1NC

1

Interpretation and violation- the aff should be a topical defense of the resolution

This interpretation is grammatically correct-

Resolved before a colon reflects a legislative forum Army Career College 13 # 12. Punctuation -- The Colon and Semicolon, United States Army

Warrant Officer Career College, Last Reviewed: December 19, 2013, http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/wocc/ColonSemicolon.asp

The colon introduces the following : A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the

one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) A formal quotation or question : The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do

about it? A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. After the introduction of a business letter:

Dear Sirs: (colon)Dear Madam: (colon) The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock A formal resolution, after

the word "resolved : " Resolved : (colon) That this council petition the mayor .

USFG should means governmental actionEricson et al 3 Jon M. Ericson, James J. Murphy, and Raymond Bud Zeuschner, Ericson is the dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts at California Polytechnic State University. He served as president of the Northern California Forensic Association (ncfa) and is a member of the forensics honor societies Pi Kappa Delta and Delta Sigma Rho. He founded the American Issues debate tournaments on value questions while he was the director of forensics at Stanford University, The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, http://hs.stdoms.org/ourpages/auto/2009/10/28/44705084/DebaterGuide.pdf

In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements , although they have slightly different functions from the comparable elements of

value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent to do the acting—“The U nited S tates ” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like

the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is usually the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should —the first part of a verb phrase that urges an action . 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here

means to put a program or policy into action through governmental means . 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the

action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs,

discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action . Nothing has yet occurred.

The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur . What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a

debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

This promotes a model of debate, as dialogue- normative restrictions are key to its potential Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RE- CONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and the Director of Debate at Samford University, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)

Taking the resolution as an invitation to a dialogue about a particular set of ideas would preserve the affi rmative

team ’s obligation to uphold the debate resolution . At the same time, this approach licenses debaters to argue both

discursive and performative advantages . While this view is broader than many policy teams would like, and certainly more limited than many

critical teams would prefer, this approach captures the advantages of both modes of debate while maintaining the stable

axis point of argumentation for a full clash of ideas around these values . Here, I begin with an introduction to the dialogic model,

which I will relate to the history of switch-side debate and the current controversy. Then, I will defend my conception of debate as a dialogical exchange. Finally, I will answer potential criticisms to the debate as a dialogue construct. Setting the Argumentative Table: Conceptualizing Debate as a Dialogue Conceiving debate as a dialogue exposes a means of bridging the divide between the policy community and the kritik community. Here I will distinguish between formal argument and dialogue. While formal argument centers on the demands of informal and formal logic as a mechanism of mediation, dialogue tends to focus on the relational aspects of an interaction. As such, it emphasizes the give-and-take process of negotiation. Consequently, dialogue emphasizes outcomes related to agreement or consensus

rather than propositional correctness (Mendelson & Lindeman, 2000). As dialogue, the aff irmative case constitutes a discursive act that anticipates a discursive response . The consequent interplay does not seek to establish a propositional truth , but

seeks to initiate an in-depth dialogue between the debate participants. Such an approach would have little use for rigid rules of logic or

argument, such as stock issues or fallacy theory, except to the point where the participants agreed that these were functional approaches. Instead, a dialogic approach encourages evaluations of affirmative cases relative to their performative benefits, or whether or not the case is a valuable speech act. The move away from formal logic structure toward a dialogical conversation model allows for a broader perspective regarding the ontological status of debate. At the same time, a dialogical approach challenges the ways that many teams argue speech act and performance theory in debates. Because there are a range of ways that performative oriented teams argue their cases, there is little consensus regarding the status of topicality. While some take topicality as a central challenge to creating performance-based debates, many argue that topicality is wholly irrelevant to the debate, contending that the requirement that a critical affirmative be topical silences creativity and

oppositional approaches. However, if we move beyond viewing debate as an ontologically independent monologue—but as an invitation to dialogue, our attention must move from the ontology of the aff irmative case to a consideration of the case in light of

exigent opposition (Farrell, 1985). Thus, the initial speech act of the affirmative team sets the stage for an emergent response. While most responses deal directly with the affirmative case, Farrell notes that they may also deal with metacommunication regarding the process of negotiation. In this way, we may conceptualize the affirmative’s goal in creating a “germ of a response” (Bakhtin, 1990) whose completeness bears on the possibility

of all subsequent utterances. Conceived as a dialogue, the affirmative speech act anticipates the negative response. A failure to adequately encourage, or

anticipate a response deprives the neg ative speech act and the emergent dialogue of the capacity for a complete

inquiry . Such violations short circuit the dialogue and undermine the potential for an emerging dialogue to gain significance (either within the debate community or as translated to forums outside of the activity). Here, the dialogical model performs as a fairness model , contending that the affi rmative speech act, be it policy oriented,

critical, or performative in nature, must adhere to normative restrictions to achieve its maximum competitive and

ontological potential.

Two net benefits-

First, Fairness- They justify arbitrarily changing the question of the debate to an infinite number of potential frameworks, destroying predictable limits and ensuring the Aff always wins. The community chooses resolutionally divided ground because it is balanced and educational. Arguments that aren’t linked to the plan are amorphous and unstable. A narrow, mutually agreed-upon understanding of the topic is a pre-requisite to meaningful research and strategy.

This is a pre-condition to debateShively 00 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, p. 181-2

The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say “no” to—they must reject and limit—some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say “yes” to some things. In particular, they must say “yes” to the idea of rational per- suasion. This

means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest , or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The

mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest —that consen- sus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or

contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on

specifics , on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting

condition of contest and debate . As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the

reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not com- municating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have

utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being

debated before we can debate it . For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one’s target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing

the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words,

contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and

debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagree- ments . The participants and

the target of a sit-in must share an under- standing of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator’s audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting

of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

Second decision-making skills-

Stasis fostered by topical advocacy creates rigorous testing Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RE- CONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and the Director of Debate at Samford University, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)

Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy. A

Siren’s Call: Falsely Presuming Epistemic Benefits In addition to the basic equity norm, dismissing the idea that debaters defend the affirmative side of the topic encourages advocates to falsely value affirmative speech acts in the absence of a

negative response . There may be several detrimental consequences that go unrealized in a debate where the affirmative case and plan are not topical. Without ground, debaters may fall prey to a siren’s call, a belief that certain critical ideals and concepts are axiological, existing beyond doubt without scrutiny . Bakhtin contends that in dialogical

exchanges “the greater the number and weight” of counter-words, the deeper and more substantial our understanding will be (Bakhtin, 1990). The matching of the word to the counter-word should be embraced by proponents of critical activism in the activity, because these dialogical exchanges allow for improvements and modifications in critical arguments. Muir argues that “debate puts students into greater contact with the real world by forcing them to read a great deal of information” (1993, p. 285). He continues, “[t]he constant consumption of material...is significantly constitutive. The information grounds the issues under discussion, and the

process shapes the relationship of the citizen to the public arena” (p. 285). Through the process of comprehensive understanding, debate serves both as a laboratory and a constitutive arena. Ideas find and lose adherents. Ideas that were once considered beneficial are modified, changed, researched again, and sometimes discarded altogether. A central argument for open deliberation is that it encourages a superior consensus to situations where one side is silenced. Christopher Peters contends,

“The theory holds that antithesis ultimately produces a better consensus, that the clash of differing , even opposing interests and ideas in the process of decision making... creates decisions that are better for having been subjected to this trial

by fire” (1997, p. 336). The combination of a competitive format and the necessity to take points of view that one does

not already agree with combines to create a unique educational experience for all participants . Those that

eschew the value of such experience by an axiological position short-circuit the benefits of the educational exchange for themselves, their opponents, as well as the judges and observers of such debates.

Switch-side debate fosters critical thinking skills Harrigan 8 AGAINST DOGMATISM: A CONTINUED DEFENSE OF SWITCH SIDE DEBATE, Casey Harrigan, University of Georgia, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 29 (2008)

Switch side debate (SSD) is an argumentative model that requires students to debate both the affirmative and negative sides of the resolution over the course of a multiple- round tournament. In practice, SSD requires that debaters’ arguments are frequently divorced from personal conviction ; in many cases students are required by the topic to take a position and argue vigorously on

behalf of views that they disagree with. Debaters with ideological beliefs are thrust into the position of the Devil’s Advocate ,

assuming the side of the opposition and needing to understand the arguments of the opposing view well enough to argue on

their behalf. Instead of approaching the debate topic from the perspective of personal belief, students often choose arguments from a strategic and competitive perspective . Because of SSD, the purpose of debate is not to

convince others to accept a certain argument as preferable or “true ”, but rather to choose the strongest and most

intellectually rigorous position that has the greatest chance of prevailin g under scrutiny (and thus earning a competitive

victory). Policy debate, an activity with few formal rules and requirements, developed this norm of arguing both sides of a topic for pragmatic, pedagogical, and social reasons. Practically, the contemporary format of tournament contests would be much more difficult to maintain if the tournament directors were not able to require that an equal number of competitors debate on the affirmative and negative in any given round. Were students free to choose their own sides, it seems likely that debaters who held strong views for or against the statement of the resolution would choose to debate exclusively on that side. Given the generally liberal leanings of the debate community and inevitable biases in topic construction, an unequal division between the sides would be unavoidable (Cripe, 1957). This would make pairing debate rounds much more difficult, if not impossible. While such pragmatic justifications for SSD are persuasive, they are admittedly secondary to the greater consideration of pedagogy. Although it is certainly true that debate is a game and that its competitive elements are

indispensable sources of motivation for students who may otherwise be apathetic about academic endeavors, the overwhelming benefits of contest debating are the knowledge and skills taught through participation. The wins and losses (and somewhat-cheesy trophies), by and large,

are forgotten with the passage of time. However, the educational values of debate are so fundamental that they eventually become ingrained in the decision-making and thought processes of debaters, giving them a uniquely valuable durability . To this end, SSD is essential. The benefits of debating both sides have been noted by many authors over the past fifty years. To name but a few, SSD has been lauded for fostering tolerance and undermining bigotry and dogmatism (Muir,

1993), creating stronger and more knowledgeable advocates (Dybvig and Iversion, 2000), and fortifying the social forces of

democracy by guaranteeing the expression of minority viewpoints (Day, 1966). Switching sides is a crucial element of debate’s

pedagogical benefit; it forms the gears that drive debate’s intellectual motor. Additionally, there are social benefits to the practice of requiring students to debate both

sides of controversial issues. Dating back to the Greek rhetorical tradition and the tension between Plato and the Sophists, great value has been placed on the benefit of testing each argument relative to all others in the marketplace of ideas . Like those who argue on behalf of the

efficiency-maximizing benefits of free market competition, it is believed that arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and

improved) when compared to all available alternatives. Even for beliefs that have seemingly been ingrained in consensus opinion or in cases

where the public at-large is unlikely to accept a particular position, it has been argued that they should remain open for public discussion and

deliberation (Mill, 1975). Along these lines, the greatest benefit of switching sides , which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is its

inducement of critical thinking. Defined as “reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Ennis, 1987), critical

thinking learned through debate teaches students not just how to advocate and argue , but how to decide as well.

Each and every student , whether in debate or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the position of

the decision-maker . Faced with competing options whose costs and benefits are initially unclear, critical thinking is necessary to assess all the possible outcomes of each choice, compare its relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about which choice is preferable. In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian food for dinner, the importance of making the correct decision is minor.

For many other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an imprudent course of action are potentially grave .

Although the days of the Cold War are over, and the risk that “the next Pearl Harbor could be ‘compounded by hydrogen’” (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978) is greatly

reduced, the manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the continuing necessity of training a well - informed and critically-aware public (Zarefsky, 2007). In the absence of debate-trained critical thinking, uninformed politicians and manipulative leaders would be much more likely to draw the country, and possibly the world, into conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of human well- being . As Louis Rene Beres writes, “with such learning, we

Americans could prepare...not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered planet” (2003). Thus, it is not surprising that

critical thinking has been called “the highest educational goal of the activity ” (Parcher, 1998). While arguing from

conviction can foster limited critical thinking skills, the element of switching sides is necessary to sharpen debate’s

critical edge and ensure that decisions are made in a reasoned manner instead of being driven by ideology . Debaters trained in SSD are more likely to evaluate both sides of an argument before arriving at a conclusion and are less

likely to dismiss potential arguments based on prior beliefs (Muir, 1993). In addition, debating both sides teaches “ conceptual flexibility ,”

where decision- makers are more likely to reflect upon the beliefs that are held before coming to a final opinion (Muir,

1993). Exposed to many arguments on each side of an issue, debaters learn that public policy is characterized by extraordinary complexity that requires careful consideration before action . Finally, these arguments are confirmed by

the preponderance of empirical research demonstrating a link between competitive SSD and critical thinking (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt and Louden, 1999; Colbert, 2002).

Political simulation creates a deliberative active-learning environment Hanghoj 8 PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming, Thorkild Hanghøj, PhD Dissertation

Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies University of Southern Denmark, 2008, http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf

The two preceding sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative activity of educational value, and how his assumptions on creativity and playful

actions represent a critique of rational means-end schemes. For now, I will turn to Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal , which assumes that social actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for future action. Dewey uses the concept dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the most extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in

imagination) of various competing possible lines of action... [It] is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure

and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal .

It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). 85 This excerpt illustrates how Dewey views the process of decision making (deliberation) through the lens of an imaginative drama metaphor . Thus, decisions are made through the imaginative projection of outcomes, where the “possible competing lines of action” are resolved through a thought experiment. Moreover, Dewey’s compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies that decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or mechanical exercises, but that they have emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are relatively few discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A notable exception is the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, who praises Dewey’s concept as a “fortunate image” for understanding everyday rationality (Schutz, 1943: 140). Other attempts are primarily related to overall discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary, 1991, 2000, 2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003; Ronsson, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out, dramatic rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of deliberation that does not characterise the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes “duties and contractual obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and rights” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Instead, dramatic rehearsal should be

seen as the process of “crystallizing possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Thus, deliberation can in no way

guarantee that the response of a “thought experiment” will be successful. But what it can do is make the process of choosing more intelligent than would be the case with “blind” trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of dramatic rehearsal provides a valuable perspective for

understanding educational gaming as a simultaneously real and imagined inquiry into domain-specific scenarios.

Dewey defines dramatic rehearsal as the capacity to stage and evaluate “acts”, which implies an “irrevocable” difference between acts that are “tried out in imagination” and acts that are “overtly tried out” with real-life consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This description shares obvious similarities with games as they require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific problems (cf. chapter 2). On the other hand, there is also a striking difference between moral

deliberation and educational game activities in terms of the actual consequences that follow particular actions. Thus, when it comes to educational

games, acts are both imagined and tried out, but without all the real-life consequences of the practices , knowledge

forms and outcomes that are being simulated in the game world. Simply put, there is a difference in realism between the dramatic rehearsals of everyday life and in games, which only “play at” or simulate the stakes and 86 risks that characterise the “serious” nature of moral deliberation, i.e. a real-life politician trying to win a

parliamentary election experiences more personal and emotional risk than students trying to win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same time, the lack of real-life consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a relatively safe learning

environment , where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be enacted and validated for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games

are able to provide a safe but meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving a poor political

presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular “competing possible lines of action” that are relevant to particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from

this pragmatist perspective, the educational value of games is not so much a question of learning facts or giving the “ right”

answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent outcomes and domain-specific processes of problem- based scenarios.

These skills are the lynchpin of solving all existential global problems Lundberg 10 Tradition of Debate in North Carolina in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century, Christian O. Lundberg, Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2010, p311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of

debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking , analysis of public claims, informed decision making , and better public judgment. If the picture of

modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy

such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them , to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political

energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take

on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn

and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-

solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay

was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for

democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the

classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities . The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and

vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of

meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive , but to thrive . Democracy faces a

myriad of challenges , including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale

environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including

an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active

citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and

effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges

to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.

2

The cultural turn evoked by “post-strategies” attempts to break part any material analysis through the use of discursive analysis – despite their attempts to incorporate materialism it remains culturalist and stuck within the paradigm of capitalism. Ebert and Zavarzadeh in 2008(Teresa L., English, State University of New York, Albany, Mas’ud, prolific writer and expert on class ideology, “Class in Culture”, p. 27-29)

On the theoretical level, the attacks on labor focused on the material logic: the question that Sumner H. Slichter had raised, namely that the U.S. was "shifting from a capitalistic community to a laboristic one-that is to a community in which employees rather than

businessmen are the strongest single influence." This second cultural front developed new arguments for the legitimacy , permanence, and transhistorical moral and social authority of capitalism as an economic regime that was seen as the condition of possibility for human freedom. This is what, for example, F. A. Hayek's writings did. Not only did they provide the grounds for a Neoliberal economics that marginalized Keynesianism, but they also offered an ethics and a philosophy for capitalism (The Fatal Conceit: The

Errors of Socialism). In a subsequent move, post-theory ("post" as in postcolonialism, postrnarxism, poststructuralism, etc.) translated Neoliberal economies into a new philosophy of representation that made discourse the primary ground of social reality . Discourse was not simply a "text" in its narrow sense but the ensemble of the phenomena in and through which social

production of meaning takes place, an ensemble that constitutes a society as such. The discursive is not. therefore, being conceived as a

level nor even as a dimension of the social, but rather as being co-extensive with the social.. .. There is nothing specifically social which is constituted outside the discursive, it is clear that the non-discursive is not opposed to the discursive as if it were a matter of "'1'0 separate

levels. History and society are an infinite text. (Laclau, "Populist Rupture and Discourse" 87) Class in post-theory was turned into a trope whose meanings are wayward and indeterminate-a metaphor for a particular language game (Jenks,

Culture 4). This move has de-materialized class by hollowing out its economic content and turning its materialism into " a materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter " (Derrida, "Typewriter

Ribbon" 281). This de-materializing has taken place through a network of "post " interpretive strategies: Such as "destruction" (Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology 22- 23); "deconstruction " (Derrida, "Letter to a Japanese Friend");

" schizoanalysis " (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 273-382); "reparative reading" (Sedgwick,

Touching Feeling 123-151), "cultural logic" (Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism); "performativity " (Butler, Gender Trouble); "immaterial labor " (Hardt and Negri, MultItude), and "whatever (qualunque)" (Agamben, The Coming

Community). The goal of both the populist and the theoretical campaigns against the labor movement -which capital

often referred to as "socialistic schemes" (Fones- Wolf 52}---has been the blurring of class lines by depicting class antagonisms as cultural differences, and to persuade people that, as Wallace F. Bennett, chairman of the National Association of

Manufacturers put it, " We are all capitalists " (quoted in Fones-Wolf 70-73). In other words, as far as capitalism is concerned, there are no class differences in the U.S. and what makes people different are their values, lifestyles, and preferences. We call this obscuring of class relations by cultural values and the play of language the "cultural turn." The term "cultural turn" is often used to designate a 'particular movement in social and cultural inquiries that acquires analytical authority in the 1970s and is exemplified by such books as Hayden White's Metahistory and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures , both of which were published in 1973. White describes history writing as a poetic act and approaches it as essentially a linguistic (tropological)

practice (Metahistory ix). The view of history and social practices as poiesis-which is most powerfully articulated in Heidegger's

writings and is re-written in various idioms by diverse authors from Cleanth Brooks through Jacques Derrida to Giorgio Agamben-constitutes the interpretive logic of the cultural turn. Geertz's argument that culture is a semiotic practice, an ensemble of texts (Interpretation

of Cultures 3- 30), canonizes the idea of culture as writing in the analytical imaginary. The cultural tum is associated by some critics with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, whose cultural activism they assume energized rebellion against "scientific" social and cultural inquiries and ushered in the cultural tum with its linguistic reading of culture and emphasis on the subjective

(Bonnell and Hunt, ed., Beyond the Cultural Turn 1-32). Other critics have also related the cultural tum to the radical activism of the post-1968 era and to postmodemism as well as to a tendency among radical intellectuals , as

Larry Ray and Andrew Sayer put it, to approach language no longer as reflecting "material being" but to read it (in

Heidegger's words) as the "house of being" (Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn I). These and similar explanations of

the cultural tum are insightful in their own terms. However, "their own terms" are not only historically narrow but are conceived within the very terms that they seem to critique: they are, in other words, accounts of the cultural tum from within the cultural tum. As a result, in spite of their professed interest in material analysis , their interpretations, like the writings of the cultural tum , remain culturalist. They too analyze culture in cultural terms-that is, immanently. Culture cannot be grasped in its own terms because its own terms are always the terms of ideology . Therefore to understand culture , one needs to look "outside ."

Capitalism promotes a dehumanizing alienation that kills value to life – This prevents authentic relationships with others – turns the affGasper 10 [Phil Gasper, philosophy professor in Madison, Wisconsin, "Capitalism and Alienation," International Socialist Review, isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation]cd

Capitalism is a system that endlessly promises people happy and self-fulfilled lives . In the United States this vision even has a name: the American Dream. But when we look around us, reality falls far short . We see this reflected in everything from divorce rates, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, stress, mental illness, and general feelings of isolation and frustration that so many people experience.¶ Rather than achieving self-realization and living meaningful and fulfilling lives, many people experience some degree of alienation, and the ones that don’t are quite likely engaged in some form of self-deception, perhaps sustaining a sense of meaning and self-worth only with the help of illusions about themselves or their circumstances.¶ Quite a few thinkers, including existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, have argued that alienation is an unavoidable feature of the human condition, but this is not Marx’s view. Instead, Marx argues

that alienation is largely a product of class society in general and of capitalism in particular , and that we could end a society characterized by pervasive alienation if we radically reorganized our economic system.¶ Marx’s most detailed

discussion of alienation is in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which he wrote in 1844 but which were not published until the 1930s. In this work, Marx focuses on what he calls “alienated labor,” because he sees alienation at work as the central form of alienation . This is based on the assumption that the need to engage in free, creative labor is a central part of human nature . It’s precisely because capitalism systematically frustrates that need , that it is an alienating system .¶ One of Marx’s main claims in

the 1844 Manuscripts is that for most people most of the time, work is a frustrating, unpleasant experience. That’s something that most of us would agree with. In fact it’s such a commonplace that there are endless popular songs about waiting for the weekend or Saturday night to arrive. There’s even a national restaurant chain named for the relief people feel when they get out of work at the end of the week. (By contrast, no one has opened an eatery named “TGI Monday.”)¶ When Marx was writing in the 1840s, he was thinking primarily of the monotonous

brutality of factory labor. But what Marx wrote about blue-collar work in the mid-nineteenth century remains true of much white-collar work at the beginning of the twenty-first. In her book The Overworked American, the sociologist Juliet Schor reports the

following:¶ Thirty percent of [American] adults say that they experience high stress nearly every day; even higher numbers report high stress once or twice a week… Americans are literally working themselves to death—as jobs contribute to heart disease, hypertension, gastric problems, depression, exhaustion, and a variety of other ailments.¶ Now a lot of people think that this is an unavoidable necessity, because work is intrinsically unpleasant. But Marx’s argument is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Work can be—or could be—meaningful, creative and self-expressive. And if it were like that for us all or most of the time, then our lives could be fulfilling and satisfying.¶ The

problem is that under capitalism work doesn’t have these characteristics for most people. Marx emphasizes two reasons why capitalism “robs workers of all life content.” The first is that it is an economic system that accentuates the division of labor, breaking production into a series of smaller and smaller, more specialized tasks, each performed by a different kind of worker, because this will increase profitability . As a result, “the individual laborers are appropriated by a one-sided

function and annexed to it for life,” depriving them of the well-rounded variety of powers and activities that they need to be full human beings.¶ The second reason why capitalism generates alienation is that it is an economic system in which a small minority controls the means of production, and in which most people can survive only by selling their own labor power . Workers under

capitalism have to work for someone else. As a consequence, Marx argues that work has little or no intrinsic worth for the worker —as he puts it, “it is not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself.”¶ More generally, we find our lives dominated by impersonal powers, from labyrinthine bureaucracies to economic forces, which we are unable to control, even though they are ultimately human creations. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe alienation as “the positing of social activity, the consolidation of our product as a real power over us, growing out of our control.” Capital describes the conditions of wage labor as “alienated from labor and confronting it independently,” and of capital as “an alienated and independent social might, which stands over against society as a thing.”¶ But if we could abolish capitalism and replace it with a society in which workers collectively and democratically control production,

then work itself could be transformed into an activity that we would find rewarding for its own sake. It would become a way of exercising our individual creativity and

talents, and of contributing to the common good— “not only a means of life but life’s prime want,” as Marx put it in Capital.¶ While capitalism continues,

however, labor will continue to be alienated. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx discusses various aspects of this alienation. First, workers are alienated from their product. What they produce does not belong to them , and the particular characteristics of what they produce are of little concern to them. All that matters is that they get paid a wage. Second, workers under capitalism are alienated from their own productive activity. They typically have no control over that activity , and it doesn’t express their own goals or projects. ¶ Third, workers are alienated from what Marx

(following Feuerbach) calls their “species-being ,” in other words from those qualities that make them distinctively human. What distinguishes humans from other species is our capacity to engage in free, conscious, and creative work. But alienated labor reduces humans to the level of animals.¶ Earlier philosophers had seen the distinctive characteristic of humans as our capacity for rational thought. But for Marx it is the application of rational, conscious thought to productive activity that distinguishes us from other creatures. As he says in The German Ideology, “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of

subsistence.”¶ Unlike other species, we can step back from activity we perform to remain alive (our “life activity”),

consciously assess it, and improve it. As Marx says, “The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from this

activity.” By contrast, a human being’s activity “is not a determination with which he immediately fuses.” Unlike other animals, “the human being makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness.”¶ But under capitalism, labor doesn’t get the opportunity to exercise this distinctively human ability. That’s why Marx says that “in his human functions [i.e.

work], [man] is nothing more than animal.” He adds that alienated labor “estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human existence.”¶ The final aspect of alienated labor is that, as a consequence of these other

forms of alienation, workers are alienated from each other. Marx writes: “the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means that each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from man’s essence.”

The alternative is to reject the aff in favor of historical materialism – historical materialism links social praxis to a decisive judgment on capitalist oppression. Lukacs in 67 (George, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived

Hungarian Soviet Republic, History and Class Consciousness) <224-225>

Historical materialism has , therefore, a much greater value for the proletariat than that of a method of historical research.

It is one of the most important of all its weapons. For the class struggle of the proletariat signifies at the same time the awakening of its class consciousness. And this awakening followed everywhere from an understanding of the true situation, of the actually existing historical connections. And it is this that gives the class struggle of the proletariat its special place among other class struggles, namely that it obtains its sharpest weapon from the hand of true science, from its

clear insight into reality. Whereas in the class struggles of the past the most varied ideologies, religious, moral and

other forms of 'false consciousness' were decisive, in the case of the class struggle of the proletariat, the war for the liberation of the last oppressed class , the revelation of the unvarnished truth became both a war-cry and the most potent weapon. By laying bare the springs of the historical process historical materialism became, in

consequence of the class situation of the proletariat, an instrument of war. The most important function of historical materialism is to deliver a precise judgement on the capitalist social system, to unmask capitalist society .

Throughout the class struggle of the proletariat, therefore, h istorical m aterialism has constantly been used at every point, where, by means

of all sorts of ideological frills, the bourgeoisie had concealed the true situation, the state of the class struggle; it has been used to focus the cold rays of science upon these veils and to show how false and misleading they were and how far they were in conflict with the truth. For this reason the chief function of historical materialism did not lie in the elucidation of pure scientific knowledge, but in the field of action . Historical materialism did not exist for its own sake, it existed so that the proletariat could understand a situation and so that , armed with this knowledge, it could act accordingly .

4

UQ – individual survival, extinction loomsKorstanje et al. 9/2014 (Dr. Maximiliano Korstanje (University of Palermo, Argentina), Dr. Peter Tarlow (Texas A&M University, Texas, USA), Dr. Geoffrey Skoll (Profesor Emeritus, Buffalo State College, New York, USA). Disasters in Postmodern Times: The 2011 Japan Earthquake. Volume 11, Number 3 (September, 2014) ISSN: 1705-6411. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies http://www.baudrillardstudies.com/contents/volume-eleven-number-three/korstanje/)

According to C. Lasch (1999), there exists an almost irreversible tendency to conceive of the external world as dangerous, catastrophic, and/or chaotic. This tendency is a product of a changing values and a cosmic vision that appeared for the first time in modernity. The current situation is despite the political rhetoric , that no one really seeks a solution to potentially catastrophic problems , but rather stresses individual survival . Lasch argues that in a narcissistic culture that elevates the ‘I’ it is hard to understand the future of the ‘we.’ Modern culture shows a lack of interest in the past and lacks a sense of tradition. In a narcissistic culture, the past only represents a trivial form of commercialization and exchange. At the same time, fear has been

converted into a way for therapists to make money. Moderns have subordinated all of their inhibitions to “the company” and are incapable of satisfying their own needs. Personal self-fulfillment is presented as the maximum measure of success in a narcissistic society. There exists an entire cultural critique that holds that psychological therapy tends to indoctrinate the lower classes into upper class goals , such as personal development and self-control .

Modern society and its productive system appeal to a division of social relations and subsuming them before technical and expert dominance (Lasch, 1999)

This has real world impacts - opens the door to opportunist and works AGAINST the elimination of anti-black violenceGupta 12/30/14 (Arun Gupta, co-founder of The Indypendent and the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Is the Anti-Police Violence Movement a New Chapter in the Black Freedom Struggle? http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Is-the-Anti-Police-Violence-Movement-a-New-Chapter-in-the-Black-Freedom-Struggle-20141230-0019.html)

The movement also needs to progress beyond racial reductionism . While it is rooted in history of state violence against Blacks, Native

people and Hispanics, racial identity doesn’t confer an advantage in organizing. Succumbing to slogans that “Black or Brown people must lead the struggle” opens the door for opportunists . Organizers need to be immersed in existing struggles, but identity matters less than knowing how to organize and build unity without abandoning key principles or goals. Already a few groups with little connection to the anti-police violence struggle are positioning themselves as mediators between City Hall and the streets . Some other organizations now in the spotlight are more about personal power than collective transformation . Racial reductionism is also used against the left. Defenders of the NYPD point out it is only 51 percent white, but in its present form it would remain a racist institution if it were 100 percent people of color.

The anti-police brutality movement looks to have staying power if for no other reason than inequality and segregation will continue to intensify in the United States and the police will enforce that order. But to be successful it will have to shift from a focus on the police to the social system that demands the violence the police mete out.

5

Counter-advocacy: We endorse the 1ac absent rage

The valorization of rage as a political feeds into a cycle of endless violence Wenning 9

(Mario Wenning holds a PhD and is an Assistant professor of philosophy @ the University of Macau, “The Return of Rage,” Parrhesia No. 8 pg. 89-99, Accessed via GMU Libraries, Last Accessed 9/22/14) ELJ

The valorization of erotic emotions and virtues over thymotic ones is as old as philosophy itself. Aristotle already insists that the virtuous person cultivates mildness of temper “the even tempered person confesses to be calm and not carried away by his feelings, but to be cross only in the way, at the things, and for the length of time

that reason dictates.” 15 Compassion is introduced as an antidote to revenge. The virtuous character does not lose the control that is necessary to provide for a self-sufficient emotional economy , which is the precondition for achieving a life that is marked by wisdom, even-temperedness, and justice. Seneca’s influential work on rage, De ira, which was immensely influential for Christian and humanist ethics, calls for a Stoic control of the dangerous affect. The general suspicion against the destructive consequences of this aggressive emotion is not limited to the

European tradition. Confucius already warns his students “to let a sudden fit of anger make you forget the safety of your own person or even that of your parents, is that not misguided judgment ?” 16 Daoism and ZenBuddhism promote meditative practices and compassion to overcome our fixation on the need of being angry with ourselves

and the world surrounding us. More recently, Martha Nussbaum argued that we should aim to understand “how to channel emotional development in the direction of a more mature and inclusive and less ambivalent type of love. ” 17 According to Nussbaum, anger should at best operate as a tool of compassion.

Acts of punishment are then seen as merciful rather than vindictive because they aim at the good of the victim. These representative examples illustrate that the erotization of the psyche replaced what is regarded as archaic forms of militancy that , it is contended, mistakenly suggest that honor, pride and craving for recognition (and the rage that results from the violation of these) has been considered to be more important than a concern for justice, equality and compassion. We might

think that the dislike of negative emotions in general and potentially aggressive ones in particular results from an insight into the misfortunes these emotions bring

about. Revenge , then, is undesirable because it tends to be too costly in producing long term damages. Hegel, for example, reminds us in the Philosophy of Right of the infinite chain of violence , the ec onomy of pay-back that results from blind vengeance and selfadministered acts of justic e. 18 The excesses of rage can easily lead to tragic repetitions of an original act of violence that might be impossible to get out of . Honor killings often lead to new honor killings rather than the

reestablishment of justice and the fight against terror breed more terrorists.

Case

Competing role of the ballot is who best politically engages institutions. The role of the survivor-activist in debate is to engage the political. This is not a form of ‘humanitarian distance’ but a third perspective challenging the limits of political expression and providing the best model for responsible activism and critiqueMurphy 2014 (Laura T. Murphy , Asst. Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, (2014): The New Slave Narrative and the Illegibility of Modern Slavery, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2014.977528)

Whether these identificatory schemes actually mobilize readers to action beyond a mere momentary empathy is debateable. Elaine Scarry remarks that those generous imaginings of others are difficult to attain and inadequate to the task of ensuring rights.89 There is the risk, in promoting this sentimental education that structures of power that have marginalized the voices of the enslaved will be replicated, that the armchair activist will merely feel a false or fleeting affinity for those who suffer around the world, that such imaginative identifications more often reiterate the com- fortable distance between a Western, privileged us and an ‘underdeveloped’ suffering other. There is the problematic basic premise that the most widely circulated human rights narratives are written specifically for American and British audiences by people who are largely not of those cultures, and that their stories thus become spectacles of otherness, sedimenting notions of ‘natural’ difference and

inequality. Hartman argues that this kind of humanitarian distance has historically led even the abolitionist to ‘feel for himself instead of for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach’.90 It is clear, despite these anxieties, that the NGOs,

lawyers and political figures who encourage the publication of these narratives believe, with Rorty, that a ‘sentimental education’ leads to significant shifts in public opinion (or at least a donation). They seek out and mobilize the first-person narrative precisely because the kinds of detail-oriented, fact-based, research-heavy reports they otherwise produce lack the ‘human face’ that has proven so often to ‘generate empathy’ among donors.91 The authors of the new slave narratives themselves also often inscribe their expectations for a sentimental education into their narratives. Bok, Lloyd, Nazer and Beah all end their narratives with accounts of the powerful influence of their storytelling on others. Bok recalls his early experience on the lecture circuit, ‘I not only managed to get the audiences to understand what I was saying. I was able to move them,’92 and he celebrates the fact that his testimony ‘played a role in getting the American Pre- sident to speak out against Sudan for the first time ever’.93 Lloyd reflects on a presen- tation she gave with the clients of her Girls Education Mentoring Service programme, which she indicates was ‘all about survivor voices, survivor achievements, survivor lea- dership’ that acted as ‘a stunning affirmation that offers a rebuttal to all the people who didn’t believe in us, in me, in any girl who has been sexually exploited’.94 The slave narrators describe themselves as human rights ambassadors and their narratives are often characterized by this optimistic purposiveness. In the process of resisting the spectacle, the bodily detail, the flesh and blood, in writing narratives that at times seem underwhelmingly sober and distant, however, the narrators revise the curriculum for the sentimental education. If we consider these autobiographies as guides to the legibility of modern slavery, as instruction manuals in the interpretation of the signs of modern slavery, then the new slave nar- ratives can be understood as teaching the reading lessons necessary for an informed sentimental education. Through these narratives, a powerful imaginative identification is attempted, as the use of the first-person ‘I’ of the enslaved speaker in the narrative is shared with the identity of the audience in the practice of reading. As Bok recalled, ‘Simply by telling what happened to me I could make an emotional connection with the audience. My feelings became their feelings. My passion became theirs.’95 The power of his nar- rative lies in his having experienced slavery and his willingness to share that experi- ence, even partially, with an audience. Even as the narrators turn away from explicit scenes of their own pain, the first-person narrative works to make readers feel impli- cated in the suffering of the narrator so that they are mobilized against suffering. Readers recognize the humanity of the other through imagining themselves in the sur- vivor’s position, however imperfect the identification may be. However, when the narrators employ the strategies of displacement described here, which, instead of providing bodily evidence, prove that the narrator’s individual experience is representative of a much larger group of suffering humans (whether they be other sexually exploited children, or all the estimated 30 million enslaved people, or perhaps even the whole of suffering humanity), they effect an identification displacement as well. While Scarry warns us that it is nearly impossible for humans to imagine vast numbers of others, the new slave narrative attempts to bridge the gulf between the single ‘human face’ of slavery and all those who remain enslaved.96 As Bok described it, To them, slavery had been something that happened in a far-off place in Africa they rarely gave a moment’s thought to. After my speech, slavery had become a person they had seen, a young Sudanese whose hand they had actually shaken.97 This synechdocal expansion links the survivor’s singular experience to the entire concept of slavery, and through that identificatory process the reader, too, is connected to all those suffering under bondage. This strategic displacement promotes a sense of world

citizenship and responsibility that exceeds the bounds of the personal identifi- cation with the solitary narrator who suffers. At the same time, their narratives provide readers with interpretative lenses that make their experiences legible not merely as victims or exploited masses but as survivor-activists. Here, a third level of identification is produced . As the narrator becomes an activist in the narrative, readers are not only interpellated as humans who suffer, but they are also privileged to identify with the one who can eradicate suffering. Joseph Slaughter calls the humanitarian the ‘third actor in the drama of suffering’, between both the violator and the victim as well as between the one who

suffers and the one who reads of suffering.98 This intermediary position ‘transforms and reroutes that pathetic force into a metonymical relation between the reader and huma- nitarian figure who is an exemplary extension of our better angels’.99 In third-person narratives of suffering or in narratives of humanitarians called to aid others, the identi- fication is with the one who responds to

suffering, with the saviour figure who inserts himself between violence and the violated. In the new slave narrative, the role of survivor activist is not located in the in- between of the humanitarian that

Slaughter describes, but instead unites the slave and the liberator, the victim and the humanitarian, in one identity. While the reader is instructed to imagine

the greatest depths of bondage with the narrators, they are quickly brought to what is often figured in humanitarian literature as the greatest height – the saviour. This slave-liberator identification allows the reader to empathize with the beneficent and responsible citizen servant while still eliding the distance between the reader and the one who suffers. It continues to foreground the suffering inherent in slavery and makes a claim to the responsibility we all have as global citizens to respond. More crucially, it defies the slave-liberator dichotomy that so often characterizes both

slavery and the abolitionist movements that seek to eradicate it. It marks the survivor’s narrative as the source of the greatest expertise on the subject and thus provides a model for responsible activism and engagement that is not top-down from the distant abolitionist perspective but from one who has been slave, witness and liberator himself or herself. The new slave narrative represents an avenue through which survivors challenge the limits of political expression , combat the structures that maintain slavery’s illegibility and promote social justice activism among the reading public . Read in

this light, the new slave narrative challenges us to transform our critical reading practices into the ‘NGO avant la lettre’ that Wai Chee Dimock describes, which employs analytic and political powers derived from the transhistorical, transnational, non-governmental potentials of scholarship.100 The time, cultures and conventions of the new slave nar- rative are our own and reading generically unveils the

contexts and political ideologies from which human rights conventions emerge. These narratives empower us as readers and scholars to engage in contemporary political discourse through our practices of close reading. Through that scholarship , we amplify the challenges marginalized people make against the normative rhetorics to which they are subject . Critical

readings can be a source of that ‘necessary and incessant pressure of culture and the world- wide activities of literature on human rights thinking and practice’ that Slaughter describes, and can have real (though likely less measurable) influence on the way forced labourers around the world are read and regarded.

These types of ‘tactical’ claims in a debate round are dangerous - results in the inevitability of anti-black death and flawed scholarship Curry Forthcoming (Tommy J. Curry, Texas A&M University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty Member. Black Studies, Not Morality: Anti-Black Racism, Neo-Liberal Cooptation, and the Challenges to Black Studies Under Intersectional Axioms. (Forthcoming in Emerging Voices of Africana: Disciplinary Resonances, Third World-Red Sea Press, ed. Michael Tillotson. https://www.academia.edu/8160498/_Draft_Black_Studies_Not_Morality_Anti-Black_Racism_Neo-Liberal_Cooptation_and_the_Challenges_to_Black_Studies_Under_Intersectional_Axioms)

There is a mythology at work in how Black people think about the utilization of knowledge against the structures of racism and white supremacy that result in the inevitability of anti-Black death . In the academy and the concentric

communities that center scholarly knowledge as the basis of discourse , there is a practice among various levels of students that de-radicalize the potential of these criticisms to make meaningful change in the structures and mentality of all those involved . The Black undergraduate and graduate student lacking the professional credentials to assert their opinion as true, or insightful, as the product of scholarly research, utilizes mimicry to convince the listener of the rightness of their position. In taking on, or parroting , the radical literature of their heroes and heroines, they strive to transform the insights of these/ their professors, lawyers, activists into a new morality. This morality seeks to escape any practical debates about the construction and constructing of a new world, or new consciousness. For these students, repeating the sacred texts of high intellectuals; the manipulators of post-structural texts/postcolonial discourse/psychoanalytic theories of death, life, power, gender, the Black woman,

capitalism, bare life, vestibularity, and of course race, seek to convince the world that as disciples of these texts, they (the poor, the Black,

the female, the marginalized student) in fact do hold the key to understanding the world beneath them, as they are now elevated to the realms of theory, from the perspectives of their gods who reside in the Ivory tower.

The mistake Black theorists make in understanding the ineffectiveness of their theories to transform the world is fundamentally rooted in the actuality of the world before them . Despite the radicality — the (new) content, the (revolutionary) ideas, and the (existential) ethicality— of the proposed theory, there is an apriori belief by the “radical (Black) theorist” that the oppressor class, be they: white, bourgeois, or male; the people the theory is directed towards, are in fact moral people able to be persuaded , convinced, and transformed through their own capacities and recognition of the “other realities” suffered by the oppressed. There is an erroneous belief that Black theory can be understood, acted upon, recognized by a person that can understand , or a newly emerged person that can now

understand, the perspective of the “representative of the oppressed” speaking to them . Why is this case? What is it in the act of critiquing whites, the bourgeoisie, or men that make

the oppressed believe fundamentally that these groups can change? For the people who are “actually oppressed,” “materially oppressed,” “silenced,” or the Black male who is killed/dead and cannot speak, but only be spoken about by the academics who use his death as a symbol—a catalyst—of conversation with whites , this belief does not exist . But for this group , Black theorists

and their parrots, who are the “representatives of the oppressed” that merely act as sleeping dictionaries, or in the case of Black men, talking monkeys this belief is substantiated by an ancient faith in reason and the modern hope of discourse.

A Black intellectual socialized to imitate white theories and by effect the pre-established semiotics that signify “intellect” as the basis of their discourse with whites under the banner of radicality, pessimism or anti-racist realism is of the greatest concern. In its brute reality, this discursive replication was the primary concern of Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). Contrary to the pop culture summation of Woodson’s 1933 work, Woodson was not primarily concerned with the general education of Blacks by whites, Woodson was concerned with the “highly educated Negro,” who in studying the ideas founded upon white understandings of philosophy, economics, law, and religion, sought to apply this knowledge to the Black community. “The educated Negro have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Latin and the Teuton and to despite the African” (Woodson, 1933, p.1). Woodson’s comment upon the disciplinary/civilizational basis of “theory,” is profound, despite being almost a century old. The highly educated Negro, the same culprit of E. Franklin Frazier’s Failure of the Negro/Black Intellectual, seeks to distant themselves from the Black community who remain mere objects of study. Seeing themselves as ontologically different from the other-Black-objects they study, these Black theorist(s) speak to white gatekeepers and members of their own intellectual class who reward them for the adamancy and spread of the ideas offered as morality. By claiming to be enlightened and spreading “truth” the post-structural/intersectional theorist need not know about the actual conditions of the people they speak of, they need only present these bodies and their conditions through the theories accepted by their particular discipline and/or disciplinary community. Black Study effectively becomes the process of confining/distorting/revising Black life to fit theory. As Ahmed reminds us, “facts require explanations, and all explanations, even bad ones, presume a

configuration of concepts, which we provisionally call 'theory,' In other words, theory is not simply a desirable but a necessary relation between facts and their explanations” (1994, p.34). It is when this theory is considered to be ontological—fundamental and necessary to the facts they seek to explain—that they become apriori and ideological. It is this paradigm from which the theory we concern ourselves with, and its effect upon the actual study of Black people, are placed at odds with Black Studies. Since the ontological claim is apriori, it dismisses the need for the study of Black life since it takes the relation between the facts of Black existence and theories proposed to be necessary to the Black bodies observed. The truth concerning Blackness thereby becomes revelation of some constant

unchanging principle within Blackness rather than the study of structures, historically conditioned and dynamic, upon Black peoples. This bourgeois fanaticism voids the world of actual Black people and replaces them with Black subjects found wanting for knowledge, recognition, and the politics of the “Black theorist-observer.”

Claims that the aff “best performatively and methodologically works for eliminating anti-black violence” within a debate round is dangerous, resulting in the inevitability of anti-black death.Curry Forthcoming (Tommy J. Curry, Texas A&M University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty Member. Black Studies, Not Morality: Anti-Black Racism, Neo-Liberal Cooptation, and the Challenges to Black Studies Under Intersectional Axioms. (Forthcoming in Emerging Voices of Africana: Disciplinary Resonances, Third World-Red Sea Press, ed. Michael Tillotson. https://www.academia.edu/8160498/_Draft_Black_Studies_Not_Morality_Anti-Black_Racism_Neo-Liberal_Cooptation_and_the_Challenges_to_Black_Studies_Under_Intersectional_Axioms)

There is a mythology at work in how Black people think about the utilization of knowledge against the structures of racism and white supremacy that result in the inevitability of anti-Black death . In the academy and the concentric

communities that center scholarly knowledge as the basis of discourse , there is a practice among various levels of students that de-radicalize the potential of these criticisms to make meaningful change in the structures and mentality of all those involved . The Black undergraduate and graduate student lacking the professional credentials to assert their opinion as true, or insightful, as the product of scholarly research, utilizes mimicry to convince the listener of the rightness of their position. In taking on, or parroting , the radical literature of their heroes and heroines, they strive to transform the insights of these/ their professors, lawyers, activists into a new morality. This morality seeks to escape any practical debates about the construction and constructing of a new world, or new consciousness. For these students, repeating the sacred texts of high intellectuals; the manipulators of post-structural texts/postcolonial discourse/psychoanalytic theories of death, life,

power, gender, the Black woman, capitalism, bare life, vestibularity, and of course race, seek to convince the world that as disciples of these texts, they (the poor, the Black, the female, the marginalized student) in fact do hold the key to understanding the world beneath them, as they are now elevated to the realms of theory, from the perspectives of their gods who reside in the Ivory tower. The mistake Black theorists make in understanding the ineffectiveness of their theories to transform the world is fundamentally rooted in the actuality of the world before them . Despite the radicality — the (new) content, the (revolutionary) ideas, and the (existential) ethicality— of the proposed theory, there is an apriori belief by the “radical (Black) theorist” that the oppressor class, be they: white, bourgeois, or male; the people the theory is directed towards, are in fact moral people able to be persuaded , convinced, and transformed through their own capacities and recognition of the “other realities” suffered by the oppressed. There is an erroneous belief that Black theory can be understood, acted upon, recognized by a person that can understand , or a newly emerged person that can now

understand, the perspective of the “representative of the oppressed” speaking to them . Why is this case? What is it in the act of critiquing whites, the bourgeoisie, or men that make

the oppressed believe fundamentally that these groups can change? For the people who are “actually oppressed,” “materially oppressed,” “silenced,” or the Black male who is killed/dead and cannot speak, but only be spoken about by the academics who use his death as a symbol—a catalyst—of conversation with whites , this belief does not exist . But for this group , Black theorists

and their parrots, who are the “representatives of the oppressed” that merely act as sleeping dictionaries, or in the case of Black men, talking monkeys this belief is substantiated by an ancient faith in reason and the modern hope of discourse. A Black intellectual socialized to imitate white theories and by effect the pre-established semiotics that signify “intellect” as the basis of their discourse with whites under the banner of radicality, pessimism or anti-racist realism is of the greatest concern. In its brute reality, this discursive replication was the primary concern of Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). Contrary to the pop culture summation of Woodson’s 1933 work, Woodson was not primarily concerned with the general education of Blacks by whites, Woodson was concerned with the “highly educated Negro,” who in studying the ideas founded upon white understandings of philosophy, economics, law, and religion, sought to apply this knowledge to the Black community. “The educated Negro have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Latin and the Teuton and to despite the African” (Woodson, 1933, p.1). Woodson’s comment upon the disciplinary/civilizational basis of “theory,” is profound, despite being almost a century old. The highly educated Negro, the same culprit of E. Franklin Frazier’s Failure of the Negro/Black Intellectual, seeks to distant themselves from the Black community who remain mere objects of study. Seeing themselves as ontologically different from the other-Black-objects they study, these Black theorist(s) speak to white gatekeepers and members of their own intellectual class who reward them for the adamancy and spread of the ideas offered as morality. By claiming to be enlightened and spreading “truth” the post-structural/intersectional theorist need not know about the actual conditions of the people they speak of, they need only present these bodies and their conditions through the theories accepted by their particular

discipline and/or disciplinary community. Black Study effectively becomes the process of confining/distorting/revising Black life to fit theory. As Ahmed reminds us, “facts require explanations, and all explanations, even bad ones, presume a configuration of concepts, which we provisionally call 'theory,' In other words, theory is not simply a desirable but a necessary relation between facts and their explanations” (1994, p.34). It is when this theory is considered to be ontological—fundamental and necessary to the facts they seek to explain—that they become apriori and ideological. It is this paradigm from which the theory we concern ourselves with, and its effect upon the actual study of Black people, are placed at odds with Black Studies. Since the ontological claim is apriori, it dismisses the need for the study of Black life since it takes the relation between the facts of Black existence and theories proposed to be necessary to the Black bodies observed. The truth concerning Blackness thereby becomes revelation of some constant unchanging principle within Blackness rather than the study of structures, historically conditioned and dynamic, upon

Black peoples. This bourgeois fanaticism voids the world of actual Black people and replaces them with Black subjects found wanting for knowledge, recognition, and the politics of the “Black theorist-observer.”

There is nothing innocent about the alternatives position in relation to power – failing to confront the complex and contradictory situation, in favor of retreat naturalizes imperial metaphysics and eliminates any subversive potential strategy or hope in challenging social deathMitchell 2014 (Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. A Riff on the Concept of the (Critical Ethnic Studies) Intellectual.

Antiracism Inc.: Intersections. 10/30/2014 - http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/ACGCC%2014-15/Mitchell%20-%20CESA%20-%20Intellectual.pdf)

As knowledge and power came to be understood as reflective of one another, the intellectual in these inaugural moments of Ethnic Studies could not but be cathected with and as a sense of heroic, occasionally even messianic, potentiality, one in which the gap between the intellectual and the leader collapsed . This collapse was perhaps

an inevitable result of a philosophy of struggle that insisted on the inseparability of representation in the domain of legitimated knowledge

(i.e. the curricular structures of the university) with representation in politics and privileged the intellectual as the figure

capable of holding these two forms of representation in the most intimate proximity (Chiang 2009). The racialized intellectual’s body plays a crucial role in stabilizing such a representational calculus insofar as it can be said to

double as the person doing the representing and the group being represented (Chow 2002), whether that group is understood as a natal community or one constituted by explicit political solidarity (Third World peoples, women of color, etc.).

But the movements for Ethnic Studies were not the sole origin of such an investment in the figure of the intellectual-as-representative-of-racialized-community as much as they opened up a space for the radical reinterpretation of the

intellectual as a figure of race leadership that, as Erica Edwards (2012, 11) writes, “had solidified as a¶ classed and gendered concept.” The elitism, in the context of Black Studies, of what Joy James (1997, 6) calls “the historic mandate for the black intellectual to be a race leader,” has been encompassing enough to accommodate efforts that cross the political spectrum—to say nothing of a great deal of intra-elite conflict between black intellectuals themselves on the questions of what equality and liberation ought to look like and how they might be achieved . But it is an elitism that , while always contested, has never strayed far from the fraught and problematic consensus that “singular male leadership”¶ (Edwards 2012, 10) constitutes a

necessary precondition for black empowerment. The patriarchal implications that underwrite such an understanding of the intellectual as leader rely on an implicit analogy between the race and the bourgeois family in which the latter

provides an idealized, naturalized asymmetry of power and privilege that obtains between the leader and the led, the speaker and the spoken for. Since the naturalization of this intellectual-privileging analogy gives it a taken-for-granted quality, it can reproduce itself by way of habits , concepts , and frameworks that give it a more innocuous appearance . This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the now commonsense invocation of “black community” such that the latter

supplies as an idealized, univocal conglomeration of collective interests (Reed 1999a, 134), a community that can be invoked as such because it is not internally riven by socially structured differences.

What all of this suggests is that the critical Ethnic Studies intellectual does not simply intervene into or transform epistemologies ; but that her position as intellectual is the complicated outcome of historically sedimented epistemologies and relations of power. It suggests, moreover, that our theories of intellectual work are problematically incomplete if we do not confront the extent to which we are made by that which we seek to oppose. There is nothing about our position in the academy , however marginal , that is innocent of power , nor is there any practice that will afford us an exteriority to the historical and geopolitical determinations of the place from which we speak , write , research , teach , organize , and learn . No longer can Ethnic Studies stake its

institutional life on the promise that it will be a site for the production of “organic intellectuals” — intellectuals who, rather than working to consolidate the hegemonic order of things , represent an emergent and potentially revolutionary class .

Rather, it is from here , from within a particular position of and in complicity , from within constitutive contradiction , that our work necessarily begins . This lesson seems particularly important to stress in a context such as Ethnic Studies, where the intellectual’s investment in her own work is performed in and routed through the belief that such work can, or at least should, be of world-transformative value, and where the political orientation of intellectual work is regularly utilized as an implicit, if not explicit, criterion for evaluating what work is and isn’t valuable.

What kind of intellectual practitioner is produced, we need to ask, when the political is situated as a normative figure in this way ? If critique is to be for Ethnic Studies a field- defining practice , it is also necessarily a site where our most extravagant fantasies about the meaning and possibilities of intellectual work are staged . Indeed, critique opens

powerfully onto scenes that narrativize the power of knowledge through individual and collective transformation, onto scenes in which the intellectual knowingly moves away from complicity in order to adopt, knowingly once again, a position of oppositionality to dominant modalities of power.

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Rage failsStone 4 (Alison Stone works for the Institute for Environment, and is a professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University, “Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 1.2, 2004, Accessed via GMU Libraries, Last Accessed 9/22/14) ELJ

An objection immediately arises to this strategic essentialist position. Any political strategy is effective only inasmuch as it allows agents to recognize and intervene into the real social events,

processes and forces which make up the social field. But it seems reasonable to think that a strategy can be effective , in this sense, only insofar as it embodies an accurate understanding of the character of social processes . This implies that a strategy of affirming fictitious commonalities among women will fail to facilitate effective action given a world where women do not really have any common social characteristics or locations. Rather, such a strategy appears destined to mislead women into fighting against difficulties which are either non-existent or— more likely—really affect only some privileged subgroup of women. This objection can be resisted,

however, as it (implicitly) is by Denise Riley in ‘ Am I That Name? ’. Riley claims that ‘it is compatible to suggest that “women” don’t exist—while maintaining a politics of “as if they existed”— since the world behaves as if they unambiguously did’. 15 In other

words, for Riley, the fiction that women share a common social experience is politically effective because the social world actually does treat women as if they comprise a unitary group. Riley

accepts that women are not a unitary group and that the socially prevalent idea that they are unified is false. Nevertheless, this false idea informs and organizes the practices and institutions that shape women’s experiences, so that those—very different—

experiences become structured by essentialist assumptions. A strategy of affirming fictitious commonalities therefore will be effective given this world in which (false) descriptive essentialist assumptions undergird women’s social existence . Riley’s argument has a problem, though: she cannot consistently maintain both that women’s social experience is fully diverse and that this experience is uniformly structured by essentialist assumptions . If essentialism informs and organizes the structures that shape women’s social experience, then this experience will be organized according to

certain shared models and will acquire certain common patterns and features. More concretely, the idea that women are a homogeneous group will structure social institutions so that they position all women homogeneously, leading to (at least

considerable areas of) shared experience. Thus, Riley (and other strategic essentialists)may be right that essentialist constructions are socially influential, but they cannot,

consistently with this, also maintain that descriptive essentialism is false. Furthermore, it is not obviously true that any uniform set of essentialist constructions informs all social experience. These constructions may all identify women as a homogeneous group, but they vary widely in their account of the context of women’s homogenous features. Consequently, these constructions will influence social structures in correspondingly varying directions, against which no counter-affirmation of

common experience can be expected to be effective Strategic essentialists, then, have attempted to resuscitate essentialism by arguing that it can take a merely political and non-descriptive form.

But this attempt proves unsuccessful , because one cannot defend essentialism on strategic grounds without first showing that there is a homogeneous set of essentialist assumptions that exerts a coherent influence on women’s social experience—which amounts to defending

essentialism on descriptive grounds(as well). Advocates of essentialism therefore need to show that it accurately describes social reality. Here, though, critics can retort that essentialism is descriptively false , since women do not

even share any common mode of construction by essentialist discourses. Yet this retort reinstates the problem of anti-essentialism: its paralysing effect on social criticism and political activism. Strategic essentialism has not resolved this problem, for it has not stably demarcated any merely political form of essentialism from the descriptive essentialism which critics have plausibly condemned as false and oppressive.

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Turns the aff—Post-modernist epistemology cause societal inaction by denying individual agency and value to life—historical-material epistemology is far superior.Skeggs, Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, 1991

[Beverley, “Postmodernism: What Is All the Fuss about?” British Journal of Sociology of Education, accessed date: 4-29-12 y2k]

This inability to theorise any form of power other than the local, presents particular problem for understanding the role of the state. Most postmodern theorists rely on Foucault's idea that systems of knowledge codify techniques and practices within localised contexts. Whilst Foucault can be exceedingly useful for understanding the role of education in the reproduction

of techniques of discipline and surveillance (Foucault, 1977; Ball, 1990) his analysis is less suited to any centralising apparatus .

The state simply becomes a multitude of local sites of micro-power: the imposition of the Education Reform Act in England and

Wales, and the responses to it, cannot be accounted for in postmodern terms alone. Educational research, or any ethnography, that attempts to understand the words and deeds of others is redundant for postmodernists . The world, according to postmodernists, is opaque; it is all lived on the surface. There is nothing that hides behind its surface appearances. It is not a case of people saying what they

mean-rather they don't mean anything-for there is not any meaning to be had; we are all just living simulcra, so it doesn't matter. Even Jameson (1981) conceives of the social totality, not as an entity that can in any sense be experienced directly, but as an absent cause inaccessible to us except in textual form. There is a complete absence of lived experience-other than that of the author-in post- modern accounts.

The methodology of play and gamesmanship suggested by Lyotard is an aimless epistemology. The concept of the multiple subject that postmodernists use is derived from a post-structuralist reworking of psychoanalysis. Althusser (1977) conceived of the subject as the site of intersection of a whole overdetermined welter of ideological discourses, noting the spurious nature of unity over the effectively interpellated subject. Foucault articulates the demotion of the subject from constitutive to constituted status. In relation to education, as early as 1981, Walkerdine sug- gested that we occupy a nexus of subjectivities in her examination of the construction of gendered identity. Jameson (1984) argues that the decentred, floating, fragmentary subject becomes the ideal target for advertising conceived as a system which no longer offers a 'magical' sanctuary from 'real' cares and needs, but provides instead an endless succession of vacatable positions for the 'desiring machines' which replace the repressed and alienated workers of the previous epoch. Whilst this may be theoretically useful, Shusterman (1988, TCS) argues that it can also be de-politicising; we cannot generate a general or even personal ethic from our functional role if we inhabit a

plurality of inadequately integrated roles both collectively and individually. For instance, Lyotard argues that we inhabit such a motley

variety of language-games and are shaped by so many forms of discourse that we can no longer say definitively who we are. Shusterman (1988) suggests that by denying the self's very existence and agency, intellectuals seek to legitimate political and social inaction , unjustifiable and unhappy complacency, even responsibility for their own lives and certainly the lives of others . Rather than referring to the modernist concept of alienated otherness, the postmodern questioning of

binary oppositions and exclusions le ads to the devel- opment of a play of differences : multiplicitous, heterogeneous and plural. To some theorists this offers liberating effects because, if the centre is seen as a construct and a fiction rather than a fixed and

unchangeable reality, the legiti- macy of it comes under scrutiny (Hutcheon, 1989). T he concepts of otherness and difference are also

useful for understanding racism as Bhabha and Hall show below. However, it can be d e-politicising : to equate women with otherness deprives the feminist struggle of any kind of specificity: what is repressed is not otherness but specific,

historically constituted agents. Owens (1988, B&R) pro- motes a utopian vision of a concept of difference without opposition; this leads Callinicos (1989) to award him first prize for the silliest argument for being so politically naive. Habermas (1987) accuses postmodernists

of being neo-conservatives. As Kellner (1988, TCS) points out, the postmodern world is devoid of meaning ; it is a universe of

nihilism where theories float in a void, unanchored in any secure harbour or mooring . Meaning requires depth , a hidden dimension, an unseen substratum; in postmodern society , however, everything is explicit, transparent, obscene . This is summed up by Kroker & Cook's (1988) description of politics, written, of course, in the postmodern mode: Politics becomes the flashing anus of promises of the better world constantly present as the carousel becomes the succession of white strobelike flashes and as the waste system runs into the now of party

Post-modern epistemology results in extinction—engaging with the material reality is necessary for survival.Morris, Emeritus professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, 1997

[Brian, “In Defence of Realism and Truth Critical reflections on the anthropological followers of Heidegger” Critique of Anthropology September 1997 vol. 17 no. 3 313-340, SAGEpub, accesed date: 4-28-12 y2k]

Post-modernist scholars exclaim with some stridency, the ’dissolution’, the ’erasure’ or the ’end’ of truth, reason, history, nature, the self, science and philosophy - misleadingly identifying all these terms with conceptions that are transcendental, ahistoric and absolutist. They thus appear to see nothing between the so-called ’god’s eye’ point of view, a transcendental perspective beyond time and space, and local - supposedly fragmented, undecidable and indeterminable - discourses (Hollinger, 1994: 81). In the process, a sense of common humanity , of human capacities , of human praxis , of human- history is lost . There is no sense of a human life-world - ’an infinitive surrounding world of life’ common to all people, as Husserl expressed it (1970: 139), that is prior and distinct both from cultural world views and transcendentalism. Yet the postmodernists nevertheless recoil from the theoretical implications of their own rather prophetic declarations, and with equal emphasis proclaim that their ’theory’ does not entail either linguistic (cultural) idealism or relativism (Flax, 1995: 155; Hollinger, 1994: 98). They could hardly do otherwise, for outside the groves of academia, and their reified and ’scholastic’ discourses, the natural and social worlds are experienced as a reality, and we experience also a shared humanity that is not reducible to the fragmented discourses of local cultures.

What exists, and how the world is constituted, depends, of course on what particular ontology or ’world view’ (to use Dilthey’s

term) is being expressed, although in terms of social praxis the reality of the material world is always taken for granted for human survival depends on acknowledging and engaging with this world . As Marx expressed it, we are always engaged in a ’dialogue with the real world’ (1975: 328). It is important then to defend a realist perspective, one Marx long ago described as

historical materialism. It is a metaphysics that entails the rejection both of contemplative materialism (the assumption that there is a direct unmediated relationship between consciousness [language] and the world) and constructivism. The latter is just old-fashioned idealism in modern guise, the emphasis being on culture, language and discourses, rather than on individual perception (Berkeley) or a universal cognition (Kant). This approach may also be described as dialectical naturalism (Bookchin, 1990), transcendental or critical realism (Bhaskar, 1978: 25; Collier,

1994), or constructive realism (Ben-Ze’ev, 1995: 50) - recognizing the significant social and cognitive activity of the human agent, but acknowledging the ontological independence and causal powers of the natural world. As Mark Johnson simply puts it:

’How we carve up the world will depend both on what independent of us, and equally on the referential scheme we bring to bear, given our purposes, interests, and goals’ (1987: 202). Our engagement with the world is thus always

mediated. Equally important is the fact that we are always, as Marx put it, engaged in a ’dialogue’ with the material world .

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The affirmative’s framing of the ballot in the name of subjective empowerment and structuring the debate in terms of primacy on social location takes part in a legacy of progressivism that has been co-opted and grafted onto the dominate managerialism of status quo capitalismStandish 97 [Paul Standish, Institute for Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Dundee, Heidegger and the Technology of Further Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1997]

Contemporary further education has been shaped by a strange alliance of forces . Predominant amongst these has been what

might be called the new managerialism with its vocabulary of efficiency and effectiveness, choice and markets . This has been linked to a limited extent and somewhat incongruously with a certain legacy of progressivism . Slogans of

1960s child-centred primary education - learning through doing, group work, experiential learning, integration - have been grafted onto the dominant managerialism in such a way that lecturing staff of apparently contrary political and pedagogical persuasions have been `brought on board'. This new progressivism has been formed by a confluence of ideas from a variety of sources, some specifically concerned with the education of adults: the notions of empowerment and the pedagogy of oppression derived from Paolo Freire; the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers; the identification of experience as a defining characteristic of adult education in the `andragogy' of Malcolm Knowles.¶ Change has been the order of the day and this has gone hand in hand with the provision of a new style of initial and in-service education and training, the latter typically involving short and specifically targeted courses or training days. In the eyes of the new management this type of staff development is crucial to success. New

social circumstances necessitate changes in the traditional attitudes and expectations of staff. New learning methods (capitalising on

information technology) make possible the more efficient use of resources. Staff must come to see themselves not as lecturers, nor even as teachers in any conventional didactic sense, but as facilitators of learning . ¶ Proponents of this new further education have constructed an over-simplified picture of traditional further education as a target . This is a picture of subject specialists with little commitment to students, where facts are presented in a non-interactive way and learners are thought of as passive receptacles . It is necessary to dispense with this crude caricature of bad practice , an easy target which ultimately does not serve the case for a new further education well. Not that the existence of bad traditional practice should be denied: entrenched attitudes, lack of commitment to widened access, impatience with the new types of student, and nostalgia about `standards' have stood in the way of the real opportunities that changing conceptions of further education and new technology provide. New management has exaggerated these failings, however, to smooth the path for the changes it seeks to introduce .

The aff gets it wrong – Capitalist consumer culture relies on counter-culture difference as a marketing strategy – This makes them complicit with American exceptionalism - Turns solvencySznaider and Winter 3 [Natan Sznaider, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv, and Rainer Winter, sociologist, Professor of Media Theory and Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization, 2003 Liverpool University Press, Introduction, Pg. 2-3]cd

The increasing popularity of the idea of globalization in sociology is connected to the fact that many of today’s problems cannot be grasped adequately on the level of nation states, but only through the analysis of global (transnational) processes. In this way, the influence of Hollywood, McDonald’s or Burger King fast food and Nike sports shoes and accessories refers to global processes of production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities, where there is no doubt that American

products dominate. In one critical interpretation, a ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’ (Sklair 1998) has been analysed, which aims to include as many social groups and cultural identities as possible worldwide. Participation in consumption does not take place in a Fordistic scenario whereby cultures become more uniform and standardized, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor

W. Adorno believed in their famous theory of the culture industry (1972). Rather the (global) market actually demands differences which are the basis for the development of marketing strategies . Critics believe that flexible and mobile organizations offer every

Western social group the very consumer commodities that they demand to develop and to express their identity in the framework of the ‘ politics of identity’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 152ff.). Even counter-cultures are deeply integrated into the transnational consumer world, which penetrates into our everyday lives . According to Fredric Jameson (1998: 64), evolving within this consumerism there are ‘developing forces that are North American in origin and result from the unchallenged primacy of the USA today and thus the “American way of life” and American mass media culture’ . His interpretation suggests that the ‘new world culture’ is dominated by the USA .

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Their rev gets crushedFlaherty 5 http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html¶ USC BA in International Relations, researcher in political affairs, activist and organic farmer in New Zealand¶ In order to understand the national security implications of militant electronic piracy, an examination of conventional insurgency against the American Corporate State is necessary.

THE NATURE OF ARMED INSURGENCY AGAINST THE ACS Any violent insurgency against the ACS is sure to fail and will

only serve to enhance the state's power . The major flaw of violent insurgencies, both cell based (Weathermen Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations etc.) and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is that they are attempting to attack the system using the same tactics the ACS has already mastered: terror and psychological operations. The ACS attained primacy through the effective application of terror and psychological operations. Therefore, it has far more skill and experience in the use of these tactics than any upstart could ever hope to attain .4 This makes the ACS impervious to traditional insurgency tactics. - Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus The ACS employs a full time counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources that are unimaginable to most would be insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe actually is . Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists. Whether or not political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political activity, they are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS. The U.S. military classifies political activism as “low intensity conflict.” The scale of warfare (in terms of intensity) begins with individuals distributing anti-government handbills and public gatherings with anti-government/anti-corporate themes. In the middle of the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to as Operations Other than War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right hand side of the graph is global thermonuclear war. What is important to remember is that the military is concerned with ALL points along this scale because they represent different types of threats to the ACS. Making distinctions between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence

services is no longer necessary. After September 11, 2001, all national security assets would be brought to bear against any U.S. insurgency movement. Additionally, the U.S. military established NORTHCOM which designated the U.S. as an active military operational area. Crimes involving the loss of corporate profits will increasingly be treated as acts of terrorism and could garner anything from a local law enforcement response to activation of regular military forces. Most of what is commonly referred to as “political activism” is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary component of political control. Letters-to-the-editor... Calls-to-elected-representatives... Waving banners... “Third” party political activities... Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech zones... Political activism amounts to an utterly useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise

that is sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency teams routinely monitor these activities, attend the meetings, join the groups and take on leadership roles in the organizations. It's only a matter of time before some individuals determine that political activism is a honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate state knows that some small percentage of the peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in activists will probably do one of two things; drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways. If the clued-in activist drops his or her political activities, the ACS wins. But what if the clued-in activist

refuses to give up the struggle? Feeling powerless, desperation could set in and these individuals might become increasingly radicalized. Because the corporate state's counterinsurgency operatives have infiltrated most political activism groups, the radicalized members will be easily identified, monitored and eventually compromised/turned, arrested or executed. The ACS wins again .

Ensures massive genocidal backlash- only a political space can solveEmery 7 Phd, Kathy, “ The Limits of Violent Resistance,” For the Western Edition, August 27, 2007 http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/Emery/westernedition/Sept07WestEd.pdf

The August 15th editorial for SF Bayview concluded that the only way to stop gentrification in the Bayview is to “go to war.” Through all our marching and complaining and testifying at City Hall, our “City Fathers” still aren’t listening. At this point, sadly, I don’t think for

a minute that anything is going to change if we continue to go the Martin route. I think we need to channel Malcolm and the Panthers —and

start making some moves instead of making some noise. I need some soldiers on my side, and as much as I am sure that there are people who

are willing to protest, I need some people next to me who are willing to go to war. By any means necessary. To me, the really sad thing, is that the editorialist, Ebony Sparks, believes that there are only two “routes” or means of opposition to the dominant/white power structure—that pursued by Martin Luther King Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference or that pursued by

Malcolm X and West Coast Black Panther Parties. Sparks apparently lumps the very different strategies employed by SNCC (Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) into those employed by the SCLC and NAACP. She also assumes that “marching, and complaining and testifying” is what constitutes the full range of tactics employed by the SCLC. This could not be

further from the truth. While I am completely sympathetic and share Sparks’ impatience with the lack of people power in the Bay Area, I think she does not appreciate the severe limitations and ramifications of violent resistance to the powers-that-be. In fact, any attempts to resist gentrification violently would be used as an excuse to make all the “undesirable” Bayview residents disappear that much more quickly . The state, especially in the era of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, can out-gun, out-infiltrate, and out-manipulate any individual or group of people. To “go to war” with City Hall is to attack it at it’s strongest point, a suicidal Pickett’s Charge, if you will.

Debate as a dialogue ensures all parties receive a fair opportunity Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RE- CONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and the Director of Debate at Samford University, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)

Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affi rmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements . While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact,

the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affi rmative reciprocally

sets the neg ative . The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When

one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers . However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component . A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice . Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect , a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular neg ative strategies . Unprepared,

one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue . They are unable to “understand

what ‘went on...’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action . We assume that argument,

discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate themselves to rules of discussion, are the best ways to decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause...If we are to be equal...relationships among equals must find expression in many

formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case

on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of

the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them

from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts.