Tournament: Bronx | Round: 8 | Opponent: Trinity Prep Pregason | Judge: Mark Gorthey, Ben Koh, Martin Sigalow

The world is fundamentally one of change.  Nothing is static, energy flows from one place to another, cells grow, die, and are replaced.  The world is not unity, it is a collection of multiplicities. Smith:

Essays:  Critical and Clinical.  Gilles Deleuze.  Tr. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco.

Literature acceded to its modernity, Deleuze suggests, not only when it turned to
AND
singularity can be connected to any other in an infinite number of ways. 

In this world of multiplicity identity does not exist.   The self is not static and sedimented but rather it is always a process of becoming.  Boundaries are constructed to limit being, we need to let beings be and open new spaces for becoming instead.  Smith 2:

Essays:  Critical and Clinical.  Gilles Deleuze.  Tr. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco.

In such a chaotic and bifurcating world, the status of the individual changes as well:
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with anything, provided one discovers the literary or artistic means of doing so.

This means that the primary ethical imperative is to open up space for relationships.  Gilson :

Erinn Cunniff Gilson.  “Responsive Becoming: Ethics between Deleuze and Feminism” in Deleuze and Ethics. 2011.

If responsibility is “a question of becoming” and becoming involves the kind of
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reterritorialize women’s bodies and selves but that facilitates women’s own becomings.

Standard: opening up spaces for becoming

Modern democratic politics is merely a ruse for normalization.   Democracy allows you to create your own identity, but only so long as you abide by the picture of the “good citizen”.  It is nothing more than a state sanctioned method of bending human will to exterior ends and destroys openness.  Massumi:

Massumi, Brian. "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari" MIT Press. 1992.

Most actual social formations fall midrange between the extremes and display complex
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approach of fascism-paranoia is toned down to a paternalistic recognizeand- subdue.

There is no agency in modern politics.  Parties are just different enough to fool the public, but have no chance of radical change and progression.  Politics is parasitic on the true nature of voting.  Massumi 2:

Massumi, Brian. "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari" MIT Press. 1992.

In the economic domain, this "corporatism" (molar incorporation; "integration")
AND
universal" — in other words, it gives every body the "free" choice to abdicate power.

Alt: affirm Rhizomatic Politics to recognize the necessity of expression.

My politics is one of disrupting the static and constantly invoking a multiplicity of change. It is a bottom-up movement which utilizes the power of individual desire to ultimately create change, which is distinct from the affirmatives use of the state as a system to create instantaneous change. Conley:

(Verena Andermatt, 2006, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

In their dialogues and collaborations, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari enquire
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occur on all continents. They are producing multiple crossings of external borders. 

The role of the ballot is to embrace border pedagogy.
Enlightenment thinking is outdated and reinforces the rigid boundaries that are the source of real-world oppression.  The pedagogical project of the AC is the only way to break away from the dominant modes of discourse and create real education and fairness.  Angus et al. :

Angus, Cook, and Evans, 2001 (Tim, Professor of Geography @ University of Birmingham, Ian, Associate Professor of Geography @ the University of Exeter, and James, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Governance @ University of Manchester, International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, Vol. 10, No. 2, “A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy?”)

None of us conforms to the traditional ‘figure of the Cartesian individual as an
AND
of domination which result from their taken-for-granted use. (Cook, 1996, 2000)

Tournament: Blake | Round: 9 | Opponent: Most | Judge:
Both of the Ks I read at Blake were cut from the following book, which was disclosed under the Sustainability K.   Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/telemorphosis-theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1.pdf?c=ohp;idno=10539563.0001.001

Note for the Post-Carbon Politics K:  There was no ROTB arg read for this K since Harvard-Westlake had already read ROTB args in their framework.

You can email me with any questions about the Ks, 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.

email: rteehas@gmail.com

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

The basis of political justification is respecting the wide variety of conceptions of the good that arise in society and not imposing one particular conception of the good.

 
Korsgaard:
Korsgaard, Christine. “The United of the Right and the Good in John Rawls’s Thought”.
We might think there is an important reason for
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must be rejected in Rawls’s mature view. 

need to respect other people's conception of good to avoid tyranny

S- Respecting differing conceptions of the good

Compulsory voting discriminates against Jehovah’s witnesses.

Yarbrough
Yarbrough, Michael. “The Ignorance of Compulsory Voting”. March 19, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-yarbrough/the-ignorance-of-compulso_b_1347525.html
The fact of the matter is that
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right not to participate.

Christadelphians can’t attend polling stations, so blank votes don’t solve.

Denney
Denney, G.H.. “To Vote, or not to Vote?”. http://houston.bereans.org/voting/voting.html. 1926.

We were glad to hear from bro. R. G. Walker
AND
booth at election times."

Compulsory voting is inconsistent with reasonable pluralism.

Lever
Lever, Annabelle. Dept of philosophy London school of economics and political science. “’A Liberal Defence of Compulsory Voting’: Some Reasons for Scepticism”. 

But there are deeper reasons to doubt
AND
idea that there is a general duty to vote. 

Exemptions can't solve

Tournament: Blake | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CC | Judge: Not gonna look it up
The shift of the AC is towards a method constituted by comsumption, but based upon the opposition to production.  We can still exploit, just less, just by replacing things and changing energy production methods every once in a while to compensate, while failing to take into account the prior level of drives.  Turns case and leads to a destruction of the subject, which is functionally extinction.  Stiegler:

We all know that in no case will this new global capitalism be able to develop in reproducing the modes of production and consumption that have been characteristic of Western, Japanese, and Korean industrial democracies. For the exportation of this mode of life is also that of the growth in the rate of production of toxins of all sorts toward the greatest part of the planetary population, and which can result in nothing else but the disappearance of the human race—to say nothing of the phenomena of and the destruction of psychic apparatuses that also create their effects as quickly as “growth” spreads over the world, which is indeed, by this very fact, a stunted growth une mécroissance. The new global capitalism will not be able to renew its energies without inventing a new logic and new objects of investment—and here the word investment must be taken literally and in all its senses: both the sense it has in industrial economy and its sense within libidinal economy. At this stage of my exposé, it is interesting to check for heart murmurs in a text by Jeremy Rifkin which is circulating all over France and Europe. Rifkin, setting his discourse under the watchword of “the end of the age of oil,” asks how we are to assure a “sustainable development” but without ever asking the question of the problem of stunted growth, that is, of a “growth” that destroys desire, and that deindividuates producers as well as consumers, stunting the dynamism of what Max Weber called the spirit of capitalism, a spirit that has to be apprehended as libidinal energy and that can be constituted only in processes of sublimation henceforth annihilated by marketing techniques. While never taking up these questions (which were however the horizon of both his European Dream and The Age of Access), Rifkin insists, apropos the age of oil and more generally of fossil fuels, its growing “external costs” (which in economics is called negative externalities): he thus describes the third limit encountered by a capitalism become an actually globalised technological system of production and of consumption. In this context, he writes, there is a residual stock of fossil energy that we will have to learn to exploit to the hilt, that is, the most economically possible, while at the same time putting into place other processes for the production and consumption of energy: So as to prepare the future, each government will have to exploit new energy sources and establish new economic models. I am myself convinced that the stakes are a change in the economic model. But I do not believe that the heart of the question is the energy of subsistence: the real question is that of an energy of existence that is libidinal energy. Now, by only asking the question of a new production of renewable, sustainable energy of subsistence, founded on the intermediary storage by the technology of the production of hydrogen, Rifkin would have us believe that the energy crisis is a passing one and that it will be able to be surmounted, and along with it the third limit of capitalism, without having to ask the question of libidinal energy, without taking into account this second limit which is the truth of the third one: where the libido has been destroyed, and where the drives it contained, as Pandora’s box enclosing every evil, henceforth are at the helm of beings devoid of attention, and incapable of taking care of their world.

This juxtaposition of consumption and production destroys the subject’s existence and drives.  The current deplenishment of these resources should be the point of departure from the logic of consumption and  production, instead of the AC act of legitimizing certain forms of production once again, it is time to break free from carbon.  Stiegler 2:
If consummation is that which destroys its object, libido is to the contrary that which, as desire and not as drive, that, as the sublimation intrinsic to desire, takes care of its object. This is why the question of the third limit of capitalism is not that of the relinquishment of fossil fuels but rather the relinquishment of a drive-driven economy and the reconstitution of a libidinal economy, that is, a sustainable one, given that this energy increases with the frequentation of its objects. The third limit of capitalism is not only the destruction of the reserves of fossil fuel, but the limit constituted by the drive to destruction of all objects in general by consumption, in so far as they have become objects of drives, and not objects of desire and attention—the psychotechnological organization of consumption provoking the destruction of attention in all its forms, on the psychic level as well as the collective level. Because he seems to ignore everything involved in the second limit of capitalism and its meaning once the third limit has been reached, Rifkin’s discourse seems to me fraught with dangers: he would have us believe that a drive-driven growth could be sustained owing to the technology of hydrogen. And yet, this discourse is interesting and of import for at least three reasons: 1. it proposes a real alternative to the question of the energy of subsistence with this system founded on hydrogen which would allow a harmful limit to be pushed back; 2. it poses the questions about energy that are never distinct from questions on networks of communication and information, that is, hypomnesic systems and retentional devices of tertiary retentions; 3. finally, and above all, it posits that the network founded on hydrogen must be based on the model of social networks made possible by the World Wide Web and, thus, must get beyond the opposition between production and consumption. An organization based on consumption, and constituted by its opposition to production, is dangerous not only because it produces excess quantities of carbon dioxide, but because it destroys minds. The opposition of production and consumption has as its consequence that both producers and consumers are proletarianized by the loss of their knowledge: they are reduced to an economy of subsistence, and deprived of an economy of their existence—they are deprived of libidinal economy, that is, of desire. This is why the fundamental question opened by the combination of the three limits of capitalism is the overcoming of this opposition and of the proletarinarization it engenders structurally. Now what is extremely interesting in Rifkin’s proposition consists in positing, based on the position set forth in the first lines of the study, the energy systems and information or mnemotechnical systems co-develop, that the most recent system of communication, the Internet, breaks precisely with the opposition of consumption and production and thus constitutes the possibility of implementing a new distributed and decentralized network of sustainable energies where everyone would be producer as well as consumer, by combining the technology of stockage by hydrogen and that of networking along the lines of the Internet model. Confronted with this unprecedented challenge to planetary (planetarianized) humanity—a challenge of practically sublime dimensions, which demands an extraordinary mobilization of the forces of the spirit to meet it: a challenge convoking what Kant called the suprasensible, that is, also the infinite (infinitely renewable)—the temptation of the industrial and capitalist world is to come up with a technological and scientific response in denial of the three limits of capitalism. This temptation borne of denial cannot apprehend: 1. that these three limits, when they combine, produce a systemic evolution at a superior level, that is, a phenomenon of emergence, 2. that we must change industrial models not only to produce a new technical and scientific rationality, but to constitute a new social rationality, productive of motivation, of reasons for living together, that is, of taking care of the world and of those living there, 3. that the fundamental question is here to reorient the financial fluxes toward long-term investments by waging war against speculation, but also against modes of life founded on the short term, of which the most every-day example is the organization of society by a marketing systematically exploiting drives by destroying libido as that which evinces the capable of sustainable investment. Consumption that becomes drive-based is profoundly dangerous for society. If there were no limit to this consumption, and if fossil fuels were inexhaustible, the catastrophe would perhaps be even greater than the one resulting from the deplenishment of fossil fuels. Perhaps this deplenishment is finally a kind of stroke of luck: the opportunity to understand that the true question of energy is not that one, that the energy of subsistence is of interest only insofar as it contributes to an energy of existence—and is such in its capacity to project what I call the plane of consistencies. Now this is the true stake of what is today called, in an ambiguous expression, ascendant innovation.

Oil and carbon are the lynchpins to American econ hegemony, that is the root cause of their impacts, their own evidence proves.  Also means you err neg on the K debate, the ruling order has a vested interest in the minute changes of the aff to bring back the old normal.  It is also the root cause of problems in developing nations and solves all the harms of the aff.  McQuillan:

The western-lead global economy is predicated on the value of oil. At the end of the Second World War, the Bretton Woods monetary conferences created the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and established a new international monetary system of competitive disinflation relative to the US dollar by tying the gold standard to the dollar. This system worked well for a while and enabled the post-war reconstruction of western Europe and Japan, and put in place the inaugural openings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which form the basis of the global economy today. However, the Bretton Woods Gold Exchange system began to break down in the mid-sixties under the pressures of the excessive costs of the Vietnam War and the resurgence of the European and south Asian manufacturing base as exporters of global trade. By November 1967 as the value of the dollar began to look increasingly precarious, withdrawals of gold bullion from the US Treasury were becoming excessive (as national governments, notably De Gaulle’s France, redeemed their dollar holdings against bullion stocks as agreed at Bretton Woods). When sterling was devalued in 1967, Bretton Woods was doomed; the dollar came under further pressure to devalue itself against gold in order to protect the value of Federal reserves against redemption of dollars by foreign governments. The plot of Ian Fleming’s 1959 Goldfinger (adapted as a film in 1964) can only be understood in relation to the Bretton Woods concords. The threat to render the Federal gold reserve inaccessible after exploding a radioactive bomb, would have meant national governments could only redeem their reserve dollars against Ulrich Goldfinger’s own gold reserve (said to be the second largest in the world) thus pushing up the value of his gold and mortgaging the US economy to Goldfinger’s personal enterprises. Consequently, James Bond, agent for the sick man of Europe, temporarily rescues not only the post-war, cold war status quo of the Bretton Woods agreement but secures the future of western leadership in a global economy. Rather than risk the depletion of the US gold reserve and the collapse of the US credit rating in 1971 President Nixon abandoned the dollar-gold link dissolving the terms of Bretton Woods in favour of a system of free floating currencies, with the international banks and the markets determining the value of the dollar. This combined with the ongoing costs of Vietnam lead to inflationary pressures and wage-price freezes in the American national economy. OPEC discussed the value of pricing oil in several currencies to spread the risks of the volatile American domestic scene. However, in 1974, Nixon moved to do a deal with Saudi Arabia only to price oil in dollars when the Saudis, unknown to the rest of OPEC and the US’s western allies, secretly purchased $2.5 billion in US Treasury bills with their surplus oil funds (equivalent to 70 of all Saudi assets), once more ensuring the position of the dollar as the international reserve currency and initiating the phase of American global hegemony based on petrodollar recycling, swapping the gold standard for the standard of oil, so-called “black gold.” As shocks in the price of oil followed political and supply instabilities, so the need for national governments to acquire US dollars ensued. On the one hand, dollars flow into oil supplying countries far beyond the needs of domestic investment. These surplus dollars are stored in banks in New York and London to retain their value as dollars. On the other hand, oil-importing countries need to buy dollars to meet the rising price of oil. In the 1970s developing nations in Africa borrowed dollars from international banks sitting on surplus petrol dollars, creating debts to be repaid entirely in dollars and at the then-high levels of interest rates based on inflationary pressures in the western national economies. In this way, the emergent, post-colonial African continent was impoverished and a cycle of crippling debt initiated. The IMF set up by Bretton Woods was used to enforce debt repayment to the international banks through the implementation of ‘austerity’ programmes that also opened up developing countries to western private companies. As surplus petrol dollars flow in from OPEC countries and are leant out again as Eurodollar bonds or loans, the Federal Reserve is in a unique position with respect to creating credit and expanding the money supply.4 It is this situation that enables the United States to sustain improbable budget deficits and latterly allowed the bail out of Wall Street after the 2007 banking crisis. However, in a post-cold war, multi-polar era, after peak oil, the position of the dollar as world reserve currency is once more in question. Previous attempts to rebalance the world economy now have genuine impetus from the need to address the imbalance of current accounts between the US and China, Chinese currency manipulation, and the emergence of the Euro as an alternative or additional reserve currency. Further, the cost in blood and treasure of physically securing the oil supply through military means may prove unsustainable for the US (the cost of bailing out the banks, $660 billion, was the same as the US annual military budget for 2007). In a post-carbon economy, it might not be the best position to be sitting on a mountain of petrodollars. There is then a great deal at stake in the question of a post-carbon economy, beyond the actual “irreversible” damage done to the earth’s climate by carbon emissions. Oil is presently the essential fuel of the global economy and oil trades are the basic enablers of manufacturing infrastructure in every industrial nation, of global transportation, and the primary energy source for 40 percent of the industrial economy. Oil trades in dollars have been the basis for American economic, cultural, and military hegemony since the 1970s, and the liquidity that ensures the development of the western-lead global economy. A post-carbon economy presents a considerable challenge to the present geo-political dispensation and, coterminus to this, the current conditions of capital. It is for these reasons that we might say that the response to climate change as a staging post in the on-going crisis of European humanity, revolves around more than a purely scientific solution that will bring the crisis to a dénouement to enable a return to western-capital normativity, and everything that depends upon it.

The alt is to reject the affirmatives minor solutions to the problem and instead affirm production without economy as part of a post-carbon politics.  There is no chance they don’t link, they are complicit in an economy of wealth, credit, free exchange, and acceding to global powers.  McQuillan 2:

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 seachange 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.

Tournament: Blake | Round: Semis | Opponent: Whitman DM | Judge:
NOTE: The framework for this NC is the same as posted by Adam Hoffman on circuitdebater.  Do not use it without permission from him.  I will not be running this framework again.

KINSELLA
Stephan Kinsella, Friday, May 27, 2011, Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide.
In setting the stage, Hoppe first observes that the standard natural-rights argument is lacking: It has been a common quarrel with the natural rights position, even on the part of sympathetic readers, that the concept of human nature is far "too diffuse and varied to provide a determinate set of contents of natural law." Furthermore, its description of rationality is equally ambiguous in that it does not seem to distinguish between the role of reason in establishing empirical laws of nature on the one hand and normative laws of human conduct on the other. (The Economics and Ethics of Private Property EEPP, p. 313; also A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism TSC, p. 156n118) Hoppe's solution is to focus on the nature of argumentation instead of action in general: The praxeological approach solves this problem by recognizing that it is not the wider concept of human nature but the narrower one of propositional exchanges and argumentation which must serve as the starting point in deriving an ethic. (EEPP, p. 345) Here he draws on the work of his PhD advisor, the famous European philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and fellow German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel, who had developed a theory of "discourse ethics" or "argumentation ethics." As Hoppe explains this basic approach, any truth claim, the claim connected with any proposition that it is true, objective or valid (all terms used synonymously here), is and must be raised and settled in the course of an argumentation. Since it cannot be disputed that this is so (one cannot communicate and argue that one cannot communicate and argue), and since it must be assumed that everyone knows what it means to claim something to be true (one cannot deny this statement without claiming its negation to be true), this very fact has been aptly called "the a priori of communication and argumentation." (EEPP, p. 314) That is, there are certain norms presupposed by the very activity of arguing. Apel and Habermas go on to argue that the ethics presupposed as legitimate by discourse as such justify the standard set of soft-socialist policies. But Hoppe, while recognizing the value of the basic approach, rejected their application of this theory and socialist conclusions. Instead, Hoppe took what was valuable in the Apel-Habermas approach and melded it with Misesian-Rothbardian insights to provide a praxeological-discourse-ethics twist on the standard natural-law defense of rights

Kinasella

In essence, Hoppe's view is that argumentation, or discourse, is by its nature a conflict-free way of interacting, which requires individual control of scarce resources. In genuine discourse, the parties try to persuade each other by the force of their argument, not by actual force: Argumentation is a conflict-free way of interacting. Not in the sense that there is always agreement on the things said, but in the sense that as long as argumentation is in progress it is always possible to agree at least on the fact that there is disagreement about the validity of what has been said. And this is to say nothing else than that a mutual recognition of each person's exclusive control over his own body must be presupposed as long as there is argumentation (note again, that it is impossible to deny this and claim this denial to be true without implicitly having to admit its truth). (TSC, p. 158) Thus, self-ownership is presupposed by argumentation. Hoppe then shows that argumentation also presupposes the right to own homesteaded scarce resources as well. The basic idea here is that the body is "the prototype of a scarce good for the use of which property rights, i.e., rights of exclusive ownership, somehow have to be established, in order to avoid clashes" (TSC, p. 19). As Hoppe explains, The compatibility of this principle with that of nonaggression can be demonstrated by means of an argumentum a contrario. First, it should be noted that if no one had the right to acquire and control anything except his own body, then we would all cease to exist and the problem of the justification of normative statements simply would not exist. The existence of this problem is only possible because we are alive, and our existence is due to the fact that we do not, indeed cannot, accept a norm outlawing property in other scarce goods next and in addition to that of one's physical body. Hence, the right to acquire such goods must be assumed to exist. (TSC, p. 161) .

The right to property implies an absolute right to destroy, there thus can be no prior obligation for preservation.  Strahilevitz:
The English courts were rather sympathetic toward the destruction of property as well, at least according to Blackstone’s Commentaries. Indeed, Blackstone read the common law of property so as to make it compatible with his absolutist conception of ownership—“the right of property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”14 The common law’s purported embrace of the jus abutendi is more precisely indicated in Blackstone’s discussion of arson. Blackstone regarded arson as an “offence of very great malignity, and much more pernicious to the public than simple theft . . . because in simple theft the thing stolen only changes its master, but still remains in effe for the benefit of the public, whereas by burning the very substance is absolutely destroyed.”15 This hostility to wasteful destruction notwithstanding, Blackstone suggests that under the common law a property owner is free to burn down his own house, so long as the fire does not threaten to spread to other people’s property: The offense of arson (strictly so called) may be committed by willfully setting fire to one’s own house, provided one’s neighbor’s house is thereby also burnt; but if no mischief is done but to one’s own, it does not amount to felony, though the fire was kindled with intent to burn another’s. . . . However such willful firing one’s own house, in a town, is a high misdemeanor, and punishable by fine, imprisonment, pillory, and perpetual sureties for the good behavior.16 Blackstone thus takes the position that one is free to set fire to one’s house, provided that no third parties are thereby injured or exposed to danger, but if neighbors, tenants, or other third parties are threatened because of their proximity to the blazing building, the burning is a crime.17

And, this view of property allows for absolute waste and opposes environmentalism.  Ataner: 

Now, the chief opposing figure here is, of course, Blackstone. That is, the aim of this thesis, in part, is to overcome the Blackstonean, absolutist (“despotic” or “egocentric”) conception of ownership, which holds that “the right of property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.48 More specifically, for our purposes, it is important to note that the absolutist conception posits that the right to destroy (jus abutendi), or to consume absolutely, to use up, or “waste”, is an essential element of property ownership. As Blackstone puts it: “If a man be the absolute tenant in fee-simple . . . he may commit whatever waste his own indiscretion may prompt him to, without being impeachable or accountable for it to anyone.”49 This absolutist or “despotic” understanding of property, which recognizes no ultimate limits (of the kind I propose) on the use of one’s own property (provided only that no harm is inflicted upon the person or property of others), is further reflected, for example, in Blackstone’s claim that intentionally burning down one’s own house, provided no mischief is done to one’s neighbours, is not felony arson, even though normally arson is a crime “much more pernicious” than theft because “in simple theft the thing stolen only changes its master, but still remains in effe for the benefit of the public, whereas by burning the very substance is absolutely destroyed.”50 I note that a number of authors have tried to show that the absolutist conception of property, as expressed by Blackstone generally, if not in every detail of his account, remains the basic, background or “intuitive” view of property in Anglo-American law and politics.51 Indeed, as Meyer argues, the absolutist conception is so thoroughly embedded, at least in American mores, as the “ideal-type” or “default” definition of property, that it constrains the imagination even of those, such as environmentalists, who would otherwise wish to oppose it.52

Tournament: Laird Lewis | Round: 6 | Opponent: Southside RR Rahul Raghavan | Judge: George Clemens
The shift of the AC is towards a method constituted by comsumption, but based upon the opposition to production.  We can still exploit, just less, just by replacing things and changing energy production methods every once in a while to compensate, while failing to take into account the prior level of drives.  This means that they firmly secure the place of consumption within the human psyche.  Turns case and leads to a destruction of the subject, which is functionally extinction.  Stiegler:

We all know that in no case will this new global capitalism be able to develop in reproducing the modes of production and consumption that have been characteristic of Western, Japanese, and Korean industrial democracies. For the exportation of this mode of life is also that of the growth in the rate of production of toxins of all sorts toward the greatest part of the planetary population, and which can result in nothing else but the disappearance of the human race—to say nothing of the phenomena of and the destruction of psychic apparatuses that also create their effects as quickly as “growth” spreads over the world, which is indeed, by this very fact, a stunted growth une mécroissance. The new global capitalism will not be able to renew its energies without inventing a new logic and new objects of investment—and here the word investment must be taken literally and in all its senses: both the sense it has in industrial economy and its sense within libidinal economy. At this stage of my exposé, it is interesting to check for heart murmurs in a text by Jeremy Rifkin which is circulating all over France and Europe. Rifkin, setting his discourse under the watchword of “the end of the age of oil,” asks how we are to assure a “sustainable development” but without ever asking the question of the problem of stunted growth, that is, of a “growth” that destroys desire, and that deindividuates producers as well as consumers, stunting the dynamism of what Max Weber called the spirit of capitalism, a spirit that has to be apprehended as libidinal energy and that can be constituted only in processes of sublimation henceforth annihilated by marketing techniques. While never taking up these questions (which were however the horizon of both his European Dream and The Age of Access), Rifkin insists, apropos the age of oil and more generally of fossil fuels, its growing “external costs” (which in economics is called negative externalities): he thus describes the third limit encountered by a capitalism become an actually globalised technological system of production and of consumption. In this context, he writes, there is a residual stock of fossil energy that we will have to learn to exploit to the hilt, that is, the most economically possible, while at the same time putting into place other processes for the production and consumption of energy: So as to prepare the future, each government will have to exploit new energy sources and establish new economic models. I am myself convinced that the stakes are a change in the economic model. But I do not believe that the heart of the question is the energy of subsistence: the real question is that of an energy of existence that is libidinal energy. Now, by only asking the question of a new production of renewable, sustainable energy of subsistence, founded on the intermediary storage by the technology of the production of hydrogen, Rifkin would have us believe that the energy crisis is a passing one and that it will be able to be surmounted, and along with it the third limit of capitalism, without having to ask the question of libidinal energy, without taking into account this second limit which is the truth of the third one: where the libido has been destroyed, and where the drives it contained, as Pandora’s box enclosing every evil, henceforth are at the helm of beings devoid of attention, and incapable of taking care of their world.

This juxtaposition of consumption and production destroys the subject’s existence and drives.  The current deplenishment of these resources should be the point of departure from the logic of consumption and production, instead of the AC act of legitimizing certain forms of production once again, it is time to break free from carbon.  Stiegler 2:
If consummation is that which destroys its object, libido is to the contrary that which, as desire and not as drive, that, as the sublimation intrinsic to desire, takes care of its object. This is why the question of the third limit of capitalism is not that of the relinquishment of fossil fuels but rather the relinquishment of a drive-driven economy and the reconstitution of a libidinal economy, that is, a sustainable one, given that this energy increases with the frequentation of its objects. The third limit of capitalism is not only the destruction of the reserves of fossil fuel, but the limit constituted by the drive to destruction of all objects in general by consumption, in so far as they have become objects of drives, and not objects of desire and attention—the psychotechnological organization of consumption provoking the destruction of attention in all its forms, on the psychic level as well as the collective level. Because he seems to ignore everything involved in the second limit of capitalism and its meaning once the third limit has been reached, Rifkin’s discourse seems to me fraught with dangers: he would have us believe that a drive-driven growth could be sustained owing to the technology of hydrogen. And yet, this discourse is interesting and of import for at least three reasons: 1. it proposes a real alternative to the question of the energy of subsistence with this system founded on hydrogen which would allow a harmful limit to be pushed back; 2. it poses the questions about energy that are never distinct from questions on networks of communication and information, that is, hypomnesic systems and retentional devices of tertiary retentions; 3. finally, and above all, it posits that the network founded on hydrogen must be based on the model of social networks made possible by the World Wide Web and, thus, must get beyond the opposition between production and consumption. An organization based on consumption, and constituted by its opposition to production, is dangerous not only because it produces excess quantities of carbon dioxide, but because it destroys minds. The opposition of production and consumption has as its consequence that both producers and consumers are proletarianized by the loss of their knowledge: they are reduced to an economy of subsistence, and deprived of an economy of their existence—they are deprived of libidinal economy, that is, of desire. This is why the fundamental question opened by the combination of the three limits of capitalism is the overcoming of this opposition and of the proletarinarization it engenders structurally. Now what is extremely interesting in Rifkin’s proposition consists in positing, based on the position set forth in the first lines of the study, the energy systems and information or mnemotechnical systems co-develop, that the most recent system of communication, the Internet, breaks precisely with the opposition of consumption and production and thus constitutes the possibility of implementing a new distributed and decentralized network of sustainable energies where everyone would be producer as well as consumer, by combining the technology of stockage by hydrogen and that of networking along the lines of the Internet model. Confronted with this unprecedented challenge to planetary (planetarianized) humanity—a challenge of practically sublime dimensions, which demands an extraordinary mobilization of the forces of the spirit to meet it: a challenge convoking what Kant called the suprasensible, that is, also the infinite (infinitely renewable)—the temptation of the industrial and capitalist world is to come up with a technological and scientific response in denial of the three limits of capitalism. This temptation borne of denial cannot apprehend: 1. that these three limits, when they combine, produce a systemic evolution at a superior level, that is, a phenomenon of emergence, 2. that we must change industrial models not only to produce a new technical and scientific rationality, but to constitute a new social rationality, productive of motivation, of reasons for living together, that is, of taking care of the world and of those living there, 3. that the fundamental question is here to reorient the financial fluxes toward long-term investments by waging war against speculation, but also against modes of life founded on the short term, of which the most every-day example is the organization of society by a marketing systematically exploiting drives by destroying libido as that which evinces the capable of sustainable investment. Consumption that becomes drive-based is profoundly dangerous for society. If there were no limit to this consumption, and if fossil fuels were inexhaustible, the catastrophe would perhaps be even greater than the one resulting from the deplenishment of fossil fuels. Perhaps this deplenishment is finally a kind of stroke of luck: the opportunity to understand that the true question of energy is not that one, that the energy of subsistence is of interest only insofar as it contributes to an energy of existence—and is such in its capacity to project what I call the plane of consistencies. Now this is the true stake of what is today called, in an ambiguous expression, ascendant innovation.

The alternative is overidentification with the system of resource extraction and consumption.  This is the only way to access the level of drives and criticize the systems that underlie capitalism.  Other ways are minor adjustments that allow capitalism to come back stronger.  This means an increase in resource extraction. Uebel:
The masochist changes the world, as Deleuze puts it, to the extent that she "questions the validity of existing reality in order to create a pure ideal reality, an operation which is perfectly in line with the judicial spirit of masochism" ("Coldness" 33). This "judicial spirit" is, in practice, intersubjective (based on contractual relations), judgmental, and assertive. Its power is directed over, even against, others—to educate, to persuade, to bring into agreement. Masochism's judicial spirit becomes most recognizably political when it sweeps the social field in the form of mass fantasy, so that in the case of oppressed groups it often takes the form of a kind of politically idealized suffering in the name of future rewards. 11  Social suffering serves as a prelude to, and in reality a warranty for, the achievement of future satisfaction. It is perhaps Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel who most boldly underscores the political—what she sees as the utopic—force of the so-called counterpleasures, when she associates "historical ruptures which give an inkling of a new world" (293) with the dynamics of perversion. A crucial point to bear in mind here, however, is that, like any tool for change, masochism can be put to both progressive and regressive uses, deployed as a political tactic for utopian change and, conversely, for cultural entrenchment and even gender violence.Deployed in the name of either revolutionary or retrograde causes, masochism works by calling into being the very Law—the limit or penance—that ostensibly blocks access to the ideal by thwarting what Lacan once called the "will to jouissance." So from outside the politico-libidinal matrix of master/slave, it looks End Page 397 as if masochism involves only the sacrifice of one's own enjoyment. However, from within, the masochist reveals the truth of symbolic power: subordination to the exact letter of the Law, thereby exaggerating its obscene dimension, subverts the very meaning of regulation. The potential political value of this is significant, as Reik's example of the masochistic art of resistance reveals: Austrian railroad workers, protesting low wages and long working hours, go on strike, but rather than walk off the job, they carry it out with increased conscientiousness and punctuality, following the railway board's myriad bureaucratic regulations to the letter. The result is a total paralysis of train traffic, and with trains neither arriving nor departing, the company elites are forced to capitulate (108; cf. 154-59). The workers, through radical obedience to the law, are able to turn the misery of their working conditions into a politically satisfying conclusion. Closing the gap between the law and its realization, extreme submission has the precise effect of revealing the fantasmic support of the law in its full inconsistency. 12 As a mode of dissidence, masochism depends on a strategy of "passive resistance," evoking a constellation of other strategies for social change such as the hunger strike, sit-ins, and related forms of nonviolent passive protest. When deployed in these ways to expose the inconsistency of cultural protocols, masochism becomes fully political, a strategy of resistance, wherein "the masochist is a revolutionist of self-surrender" (Reik 156). Given masochism's primary function as defiant submissiveness ("victory through defeat" is Reik's famous formula), there are expedient reasons to conceptualize it across the limits of the sexual or the erotic, into the social.Masochism, despite remaining a slippery (and at times hotly contested) term in psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses, 13 has emerged in recent critical treatments as a particularly flexible, even necessary, form of cultural critique. It is within this context that one of Deleuze's most valuable insights is intelligible as a fully political revelation: "The masochist's apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation" ("Coldness" 88). Remarkably, the fundamentally utopian energy of masochism increases with cultural advancement. If masochism is indeed "unmistakably the most important culturally" among the usual perversions, it is so, to follow Reik, precisely because it is the chief register of culture, developing coterminously with it: as culture progresses, masochism increasingly becomes a psychic necessity (264; cf. 383). 14 But, as Reik himself rather presciently points out, masochism is fast evolving beyond its status as a psychic necessity to become something of a mental luxury, a political option (though admittedly never available to all) replacing what had once End Page 398 been diagnosed strictly as a psychic condition simply suffered by desiring subjects beyond their own will. Despite its status as luxury, masochism appears no less urgent a tool for reimagining or remaking the self and the social. Leaving behind the limited notion of the masochist as a self-destructive subject, one to whom something is done, or on whom something is perpetrated, we are able to see the masochist as an idealizer par excellence, a revolutionary who seeks after a utopic condition that is never merely or only libidinal

Tournament: Emory | Round: 6 | Opponent: None | Judge: none
Barker, Stephen. "Transformation as an Ontological Imperative: The Human Future According to Bernard Stiegler". http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_01.shtml

Barker:
Meta-transformation means that just as the ego/moi contains and conceals the id/ça, so new modes of individuation resist “worse” or “worst” transformations that they too conceal (i.e. which are not lost as possibilities, since transformation must always remain radically open); this aspect of critical thinking acts as a kind of superego (surmoi), perpetually analyzing and judging the results of previous transformative regional ontologies against current ones. What must be guarded against, through the programming institutions, as a result of the ascendency of the programming and cognitive industries, is any sign of the “mass mystification” 38 resultant from the occlusion of desire by drives, of deep attention by hyper-attention, and of oiko-nomia 39 by consumer capitalism. Meta-transformation is a cumulative process of innovation, a socio-genesis that is clearly a techno-genesis in Stiegler’s sense. The moment “knowledge” transmutes into the condition of a set of rules (or rules as mystifications) that cannot subsequently generate new rules, it is no longer knowledge, but either dogma or marketing (between which there is no différance). This evaluation forms the very core of meta-transformation. Insofar as psychic and collective individuation must be defined – always fluidly – as projected desire, it is always a matter of either dis- or re-enchantment. Enchantment, in the sense in which Stiegler appropriates it from the MEDEF, is the undoing of “cognitive capitalism’s” seizure and control of techniques (skills), knowledge, and consumption, a seizure which, as the word suggests, is a suspension of dynamic development. The forces of transindividuation bring about the adoption not only of cultural histories and techniques but of the dynamic, participatory involvement that can re-direct “telecracy” “back” into democracy – which in Stiegler’s participatory sense of it cannot survive the amnesia resultant from the subversion of long circuits of attention and critical thinking by programming industries whose strategic goal is attention-capture and the undermining, if not the destruction, of inter-generational transference. The forces of control operating in the “worst” transformative dimension in which we now find ourselves strive to become “adaptive,” rather than adoptive, Stiegler points out; that is, entropic (Réenchanter le monde 122). Adaptation – to adapt to environmental circumstance – as opposed to adoption – to participate in the genealogical transmission and transformation of knowledge and culture – is for Stiegler not a matter of adjustment but of amnesia, of the mind in thrall to the spectacle of images and messages designed to short-circuit attention and critique. Adaptation means “the imperatives of production that are secondary to shareholder expectations, and not producers of alternatives, of models of meta-transformation. Knowledge is intrinsically contradictory to adaptation, as innovation” (Réenchanter le monde 122). In other words, adaptation offers no alternative options to control, and emerges as the blocking of – the obstacle to – human development. Stiegler, 40 sees the ex-teriorization of memory – technics – as the very ground of human being as such (original prostheticity); all knowledge, Stiegler says, has its origins in exteriorization: memory is “exteriorization re-interiorized in new intellectual and motor behaviors” (Réenchanter le monde 136). The transformative process of individuation is the process of exteriorization is grammatization. Re-enchantment, then, “the re-enchantment of the world,” is beyond all else a gamble – indeed, according to Stiegler, a gamble against all the current odds. As the word “enchantment” implies, re-enchantment in a world currently “enchanted” (in thrall to) psychotechnologies would be nothing less than magical, resultant from supernatural forces. But despite seemingly overwhelming evidence, Stiegler is not pessimistic about this potential renewal; in his most recent work he sees the possibility of such a re-enchantment’s occurring as resting on the associative circuitry of “information, knowledge, technology, industry, and society as the fragile product of an international politics of the transformation of contemporary capitalism” (Réenchanter le monde 165; emphasis added). In the battle against disenchantment – whose other names are ennui and care-less-ness incurie – in the battle for intelligence and for the perpetual (re)creation of enchantment, the transformation of psychotechnologies into “psychopolitics devoted to the service of a noopolitics . . . through technologies of the mind” (Taking Care 339) is Stiegler’s great hope. There is no reason to think that this re-creation is not possible; indeed, Stiegler insists, we must assume that it is possible (to give Stiegler the last word): We can certainly go on struggling against care-less-ness and weigh the results. But we must face the consequences of recent information on the state of the human mind, on what is destroyed and on the possibilities of reconstructing what has been destroyed – on condition of fundamentally reversing the situation of this power as a psychopower, and of subjecting it to the controls prescribed by a psychopolitics placed in the service of a noopolitics, across an industrial politics of the mind. (Taking Care 339) Only through transindividuation – psychic, collective, and technical – can any hope of a future transcending our current thrall to programming, an ontological future in the most fundamental sense, become a program for a future of the human in a world of psychotechnological mystifications.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 4 | Opponent: Marcus LH | Judge:
Their attempt to empower agency ignores that climate change is nonhuman to begin with – at the individual level scale effects are invisible – their understanding of the body produces a politics that destroys the biosphere
Clark 12 (Timothy Clark is Professor of English at the University of Durham, 2012, “Scale” in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/telemorphosis-theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1.pdf?c=ohp;idno=10539563.0001.001)

Introduction: Scale Effects You are lost in a small town, late for a vital appointment somewhere in its streets. You stop a friendly-looking stranger and ask the way. Generously, he offers to give you a small map which he happens to have in his briefcase. The whole town is there, he says. You thank him and walk on, opening the map to pinpoint a route. It turns out to be a map of the whole earth. The wrong scale. A scale (from the Latin scala for ladder, step or stairs) usually enables a calibrated and useful extrapolation between dimensions of space or time. Thus a “cartographic scale” describes the ratio of distance on a map to real distances on the earth’s surface. To move from a large to small scale or vice versa implies a calculable shift of resolution on the same area or features, a smooth zooming out or in. With climate change, however, we have a map, its scale includes the whole earth but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless. Policies and concepts relating to climate change invariably seem undermined or even derided by considerations of scale: a campaign for environmental reform in one country may be already effectively negated by the lack of such measures on the other side of the world. A long fought-for nature reserve, designed to protect a rare ecosystem, becomes, zooming out, a different place. Even the climatology works on a less than helpful scale: “Paradoxically, it is simpler to predict what will happen to the planet, a closed system, than to make forecasts for specific regions” (Litfin 137). Cartographic scale is itself an inadequate concept here. Non-cartographic concepts of scale are not a smooth zooming in and out but involve jumps and discontinuities with sometimes incalculable “scale effects.” For instance: In the engineering sciences, scale effects are those that result from size differences between a model and the real system. Even though a miniature model of a building made of wood is structurally sound, it is not necessarily appropriate to infer that the same process maintaining structural stability could hold for a full-size building made of wood. (Jenerette and Wu 104) To give another instance, a map of the whole earth, at a “small” scale in cartographic terms, is at an enormous scale ecologically, one at which other non-linear scale effects become decisive and sometimes incalculable. Garrett Hardin writes: Many stupid actions taken by society could be avoided if more people were acutely aware of scale effects. Whenever the scale is shifted upward, one should always be alert for possible contradictions of the conventional wisdom that served so well when the unit was smaller…. Failure of the electorate to appreciate scale effects can put the survival of a democratic nation in jeopardy. (52) Some thinkers less controversial than Hardin draw on complexity theory to suggest the necessary emergence of scale effects with merely the increasing complexity of globalizing civilization: “once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down” (MacKenzie 33). For others, the environmental crisis is in part caused by the effects of conflicting scales in the government of human affairs. Jim Dator writes: Environmental, economic, technological and health factors are global, but our governance systems are still based on the nation state, while our economic system (‘free market’ capitalism) and many national political systems (interest group ‘democracy’) remain profoundly individualistic in input, albeit tragically collective in output (215–6). Scale effects in relation to climate change are confusing because they take the easy, daily equations of moral and political accounting and drop into them both a zero and an infinity: the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of consumption then the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their insignificance. As a result of scale effects what is self-evident or rational at one scale may well be destructive or unjust at another. Hence, progressive social and economic policies designed to disseminate Western levels of prosperity may even resemble, on another scale, an insane plan to destroy the biosphere. Yet, for any individual household, motorist, etc., a scale effect in their actions is invisible. It is not present in any phenomenon in itself (no eidetic reduction will flush it out), but only in the contingency of how many other such phenomena there are, have been and will be, at even vast distances in space or time. Human agency becomes, as it were, displaced from within by its own act, a kind of demonic iterability. The argument of this paper is that dominant modes of literary and cultural criticism are blind to scale effects in ways that now need to be addressed. Derangements of Scale One symptom of a now widespread crisis of scale is a derangement of linguistic and intellectual proportion in the way people often talk about the environment, a breakdown of “decorum” in the strict sense. Thus a sentence about the possible collapse of civilization can end, no less solemnly, with the injunction never to fill the kettle more than necessary when making tea. A poster in many workplaces depicts the whole earth as giant thermostat dial, with the absurd but intelligible caption “You control climate change.” A motorist buying a slightly less destructive make of car is now “saving the planet.” These deranged jumps in scale and fantasies of agency may recall rhetoric associated with the atomic bomb in the 1950s and after. Maurice Blanchot argued then that talk of humanity having power over the whole earth, or being able to “destroy itself,” was deeply misleading. “Humanity” is not some grand mega-subject or unitary agent in the sense this trope implies. In practice such destruction would certainly not be some sort of consciously performed act of self-harm, “humanity destroying itself.” It would be as arbitrary as was “the turtle that fell from the sky” and crushed the head of Aeschylus (Blanchot 106). The almost nonsensical rhetoric of environmental slogans makes Blanchot’s point even more forcefully. Received concepts of agency, rationality and responsibility are being strained or even begin to fall apart in a bewildering generalizing of the political that can make even filling a kettle as public an act as voting. The very notion of a “carbon footprint” alters the distinctions of public and private built into the foundations of the modern liberal state. Normally, demands in a political context to face the future take the form of some rousing call to regained authenticity, whether personal, cultural or national, and they reinforce given norms of morality or responsibility, with an enhanced sense of determination and purpose. With climate change this is not the case. Here a barely calculable nonhuman agency brings about a general but unfocused sense of delegitimation and uncertainty, a confusion of previously clear arenas of action or concepts of equity; boundaries between the scientific and the political become newly uncertain, the distinction between the state and civil society less clear, and once normal procedures and modes of understanding begin to resemble dubious modes of political, ethical and intellectual containment. Even a great deal of environmental criticism, modeling itself on kinds of progressive oppositional politics and trying (like Murray Bookchin’s “social ecology”) to explain environmental degradation by reference solely to human-to-human hierarchies and oppressions can look like an evasion of the need to accord to the nonhuman a disconcerting agency of its own. The environmental crisis also questions given boundaries between intellectual disciplines. The daily news confirms repeatedly the impossibility of reducing many environmental issues to any one coherent problem, dysfunction, or injustice. Overpopulation and atmospheric pollution, for instance, form social, moral, political, medical, technical, ethical and “animal rights” issues, all at once. If that tired term “the environment” has often seemed too vague—for it means, ultimately, “everything”—yet the difficulty of conceptualizing a politics of climate change may be precisely that of having to think “everything at once”. The overall force is of an implosion of scales, implicating seemingly trivial or small actions with enormous stakes while intellectual boundaries and lines of demarcation fold in upon each other. The inundation of received intellectual boundaries and the horror of many probable future scenarios has the deranging effect, for instance, of making deeply unsure which of the following two statements is finally the more responsible—(1) “climate change is now acknowledged as a legitimate and serious concern and the government will continue to support measures to improve the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles” or (2) “the only defensible relationship to have with a car is with a well aimed brick”? 1

The new normal is catastrophe: fracking, drilling, warming, sovereign debt, inequality, hyper-consumption, planetary extinction – their nostalgic agenda for a praxis of bodies and genuine feeling only accelerates this.
Cohen 12 (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, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/telemorphosis-theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1.pdf?c=ohp;idno=10539563.0001.001)

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.

Vote negative to disoccupy the political and theoretical space opened by the affirmative – this act of disidentification is a prerequisite to revealing the violent implications of all forms of subjectivity formation in the context of climate change
Cohen 12 (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, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/telemorphosis-theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1.pdf?c=ohp;idno=10539563.0001.001)

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.

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, epistemic prerequisite to their arguments. Cohen 12:

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.

Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Stuyvesant MK | Judge: Scoggins
Current modes of understanding climate change and environmental damage are increasingly focused on both the embodied experience as well as the abstraction of scientific knowledge.  Embodied experience becomes a mere deference to the authority.  Sacrifice is essential in that realm.  Markley : 12:

Robert Markley. "Time, History, and Sustainability".  Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/telemorphosis-theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1.pdf?c=ohp;idno=10539563.0001.001

The expanses of pre-human...to an ideal of sustainability.

This turns case and makes aff impacts inevitable, their representation of the world normalizes a notion of nature as an inexhaustible resource and reentrenches neoliberalism.  Markley 2:

The technologically-mediated...required to manage finite resources.

The alternative is to reject the affirmative notions of sustainability and their model of time in favor of a view of Nature as complex and transcendent. Markley 3:

Nineteenth-century transcendentalism... particle its equal channel.”

Same ROTB arg as before, disclosed here and on LDleaks

And, representations of time come first.  They impact policy decisions, shape action, and are a prerequisite to actually knowing the impacts of the aff.  The ambiguity in the terms sustainability and future generations unique justifies this position, means it is most predictable, fair, and best for education since it forces debates to actually defend their positions.  Markley 4:

In this essay, I outline a brief history of the registers...  for literally thousands of years.

Tournament: Lex RR | Round: 9 | Opponent: Daiya | Judge: Weisberg, Zhou
NOTE:  This is also part of my K aff on this topic, I haven't broken it as an aff yet, so it is disclosed here.  All cards from Telemorphosis

The new normal is catastrophe: fracking, drilling, warming, sovereign debt, inequality, hyper-consumption – an accelerating vortex underpinned by the regimes of thought of modernity, a cognitive complex even theory cannot escape. Thought must begin from the death of thought – a break with the eco-oikonomics of philosophy that underpins memetic regimes of dominance.  Cohen:

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. This 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 nonexistent 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. 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 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.

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 and opens up space for a new materiality.  This is both the role of the ballot and the only ethical stance available.  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 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” have 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 posthumanism 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.  This is a new shared imaginary that arises from the disocupation of the subject and the home.  McQuillan :

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 seachange 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.

This post-carbon economy is not simply a question of oil, but a rethinking of speculation and crisis itself.  The AC calls for a new version on normativity, one that eschews traditional reason in favor of a recognition that crisis is constant.  There is no end, and any indication otherwise is another introduction of economy, turning us all into crisis managers deferring to the speculator.  This is a rethinking of our conceptual and drive-based investments with the present. McQuillan:
For either side of the present debate on climate change, say, to name only one of the threats to planetary life today, to name this process and event as a crisis would be to appropriate it for the present and for a metaphysics of presence. In giving the event of climate change a form and a certain calculability one has begun to neutralize the effects of its unknowable future and to erase the experience of alterity at the heart of an encounter with the wholly other. To name it as a crisis is to say subject it to the temporality of “the crisis,” namely that it will one day come to an end and a state of normativity will be restored. One side of the debate would say that “normality” (whatever normal might mean on a planet that has weathered at least five major ice ages) can be resumed by cutting carbon emissions and introducing “sustainable” energy consumption. The other side says the present is in fact normal and no change in climate is in process. Either way, each side depends upon the idea of a normative climate derived from the idea that a change in climatic conditions would constitute a crisis for the human race. A crisis that would no longer allow mankind to run a system of resource exploitation that has sustained its development for the last two hundred years. In other words, what is at stake in the climate change debate is the very future of a world economy and the normative, or, ideal conditions for its operation. That is to say, the debate is predicated on an essentially conservative notion of how to sustain the ideal or normative. In fact, the event and singularity of climate change is constituted in the concept that it is already irreversible. The singularity of climate change as a crisis might be that it is not subject to the temporality of the crisis and that it might be a crisis without resolution and so demonstrate itself not to be a crisis at all but a constant state. In this sense crisis becomes a permanent condition or at least the resolution of this crisis is the construction of a new idea of the normative. In this way, climate change must change the very idea of a crisis by which we seek to determine it. At the same time, climate change becomes part of the latest chapter in the history of the idea of crisis and continues to be appropriated by it and subsumed to the model it undermines. On the issue of irreversible climate change and peak oil, I find myself to be surprisingly sceptical. Given that hydrocarbon consumption is already in decline and without fresh initiatives (although there are many mountain tops to be dynamited and much oil shale to be extracted yet) even the most optimistic forecasts suggest that petroleum consumption will have dwindled to almost nothing in my life time, why should we then be overly concerned by targets for climate emissions set for fifty years into the future? I do not doubt the damage that will be caused to, say, the polar ice caps during those fifty years and the resultant biodiversity loss. However, such targets seem to me to be aimed at ‘eking out’ the remains of carbon emission rather than addressing the more fundamental underlying causes of climate change. This “eking out” is also a transition phase for global capital as it acquires a new carbonless fuel. In fact, while it may take a million years for the planet to correct the damage inflicted in the next fifty, surely this realignment of the environment will take place in the absence of continued fossil fuel consumption. That is to say, that irreversible climate change is not necessarily irreversible, just that it is irreversible in the lifetime of global capital that as a planetary life form is something of a Johnny-come-lately. In this way, the discourse on climate change on all sides retains the vestiges of an irreducible humanism and the parochialism of western metaphysics. It would not be enough, it seems to me, for philosophy to accept the discourse and axiomatics of climate change advocates, even if it were possible to accept the science without reservation. Rather, this discourse in its present state is open to question, is fragile and perfectible, or even deconstructable (as Derrida reminds us of the abolitionist discourse on the death penalty3 ) because it more often than not limits the idea of planetary life to the present conditions of a western-lead globalization and so inadvertently positions climate change as the latest accident to befall the western subject. In this way, climate change is the latest phase of the crisis of European humanity. Accordingly, it calls for a response from western humanity, one that will require the response of science, philosophy, and the human sciences (including economics). However, as an encounter with the wholly other of planetary life beyond the limits of western humanism, the event of climate change will transform, mutate, and challenge the protocols of European humanity’s intellectual apparatus. Climate change accordingly is a challenge to reason and so to philosophy as the custodian of western reason. If one were to question or attempt to exceed this as the locus of the present discourse of crisis, one might quickly find oneself in a position where terms like “crisis” and “irreversible” were no longer appropriate. As soon as we have determined a moment of crisis, with the temporality of a crisis and the calculability of a crisis, then we have entered the realm of economy. The response to a crisis is always economic in every sense of that word. Just as we bring a crisis “in house” by naming it as such, one must always ask what is the quickest and most efficient way of bringing a crisis to an end. Equally, in the final analysis, we are often told a planetary crisis will be a question of economics. However, just as one must question reason as the axiom of crisis, then we must question whether economics can continue to stand as a strictly determinable region of competence in the face of such a crisis. One would have to ask if economics can offer a competent realm of judgment, decision, and will to respond to the demands of the incalculable. It is not that economics does not have a response to the incalculable, but rather that a response directed here cannot be purely or strictly economical. This is where philosophy makes a return in the economy of crisis management. There is a clear and legible connection between what the oil industry calls “speculation” and the speculative philosophical enterprise. I would like to suggest that speculating for oil has been the basis of industrial modernity and the western economy for the last two hundred years (whether that oil was derived from the exploitation of hydrocarbons or whales is a moot point, even though the use of oil as a fuel dates, according to Herodotus, to Babylon 4,000 years ago). As that which fuels the engine of the economy, that which makes the economy as such possible, the search for oil is an investment in a venture with the hope of gain but with the risk of loss. The speculative structure of oil exploitation follows from and is now itself the basis for the structure of all investment in stock, property, and the fictional products of capital today. As with speculative philosophy, it involves the conjecture or theorization of a future event in the absence of the firm evidence of a present. It is this speculative structure that opens the future as a thinking of risk and as thinking as risk, that closely ties philosophy to the carbon economy. The question of the postcarbon economy is therefore clearly a matter of concern for philosophy. I have been careful to speak here from the beginning of a “post-carbon economy” (although we might also say “post-carbon-economies” since there will undoubtedly be more than one). While oil is a material thing, the stuff itself as it were, the price of oil is a question of economy, a matter of relation, and is irreducibly conceptual. My concern in this text is to think through the prospects for an economy and culture (if that is not a tautology) based upon the pricing of hydrocarbons as fuel. This question may come down to one that concerns the future of speculation itself, as much as it does a speculation on the future. I would like to offer a hypothesis here, even a speculation, apropos of today, that will need to be put at risk and tested, namely that whenever we speak of so-called “environmental catastrophe” the business of “financial crisis” is never far behind. In fact, a strong formulation of the hypothesis might be that the two are intimately connected, and that their relation always follows from a structure of speculation. In this sense, philosophy is what is put at risk and must put itself at risk by the conjuncture of the two.

Tournament: Villiger | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dont worry, you wont hit them | Judge: Forget

Ryan Teehan was sitting next to me and told me to post this. -- Tomasiswag"

I negate the resolution. Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, truth-seeking ought to take precedence over attorney-client privilege.

The value is morality because ought implies a moral obligation.

All moral theories assume that people have some moral value. Treating people as if they only exist for an external purpose undermines any moral theory. Warren Quinn explains
Quinn, Warren S. “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 3, (Jul., 1989), pp. 287-312. JSTOR.

Whether we are speaking of ownership or more fundamental forms of possession, something is, morally speaking, his only if his say over what may be done to it (and thereby to him) can override the greater needs of others. A person is constituted by his or her body and mind. They are parts or aspects of him. For that very reason, it is fitting that  he have primary say over what may be done to them-not because such an arrangement best promotes overall human welfare, but because any arrangement that denied him that say would be a grave indignity. In giving him this authority, morality recognizes his existence as an individual with ends of his own—an independent being. Since that is what he is, he deserves this recognition. Were morality to withhold it, were it to allow us to kill or injure him whenever that would be collectively best, it would picture him not as a being in his own right but as a cell in the collective whole. This last point can be illustrated not by thinking of bodies or minds but of lives. The moral sense in which your mind or body is yours seems to be the same as that in which your life is yours. And if your life is yours then there must be decisions concerning it that are yours to make-decisions protected by negative rights. One such matter is the choice of work or vocation. We think there is something morally amiss when people are forced to be farmers or flute players just because the balance of social needs tips in that direction. Barring great emergencies, we think people's lives must be theirs to lead. Not because that makes things go best in some independent sense but because the alternative seems to obliterate them as individuals. This obliteration, and not social inefficiency, is one of the things that strikes us as appalling in totalitarian social projects for example, in the Great Cultural Revolution. None of this, of course, denies the legitimate force of positive rights. They too are essential to the status we want as persons who matter, and they must be satisfied when it is morally possible to do so. But negative rights, for the reasons I have been giving, define the terms of moral possibility. Their precedence is essential to the moral fact of our lives, minds, and bodies really being ours.

And, the only reason we care about morality at all is because we recognize the worth of an individual. Thus the criterion is respecting human worth. 

Contention One: Denying ACP coerces the defendant and denies their dignity

 First, absent ACP, the client has no way out and is denied the fundamental right to counsel.  Luban:
David Luban (professor of law at Georgetown). “Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity (When They Aren’t Busy Assaulting It).” U. Ill. L. Rev. 815-845 (2005). http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164andcontext=facpub

So far, then, we have discovered only reasons to abandon confidentiality and the attorney-client privilege, not to defend them. Let us try again. Suppose that the attorney-client privilege and the duty of confidentiality were eliminated from the legal system. Then consider the situation faced by a client with something to hide. The client faces a trilemma of unpleasant choices. First, he can elect not to tell his story to his lawyer because he is afraid that the lawyer might be compelled to reveal it. Second, he can lie to his lawyer. Either way, silence or lies, the client loses much of the benefit that having an advocate was supposed to provide. Or, finally, he can reveal the story to his lawyer, knowing that doing so amounts to revealing it to the world at large. If the story con-cerns a crime he has committed, revealing it to his lawyer amounts to vicarious self-incrimination, because without the attorney-client privilege, the lawyer can be compelled to testify about whatever the client has told her. All three choices are disastrous: the first two abrogate the right to counsel, while the third abandons the right against self-incrimination.

Second, lack of ACP amounts to self-incrimination, which is self-alienating and denies human dignity. Luban 2:
David Luban (professor of law at Georgetown). “Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity (When They Aren’t Busy Assaulting It).” U. Ill. L. Rev. 815-845 (2005). http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164andcontext=facpub

 In both practices, the humiliation lies in enlisting a person's own will in the process of punishing her, and thereby splitting her against herself. To see this, begin with the actual language of the self-incrimination clause, which states that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself._{67 The crucial phrase "witness against himself" indicates a kind of splitting or division within the self-one half, the person with an interest in evading condemnation; the other, the witness who disinterestedly provides whatever information the state requires. A witness fulfills a civic obligation. Even if it is unpleasant or inconvenient to testify, she must do so for the good of the community, if need be under compulsion of subpoena. Temporarily, at any rate, the witness becomes the eyes and ears of the community, and aims at a collective, rather than a personal or individual, good. To be a witness against yourself means to assume this disinterested outsider's stance toward your own condemnation. This is an extraordinary kind of self-alienation, as if the only interest you have in the matter is the state's interest in ascertaining the truth and apportioning blame. Being a witness against yourself divides you in two, one half the individual with an interest in evading condemnation, the other half, the state's representative; and compelling you to be a witness against yourself subordinates the former to the latter. In effect, it treats the individual as insignificant- as if his subjectivity simply doesn't exist or matter. Even if humiliation is not the purpose of compelling someone to be a witness against himself, as it is in forcing someone to administer his own punishment, humiliation is the outcome.}