the occasions on which the use of nuclear weapons was seriously contemplated." This situation has created a frightening and largely unacknowledged gap between official policies of nuclear control and actual military practices that has heightened nuclear risk and created an ongoing mystery regarding whether and how the ideals of democratic rule are preserved in moments of crisis. Throughout the Cold War, this problem plagued demophobic Realists who feared on the one hand that "excessive [nuclear] power in the hands of an aroused or angry citizenry could lead to more than political upheaval and revolution; it could lead to annihilation" (Rosenthal 1991, 123) and, on the other, that near-disasters such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis demonstrated an unacceptable level of risk created by nuclear elites. For philosopher Elaine Scarry (1990), the problem of centralization is fundamentally moral: the semi-automated status of nuclear weapons subverts a requirement of democratic rule that bodies which may be destroyed in war must have the opportunity to consent to their conscription and deployment. Third, Hudson (2004, 320) argues that the postwar national security state practices anti-democratic repression as officials invoke its imperatives to justify their subversion and suspension of domestic civil liberties. Telescoping this claim to focus on nuclear weapons and rhetoric, we may concede the historical impact of anti-Communist rhetoric on mainstream public regard of anti-nuclear dissent. Additionally, we may consider how—in the 1953 resolution of the U.S. government's case against the Rosenbergs—repression has included the ultimate act of executing nuclear spies (Carmichael 1993; Garber and Walkowitz 1995). This outcome is achieved through rhetorical practices such as courtroom cross-examination, and it also functions in the public sphere as a "message" confirming the nuclear state's level of commitment to disciplining threats posed to its order by political difference.


IMPACT – NUCLEAR BIOPOLITICS DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE

BIOPOLITICAL EXPOSURE TO DEATH IN THE NUCLEAR REALM PERPETUATES GENOCIDE AGAINST POPULATIONS AND EXPROPRIATES THE VALUE OF THOSE LIVES IT SACRIFICES.

Bianco 2k4[Jamie sky, “zones of morbidity”, rhizomes #08.spring, jc]

If disciplinary bio-politics are constituted in the governmentality, management and instrumentality of human life, such as the doctrines of Human Rights, then the bio-politics of control and abandonment are constituted as "necropolitics," the profitable designation of bodies, races, gender, nations, and sub-populations selected for access, left to death, and/or made to die. The mutual positioning taken up in Silko's "novel" [10] and in Mbembé's "political science" and Sandoval's "Chicana, feminist theory" [11] are the deadly and catastrophic stakes of bodies, complexity, control, bio-power, and bio-political technologies not simply designed to subdue the mass proletariat and exploit labor power, but to expropriate the value of living flesh itself.

Articulating the necropolitical and indigenous politics of land, Silko writes, "North was the direction of Death" (Almanac 590). Within the continental "Americas" and by virtue of catastrophically under-acknowledged and profitable exclusion and genocide across these lands, indigenous and non-white im(migrant) bodies occupy what I term "zones of morbidity." For Silko, born in the Laguna Pueblo, this genocide continues through geo-economic ecocide in the form of the largest un-reclaimed uranium mine in the United States, the Jackpile-Paguate mine, sitting in the middle of the village. Given the vast complex of irradiation sicknesses, cancer clusters, and death through uranium mining, nuclear weapons testing and radioactive waste disposal facilities found across and adjacent to the traditional territories and current reservation lands of most Western states tribes, a case for contemporary environmental racism as genocide could be made on behalf of indigenous peoples without any historical considerations. The continuation of extermination practices and policies of the federal and state governmental bodies, nuclear and genetic laboratories, military and police agencies, working directly with corporate energy interests under the political and economic support and racist social oppression by the U.S. middle class and international corporate elite makes for a tale of necropolitical technologies. This is precisely what is found in Silko's rendering of contemporary storytelling and prophecy through the Almanac. The prophecies of death or necropolitical design and political affect travel within and among the dead, the dying, the living and the morbid. And as her Almanac demonstrates a prophetic and differential future must be mapped in consultation with the remains of history, tradition, and culture because under these necropolitics of control, direct opposition to power is not only futile; it is deadly.


ALT - QUEER APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC

THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO VOTE NEGATIVE AS AN ACT OF QUEERING THEIR APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE – THIS ALLOWS US TO PROBLEMATIZE DANGER AND OPPRESSION WHILE PRECLUDING THE IMPULSE FOR RETALIATORY VIOLENCE


Is the apocalyptic imagination, like fascism intrinsically violent? Carpenter wonders, “If Revelation puts sex into discourse as gynephobia and homophobia, then sexual and gendered violence may be integral to ‘apocalypse’as we know it: the sexual politics of ‘apocalypse’may be unable to dispense with violence because that violence – a gendered violence – may be what is at stake in the vision of apocalyptic power” (1995: 111). Carpenter suggests that a “gay apocalyptic” is a potential way to somewhat work around this violence, an approach to the apocalyptic imagination first developed in the 1960s. The revolution of the imagination seems to be a strong component, Carpenter explains : But the events of the revolutionary sixties also gave rise to an oppositional apocalyptic: readings of Revelation that valorize a line of prophets linked in a common opposition to “culture,” and that celebrate apocalyptic vision as a rapturous opening of the seals of prophesy or the doors of perception, a longed for “coming out.” In this “gay apocalyptic,” representations of Revelation take on the structure of a visionary “coming-out” narrative, a prophecy of something to be revealed at the end of History but not in history (1995: 120). This “gay apocalyptic” bears similarity to Keller’s counter-apocalypse, and also reflects Collins’s characterization of the apocalyptic imagination being a revolution of the imagination. Opening the “doors of perception” is one approach to changing the ways in which truths often taken as givens are challenged. Rather than ignoring the gendered violence of Revelation, it must be acknowledged and be part of that which is to be done away with. Rather than the Whore of Babylon being defeated, the apocalyptic imagination could be employed to defeat such dichotomies of whore and mother. Richard Dellamora finds William S. Burroughs to be a figure representative of such an engagement with the apocalyptic imagination, though he uses the term “queer apocalypse.” (1995). This term may be somewhat more apt because it does not connote the diametric way of thinking that is to be subverted; rather than gay as opposed to straight, queer has been used to describe the state of flux in which sexuality exists. Kermode, does not find much to be found of use in the apocalyptic imagination, including Burroughs. What is particularly problematic for Kermode is “The most terrible element in apocalyptic thinking is its certainty that there must be universal bloodshed” (2000: 107). This is certainly true of many manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination, particularly Christian Revelation as deployed by those who seek to create or protect their authority. However it is overstatement to characterize it as a necessary element of the apocalyptic imagination. While bloodshed and destruction are often present, it is not so in some of the Jewish apocalypses examined by Collins, and seems to be mitigated or at least downplayed in some contemporary manifestations. The conflation between judgment and punishment is what makes bloodshed seem necessary. The revolution of imagination within queer or counter-apocalypse can call out domination and oppression without demanding that an archangel line those responsible up against the wall.




APOC. RHETORIC -> POLICY

APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR RHETORIC SHAPES POLICY


First, although there is scholarly disagreement surrounding the utility of "the rhetorical presidency" as an analytic concept (Ivie 2005; Medhurst 1996), it is largely uncontested that presidents use the full power of language at their command to interpret the interests of the nation and to advocate policies that serve them. Here, politics, poetry, and rhetoric may intersect as nuclear presidents draw on formal literary devices such as metaphor and ideological narratives establishing what is true, beautiful, and good for the nation in order to justify America's historical development of nuclear weapons. Here, Hall's poem reminds us that poetic language dialogically shadows the rational deliberation of nuclear policy and potentially intervenes in its abstractions and exclusions.


AT: FRAMEWORK 1/3

APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR WEAPONS RHETORIC DESTROYS DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY – INTERNAL LINK TURNS YOUR POLICYMAKING GOOD D.A.


Finally, nuclear weapons contribute to the anti-democratic condition of distortion. Hudson (2004) depicts this condition as an illegitimate stranglehold exerted by agents of the military-industrial complex on public deliberation of national security policy. He lists associated practices such as persistent threat exaggeration and incongruous promotion of anachronistic weapons systems and attributes these to the ongoing need of institutional actors to preserve their authority, legitimacy, and profitability. This political-economic determinism, however, does not explain the cultural dependency and productivity of such rhetoric. Additionally, the trope of "distortion" invites us to prematurely judge nuclear rhetoric as either converging with or diverging from a preexisting, objective truth condition. Alternately, we may consider that the critical significance of this rhetoric lies not in its referentiality, but in its capacity to shape the conditions of deliberation by advancing particular discourses and frames over their competitors.

Central to this discussion is the famous conceptualization by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk (1991) of "nuclearism" as a potent mixture of ideologies including bureaucracy, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, militarism, technological determinism, and instrumental rationality. This hegemonic condition, argue Lifton and Falk, fuels the promotion of nuclear weapons as a "solution" to perceived problems of national security. It inhibits democratic discourse by inducing primitive and inappropriate defenses in the public mind as a response to the terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation. These mechanisms include a quasi-religious faith in nuclear weapons as a source of "salvation" in national security and "psychic numbing" that mediates dread and guilt arising from repressed understanding of the actual consequences of nuclear weapons development and use.


AT: FRAMEWORK 2/3

EXCLUSION OF THE ALTERNATIVE REPLICATES THE EXCEPTIONALIST VIOLENCE OF APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR RHETORIC, DESTROYS CULTURE, LEADS TO CYLCICAL WARFARE, AND PREVENTS PUBLIC DELIBERATION.


In his related critique of rhetoric surrounding the global war on terror, Robert Ivie (2005) establishes that the continued degradation of American political culture stems from long-standing "demophobia." In this condition, democracy is an ideal that must be enforced on international others to preserve essential American interests. Simultaneously, however, it is viewed as a threatening source of domestic dissent and change that offends the republican and federalist sense of political order. Ivie unflinchingly probes this throbbing paradox in the history of U.S. war making: even as they claim to serve democracy through military adventurism abroad, U.S. officials consistently distort the interests of their opponents and cripple citizen deliberation. They do so through use of a "decivilizing" rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid, and exceptionalist discourses to demonize Other-ness and delegitimate domestic dissent. The consequences of this practice, Ivie argues, are grave indeed. It degrades cultural diversity required for successful adaptation to changing political conditions; it suppresses the contradiction between the ideal of deliberation and the coercive use of armed force; it exacerbates tensions that lead to war's irrevocable destruction; and it marginalizes alternate formats (such as poetry) that may serve political deliberation. Ivie's solution to these problems is neither direct nor simple: he calls for nothing less than a radical reorientation to the possibilities of political discourse. Here, political speakers would privilege the comic pole of Burkean discourse and reject short-sighted, cynical, desperate, and self-indulgent discourses. Instead, political actors resign themselves to continuous and "adventurous" struggle (Peterson 2007) and cultivate the civil possibilities of rhetoric and performance for achieving tolerance, coexistence, and dialogue. As a result, militarist and imperialist discourses of national security that have attained unwarranted authority and autonomy may be rejoined with a full range of democratic voices.


AT: FRAMEWORK 3/3

DOMINANT NUCLEAR DISCOURSE MAKES INFORMED DELIBERATION IMPOSSIBLE BY MATAINING A REGIME OF POWER OVER NUCLEAR INFORMATION.


Liberal scholars and other commentators who assess the relationship between nuclear weapons and democracy balance cynicism and optimism (see, for example, Falk 1982; Mitchell 2000; Peterson 2007). Their tone frequently evokes the morbid genres of diagnosis, autopsy, and obituary, but their grieving, condemnation, and pleading also seek a healing—if not outright resurrection—of the nuclear-democratic body. This activity typically grows more active during periods of nuclear instability, in which possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between nuclear officials and citizens are at least temporarily opened. During the late Cold War and post-Cold War periods, then, several speakers addressed this relationship in the context of extraordinary changes in international politics (Deudney 1995; Falk 1982; Rosen 1989; Rosow 1989; Stegenga 1988). Collectively, these speakers considered how institutions sediment around the artifact of nuclear weapons and how that process yields rhetoric that undermines the possibility of robust democratic speech. To varying degrees, these critiques all assert a fundamental incompatibility between nuclear weapons and the ideals of the democratic state. They argue that oppressive conditions surrounding the development of nuclear weapons subvert the capabilities of citizens to acquire, deliberate, and act on information concerning nuclear policy. As a result, the nuclear public is characterized as fragmented, alienated, uninformed, and unable to participate in deliberation with forceful and reasoned discourse. Commonly listed elements in this indictment include: an official regime of secrecy which suppresses and distorts nuclear information; official cultivation of a climate of permanent emergency that promotes public inertia and acquiescence to authoritarian rule; undue deference by nominal agents of congressional oversight to the interests of military elites and corporate defense contractors; a timid and amnesiac news media; and official demonization of anti-nuclear dissent as extreme, irrelevant, and unpatriotic (Rosen 1989). "This long train of official lies," argues James Stegenga (1988, 89), "has made truly informed consent an impossibility" (emphasis in original).


AT: PERM – CO-OPTION DA

CO-OPTION OF THE ETHICAL CRITICISM OF THE 1NC INTO A REALM OF STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION ALIENATES NUCLEAR POLICY FROM PUBLIC CONTRAINTS, DECREASES NATIONAL CREDIBILITY, AND TURNS THE CASE.


Other studies of this pivotal moment in nuclear-rhetorical history have focused on the success of the Reagan administration in depriving the Freeze movement—and anti-nuclear opponents generally—of viability and legitimacy. Bjork (1992), Goodnight (1986), Holloway (2000), and Rushing (1986) have all focused on how Reagan's depiction of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) skillfully invoked mythic national narratives, and joined these images with a proposed redemption of tainted nuclear techno-science. This rhetoric legitimated a preferred strategic vision and continued the seemingly endless presidential quest to resolve nuclear weapons within the fiendishly conflicting demands of national security and international peace. Sadly, these scholars conclude, this rhetoric was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge how the SDI proposal merely deferred inconvenient ambiguity and paradox, such as the utility of strategic "defenses" for supporting a U.S. nuclear first strike against a nuclear-armed opponent. Nonetheless, this rhetoric effectively neutralized Freeze rhetoric because it appropriated the movement's concern with the morality of the arms race and appeared to share its commitment to ending that frustrating and frightening condition.

Mitchell (2000) has critiqued the implications for democracy of ongoing institutional and presidential BMD rhetoric. Because this rhetoric is shot through with distortion, deception, and self-interest, he concludes, it constitutes a wasteful, fraudulent, and technically compromised enterprise that should be either reorganized or canceled. It has undermined the integrity of scientific research and eroded the international credibility of U.S. military and political officials. It has increased the cynicism and alienation of U.S. citizens and their withdrawal from the nuclear-political process. Finally, Mitchell concludes, it has inhibited the progress of significant nuclear arms control and reduction.


ALT SOLVE – PROBLEMATIZATION

PROBLEMATIZING APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR RHETORIC IS ESSENTIAL TO CONTEST ITS VIOLENT POLICY IMPLICATIONS.

Taylor 2k7[byran, “the means to match their hatred”: Nuclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse”, University of Colorado–Boulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692]

The first involves reappreciating the significance of presidential rhetoric in shaping the story of the nuclear state. In the introduction to this essay, I considered a provocative allegory linking presidential rhetoric to the voice of world destroyer. That image is potentially useful as a spur to consider what seethes and languishes beneath the discourse of nuclear policy deliberation. It obscures, however, the historical process by which nuclear presidents have talked themselves and the nation into a seemingly rational—albeit life-threatening—accommodation of potential global destruction. Here, critics should continue to follow the rhetorical career of "good reasons" justifying nuclear "solutions" to the "problems" of national security. Specifically, they should challenge the continued use of irrational, religious imagery that conflates presidential authority with nuclear potency and thus sustains imperial rule at the expense of a democratic republic.


AT: ACTION GOOD

TURN – APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC DEMOBILIZES ANTI-NUCLEAR EFFORTS.


Beyond the prospect for factual rebuttal, apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears run a psychological risk. Compare the responses to the nuclear threat and the terrorist threat. Regardless of whether the big boom will bring on global doom, does belief in nuclear war as apocalyptic motivate people to eliminate this threat? Much of the public protest against governmental plans relied on the myth of the motivating power of fear to spur otherwise apathetic citizens to rally around the anti-nuclear cause. But as we well know, the anti- nuclear bandwagon is not exactly overflowing these days. Initially after the events of 11 September 2001, many people were motivated to act. Unfortunately, already many people are beginning to suppress their fear. Suppressing negative emotions or entering a state of denial represents the psychological risk that faces apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears. The saying that the main responses to fear are fight or flight is instructive. We have no way to guarantee that people frightened by accounts of the horrors of nuclear war or terrorist attacks will fight back. Many people take flight, especially when they feel disempowered in the political arena and see how limited the success of past efforts has been. These persons may suffer from psychic numbing. When fear is suppressed, the call to action is avoided.


AT: INDIVIDUATION DA/ GENERIC LINK

INDIVIDUATION IS NOT A PLOY OF POWER BUT ENABLES A WORKABLE STRATEGY TO COMBAT DEBILITATING APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC.


One of the messages of the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century that we should appropriate is that hope serves us better than fear. A telling inadequacy of fear, whether proportionate or excessive, is that fear is only negative. Nuclear prophets frightened many people with the negative images that they presented repeatedly. Anti-terrorist politicians do the same. Their negative images give many people nightmares when they are asleep and anxi- ety when they are awake. This negativity can get out of hand, unless we couple it with a positive vision. In order to attain hope, we need to know about the feasibility of nonviolent struggle. In this regard, Ackerman and Duvall note: We also believe that nonviolent resistance deserves more attention than it has generally received. In our time violence generates more news because, for many, history is perceived as a spectacle. But if it were understood more commonly as a process, then the dynamic effect of nonviolent sanctions would be more easily appreciated. This form of power is not arcane; it operates on the same level of reality that most people live their lives, and it is comprehensible for that reason. Contrary to cynical belief, the history of nonviolent action is not a succession of desperate idealists, occasional martyrs, and a few charismatic emancipators. The real story is about common citizens who are drawn into great causes, which are built from the ground up.10


***AFF ANSWERS***


IMPACT TURN – APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 1/2

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC IS KEY TO PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR EVEN IF IT IS FICTIONAL.

Weaver 2k7[Roslyn, university of Wollongong, “the four horsemen of the greenhouse apocalypse”. forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/weaver.pd, jc] For I.F. Clarke, the new apocalyptic fictions were not only nihilistic but also didactic because the discovery of the “new-found human capacity for creating the most genocidal instruments conceivable ... transformed the tale of the Last Days into a most admonitory form of fiction that centres on the dangerous pursuit of super-weapons” (21). Apocalypse can therefore be an appropriate mode for writers keen to protest against complacent political systems, harmful environmental policies, and reckless technological and scientific experimentation; the form allows authors to extrapolate from current events and imagine a terrible future should certain actions be taken. Even if social criticism is not the intention of the author, a disaster scenario that is the result of human action (or, frequently, inaction) functions as a warning to readers. In this way, politics, technologies, ecological issues and science may be construed as significant causative factors in either the end of the world or a world very much worse than it is now.


IMPACT TURN – APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 2/2

REJECTION IGNORES POSITIVE CHANGES CAUSED BY APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC’S MOTIVATING DIMENSION. THIS TURNS THEIR NUCLEAR PASSIVITY ARGUMENTS.

WARREN 2K8[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalypticimagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?acc_num=bgsu1218993516

Jay, drawing on Sigmund Freud, contends that the apocalyptic imagination rests on vacillations between melancholia and mania stemming from an inability to mourn a lost object. He explains: For there can be little doubt that the symptoms of melancholy, as Freud describes them, approximate very closely those of apocalyptic thinking: deep and painful dejection, withdrawal of interest in the everyday world, diminished capacity to love, paralysis of the will, and most important of all, radical lowering of self- esteem accompanied by fantasies of punishment for assumed moral transgressions (1994: 37). Jay’s characterization of the apocalyptic imagination only describes some of its manifestations, completely ignoring its possible constructive uses. While a resignation to waiting for retribution, whether divine or natural is a possible course of action, so too is taking predictions of a worst case scenario as a motivation to action. Jay also seems to be overly dismissive of the “anti- redemptive postmodernist voices in the apocalyptic chorus,” characterizing “Derrida’s valorization of infinite, unconstrained linguistic play” (ibid: 38) as an example of the accompanying manic impulse that also leads to inaction. This argument seems to be based on a misreading of Derrida, or an overlooking of his work, such as “Force of Law” in which he calls specifically for a socially engaged project of deconstruction.




IMPACT TURN – BIOPOWER GOOD 1/2

Biopower’s method of normalization is key to maximizing healthcareDickinson, Professor at Victoria University, 2004(Edward, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About ‘Modernity’,” Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1, p.4, JC)

In this account, then, the history of modern Germany is above all the history of a particular national variant of biopolitics. I will use the term here in the broad sense in which I believe it to be widely understood among historians today as an extensive complex of ideas, practices, and institutions focused on the care, regulation, disciplining, improvement, and shaping of individual bodies and the collective "body" of national populations the " Volkskorper" as it was sometimes called in Germany.5 Biopolitics in this sense includes medical practices from individual therapy and regimes of personal hygiene to the great public health campaigns and institutions; social welfare programs, again from individualized care for particular populations to larger-scale and quasi-universal programs such as social insurance and tax policies intended to encourage particular demographic outcomes; the whole complex of racial science, from physical anthropology to the various racial theories; eugenics and the science of human heredity; demography; scientific management and occupational health; and at least potentially the full range of related disciplines and practices such as psychiatry and psychology, discourses of self-improvement (nudism, vegetarianism, fitness and nutrition fads, temperance), regimes of beauty, and the like. The overarching aim of all these disciplines was to create a more powerful and prosperous society by maximizing health and efficiency. All of them operated through the creation of expert knowledge centered around the project of the "normalization" of the individual and his or her physical characteristics and (social and private) behaviors, and the corresponding "pathologization of difference" the definition of some characteristics and behaviors as healthy and natural, and of others as diseased, unhealthy, unnatural, and in need of containment, stigmatization, treatment, or ehmination.6 This dual process is central to the functioning of biopolitics as a conceptual framework and as a set of social practices. It serves as the critical legitimating discourse for policy, and defines its targets and ends.


IMPACT TURN – BIOPOWER GOOD 2/2

TURN - BIOPOLITICS IS THE NECESSARY CONDITION FOR A DEMOCRATIC POLITICS THAT CONSTRAINS THE VIOLENT POTENTIAL OF BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL.

Ross, Berkeley history professor, 2004 (Edward, “Central European History,” AD:7-8-9March, p. 35-36) PMKIn short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the “disciplinary society” and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce “health,” such a system can —and historically does— create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a “logic” or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of “liberty,” just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not “opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept “power” should not be read as a universal staring night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate.


ALT NO SOLVE

THE ALTERNATIVE CANNOT CHANGE DOMINANT NUCLEAR DISCOURSE – ESPECIALLY IN DEBATE.

SANDLIN 2K4[Micahel, review of "people of the bomb: portraits of america's nuclear complex by hugh gusterson", http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/p/people-of-the-bomb.shtml]

And today, more than ever, Livermore nuclear scientists are flush with taxpayer dollars. The Bush administration is still pining for the warped Reagan dream of militarizing space, while "mini-nukes" are being developed to smoke out state-less, spiderhole-dwelling warlords. Gusterson leaves us with the idea that US nuclear dominance-as-defense has become the reconstructed "natural" order of the day. The utopian dreams of anti-nuclear critics like Gusterson, Jonathan Schell and many others, advocate worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons as the only truly fail-safe policy. Although realistically, unless there's an unexpected Green Party putsch in Washington, this country's dominant discourse on nukes and militarism will probably be, at best, limited to whether nuclear weapons should function as deterrents or as pre-emptive instruments of global restructuring. Any heretical dovish discourse calling for peacetime economic conversion of military industries, or faith-based multi-lateral nuclear abolition, will likely be relegated to chicken-wired "free speech zones" and academic echo chambers.


INDIVIDUATION DA 1/2

THEIR INDIVIDUIZED RESPONSE TO THE 1AC IGNORES THAT THE INDIVIDUAL IS ITSELF A PRODUCT OF THE POWER THEY CRITICIZE. THE ALT PRODUCES QUALITATIVELY MORE VIOLENT CONSTRAINTS.

Shapiro 2007[Steve, Gather, Foucault and Constraints on Individualism, 4-22-07 http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976965588, Accessed 7-8-09, JC]

Think of the amount of suffering that binds us within small deviations of relative constraints. Any biopolitical means is already a constraint of individualism in itself, therefore any attempt other than the attempt of the individual to end that constraint is already deviating that biopolitical limitation the individual. Attempting to change a constraint will only lead to a greater biopolitical constraint over the individual. Any attempt to end the suffering of the individual will only lead to more suffering. Essentially, this action is the destruction of that constraint altogether, but a destruction of a constraint can be as devastating, if not more devastating, than the status quo itself. The constraint cannot be destroyed by any means, it can only be limited through use of power over the initiation of that constraint. What can seem like agonizing to one outside the constraint can be a simple form of life for another within it. Changing that form of life tremendously increases the power structures over the individuals within the constraint, further leading to power over that individual's mind. Interference can devastate the mind of the individual, making the lifting of the constraint even more difficult. In particular instances, it takes more exertion of power to deviate a system than to control it. “Breaking free” in essence, is the only possible change that can be enacted by the individual as a means of deviating the constraint. Examining the contextuality of the historical abstract can lead us to a possible non-biopolitical deviation of the status quo. Instead of attempting the impossible, destroying the constraint altogether, the individual can lift that constraint through the visualization of its context. Only when the individual discovers the source of his suffering can he truly be free from that constraint.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976965588

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976965588


INDIVIDUATION DA 2/2

THE ALTERNATIVE, BY RELYING ON YOUR INDIVIDUAL BALLOT TO EXPRESS CRITICISM OF THE 1AC, SUSTAINS POWER’S INDIVIDUATING FUNCTION TO CREATE DOCILE INTELLECTUALS. NO ALT. SOLVENCY.

Pickett, Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College, 2005 (Brent, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics pp. 24-25, 2005, AD:7-10-9, JC)

Foucault also describes the growth of an individualizing political rationality "whose role is to constantly ensure, sustain, and improve the lives of each and every one."71 This rationality develops into a system that he calls 'pastoral power.' The issue in this system is the relationship between the leader and the led and how it is to be conceptualized . Foucault traces the origins of pastoral power back to Hebraic and early Christian writings, where the leader is the shepherd and the led are the sheep. According to these writings, obedience is a virtue, and the knowledge about each individual sheep by the shepherd is essential. The shepherd, who should be ever-watchful, must know what goes on in the soul of each one . This account is contrasted with the Greek view that focused upon the relation between the city and the citizen. Instead of the leader involving himself with individuals, he is to seek the unity and flourishing of the state as a whole. It is not that the Greek view has been superseded by the Judeo-Christian one; instead the two have grown together: "Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game—in what we call the modern states."72 Two elements are pivotal to this combination. First, individuals must be governed by their own truth. We hold a certain conception of ourselves and attempt to live in accordance with it. We think of our identities as something deep and natural and hence relate to ourselves as the bearers of a truth. One principal mechanism through which this is expressed is our sexuality. Again, this is seen as something natural and therefore as something to which we ought to be true. If a man is not sure about the truth of his sex, he may go to a psychiatrist who interprets what he says and explains his truth back to him. The conceptual preconditions of such a relationship are, first, that there is a truth about one's sex, and second, that one may be incapable of understanding that truth but that another, through one's confession, can. Self-awareness, self- discipline, and self-correction are at the heart of this conceptualization. It is simply a later instance of Christian techniques of self-mortification, techniques which introduced this linkage between obedience, knowledge of oneself, and confession.73 The second central element of this modern political rationality is the fostering of individual lives in a way that adds to the strength of the state.74 Healthy, productive, docile citizens are essential to that strength. This is, in one sense, the pinnacle of disciplinary power. The forces of individuals must be maximized in a manner that adds to the outcome of the disciplinary institution itself . The same is true with the state, supported by all of these various disciplinary practices within society, but in turn supporting them. It is a network of power, beginning with the lowly but ubiquitous practices of discipline, the techniques and strategies of bio-power, all producing the sort of individual who can live within the modern state and who in turn maintains that state as it supports those disciplinary and bio-power practices and institutions. Since modern power produces individuals, it is useless to attempt to subvert that power through an appeal to individualism or an assertion of the rights of the individual. Through a historical analysis of the rationality specific to the art of governing modern states, it is clear that those states have been both individualizing and totalitarian from the very beginning.75 Hence Foucault's claim: "Opposing the individual and his interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with the community and its requirement s." 76 The liberal individual, his normative intuitions, and the rights that he bears are the effects of power, and therefore the liberal individual cannot be the basis for an attack on the modern power regime .


AT: IRANIAN PROLIF LINK

CHANGE SOLVES! U.S. DIPLOMACY WITH IRAN IS NO LONGER INFLUENCED BY APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC.

GAHRIB 2K9[ali, interpress service writer, “As Obama Engages, Hawks Soften Rhetoric”, http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/as_obama_engages_hawks_soften_rhetoric, a:jul 30 09, jwc]

Even the issue of an Iran with nuclear weapons is no longer discussed with the same apocalyptic language that has been used in the past, with most panelists now saying the biggest threat is an Iran emboldened to "act out" with what Lieberman called its "terrorist proxies."

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/as_obama_engages_hawks_soften_rhetoric


AT: BIOTERRORISM LINK

APOCALYPTIC BIOTERROR SCENARIOS COMPELL POLICYMAKERS TO ADDRESS CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ISSUES AND TO HELP INDIVIDUALS IN CASE OF ATTACK.

Spana 2k4[monica sochoh, asst. professor of medicine at uPittsburgh, “bioterrorism: us public health and a secular apocalypse”, anthropology today, vol 20, issue 5, p.8-13, oct 21, jc]

Instructive in terms of the capacity of biological weapons to inflict human suffering on an immense

scale, bioterrorism scenarios nonetheless invite elaborate fantasies as to the cataclysm that could

ensue. Playing one- dimensional roles in bioterrorism scenarios, members of the public usually

surface as mass casualties or hysteria- driven mobs who self-evacuate affected areas or resort to violence to gain access to scarce, potentially life-saving antibiotics and vaccines. These images,

around which official response systems are being built – the public as a problem to be managed

during a crisis – preclude careful consideration of, and planning for, ways to solicit the cooperation of

an affected population. The emphasis is on crowd control rather than enhancing the people’s ability to cope with a public health emergency. In addition, such images help skirt the difficult issue of how to

ensure a fair distribution of resources during an epidemic emergency, by perpetuating a more

simplistic notion of the ‘natural’ volatility of people in grave peril. The apocalyptic mode of scenarios comes at the cost of fatalism and questionable substantive claims such as those involving mass responses to disaster. Scenarios also have positive, generative effects as well. They are a compelling medium through which policy-makers and public health and safety professionals come to comprehend the complex dangers posed by biological weapons. As deliberately staged interactions among disparate communities, scenarios temporarily embody a larger response ‘system’, one typically outside of individual experience. The mayor sees the dilemmas of the hospital administrator who sees the dilemmas of the

emergency room physician who sees the dilemmas of the health department, and so on. Bioterrorism scenarios foster acquaintances, social connections and understandings across disciplinary boundaries. In this respect, bioterrorism scenarios have been revelatory experiences for officials unaware of how public health actually operates or what limited ability it has to deal with unforeseen events, given its historically low pri- ority in government, or how a dysfunctional health care system bears directly upon security matters.


PERM SOLVENCY

ABSTRACT CRITICISM OF THE NUCLEAR PARADIGM IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT THE ASPIRATION TOWARDS CONSEQUENTIAL POLITICAL CHANGE. PERM SOLVES BEST.


When Derrida asks “wouldn’t the apocalyptic be a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even, of every mark or every trace” (Derrida, Apocalyptic Tone, 1984: 27), and claims that the genre of written apocalypse is an “exemplary revelation” of such a structure, Derrida is suggesting that all works that are concerned with truth claims are in fact apocalyptic, in that their purpose is to reveal certain truths. To illustrate this central point, he repeatedly distinguishes between end and closure. The apocalyptic imagination is concerned with ends rather than closures, and one must be clear as to what is meant by end. Eschatology is the detailing of the enactment of a teleology. The end concerning Derrida is the end meaning purpose, not the end of purposes. Apocalypse forever ought not be conceived as destructive, but rather, deconstructive, or calling for deconstruction to come. Derrida conceives deconstruction as problematizing, destabilizing, complicating and bringing out the inherent paradoxes of that which it turns its attention to. Though it may sometimes be characterized as apolitical or merely anesthetizing politics, Derrida at least sees the project of deconstruction as much more consequential, and critical legal studies to be an exemplary enactment: “in order to be consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather (with all due respect to Stanley Fish) to aspire to something more consequential, to change things” (1992: 8). The dig at Fish is particularly telling, in that while Fish acknowledges the constructed nature of law, he distances himself from critical judgments against existing political- juridical systems because they at least work. This distancing from criticism of meaningful things in favor of mere criticism of meaning is not a full enactment of deconstruction for Derrida. Deconstruction attempts to end established interpretive ends, reveal those meanings that have been obscured, and enact change.




AT: MOURNING/RAINFOREST DA

THE KRISTEVAN NOTION OF ABJECTION MYSTIFIES THE BODY AND SUBUMES HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE AND THE “PRIMITIVE” OR “ORIENTAL”. THIS PROVES THEIR IMPACT ANALYSIS NORMALIZES SYSTEMIC FORMS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST SELECTED POPULATIONS. INTERNAL LINK TURNS THE DA.

CHRISTIAN 2K4[laura, of housewives and saints: abjections, transgression, and impossible mourning in Poison and Safe, camera obscura, 19.3]

In situating the concept of abjection, Kristeva summons [End Page 96] the image of an infant who, gagging on a surfeit of milk, choking on the enigmatic signifiers of its mother's desire, vomits itself out, expelling itself, abjecting itself with the same convulsive motion through which it establishes itself as provisionally and tenuously separate from the mother's body. This process, coincident with what is known in classical Freudian discourse as the primal repression, lays the psychic foundations for the separation between self and other, subject and object, concomitantly establishing the conditions for the infant's entry into language. The return of the abject is thus associated with various borderline phenomena—the collapse of bodily boundaries, as well as the breakdown of structures of signification.In a sense, one encounters the limits of Kristeva's concept of abjection precisely at the point where it promises to be the most generative. As soon as Kristeva attempts to position this psychical mechanism of foreclosure (forclusion) within a broader sociosymbolic system, her analysis succumbs to a mystification of the maternal body as the universal locus of a presymbolic multiplicity of drives (the semiotic). Butler and others have observed how Kristeva subsumes not only homosexual desire but that which is marked as "primitive" or "Oriental" under the ultimately metaphysical category of the "maternal-feminine."6 Haynes's films trouble this category, suggesting that the abject assumes different codings and is identified with different marginal zones of social life in different sociohistorical contexts. When the abject erupts in Haynes's films, virtually rending the fabric of the text, it is not simply equivalent to the return of the "demoniacal potential of the feminine."7 It is always situated in a specific sociosymbolic economy.

arizona debate institute 2009

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