ddi anti-k file

7/29/2019 DDI Anti-K File

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Aff K Answers Dartmouth 2K9

CJ Lab 1

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

1

AFFIRMATIVE KRITIK ANSWERSImpact Calc Prefer Extinction .......................................................................................................... 3

Realism Solves ................................................................................................................................. 4

Pragmatism - Rorty ......................................................................................................................... 5Pragmatism - Rorty ......................................................................................................................... 6

Pragmatism - Rorty ......................................................................................................................... 7

Pragmatism Consequentialism ........................................................................................................... 8

Biopower Good Welfare State .......................................................................................................... 9

Biopower Good Solves Holocaust ..................................................................................................... 10

Biopower Impact Takeouts ............................................................................................................. 1

Biopower Alt Fails/Impact Takeout ................................................................................................. 12

Biopower Alt Fails ....................................................................................................................... 13

Biopower Alt Fails ....................................................................................................................... 14

Biopower - XT: No action ............................................................................................................... 15

Biopower Perm Solvency ............................................................................................................... 16

Biopower - 2AC 1/5 ........................................................................................................................ 17

2AC 2/5.......................................................................................................................................18

2AC 3/5...................................................................................................................................... 19

2AC 4/5 ..................................................................................................................................... 20

2AC 5/5...................................................................................................................................... 2

Poverty K Plan Key .................................................................................................................... 22

Poverty K Undermines Justice ...................................................................................................... 23

CLS

Alt Fails ............................................................................................................................. 24Capitalism Solves Tech ................................................................................................................. 25

Capitalism Solves Everything ......................................................................................................... 26

Capitalism Solves Overpop Lx ........................................................................................................ 27

Capitalism - Overop Impact ............................................................................................................. 28

Capitalism Solves Disease .............................................................................................................. 29

Capitalism Solves Rights/Trade ...................................................................................................... 30

Capitalism - Socialism Totalitarian ................................................................................................. 3

Capitalism - Cede the Political ......................................................................................................... 32

Capitalism Alt Fails ..................................................................................................................... 33

Capitalism - Patriarchy is Prerequisite ............................................................................................... 34

Cap Bad 2AC 1/4........................................................................................................................ 35

Cap Bad 2AC 2/4 ....................................................................................................................... 36

Cap Bad 2AC 3/4 ....................................................................................................................... 37

Cap Bad 2AC 4/4 ....................................................................................................................... 38

K Alt Fails ................................................................................................................................ 39


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CJ Lab 2

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

2

Zizek Alt No Solvency ................................................................................................................. 40

Zizek Alt No Value to Life ......................................................................................................... 41

Zizek - Alt Fails ........................................................................................................................... 42

Zizek Alt Laclau Nihilism ............................................................................................................. 44

Zizek Alt - Perm Solvency .............................................................................................................. 45Neg Capitalism Alt - Withdraw ........................................................................................................ 46

Neg Capitalism Etho-poltical Obligation ........................................................................................... 47

Neg Cap =/= Inevitable ................................................................................................................... 48

Neg Cap =/= Inevitable ................................................................................................................... 49

Coercion State Key ..................................................................................................................... 50

Nietzsche AT: Better off Dead ...................................................................................................... 51



Nietzsche Impact Takeouts ........................................................................................................... 54

Nietzsche Government Domination ................................................................................................. 55

Nietzsche Government Domination ................................................................................................. 56


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CJ Lab 3

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

3

Impact CalcPrefer ExtinctionThe only moral act is the affirmativeExtinction causes thousands of generations to die.

Matheny 07 [Jason G. Matheny Research Associate, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, PhD student, Bloomberg

School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University "Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction" Risk Analysis. Volume 27, Number 5,

2007 http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2007_orig-articles/2007-10-15-reducingrisk.html

An extinction event today could cause the loss of thousands of generations. This matters to the extent we valuefuture lives. Society places some value on future lives when it accepts the costs of long-term environmental policies or hazardous waste storage.Individuals place some value on future lives when they adopt measures, such as screening for genetic diseases, to ensure the health of children

who do not yet exist. Disagreement, then, does not center on whether future lives matter, but on how much they matter. 6Valuing future lives lessthan current ones (intergenerational discounting) has been justified by arguments about time preference, growth in consumption, uncertaintyabout future existence, and opportunity costs. I will argue that none of these justifications applies to the benefits of delaying human extinction.

Under time preference, a good enjoyed in the future is worth less, intrinsically, than a good enjoyed now. The typical justification for

time preference is descriptivemost people make decisions that suggest that they value current goodsmore than future ones. However, it may be that peoples time preference applies only to instrumental

goods, like money, whose value predictably decreases in time . In fact, it would be difficult to design an experiment in which timepreference for an intr insic good (like happiness), rather than an instrumental good (like money), is separated from the other forms of discounting discussed below. But even

supposing individuals exhibit time preference within their own lives, it is not clear how this would ethically justify discounting across different lives and generations (Frederick,

2006; Schelling, 2000). In practice, discounting the value of future lives would lead to results few of us would accept as being ethical. For instance, if we discounted lives at a

5% annual rate, a life today would have greater intrinsic value than a billion lives 400 years hence (Cowen & Parfit, 1992). Broome (1994) suggests most economists and

philosophers recognize that this preference for ourselves over our descendents is unjustifiable and agree thatethical impartiality requires setting the intergenerational discount rate to zero. After all, if we rejectspatial discounting and assign equal value to contemporary human lives, whatever their physical

distance from us, we have similar reasons to reject temporal discounting, and assign equal value to

human lives, whatever their temporal distance from us. I Parfit (1984), Cowen (1992), and Blackorby et al. (1995) have similarly arguedthat time preference across generations is not ethically defensible. 7 There could still be other reasons to discount future generations. A common justification for discounting

economic goods is that their abundance generally increases with time. Because there is diminishing marginal utility from consumption, future generations may gain less

satisfaction from a dollar than we will (Schelling, 2000). This principle makes sense for intergenerational transfers of most economic goods but not for intergenerational

transfers of existence. There is no diminishing marginal utility from having ever existed. There is no reason to believe existence matters less

to a person 1,000 years hence than it does to a person 10 years hence. Discounting could be justified by

our uncertainty about future generations existence. If we knew for certain that we would all die in 10 years, it would not make sense for usto spend money on asteroid defense. It would make more sense to live it up, until we become extinct. A discount scheme would be justified that devalued (to zero) anything

beyond 10 years. Dasgupta and Heal (1979, pp. 261262) defend discounting on these groundswe are uncertain about humanitys long-term survival, so planning too far

ahead is imprudent.8 Discounting is an approximate way to account for our uncertainty about survival (Ponthiere, 2003). But it is unnecessaryan analysis ofextinction risk should equate the value of averting extinction at any given time with the expected value

of humanitys future from that moment forward, which includes the probabilities of extinction in all

subsequent periods(Ng, 2005). If we discounted the expected value of humanitys future, we would count future extinction risks twiceonce in the discount rateand once in the undiscounted expected valueand underestimate the value of reducing current risks. In any case, Dasgupta and Heals argument does not justify traditional

discounting at a constant rate, as the probability of human extinction is unlikely to be uniform in time. 9 Because of nuclear and biological weapons, the probability of human

extinction could be higher today than it was a century ago; and if humanity colonizes other planets, the probability of human extinction could be lower then than it is today.

Even Reess (2003) pessimistic 50-50 odds on human extinction by 2100 would be equivalent to an annual discount rate under 1% for this century. (If we are 100% certain of a

goods existence in 2007 but only 50% certain of a goods existence in 2100, then the expected value of the good decreases by 50% over 94 years, which corresponds to an

annual discount rate of 0.75%.) As Ng (1989) has pointed out, a constant annual discount rate of 1% implies that we are more than 99.99% certain of not surviving the next

1,000 years. Such pessimism seems unwarranted. A last argument for intergenerational discounting is from opportunity costs: without discounting, we would always invest our

money rather than spend it now on important projects (Broome, 1994). For instance, if we invest our money now in a stock market with an average 5% real annual return, in a

century we will have 130 times more money to spend on extinction countermeasures (assuming we survive the century). This reasoning could be extended indefinitely (as long

as we survive). This could be an argument for investing in stocks rather than extinction countermeasures if: the rate o f return on capita l is exogenous to the rate of social savings,

the average rate of return on capital is higher than the rate of technological change in extinction countermeasures, and the marginal cost effectiveness of extinction

countermeasures does not decrease at a rate equal to or greater than the return on capital. First, the assumption of exogeneity can be rejected. Funding extinction

countermeasures would require spending large sums; if, instead, we invested those sums in the stock market, they would affect the average market rate of return (Cowen &

Parfit, 1992). Second, some spending on countermeasures, such as research on biodefense, has its own rate of return, since learning tends to accelerate as a knowledge base

expands. This rate could be higher than the average rate of return on capital. Third, if the probability of human extinction significantly decreases after space colonization, there

may be a small window of reducible risk: the period of maximum marginal cost effectiveness may be limited to the next few centuries.Discounting would be a crude way of

accounting for opportunity costs, as cost effectiveness is probably not constant. A more precise approach would identify the optimal invest-

and-spend path based on estimates of current and future extinction risks, the cost effectiveness of countermeasures, and market returns.In summary, there are good reasons not to discount the benefits of extinction countermeasures. Time preference is not justifiable inintergenerational problems, there is no diminishing marginal utility from having ever existed, and uncertainties about human existence should be

represented by expected values. I thus assume that the value of future lives cannot be discounted. Since this position iscontroversial, I later show how acceptance of discounting would affect our conclusions.


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CJ Lab 4

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

4

Realism SolvesRejecting realism makes it more dangerouswe have to use it strategicallyGuzzini 98 [Stefano Guzzini,Assis. Prof @ Central European U, Realism in Intl Relations, 1998, p. 212

Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that it is impossible just to heap realism onto the dustbin of history and start

anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a disappointment, various realist assumptions

are well alive in the minds of many practitioners and observers of international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a

theory which helps us to understand a real world with objective laws, it is a world-view which suggests thoughts about it, and

which permeates our daily language for making sense of it. Realism has been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of

lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which, in the hands of its most gifted representatives, have been

proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international affairs. Realism is alive in

the collective memory and self-understanding ofour (i.e. Western) foreign policy elite and public whether educated or not.

Hence, we cannot but deal with it. For this reason, forgetting realism is also questionable. Of course, academic observers

should not bow to the whims of daily politics. But staying at distance, or being critical, does not mean that they should lose the

capacity to understand the languages of those who make significant decisions not only in government, but also in firms, NGOs,

and other institutions. To the contrary, this understanding, as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very

profession. More particularly, it is a prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name although not

always necessarily in the spirit, of realism.

Perm solveswe can support both realism and critical theory to enable a transitionMurray 97 [Alastair J.H. Murray, Politics @ Wales, Reconstructing Realism, 1997, p. 178-9]

In Wendts constructivism, the argument appears in its most basic version, presenting an analysis of realist assumptions

which associate it with a conservative account of human nature. In Linklaters critical theory it moves a stage further,

presenting an analysis of realist theory which locates it within a conservative discourse of state-centrism. In Ashleys post-

structuralism it reaches its highest form, presenting an analysis of realist strategy which locates it not merely within a

conservative statist order, but, moreover, within an active conspiracy of silence to reproduce it. Finally, in Tickners

feminism, realism becomes all three simultaneously and more besides, a vital player in a greater, overarching, masculine

conspiracy against femininity. Realism thus appears, first, as a doctrine providing the grounds for a relentless pessimism,

second, as a theory which provides an active justification for such pessimism, and, third, as a strategy which proactively

seeks to enforce this pessimism, before it becomes the vital foundation underlying all such pessimism in international

theory. Yet, an examination of the arguments put forward from each of these perspectives suggests not only that the effort

to locate realism within a conservative, rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to provide

reformist strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves. The progressive purpose which motivates

the critique of realism in these perspectives ultimately generates a bias which undermines their own ability to generate

effective strategies of transition. In constructivism, this bias appears in its most limited version, producing strategies so

divorced from the obstacles presented by the current structure of international politics that they threaten to become counter-

productive. In critical theory it moves a stage further, producing strategies so abstract that one is at a loss to determine what

they actually imply in terms of the current structure of international politics. And, in post-modernism, it reaches its highest

form producing an absence of such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at which we are left with nothing but

critique. Against this failure, realism contains the potential to act as the basis of a more constructive approach to

international relations, incorporating many of the strengths of reflectivism and yet avoiding its weaknesses. It appears, in

the final analysis, as an opening within which some synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism, of conservatism and

progressivism, might be built.


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CJ Lab 5

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

5

Pragmatism - RortyThe State is inevitable- the alts ivory tower criticism fails and kills the left and any chance for change-

only the plan can help elevate the actual suffering of the poor

Rorty 98 (Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literatureat Stanford, Achieving our country, 1998, p. 98-99)

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive

national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agentcapable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in dangerof being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement forsuch governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to prevail. Bill Readings

was right to say that the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit ofcapitalism, but it remains the entity which makes decisionsabout social benefits, and thus about social justice.The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to aglobal polity is as useless as was faith in Marxs philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevantto the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage

of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essentialtransformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semi- conscious anti-Americanism, which it carriedover from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for "the system" andstart trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the

academyand, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part

of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have anyeffect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America asDisneylandas a country of simulacraand to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are

enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the AmericanLeft than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a listendlesslyreprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people andof those who clean the professionals' toiletsmight revitalize leftist politics.

With the left destroyed, facism is inevitable

Rorty 98 (Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literatureat Stanford, Achieving our country, 1998, pp. 87-94)

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in

which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascismmay be the American future. The point of his bookThe Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized

unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobsfrom being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workersthemselves desperately afraid of

being downsizedare not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something willcrack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote forsomeone

will assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and postmodernist professors willno longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For oncesuch a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen ifHindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past

forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back intofashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried tomake unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having theirmanners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness.

For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made with theGerman industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitablerise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about theconsequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed?


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CJ Lab 6

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

6

Pragmatism - RortyPragmatism sees the true good of certain actions

Rorty 82 (Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literatureand Philosophy at Stanford, 1982,Consequences of Pragmatism Pg. xiii)

The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from a pragmatist theory about truth. This theory says that truthis not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about. For pragmatists, "truth" is just

the name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to "Bacon did not write Shakespeare," "It

rained yesterday," "E equals mc2" "Love is better than hate," "The Allegory of Paintingwas Vermeer's best work," "2 plus

2 is 4," and "There are nondenumerable infinities." Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be said about this common

feature. They doubt this for the same reason they doubt that there is much to be said about the common feature shared by

such morally praiseworthy actions as Susan leaving her husband, America joining the war against the Nazis, America

pulling out of Vietnam, Socrates not escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and the suicide of the Jews at

Masada. They see certain acts as good ones to perform, under the circumstances, but doubt that there is anything general

and useful to say about what makes them all good. The assertion of a given sentence -or the adoption of a disposition to

assert the sentence, the conscious acquisition of a belief -is a justifiable, praiseworthy act in certain circumstances. But, a

fortiori, it is not likely that there is something general and useful to be said about what makes All such actions good-about

the common feature of all the sentences which one should acquire a disposition to assert.

Only pragmatism takes into account ethics and science

Rorty 82 (Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literatureand Philosophy at Stanford, 1982,Consequences of Pragmatism Pgs. xlii-xliii)

A post-Philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no

links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist's account, position was only a halfway stage in the development of such a

culture-the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God. For positivism preserved a god in its notion of Science

(and in its notion of "scientific philosophy"), the notion of a portion of culture where we touched something not ourselves,

where we found Truth naked, relative to no description. The culture of positivism thus produced endless swings of the

pendulum between the view that "values are merely 'relative' (or 'emotive,' or 'subjective')" and the view that bringing the

"scientific method" to bear on questions of political and moral choice was the solution to all our problems. Pragmatism, by

contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature-or,put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics

as neither more "relative" or "subjective" than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made "scientific." Physics is a way of

trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps

physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with propositions, some with

narratives, some with paintings. The question of what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what narratives to

listen to and comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or about what we should

want).


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CJ Lab 7

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

7

Pragmatism - RortyThe concept of Truth is ambiguous the affs harms are reason enough to act

Rorty 82 (Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, the University of Virginia and Stanford, Professor of ComparativeLiturature at Stanford Consequences of Pragmatism 1982)

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word

true or good, supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. Itmight, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition

of number. They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they havent. The his tory of attempts to do so,

and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call philosophy a genre founded by Plato. So

pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-

Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they

suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory

about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that there is no such thing as Truth or

Goodness. Nor do they have a relativistic or subjectivist theory of Truth or Goodness. They wouldsimply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, orthe Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to

affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that thevocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-

philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too literary, they will be accused of changing the subject; if it

is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach. Allthis is complicated by the fact that philosophy, like truth and goodness, is ambiguous.

Uncapitalised, truth and goodness name properties of sentences, or of actions and situations.

Capitalised, they are the proper names of objects goals or standards which can be loved with allones heart and soul and mind, objects of ultimate concern. Similarly, Philosophy can mean simply

what Sellars calls an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang

together, in the broadest possible sense of the term. Pericles, for example, was using this sense of the term when he praised theAthenians for philosophising without unmanliness (philosophein aneu malakias). In this sense, Blake is as much a philosophe r as Fichte, Henry Adams

more of a philosopher than Frege.No one would be dubious about philosophy, taken in this sense. But the word

can also denote something more specialised, and very dubious indeed. In this second sense, it canmean following Platos and Kants lead, asking questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., truth, rationality, goodness) in the hope of better obeying such norms. The idea is to believe more

truths or do more good or be more rational by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality. Ishall capitalise the term philosophy when used in this second sense, in order to help make the point that Philosophy, Truth , Goodness, and Rationality

are interlocked Platonic notions. Pragmatists are saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to practise

Philosophy. They think it will not help to say something true to think about Truth, nor will it help to

act well to think about Goodness, nor will it help to be rational to think about Rationality.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm


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CJ Lab 8

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

8

PragmatismConsequentialismConsequences outweigh representations or justification

Rorty 82 (Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literatureand Philosophy at Stanford, 1982,Consequences of Pragmatism Pg Pgs. 162-163)

Rather, the pragmists tell us, it is the vocabulary of practise rather than theory, of action rather thancontemplation, in which one can say something useful about truth. Nobody engages in epistemology or

semantics because he wants to know howThis is red pictures the world. Rather, we want to know in what sense Pasteurs views ofdisease picture the world accurately and Paracelsus inaccurately, or what exactly it is that Marx pictured more accurately t han Machiavelli. But justhere the vocabulary of picturing fails us. When we turn from individual sentences to vocabularies

and theories, critical terminology naturally shifts from metaphors of isomorphism, symbolism, and

mapping to talk of utility, convenience, and likelihood of getting what we want. To say that the parts ifproperly analyzed true sentences are arranged in a way isomorphic to the parts of the world paired with them sounds

plausible if one thinks of a sentence like Jupiter has moons. It sounds slightly less plausible for The earth goe s round the

sun, less still for There is no such thing as natural motion, and not plausible at all for The universe is infinite. Whe n

we want to praise of blame assertions of the latter sort of sentence, we show how the decision to assert them fits into a

whole complex of decisions about what terminology to use, what books to read, what projects to engage in, what life to

live. In this respect they resemble such sentences as Love is the only law and History is the story of class struggle.Thewhole vocabulary ofisomorphism, picturing, and mapping is out of place here, as indeed is the notion of

being true of objects. If we ask what objects these sentences claim to be true of, we get only unhelpful

repetitions of the subject termsthe universe, the law, history. Or, even less helpfully, we get talk

about the facts, or the way the world is. The natural approach to such sentences, Dewey tells us, is

not Do they get it right?, but more like What would it be like to believe that? What would happen if I did? What

would it be like to believe that? What would happen if I did? What would I be committing myself to? The vocabulary

of contemplation, looking, theoria, deserts us just when we deal with theory rather than observation,

with programming rather than input. When the contemplative mind, isolated from the stimuli of the moment,takes larger views, its activity is more like deciding what to dothan deciding that a representation is

accurate. Jamess dictum about truth says that the vocabulary of practice is uneliminable, that no distinction of kindseparates the sciences from the crafts, from moral reflection, of from art.


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CJ Lab 9

Tony and Werner

Last printed 3/16/2013 9:39:00 PM

9

Biopower GoodWelfare StateThe modern democratic welfare state doesnt trigger their impact the negs shallow analysis fails to

understand structural differences

Dickinson 2004 (Edward Ross. Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity.Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)

In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of thewelfare 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 thedemocratic 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 coercivepolicies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and

historically doescreate compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentialsand 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 andparticipation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuitof 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.


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CJ Lab 10

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Biopower GoodSolves HolocaustBiopolitics are goodthe Holocaust was a product of the sovereign right to kill

OJAKANGAS 5 (2005, MIKA, HELSINKI COLLEGIUM FOR ADVANCED STUDIES, FINLAND; IMPOSSIBLEDIALOGUE ON BIO-POWER: AGAMBEN AND FOUCAULT FOUCAULT STUDIES, NO 2, MAY, PP. 5-28; P.20-22TN)

Admittedly, in the era of biopolitics, as Foucault writes, even massacres have become vital.82 This is not the case,

however, because violence is hidden in the foundation of biopolitics, as Agamben believes. Although thetwentieth century thanatopolitics is the reverse of biopolitics,83 it should not be understood, according to

Foucault, as the effect, the result, or the logical consequence of biopolitical rationality.84 Rather, itshould be understood, as he suggests, as an outcome of the demonic combination of the sovereign power and bio power,

of the citycitizen game and the shepherdflock game85 or as I would like to put it, of patria potestas (fathers

unconditional power of life and death over his son) and cura materna (mothers unconditional duty to take care of her

children). Although massacres can be carried out in the name of care, they do not follow from the logic of

biopower for which death is the object of taboo.86 They follow from the logic of sovereign power, whichlegitimates killing by whatever arguments it chooses, be it God, Nature, or life. Indeed, the imperative to improve life, to

prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings,87 may also legitimate

killing. According to Foucault, it may legitimate killing if it assumes the following logic of argumentation of racism: The

more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individual are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in thespecies as a whole, and the more I as species rather than individualcan live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I

will be. I will be able to proliferate.88 It is the logic of racism, according to Foucault, that makes killingacceptable in modern biopolitical societies. This is not to say, however, that bio political societies are necessarily moreracist than other societies. It is to say that in the era of bio politics, only racism, because it is a determination immanent to

life, can justify the murderous function of the State.89 However, racism can only justify killing killing that does not

follow from the logic of biopower but from the logic of the sovereign power. Racism is, in other words, theonly way the sovereign power, the right to kill, can be maintained in bio political societies: Racism is bound up with

workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its

sovereign power.90 Racism is, in other words, a discourse quite compatible91 with biopolitics through which

biopower can be most smoothly transformed into the form of sovereign power. Such transformation, however, changes

everything. A biopolitical society that wishes to exercise the old sovereign right to kill,92 even in the name of

race, ceases to be a merebio

political society, practicing merely bio

politics. It becomes a demonic combination ofsovereign power and biopower, exercising sovereign means for biopolitical ends. In its most monstrous form, it becomes

the Third Reich. For this reason, I cannot subscribe to Agambens thesis, according to which bio politics is absolutized in

the Third Reich.93 To be sure, the Third Reich used biopolitical meansit was a state in which insurance andreassurance were universal94 and aimed for biopolitical ends in order to improve the living conditions of the German

people but so did many other nations in the 1930s. What distinguishes the Third Reich from those

other nations is the fact that, alongside its biopolitical apparatus, it erected a massive machinery ofdeath. It became a society that unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to

take life throughout the entire social body, as Foucault puts it.95 It is not, therefore, biopolitics that wasabsolutized in the Third Reichas a matter of fact, biopolitical measures in the NaziGermany were, although harsh,

relatively modest in scale compared to some presentday welfare statesbut rather the sovereign power: This powerto kill, which ran through the entire social body of Nazi society, was first manifested when the power to take life, the power

of life and death, was granted not only to the State but to a whole series of individuals, to a considerable number of people(such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her

neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the people next door, or

having them done away with.96 The only thing that the Third Reich actually absolutizes is, in other words, the sovereignty

of power and therefore, the nakedness of bare life at least if sovereignty is defined in the Agambenian manner: The

sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to

whom all men act as sovereigns.97


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CJ Lab 11

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BiopowerImpact TakeoutsNo impact In a biopolitical world, peoples lives are controlled and directed not killed It needs a

subject to stay in power.Ojanakas 05 [Mika, " Impossible dialogue on bio-power: Agamben and Foucault" Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, May

2005, Foucault Studies No. 2, http://www.foucault-studies.com/no2/index.html]

In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there

exists a form of power which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing peoples lives . The

effectiveness of biopower can be seen lying precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even

though these demands would derive from the demand of justice. In biopolitical societies, according to Foucault, capital

punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the

criminal: One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others. However, given that the

right to kill is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the biopolitical societies analyzed by Foucault were no t

entirely biopolitical. Perhaps, there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely biopolitical. Nevertheless, the fact

is that present-day European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It is the

very right to kill that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question because of enlightened moral

sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of biopolitical thinking and practice. For all these reasons, Agambens

thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.

The biopolitical paradigm of the West is not the concentration camp, but, rather, the present-day welfare society and,

instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the biopolitical society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class

Swedish social democrat. Although this figure is an objectand a productof the huge biopolitical machinery, it does not

mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his

greatest crime against the machinery. (In biopolitical societies, death is not only something to be hidden away, but,

also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing of all.) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of

death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact, the biopolitical machinery does not want to threaten him,

but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happilyeven

when, in biological terms, he should have been dead longago.115 This is because biopower is not bloody power over

bare life for its own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the condition

of all lifeindividual as well as collectivethat is the measure of the success of biopower.

Root CauseBiopower isnt the cause of violence its the sovereign power. Ojanakas 05 [Mika, " Impossible dialogue on bio-power: Agamben and Foucault" Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, May

2005, Foucault Studies No. 2, http://www.foucault-studies.com/no2/index.html]

For Foucault, the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the

care of individual life was something puzzling: It is one of the central antinomies of our political reason. 110 However,

it was an antinomy precisely because in principle the sovereign power and biopower are mutuallyexclusive. How is it possible that the care of individual life paves the way for mass slaughters? Although Foucault could

never give a satisfactory answer to this question, he was convinced that mass slaughters are not the effect or thelogical conclusion of biopolitical rationality. I am also convinced about that. To be sure, it can be argued that

sovereign power and biopower are reconciled within the modern state, which legitimates killing by

biopolitical arguments. Especially, it can be argued that these powers are reconciled in the Third Reich in which theyseemed to coincide exactly. 111 To my mind, however, neither the modern state nor the Third Reich in which the

monstrosity of the modern state is crystallized are the syntheses of the sovereign power and biopower, but,rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension. This is, I believe, what Foucault meant whenhe wrote about their demonic combination.


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CJ Lab 12

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12

BiopowerAlt Fails/Impact TakeoutThe negatives claim of Biopower being bad is ahistorical- there is no norm for its being bad, prefer our

specificity AND There cant be an alt to biopower because there isnt agency to it

Strout 95 (Cushing Strout, Professor of History at Cornell, 1995, The Poverty of Poststucturalism, Scholar)

Nevertheless for historians Foucault at least has the advantage of writing about actual institutions, such as hospitals,prisons, and asylums, and he affirmed the need to be empirically particular about "who is engaged in

struggle, what the struggle is about, and how, where, by what means and according to what rationality

it evolves."12 These are genuine historical questions, and he had the historical merit of knowing that "what happensnow is not necessarily better or more advanced, or better understood, than what happened in the

past."13Nor did he think, as campus leftists often do, that "everything derives from the market economy, or from

capitalist exploitation, or simply from the rottenness of our society," or that "everyone is responsible

for everything"all these recourses being "displacements that are glibly practiced today ." He was, in

fact, no friend of "the whole relentless theorization of writing which we saw in the 1960s," and he saw its use of

linguistics, semiology, and psychoanalysis, for example, as proof that " the activity of the writer was no longer at

the focus of things."14 This Foucault is congenial to historians, but his antihumanism, like that of the

structuralists and poststructuralists, ultimately dismisses agency, for power in his view "is not built upout of 'wills' (individual or collective), nor is it derivable from interests."15 It then becomes as

unhistorical as any other totalistic form of explanation, whether it be the Marxian dialectic or the

feminist patriarchy, which explain everything in general and therefore nothing in particular. Frenchhistorians, inspired by Fernand Braudel as editor of Annales, have emphasized "the long dure" in a structural way, in

contrast to a narrative of political events. They have done so to such an extent and for so long that the current editor of

Annales, Bernard Lepetit, has been developing a revisionary reflection that is mplied in the title of the lecture he gave at

Cornell University this past May: "Do French Historians Take Agency Seriously?"


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CJ Lab 13

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13

BiopowerAlt FailsAlternatives to biopower block critical thought

Virno 05 [Paolo Virno 2005 "General Intellect, Exodus, Multitude" http://generation-online.org/p/fpagamben1.htm]

Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then,

when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological category with valuealready since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that

the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commoditythat is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, thatlabor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a

paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but ratheris simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is

necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri)and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but

Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base

for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can betransformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting

them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk ofblocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like thecries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that

there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use,

like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

Rejecting the paranoia of the neg is key to decisionmaking

Faubian 94 (James D. Faubian, professor of anthro @ Rice University, Michel Foucault: Power, Essential Works of Foucault1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xviii-xix)

One of the key clarifying points Foucault makes is that what is most interesting about links between power and knowledge

is not the detection of false or spurious knowledge at work in human affairs but, rather, the role of knowledges that are

valued and effective because of their reliable instrumental efficacy. Foucault often uses the French word savoira term forknowledge with connotations of know-how (a way to make a problem tractable or a material manageable)for this

middle sort of knowledges, which may fall short of rigorous scientificity but command some degree of ratification within a

social group and confer some recognized instrumental benefit. The reason the combining of power and knowledge in

society is a redoubtable thing is not that power is apt to promote and exploit spurious knowledges (as the Marxist theory of

ideology has argued) but, rather, that the rational exercise of power tends to make the fullest use of knowledges capable of

the maximum instrumental efficacy. What is wrong or alarming about the use of power is not, for Foucault, primarily or

especially the fact that a wrong or false knowledge is being used. Conversely, power and the use of knowledge by power

are not guaranteed to be safe, legitimate, or salutory because (as an optimistic rationalist tradition extending from the

Enlightenment to Marxism has inclined some to hope) the knowledge that guides or instrumentalizes the exercise of power

is valid and scientific.Nothing, including the exercise of power, is evil in itselfbut everything is dangerous.

To be able to detect and diagnose real dangers, we need to avoid equally the twin seductions of

paranoia and universal suspicion, on the one hand, and the compulsive quest for foundationalist certainties and

guarantees, on the otherboth of which serve to impede or dispense us from the rational and responsiblework of careful and specific investigation.


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CJ Lab 14

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BiopowerAlt FailsFoucaults alternative is all rhetoric cant solve

Walzer 83(Michael, Foundation Professor at Princeton School of Social Science, Dissent, Foucault: A Critical Reader vol. 30page 65)

As the conventional disciplines are generated and validated by the conventional uses of power, so Foucaults antidisciplineis generated by the resistance to those uses. But I dont see, on Foucaults terms, how it can be validated by resistance until

the resistance is successful (and its not clear what success would mean). But perhaps, after all, the demand that Foucault

show us the ground on which he stands, display his philosophical warrants, is beside the point. For he makes no

demands on us that we adopt this or that critical principle or replace these disciplinary norms with some other setof norms. He is not an advocate. We are to withdraw our belief in , say, the truth of penology and then

support what? Not every prison revolt, for there may be some that we have good reason not tosupport. At this point, it seems to me, Foucaults position is simply incoherent. The powerful evocation of the

disciplinary system gives way to an antidisciplinarian politics that is mostly rhetoric and posturing.


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CJ Lab 15

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15

Biopower - XT: No action

Broad, totalizing kritiks of biopower that their answers to the permutation will endorse leaves no scope

for effective moral or political action

Norris 94 (Christopher Norris, Professor of the History of Ideas, University of Wales, TRUTH AND THE ETHICS OF

CRITICISM, 1994, p.41-2. (PDNSS1457)

New Historicism inherits this dead-end predicament without the least sign of acknowledging its problematic character.

That is to say, it follows Foucault in reducing all questions of knowledge, judgment and ethics to the level of

an intra-discursive force-field, an agonistic play of resistances orpower/knowledge effects where the

subject is just a ghost in the linguistic machine, an epiphenomenon of discourse. Nor is it in any way fortuitous that indrawing out the aporias of Foucault's position one is led to invoke these Cartesian metaphors and echoes of Gilbert Ryle on

Descartes. Forthere is a similarproblem with Foucault: how to overcome the deep-laid conflict that exists

between a thoroughgoing determinism as applied to the body and its various disciplinary-discursive regimes, and

the necessary margin of free-will required to envisage any ethics or politics worth the name.


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CJ Lab 16

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BiopowerPerm SolvencyPermdo the plan and acknowledge the importance of biopower

Deranty 4 (Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands ejournal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)

47. If, with Rancire, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continualstruggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the policeorder viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancire 1999), then it is possible to

acknowledge the normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age without

falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation . What should be stressed

about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the equal

entitlement of all to claim any rights at all . This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallelacknowledgment that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation

of this principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it points to a tension

inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies that

structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion. 48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the

biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancire remarks,

Foucaults late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976

lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancire suggests, when

the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic.

There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The power

that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is

already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by

excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault wasdeveloping in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised

only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social

structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode ofexclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of

equality and the challenge to exclusion.


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CJ Lab 17

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Biopower - 2AC 1/51. Permdo the plan and acknowledge the importance of biopower

Deranty 4 (Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights,borderlands e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)

47. If, with Rancire, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continualstruggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from thepolice order viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancire 1999), then it is possible

to acknowledge the normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age

without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation . What should be

stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the

equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by theparallel acknowledgment that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the

total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it points to

a tension inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the systemic

tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion. 48. One can acknowledge the descriptive

appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As

Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite

clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As

Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of

politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics

that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically

simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit

recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. Thisinsight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism"

(Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The

hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an

equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition

that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion.


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CJ Lab 18

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18

2AC 2/52. The modern democratic welfare state doesnt trigger their impact the negs shallow analysis fails

to understand structural differences

Dickinson 2004 (Edward Ross. Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse AboutModernity. Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)

In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices ofthe welfare state in our own time are unmistakable . Both are instances of the disciplinary society and ofbiopolitical, 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 ofregimes. 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 forsuch 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 doescreate 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 democraticcitizenship 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.

3. External case impacts that the alt doesnt solve ____________________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________


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CJ Lab 19

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2AC 3/54. Biopolitics dont justify massacres the Holocaust was a product of the sovereign right to kill

OJAKANGAS 5 (2005, MIKA, HELSINKI COLLEGIUM FOR ADVANCED STUDIES, FINLAND; IMPOSSIBLEDIALOGUE ON BIO-POWER: AGAMBEN AND FOUCAULT FOUCAULT STUDIES, NO 2, MAY, PP. 5 -28; P.20

22TN)

Admittedly, in the era of biopolitics, as Foucault writes, even massacres have become vital.82 This is not the

case, however,because violence is hidden in the foundation of biopolitics, as Agamben believes. Althoughthe twentieth century thanatopoliticsis the reverse of biopolitics,83 it should not be understood, according to

Foucault, as the effect, the result, or the logical consequence of biopolitical rationality.84 Rather, itshould be understood, as he suggests, as an outcome of the demonic combination of the sovereign power and

biopower, of the citycitizen game and the shepherdflock game85 or as I would like to put it, of patria potestas

(fathers unconditional power of life and death over his son) and cura materna (mothers unconditional duty to take care

of her children). Although massacres can be carried out in the name of care, they do not follow from the logic

of biopower for which death is the object of taboo.86 They follow from the logic of sovereign power,which legitimates killing by whatever arguments it chooses, be it God, Nature, or life. Indeed, the imperative to

improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings,87 may

also legitimate killing. According to Foucault, it may legitimate killing if it assumes the following logic ofargumentation of racism: The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individual are eliminated, the fewer

degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I as species rather than individual can live, the

stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.88 It is the logic of racism, according to

Foucault, that makes killing acceptable in modern biopolitical societies. This is not to say, however, thatbiopolitical societies are necessarily more racist than other societies. It is to say that in the era of biopolitics, only

racism, because it is a determination immanent to life, can justify the murderous function of the State.89 However,

racism can only justify killing killing that does not follow from the logic of biopower but from thelogic of the sovereign power. Racism is, in other words, the only way the sovereign power, the right to kill, can bemaintained in biopolitical societies: Racism is bound up with workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the

elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power.90 Racism is, in other words, a

discoursequite compatible91 with biopolitics through which biopower can be most smoothly transformed into

the form of sovereign power. Such transformation, however, changes everything. A biopolitical society that

wishes to exercise the old sovereign right to kill,92 even in the name of race, ceases to be a mere

biopolitical society, practicing merely biopolitics. It becomes a demonic combination of sovereign power andbiopower, exercising sovereign means for biopolitical ends. In its most monstrous form, it becomes the Third Reich.

For this reason, I cannot subscribe to Agambens thesis, according to which biopolitics is absolutized in the Third

Reich.93 To be sure, the Third Reich used biopolitical means it was a state in which insurance andreassurance were universal94 and aimed for biopolitical ends in order to improve the living conditions of the

German people but so did many other nations in the 1930s.What distinguishes the Third Reich from

those other nations is the fact that, alongside its biopolitical apparatus, it erected a massivemachinery of death. It became a society that unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the oldsovereign right to take life throughout the entire social body, as Foucault puts it.95 It is not, therefore,

biopolitics that was absolutized in the Third Reich as a matter of fact, biopolitical measures in the

NaziGermany were, although harsh, relatively modest in scale compared to some present

day welfare states but

rather the sovereign power: This power to kill, which ran through the entire social body of Nazi society, was firstmanifested when the power to take life, the power of life and death, was granted not only to the State but to a whole

series of individuals, to a considerable number of people (such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in

the Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing,

which effectively meant doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with.96 The only thing that

the Third Reich actually absolutizes is, in other words, the sovereignty of power and therefore, the nakedness of bare

life at least if sovereignty is defined in the Agambenian manner: The sovereign is the one with respect to whom all

men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.97


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CJ Lab 20

Tony and Werner

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20

2AC 4/55. Biopower isnt bad in the context of the aff the neg lacks the specificity Foucault demands

Strout 95 (Cushing Strout, Professor of History at Cornell, 1995, The Poverty of Poststucturalism, Scholar)

Nevertheless for historians Foucault at least has the advantage of writing about actual institutions, such as hospitals

prisons, and asylums, and he affirmed the need to be empirically particular about "who is engaged instruggle, what the struggle is about, and how, where, by what means and according to what rationality i

evolves."12 These are genuine historical questions, and he had the historical merit of knowing that "what happens now

is not necessarily better or more advanced, or better understood, than what happened in the past."13Nordid he think, as campus leftists often do, that "everything derives from the market economy, or from capitalis

exploitation, or simply from the rottenness of our society," or that "everyone is responsible for

everything"all these recourses being "displacements that are glibly practiced today ." He was, in fact, no

friend of "the whole relentless theorization of writing which we saw in the 1960s," and he saw its use o

linguistics, semiology, and psychoanalysis, for example, as proof that " the activity of the writer was no longer at the

focus of things."14 This Foucault is congenial to historians, but his antihumanism, like that of thestructuralists and poststructuralists, ultimately dismisses agency, for power in his view "is not built up

out of 'wills' (individual or collective), nor is it derivable from interests."15 It then becomes asunhistorical as any other totalistic form of explanation, whether it be the Marxian dialectic or the

feminist patriarchy, which explain everything in general and therefore nothing in particular. Frenchhistorians, inspired by Fernand Braudel as editor of Annales, have emphasized "the long dure" in a structural way, in

contrast to a narrative of political events. They have done so to such an extent and for so long that the current editor o

Annales, Bernard Lepetit, has been developing a revisionary reflection that is mplied in the title of the lecture he gave at

Cornell University this past May: "Do French Historians Take Agency Seriously?"

6. TURNthe paranoia of the neg precludes specific investigation and thus solvencyFaubian 94 (James D. Faubian, professor of anthro @ Rice University, Michel Foucault: Power, Essential Works ofFoucault 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xviii-xix)

One of the key clarifying points Foucault makes is that what is most interesting about links between power and

knowledge is not the detection of false or spurious knowledge at work in human affairs but, rather, the role of

knowledges that are valued and effective because of their reliable instrumental efficacy. Foucault often uses the French

word savoira term for knowledge with connotations of know-how (a way to make a problem tractable or a material

manageable)for this middle sort of knowledges, which may fall short of rigorous scientificity but command some

degree of ratification within a social group and confer some recognized instrumental benefit. The reason the combining

of power and knowledge in society is a redoubtable thing is not that power is apt to promote and exploit spurious

knowledges (as the Marxist theory of ideology has argued) but, rather, that the rational exercise of power tends to make

the fullest use of knowledges capable of the maximum instrumental efficacy. What is wrong or alarming about the use

of power is not, for Foucault, primarily or especially the fact that a wrong or false knowledge is being used. Conversely,

power and the use of knowledge by power are not guaranteed to be safe, legitimate, or salutory because (as an

optimistic rationalist tradition extending from the Enlightenment to Marxism has inclined some to hope) the knowledgethat guides or instrumentalizes the exercise of power is valid and scientific. Nothing, including the exercise of

power, is evil in itselfbut everything is dangerous. To be able to detect and diagnose real dangers, weneed to avoid equally the twin seductions of paranoia and universal suspicion , on the one hand, and thecompulsive quest for foundationalist certainties and guarantees, on the otherboth of whichserve to impede or

dispense us from the rational and responsible work of careful and specific investigation.


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CJ Lab 21

Tony and Werner

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21

2AC 5/57. The alternative is all rhetoriccant solve

Walzer 83(Michael, Foundation Professor at Princeton School of Social Science, Dissent, Foucault: A Critical Readervol. 30 page 65)

As the conventional disciplines are generated and validated by the conventional uses of power, so Foucaultsantidiscipline is generated by the resistance to those uses. But I dont see, on Foucaults terms, how it can be validated

by resistance until the resistance is successful (and its not clear what success would mean). But perhaps, after all, the

demand that Foucault show us the ground on which he stands, display his philosophical warrants, is beside the point.

For he makes no demands on us that we adopt this or that critical principle or replace these disciplinary

norms with some other set of norms. He is not an advocate. We are to withdraw our belief in, say, the truth

of penology and then support what? Not every prison revolt, for there may be some that we havegood reason not to support. At this point, it seems to me, Foucaults position is simply incoherent. The

powerful evocation ofthe disciplinary system gives way to an antidisciplinarian politics that is mostly rhetoric

and posturing.

8. TURNthe alt blocks critical thought and prevent the engagement of problemsVirno 5 [Paolo Virno 2005 "General Intellect, Exodus, Multitude" http://generation-online.org/p/fpagamben1.htm]

Agamben is a thinker of great value but also , in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation . Then,when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological category with value

already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe,

that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a

commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life . Agamben says, onthe other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all becauselabor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle

of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into

a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that

contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historicallydetermined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth ofliberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension,

my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of

being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an

exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then,my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that

says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however

I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us

are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.


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CJ Lab 22

Tony and Werner

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22

Poverty KPlan Key

The idea of poverty is key to social changeThe plans political struggle is crucial to solve the K

Schram 2 (Sanford F. Schram, Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr, 2002 Praxis for the Poor)

While there is a role for writing that popularizes important ideas, the notion that welfare scholarshipon its owncan mobilize the mass public to supportprogressive change needs to be challenged as Skocpol would add thatpolitically effective welfare scholarship is more likely to occur when it is not written simply for a general audience.

Politically effective scholarship is more likely to occurwhen it is tied to ongoing political struggle by theoppressed. In other words, critical distance need not mean disconnectedness. A good example is the writing of Frances Fox

Piven and Richard CIoward.4 They worked with low-income groups who already were struggling to resist oppression and offered new strategiesfor helping make those struggles more effective. Yet they wrote no simple pamphlets or brochures to disseminate their view beyond their immediate

activist com- munity. They used their theoretical writings in the 1960s and early 1970s to energize themselves and other activists and then work actively in

face- to-face meetings and organized sessions to make the welfare rights movement a reality-one that almost resulted in the adoption of a guaranteed

income Policy for the entire country. The political effectiveness of their scholarship was the result of its ongoing connection to the welfare rights

movement. Their writing did not pander to the middle class with appeals that were bound to be co-opt lye. And with good reason. There are

thousands of ex- amples of how appeals to the middle clan to "leave no child behind," to "invest in the next generation," to

"do it for the children," to "put families first," to think of "us all as family," and so on, never work. It is time to give up

on this failed strategy, which, if it were ever to succeed, would only end up reinscrihing poor people'ssubordination for failing to measure up to middle-class standards. When it comes to poverty, the whole strategyof showing how "they" are like "us" goes nowhere that is good more often than not. A better approach is to

write about welfare and poverty as part of ongoing struggle.Writing disconnected fr

ddi anti-k file

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