killing the k

LYNBROOK 05-06 KILLING THE K

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This is not Nam, this is bowling, there are rules

KILLING THE K INDEX

KILLING THE K INDEX.......................................................................................................................................................................1 CONSEQUENTIALISM GOOD ............................................................................................................................................................2 STATE GOOD – MURRAY ...................................................................................................................................................................4 WORKING WITHIN THE STATE GOOD – ZIZEK .........................................................................................................................5 STATE GOOD - COUNTER REVOLUTIONS ....................................................................................................................................8 STATE GOOD – SEDGWICK ...............................................................................................................................................................9 REALISM INEVITABLE (THAT MEANS THE K HAS NO SOLVENCY) ..................................................................................10 CAPITALISM KEY TO VALUE OF LIFE ........................................................................................................................................11 ABANDONING CAPITALISM LEADS TO TRANSITION WARS................................................................................................12 ABANDONING CAPITALISM LEADS TO COMMUNISM ...........................................................................................................14 CAPITALISM KEY TO TECHNOLOGY ..........................................................................................................................................15 CAPITALISM KEY TO RESOURCES...............................................................................................................................................17 CAPITALISM KEY TO PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR.....................................................................................................................18 CAPITALISM KEY TO PREVENT TERRORISM...........................................................................................................................19

NOTE: MOST PEOPLE WHO RUN KRITIKS WILL HAVE A FRAMEWORK WITH LIKE

OPPRESSION/MORAL WORTH AS, UTILIZING THESE CARDS MEANS YOU PROBABLY NEED

TO MAKE SOME UTILITARIAN/CONSEQUENTIALISM ARGUMENTS (THE CARDS ARE

PROVIDED TO DO SO)

-PATRICK


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CONSEQUENTIALISM GOOD

1. DISREGARDING THE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR ACTIONS IS IMMORAL


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2. I CONTROL THE ONLY INTERNAL LINK INTO ETHICS, STABILITY IS A PRE-REQUISITE

TO ANY APPLICATION OF MORALITY OR ETHICS


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STATE GOOD – MURRAY

THE STATE DOESN’T LIKE IT WHEN YOU RUN AWAY, IT WILL CRUSH YOU


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WORKING WITHIN THE STATE GOOD – ZIZEK

1. OUR DEMAND SERVES AS A METAPHOR AROUND WHICH LARGER SOCIAL STRUGGLES

CAN CONDENSE—THE DEMAND FOR AUTO-MOBILITY SERVES AS A METAPHOR FOR

SOCIAL MOBILITY AND A BROADER CRITIQUE OF DOMINATION IN THE SYSTEM AS A

WHOLE

ZIZEK, SENIOR RESEARCHER AT THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL STUDIES (LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA), 1999 [SLAVOJ, THE TICKLISH SUBJECT,

P. 204, 206-209]

Let us recall the standard example of a popular protest (mass demonstration, strike, boycott) directed at a specific point, that is,

focusing on a particular demand (‘Abolish that new tax! Justice for the imprisoned! Stop exploiting that natural resource!’…) –

the situation becomes politicized when this particular demand starts to function as a metaphoric

condensation of the global opposition against Them, those in power, so that the protest is no longer

actually just about the demand, but about the universal dimension that resonates in that particular

demand (for this reason, protesters often feel somehow deceived when those in power against whom their protest was addressed simply accept their demand – as if,

in this way, the have somehow frustrated them, depriving them of the true aim of their protest in the very guise of accepting their demand). What post-

politics tends to prevent is precisely this metaphoric universalization of particular demands: post-politics

mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall demand (complaint)

of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content – no wonder this suffocating closure gives birth to

‘irrational’ outbursts as the only way to give expression to the dimension beyond particularity. […]

It is clear that the protesting crowds in the DDR, Poland and the Czech Republic 'wanted something else,’ a utopian

object of impossible Fullness designated by a multiplicity of names ('solidarity', 'human. rights', etc.), not

what they actually got. There are two possible reactions to this gap between expectations and reality; the

best way to capture them is by reference to the well-known opposition between fool and knave. The fool is

a simpleton, a court jester who is allowed to tell the truth precisely because the 'performative power' (the

sociopolitical efficacy) of his [OR HER] speech is suspended; the knave is the cynic who openly states the truth, a

crook who tries to sell the open admission of his crookedness as honesty, a scoundrel who admits the need for

illegitimate repression in order to maintain social stability. Following the fall of Socialism, the knave is a

neoconservative advocate of the free market, who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as

counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool is a multiculturalist 'radical' social critic who, by means

of his ludic procedures destined to 'subvert' the existing order, actually serves as its supplement. With regard to

Eastern Europe, a knave dismisses the 'third way' project of Neues Forum in the ex-DDR as hopelessly outdated utopianism, and exhorts us to accept cruel market

reality; while a fool insists that the copse of Socialism has actually opened up a Third Way, a possibility left unexploited by the Western recolonization of the East.

This cruel reversal of the sublime into the ridiculous was, of course, grounded in the fact that there was a double misunderstanding at work in the public (self-

)perception of social protest movements (from. Solidarity to Neues Forum) in the last years of Eastern European Socialism. On the one hand, there were the attempts of the ruling nomenklatura to reinscribe these events in their police/political framework, by distinguishing between 'honest critics' with whom one could discuss matters in

a calm, rational, depoliticized atmosphere, and a bunch of extremist provocateurs who served foreign interests.36. The battle was thus not only for higher wages and

better conditions, but also – and above all – for the workers to be acknowledged as legitimate partners in negotiating with representatives of the regime – the moment the powers that be were forced to accept this, the battle was in a way already won.37 When these movements exploded in a broad mass phenomenon, their demands for

freedom and democracy (and solidarity and…) were also misperceived by Western commentators who saw in them confirmation that the people of the East also want

what the people in the West already have: they automatically translated these demands into the Western liberal-democratic notion of freedom (multiparty

representational political game cum global market economy). Emblematic to the point of caricature here was the figure of Dan

Rather, the American news reporter, on Tiananmen Square in 1989, standing in front of a copy of the

Statue of Liberty and claiming that this statue says everything about what the protesting students were

demanding (in short, if you scratch the yellow skin of a Chinese, you find an American). What this statue

actually stood for was a utopian longing that had nothing to do with the real USA (incidentally, it was the

same with the original immigrants to America, for whom the view of the statue stood for a utopian

longing that was soon crushed). The perception of the American media thus offered another example of

the reinscription of the explosion of what, as we have seen, Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté (the

unconditional demand for freedom-equality which explodes any positive order) within the confines of a

given order.


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Are we, then, condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave and a fool, or is

there a tertium datur? Perhaps the contours of this tertium datur can be discerned via reference to the fundamental European legacy. When one says

'European legacy', every self-respecting leftist intellectual has the same reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture as such: he reaches for his gun and starts to fire

accusations of proto-Fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism.... Is it possible, however, to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political tradition? Yes, if we follow Ranciére and identify as the core of this tradition the unique gesture of democratic political subjectivization: it was this politicization proper which re-emerged

violently in the disintegration of Eastern European Socialism. From my own political past, I remember how, after four journalists were arrested

and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988, I participated in the 'Committee for the

protection of the human rights of the four accused'. Officially, the goal of the Committee was simply to

guarantee fair treatment for the four accused; however, the Committee turned into the major

oppositional political force, practically the Slovene version of the Czech Civic Forum or East German Neues Forum, the body which co-ordinated

democratic opposition, a de facto representative of civil society.

The Committee's programme consisted of four items; the first three directly concerned the accused, while the 'devil in the detail', of course, was the fourth item, which said that the Committee wanted to clarify the entire background of the arrest of the four accused, and thus contribute to creating circumstances in which such arrests

would no longer be possible – a coded way of saying that we wanted the abolition of the existing Socialist regime. Our demand 'Justice for the four

accused!' started to function as the metaphoric condensation of the demand for the global overthrow of

the Socialist regime. For that reason, in almost daily negotiations with the Committee, Communist Party officials were always

accusing us of a 'hidden agenda', claiming that the liberation of the four accused was not our true goal – that we were 'exploiting and manipulating

the arrest and trial for other, darker political goals'. In short, the Communists. wanted to play the 'rational' depoliticized

game: they wanted to deprive the slogan 'Justice for the four accused!' of its explosive general

connotation, and reduce it to its literal meaning, which concerned just a minor legal matter; they cynically

claimed that it was we, the Committee, who were behaving 'non-democratically' and manipulating the fate of the accused, using global pressure and blackmailing

strategies instead of focusing on the particular problem of their plight.

This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of

interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global

restructuring of the entire social space. There is a clear contrast between this subjectivization and today's proliferation of postmodern 'identity

politics' whose goal is the exact opposite, that is, precisely the assertion of one's particular identity, of one’s proper place within the social structure. The postmodern

identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.) lifestyles perfectly fits the depoliticized notion of society, in which every particular group is 'accounted for', has its specific status (of victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures destined to guarantee social justice. The fact that this kind of justice meted out to

victimized minorities requires an intricate police apparatus (for identifying the group in question, for punishing offenders against its rights – how legally to define

sexual harassment or racial injury?, and so on – for providing the preferential treatment which should compensate for the wrong this group has suffered) is deeply significant: what is usually praised as 'postmodern politics' (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution must be negotiated within the 'rational' global order

allocating its particular component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of politics proper.

2. SUBVERSIVE STRATEGIES FAIL—IT’S BETTER TO READ THE LETTER OF THE LAW

AGAINST ITSELF AND WORK WITHIN THE SYSTEM

ZIZEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 1998 [SLAVOJ, “WHY DOES THE LAW NEED AN OBSCENE

SUPPLEMENT?” LAW AND THE POSTMODERN MIND, P. ELECTRONIC]

When, in the late eighteenth century, universal human rights were proclaimed, this universality, of course,

concealed the fact that they privilege white, men of property; however, this limitation was not openly

admitted, it was coded in apparently tautological supplementary qualifications like "all humans have rights, insofar as they truly are. rational and

free," " which then implicitly excludes the mentally ill, "savages," criminals, children, women.'. . So, if, in this situation,

a poor black woman disregards this unwritten-implicit, qualification and demands human rights, also for

herself, she just takes the letter of the discourse of rights "more literally than it was meant" (and thereby

redefines its universality, inscribing it into a different hegemonic chain). "Fantasy" designates precisely

this unwritten framework that tells us how are we to understand the letter of Law. The lesson of this is that-

sometimes, at least-the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the

underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy that sustains it. Is-at a certain level, at least-this not the

outcome of the long conversation between Josepf K. and the priest that follows the priest's narrative on the Door of the Law in The Trial?-the uncanny effect of this

conversation does not reside in the fact that the reader is at a loss insofar as he lacks the unwritten interpretive code or frame of reference that would enable him to discern the hidden Meaning, but, on the contrary, in that the priest's interpretation of the parable on the Door of the Law disregards all standard frames of unwritten

rules and reads the text in an "absolutely literal" way. One could also approach this deadlock via. Lacan's notion of the specifically symbolic mode of deception:

ideology "cheats precisely by letting us know that its propositions (say, on universal human rights)' are


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not to be read a la lettre, but against the background of a set of unwritten rules. Sometimes, at least, the most

effective anti-ideological subversion of the official discourse of human rights consists in reading it in an

excessively "literal" way, disregarding the set of underlying unwritten rules. The need for unwritten rules thus bears

witness to, confirms, this vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices that must never actually take place since they would disintegrate the

system, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. One can see how unwritten

rules are correlative to, the obverse of, the empty symbolic gesture and/or the forced choice: unwritten rules prevent the subject from effectively accepting what is offered in the empty gesture, from taking the choice literally and choosing the impossible, that the choice of which destroys the system. In the Soviet Union of the

1930s and 1940s, to take the most extreme example, it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was perhaps even more prohibited to enounce publicly this

prohibition, i.e., too state that one is prohibited to criticize Stalin-the system needed to maintain the appearance that one is allowed to criticize Stalin, i.e., that the absence of this criticism (and the fact that there is no opposition party or movement, that the Party got 99.99% of the votes at elections) simply demonstrates that Stalin

is effectively the best and (almost) always right. In Hegelese, this appearance qua appearance was essential.

This dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the System also enables us to

denounce the ultimate racist and/or sexist trick, that of "two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand":

when women demand' simple equality, quasi-"feminists" often pretend to offer them "much more" (the role

of the warm and wise "conscience of society," elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination ...)-the only proper answer to

this offer, of course, is "No, thanks! Better is the enemy of the Good! We do not want more, just

equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("Why reach for the moon, when we can have the stars?") are wrong. It is homologous with

the native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a

politically correct progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that, he is thereby renouncing his very unique

prerogative, the authentic native culture and tradition-no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my

part of consumerist alienation! ... A modest demand of the excluded group for the full participation at the

society's universal rights is much more threatening for the system than the apparently much more

"radical" rejection of the predominant "social values" and the assertion of the superiority of one's own

culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are "ontologically false," lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be

acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the false elevation of women that makes them "too good" for the banality of

men's rights.

3. ABANDONING THE STATE LEADS TO MASSIVE SELF-DESTRUCTION, INSTEAD WE NEED

TO CHANGE THE IDEOLOGICAL COORDINATES OF THE STATE TO ACTUALLY SOLVE

THEIR CRITIQUE

ZIZEK, SENIOR RESEARCHER AT THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, ORGANS

WITHOUT BODIES: DELUZE AND CONSEQUENCES, P.72-4]

However, even if there is a grain of truth in the reproach of Deleuze's "dualism," and in the remark that the opposition(s) between nomadic and

State, molecular and molar, and so forth is not simply the opposition between the Good (nomadic...) and the Evil (state...), Deleuze is as far as possible from asserting any kind of complementarity between the two poles (in the sense that, while the molar State alone is oppressive, suffocating

the flow of desire, the opposite extreme, as the total abolition of the State, would mean "regression" into the psychotic, self-destructive rage of the-pure, pre-Oedipal

flow of desire). So, what we ostensibly need is the right balance between the two. This is how, among others, Julia Kristeva

reads and appropriates Deleuze: while praising his liberation of the creativity of desire from the constraints of State Power, she nonetheless warns of the

destructive consequences of seeing in the State only a negative barrier to be abolished: to avoid direct

self-destruction, the total revolutionary abolition of the (existing) State always reverts into a new Order,

even more oppressive than the previous one. In this sense, Kristeva praises revolt-the liberation of the "wild" pre-Oedipal creative forces, the

liberation that is not primarily political but more intimate, psychic, religious, artistic... -and condemns revolution as the installation of a new Order, the coagulation of the creative energies of the revolt." From a truly Hegelian, Deleuzian, and/or Lacanian approach (a strange series of equivalences indeed), this line of argumentation

should be rejected in toto: true radicality does not consist in going to the extreme and destroying the system (i.e., in

disturbing too much the balance that sustains it) but consists in changing the very coordinates that define this balance. Say,

once we accept the social-democratic idea of the modern capitalist market economy cum welfare state, it is easy to claim that one should avoid both extremes (i.e., the

total freedom of the market, on one hand, and excessive state intervention, on the other hand) and find the right balance between the two. However, the true

revolution would consist in transforming the very overall balance of the social edifice, in enforcing a new

structural principle of social life that would render the very field of the opposition between market and

state obsolete. Or, let us take the platitude about the right balance between the permissive indulgence of spontaneity and the rigors of discipline. Revolution is

not the assertion of spontaneity and rejection of every discipline but the radical redefinition of what counts as true spontaneity or discipline.


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STATE GOOD - COUNTER REVOLUTIONS

1. AVOIDING STRATEGIC USE OF THE STATE WILL GENERATE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONS

THAT ARE GENOCIDAL AND NUCLEAR

Martin Shaw, 2001 [Professor of International Studies and Politics at the University of Sussex, “The Unfinished Global Revolution”, Review of International Studies V. 27]


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STATE GOOD – SEDGWICK

ABANDONING THE STATE WILL NEVER CREATE TRUE SOCIAL PROGRESS, THE ONLY

HOPE FOR SUCCESS IS BY WRAPPING THE THEORETICAL GOALS OF THE KRITIK INTO

STATE REFORM


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REALISM INEVITABLE(THAT MEANS THE K HAS NO SOLVENCY)

REALISM IS HERE TO STAY


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CAPITALISM KEY TO VALUE OF LIFE

1. CAPITALISM IS KEY TO VALUE OF LIFE, AND ACTUALIZING CHOICES. ALL OTHER

SYSTEMS ARE SLAVERY


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ABANDONING CAPITALISM LEADS TO TRANSITION WARS

1. ABANDONING CAPITALISM LEADS TO TRANSITION WARS

2. TRANSITION AWAY FROM CAPITALISM LEADS TO NUCLEAR WAR

3. TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM GENERATES RESISTANCE FROM THE ELITES CAUSING

WAR


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5. TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM INTENSIFIES CLASS CONFLICT INTO WAR


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ABANDONING CAPITALISM LEADS TO COMMUNISM

1. ESCAPING CAPITALISM LEADS TO COMMUNISM

2. COMMUNISM LEADS TO GENOCIDE AND MURDER OF MILLIONS


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CAPITALISM KEY TO TECHNOLOGY

1. CAPITALISM IS KEY TO TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH WHICH IS KEY TO PREVENTING

DISEASE

2. THE IMPLICATION OF NOT STOPPING DISEASE IS EXTINCTION

3. CAPITALISM IS KEY TO SPACE EXPLORATION


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4. SPACE EXPLORATION KEY TO SURVIVAL


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CAPITALISM KEY TO RESOURCES

1. CAPITALISM IS KEY TO INNOVATION WHICH IS NECESSARY TO SOLVE RESOURCE

SHORTAGES


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CAPITALISM KEY TO PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR

1. DECREASE IN THE US ECONOMY LEADS TO GLOBAL NUCLEAR WAR Charles Bearden 2000 [6/24/04, http://www.seaspower.com/EnergyCrisis-Bearden.htm]

History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will

have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass

destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, suppose a starving North Korea {[7]}

launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including U.S. forces there, in a spasmodic suicidal response. Or suppose a desperate China — whose long-

range nuclear missiles (some) can reach the United States — attacks Taiwan. In addition to immediate responses, the mutual treaties involved in such

scenarios will quickly draw other nations into the conflict, escalating it significantly.

Strategic nuclear studies have shown for decades that, under such extreme stress conditions, once a few nukes are launched, adversaries

and potential adversaries are then compelled to launch on perception of preparations by one's adversary.

The real legacy of the MAD concept is this side of the MAD coin that is almost never discussed. Without effective defense, the only chance a nation

has to survive at all is to launch immediate full-bore pre-emptive strikes and try to take out its perceived foes as rapidly and massively as

possible.

As the studies showed, rapid escalation to full WMD exchange occurs. Today, a great percent of the WMD arsenals that will be unleashed,

are already on site within the United States itself {[8]}. The resulting great Armageddon will destroy civilization as we know

it, and perhaps most of the biosphere, at least for many decades.

2. CAPITALISM IS KEY TO SOLVE PROLIFERATION, DISEASE, FAMINE AND THE

ENVIRONMENT


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CAPITALISM KEY TO PREVENT TERRORISM

1. CAPITALISM IS KEY TO SOLVE POVERTY WHICH IN TURN SOLVES TERRORISM

2. AND TERRORISM LEADS TO GLOBAL NUCLEAR WAR

killing the k

Documents

capitalism key

rules state good murray

state good zizek

state good sedgwick

rules consequentialism

abandoning capitalism

state doesnt

ethics lynbrook