Tournament: TOC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Greenhill BE | Judge: Alston
The AC’c call for conservation and sustainability is nothing more than an aesthetic difference: it leaves the underlying logic of consumption untouched and recreates the world, and everything in it, as an object to be exploited and expended.  Turns case and is the root cause of all the AC harms. Stoekl ‘07: 

Nature has lost what we might call its autonomy; its model is no longer the bringing -forth of the flower bud, or the energy of the windmill (which “does not unlock energy from the wind currents in order to store it” 14), but the violent, commandeering, ordering, and stockpiling of energy by the human as challenging -forth. The human, now revealed as a sort of martial monster, is opposed, in its actions, to the bringing -forth that best characterized poeisis (a causal model in which the human plays only a part). And, Heidegger makes clear in another essay, “The Age of the World Picture,” reality itself in and through technology can only be grasped as a standing reserve, ripe for quantification, stockpiling, use, and disposal, if it is isolated in an objective “picture,” a coherent, passive, inert totality whose only aspect is that it can be brought -forth, by man, violently, in techné. “To represent” objectively (as the Rhine is represented by those who would harness its energy) is “to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself ” (Heidesser 1977, 132). “That the world becomes picture is one and the same even with the event of man’s becoming suiectum in the midst of that which is” (132). The rise of subjectivity, of the isolated, active self, conquering nature, storing its energy, is inseparable from the appearance of an “anthropology” through which “observation and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man” (133). Or, we might say, observation and teaching about the world become observation and teaching about man: the measurement of nature’s resources and their stockpiling—and wanton expenditure—are inseparable from the stockpiling and wastage of the human in techno - scientific methods. Man the subject for whom the objective world exists as a resource is quickly reversed and becomes man the object who, under the right conditions, is examined, marshaled, and then releases a specific amount of energy before he himself is definitively depleted. Although Heidegger does not stress this point in “The Age of the World Picture,” he does make this point elsewhere, noting what for him is the inevitable link between the transformation of the world into a giant energy reserve and the transformation of man into a resource to be exploited in, for example, concentration camps.8 Subject/ object; this is the infernal duo that, for Heidegger, characterizes modernity. The world is quantified in order to be exploited by “man,” but man himself is a consequence of this mode of expenditure. The man who hoards, who works to preserve his individual existence and protect it from all threats, is inseparable from a natural world completely transformed and rendered “monstrous” by a kind of instrumental mania. Man himself becomes a resource to be scientifically investigated, fully known, perfected, made fully human (with an identity and consciousness) and put to use.9 This brief excursion through Heidegger on technology is useful, I think, to put the work of ideologists of suburbia and car culture, like Lomasky and Brooks, in perspective. We could argue, following Heidegger, that their version of car culture inevitably entails a subjectivity, one that, as in Heidegger, is both produced by their model and in turn produces it. The illusion “Man” derives his “freedom” from the quantification and commodification of natural resources: oil, to be sure, but also the steel, plastics, and other materials that go to make up the “autonomist” lifestyle. Utility as the autono mists conceive it is inseparable from a freedom that wastes, though they are notably reticent when it comes to discussing the consumption of resources on which their favorite lifestyle depends. Heidegger, although he does not explicitly pose the question of waste, certainly implies it: the Rhine, ruined by all those who exploit it, is a “resource” that has been squandered for the self -satisfied pleasures of domestic life and tourism. I have discussed the analyses of Lomasky and Brooks at such length because they are the most articulate and coherent defenders of the current culture in which we (attempt to) live. These proponents of the ideology of the current American fossil fuel regime valorize a lavish and ruinous wastage but do so in a way that masks it, invoking as they do utility: the squandering of vast amounts of wealth is necessary, indeed is a given, because we are necessarily engaged in developing to the fullest our nature as autonomous, free, individuals. As those free individuals we are the highest being on the earth (as Aristotle would remind us), the most developed. And as such we can be expected to reject any calls to conservation or sustainability. Heidegger, however, would note that our being, our subjectivity, is a quantifiable term that is a function of the very same movement, the very same bringing forth as techné, that renders the world a quantifiable mass ripe for exploitation. And such a subject, immediately transformed into an object, a standing reserve, warehoused in an institution (concentration camp, prison, army, hospital, school, freeway, suburb), is itself ripe for use and disposal. The vaunted subject of the autonomists is for that reason autonomous only in its slavery to a “monstrous” energy regime. Energy is surely wasted in a challenging, but it is a wastage that goes hand in hand with the production and wastage of a subjectivity that is closed in on itself, concerned with its own comfort, stability, and permanence. The freedom of car culture, of the fossil fuel era, is the freedom of a subject whose imperial grasp is inseparable from its weakness as a quantifiable “dust mote” (as Bataille would put it). Once we have seen the fundamental cult of subjectivity on the part of the autonomists, we can return and consider the model of subjectivity of the sustainability partisans. For them too the chief raison d’être of their model of the future is a subjectivity. Now, however, subjectivity entails not so much the lavish expenditure of a stockpiled energy (cars, freeways, consumer waste) as it does an even more rigorously stockpiled resource base. While Heidgegger’s retro -grouch analysis implied a wanton destruction of the stockpiled energy base (the concentration camp as extreme and no doubt self -exculpating example), the sustainability proponents imagine a standing reserve that would somehow not deplete but rather conserve the resources that go into it. “Humanity” would appropriate and store those resources in such a way that they would be perpetually ready to hand. But nature would still consist of a reserve to be tapped and resources to be expended; the goal of the operation would still be the furthering of the stable human subject, the master of its domain. Now the world is really to be useful, and nature is to be pristine exactly to the extent that that untouched state furthers man’s permanence and comfort on Earth. The quantified, mechanized destruction of Earth becomes the quantified, mechanized preservation of Earth.

The AC is trapped in the logic of quantification and maximization, where energy sources are brought forth as a mere standing reserve for continued human use, turning case, justifying absolute destruction of humanity, and leading to total war.  The only alternative is the logic of unproductive expenditure and sacrifice.  Stoekl 2:

Just as there are two energetic sources of economic value, then—muscle power and inanimate fuel power—so too there are two kinds of expenditure. The stored and available energy derived from fossil or inanimate fuel expenditure, for production or destruction, is different in quality, not merely in quantity, from muscular energy. The latter is profoundly more and other than the mere “power to do work.” No intimacy (in the Bataillean sense) can be envisaged through the mechanized expenditure of fossil fuels. The very use of fossil and nonorganic fuels—coal, oil, nuclear— implies the effort to maximize production through quantification, the augmentation of the sheer quantity of things. Raw material becomes, as Heidegger put it, a standing reserve, a measurable mass whose sole function is to be processed, used, and ultimately discarded.28 It is useful, nothing more (or less), at least for the moment before it is discarded; it is related to the self only as a way of aggrandizing the latter’s stability and position. There is no internal limit, no angoisse or pain before which we shudder; we deplete the earth’s energy reserves as blandly and indifferently as the French revolutionaries (according to Hegel) chopped off heads: as if one were cutting off a head of cabbage. “Good” duality has completely given way to “bad.” As energy sources become more efficiently usable—oil produces a lot more energy than does coal, in relation to the amount of energy needed to extract it, transport it, and dispose of waste (ash and slag)—more material can be treated, more people and things produced, handled, and dumped. Consequently more food can be produced, more humans will be born to eat it, and so on (the carrying capacity of the earth temporarily rises). And yet, under this inanimate fuels regime, the very nature of production and above all destruction changes. Even when things today are expended, they are wasted under the sign of efficiency, utility. This very abstract quantification is inseparable from the demand of an efficiency that bolsters the position of a closed and demanding subjectivity. We “need” cars and SUVs, we “need” to use up gas, waste landscapes, forests, and so on: it is all done in the name of the personal lifestyle we cannot live without, which is clearly the best ever developed in human history, the one everyone necessarily wants, the one we will fight for and use our products (weapons) to protect. We no longer destroy objects, render them intimate, in a very personal, confrontational potlatch; we simply leave items out for the trash haulers to pick up or have them hauled to the junkyard. Consumption (la consommation) in the era of the standing reserve, the framework (Ge - Stell), entails, in and through the stockpiling of energy, the stockpiling of the human: the self itself becomes an element of the standing reserve, a thing among other things. There can hardly be any intimacy in the contemporary cycle of production -consumption -destruction, the modern and degraded version of expenditure. As Bataille put it, concerning intimacy: Intimacy is expressed only under one condition by the thing la chose: that this thing fundamentally be the opposite of a thing, the opposite of a product, of merchandise: a burn -off consumation and a sacrifice. Since intimate feeling is a burn -off, it is burning -off that expresses it, not the thing, which is its negation. (OC, 7: 126; AS 132: italics Bataille’s) War, too, reflects this nonintimacy of the thing: fossil fuel and nuclear - powered explosives and delivery systems make possible the impersonal destruction of lives in great numbers and at a great distance. Human beings are now simply quantities of material to be processed and destroyed in wars (whose purpose is to assure the continued availability of fossil fuel resources). Killing in modern warfare is different in kind from that carried out by the Aztecs. All the sacrificial elements, the elements by which the person has been transformed in and through death, have disappeared.

The Alt is to embrace unproductive expenditure, a sacrifice of natural resources.   This entails an increase in resource extraction.  Conservation practices ignore the limit and re-inscribe the self as the center of concern, only the alt can solve.  
Stoekl 3 :

In accord with Bataille’s implicit ethical model, one can argue that the limits imposed by carrying capacity evoke two possible responses from societies. First, a society can recognize limits. Here, paradoxically, one violates limits, consciously transgresses them, so to speak, by recognizing them. Through various forms of ritual expenditure one ultimately respects limits by symbolically defying the very principle of conservation and measured growth—of, in other words, limits. “Spending without reserve” is the spending of that which cannot be reinvested because of the limit, and yet the very act of destruction is the transgression of the logic of the limit, which would require, in its recognition, a sage and conservative attentiveness to the dangers of excessive spending. If there is a limit to the production of goods and resources, however, we best respect and recognize that limit through its transgression—through, in other words, the destruction of precious but unusable energy resources. To attempt to reinvest, or put to use, the totality of those resources, to guarantee maximum productivity and growth, would only ignore the limit (rather than transgressing it), thereby eventually lowering the limit if not eliminating it entirely (elimination of carrying capacity, ecological destruction, desertification).25 For this reason, a theory of expenditure is inseparable from, is even indistinguishable from, a theory of depletion. Such an affirmation—of limits and expenditure—entails a general view of economy and, we might add, ecology. In positing such a respect for limits through their transgression, we forgo an individual concern, which would customarily be seen as the human one (but which is not, in Bataille’s view): a concern with personal survival, enrichment, and advancement. From a larger perspective, we forego the needs of Man as a species or moral category (or the needs of God as Man’s moral proxy). The supremacy of self-interest is tied for Bataille to the simple ignorance of limits: not their transgression, but their heedless violation. In the case of transgression of limits, we risk what might be personally comfortable or advantageous in order to attain a larger “glory” that is tied to unproductive expenditure and entails a possible dissolution of the self. From a general perspective, this expenditure is (as Bataille would say) on the scale of the universe; it must also be, in principle, on the scale of the carrying capacity of a given landscape or ecology (else the expenditure would very quickly cancel itself out).

All Ev from:
Stoekl, Allan. Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007. Print. Professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University,

Tournament: Blake | Round: 9 | Opponent: Some | Judge: Who can truly judge another
I'll be disclosing Blake stuff prior to the tournament on here.  Neg is going to be a couple of Ks, so far is DnG and a Sustainability K.  Aff is not decided yet.

Tournament: Bump | Round: 1 | Opponent: Neg | Judge:
These are the plan texts I will be reading on the aff for this topic, so they are predictable.  Also anything Tomasi posts

Plan Text:  The United States Federal Government should force the ABA to add an exception to Model Rules 1.6 to permit attorneys to be compelled to present exculpatory evidence that would be protected under attorney-client privilege when the two conflict after the death of the client.  The exception should stipulate to a due process analysis.

Plan Text:  The United States Federal Government should implement mandatory reporting laws for child abuse and force the ABA to add an exception to MR 1.6 in cases of child abuse as well as implement a training program for attorney’s to help them stop abuse.

Tournament: Blake | Round: 6 | Opponent: ALL | Judge: ALL
You can email me with any questions about the K Affs, requests for more lit on them, even stuff I haven't read in round, and really whatever other concerns you have. I don't claim to be anywhere near an expert on the lit, but if you want to ask me questions about the arguments, I'm willing to answer them and if you think I'm misrepresenting the viewpoint of the authors, feel free to let me know.

This also applies for any other philosophy I read in my cases.  Some people have already taken me up on this offer, but if you want any lit to cut or read, even if i haven't read it in round, I'll happily give it to you.

Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: All | Judge: All
I sometimes forget to put up cites or cases, so if you remember me running something that isn't up here send me a message and/or put it on ldleaks.  I'll be disclosing full text for now.

Contact:
rteehas@gmail.com

Tournament: BUMP | Round: 9 | Opponent: Some | Judge: At least one
Part One is Moral Point of View

Time to give up on the point of view of the universe, ethics and morality are grounded in the struggles of individuals with actual commitments that form their particular way of life.  This means that ethical theories must respond to the commitments people have that make them who they are.  Williams :

Government House utilitarianism had at least the merit of one kind of realism, inasmuch as it tried to find the theory an actual social location. It placed it in a particular body of people, the utilitarian elite (though it had a deluded idea of what such people might be like in reality.) Some versions of indirect utilitarianism fail to provide any location at all for the theory. They treat theory as transcendental to life, existing in a space quite outside the practice it is supposed to regulate or justify. In the psychological version, the temptation to do this is found in a certain picture of the time of theory: it is an hour in which the agent leaves himself and sees everything, including his own dispositions, from the point of view of the universe and then, returning, takes up practical life. But any actual process of theorizing of that sort would have to be part of life, itself a particular kind of practice. One cannot separate, except by an imposed and illusory dissociation, the theorist in oneself from the self whose dispositions are being theorized. In the case of indirect utilitarianism, this dissociation helps to disguise a particular difficulty, the conflict between the view the theorist has of these dispositions and the view of the world he has from those dispositions. Other difficulties arise from any attempt to see philosophical reflection in ethics as a jump to the universalistic standpoint in search of a justification, which is then brought back to everyday practice. They arise even if one requires the justification to be consistent in spirit with what is justified, as contractualism typically does and indirect utilitarianism does not. Any such picture makes in some degree a Platonic assumption that the reflective agent as theorist can make himself independent from the life and character he is examining. The belief that you can look critically at all your dispositions from the outside, from the point of view of the universe, assumes that you could understand your own and other people’s dispositions from that point of view without tacitly taking for granted a picture of the world more locally familiar than any that would be available from there; but neither the psychology nor the history of ethical reflection gives much reason to believe that the theoretical reasonings of the cool hour can do without a sense of the moral shape of the world, of the kind given in the everyday dispositions.

This means a) no utilitarianism since it view dispositions as having only instrumental value whereas we view our dispositions as having some essential value within our plan or life b) no contractualism or reflection based ethical theories since they all assume we can separate ourselves from our way of life in order to evaluate it.  This also implies internalism, since the only thing available from the first-person standpoint are our motivations

Part Two is The Nature of Moral Judgments

Moral epistemology, semantics, and ontology point to the relativity of moral judgments.  Moral concepts just describe a social world that we inhabit.  Absent an objective way to weigh between different uses of concepts, all moral statements are true and you affirm.  Delapp :
Moral epistemology explores the contours of moral knowledge itself—not the specific content of individual moral beliefs, but the conceptual characteristics of moral beliefs as a general epistemic category. Here, one of the biggest questions concerns whether moral knowledge involves claims about generic moral values such “goodness” or “wrongness” (so-called “thin” moral concepts) or whether moral knowledge may be obtained at the somewhat more concrete level of concepts such as “courage”, “intemperance”, or “compassion” (which seem to have a “thicker” descriptive content). The general methodology of the thick-thin distinction was popularized by Clifford Geertz (1973) following the introduction of the terminology by Gilbert Ryle (1968). Its specific application to metaethics, however, is due largely to Bernard Williams’ (1985) famous argument that genuine (that is, action-guiding) moral knowledge can only exist at the thicker level of concrete moral concepts. This represents what Williams called the “limits of philosophy,” since philosophical theorizing aims instead at more abstract, thin moral principles. Furthermore, according to Williams, this epistemological point about the thickness of moral knowledge has important implications for the ontology of moral values; namely, Williams defends a kind metaethical relativism on the grounds that, even if thin moral concepts such as “goodness” are universal across different societies, the more specific thick concepts that he thinks really matter to us morally are specified in often divergent ways, for example, two societies that both praise “goodness” may nonetheless have quite different understandings of what counts as “bravery”. 

Comes first because it frames the existence of those properties, our ability to know them, and our ability to express them.

Part 3 is Convergence

A necessary feature of our moral judgment is dealing with disagreement about morality.  Disagreements, unresolved, means that there is no moral system to turn to.  In order to deal with that we turn to the principles we converge upon, those that are consistent across belief systems.  Ethical convergence isn’t possible since our ethical concepts are specific to our particular form of life, for example we can think of a priest and knight saying that lying is wrong for either honor or sinfulness yet those terms in general justify different things, such as the knight killing out of honor, but we can converge on a method to determine which use of those terms is best.

The only convergence possible is one brought about through the pursuit of human excellence.  This is how we determine which cultural habitation is better or worse.  We must imagine the best social world for a human to inhabit.  Williams 2:

If the project succeeded, it would not simply be a matter of agreement on a theory of human nature. The convergence itself would be partly in social and psychological science, but what would matter would be a convergence to which scientific conclusions provided only part of the means. Nor, on the other hand, would there be a convergence directly on ethical truths, as in the other objectivist model. One ethical belief might be said to be in its own right an object of knowledge at the reflective level, to the effect that a certain kind of life was best for human beings. But this will not yield other ethical truths directly. The reason, to put it summarily, is that the excellence or satisfactoriness of a life does not stand to beliefs involved in that life as premise stands to conclusion. Rather, an agent’s excellent life is characterized by having those beliefs, and most of the beliefs will not be about that agent’s dispositions or life, or about other people’s dispositions, but about the social world. That life will involve, for instance, the agent’s using some thick concepts rather than others. Reflection on the excellence of a life does not itself establish the truth of judgments using those concepts or of the agent’s other ethical judgments. Instead it shows that there is good reason (granted the commitment to an ethical life) to live a life that involves certain those concepts and those beliefs.17 The convergence that signaled the success of this project would be a convergence of practical reason, by which people came to lead the best kind of life and to have the desires that belonged to that life; convergence in ethical belief would largely be a part and consequence of that process. One very general ethical belief would, indeed, be an object of knowledge at that level. Many particular ethical judgments, involving the favored thick concepts, could be known to be true, but then judgments of this sort (I have argued) are very often known to be true anyway, even when they occur, as they always have, in a life that is not grounded at the objective level. The objective grounding would not bring it about that judgments using those concepts were true or could be known: this was so already. But it would enable us to recognize that certain of them were the best or most appropriate thick concepts to use. Between the two extremes of the one very general proposition and the many concrete ones, other ethical beliefs would be true only in the oblique sense that they were the beliefs that would help us to find our way around in a social world which—on this optimistic program—was shown to be the best social world for human beings.

And, the question of the resolution is that of the lawyer’s role

a. Only the lawyer is torn between a respect for ACP and truth-seeking
b. The focus on ACP specifically places the conflict of the resolution in the role of the lawyer
c. The majority of the topic literature deals with the duties of the attorney and only with the rest of the justice system through the lens of attorney duties.  

This means that the lawyer just is the site of the resolutional conflict, all other interps assume mine.

Next, the function of the CJS terminates in the function of the lawyer in this case because the roles of individuals combine to meet the function of the CJS in general.  For example, the baliff need not himself seek the truth in order to be part of the CJS, rather his role fits together with the roles of the other members to jointly meet the function of the court.  This also means that you default to this absent an opposing method of characterizing the CJS because there is no other way to think under the rez since it assumes a CJS standpoint.  

And, The ABA, which outlines the duties of a lawyer, is a uniquely key agent on issues of ACP, so the rez is about the lawyer’s role.
Tolaj 12 writes
In the US, lawyers are subject to regulation from the judicial branch, self-regulation by the organized bar and private malpractice regulations. To comparatively understand the rules of ethics in the US and Kosovo, one must look to their respective codes. In the US, the established bar's code of ethics is the American Bar Association's (ABA) Model Rules of Professional Conduct and, in Kosovo, it is the Kosovo Chamber of Advocates' (KCA) Code of Professional Ethics for Lawyers PDF. While the KCA's ethics code is mandatory for all practicing lawyers in Kosovo, the ABA's model rules are not mandatory unless adopted by individual states. It should be noted, however, that the KCA's ethics code was largely drafted based on the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct. In the US, courts can hold a lawyer in contempt or can discipline a lawyer for misconduct. On the other hand, Article 42 of the KCA's ethics code states that, "a lawyer, during law practice, is obliged to always maintain court authority, of administrative bodies and other authorities to which he/she offers legal assistance and to express the proper respect." Similarly, Article 47 prohibits a lawyer from making "insulting declarations before the court or any underestimating opinions about court decisions or without reason, ask for exclusion of judges, accuse them etc." Furthermore, judges are vested with the power of warning, fining and/or removing lawyers from proceedings if they fail to obey court orders. Nevertheless, in the US, the increase in transactional lawyers, who rarely see the interior of a courtroom, has led to a questioning of judicial control over the profession. On the other hand, in Kosovo, most licensed lawyers practice individually, with the exception of a small number of lawyers who practice in recently established law firms. As such, there does not appear to be many obstacles preventing the courts from fining or disciplining licensed lawyers. However, difficulty arises with respect to unlicensed practitioners, who hold law degrees, but who have not been formally admitted to the profession, as they provide legal advice outside court facilities. In the US, lawyers also self-regulate through the ABA. The ABA has had a strong role in determining the ethical standards of the profession. It promulgated its Canons of Professional Ethics PDF in 1908, which was later adopted by many state bar associations. Ethics committees also established advisory canons, and several courts eventually began enforcing them as if they were rules of law. The canons remained in effect until 1970, when the ABA established the Model Code of Professional Responsibility PDF. Many courts cited this code as evidence of the law even in states where it had not been officially adopted. In 1983, the ABA replaced the code with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Although the ABA revised the model rules in 2002, it kept the format of the 1983 rules, but clarified some language and dealt with new issues that were only dimly foreseen in 1983. Because the ABA is a private organization and lacks the power to impose its rules, the code and rules are merely suggestions, unless and until a given jurisdiction enacts them as law. Nonetheless, they have been widely adopted by states as law. The Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo PDF, adopted on June 15, 2008, defines the bar as an independent profession that provides services "in the manner provided by law." The Law on the Bar PDF, enacted in 2009, has replaced the old 1979 Law on Advocacy, thus setting forth rules that are compatible with international standards. Article 20(1) obliges Kosovar lawyers to "affiliate with the Kosovo Chamber of Advocates," while Article 20(3) mandates the KCA to "regulate and control law practice in Kosovo." Under the new law, Kosovar lawyers "are subject to reasonable restrictions against disseminating confidential information, accepting representations that constitute conflicts of interest, and improperly discriminating against clients." Similarly, they are required by Article 14(1) "to participate in the free of charge system of the provision of legal assistance, financed in terms of public means." Moreover, Kosovar lawyers are also subject to the KCA's code of ethics, which sets forth the principles of the profession's ethics and provides for specific duties of lawyers. In the US, malpractice suits against lawyers were once a rarity. That is no longer so. Nonetheless, malpractice suits in Kosovo are still infrequent. Most complaints against lawyers are brought to the KCA's disciplinary bodies for disciplinary actions, pursuant to Articles 97-110 of the KCA's Model Code of Professional Responsibility. Most sanctions to date have consisted of reprimands, and most cases filed have not involved allegations of serious misconduct under the statute. In the US, the most successful malpractice cases have been for especially egregious conduct, such as the deliberate and willful neglect of a client matter to the extreme detriment of the client or of gross incompetence. Some of the common activities regulated by both the ABA and the KCA are: the principle of lawyer-client confidentiality, the duty of competent representation, the duty to charge reasonable fees, the prohibition of conflicts of interest, the duty to follow court rules and orders, the duty to engage in pro-bono service and the prohibition of client solicitation and advertising. Confidentiality, as one of the most important principles governing the relations between lawyers and clients, is treated with special care by both the ABA and the KCA's codes of ethics. There are three exceptions to the strict rule of confidentiality in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The first two exceptions are if an attorney believes the client is intending to commit a crime or fraud that is likely to result in imminent death or substantial bodily harm, property or financial interests. Similarly, a Kosovar lawyer may reveal information when disclosure is necessary to prevent death or substantial bodily harm. The third exception under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct is that, "an attorney may reveal client confidences where it is necessary to prove a claim or defense in a controversy between the lawyer and the client." The same rule is incorporated in the KCA's code of ethics, as a lawyer may disclose information to defend him or herself "against charges filed by the client against the lawyer. In addition to these exceptions, the KCA's Code of Professional Ethics for Lawyers also allows lawyers to reveal confidential information for the protection of the state's interests, to show that an ethical violation did not occur or if the client wishes the lawyer to do so. 

Topic education. USFG plans misinterpret the topic. Regulation of lawyers regarding the ACP actually comes from the ABA because lawyers are a self-regulating community, that’s Tolaj 12.

The ABA uniquely regulates ACP, so it’s the only sensible actor. This means (a) key to aff ground, it’s the only way I can solve, and (b) it’s the most predictable actor, so no neg ground loss.

And, the resolution does not mean that ACP must be eliminated, rather that it should be constrained by truth-seeking.  If ACP ought to be minimally construed because of duties to the truth, you affirm. No constitutional violation because I don’t change ACP or truth seeking, I just interpret existing statutes to see which ought to be valued more.  Other interps would eliminate all topic lit since author speak to the question of limiting ACP rather than a complete elimination.  

Thus, the standard is consistency with the best role for the attorney.

The duty to represent is founded upon a prior duty to the truth and that solves the splitting of lawyer identity.  Freeland 2:

The lawyer is in a double bind: the officer of the court representing a client is enmeshed in a dual role, and may experience role strain109 if these ties diverge. However, the lawyer’s dual enmeshment problem eases in light of the present discussion. It is clear that the lawyer would not even be present to represent the client were the court not creating and maintaining her. Thus, the lawyer’s original, persistent and primary duty is to the court, to function as its officer in the administration of justice; any other roles depend upon—hang upon, are subordinate to—her role as the court’s functionary. In other words, the lawyer’s role as the client’s representative exists to help the court function in its administration of justice, so that the representative functions that the lawyer performs to help the client are circumscribed and subtended by her role as an officer of the court.  

Currently, lawyers is torn between the client and the court.  Their dueling responsibilities create an identity crisis where either way they internalize bad sentiments against themselves.  The solution is to recognize the source of client duties as the duty as an officer of the court. 

There is no other way to preserve the integrity of the profession.  The lawyer will disintegrate absent this conceptualization.  Freeland 3:

The officer-of-the-court analysis provides an “integrity-preserving rolebased redescription” for the lawyer that Markovits calls for, but one that does not necessarily rely on the “authoritative insularity”274 of the lawyer’s role from which modernity abjects her. So, where Markovits sees that “as lawyers are called on”—that is, interpellated by courts—”to integrate clients into a process of adjudication that would otherwise be alien, they are denied the cultural resources needed to shoulder the ethical burdens that arise on answering this call. These burdens threaten to dis-integrate the lawyers themselves”275—I see instead a more felicitous outcome for the lawyer who shoulders the ethical responsibilities of the officer of the court whom she becomes in answering the court’s interpellation. The decisions to focus on the individual lawyer and adversariness per se are errors of scale in this debate. Framing the lawyer as an advocate only— ignoring her manifestation by, for, and subject to the court—is a failure to appreciate the full tapestry of our Constitutionally provided social order, marginalizing the lawyer’s duties to the judicial powers276 provided by the Constitution. The bar is both the court and the legal profession of which the lawyer is a member, and the client has not only individual, private interests but a public interest in the rule of law. When we survey the design of our social order, we perceive the lawyer not as a mere tool of the client, but as an articulate instrument in the administration of justice.

Tournament: GMU | Round: 9 | Opponent: All | Judge: All
My first observation is that the question of the resolution is, “Should an attorney be obligated to disclose confidential information of a client if doing so is essential to finding the truth about a crime?” Expectations of an attorney are the locus of the debate since only the attorney has both a legal duty to justice and truth as well as to the client. Lawyers belong to a self-regulating community, governed by the American Bar Association’s Model Rules, which are not binding but can be accepted by states as they wish. These rules codify the attorney-client privilege, or ACP for short.

My second observation is that affirming does not entail eliminating the privilege, rather, qualifying it. Virtually all of the legal experts that prioritize truth seeking do not believe that it should be eliminated, just that certain interests require exceptions to the rule. 

I value morality as “ought” denotes moral obligation.

There is a difference between general moral duties and professional ethics.  There are often actions taken during a job that would otherwise be considered morally reprehensible, but are good within that context.  Professionals are required to answer questions like the resolution in light of those principles.  Bernard Williams writes:

These possibilities help to make the important point that a professional morality is not just a different morality and professionals are not merely an out-group relative to the moral community. Two considerations are connected here, that the profession is (broadly) morally acceptable to the community and that the professionals see themselves as members of that community, members moreover who exercise their profession there. We started from divergences between professional and general morality, but now it may be wondered how there can be divergences at all. For, it may be said, either there is a justification of this profession in terms acceptable to the community and its everyday standards, or there is not. If there is not, then it is not a professional morality but a different one. If there is, then there can be only superficial divergences - the everyday morality will contain the professional morality as an application of itself to special circumstances. So how can there be divergences? It is natural to say, and it has been said in the literature, that divergences between professional and everyday moralities arise because the profession requires some acts that would be immoral if done in other than a professional context.2 This is not very helpful. It leaves a very thin sense of 'divergence', if any at all - there are many sorts of acts that, relative to the general standards of everyday morality itself, would be immoral unless performed in special, specified circumstances. Moreover, this approach raises a problem about 'the same act' being done in a professional or a non-professional context. Many professional acts simply cannot be done in a non-professional context (e.g., harassing witnesses). This is the familiar point that under some descriptions the action is the same, but that under some other, morally relevant descriptions, it is not the same. Moreover, it is rarely the case that the morally relevant difference between a professional (and permissible) action and a non-professional (and impermissible) action consists solely in the fact that the agent acts in a professional capacity in the one case and not in the other. What comes closest to that specification is the case in which the context is in all ways like the usual professional context, but the agent is only pretending to discharge a professional function, or wrongly believes himself or herself to be doing so, as with those who are impostors or have been disbarred, and so forth. Such a case gives us no help in understanding divergences between professional and everyday morality, which are called up, rather, by situations that typically display some larger differ-ence between the professional act and the non-professional act that is being contrasted with it. We are then back with the absolutely familiar point that what is, under some description, the same act can be acceptable in some contexts and not in others. Yet, once again, there obviously are divergences: we are not discussing nothing. A natural model to help us understand the problem is a two-tier structure of the kind that is familiar from the discussion of indirect utilitarianism.3 The model will not help, however, unless we correctly specify in it what kind of item is being justified at the first level. It is often said that this is a set of rules. But what comes about or continues to exist if the second-order argument is accepted in practice is some social or psychological item, such as a rule's being followed in a group, people having a disposition to follow a rule, and so forth.4 It is this concrete social or psychological item to which we should direct our attention, and if we are going to consider second-order justifications, it is usually most helpful to apply them to psychological dispositions and to such things as an educational system that encourages some dispositions rather than others. In the present connection, it is only in these terms that the problem can be understood at all. I shall correspondingly be concerned with the set of professional reactions, dispositions of deliberation, and so forth, that lawyers or other professionals acquire as a result of their training. (What they acquire as a result of their training is of course not to be understood merely in terms of what they get from their training and from nothing else, since the effects of their training will be very much a function of their general socialization.) Let us call, then, the first-order item that is going to be discussed - the relevant psychological item that corresponds to this professional morality - 'the professional dispositions'. The second-order considerations that are to be applied to justify, or perhaps criticize, the professional dispositions will consist of some more general considerations. They need not be completely universalist, but they will have a wider application than the first-order system of professional dispositions. They do not have to be utilitarian. They must be able to take up in some way consequences of the first-order dispositions and of the institutions that go with them, but they do not have to treat those consequences merely in welfarist terms. Thus the relevant considerations about what follows from encouraging certain legal dispositions in society could well include reference to rights, such as the likelihood of one or another set of dispositions on the lawyers' part bringing it about that people will get their legal rights. Those who have the professional dispositions must sometimes, in virtue of those dispositions, give answers to practical questions, or react to situations with which they are presented, in ways that differ from the decisions or reactions that would be appropriate merely on the basis of the wide system. If that were not so, there would be no point in the two-tier structure and the problems that it is supposed to help us to answer would not arise. This basic fact can give rise to serious problems for systems of this kind. The problems come out when one asks how the dispositions in question are supposed to coexist, psychologically or socially, with the consciousness of the general considerations that justify them. The difficulty is most acute when the justifying considerations are utilitarian. Disposition-utilitarianism typically tries to banish the problem by alienating the dispositions from the consciousness of their justification, but the outcome is never satisfactory.5 Let us make it a condition of applying the two-tier structure to our topic that the alienation problem should not arise. If there is to be a second-order justification of professional dispositions, then the consciousness appropriate to those dispositions should be able to coexist coherently with the consciousness of their justification, not just in one society, but in one head. To a limited extent, this follows from its being a professional morality that is in question. As has already been said, a profession is something that one can choose to leave or try to join, and the choices involved at those points must surely allow the two kinds of consciousness to come together. More important than this, however, is the substantive demand on a rational society that its institutions and the conceptions that legitimate them should be as far as possible transparent to it.6 We can now explain how it is that, despite the argument that there can be no divergence between professional and general morality, there really are such divergences. The two-level structure permits conflicts between its levels, and the fact that alienation has not been ruled out does not decrease that possibility, but if anything increases it, since alienation is itself a device for evading conflict. Conflict can arise because the justifying considerations are part of the general morality, wider than the professional system, and this has its own dispositions, not identical with the professional dispositions. It may simply be a fact that a natural expression of these is to feel repugnance at certain acts that are perfectly all right, or indeed required, as an expression of the professional dispositions.

This means you should only accept ethical theories specific to the lawyer.  Other theories are simply inapplicable unless specifically applied to the lawyer’s role. 

The inequality in the lawyer-client relationship means that lawyer’s ethics are not based on contractual obligations, but rather on an obligation to protect the vulnerable.  Robert Goodin writes:

The above three factors. taken together, suggest that the relationship between professional and client is not (and should not be viewed as primarily a contractual or quasi-contractual one. The reason lies in the unequal bargaining power of the two parties to the putative contract. Bayles ll98l. 64) usefully catalogues these inequalities: First. a professionals knowledge far exceeds that of a client. A professional has the special knowledge produced by long training. knowledge a client could not have without comparable training. Second, a client in concerned about some basic value-personal health, legal status, or financial status-- whereas a professional is not as concerned about the subject matter. The client usually has more at stake. Third, a professional often has a freedom to enter the relationship that a client lacks. A professional is often able to obtain other clients more easily than a client can obtain another professional. From this point of view. the bargaining situation is more like that between an individual and a public utility)" (See similarly Masters I975. 25—26; May I975. 35 “This relationship of inequality is," Wasserstrom (1975. l6 concludes, “intrinsic to the existence of professionalism. For the professional is, in some respects at least, always in a position of dominance vis-8-vis the client, and the client in a position of dependence vis-s-vis the professional." It is the client's dependence upon the professional, l would argue, that gives rise to strong obligations on the professional's part.” Clients are and must neces- sarily be relying upon professionals to protect them in these crucial ways. Here. as in the case of promises and contracts discussed above, "the factor of reliance . . . that the doctor {or other professional} will render aid means that he is . . . obliged to do so," both legally and morally (Fletcher l968. 66); or as Bernard Williams {l98l, 55 similarly remarks, “lawyers and doctors have elaborate codes of professional entities . . . because their clients need to be protected. and be seen to be protected, in what are particularly sensitive areas of their interests." Although there are undeniably contractual elements in the relationship be- tween professionals and their clients. a better legal model for the relationship would be that Of a "trust." The law does indeed "use such a conception to characterize most professional-client relationships," Bayles ( l98l. 69 writes.” “In a ?duciary relationship. . . . because one party is in a more advantageous position, he or she has special obligations to the other. The weaker party depends upon the stronger in ways in which the other does not and so must trust the stronger party.“ What follows from such a relationship of trust. both in law and in morals, is that “a person in a ?duciary relation to another is under a duty to act for the bene?t of the other as to matters within the scope of the relation" (Scott I959, sec. 2, comment B; Frankel I983). Tracing professional responsibilities to the vulnerabilities of clients or pa- tients explains certain particular features of professional responsibilities which, within models built around notions of contracts or quasi-contracts. would seem most peculiar. Consider the three anomalies discussed above. The vulnerability of prospective clients explains why parties are held to the standard-form contract set out in professional codes of ethics: otherwise the party in the stronger bargaining position. the professional. might drive an unconscionably hard bargain with the vulnerable client. So, too, does the vulnerability of the prospective client explain why it physician is not free to decline the offer of employment in an emergency: no one else could provide the desperately needed assistance if he did not. So, too, does the vulnerability model explain why professionals cannot withdraw from a ease without giving the client sufficient opportunity to obtain other assistance: that would leave the client dreadfully exposed (Fried 1976, 1077). This analysis of professional responsibilities in terms of client vul- nerabilities suggests the following general rule governing the permissibility of a professional's declining to serve a would-be client: a professional ought to be held morally and professionally (if not necessarily legally) responsible to provide assistance in any situation in which, if he did not. someone would be left helpless. Consider the case of the only doctor in an isolated frontier town. Surely he should not be entitled to withdraw from the case of someone too ill to be moved, no matter how much notice he gives of his intention to do so. Neither should he be entitled to refuse to treat that patient in the first place (Rcedet I982, 99).

This means that the primary moral obligation of the lawyer is to protect those that are helpless.  If someone is left helpless in both cases, the question becomes how helpless the parties are in relation to one another as well as how many people are left helpless.  This also means morality is comparative.  The negative must defend how ACP over truth seeking better protects the helpless, otherwise morality can’t guide action.  This means that they can’t just point out flaws in the AC, they need a separate advocacy that solves both problems otherwise you affirm.

The criterion is thus protecting the helpless. 

Contention One: ACP puts child victims of abuse at a disadvantage and prioritizing truth-seeking is key to protecting them

First, studies show that an increase in attorney evidence would lead to an increase in convictions of child abuse cases. Giving the attorneys the ability to testify in court will allow for convictions.  Wendy Walsh writes:

Nearly two thirds (64) of cases had charges filed against an alleged offender. As shown in Table 2, cases with older victims, male offenders, and alleged penetration were significantly more likely to have charges filed. All types of evidence except for two increased the likelihood that charges would be filed following an investigation: Cases that included behavioral evidence were significantly less likely to be charged, a finding likely related to the correlation between behavioral evidence and younger victims. The presence of psychological evidence did not, by itself, increase the likelihood that charges would be filed. Most notable is the strong effect size for the association between having a corroborating witness and charges being filed (Cramer’s V = .41). Offender confession also had a relatively strong effect size (Cramer’s V = .28). Four other types of evidence had a moderate effect size with charging (average Cramer’s V = .19): child disclosure, eyewitness account, physical evidence, and an additional report against the offender. Cases with charges filed had significantly more types of supporting evidence, and there was a strong effect size for this association (Cramer’s V = .38). It is important to note that when this analysis was conducted for cases with and without a child disclosure, the pattern was similar, with charged cases having two or three types of evidence. In sum, 18 of the 43 cases with no child disclosure were charged, and the majority (77) went forward with either two or three types of evidence. There also was a large effect size (Cramer’s V = .33) for the association between the strongest available evidence and charging. 

Second, without disclosure on the part of the attorney, prosecutors are less likely to take a case that involves child abuse.  This puts the abused at an inherent disadvantage.  Michael Martin explains:

A fourth reason for the difficulty of prosecution of child sexual abuse cases is the reluctance on the part of many prosecutors to undertake a case which rests primarily on the child's testimony without corroborating physical evidence. Investigatory and court procedures which may emphasize the rights of the accused over the rights of the victim often make a clear, uncontaminated testimony difficult to obtain. 

And, children are the most vulnerable members of society, child abuse should be our paramount concern.  Kathryn Christian writes:

The purpose of mandatory child abuse reporting statutes is to protect children who are incapable of protecting themselves and who are incapable of reporting child abuse that is inflicted upon them. n111 Along these lines, proponents of mandatory child abuse reporting laws contend that because child abuse victims often are young, innocent, defenseless children, society must protect such children through the reporting of child abuse. n112 *230 "The child abuse victim is in a particularly vulnerable position in our society. The victim cannot 'walk away' from the abuse; the victim is almost always dependent on the abuser for support and care." n113 At some point, the prevention of harm to a third person outweighs the importance of protecting a client's wishes or confidential information. n114 In the unique case of child abuse, where the victims do not have the capacity to help themselves, but instead "are young, vulnerable, and without physical and legal protection, special protections must be afforded by the law." n115 In these cases, an attorney, as an officer of the court, must play a limited but important roleemdashreporting information and evidence of suspected child abuse or neglect. n116 As concluded by one scholar,

Also, look to smaller systemic impacts over ridiculous improbable ones.  There is always a minute chance of devastation, but that distracts from issues that hare happening right now.  The impacts to child abuse are already occurring, a solution is needed now.  Gut check against other frameworks, we all hold child abuse to be morally wrong, meaning they can’t exclude my impacts.

Contention Two:  All other systems let abusers go free.

 First, due to the nature of child abuse, the only source of evidence in too many abuse cases is the testimony of the abused.  Wendy Walsh  explains:

The decision to prosecute child sexual abuse is a complicated process in part because of the special dynamics surrounding child abuse: the crime of sexual abuse is often committed in private; there are rarely eyewitnesses; and the child’s testimony usually provides most of the information about the crime. When children are young, the quality of their testimony may be compromised by developmental limitations in memory and language. Furthermore, there are potential complications to sexual abuse cases: The child may have a preexisting close relationship with the offender, thereby increasing the chance of reluctant cooperation in the court process. In addition, the criminal court process can be extremely lengthy for sexual abuse cases (Walsh, Lippert, Cross, Maurice, and Davison, 2008), and caregivers may be concerned about the stress placed onto their children as a result of the process (Goodman, Quas, Bulkley, and Shapiro, 1999; Lipovsky, 1994; National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, 2004). Child sexual abuse is distinct from other types of crimes because multiple forms of convincing evidence are often lacking (Myers, 2002). As such, prosecutors must rely heavily on children’s reports of the crime.

The lack of corroborating evidence in child abuse cases lets abusers go free.  Kate Warner  writes:
A person accused of a crime cannot be convicted on the unsworn evidence of a child unless the testimony of such a child is corroborated in some material particular by other evidence (s.128(2) Evidence Act 1910 (Tas.); s.9(2) Evidence Act 1977-1984 (Qld); s.9(2) Evidence Act 1958 (Vic.)). At common law there is a rule of practice to the effect that the trial judge should warn the jury that although they may convict on the sworn evidence of a child witness, it would be dangerous to do so in the absence of corroborative evidence (Byrne and Heydon 1986; also Paine v. The Queen 1974 Tas.SR 117, NC 14 in which the Court of Criminal Appeal suggested the requirement was not peremptory). In some jurisdictions corroboration or corroboration warnings are still required for sexual offences, and therefore in cases of child victims of sexual assault, corroboration may be required by two separate rules. Corroboration rules provide an additional obstacle to proof of child sexual assault. If appropriate corroborative evidence is not available, proceedings against the alleged offender will rarely be commenced. This is despite the fact that the child's evidence appears reliable and truthful, and despite the existence of other evidence such as a prompt complaint or medical evidence of trauma to the child's genital organs, pieces of evidence which may fail to satisfy the strict legal technicalities of corroboration. 

Contention Three: Keeping ACP leaves attorneys with no option and tears them between two undesirable situations

Current mandatory reporting procedures conflict with ACP and put lawyers in a double bind, which eliminates the ability to effectively represent the client.  Brooke Albrandt  writes:

Mandatory reporting provisions directly conflict with the attorney-client relationship. The attorney-client privilege protects from court-compelled disclosure all confidential communications and, in criminal cases, any other fact brought to the lawyer's attention by means of the attorney-client relationship. n21 Mandatory reporting requirements completely abrogate the attorney-client privilege by requiring the attorney to disclose otherwise privileged information. The requirement thus subjects clients who abused their children to potential criminal charges. Lawyers defending battered women face another difficult situation, however, when the abuser is not the battered client, but the client's spouse or partner. Reporting the child abuse may subject the client to criminal charges for failure to protect the child. Under the Texas Penal Code, for example, an individual who allows a child *659 to suffer bodily injury by action or omission is guilty of a felony. n22 Therefore, a battered woman could face felony charges for failing to prevent her batterer from abusing her children. This problem is the one most likely to be encountered by attorneys representing women on criminal charges. One study found that in abusive relationships also involving child abuse, the abusive man was six times more frequently the child abuser than was the battered woman. n23 The mandatory reporting requirement thus creates a difficult ethical dilemma for attorneys representing clients on matters in which child abuse is likely to become an issue. Attorneys must choose among (1) obeying the law and thereby offer their clients up for indictment, (2) maintaining client confidences and thereby break the law, or (3) withdrawing from the representation completely, leave their clients without any legal representation whatsoever. n24 In most states, lawyers are not mandatory reporters, and the dilemma is merely whether or not they are permitted to report. n25 This situation, of course, also creates difficult decisions for attorneys torn between their personal, professional, and moral obligations. n26 For attorneys in states with attorney-inclusive provisions, however, this dilemma creates a legal, professional, and ethical nightmare, particularly in cases involving abuse, such as the representation of domestic violence victims.

Contention Four: This violation of ACP is constitutional

The Fifth and Sixth Amendments are not violated by this limiting of ACP.  Mosteller explains:

1. The Fifth Amendment's Non-Protection of the Attorney-Client Privilege. In Fisher v. United States, n195 the Supreme Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment affords no direct protection for the attorney-client privilege when confidential client information is compelled from the attorney. As long as the state does not require the client to make statements to his lawyer in the first instance, the necessary element of compulsion is missing. Statements voluntarily made by the client, although covered by the attorney-client privilege, are not protected by the client's Fifth Amendment rights. n196 A number of federal and state courts have reiterated this point in various contexts, n197 including the observation that the scope of the privilege may be changed by state legislative action without violating Fisher. n198 *270 The lack of Fifth Amendment protection for the attorney-client privilege does not mean that the government would be totally free to compel disclosures from the attorney. For instance, if a lawyer obtains information from a client under the explicit or implicit promise that the information is protected by a then-existing privilege and the lawyer later discloses the information under government coercion, that revelation may violate at least the due process rights of the client. n199 However, if the privilege were changed by legislative action prior to the client's consultation to eliminate the guarantee of confidentiality upon which the defendant may have relied, it is difficult to find much in the theory of the Fifth Amendment, or due process for that matter, that would render the legislative action unconstitutional. n200 2. The Sixth Amendment's Narrow Support for the Attorney-Client Privilege. The Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel is a much more fruitful, but clearly limited, source of support for the attorney-client privilege. Although the Supreme Court has not established its precise contours in this context, n201 the right to counsel as it has come to be accepted in the latter half of the twentieth century surely includes some guarantee of confidential consultations with an attorney. n202 However, *271 the Sixth Amendment right is quite limited in coverage. It has no place in civil litigation, and attaches in criminal litigation only when a suspect formally becomes the accused by indictment, preliminary hearing, or other similar step in the criminal proceeding. n203 Accordingly, a legislature could constitutionally eliminate the protections of the attorney-client privilege except when criminal litigation has been formally initiated. n204 This statement may seem *272 shocking, suggesting an unrealistic, apocalyptic result, but to the contrary is based on uncontroversial constitutional interpretation. The attorney-client privilege as it applies to reporting of child abuse and indeed to testimony by an attorney against the (former) client depends largely upon the good judgment of legislatures and their determination of sound social policy.

Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: None | Judge: Only God can judge me now - Tupac
I might also read stuff on Tomasi's wiki, so go there for cites you don't find on my wiki.

Tournament: Ridge | Round: 2 | Opponent: ALL | Judge: ALL
I'll be running DnG in addition to what's already disclosed.  Most of it is disclosed under the Lawyer's role AC, new cards will be disclosed when I break them.  DnG K is disclosed on wiki leaks, for the most part.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Whitman DM | Judge:
The new normal is catastrophe: an accelerating vortex underpinned by modern regimes of thought.  Thought must begin from the death of thought – a break with the eco-oikonomics of philosophy that underpins memetic regimes of dominance.  Cohen  12:

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And we are trashing the natural world. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. The atmosphere can’t absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological. —Naomi Klein, “The fight against climate change is down to us—the 99” 2011 Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth’s natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday. —Agence France-Presse, “Time to find a second Earth, WWF says” 2010 1. Warnings regarding the planet earth’s imminent depletion of reserves or “life as we know it” arrive today more as routine tweets than events that might give us pause, particularly as the current wars over global “sovereign debt” and economic “crises” swamp attention. The intensifying specter of megadebt—at a time of “peak everything” (peak water, peak oil, peak humans)—dumped into a future despoiled of reserves and earning capacity has a specific relation to this white-out—the “economical” and “ecological” tandem shifts all attention to the first term (or first “eco”). In a post-global present consolidating what is routinely remarked as a neo-feudal order, the titanic shift of hyperwealth to the corporatist few (the so-called 1 ) sets the stage for a shift to control societies anticipating social disruption and the implications of “Occupy” style eruptions—concerning which the U.S. congress hastily passed new unconstitutional rules to apprehend citizens or take down websites. The Ponzi scheme logics of twenty-first century earthscapes portray an array of time-bubbles, catastrophic deferrals, telecratic capture, and a voracious present that seems to practice a sort of tempophagy on itself corresponding with its structural premise of hyper-consumption and perpetual “growth. The supposed urgencies of threatened economic and monetary “collapse” occlude and defer any attention to the imperatives of the biosphere, but this apparent pause or deferral of attention covers over an irreversible mutation. A new phase of unsustainability appears in which a faux status quo ante appears to will to sustain itself as long as possible and at whatever cost; the event of the twenty-first century is that there will be no event, that no crisis will disturb the expansion of consumption beyond all supposed limits or peaks. In such an environment other materialities emerge, reference systems default, and the legacies of anthropo-narcissm go into overdrive in mechanical ways. Supposedly advanced or post-theory theory is no exception—claiming on the one hand ever more verdant comings together of redemptive communities, and discretely restoring many phenomenological tropes that 20th century thought had displaced. This has been characterized as an unfolding eco-eco disaster—a complex at once economic and ecological. 1 The logics of the double oikos appear, today, caught in a self-feeding default. The present volume, in diverse ways, reclaims a certain violence that has seemed occluded or anaesthetized (it is a “present,” after all, palpably beyond “tipping points” yet shy of their fully arrived implications—hence the pop proliferation of “zombie” metaphors: zombie banks, zombie politics, zombie “theory”). It departs from a problem inherent in the “eco” as a metaphoric complex, that of the home (oikos), and the suicidal fashion in which this supposed proper ground recuperates itself from a non-existent position. The figure of an ecology that is ours and that must be saved precludes us from confronting the displacement and dispossession which conditions all production, including the production of homelands. Memory regimes have insistently, silently and anonymously prolonged and defended the construct of “homeland security” (both in its political sense, and in the epistemological sense of being secure in our modes of cognition), but these systems of security have in fact accelerated the vortices of ecocatastrophic imaginaries. This leads to what can be called the zone of telemorphosis: that is, how and whether conceptual practices and cognitive rituals, including those of critical theory, have participated in the production of these horizons, and what, today, breaks with that. If a double logic of eco-eco disaster overlaps with the epoch in deep time geologists now refer to as the “anthropocene,” what critical re-orientations, today, contest what has been characterized as a collective blind or psychotic foreclosure? Nor can one place the blame at the feet alone of an accidental and evil ‘1’ of corporate culture alone, since an old style revolutionary model does not emerge from this exitless network of systems. More interesting is the way that ‘theory’, with its nostalgic agendas for a properly political world of genuine praxis or feeling has been complicit in its fashion. How might one read the implicit, unseen collaboration that critical agendas coming out of twentieth century master-texts unwittingly maintained with the accelerated trajectories in question? The mesmerizing fixation with cultural histories, the ethics of “others,” the enhancement of subjectivities, “human rights” and institutions of power not only partook of this occlusion but ‘we theorists’ have deferred addressing biospheric collapse, mass extinction events, or the implications of resource wars and “population” culling. It is our sense of justified propriety—our defense of cultures, affects, bodies and others—that allows us to remain secure in our homeland, unaware of all the ruses that maintain that spurious home.

This is particularly true of climate change and environmental degradation – traditional notions of subjectivity operationalize a regime of thought that makes shared imaginaries impossible, which are a precondition for debate. This is telemorphosis: regimes of memory that pave the way toward extinction. Cohen 2:

If it is possible to note that theory’s retrieval of human and animal otherness against the horrors of capitalism is akin to political deferrals of the future for the sake of saving the present, then we might ask what might open the reactive self-bound logics beyond homeland security? What has been absent to date is any shared or possible climate change imaginary—or a critical matrix. The problem is that the other materialities that constitute the forces of climate change would pulverize whatever informs “imaginaries” in general, which have always been tropological systems. When a recent critical query asks, for example, how to define “a political subject of climate change” the authors focus on how the “climate crisis shapes particular subjectivities,” properly putting any rhetoric of “crisis” itself to the side as appropriable. The problem lies in the premise of defining a “political subject” or subjectivities to begin with: “Unsurprisingly, much of the current discourse on climate change oscillates between these two poles: most dramatically, between imminent catastrophe and the prospect of renewal; between unimaginable humanitarian disaster and the promise of a green-tech revolution. As such the climate crisis regularly calls forth regimes of risk” Dibley and Neilson 2010: 144. This Janus-faced algorithm, the “political subject of climate change” (147), arrives as a form of cognitive disjuncture: “these two images… are alternative figures of the subjectivity of ecological crisis. They are complimentary… . something like a dialectical image of the subjectivity of climate change” (146). On the one hand, this theoretical intervention is typical of the cognitive reflex toward pre-emption of the worst in arguments focused on mitigation, on sustainability, and on various “environmental” agendas—despite none of these answering to what science would demand. Sustainability has been angled to “sustain” the level of comfort and acquisition that the economy of “growth” demands. On the other hand, there is a reflex of occlusion. This straining for a “subjectivity” that would account for a political feature of this new landscape comes up with two mutually canceling algorithms: a desperate sense of imminent crisis and end, alongside a hope of something as lulling as ‘subjectivity’. As a number of essays in the volume imply, one might proceed otherwise: depart or begin from a subject without subjectivity (Catherine Malabou), or an exteriority without interior (Justin Read). The aporia of an era of climate change are structurally different from those that devolved on the torsions of Western metaphysics. They are not the aporia explored by Derrida around the figure of hospitality, taken as an endless refolding that keeps in place, while exposing, a perpetuated and lingering logics that defers the inhospitable. (One mode of deconstruction as solicitation involves shaking the house or structure within which one finds oneself, and this circuit might itself be disturbed by a refusal to occupy.) As Masao Myoshi 2001 first suggested, the logics of extinction compromise the aims of an emancipatory future along with all else. Any project of “formal democracy” runs up not only against the twenty-first century post-democratic telecracies that render that episode of 90’s thought transparently inscribed in the neo-liberal fantasy (or propaganda) it would appropriate back for the then bruised “Left.” But it also faces the transparency by which market democracy not only appears a Potemkin figure itself but, in fact, guarantees planetary ruin by the demographic requirements of cars alone for any emerging middle class of India and China (as Arundhati Roy argues). 4 Any focus on global population control runs up against feminist progressivism Hedges 2009; Hartman 2009; post-colonial narratives that would restoratively mime the promise of 90’s neo-liberalism of a world of market democracy would require three planets of resource materiel to allow dispossessed others to reach our levels of prosperity. The profound 90’s investment in the “otherness of the other,” an other who would be recognized, communed with, raised into the polis, and colonized, appears today as a stubborn archaism and, perhaps, as an epochal error, that maintained the sovereign trace of subjective mastery. It would seem that both metaphysics and its deconstruction jointly participated in what is now disclosing itself as the “anthropocene”—an epoch of self-affirmation into which Enlightenment ideologemes have played, as Dipesh Chakrabarty analyzes in the term “freedom.” 5 The impasse between today’s spellbound and rapacious present and supposed future generations, the rupture of any imagined moral contract to or recognition of same, has been in circulation for a while. The present volume of essays focuses on this under-examined question: how do mnemotechics, conceptual regimes, and reading—a certain unbounded textualization that exceeds any determination of writing—participate in or accelerate the mutations that extend, today, from financial systems to the biosphere? The volume gives this a name, telemorphosis.

Vote affirmative to endorse a radical disidentification with the subject and current systems of domination that support resource extraction. Far from lacking theory, politics is saturated by it – referential regimes of memory that authorize and legitimize destruction – only a disoccupation solves.  Cohen 3:

The rapacious present places the hidden metaphoric levers of the eco or oikos in an unsustainable exponential curve, compounding megadebt upon itself, and consuming futures in what has been portrayed as a sort of psychotic trance—what Hillis Miller calls, in this volume, a suicidal “auto-co-immunity” track. 2 Yet the “Sovereign debt crisis” corresponds to a credibility crisis as well. The latter applies not only to the political classes of the post-democratic klepto-telecracies of the West but seems to taint the critical concepts, agendas, and terms received from twentieth-century itineraries that accompanied the last decades and that persist as currency. Far from opening beyond the propriety of the oikos theories of affect, living labor and critical legacies have doubled down on their investments, created guilds as reluctant as Wall St. to give up cognitive capital. All the while there is attention paid to ‘saving’ the humanities or a critical industry that might be extended for a while longer (as if with “sovereignty” itself). Bruno Latour 2010 presumes to call this recent and ongoing episode the “Modernist parenthesis” of thought. In his conjecture, the very pre-occupation with human on human histories, culturalism, archivism, and the institutions of power were complicit with a larger blind that, in his view, the ecological crisis belatedly discloses. 3 At the moment of writing it is common to point to the 2011 “occupy” movement, viral and cloud-like, as the Bartlebyesque counter to a totalization of the systems of this control. Bartleby has become the figure for a rejection of end-fixated production. Were one able to speak of an occupy movement applied to critical concepts and twentieth century derived idioms one might imagine a call to occupy critical theory and conceptual networks—but with what interruption of received programs (“Sovereign debt”), what alternative materialities, what purported “ethics” involving commodified futures (and the structure of debt), what mnemotechnics, and with resistance to what power, if it is the oikos itself, the metaphoric chimera and its capture of late anthropocene imaginaries that is at issue? This is one of the implications of what this volume terms telemorphosis, the intricacy by which referential regimes, memory, and reading, participate in these twenty-first century disclosures. The occupy motif, at the moment, sets itself against a totalization or experience of foreclosure—political, mediacratic, financial, cognitive. Various strategies appearing in this volume involve what could equally be called a disoccupy logic or meme. Such a logic of disoccupation assumes that the domain in question is already saturated, occupied in the militarist sense by a program that, unwittingly, persists in the acceleration of destruction and takeover. Critical thought of recent decades would have walked hand in hand with the current foreclosures. The explication of ecocatastrophic logics, accordingly, are not found in Foucault nor, surprisingly, Derrida. Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature is one such effort at disoccupation—seeking to void the two terms of the title, and in the process disrupt the “revised organicisms” of contemporary critical schools which, he argues, have managed to lapse into sophisticated pre-critical modes not unrelated to a more general inertia. The meme of disoccupation resonates, for instance, with what Robert Markley in this volume proposes as a practice of “disidentification,” and is implied by Timothy Clark’s tracking of a “derangement of scale” in the perpetual cognitive disjunctures that come up against the ecocatastrophic present. One would disoccupy the figure of subjectivity, refusing not only the comforting commodifications of “the other” in cultural theory, but also and the later moral appeals to other redemptive beings, such as the animal (as Joanna Zylinska argues with regard to post-humanism and its “animal studies”). What might be disoccupied would be the metaphorics of the home, even where the latter would sustain itself today in cherished terms like trauma, affect, alterity, embodiment, or even culture. Yet a refusal of supposed redemptive ‘outsides’ to capitalism does not lead to a place of critical purity beyond the implied moralism of ‘occupy’ but the return of, and orientation to, a violence before which no model of sovereignty can be sustained. To imagine that one might disoccupy by refusing all the supposed redemptive ‘outsides’ to capitalism is not to find a place of critical purity beyond the moralism of ‘occupy.’ Occupation is never simply takeover and appropriation, but always involves destruction of what it claims. The viral migration of the “occupy” motif involves a premise of disoccupation covertly. In the present volume this takes different forms. If one is now beyond tipping points in a zone of irreversibility, what corresponds to this as a critical injunction? Catherine Malabou sets aside the entire way the figure of trauma and the “always already” has organized time. Claire Colebrook affirms, rather than accepting as tragic, extinction as a point of departure for thought, which can be used to work against the organicist ideologies of the present (such as sexual difference). Martin McQuillan shifts the referential spectrum of discourse to “other materialities” in the hypothesis of a post-carbon thought, while Robert Markley tracks the influx of geological times that displace human narrative matrices. Bernard Stiegler voids the biopolitical model, which he sees as exceeded by “the third limit of Capitalism” (when it impinges on the biosphere). From that point of excess he strategizes a counter-stroke to the capture of attention by telecratic circuits, initiating a noopolitics. Joana Zylinska disoccupies, to continue this motif, the covert model of soft “otherness” by which animal studies has invented itself as an anthropo-colonianism. Like post-humanism generally, Zylinska argues, animal studies sustains its subjectal hegemonies. Hillis Miller locates a source for the ecocatastrophic imaginary in the blind insistence of “organicist” models of reading that sustain the comforts of the oikos. Against this hermeneutics of security Miller posits an “ecotechnics” that is at once machinal and linguistically based (where language is not communicative, but literal and inscriptive in a manner exemplified by Kafka’s Odradek). Justin Read displaces any biopolitical model, again, by relinquishing trauma, the oikos, survival and interiorities of any manner, instead describing the circulation of data (or the “unicity”) from which the only remaining political gesture would be oriented to the ecocatrastrophic. Jason Groves shifts the referential screen from, again, a human-centered index to the viral textualism of (alien) species invasion, the global rewriting of bio-geographies. Mike Hill transitions to the alteration of atmospherics under the imaginary of climate war technologies in a new horizon of invisible wars (and wars on visibility), which today include not only nanotechnologies but also the “autogenic” turning of wars without discrete (national) enemies into suicidal rages against the “homeland”—a sort of, again, auto-occupation that is accelerating.

The resolution leaves unquestioned the economic relations of the subject. My interpretation of resolution demands production without economy, energy beyond carbon.  McQuillan  12:

Modern as the phenomenon might be and while philosophy has a great deal to say about “energy,” for example, if I might be allowed to paraphrase one of Derrida’s more familiar hyperboles: no philosopher as a philosopher has ever taken seriously the question of oil. Oil and carbon emission has a massive readability today and may define the most acute moment of the paroxysm that makes the present crisis like no other. This is not to say that there have not previously been bouts of financial uncertainty and environmental disasters precipitated by oil. In fact, the history of oil production might be nothing other than a chain of such instances. Rather, the most decisive index of the present moment is the toxic combination of climate change caused by carbon emission, the urgency for global capital of the risks of peak oil, and the central role played by oil trades in the global economy. We might go so far as to say on this later point that the entire practice of the western economy, that is the so-called global economy, depends upon oil. That is to say, that while the idea of the world market and of the “free exchange” of goods has a philosophical heritage running through early modern humanism and enlightenment thought, our present understanding of all exchange, debt, and faith runs through oil. To speak of a post-carbon economy might in fact be to say something quite radical, given that our present situation is so intensively related to the price of oil. To think an industrialized economy without the price of oil may on the one hand simply be a question of swapping one transcendental signifier for another, as gold was replaced by oil, so oil might be replaced by a trade in plutonium recycling. On the other hand, an opportunity exists here to understand economy as an experience of difference and as an encounter with the wholly other. This would require an other understanding of economy, one that was not dedicated to the utilization of wealth (what we now call a “restricted economy”) but one in which we began to understand the complexities of a sovereign economic term such as gold or oil, not in its loss of meaning but in relation to its possible loss of meaning (what Derrida, after Bataille, after Hegel calls a “general economy”). 5 In this sense, a “post-carbon economy,” presents an opportunity for a consideration of economy not to be limited to the circulation of strictly commercial values, the meaning and established value of objects such as gold, oil, and plutonium or so-called “carbon swaps.” Rather than a phenomenology of values as a restricted economy, we might begin to understand what exceeds the production, consumption, and destruction of value within the circuit of exchange. What Bataille might call “energy” beyond the energy of oil. This would not be a reserve of meaning within economy but an aneconomic writing of economy that is legible because its concepts move outside of the symmetrical exchanges from which they are identified and which according to a certain logic of recuperation they continue to occupy. This task of paleonymy as deconstruction is not one that philosophy will undertake on its own but one that will be played out in the irreversible mutations that take place in the global economy as a consequence of climate change, one which philosophy, opened by the materialism of nonphilosophy, will merely be at the forefront of reporting. It returns us to a familiar problem with which we began: having exhausted the oil reserve and the language of philosophy, the unfinished project of Modernity must continue to inscribe within its frames and language of intelligibility (i.e. philosophy) that which nevertheless exceeds the oppositions of concepts governed by its doxical logic. It is not that nineteenth and twentieth-century thought is incapable of responding to the new crisis of climate change but that climate change is a product of such thought as its latest episode and challenge. On the other hand, such a reading of economy seeks to understand or think what is unthinkable for philosophy, its economic blind spot. The reserves of deconstruction suggest writing in general as a slick economy without oil reserve. Derrida’s text on Bataille and economy was first published in L’arc in May 1967, well into de Gaulle’s diplomatic and economic attack on Bretton Woods and American expropriation of the European economy through dollar investment. His seminar on counterfeit money was given in the academic year 1977–78, between the two shocks in the price of oil in 1974 and 1979, when, as Muriel Spark puts it her 1976 novel The Takeover, “a complete mutation of our means of nourishment had already come into being where the concept of money and property were concerned, a complete mutation not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system, or a global recession, but a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud” (127). Spark’s fiction identifies here a “mutation” more significant than the local weather of a global recession or the collapse of western capitalism. She recognizes precisely the deportation of value itself from the symmetrical alternatives of exchange within a restricted economy of meaning. This is not a deconstruction brought about by philosophy but a critical climate change in the entire environment of meaning that shifts and re-settles of its own accord. For sure, capitalism survived the oil crisis of the early 1970s but as result there was an irreversible change and redistribution in the meaning of meaning itself. A clear line can be drawn from the substitution of gold for oil in 1971 to the credit bubble of 2007 and the transformations in capitalism (around futures and credit transfer derivatives) and the global economy (around the planetary production and consumption of natural resources). The question of the price of oil, and so of the petrodollar and the pricing of the global economy, must always be a question of the phenomenon of credit. The monetary crisis of 2007, the so-called “credit crunch,” was a matter of the credit-worthiness and the credibility of the value of assets. Oil futures and the future of oil are a question of credit and so of faith: belief in the conventional authority of the market and the credibility of the economy, economists, and politicians. The authority of the market is constituted by the accreditation, both in the literal sense of capitalization and creditworthiness in future exchanges but also in the sense of legitimation as an effect of belief or credulity. The authority of a fiction of economy such as a global financial and industrial system based on the future pricing of petroleum depends upon a planetary act of faith that far exceeds the credibility required to believe in climate change. It should not be surprising that the current financial crisis is a crisis of credit, a monetary crisis based upon the exchange of credit itself independent of physical assets, a dematerialization of money and value that requires a leap of faith and which in the absence of tangible proof tests that credibility to the limit: a sea change in the very idea of reality. Carbon is the element that oils faith in the global economy. It is inextricably bound to the history of a formation of a world that is essentially Abrahamic and European. It is over the question of the propriety of oil that the geopolitical now plays out all the contests between Europe and its others, and between the religions of the book. 6 The price of oil is the liquidity that fuels what Derrida called in 1994, “the world war” between all the people of the book, whose preeminent figure is “the appropriation of Jerusalem” (Spectres 52). Faith in the book and faith in oil are the two pillars of globalization and the temple of capitalism. In the complex history of the development of industrial capital and industrial Capitals, the city, polis and metropolis, oil powers the transformation of monetary forms from the pre-modern faith in metals to the belief in credit exchanges and credit-worthiness of the name as signature or future position. In this history of Modernity, oil is surely then closely linked to literature, not only as the energy source that fuels the illumination of literary production, but as the alternative, yet intimately related, site of an idea of credit, debt, and belief that runs across the modern period. Oil itself is not the stuff of literature, although certain exceptional cases might be identified. For example, Melville’s Moby Dick in 1851 is a text on the cusp of a transition from whale oil to hydrocarbons; modern literature would be unthinkable without the automobile, the aeroplane or gas lighting, from The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway to Sherlock Holmes. Zola’s Germinal is one of many texts on the subject of carbon extraction, and Dickens’ Hard Times is notable for its description of Coketown: better examples could no doubt be multiplied. On the other hand, film is the stuff of oil, and cinema is only a special case within the history of modern literature.

Instead of imagining a world governed by traditional notions of agency, I ask you to imagine climate change as something nonhuman, more than human: inhuman.  Cohen 4:

Given more, or different times, one might suggest that a sort of affirmative perspective emerges: First: the twentieth century preoccupation with human on human justice might be interrupted, with incompatible referentials arriving that would operate beyond archival memory and social history. Second, what we call the “political” would migrate from an exclusively social category (Aristotle), as it has been defined in relation to the polity, to a cognitive or epistemographic zone. Third, the era of the Book and its attendant nihilisms (alphabeticist monotheism) would appear as a dossier in the trajectory of telemorphic practices and memory regimes. Fourth, rather than segregate textual premises from the “real” world according to referential regimes and theotropes, the notion of text would intensify the sense of multiscalar and inhuman logics all operating in an open field that would be better referred to as an (a)biosemiosis, or nano-inscriptive process. Finally, in the “anthropocene era,” writing practices might be apprehended in their interweave with carbon and hydro-carbon accelerations, from a position beyond mourning and the automatisms of personification, or “identification.” What emerges in the above postulates is that a hermeneutic reflex and semantic ritual might be repositioned. We would not only locate reactive processes of meaning in the sphere of textual criticism and but discern a broader tendency towards the foreclosure of forces of the future. A certain reading practice—or returning to the proper (or the other) from which one might draw credit—would be akin to cannibalizing a fantasmatic past for the sake of an unreal future. The financial system in its current vortices, in which global currency collapse is constantly threatened, resembles the “unsustainability” of resource consumption and global heating. And each echoes with the current cognitive trances—“unsustainable,” yet extending themselves credit (“quantitative easing”). To think that the modern question of power ought to be one of mourning and sovereignty—or of questioning how we lost an originary openness and fell into systemic closure, or how we failed to recognize some genuine others—precludes facing up to the fact that misrecognition, violent dispersal, decentred and inhuman forces have produced the mourned other and the sovereign as a lure that closes down confrontation with disappearing “futures.” At issue is not just moving “beyond” the fetishization of mourning (get over it!) but parrying this steel trap relapse that, as in the model of the organicism analyzed by Hillis Miller (“it’s everywhere”), fuels the acceleration. One returns to a putative domain of very small things: inscriptions, nano-settings, memory regimes, perceptual settings. The contemporary trends of today’s theory “after theory” often circle back to pre-critical premises. And they share a curious trait, aside from mourning 20th century master texts. Without disjuncture, the “new” model of networks and holistic circuitry that binds humanity and effortlessly traverses otherness and inter-species communications is the oddest replica of the previous organicisms whose suspension was the beginning of “theory” as such. 8 One is left with the impression that, as Žižek remonstrates of “the critical Left” during the ‘naughts Žižek 2009, recent critical pre-occupations discretely collaborate with the accelerations we are witnessing today.

Absent a critique of mnemotechnics, any knowledge or skill we gain from this debate is forgotten – progressive politics has been consumed by the psychosis of corporate design. Cohen 5:

Bruno Latour, as observed above, offered a curious fable in which he identifies what he calls the “Modernist parenthesis” as the default mode of thought that accompanied the disclosure of an ecocatastrophic horizon. The twentieth century focus on “critique” that would be transfixed with reading and rewriting its own chaotic histories would have walked hand in hand with the unfolding impasse to terrestrial life. Latour’s “Modernist parenthesis” includes the very project of critique and a pre-occupation with the past at the expense of addressing the past’s now exponentially accelerated consequences. Latour—whose speculation departs from a painfully Gaiesque reading of the film Avatar—proposes that, as part of any reset today, the term materiality ought to be retired as part of a faux binary. He also recommends jettisoning the term “future”, which he would replace with the ratcheted down and humbled term “prospects.” The label “Modernist parenthesis” is an intriguing trope. It resonates with a term like the “anthropocene” that can only, it implies, be pronounced in a future past tense which the speaker would inhabit. What might reading be if we were already looking back at our present, from a future that we cannot yet allow? Latour seems unaware to what degree he inscribes himself in this specular construction, both by his use of the retro-organicism of the Gaia metaphor and his premise, a signature of the “modernist” gameboard, of announcing a temporal break and new beginning, the revolutionary hypothesis of his imagined “parenthesis.” It is thus reluctantly that he finds his way back to a canonical twentieth century text, the “tired… trope” of Benjamin’s Angel of History to make his point: I want to argue that there might have been some misunderstanding, during the Modernist parenthesis, about the very direction of the flow of time. I have this strange fantasy that the modernist hero never actually looked toward the future but always to the past, the archaic past that he was fleeing in terror. … I don’t wish to embrace Walter Benjamin’s tired “Angel of History” trope, but there is something right in the position he attributed to the angel: it looks backward and not ahead. “Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.” But contrary to Benjamin’s interpretation, the Modern who, like the angel, is flying backward is actually not seeing the destruction; He is generating it in his flight since it occurs behind His back! It is only recently, by a sudden conversion, a metanoia of sorts, that He has suddenly realized how much catastrophe His development has left behind him. The ecological crisis is nothing but the sudden turning around of someone who had actually never before looked into the future, so busy was He extricating Himself from a horrible past. There is something Oedipal in this hero fleeing His past so fiercely that He cannot realize—except too late—that it is precisely His flight that has created the destruction He was trying to avoid in the first place. Latour 2010: 485–6 This default appeal to Oedipus is perhaps too quick. Latour creatively misreads the “tired… trope” of an Angel who is, in Benjamin’s text, already something of a charlatan. The Angel is thoroughly impotent, aware of the scam of what the undead masses expect of him (to make them whole). “He” can’t give the undead masses and debris of history, turned toward him, what they want but lingers, as if wanting to, until he is simply torn away by what is called a “storm from the future.” This last angel is but the ragdoll of a certain angelicism—not just the costumed human face (with wings) imposed on the sign as messenger, here of no message, but the entire will to redemption narratives that his very form signifies. The text reads differently if one focuses on the word in Benjamin’s text, “storm,” which is repeated three times as the subject of three declarative sentences. It is a climactic term and subsequently indexed to what Thesis XVIII invokes as the aeons of organic life on earth within which human time appears as fractional seconds (an “anthropocene” perspective). Benjamin’s so-called Angel of History is in fact a vaudevillian figure and not the avatar of the hero, the materialist historiographer. He embodies and destroys both the angelicism of an utopist Marxian and the theotropes of a Cabbalist—the two specular idioms which the Theses fuses in order to cancel one another out. The description of the Angel is so abdicating, deceptive, and suicidal (one can imagine him diving for a cigarette as he looks at the masses) that it nullifies, in advance, the project of materialistic historiography. It also cancels any “weak messianism”—or any messianism whatsoever. The Angel is shown as a con, held to his post by his expectant readership who still wants to be made whole. It will never be clear whether the Angel only thinks this is what is wanted of him, or if the undead masses think he wants them to want this. He is the last trace of anthropopism, dolled up as a human figure to mediate chance. When he is torn away by the “storm” he removes the anthropo-narcissm of angelicism, the lure of giving matter a human form, face and, in this case, betraying bird wings. He is the last personification of a human face plastered on an imaginary other, already a wire-framed incandescent in Klee’s graphic deconstruction. He mimes and is dismissed as the sort of “weak messianism” that Benjamin elsewhere pretends to evoke—and which Derrida will return to, and try to use to keep a rhetoric of the future open (the trope of an impossible “democracy to come”). In this way, the Derrida of Specters of Marx regresses from Benjamin’s destructive project by restituting the phrase “weak messianism.” Derrida’s omission of ecocatastrophic logics from his otherwise compendious agenda—for instance, nowhere to be found in Specters’ “ten plagues” of the new world order—echoes elsewhere in an archival limit he seemed to require for “deconstruction” to rhetorically stage itself. It is not that Benjamin’s Angel trope is about fixation on the past—as archive, trace, histories of power, identity formations, narratives of justice, inscriptions—and hence ritual or time management. It is that “He” thinks that’s what his readers seek in him, and he both gestures toward wanting to oblige (with, say, weak messianism?) and effectively gets out of dodge. Benjamin’s Angel is given to us as a sort of con: knowing what his readership needs and hires him for (since “He” is the messenger of no revelation and reports to no god, is nothing but sign itself), He wants to help but is violently blown away. This lure of redemptive history is about angelicism tout court, its reflex or façade, the compulsion to reconstitute and to be reassured (even sanctified). The trompe l’oeil points not only to where this faux Angel is in costume as the last anthropomorphic form and face. (He looks human, is more or less male traditionally). It also points to the disappearance of the pretended mediation of an otherwise void sign (angel as messenger, as hermeneut). It gives the lie to a certain pretense to ethics, and to cognitive moralisms, and indicates a participation of angelicism in a more radical evil of which it is, adamantly, structurally, and violently unaware. The impulse toward angelicism pervades the recycling of twentieth century critical idioms in sophisticated variations. And this systemic relapse, like the Nachkonstruction of an oikos whose non-existence would accelerate its militarized defense, itself appears to further a suicidal arc. This new angelicism, like what Timothy Morton 2007 calls “revised organicisms,” merits suspicion. It is opportunistic to note where various critical traditions of return and redemption mingle. In a conversation between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt on “love” as a political agency at a conference titled “On the Commons; or, Believing-Feeling-Acting Together” we can read yet one more variant of an appeal to an angel that would make us and our past whole. Let us ignore that the commons in question for Hardt and Berlant is not water, oil, or food but the “transformative” zone of a new social “relationality” of liberal souls. “Love” here retains the soft debris and promise of a Christological meme. If for Hardt love “makes central the role of affect within the political sphere,” for Berlant a more aggressive claim erupts: Another way to think about your metaphor, Michael, is that in order to make a muscle you have to rip your tendons. I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality. The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. Davis and Sarlin 2011 Perhaps the metaphorical faux pas about “tendons” being ripped is a clue to the skeletal argument (this is not, literally not, the way to build muscle). What one witnesses is the effect of doubling down in the idiom of commitment (“change without trauma”?), a closing off, as academics of a certain age and temperament murmur, narcissistically, about affect. One has found a new name for the oscillation that retains a sovereignty of intentionality under a shifted algorithm: “Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional.” Sometimes, as we hear, it’s just not about us, even where self-love is called the commons and projects a socio-union, or jouissance, beyond the confines of a dubious “collective” individualism. Perhaps this is one marker of an end of a cycle, this fusion of critical and culturalist idioms, returning to a redeeming origin—this time as “farce.” This sort of eddy appears as the comfort spa for what could be called academic theory’s “Lehman moment.” 5. What is interesting in the horizons converging at present is not how a certain irreversibility impacts or is excluded still by telecracies and cognitive regimes. Nor is the main point of interest how sophisticated critical agendas have discretely served an agenda of institutional inertia—especially in the guise of critique. What is interesting is not the shape this will take, the variable catastrophes that are calculable or envisioned. What should be interesting is a logic of foreclosure or psychosis that has become, in part, normatized, accommodated or confirmed by corporate media. 9 This psychosis takes the form of excluding, occluding, or denying what is fully in the open and palpable, whether in science or before one’s eyes. Latour assumes that a “Modernist parenthesis” erred by its assiduous focus on rereading the past otherwise, but he misses the target of Benjamin’s cartoon. It is not attention to the past but rather angelicism that constitutes a violent hermeneutic relapse. Perhaps an example of Latour’s paralyzing ‘parenthesis’ would be Derrida’s injunction against thinking the “future” in order to keep open the incalculable and the “to come.” In fact, the current plunge in economic and societal “prospects”—lost “sovereignty,” debt enslavement, banker occupation, collapse of reserves, and so on—is not premised on an undue focus on the past but is all about alternative time-lines. In this respect Latour’s “prospects” run into the same capture of futures that occurs in the market, whether manipulated from above to defer reckoning (the “too big to fail” logic) or bet against. Calculations about future events, the forward narratives that flood media and alternative journalism, suggest a time in which the commodification of the “past” has flipped forward—marking both past and future as fantasmatic projections. One is not, so to speak, nor have we been, outside of “literary” constructions, least of all when we say something like system or reserves. What is called the market, now technically rogue in the sense that it serves as a façade of manipulations to play for time, is all about bets on future circumstance. Expanded to commodified futures and derivatives, and credit default swaps; wired through ingenious and self-imploding “financial instruments”—said market parallels the global despoilment of future reserves and times (generations). It would be indulgent to run through variations of this. Some are familiar: the consolidation of a new form of totalitarianism and internal security apparatuses; new climate war technologies (applied internally) testing the “full spectrum dominance” protocols that the Pentagon retains as its post-imperial template (which Mike Hill explores in this volume). Some are becoming visible: untimed prognoses of biospheric collapse (marine food chains), extreme weather disasters (mega-drought, flooding, fracking induced quakes). Others hover at the edge of recognizability: mass extinction events, the mathematics of global population “culling.” These nonetheless, like hydo-carbons and oil itself, literally shape visibility and invisibility—no oil, no hyper-industrial techno-culture, no photography as we know it, no cinema, no global transport. Is there an imperative, as Martin McQuillan suggests, to rethink the histories of writing and cognition in relation to carbon and hydrocarbon culture explicity—and to do so not only in relation to human mnemo-technologies? When Claire Colebrook converts extinction from a tragic taboo to an affirmative perspective she deflates the semantic boundedness that any angelicism has always sought to save. The problem is not that the past draws human narcissism toward it in the latter’s critical revisionism and deconstructions; the problem is that the more active “other temporalities” intervene, the more the artefacted present appears spellbound.

Martin McQuillan, Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis at Kingston University, 2012, “Notes Toward a Post-Carbon Philosophy” in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1,

Tom Cohen, Professor of Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies at University at Albany, State University of New York, Ph.D., from Yale University, 2012, “Introduction: Murmurations—“Climate Change” and the Defacement of Theory” in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1,

Tournament: Blake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Hopkins AL | Judge: Erik Baker
I affirm and value morality because ought implies a moral obligation.
 Should is defined as ought to. ELU: 

Semantically, there is no real difference between the two constructions, and they can be used interchangeably. I agree with you that "should" has become the far more common construction. Even back to the Old English (and earlier Proto-Germanic), the words carry a nearly identical sense of obligation. As such, I'd be hard pressed to articulate even a minor connotative difference between the two forms in modern usage.

And, all my arguments contextualize what a government should do under any definition.

The standard is consistency with a system of equal freedom.

1. – Analytic Truth

A – Authority
The only justification for governmental force and coercion is establishing a system of equal freedom, which is analytically true.  Guyer :

Perhaps in spite of his clear recognition that the objective reality of the concept of right needs a deduction, thus that the analysis of the concept of right must, like any analysis, presuppose a synthesis, Kant was distracted by his focus on the mathematical aspect of the determination of claims of right (what is necessary to make them precise) and thereby failed to provide the necessary argument that coercion can ever contribute to a condition of universal freedom. Yet it should not have been hard for him to provide the necessary argument or ‘construction’. It could go something like thi s: while one person who would commit an unprovoked act of coercion against another would certainly deprive the latter of his use of freedom—for a short period, a long period, or permanently, depending upon the nature of the injury he would inflict—the judicial threat and even use of coercion against such a would-be perpetrator does not deprive him of his freedom in the same way that he would deprive his victim of his. When the laws and the sanctions for breaking them are known, it can be argued, anyone who chooses between conforming to them and breaking them can make his own choice freely. If he chooses to conform his behaviour to the law, he may have to give up his particular desire to do violence to another, but at least he does so freely; and, if he chooses to break the law, he does that freely too, and can then even be said to suffer the consequences of his action freely, though undoubtedly not gladly. The point is that while in either case there are ways in which his freedom is limited, he is not simply deprived of it in the way that the victim of a crime is. His freedom is limited—indeed, this is what it means for freedom to be limited to the conditions of its own universality, that is, compatibility with the freedom of others—but unlike his victim’s it is not destroyed. 28 If Kant needs an argument like this, then his connection of right and the authorization to use coercion not only needs but also can have a deduction that establishes the theoretical condition for the rightful use of coercion—namely, that it can actually bring about a condition of universal freedom, as well as specifying the moral constraints on the use of coercion. Perhaps Kant was never completely clear that the argument required for the deduction of the authorization to use coercion for the sake of right must have both a theoretical and a practical component. In the case of the postulate of practical reason regarding the acquired right to property, however, he does seem to recognize clearly that establishing the possibility of the rightful acquisition of property involves both a moral inference from the concept of freedom as well as theoretical and clearly synthetic premisses about the conditions of the possibility of our experience as well. Let us now see how he supplies such a complex deduction while still calling the principle of acquired right a postulate.

B – Innate Right

The innate right to freedom is a necessity from the first-person perspective, from which is impossible to move.  There is no action that does not tacitly presuppose this right and it follows analytically from the concept of a person and will.  Guyer 2:

While Kant thus uses the analytic/synthetic distinction to contrast duties of right and ethical duties, he also uses it to draw a contrast within the domain of principles of right. This is the contrast between the innate right to freedom of the person and acquired rights to property. Kant makes this contrast in the ‘Doctrine of Right’ by using his contrast between ‘empirical possession’, or physical detention of an object— holding it in one’s hands or sitting on it—and ‘intelligible’ or ‘noumenal possession’, a right to control its use and disposition that does not depend upon current physical detention of it, but instead ultimately consists in an agreement among possible users of the object concerning who will have the right to it. Kant’s argument is that one ordinarily has the right to control one’s own body without any special consent from others, thus that forcible removal of an object from one’s bodily grasp or of one’s body from an object on which it currently sits would be interference with a right to freedom that does not depend upon the concurrence of others; but that the removal of an object from one’s intelligible but not physical possession can only be a wrong if there is a prior agreement that one has a right to it. In Kant’s words:

Three implications

1. This innate right is inescapable, which means all other frameworks necessarily presuppose it.  Any other system would foreclose on actions since we would need explicit consent from everyone else to take any action.
   2. Reject skepticism, even skeptics need to act, which means that they tacitly adopt this value
   3. Moral uncertainty flows aff and err aff on the framework debate, it is intuitive that we don’t need permission of others for simple actions.

The innate right of freedom and the necessity of valuing each individual as an end in itself analytically leads to a system of equal freedom.  Guyer 3:

Summing up, we can take Kant’s analyses of his examples of the four commonly accepted classes of duty to imply the following comprehensive interpretation of the duty always to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means: this consists of the duties (1) not to destroy human beings qua agents capable of free choice, (2) not to compromise the possibility of their exercise of their freedom of choice and action, (3) to cultivate general capacities that will facilitate the successful pursuit of the ends that they freely set for themselves, and (4), as circumstances warrant and allow, to take particular actions in order to facilitate the realization of the particular ends that they freely set for themselves. It is not clear what a formal completeness-proof for a classification of duties would look like, but this schema seems exhaustive of the kind of steps we can take in order to preserve and promote humanity, and thus appears to be an adequate derivation of a comprehensive system of duties from a single principle. This may seem even clearer when we add one further consideration that we can derive from Kant’s discussion of ‘private right’, that is, the right to property, from the ‘Doctrine of Right’. The underlying empirical assumption of Kant’s theory of property rights is that we are embodied creatures who can function only by means of the movement of our bodies— this gives rise to what Kant calls the ‘innate right to freedom’ (MM, DR, Introduction, 6:237–8)—and the use of bodies other than our own, including the use of non-human bodies, such as land, minerals, vegetables, and non-human animals, and also other human bodies, such as those of servants, other employees, contractors, and spouses—this is what gives rise to the various categories of what Kant calls ‘acquired right’. The preservation of our own humanity and that of others as well as the pursuit of the freely chosen ends of ourselves and others will require us to be able to move our own bo dies freely and to control and use various other bodies as well. Of course, the free movements of our own bodies as well as the free use of other bodies, whether non-human or human, can come into conflict with the free use of their own bodies and other bodies by other persons, and thus the general duty to treat humanity, that is, the capacity for freedom of choice and action, as an end and not merely as a means in both ourselves and others means that we will have to find ways to regulate the movements of our own bodies and the use of other bodies in order to preserve freedom not only in ourselves but also in others. The general duties to preserve free beings and the possibility of their exercise of their freedom as well as to promote the success of such exercise and the realization of particular freely chosen ends will all require the regulation of the use of both our own bodies and other bodies in ways designed to respect the humanity of all.

Deriving this truth analytically precedes other theories since they already presume the content of the will, this is the basis for a political and social will at all.  Guyer 2:

On this account, principles of right are analytic because they simply state the conditions under which freedom can be used in accordance with universal law—that is, the conditions under which multiple persons can exercise their individual freedom of choice consistently with each other—while principles of ethics are synthetic because they assume that human beings have necessary ends and state the conditions under which the use of our power of choice is consistent with the realization of those ends. The proof of a principle of ethics must therefore appeal beyond the concept of freedom itself to a necessary end of mankind, while the proof of a principle of right need demonstrate only that a relationship among persons is one that is consistent with the concept of freedom itself. Of course, to say the latter is to say precisely that a principle of right is derived from the concept of freedom and expresses the conditions necessary for the instantiation of the concept of freedom in relations among persons. Thus Kant’s claim that principles of right are analytic is itself a claim that such principles ‘proceed from’ and therefore can be proven by appeal to the concept of freedom.

This means that my conceptualization comes before other theories, such as util or contractarianism, since they assume a will which already has certain ends attached.  

Collective action requires both the publicity of reasons and respecting each as an end in themselves.   This link turns all contract or governmental frameworks since it frames our ability to act together.  Korsgaard:

But on the public conception of reasons, we do not get this result. On the public conception I must take your reasons for my own. So if I am to think I have a reason to shoot you, I must be able to will that you should shoot me. Since presumably I can’t will that, I can’t think I have a reason to shoot you. So it is only on the public conception of reasons that a universalizability requirement is going to get us into moral territory. 9.4.6 I just claimed that if personal interaction is to be possible, we must reason together, and this means that I must treat your reasons, as I will put it, as reasons, that is, as considerations that have normative force for me as well as you, and therefore as public reasons. And to the extent that I must do that, I must also treat you as what Kant called an end in yourself—that is, as a source of reasons, as someone whose will is legislative for me. To see why, consider a simple coordination problem. Suppose you and I are related as student and teacher, and we are trying to schedule an appointment. ‘‘Stop by my office right after class,’’ I say, thinking that that will be convenient for me, and hoping that it will also be convenient for you. It isn’t, as it turns out. ‘‘I can’t,’’ you say, ‘‘I have another class right away.’’ So I have to make another proposal. It’s important to see why I do have to do this: it’s because having the meeting is something that we are going to do together. The time I suggested isn’t good for you, and therefore it isn’t good for us, and it follows from that that it isn’t after all good for me, and so I need to suggest another time. To perform a shared action, each of us has to adopt the other’s reasons as her own, that is, as normative considerations with a bearing on her own case. That’s why the fact that the time is not good for you means that it also is not good for me. So we both keep making suggestions and considering them until we find a time that’s good for both of us. The aim of the shared deliberation, the deliberation about when to meet, is to find (or construct) a shared good, the object of our unified will, which we then pursue by a shared action. And it follows from the fact that the action is shared that if either of us fails to show up, we will both have failed to do what we set out to do. Our autonomy and our efficacy stand or fall together.

Multiple implications:

1. No self-interest based frameworks since they rest on private reasons
   2. Even if I lose that the standard follows analytically from the innate right to freedom,  I still win the framework
   3. To disprove the framework, they must justify purely private reasons within a social context, otherwise their framework is based on a system of mutual respect, which implies the aff

2 -  The Good

The notion of the good is fundamentally relational, any notion of good that relates to some intrinsic property cannot properly answer the question of why happiness is good or what it means to have happiness.  Korsgaard:
We can see a pattern here. Many people find it natural to suppose that what makes something good for you is that it makes you happy. But they also suppose that your own happiness is a good thing for you. For it is surely better for you to be happy than sad. Is that because being happy makes you happy? This little conundrum may be what drives people to the ownership theory that I mentioned earlier: happiness, they say, is a good thing in itself, and what makes a bit of happiness good for you is that it is yours. But, as I argued before, we then need to explicate what it means to say that the happiness is yours. What relation is that? As I said before, it is not the ordinary ownership relation, the relation of standing in normative control over the use of a thing. It also seems odd to analogize happiness to property for other reasons. Could there be unowned bits of happiness lying around, the way there were once unowned bits of real estate?6 Following John Locke, shall we say that you may lay claim to a piece of happiness, only if you make sure you leave enough and as good for others?7 From a moral point of view, it might be pleasant to believe that, but declining a piece of happiness is not a way of ensuring that it is there for someone else.8 All happiness is someone’s happiness: the idea of happiness is an inherently relational idea. To say that your happiness is yours is not to say that you stand in a special relation to some piece of happiness that would otherwise be free-floating or belong to someone else. And if happiness is the good, that means that to say that something is good for you is not to say that you stand in a special relationship to something good that would otherwise be free-floating, or belong to someone else. Now of course some people assert, and some deny, that happiness is the good. If this debate is about anything, the term ‘happiness’ must refer to something more specific than just ‘whatever is good for someone.’ Many people think it refers in particular to the quality of our experiences, and has something to do with their being pleasant rather than painful. Then people who deny that happiness is the good are protesting against the idea that all that matters is the quality of our experiences, while the people who think happiness is the good are convinced that unless we experience something, at least indirectly, it can have no impact on us whatever. But we do not need to enter this familiar debate, for everything I said before about happiness can be said about pleasure. We can claim that what makes something good for you is that it provides you with pleasant experiences. But that cannot be what makes pleasant experiences themselves good for you. That little conundrum may drive us into an ownership theory of pleasure: pleasure is a good thing, and what makes it good for you is that it is yours. But then again, we have to ask what the ownership consists in. Here the tempting answer will be that you are the one who experiences it. But again, it is not as if there is some unexperienced pleasure lying around, and being the one who experiences it is laying some sort of a claim to it.9 All pleasure is someone’s pleasure: the idea of pleasure is an inherently relational idea. To say that your pleasure is yours is not to say that you stand in a special relation to some piece of pleasure. If pleasure were the good, that would mean that to say that something is good for you is not to say that you stand in a special relationship to something good. And while we are at it, experience is relational too: so to say that you are the one who has a certain experience is not to say that there is some experience to which you stand in a special relation. So what makes something your good cannot be that you are the one who experiences it. I have been arguing that to say that something is your good cannot be to say that there is some good to which you stand in a special relation, a relation at which we gesture by saying that you are the one who ‘has’ that good. I can imagine someone thinking that he can show that this form of argument must be wrong. Take the following comparison: If Aristotle is right in arguing that a dead hand is not really a hand at all, then every real hand must be someone’s hand.10 Yet, surely, we can still say that what makes something your hand is that you are the one who has it? But, no, actually we cannot, for there is still the problem of what the right kind of ‘having’ consists in. We can imagine all kinds of macabre ways in which you could ‘have’ a hand that would not make it yours in the sense we want here. Only when we hit on the right relation – the right kind of ‘having’ – would the hand really be, by Aristotle’s criterion, a hand at all. 11 What this shows is that the condition of ‘having a hand’ is prior to the hand itself. So the important point here is not merely that everything that is good must be someone’s good: it is that everything that is good must be related to someone in a particular way before it can really be something good at all. That shows that the condition of ‘having a good’ is prior to the good itself. That is why I am claiming that someone’s being in a condition of having a good, or something’s being good for someone, is prior to the good itself.

This means no aggregation since there is no aggregate agent create for whom the aggregate good is good.

This notion of the good leads to respect for humanity as an end in itself and is the origin of reasons.  Korgaard:

I have already suggested that when we say that something would be good-for X in the final sense of good, we are speaking from a point of view made possible by our empathy, or in Hume’s sense, sympathy, with X. We are doing that because we are saying something that is only intelligible when we look at the world from X’s point of view. Claims about an animal’s final good are essentially relative to the animal’s point of view, for we identify his good and bad with respect to the view that he must take of his own condition.52 Now it might seem a little odd to say that when I judge that something is good or bad for me I am sympathizing with myself, but in fact I think that this is exactly the right thing to say.53 For to say that something is good-for me is to describe something’s relation to my condition as having normative implications, and that is in turn is to endorse the view of myself that, simply as a conscious being – as a being who is in her own keeping – I necessarily take of my own condition. One might see the endorsement of that view as an act of sympathy with myself. However that may be, that act of sympathy or endorsement – the conscious determination to act on the those motives that arise from the view that I necessarily take of my own condition – is what first gives rise to reasons. When I decide to treat what I cannot but think of as good-for me as being worthy of pursuit, then I decide to treat what is good-for me as good absolutely. In Kant’s language, I treat myself as an end in itself.
And, this notion of end in itself is perceptual.  Since our perceptions of the world are things that we believe others would perceive as well were they in the same situation those reasons are public.  

I contend that environmental protection creates a system of equal freedom.

Sub-point A is the original community of land.

Environmental protection is a material prerequisite to a system of equal freedom.
Ataner 12 writes
Brackets in original. My second line of argument in rejecting the claim that unowned lands are freely destructible, i.e., the view that our freedoms over and against the natural environment are unlimited, is as follows. Given, as we have seen above, Kant’s claims pertaining to humanity’s possession of the earth ab initio being an “original possession in common” or an “original community of land in general”, I deny that the natural environment can ever be thought of as truly res nullius, or, more appropriately, that land can be terra nullius in some absolute sense. This claim, while I cannot fully develop it here, rests simply on Kant’s general conception of land, which has unusual, often overlooked, implications within his overall framework. Briefly put, as we have seen, Kant claims that our possession in common of the finite surface of the earth is a (material) precondition of (the possibility of) our collective coexistence under Right, or, relatedly, that the unity of all places on the earth’s finite surface is a condition of the possibility of a united will among a plurality of unavoidably interacting persons. (For, as we have already noted, if the surface of the earth were infinite and unbounded, we would not necessarily come into contact with each other; hence, the united will, the sole condition pursuant to which rightful relations among all can be established, would carry no normative necessity. As Edwards puts it succinctly, if somewhat obscurely, Kant’s “idea of original community of land is a conceptual representation that picks out the objective correlate of the idea of universal will.”) The upshot of Kant’s line of reasoning, essentially, is that, as a collective, we inhabit the surface of the earth (and, by extension, the natural environment) in a manner parallel to the way in which we inhabit our bodies as individuals: in order to exist as free persons, we have to subsist as individuals in finite bodies; in order to co-exist as free persons under conditions of Right dictated by a united will (the only possible way in which we can co-exist as mutually free persons, mediated by the dictates of practical reason in its external aspect and the idea of the social contract, etc.), we have to subsist collectively within a finite (confined) space, namely upon the spherical surface the earth that unites all lands upon it. In either case, freedom as such can only have reality under certain material, empirical (pre)conditions. But, if the integrity of our finite bodies is necessary to our individual freedom, then we have to also admit that the integrity of the finite surface of the earth (and by extension, the natural environment) is essential to our collective co-existence as free persons. For, imagine if each of us were free to destroy some bit of the finite surface of the earth; in that case, it would, in principle, be permissible to destroy all surfaces of the earth. However, if we, through collective cumulative action, were to destroy the earth’s (finite) surface, we would have nothing, no space, to subsist upon, either collectively or individually. As such, it is hardly coherent to say that the destruction of portions of the surface of the earth must be permissible under laws of freedom; and, the incoherence of the destruction of land (as a matter of Right) in this regard is exactly parallel to the incoherence of suicide (as a matter of Virtue). 

Sub-point B is property rights.

A system of equal freedom would protect property rights, requiring environmental protection of owned land. Ataner 12 writes
Now, at this stage I reiterate my basic claim, per the environmentalist agenda, which is that the destruction of owned objects is outside the scope of owners’ legitimate freedoms. My rationale for this claim is as follows. As we have seen, Kant (along with Hegel) insists that property ownership must be possible as a matter of Right; otherwise our freedom, our capacity to act effectively in the world, would be radically inhibited. This simply follows from the Juridical Postulate, pursuant to which any unowned object (res nullius) must be available for acquisition. But if property is so utterly crucial to freedom, if the rightful use of evidently usable things is so very vital to our ability to have actual presence and effective agency in the world, then the destruction of evidently usable things (even where they are already owned) would appear to contradict the core logic, the underlying rationale, of property, for the simple reason that destruction renders usable things no longer usable. The logic of freedom (the “laws of freedom”) as applied to property rights suggests that ownership of things is supposed to enhance the freedom of owners; otherwise, as Ripstein notes, they would have rightful use only of their own bodies, which in itself is a severely limited means of effecting one’s purposes. In this vein, the destruction of one’s own finite, non-renewable resources is patently self-contradictory: for example, it is simply not rational for a land-owner to destroy (for example, to permanently poison or flood or irradiate) the land he inhabits. Would not such a land-owner, to use Kant’s own language, “be putting usable objects namely his own land beyond any possibility of being used” and would he not, in other words, “annihilate it, the land in a practical respect and make them into res nullius”? We can also make our point with a series of questions: If “freedom requires that you be able to have usable things fully at your disposal, to use as you see fit, and so to decide which purposes to pursue with them”,131 then is not the destruction of usable things in contradiction with the requirements of freedom? How are you supposed to pursue any further purposes if you have made it your purpose to destroy the things within which you pursue your purposes? Clearly, given the Kantain perspective on the meaning of property, the (permanent) destruction of finite, non-renewable natural resources, such as land, is incoherent: one simply cannot invoke the right of property, or the freedoms that it is supposed to enable, to justify destroying such resources. Similarly, suppose Hegel is right to say that property permits the suppression of the “pure subjectivity of personality”, or that in possessing property I become “an actual will”, or that property “gives my will existence”, such that “not until he has property does the person exist as reason”. In that case, wouldn’t the destruction of property result in a failed actualization of the will? Suppose, again, we have a land-owner who wishes to poison his lands, rendering them unfit for future use: is such a person actualizing his will freely and effectively, or is he undercutting his own (future) ability to act freely and effectively? I maintain that, for both Kant and Hegel, the destruction of property holdings, especially of finite depletable resources, is fundamentally incompatible with the core rationale of property as a freedom-maximizing institution. Put differently, the destructive, dissipating or non-sustainable use of finite, depletable natural resources, especially land, constitutes a transgression of freedom because such use is radically inconsistent with the conditions under which alone “the greatest use of freedom” is possible. That is, Kant’s core tenet regarding the necessity of property acquisition as a function of our extended freedom in the world dictates that the character of usable things as usable, as means fit for the realization of human purposes, must be maintained in perpetuity. 

Environmental damage of un-owned land is a unilateral assertion of property rights which kills equal freedom.
Ataner 12 writes
A thorough response to such a challenge is beyond the scope of my thesis here. However, I can say the following: an act of this kind is, in fact, not normatively neutral; indeed, in light of Kantian principles of property, an act that destroys unowned land constitutes a form of original acquisition of property. Consider this: Kant, pursuant to the basic principles of acquisition, holds that res nullius objects become a person’s property by means of a unilateral act. But, as we have seen, in order to qualify as a valid act of original acquisition, first possession as a physical act by the potential owner must assert and manifest decisive control over the sought object. Control, in turn, is indicated by the putative proprietor’s ability to exclude other persons from use of the object, as well as his ability to subject the object to his purposes. But, in that case, an environmentally destructive act, such as the poisoning of land (or, say, its irradiation, or some other manner of rendering it uninhabitable), just is an act of original acquisition: at a minimum, it is a form of proto-proprietary act and thus must fall under the rubric of property rules, including the prohibitions I have outlined above. For, by polluting a tract of land, for example, the polluter has asserted a form of control over it: (a) in so far as other persons are forthwith excluded from making use of the given tract of land (note that pollution or other similarly destructive uses of finite resources are functionally equivalent to fencing off, for the simple reason that, by destroying the resource, the first-user, i.e., the destroyer, has effectively excluded all other potential users from the resource, and, indeed, destruction is arguably the ultimate and most radical form of exclusion in this sense); and (b) in so far as the polluter has clearly realized at least one of his purposes effectively, namely the destruction of the resource in question (granted he has made a very limited, one-off use of the land, it is nevertheless fair to say that, precisely by destroying its future use value the polluter has, in fact, albeit M.A. Thesis – A. Ataner; McMaster University – Philosophy 136 in an admittedly unique sense, originally acquired that tract of land). Whatever form it takes after the destructive act, the destroyed object certainly cannot be classified as res nullius. Rather, the act of destruction itself attaches the object to its destroyer in a protoproprietary relation. And, of course, I say it is a “proto-“ or “quasi-“ proprietary relation because ownership, in this context, must ultimately be inchoate and, indeed, radically incoherent: the polluter has sought to simultaneously acquire and discard the tract of land, or, put differently, he has sought to use and deplete the object in question at once. Suffice it to say, this kind of incoherence – this irrationality at the core of an act of destruction against a purportedly res nullius object – is fatal from the standpoint of Right: an act of this kind simply cannot be authorized under laws of freedom, for the same reasons that already owned lands are subject to duties of preservation (as I have argued above). Just as with self-mutilation or suicide, acts of this kind are, from the standpoint of freedom, radically self-defeating, and hence impermissible within the Kantian normative framework. In sum, the basic preservationist duty intrinsic to property rights, as characterized above, must apply even in the context of supposedly neutral acts of destruction inflicted on land that is supposedly terra nullius, or on res nullius objects. There is, of course, an important difference between an act of original acquisition in the ordinary course, where a person intends to acquire and make future use of land, and a one-off act of destruction that, I say, structurally mimics original acquisition. In the ordinary case, the acquirer purports to unilaterally impose an obligation on all others to stay away from the object he seeks to make his own. (This, as we saw, posed a key predicament for Kant’s theory of property acquisition: how does a unilateral act give rise to omnilateral obligations?) Now, arguably, in the case of someone who simply wishes to destroy an object that is owned by no one (or just to render a tract of land uninhabitable), M.A. Thesis – A. Ataner; McMaster University – Philosophy 137 there is no intent (implicit or explicit) to generate an omnilateral obligation. But I claim that this is irrelevant: the potential destroyer of unowned (“vacant”) land purports to have a right to destroy it: the performance of such an act must be accompanied by an implicit assertion of such a right. The fact that, technically, no correlative (or corresponding) omnilateral duty to stay away from the land can be said to arise is, in my view, irrelevant. The normative structure, and import from the standpoint of Right, of an act of original acquisition whereby all others are excluded from use of the acquired land by obligation (unilaterally imposed yet omnilaterally held), is ultimately identical to that of an act of destruction whereby all others are excluded from use of the land in virtue of physical (empirical) restrictions (i.e., the post-destruction unsuitability of the land for further use by any others). The claim that you should have the right to exclude all others from using a given plot of land because you intend to make use of it for your own purposes going forward is not distinguishable in any important sense from the claim that you should have the right to physically exclude all others from using a given plot of (unowned) land going forward because you intend to make one-off use of it by destroying it. At a minimum, the two claims are normatively parallel: to posit a right in the former sense entails a virtually identical effect or outcome as positing a right in the latter sense, it is simply that in the former sense the resulting exclusion of all other persons from use of the land is due to normative constraint, while in the latter sense the resulting exclusion is due to empirical constraint. And yet, even here, because the resulting constraints issue from acts of freedom, purportedly undertake under color of right, the supposedly merely empirical constraint (i.e., the physical exclusion of all persons from use of the destroyed land) must be understood to carry normative weight. As such, the destruction of unowned land (by persons endowed only with innate right) is normatively indistinguishable from the destruction of owned land (by persons who have acquired rights in it).

Tournament: Emory | Round: 6 | Opponent: Loyola NR | Judge: Evnen
The political praxis of the 1AC is parallel to that of the Zapatistas in Mexico. Nonrepresentation is no longer a method of marginalization and subjugation, but is transformed through affirmation of difference and coexistence with all nature.  Their revolution against neoliberalism and the state is continuous.
Nail 10 writes
Zapatismo, as a non-representational political event that has brought hundreds of thousands of people together against neoliberalism and for the democratic defense of the earth, without folding to state politics, green capitalism, or environmental bureaucracy, I believe, should be considered as an abstract machine. Like the phenomena of the revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune, and the revolution of 1917, what is singular about this event is its irreducibility to social determinism and deductive causal chains: in 1994, in Mexico, Zapatismo held no resemblance to any recognizable, legal, or legitimate thing within the present “state of affairs,” i.e., no political representation (party), no market representation, linguistic representation (their languages are not spoken or recognized by political representatives), or representation by the local indigenous leaders (Caciques). There was no causal necessity that Zapatismo should have existed, no way it could have been deduced from the domains of “rights” and “commodities” from which it emerged, and yet they “burst upon a world that denied their existence” anyway, as Zapatista scholar John Holloway says.26 From the representational point of view of Mexican politics, the marginalized and unrepresented Zapatistas of Chiapas have no “legitimate” existence. But what is most interesting about the Zapatista communities is that they do not legitimate their revolution strictly by presupposed norms based on identity (prescriptive requests for “rights,” the overthrow of the state, a new market economy, or a new ethnic nationalism), but rather affirm a self-reference or autonomy. Instead of simply valorizing their difference and un-representability as such, as Simon Tormey has argued, the Zapatistas, I am arguing, have created a new form of ecopolitical evaluation that better allows them to realize the (self)management of forest commons.27 Contrary to normative theories of environmental philosophy based on prescription, the Zapatistas practice a form of rotational direct democracy where members take fourteen day shifts deliberating and facilitating communal/environmental matters, where they consider the ecosystem to be inseparable from who they are as Zapatistas. As Subcomadante Marcos puts it, For a long time, this place has existed where men are Zapatistas, the women are Zapatistas, the kids are Zapatistas, the chickens are Zapatistas, the stones are Zapatistas, everything is Zapatista. And in order to wipe out the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, they will have to wipe this piece of territory off the face of the earth- not just destroy it but erase it completely, because there is always the danger of the dead down below.28 If we are to take this passage seriously, what it means to be Zapatista is also to be the stones, trees, and animals of the Zapatista autonomous zones. Participatory (as opposed to representative democracy) and collective (as opposed to personal or moral conscience) decision-making actually is the whole ecological system speaking through (as opposed to for) the proper name of Zapatismo expressively. “Zapatismo” is thus not a thing, or norm, that represents or signifies anything, but rather a singular and constantly renegotiated abstract machine.

Thus, I advocate a paralleling of Zapatista ecopolitics in resistance to resource extraction in Note this is struckthrough developing countries. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until he checks in cross-ex.

There is nothing static in the world.  The AC is a rejection of totality and unity in favor of an ontology of difference.  Everything is interconnected. The conscious mind is an illusion, the unconscious should be the point of ethics.  This is an epistemic, ontic, and ethical claim.  Marginalization of ecological knowledge by the state and corporations is both violent and the root cause of environmental damage.
Hipwell 4 writes
For Deleuze, static identities are dangerous illusions: the real world is, by contrast, always fluid and mobile; reality is ontologically characterised by ‘difference’. This difference is not, as it might seem, difference between things (an identitarian notion) but rather the idea that reality is a continuum of interplay, interpenetration and interconnectedness and that ‘things’ are merely intensities in this continuum, internally constituted by the interplay of different forces, and themselves interacting and interpenetrating with everything around them. In this sense, allegedly separate entities are mutually constitutive and interdependent, and treating them as entirely separate inevitably does intellectual and physical violence to the world. In an ontology of difference, the world is viewed holistically. Differential being is defined on the basis of what it is rather than what it is not. It is dynamic, not static. As Deleuze (1988, 123) puts it, ‘the important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities’. While we may, for practical purposes, speak of ‘a tree’, ‘a fish’, ‘the human species’, etc., awareness of ontological difference reminds us that it is a mistake to abstract such things from their dynamic and continuous context. Prior to striation by identitarian forces, the world is made of ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474–500), or what Patton (2000, 112) has called ‘the heterogeneous space of qualitative multiplicity’. In smooth space, diverse and unexpected interconnections may appear and reconfigure (‘lines of flight’). Smooth space is continually in flux; it is difficult to know intellectually and (therefore) difficult to control. To know one’s way in the tangle of The Canadian Geographer / Le Ge´ographe canadien 48, no 3 (2004) 360 William T. Hipwell primeval forest or other ‘wild zones’ (Dalby 2001), one must have good instincts. Wisdom of the body Following early-twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson, Deleuze calls for the epistemological rehabilitation of intuition. He describes this intuitive epistemology as ‘transcendental empiricism’ or ‘wisdom of the body’. Prior to intellectualisation, our instincts respond to and process the sensory data received by the body as a continuous and multiplicitous flow. Thus, the way humans perceive the world through ‘wisdom of the body’ is better attuned to ontological difference (and therefore better capable of understanding smooth space) than through the intellect. This ‘libidinal epistemology’ provides us with an understanding of a continuous, mobile, fluid and interconnected world (Ford and Hipwell 2001). A shift in focus from identity to difference requires a greater reliance on the unconscious, on instinct and on knowing through the heart. It requires, in many senses, an un-focusing. As an empiricist and materialist, Deleuze does not mean that un-focusing entails abandoning empirical knowledge gained through the representational intellect but rather augmenting it with wisdom of the body. He would argue that researchers—especially in the social realm—must come to recognise that variations and tangential relationships may often be more important than structures and causal relationships. Doel (1996, 430) advises that researchers learn ‘nomad thought’, ‘dwelling on change, becoming and inconsistency, rather than fixity, being and constancy’. Friedrich Nietzsche, a formative influence on Deleuze, made the argument for intuitive routes to knowledge in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche argued that . . . ‘being conscious’ is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided into certain channels by his instinct. (Nietzsche 1966, 11) As Deleuze puts it The great activity is unconscious. . . . Consciousness is essentially reactive; this is why we do not know what a body can do . . .. The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. (Deleuze 1983, 41) Geographer David Livingstone (1992, 1–2) echoes this sentiment, noting that the myth of science as proceeding solely through ‘experimental analysis and logical rigour’ has been thoroughly dispelled (see also Saul 2001, 5). In sum, reality can only be fully grasped with the aid of wisdom of the body, which is more attuned to difference than to identity. Wisdom of the body is implicitly granted epistemological status in the local–traditional ecological knowledge (Lo-TEK) employed by peripheral communities engaged in the small-scale harvest of natural resources (see Inglis 1993; Acheson and Wilson 1996). As is discussed below, the marginalisation of such knowledge by state and corporate managers is a key cause of many environmental problems. 

There is no distinction between the human and nonhuman.  The great mistake has been to assume human agency can exist separately from the nonhuman entities that facilitate it.  Capitalism is the underlying logic of extraction and subjugation.  Nothing except rejection can recognize the ways in which production conditions human desire and reason.
Nail 2 writes
Deleuze and Guattari begin their first collective work, Anti-Oedipus, with the rejection of the dualism between the supposedly autonomous spheres of nature and culture. Where industry extracts its raw materials from nature, consumes them, and then returns its refuse to nature, Deleuze and Guattari argue, following Marx, that this is not the operation of relatively separate spheres (production, distribution, consumption), but rather an activity predicated on the common structural relations of the capitalist division of labor and the concept of supposedly “fixed elements” within the overall process of profit generation. Human beings do not autonomously extract raw materials from nature, nor do they autonomously decide to “save nature” from unsustainable extractions or toxic waste disposals. While there are, of course, human agents who speak of the “rights of nature” and “sustainable extraction,” their very ability to conceive of environmental protection in terms of “rights,” “labor,” and “value” is conditioned by an advanced technoscientific coordination of research, organization, and green capitalist industry. For this reason Deleuze and Guattari can say, We make no distinction between man human and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of viewof utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not man human as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of being. Human activity and “reason” is thus conditioned on an enormous matrix of non-human activities (economic, biological, and technological structures, etc.), just as nature is conditioned by an enormous network of human activity. To assert an independence of one from the other is sheer abstraction. Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion is thus that there are only processes of mutual production that are neither strictly human, nor strictly natural, but both, that is, artificial. Insofar as artifacts and technology are a mix between human activity and natural objects, Deleuze and Guattari claim that all processes of production (insofar as they too are always natural/human) are machines. And “every machine is a machine connected to another machine,” and the multiplicity of machines connected up with one another forms the “Mechanosphere” of the earth (AO 12/6). As Guattari insists, “We might just as well rename environmental ecology machinic ecology, because Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines.”11 

Transcendental ethical norms falsely assume human independence from nature. Ethics must enable a shared condition that facilitates creative expressions of subjectivity in that it can be constantly re-invented. Words, names, events, everything is a constant process of creativity and becoming.  Affirmation of this creative power is the ultimate ethical goal.
Nail 3 writes
Where one might locate the concept of an ethical “norm,” “law,” or “condition” in environmental philosophy that allows disparate human voices to come to a common prescriptive agreement on a dispute, Deleuze and Guattari instead propose the alternative concept of an “abstract machine.”A norm does not describe the world the way it “is,” but how it “ought” to be. A norm is thus a transcendent element intended by an autonomous form of consciousness or sovereign state unhindered by existential bias. For instance, the prescriptive value of “ecological diversity” is defined in conceptual or legal terms, prior to or independent from any specific thing that might be described as realizing that value. Something either realizes biodiversity and is right or it does not and it is wrong. “Athing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise,” as Aldo Leopold asserts in his land ethic.23 Difference is thus only a difference from the same, e.g., the norm which represents the independent unity of the diverse. Opposed to this, the abstract machine is an event or shared condition for action and evaluation only insofar as it is immanently transformed by the concrete elements that realize and differentiate it . There is thus a “coadaptation” or “reciprocal presupposition” of the two that allows for their participatory transformation.24 The event thus changes in nature each time there are “reconversions subjectives actuelles” (actually occurring subjective redeployments) of it (DRF 217/236). Subsequently, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the abstract machine is absolutely singular and unable to be deduced from either history or introspection. In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. (DRF 215/233) The abstract machine is not deducible because it is the condition for deduction, description, and prescription itself: it is a more primary evental commitment. This machine is abstract in the sense that is not a thing among other things, but also real (vrai-abstrait), insofar as it is a condition that allows for the appearance of “new space-times” and new subjectivities antagonistic to representation and power (P 233/172).25 However, while it may not be a thing, the abstract machine is still marked by a singular and asignifying proper name, date, and image, like the names of military operations or the names of hurricanes, as Deleuze and Guattari say (MP 51/28, 322– 323/264). These names do not represent, symbolize, or refer to anything at all. Rather, they are spoken through. As a self-referencing and autonomous event independent from political representation, the abstract machine allows for the shared expression and conjunction of the various heterogenous elements that speak and exist through it (MP 177–178/142). 

The Zapatistas movement is one of continuous unfolding and continuous production of ways of life that are coextensive with nature. This is not only a commitment on material level, but a rejection of previous methods of libidinal investment.  Nail 4 writes
The procedure of counting the affects of the situation thus decides what can or will be done in the assemblage. There are no universal ends or values that inhere in things themselves, only their immanent capacities to be assembled and reassembled in a continually renegotiated and expressive machinic assemblage or relation. Insofar as the Zapatistas practice such a continual and affective renegotiation of their ecological assemblage, without drawing on the concepts or practices of state-based or universal environmental rights, they effect a concrete machinic assemblage. That is, the Zapatista communities practice a form of collective valorization that refers back not to the sovereignty of the state, or the intrinsic value of nature, or any other pre-given teleology, but to the immanent act of determining in each case what their collective ecological body is capable of. Assembled in a heterogeneous mix of NGOs, diverse indigenous traditions, and in ternational influence, the Zapatistas have had to learn how to manage the environment. This commitment takes the form of several specific forest management affects: to be able to cultivate the land by the no-till method, to be able to ban slash and burn practices, to be able to take a limited amount of trees from the forest or be penalized by having to plant and care for two more for every one taken in excess, and to be able to ban agrochemical use. As a Montes Azules resident explains, “we have been accused of destroying the jungle. But we as indigenous people are the true guardians of the environment, we live together with the jungle. If the jungle dies, we die with it.”32 The Zapatistas do not speak for the forest, because they are the forest, or rather, their life is an affect of the forest, “to be Zapatista in the Lacandon.” Their political practices express the life of the forest and exist as so many affects within its collection. Even their relations of production are owned in common and practiced sustainably. The workers’ cooperatives (honey, coffee, textiles, etc.) in Zapatista territory are based on collective or common (not private, or public) property, worker control, and self-management. While Zapatismo may have its flaws, the spirit of these institutions (the schools, the hospitals, the homes, the farming, etc.) is, as Guattari would say, to set up structures and devices that establish a totally different kind of contact. A kind of selfmanagement or self-organization of a set of problems which does not start from a central point that arranges elements, inserts them into a control grid, or establishes an agenda, but that, on the contrary, allows the various singular processes to attempt a rhizomatic unfolding. This is very important, even if it doesn’t work.33 Zapatismo is thus a struggle for the creation of a maximum of participation, both human and natural, in achieving an ecological “self-management conceived outside the criteria of a formal democracy that has proven to be sterile,” as Guattari puts it (MRB 391).  

Creativity is the internal link to all of their fairness and education claims, it frames the process of debating.  All arguments are already within the space of play that is debate and they only arose in their current forms because of it.  The political praxis of the AC resonates with this claims, reject theory to bring debate back.  Zagorin:
This understanding of rules which sediment the boundaries of convention only to be swept away in the interplay of change, or which interpolate the opposition into conformity with the frame which it establishes, is thus similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the inter-play between smooth and striated spaces, the latter which enables metrical progression, the former which enables a greater degree of experimental becoming. The negotiation of innovation cannot function without the establishment of a prior conformity—a negation insensible without a prior affirmation to ground its ontology—and thus we see a relationship of necessity between the assertion or understanding of prior rules and rhizomatically mobile technologies of challenge, resistance, critique, subsidence, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ...the two are linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth space, with potentially very different values, scope, and signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space. (1987, 486) Just as the condition of debate which enables restriction of certain arguments contingently from frames of consideration, it enables every argument to potentially be internally mutant within multiple interlocking frameworks. As Elizabeth Pass writes, “Smooth spaces are dynamic, and transformation is more important than essence” (2001, par. 9). Even in the moment of assertion of a particular rule-set, value-set, criteria-set, evaluative framework, the concern for the “essence” of these arguments is minimal to non-existent; gaming makes the employment of rules purely strategic and already folded into the flow of play. The argument that we need to act to stop violence means something radically different in a Kantian, utilitarian, and pure ontological framework. That same argument is internally dependent on value judgments about whether or not violence is good or bad, or whether acting to stop violence is the appropriate response to observing violence in the world. The frames change as debaters’ arguments compete and negotiate within them. In a framework which is only concerned with representations, the fact that the plan, if enacted, would save a million children, counts for almost nothing. This conceptual result itself may be a reason to reject the framework, but nothing is a priori; it can only be weighed against other counter-veiling considerations for which privileging representations in decision-calculus is, in and of itself, a meritous proposition. These observations demonstrate an important proposition about the activity: part of what gives debate its creative vibrancy is its ability to consistently re-draw the boundaries of discrete conceptual objects, to leave fluid the criteria of relevance for research and inquiry while simultaneously intensively pursuing that scholarship. In debate, the fruits of critical theory and persistent interrogation are not intellectual paralysis or withdrawal from political advocacy, but more often than not a reciprocal engagement with creative experimentation.

Need to address the question of desire. This is the framing question for the round. Stiegler 12 writes
It was at the end of the 19th century and at the end of the 20th century that capitalism met with its first two limits: The industrial revolution, as the implementation of the capitalist system of production, is the extension of the process of grammatization whereby and wherein tertiary retentions (which include psychotechniques) are formed by apparatuses of the control of gestures which allow, as machine-tools, the liquidation of workers’ know-how, and, on this basis, the realization of immense gains in productivity, and the development of a new prosperity. However, besides the misery this process engenders in the form of the proletariat, it encounters the limit analysed by Marx as the tendency of diminishing returns. To fight against this limit of capitalist development, the American way of life invented the figure of the consumer whose libido is systematically put to work to counter the problems of excess production, which is the social concretization of this tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This canalization of the libido operated by the capture of attention ends up by liquidating the expertise in living savoir-vivre of consumers, by the massive development of societies of services which let them off the hook of their own existences, that is, of their diverse responsibilities as adults having reached their legal maturity. This is what ends up provoking the liquidation of their own desire, as well as the desire of their own children, to the strict extent that the latter can no longer identify with them, both because these parents no longer know anything, and are no longer responsible for anything, having become themselves big fat children, and because the process of primary identification is short-circuited by psychopower through the psychotechnologies. This destruction of desire (that is to say also the destruction of attention and of care) is a new limit encountered by capitalism, this time not only as mode of production, but also as mode of consumption, way of life, that is, as biopower having become psychopower. A third limit henceforth imposes itself on our attention. It consists in the fact that the development of the industrial way of life, inherited Care 111 from the 19th and 20th centuries, has become not only toxic on the level of minds and of libido, but also on the geophysical and biological level. This third limit will not be able to be raised or effaced before the invention of a mode of life constitutive of a new way of taking care and of paying attention to/of the world by the invention of therapeutics: techniques, technologies and socio-pharmacological apparatuses of the formation of attention corresponding to the organological specificities of our time: to the specificities of the technologies of transindividuation forming the infrastructure of an industrial system itself functioning in an endogenous way as a system of care: making care its “chain of value” that is, its economy, and thereby renewing with the original sense of the word economy, for to economize is to take care. Western societies, in the sway of the exportation of technologies issuing from their mode of production, have engendered industrial competitors (on whom Paul Valéry was already meditating as to their consequences to come) by a movement of financialization that could do nothing but cause a global economic war. In this new form of war, the stakes are a defense of society no longer as an enemy, exterior or interior, but against a process that ruins time, that is, the horizon of the long term, and the possibility of projecting this horizon in giving oneself objects of desire. This process spins out of control at this precise moment when the effects of the three limits of capitalism combine. Global competition fired up by financialization has ended up in the destruction of the complex equilibrium that allowed that capitalism’s development also be the social development of industrial democracies by the Keynesian organization of the redistribution of wealth under the authority of a welfare State, and it is in the context of the economic war which resulted that marketing has become, as Gilles Deleuze put it, “the instrument of social control” in the societies of control, and that the tendency of libidinal energy to self-destruct suddenly worsened. Thus, on the side of consumption, the capitalist mode of life has become at the end of the 20th century an addictive process less and less capable of finding sustainable satisfactions—this has induced great discontent in the civilization of consumption, which has replaced culture, that is, care, if we accept that culture precedes cults of all types, that is, attachments to objects whose ensemble constitutes a system of care. It is in this context that Jenny Uechi could write in Adbusters that: According to surveys conducted recently by the sociologist Juliet Schor, 81 of Americans estimate that their country is too centered on consumption and almost 90 of them consider that it is too materialistic. 

Traditional notions of subjectivity operationalize a regime of thought that makes shared imaginaries impossible, which are a precondition for debate. This is telemorphosis: regimes of memory that pave the way toward extinction. The aff provides a new imaginary through Stiegler.  Cohen:

If it is possible to note that theory’s retrieval of human and animal otherness against the horrors of capitalism is akin to political deferrals of the future for the sake of saving the present, then we might ask what might open the reactive self-bound logics beyond homeland security? What has been absent to date is any shared or possible climate change imaginary—or a critical matrix. The problem is that the other materialities that constitute the forces of climate change would pulverize whatever informs “imaginaries” in general, which have always been tropological systems. When a recent critical query asks, for example, how to define “a political subject of climate change” the authors focus on how the “climate crisis shapes particular subjectivities,” properly putting any rhetoric of “crisis” itself to the side as appropriable. The problem lies in the premise of defining a “political subject” or subjectivities to begin with: “Unsurprisingly, much of the current discourse on climate change oscillates between these two poles: most dramatically, between imminent catastrophe and the prospect of renewal; between unimaginable humanitarian disaster and the promise of a green-tech revolution. As such the climate crisis regularly calls forth regimes of risk” Dibley and Neilson 2010: 144. This Janus-faced algorithm, the “political subject of climate change” (147), arrives as a form of cognitive disjuncture: “these two images. . . are alternative figures of the subjectivity of ecological crisis. They are complimentary. . . . something like a dialectical image of the subjectivity of climate change” (146). On the one hand, this theoretical intervention is typical of the cognitive reflex toward pre-emption of the worst in arguments focused on mitigation, on sustainability, and on various “environmental” agendas—despite none of these answering to what science would demand. Sustainability has been angled to “sustain” the level of comfort and acquisition that the economy of “growth” demands. On the other hand, there is a reflex of occlusion. This straining for a “subjectivity” that would account for a political feature of this new landscape comes up with two mutually canceling algorithms: a desperate sense of imminent crisis and end, alongside a hope of something as lulling as ‘subjectivity’. As a number of essays in the volume imply, one might proceed otherwise: depart or begin from a subject without subjectivity (Catherine Malabou), or an exteriority without interior ( Justin Read). The aporia of an era of climate change are structurally different from those that devolved on the torsions of Western mestphysics. They are not the aporia explored by Derrida around the figure of hospitality, taken as an endless refolding that keeps in place, while exposing, a perpetuated and lingering logics that defers the inhospitable. (One mode of deconstruction as solicitation involves shaking the house or structure within which one finds oneself, and this circuit might itself be disturbed by a refusal to occupy.) As Masao Myoshi 2001 first suggested, the logics of extinction compromise the aims of an emancipatory future along with all else. Any project of “formal democracy” runs up not only against the twenty-first century post-democratic telecracies that render that episode of 90’s thought transparently inscribed in the neo-liberal fantasy (or propaganda) it would appropriate back for the then bruised “Left.” But it also faces the transparency by which market democracy not only appears a Potemkin figure itself but, in fact, guarantees planetary ruin by the demographic requirements of cars alone for any emerging middle class of India and China (as Arundhati Roy argues).4 Any focus on global population control runs up against feminist progressivism Hedges 2009; Hartman 2009; post-colonial narratives that would restoratively mime the promise of 90’s neo-liberalism of a world of market democracy would require three planets of resource materiel to allow dispossessed others to reach our levels of prosperity. The profound 90’s investment in the “otherness of the other,” an other who would be recognized, communed with, raised into the polis, and colonized, appears today as a stubborn archaism and, perhaps, as an epochal error, that maintained the sovereign trace of subjective mastery. It would seem that both metaphysics and its deconstruction jointly participated in what is now disclosing itself as the “anthropocene”—an epoch of self-affirmation into which Enlightenment ideologemes have played, as Dipesh Chakrabarty analyzes in the term “freedom.”5 The impasse between today’s spellbound and rapacious present and supposed future generations, the rupture of any imagined moral contract to or recognition of same, has been in circulation for a while. The present volume of essays focuses on this under-examined question: how do mnemotechics, conceptual regimes, and reading—a certain unbounded textualization that exceeds any determination of writing—participate in or accelerate the mutations that extend, today, from financial systems to the biosphere? The volume gives this a name, telemorphosis.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x

Part 1 is the Human Form

The form of a living thing is self-maintaining; we develop dispositions towards objects with regards to our functioning. Human life is one of choice. We designate a conception of the good as the one we will pursue, and that is what we mean when we say someone lived a good life.

 Korsgaard:
There is nothing to say. But according...lead a specifically human form of life.

The Origin of the Good and Our Animal Nature” Christine Korsgaard. In Problems of Goodness: New Essays on Metaethics, edited by Bastian Reichardt. Berstein Verlag, forthcoming

This goodness is not itself normative, however. Instead, moral force comes from the implicit valuing of our valuing capacities that it part of choice. We place value on the world and thus express our own unconditional value.

Korsgaard 2:
Now Aristotle’s view, like the hedonist...because of our animal nature.

S-Consistency with a system of mutual respect.

Underview to the Framework - Publicity

Collective action requires both the publicity of reasons and respecting each as an end in themselves. This link turns all contract or governmental frameworks since it frame our ability to act together.

Korsgaard 3:

But on the public conception of reasons...efficacy stand or fall together.

Korsgaard, Christine M. Self-constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. p 192.

Contention 1 - Inclusion

Voter turnout absent compulsory voting is lower and reflects mainly higher socio-economic classes, compulsory voting solves.

 Ebb in 2013:

The first step in establishing...turnout and electoral equality.

Ebb, James. Government of the People: A Case for Compulsory Voting. April 2013. Bachelor's Thesis.

The pre-election description of likely voters skews political influence towards the upper class, counterplans can’t solve.

 Ebb 2:

Schäfer (2011) and Lijphart...socio-economic classes.

Contention Two is the Duty of Liberty
Nonvoting violates the rights of others, compulsory voting is key to solve.

Dagger:

For that matter, a republican...forced to be free.

Dagger, Richard. Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Compulsory voting is necessary to justify policies to the people. It fosters civic relationships and political culture that is a precondition to any notion of a good state. It is also necessary for individuals to see themselves as part of a state, which is necessary for the stability of justice.

Rawls:

Of course, the grounds for self-government...conception of the good of justice.

Rawls, John. Arguably the greatest man to ever live. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971

Tournament: Blake | Round: 5 | Opponent: Marilyn Frye | Judge: Will Cox
Resource extraction in developing countries is influenced by neoliberalism. Corporations and states suppress environmentally-focused protest by indigenous groups with violence.
Downey et al. 10 writes
Of course, transportation technology alone does not ensure access to affordable raw materials, especially when those materials are located in other nations or in areas controlled by other groups. Thus, since World War II and the breakup of Europe’s colonial empires,4 wealthy nations and corporations, which consume the bulk of the world’s natural resources (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins, 1999; Speth, 2005), have relied on a combination of mechanisms that they control, including ideology (e.g., neoliberalism; Goldman, 2005), debt (Bello et al., 1999; Clark and Foster, 2009), agricultural research institutes (Foster, 1994), export credit (Evans, Goodman, and Lansbury, 2002), political risk insurance (Moody, 2005, 2007), the WTO (Wallach and Woodall, 2004), the World Bank, and the IMF (Bello et al., 1999; Goldman, 2005), to ensure their continued access to and control over vital raw materials. Among other things, these institutions, organizations, and ideologies have worked collectively to open the economies of developing nations to corporate investment, increase the flow of natural resources from developing to developed nations, create new legal structures and government institutions that facilitate foreign involvement in developing nation economies, and garner developing nation support for corporate activities, including resource extraction activities, within their borders (Bello et al., 1999; Goldman, 2005; Harrison, 2004; Moody, 2007; Potter, 2000; Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, 2004; Toussaint, 2005; Vorley, 2004; Wallach and Woodall, 2004). However, nations and societies are not monolithic entities, and regardless of whether a government willingly or unwillingly engages in specific resource extraction activities, whether these activities are organized by local or foreign companies, or whether they occur in developed or developing nations or in nations with strong or weak legal and property rights regimes, it is likely that in many cases individuals and groups will protest, resist, or rebel against these activities. For example, protestors might be worried about local environmental degradation or health problems that result from resource extraction activities, they might be aggrieved by any loss of livelihood that they and their community may experience as a result of these activities, or they may be forced to relocate in order to make way for resource extraction (Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, 2004). Similarly, workers hired by resource extraction firms may protest poor working conditions, local residents may receive few of the benefits but all of the burdens associated with resource extraction activities, or local residents may be indigenous, colonized, or otherwise marginalized people who resent government and outsider intrusion into their lives (Evans et al., 2002; Gedicks, 2001; Moody, 2007). In such instances, local and national governments, resource extraction firms, or rebels who control natural resources may feel that they have no choice but to use violence or the threat of violence to protect their resource extraction activities. Violent actions and threats of violence might include the forced relocation of local residents; the use of police, military, or mercenary forces to break up protests, arrest protestors and provide mine security; and the repression of local indigenous people from whose ranks protestors have emerged or might emerge. Violent actions might also include military conflict with groups that threaten resource extraction activities and foreign military aid and training to local police and military forces. Of course, armed violence may occur even in the absence of protest. For example, forced labor may be used to decrease labor costs or because working conditions are horrendous, and forced removal may occur in the absence of protest to either forestall protest or because there is no way to extract resources with people living on or near the extraction site. In either case, violence or threatened violence will likely be necessary because most people do not want to be forced to work or leave their homes. The use or threatened use of violence to gain or maintain access to vital raw materials may also occur in situations in which a resource that is viewed as being critical to national survival and economic prosperity, such as oil or water, is located in an area controlled by others in which mechanisms such as trade liberalization or structural adjustment have not effectively guaranteed permanent supplies of or control over the resource (see Klare, 2001, 2004, for detailed discussions of this type of situation). In such cases, governments might resort to actions such as militarily enforced trade sanctions, counterterrorism activities, proxy wars, military threats, invasion, or providing military aid and training to local police and military forces. Finally, because land and water transport is potentially subject to piracy or military disruption, governments may devote military resources toward protecting specific resource shipments (such as U.S. protection of Kuwaiti shipping during the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s) or providing security for roads, railroads, and naval shipping lanes (Klare, 2001, 2004).5

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The Zapatistas of Mexico rebel against neoliberalism and prioritize environmental protection.
Nail 10 writes
Zapatismo, as a non-representational political event that has brought hundreds of thousands of people together against neoliberalism and for the democratic defense of the earth, without folding to state politics, green capitalism, or environmental bureaucracy, I believe, should be considered as an abstract machine. Like the phenomena of the revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune, and the revolution of 1917, what is singular about this event is its irreducibility to social determinism and deductive causal chains: in 1994, in Mexico, Zapatismo held no resemblance to any recognizable, legal, or legitimate thing within the present “state of affairs,” i.e., no political representation (party), no market representation, linguistic representation (their languages are not spoken or recognized by political representatives), or representation by the local indigenous leaders (Caciques). There was no causal necessity that Zapatismo should have existed, no way it could have been deduced from the domains of “rights” and “commodities” from which it emerged, and yet they “burst upon a world that denied their existence” anyway, as Zapatista scholar John Holloway says.26 From the representational point of view of Mexican politics, the marginalized and unrepresented Zapatistas of Chiapas have no “legitimate” existence. But what is most interesting about the Zapatista communities is that they do not legitimate their revolution strictly by presupposed norms based on identity (prescriptive requests for “rights,” the overthrow of the state, a new market economy, or a new ethnic nationalism), but rather affirm a self-reference or autonomy. Instead of simply valorizing their difference and un-representability as such, as Simon Tormey has argued, the Zapatistas, I am arguing, have created a new form of ecopolitical evaluation that better allows them to realize the (self)management of forest commons.27 Contrary to normative theories of environmental philosophy based on prescription, the Zapatistas practice a form of rotational direct democracy where members take fourteen day shifts deliberating and facilitating communal/environmental matters, where they consider the ecosystem to be inseparable from who they are as Zapatistas. As Subcomadante Marcos puts it, For a long time, this place has existed where men are Zapatistas, the women are Zapatistas, the kids are Zapatistas, the chickens are Zapatistas, the stones are Zapatistas, everything is Zapatista. And in order to wipe out the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, they will have to wipe this piece of territory off the face of the earth- not just destroy it but erase it completely, because there is always the danger of the dead down below.28 If we are to take this passage seriously, what it means to be Zapatista is also to be the stones, trees, and animals of the Zapatista autonomous zones. Participatory (as opposed to representative democracy) and collective (as opposed to personal or moral conscience) decision-making actually is the whole ecological system speaking through (as opposed to for) the proper name of Zapatismo expressively. “Zapatismo” is thus not a thing, or norm, that represents or signifies anything, but rather a singular and constantly renegotiated abstract machine.

Thus, I advocate an embracing of Zapatista ecopolitics in resistance to resource extraction in Note this is struck through  developing countries.

Corporations and the state marginalize the ecological worldview of indigenous groups which rejects totality in favor of instinctual knowledge. This is epistemically flawed and causes violence.
Hipwell 4 writes
For Deleuze, static identities are dangerous illusions: the real world is, by contrast, always fluid and mobile; reality is ontologically characterised by ‘difference’. This difference is not, as it might seem, difference between things (an identitarian notion) but rather the idea that reality is a continuum of interplay, interpenetration and interconnectedness and that ‘things’ are merely intensities in this continuum, internally constituted by the interplay of different forces, and themselves interacting and interpenetrating with everything around them. In this sense, allegedly separate entities are mutually constitutive and interdependent, and treating them as entirely separate inevitably does intellectual and physical violence to the world. In an ontology of difference, the world is viewed holistically. Differential being is defined on the basis of what it is rather than what it is not. It is dynamic, not static. As Deleuze (1988, 123) puts it, ‘the important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities’. While we may, for practical purposes, speak of ‘a tree’, ‘a fish’, ‘the human species’, etc., awareness of ontological difference reminds us that it is a mistake to abstract such things from their dynamic and continuous context. Prior to striation by identitarian forces, the world is made of ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474–500), or what Patton (2000, 112) has called ‘the heterogeneous space of qualitative multiplicity’. In smooth space, diverse and unexpected interconnections may appear and reconfigure (‘lines of flight’). Smooth space is continually in flux; it is difficult to know intellectually and (therefore) difficult to control. To know one’s way in the tangle of The Canadian Geographer / Le Ge´ographe canadien 48, no 3 (2004) 360 William T. Hipwell primeval forest or other ‘wild zones’ (Dalby 2001), one must have good instincts. Wisdom of the body Following early-twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson, Deleuze calls for the epistemological rehabilitation of intuition. He describes this intuitive epistemology as ‘transcendental empiricism’ or ‘wisdom of the body’. Prior to intellectualisation, our instincts respond to and process the sensory data received by the body as a continuous and multiplicitous flow. Thus, the way humans perceive the world through ‘wisdom of the body’ is better attuned to ontological difference (and therefore better capable of understanding smooth space) than through the intellect. This ‘libidinal epistemology’ provides us with an understanding of a continuous, mobile, fluid and interconnected world (Ford and Hipwell 2001). A shift in focus from identity to difference requires a greater reliance on the unconscious, on instinct and on knowing through the heart. It requires, in many senses, an un-focusing. As an empiricist and materialist, Deleuze does not mean that un-focusing entails abandoning empirical knowledge gained through the representational intellect but rather augmenting it with wisdom of the body. He would argue that researchers—especially in the social realm—must come to recognise that variations and tangential relationships may often be more important than structures and causal relationships. Doel (1996, 430) advises that researchers learn ‘nomad thought’, ‘dwelling on change, becoming and inconsistency, rather than fixity, being and constancy’. Friedrich Nietzsche, a formative influence on Deleuze, made the argument for intuitive routes to knowledge in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche argued that . . . ‘being conscious’ is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided into certain channels by his instinct. (Nietzsche 1966, 11) As Deleuze puts it The great activity is unconscious. . . . Consciousness is essentially reactive; this is why we do not know what a body can do . . .. The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. (Deleuze 1983, 41) Geographer David Livingstone (1992, 1–2) echoes this sentiment, noting that the myth of science as proceeding solely through ‘experimental analysis and logical rigour’ has been thoroughly dispelled (see also Saul 2001, 5). In sum, reality can only be fully grasped with the aid of wisdom of the body, which is more attuned to difference than to identity. Wisdom of the body is implicitly granted epistemological status in the local–traditional ecological knowledge (Lo-TEK) employed by peripheral communities engaged in the small-scale harvest of natural resources (see Inglis 1993; Acheson and Wilson 1996). As is discussed below, the marginalisation of such knowledge by state and corporate managers is a key cause of many environmental problems. 

Humans are not completely independent of nature, and vice versa. This requires a rethinking of not only the human subject but how we conceive of environmental protection and resource extraction.
Nail 10 writes
Deleuze and Guattari begin their first collective work, Anti-Oedipus, with the rejection of the dualism between the supposedly autonomous spheres of nature and culture. Where industry extracts its raw materials from nature, consumes them, and then returns its refuse to nature, Deleuze and Guattari argue, following Marx, that this is not the operation of relatively separate spheres (production, distribution, consumption), but rather an activity predicated on the common structural relations of the capitalist division of labor and the concept of supposedly “fixed elements” within the overall process of profit generation. Human beings do not autonomously extract raw materials from nature, nor do they autonomously decide to “save nature” from unsustainable extractions or toxic waste disposals. While there are, of course, human agents who speak of the “rights of nature” and “sustainable extraction,” their very ability to conceive of environmental protection in terms of “rights,” “labor,” and “value” is conditioned by an advanced technoscientific coordination of research, organization, and green capitalist industry. For this reason Deleuze and Guattari can say, We make no distinction between man human and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of viewof utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not man human as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of being. Human activity and “reason” is thus conditioned on an enormous matrix of non-human activities (economic, biological, and technological structures, etc.), just as nature is conditioned by an enormous network of human activity. To assert an independence of one from the other is sheer abstraction. Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion is thus that there are only processes of mutual production that are neither strictly human, nor strictly natural, but both, that is, artificial. Insofar as artifacts and technology are a mix between human activity and natural objects, Deleuze and Guattari claim that all processes of production (insofar as they too are always natural/human) are machines. And “every machine is a machine connected to another machine,” and the multiplicity of machines connected up with one another forms the “Mechanosphere” of the earth (AO 12/6). As Guattari insists, “We might just as well rename environmental ecology machinic ecology, because Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines.”11 

The event is not something static and sedmented, rather each event is an opening of infinite potentialities.  Subjectivies are broken down in the creative act of realizing a new politics of immanence. Affirm the Rhizomatic politics of the abstract machine, viewing oppressive events as immutable things that stand above us eliminates the possibility for revolutionary potential. Nail 10 writes
Where one might locate the concept of an ethical “norm,” “law,” or “condition” in environmental philosophy that allows disparate human voices to come to a common prescriptive agreement on a dispute, Deleuze and Guattari instead propose the alternative concept of an “abstract machine.”A norm does not describe the world the way it “is,” but how it “ought” to be. A norm is thus a transcendent element intended by an autonomous form of consciousness or sovereign state unhindered by existential bias. For instance, the prescriptive value of “ecological diversity” is defined in conceptual or legal terms, prior to or independent from any specific thing that might be described as realizing that value. Something either realizes biodiversity and is right or it does not and it is wrong. “Athing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise,” as Aldo Leopold asserts in his land ethic.23 Difference is thus only a difference from the same, e.g., the norm which represents the independent unity of the diverse. Opposed to this, the abstract machine is an event or shared condition for action and evaluation only insofar as it is immanently transformed by the concrete elements that realize and differentiate it . There is thus a “coadaptation” or “reciprocal presupposition” of the two that allows for their participatory transformation.24 The event thus changes in nature each time there are “reconversions subjectives actuelles” (actually occurring subjective redeployments) of it (DRF 217/236). Subsequently, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the abstract machine is absolutely singular and unable to be deduced from either history or introspection. In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. (DRF 215/233) The abstract machine is not deducible because it is the condition for deduction, description, and prescription itself: it is a more primary evental commitment. This machine is abstract in the sense that is not a thing among other things, but also real (vrai-abstrait), insofar as it is a condition that allows for the appearance of “new space-times” and new subjectivities antagonistic to representation and power (P 233/172).25 However, while it may not be a thing, the abstract machine is still marked by a singular and asignifying proper name, date, and image, like the names of military operations or the names of hurricanes, as Deleuze and Guattari say (MP 51/28, 322– 323/264). These names do not represent, symbolize, or refer to anything at all. Rather, they are spoken through. As a self-referencing and autonomous event independent from political representation, the abstract machine allows for the shared expression and conjunction of the various heterogenous elements that speak and exist through it (MP 177–178/142). 

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The Zapatista movement is an expression of the immanence of rhizomatic politics. Their rejection of oppression and neoliberalism is not an act of refusal, but rather an affirmative act calling forth a new politics.  Nail 10 writes
The procedure of counting the affects of the situation thus decides what can or will be done in the assemblage. There are no universal ends or values that inhere in things themselves, only their immanent capacities to be assembled and reassembled in a continually renegotiated and expressive machinic assemblage or relation. Insofar as the Zapatistas practice such a continual and affective renegotiation of their ecological assemblage, without drawing on the concepts or practices of state-based or universal environmental rights, they effect a concrete machinic assemblage. That is, the Zapatista communities practice a form of collective valorization that refers back not to the sovereignty of the state, or the intrinsic value of nature, or any other pre-given teleology, but to the immanent act of determining in each case what their collective ecological body is capable of. Assembled in a heterogeneous mix of NGOs, diverse indigenous traditions, and in ternational influence, the Zapatistas have had to learn how to manage the environment. This commitment takes the form of several specific forest management affects: to be able to cultivate the land by the no-till method, to be able to ban slash and burn practices, to be able to take a limited amount of trees from the forest or be penalized by having to plant and care for two more for every one taken in excess, and to be able to ban agrochemical use. As a Montes Azules resident explains, “we have been accused of destroying the jungle. But we as indigenous people are the true guardians of the environment, we live together with the jungle. If the jungle dies, we die with it.”32 The Zapatistas do not speak for the forest, because they are the forest, or rather, their life is an affect of the forest, “to be Zapatista in the Lacandon.” Their political practices express the life of the forest and exist as so many affects within its collection. Even their relations of production are owned in common and practiced sustainably. The workers’ cooperatives (honey, coffee, textiles, etc.) in Zapatista territory are based on collective or common (not private, or public) property, worker control, and self-management. While Zapatismo may have its flaws, the spirit of these institutions (the schools, the hospitals, the homes, the farming, etc.) is, as Guattari would say, to set up structures and devices that establish a totally different kind of contact. A kind of selfmanagement or self-organization of a set of problems which does not start from a central point that arranges elements, inserts them into a control grid, or establishes an agenda, but that, on the contrary, allows the various singular processes to attempt a rhizomatic unfolding. This is very important, even if it doesn’t work.33 Zapatismo is thus a struggle for the creation of a maximum of participation, both human and natural, in achieving an ecological “self-management conceived outside the criteria of a formal democracy that has proven to be sterile,” as Guattari puts it (MRB 391).  

Single issue focus fails, the resonant affirmation of the Zapatistas, never completely definable or restricted, is key to causing real change.  1.  Gives only the apprearance of solvency without causing anything. 2. Recreates representation issues and fails to oppose the state, subsumed by capitalism.  3. Reentrenches the same hierarchies within the movement.  Nail:
As a diagnostic tool, and not as a mere historical contingency, territorial representation reveals two errors and two dangers within revolutionary praxis. 'The first error', Deleuze and Guattari say, 'is axiological and consists in believing that a little suppleness is enough to make things "better"' (1987: 262/215). Supple reforms based on the representation of an essential group identity only appear to be transformative when in fact they deeper structural problems intact. That is, if revolutionary ments produce their own coded (and thus restricted) values, es!;ential meanings and segmented territories, they may appear to have important reforms by legitimating their own identities/values. But representing their culture as a coded identity, they are only that easier to incorporate into the larger processes of state overcoding a profitable and tolerant multiculturalism. 'The second error', Deleuze and Guattari say, 'is psycholo)ical as if the molecular territorial were in the realm of the ll·ma.guiarw and applied only to the individual and interindividual. But there just as much social-Real on one line as on the other' (1987: "'o"''"''" That is, territorial social struggles may not be state politics that does not mean that they are 'social-imaginaries', reducible ncvrhnlntYic I or nhenonlenological cases of subj ' Segmentary distributions are real political representations even if they are not represented by the state The first danger of supple segmentarity, Deleuze and Guattari say is the clarity of 'monomania'. That is, ' Interactions without resonance. Instead of the great paranoid fear of the state, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice policeman, neighborhood SS man. (1987: 279/228) ' Monomania is the danger that revolutionary movements can become what Deleuze and Guattari call 'neoterritorialities': gangs, bands minorities, margins and 'tribalisms' that 'continue to affirm the right of segmentary societies' but tend to persist within the interiority of the state. These neoterritorialities remain relatively independent from each other by presuming a coded clarity of their own issue, campaign Identity. However, the clarity afforded by independent singleu~'" is ultimately unable to form a cohesive alternative to state capitalism.  These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainJy folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially pohttcal forces (from dommo players to home brewers via the Veterans Foreign. Wars). Others ar enclaves whose archaism is just as capable nounshmg  modern fasctsm as of freemg a revolutionary charge (the .et·hn;r mmonttes, the Basque problem, the Irish Catholics, the Indian ;reservaltio1ns) ... (neighborhood territorialities, territorialities of the large 'gangs'). Others are organized or promoted by the State even thouf(h they might turn against the State and cause it serious problems :JregionalJism, nationalism). (1983: 306-7/257-8) revolutionary potential of these groups should not be dismissed. : p)lil:i'•cal isolation and single-issue reform campaigns without the horizon of revolution are in danger ,of being exceptions that prove the rule of state-capitalism (see Zizek 1997). second danger of supple segmentarity for revolutionary praxis Deleuze and Guattari call 'microfascism'. Coded revolution- )mtov·enierlts, bands, gangs, sects, families, towns and neighbourcan recreate, on their own territorial scale, the hierarchical . ' organisation present at the state bureaucratic level. revolutionary struggles, patriarchal, racist, classist and so on and segments can all reappear. These microfascisms spare no one. 'Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms,' Deleuze and Guattari warn us. 'It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective' (1987: 262/215). Supple segmentarity may undermine the rigid state segments, 'but everything that it dismantles it reassembles on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power, microfascisms' (1987: 251/205). But what dangers are posed for revolutionary praxis when these segmentary processes begin to resonate together in a process of state overcoding?

The role of the ballot is to affirm a breakdown of identity and normalization through the creative act of nomad thought.  Semetsky:

Nomad is a mobile, dynamic element; according to Deleuze, nomads are always “becoming ... they transmute and reappear” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 153) by consistently becoming-other. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness necessarily leads to the “intensification of life” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 74) by virtue of the affective “experimentation on ourselves that is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us” (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, p. 11). This experimentation constitutes post-formal bodymind learning. We can become “filled with immanence” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 137) therefore necessarily fulfilled by Sens – meaning and direction – that we ourselves create in our embodied experiences. For Deleuze, learning is “infinite and of a different nature to knowledge” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 192): it is a creative process of assigning meanings and values to experience, partaking as such of self-creation and transforming one’s identity. Individuation cannot proceed without a means to both express and transform oneself, and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) referred to metamorphosis with regard to Jung’s theory of the transformation of the libido as spiritual or psychic energy irreducible to Freud’s limited definition of the libido as a sex drive. Deleuze considered transformation, or change in nature, to be a precondition for becoming-other. It is multiple interpretations and revaluations of experience by means of which “we rediscover singular processes of learning” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 25) and become creative and fruitful in our endeavors. We become able to bring novelty to life; only thus our life “reconquers an immanent power of creation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 140). Novelty comes into being, or becomes, along lines of flight. Novelty is created in experience when some potential, as yet “nonlocalizable connections” (Deleuze, 1994a, p. 83), such as the connection between body and mind, between a swimmer and the sea, meet each other along the lines of rhizomatic becomings. The creative, transformative, and evaluative element embedded in experiential learning defies the reductive approach to education as merely formal schooling. Post-formal education embedded in real life has an ethical dimension as its intrinsic value. This type of education is genuinely ethical because it “does ... challenge deeply held beliefs or ways of life” (Noddings, 2006, p. 1). Bodymind learning is necessarily characterized by “new percepts and new affects” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 164) created in our experience, in practical life. Deleuze’s philosophy presents concepts, meanings and values as future-oriented and yet-tobecome when we ourselves create them in the process of learning from experience, from the depths of the collective unconscious.